Irresistible Impulse

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Ah, Gerry,” said Roland, “this Mrs. Rodriguez, the neighbor, seems to be your chief witness. In fact, she’s your only decent witness, am I right?”

  “There’s Fuentes,” offered Nolan.

  “Oh, fuck Fuentes!” snarled Roland. “Fuentes is the vic’s sister. Morella used to beat the shit out of the wife before he went upstate. Fuentes’d say he was Hitler. No witness. So, you going to trial with Rodriguez, Gerry? Is that what you’re telling us? With no gun? Where’s the fucking gun, Jerry?”

  “He had a gun,” said Nolan. “We had a witness who saw him with it …” He started leafing frantically through his papers, seeking the name of the witness who had seen the D. with a gun.

  “Hey, he had a gun? Nolan, I had a gun once too. Maybe I killed Carmen Morella and what’s-his-face, the boyfriend, Claudio Bona,” said Roland. “Anyway, what’s Ms. Rodriguez’s story? Did she get along with Carmen okay? Did she ever fuck Claudio? Did she ever fuck Morella? What about her kids? They selling any dope up there on East 119th Street?”

  Guma said, “Yo, and I hear old Claudio was pretty tight with the Colombians.” Everyone looked at him. Guma had a reputation as a man from whom organized crime in the City held no secrets. Nolan’s face was blotched red where it was not cheeselike.

  “I … um, there was no evidence of drug, um, involvement,” he stammered.

  “No evidence?” said Roland. “Did you check? Did you check with Narco? With Organized Crime? No, you didn’t. You don’t know shit about Mrs. Rodriguez either, just her statement. You know what you got? You’re on your knees saying, ‘Believe the Rodriguez woman and not the D.’s witness, the cousin, Morella’s cousin, who says he wasn’t anywhere near the place when the shooting went down.’”

  “There’s the forensics. He was there.”

  Roland hooted. “The forensics! My sweet white ass, the forensics! Schmuck! It was his apartment before he went upstate. The vic was his wife! Of course there’re fucking prints and fibers. There’s going to be his prints and fiber on her snatch! No, look: let me tell you what you did, sonny. You didn’t build a case with your own hands. You just bought what the cops dragged in, and what the cops did was they caught this case, a couple uptown spics get whacked, no biggie, they check out the husband did time, got a violent sheet on him, and case closed. Well, fuck them, that’s their job. Your job, which you didn’t do, was to construct a case that would stand the test of no reasonable doubt. What we got instead is something any little pisher in Legal Aid with two weeks’ experience could drive a tank through.”

  And more of the same, with Guma joining in, and a couple of the more confident of the group picking like vultures on the bones of the case. Nolan grew paler and quieter; he stopped making objections, and scribbled notes, nodding like a mechanical toy. Karp ended his misery by suggesting that he needed some more time to prepare, and after that the meeting dissolved. Everyone filed out with unusual rapidity, as if fleeing one afflicted with a purulent disease. Nolan was silently gathering up his papers when Karp said, “Gerry, the reason why we do this is that we figure it’s better you get it here than in court, in front of a judge.”

  Nolan looked up, his lips tight, his chest heaving with suppressed rage. “I got twenty-eight convictions,” he said “I don’t like being treated like a kid out of law school.”

  Karp had heard this before. “It doesn’t matter what you did in Felony, Gerry. This is the Show, the majors. It doesn’t matter you could hit the Triple-A fast-balls. Homicide is different, which is the point of all this.”

  “Morella did it.”

  “I’m sure,” said Karp. “But like I’ve said, more than once, it’s irrelevant that he did it. The only question is, Do you have a case of the quality necessary to convict? And you don’t. So get one and come back with it.”

  Nolan gave him a bleak look, stuck his file folders under his arm, and walked out.

  Karp was sure that Nolan would be back, and with a better case too, because Karp had picked him as being the kind of skinny Irishman who never gives up. Nolan was an athlete. He had been a J.V. quarterback at Fordham, although someone as small as Nolan should never have gone anywhere near a football field. In fact, all the people Karp hired were athletes of one kind or another. It was a tradition. Roland was a wrestler and running back. Guma was a shortstop who, before he got fat, had been offered a tryout with the Yankees. Karp himself was a high-school All-American and a PAC-10 star before an injury to his knee ended his career. The other twenty-two attorneys on Karp’s staff included enough football and basketball and baseball players to field complete teams, and good teams, in each of those sports. The three women on the staff included a UConn power forward, a sprinter, and an AAU champion diver. The one wheelchair guy played basketball. A jock sort of place, the Homicide Bureau; Karp believed, on some evidence, that no one who did not have the murderously competitive instincts of a serious athlete could handle the rigors of homicide prosecution, or the sort of coaching delivered by people like Roland Hrcany. The sports credential impressed the cops too, which didn’t hurt.

  The phone rang. Karp picked up, listened for a moment, said, “I’ll be by in a minute,” and hung up. He stood, and from long habit tested his left knee before he allowed it to take weight. It would undoubtