Reversible Error

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Marlene saw that Karp was now alert, not smiling, grave. “Yes, I do,” he said.

  Sophie went on. “He would ask me, how come they put the little mark across the seven like they make, and I would tell him, they’re very careful, the Nazis, they don’t want to mix it up with a number one, God forbid they should kill the same person twice.” She laughed and shook her head.

  “So, dolling … quel mignon! You was going to grow up and get those Nazis for your old Aunt Sophie. So tell me, Roger, what do you hear from Daniel and Richard? I never hear from them.”

  Karp and his great-aunt began speaking of family, reminiscences mixed with news of births, deaths, college graduations, professional success or failure, speculation about missing persons, the occasional maledictions on the clan’s bums. Marlene sucked on the remains of the wine and listened to the hearthfire legends of the paternal Karps and the maternal Gimmels. It had not sunk in on her until this moment that Karp sprang from the same sort of limitless immigrant circus from which she herself had sprung, with its stars, its clowns, its humble shovelers-up after elephants.

  That Karp had depths, she knew; she had never glimpsed before this evening the creatures that inhabited them, and was by turns fascinated and frightened, as she had been when studying the pictures on the piano.

  Karp seemed so isolated as a man, so himself, a creature sui generis, that Marlene had let herself imagine that Karp’s origins meant as little to him as they did to her: an interesting fact, an exotic spice; occasionally, as with the wedding preparations, a mild pain in the ass. She saw Karp as a perfectly melted New Yorker, as she was. Now it began to dawn on her that there might be a chunk of some more refractory metal buried in the melt, something ancient and hard as diamond.

  Aunt Sophie was running down, the pauses between her remarks getting longer, her voice fading into whispery hoarseness. Karp and Marlene cleaned up the supper things and, with many a sincere promise to return often, made their farewells.

  Out in the street, searching for cabs on Central Park West, Karp seemed to have dropped some of the defeated sullenness that he had worn on the ride uptown. He put his arm around Marlene’s shoulders and asked, “So how did you like my Aunt Sophie?”

  “I loved her,” said Marlene with feeling. “There’s a lot of her in you.”

  “You think so? She’s a tough old lady. I could use all I can get.”

  A cab appeared and Marlene stopped it with her ear-cracking two-fingered whistle. As they started their downtown drive, Karp remarked, “Yeah, she’s something. When we were in the kitchen, she took one look at me and asked what was wrong, I had such a long face. I looked at her and, I don’t know, I started to feel better. And it’s funny, I remembered she had the same effect on me when I was a kid, when I was miserable. Like when my mom died. ‘There’s worse things dolling,’ sympathy, but … it somehow put everything in proportion, because you knew that whatever you were going through, it was bullshit compared to what she went through. And there she was, this funny, happy lady.

  “And that business with the tattoo …” Karp laughed. “I could never get over the cross mark on the seven. So they wouldn’t mix up the corpses. God! I haven’t thought about that in years, it’s like …” Karp suddenly stopped short and sat up rigid in his seat. He looked at his watch.

  Marlene felt the motion and asked, “What is it?”

  Karp leaned forward and gave the driver a new address. The cab swung into a left turn and soon was heading north and west.

  “We’re not going home?”

  “No,” said Karp. “We’re going to a club. Listen to some music. Live a little.”

  “Butchie, what a treat!” cried Marlene. “Let’s hear it for Aunt Sophie! Where are we going?”

  “A little joint uptown. Pepper’s,” said Karp.

  “Jesus, Butch, I didn’t know you knew about places like this,” said Marlene, peering through the smoky darkness of Pepper’s. “What an evening of revelations this is turning out to be!”

  Settled at a table the size of a dinner plate next to the toilet door, Marlene remarked, “God, they really know how to treat white folks here. Fuck-a-duck, Butch, I haven’t come uptown to hear music since high school.”

  “Takes you back, does it?”

  “Yeah, ply me with sweet drinks and I might let you feel me up in the cab.”

  “Not all the way?”

  “Well, perhaps just the tip, if you’re super nice. Not a bad band, by the way. Who is it?”

  “I don’t know the official name. Recognize the piano?”

  Marlene put her glasses on and squinted. “Looks like … Clay Fulton?”

  “Yup, that’s him.”

  Marlene gave him a suspicious look. “The plot thickens. Could it be that we’re here for something other than careless gaiety?”

  Karp shrugged and ordered a couple of beers from a passing waitress. The band finished its set, and a few minutes later Clay Fulton walked by their table on the way to the men’s room. Marlene was about to hail him but Karp held a finger to his lips and shook his head. Fulton went through the swinging door and Karp stood up. “Be back in a minute,” he said.

  Fulton was standing at the single urinal. Karp waited for him to finish. He said, “Hey, Clay.”

  Fulton spun around. His face was tight, and he had dropped a few pounds since Karp had seen him last. “What’re you doing here, Butch?” he asked curtly.

  “Listening to music with Marlene. Thought I might talk to you while I was up here.”

  Fulton pretended to look at his watch. “Yeah, well, I’d like to shoot the shit with you, but I got to make some calls.”

  Karp didn’t move from his position in front of the door, and it was clear from his stance that he didn’t intend to.

  “Let me by, Butch,” said Fulton, a stiff smile on his face.

  “In a second, Clay. I just need to know something. The word is you took a couple of shots at Tecumseh Booth the other day.”

  Fulton’s smile vanished. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped.

  “Yeah, you do. Somebody tried to kill Booth at his mother’s place, and Dugman’s bunch saw you driving away, and I just wanted to—”

  “What the fuck is this, Karp? I’m the cop. I ask the questions. Don’t bother me with this horseshit! Now, get the fuck out of my way!”

  “You’re being set up, Clay. And I know what you’re doing and you’re fucking it up.”

  For an instant Fulton went rigid, gaping like a gaffed cod. Then his jaw tightened, he uttered an inarticulate growl and tried to force his way past Karp by main force. Karp gave him the hip and pinned him up against the plywood wall of the narrow passage leading to the door.

  “Listen to me! I’m your friend, goddammit!” Karp yelled into his ear. “You owe me three minutes without bullshit. And if I have to grab you in a fucking John, that’s your fault, not mine.”

  Karp felt the tension in Fulton’s body relax slightly, and he pulled back. There was still less than a foot of space between their bodies. Fulton’s face glistened like damp dark wood in the unforgiving light of the naked bulb.

  “OK,” said Karp, “I’m gonna lay out what I know, just the way it came to me. One, you come in and tell me these dope-dealer killings are connected and you’re trying to get put in charge of all of them. Two, I find out Bloom is organizing a task force to look into them, to which you’re not invited. I go to the first meeting, and I find out that the official representative of the police force thinks you’re poison. Three, you drop out of sight. There’s rumors flying around that you’re dirty. Four, Tecumseh Booth gets sprung on a technicality under suspicious circumstances. Somebody with serious clout was using it, on a judge.

  “Five, I’m worried about you, so I call the C. of D. I get completely stonewalled. This sets me wondering. I’m pretty tight with the chief. I’m pretty tight with you. Why doesn’t anybody want to talk to me about these murders? What could it be? Is Denton taking bribes in
his old age, a guy who never took a free cup of coffee in his life? Clay Fulton is dirty? It’s like the pope saying, hey, I already got the yarmulke, I might as well get circumcised and move to Crown Heights. It doesn’t figure, except for one possibility. One possibility would make Denton and Fulton act this way. What is it, Clay? You gonna tell me?”

  Fulton looked into his eyes a long minute. Then he sighed and said, “I can’t tell you, Butch—believe me, I would if I could, but—”

  Karp held up his hand. “OK, OK, I understand. Let’s be hypothetical, then. Let’s say we got the chief of detectives and his ace lieutenant investigating a series of drug-pusher killings. The lieutenant thinks they’re all connected. So what do these ace detectives do? Do they bring their evidence to the task force that the D.A. has started to investigate these selfsame killings? Do they launch a serious public investigation of these killings? They do not. They work in secret. They don’t even talk about it to their close personal friend who happens also to be a D.A.

  “So this friend starts asking himself, why the secrecy? What’s the answer here? The envelope, please. Ah, here it is. The one thing that would cause this kind of shutdown. What if our two detectives have concluded that the only way the killings could have been done the way they were done is if they were done by rogue cops? Something snapped somewhere and you got a couple of guys out trying to clean up the city. Clint Eastwood in real life—they’re shooting dope pushers.

  “See, it’s like your pattern that wasn’t a pattern. You get two good honest cops like you and Denton acting in this way, and somebody who knows they’re good and honest has to guess what they’re doing.

  “Because, being good cops, they have this problem—crazy cops, it’s bad for the force. It’s one thing in the movies, but in real life it’s another story: they’re looking at a long, messy trial, a scandal, and so soon after the Knapp Commission? So maybe they can handle it privately. Grab the guys, a quick ticket out of town, case closed. And the victims are scumbags, nobody gives a shit about them anyway.”

  Karp paused and looked searchingly at his friend. Fulton gave him a long flat stare. At length, some little flicker around the eyes showed Karp he had gotten through, a mental transmission had clunked into a different gear. Fulton nodded slowly. “Go on,” he said.

  “So they’re looking for wackos. The lieutenant goes underground, they start spreading stories he’s dirty. Why? He wants access to the underworld. He wants to be approached. Now he’s a guy who takes dirty money, he beats up people. Maybe his new mutt friends will let something drop, maybe he’ll hit the jackpot, he’ll get contacted by the actual guys: ‘Hey, Loo, want to ace a pusher—it’s fun!’”

  Fulton was growing restless. A man pounded on the locked door to the toilet. Karp understood he had less than a minute to finish.

  “Get to the point, Butch,” said Fulton.

  “The point is, they’re wrong. You’re wrong. It’s not a couple of crazies. They’re connected. They’re not freelancing. They’re doing it for somebody, and whoever it is has a shitload of clout.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Got you interested, didn’t I? It was the judge who sprung Booth that got me thinking. Why would he do that? A judge conspiring with crazy cops? Maybe, if it was a certain kind of judge, but not the Honorable Mealy Nolan. This is a lightweight: intellectual and moral. And a criminal lightweight too, which is my point. On the pad since the year one, but safe.

  “Not a sticker-out of the judicial neck, you know? Little fixes a specialty, for a consideration, but no fat envelopes. Somebody calls him, says, ‘Terry, me lad, I just heard IBM is about to split and I took the liberty of picking up a hundred shares for you. And by the way …’

  “That’s how it would go. But a cop walks in, says, ‘Judge, we been waxing these dope dealers, cleaning up the streets for the citizens, and now we’d like you to spring the only witness so we can wax him too.’ No fuckin way, boss!”

  “Who’s the guy, then?” Fulton asked, going instantly, as Karp had feared, to the key weakness of the hypothesis.

  “The guy who called Nolan, you mean. This I don’t know.”

  Fulton seemed to let out a long breath. He shrugged and walked toward the door. This time Karp did not block him. Fulton said, “It’s a nice story, Butch. Hypothetically speaking. I don’t know what you plan on doing with it, though—”

  “But I know how to find out,” Karp interrupted.

  “How?”

  “I’m going to ask Tecumseh. He leads us to the cop, and the cop leads us to the guy.”

  Fulton grinned broadly and shook his head. “You don’t give up, do you? What makes you think Booth will talk? He never talked in his damn life, except to tell a lie.”

  “He’ll talk to me,” said Karp, and even as the words formed in his mouth, the plan for making them true leapt all complete into his brain. He said, “Come and watch us play ball tomorrow. I’ll set it up.”

  Fulton said, “You better not tell Dugman that I’m gonna be around. I don’t think he trusts me around Tecumseh anymore.”

  “No, I’ll fix it up so there’s no contact,’ said Karp. “By the way, I should call him now. You happen to know where he is?”

  “Yeah, he’s got the graveyard shift tonight, at the precinct.”

  “OK, I’ll call you tomorrow after everything’s set.”

  Fulton nodded and left.

  Karp went to the pay phone and called Dugman. After some preliminary fencing, Dugman became extremely cooperative. The detective had grown increasingly nervous about his position: he was working for a lieutenant he thought was involved in the very murders that lieutenant had ordered him to investigate; he was holding a private prisoner who might be a key witness in those murders; and he sensed that there were big wheels moving somewhere behind all this, wheels that could squash a fifty-five-year-old black detective without even slowing down.

  Fearless on the streets, Dugman felt helpless before the forces of bureaucracy; he was looking for shelter and when he discovered that the D.A. was going to provide it, he was unabashedly grateful.

  After the call, Karp walked back to Marlene, who had ordered another set of drinks. “Hi, sailor,” she said. “You were in there long enough for a blowjob.”

  “What’s a blowjob?”

  “Fifteen dollars, same as downtown,” she shot back.

  Karp looked at the drinks in a meaningful way. Marlene caught the look.

  “It’s a wine spritzer, Doctor,” she said defensively. “I have cut down smoking and drinking as much as I am going to, and if you think I am going to become a granola fascist because I’m knocked up, you have another think coming. My mom drank a pint of wine and smoked a pack of Pall Malls every day of her six pregnancies, and we’re all perfectly normal.”

  “Present company included?” asked Karp.

  “Besides me, I mean,” said Marlene, cracking a smile. “But really, what’s going on—with Clay and all?”

  “Just office stuff. Catching up on things,” said Karp evasively.

  Marlene pouted. “OK for you, buster—in that case I’m not going to tell you my secret. Oh, good, they’re going to do another set.”

  Fulton and his trio had come back to the tiny stage, and without preamble burst into a lively upbeat tune.

  “‘Tinkle Toes,’” said Marlene. “Lester Young.” They listened. After, she said, “Hey, Clay’s not bad. And the sax. Not that I know much.”

  “Lester Young,” said Karp. “Pres.”

  Marlene looked at him in amazement. “That’s an impressive piece of cultural information, for you. He has an aunt who knew Colette, he drinks, he clubs, he jazzaficionados … it’s a whole new Karp.”

  “Oh, and what was wrong with the old Karp?”

  “Nothing, dear, nothing—you were perfect then and you’re even more perfect now,” breathed Marlene in her best phony Donna Reed voice. “Let’s just listen to the music.”

  They left at two. The magic
of the evening was capped by their fortune in finding an on-duty cab in Harlem.

  “We’ll never get to work tomorrow, and I don’t care.” Marlene yawned. “Let the wheels of justice grind to a halt.”

  “Yeah,” said Karp, “what’s a few less asses in jail?”

  Marlene looked him full in the face. “You’re such a phony baloney, Butch,” she told him sternly. “The line you lay down about it all being a game—putting asses in jail. It’s that number seven, isn’t it? That drives you. You can’t stand for anybody to get away with it. That’s why you’re such a fanatic.”

  “Yeah, right. If you say so,” Karp retorted, feeling defenseless and more vulnerable than he liked to feel. “You’re in charge of that deep stuff.” Marlene was about to answer this, but found she lacked the energy required for another bout of mutual introspection. She snuggled into Karp’s chest and immediately fell asleep.

  Karp watched the traffic lights shine through the steam from the manholes, and reflected that he had not felt this good in weeks. He had managed to scoop Fulton in with a net of plausible lies, all whiter than white, revealing his own knowledge of the affair to Fulton without breaking his promise to Denton. It was unlikely that Fulton would tell Denton about this conversation; it would be close to admitting that Fulton had let Karp in on the deal. As Denton had in fact.

  Fulton was now no longer entirely outside the cover of the law, nor was he pursuing the phantom of a mentally deranged-police-officer cabal. He was ready to listen, and if he rolled, Denton would roll too. The kid had dribbled through the zone, he had paint underfoot, and tomorrow he would take his one and only possible shot.

  ELEVEN

  Karp and Hrcany, dressed in sweats and sneakers, and carrying duffel bags laden with softball equipment, walked out of the Criminal Courts Building and toward Hrcany’s car, which he had stashed in the special judges-only parking on the Leonard Street side. It was five-fifteen on a Friday, and every judge in the world had been safe at home for hours.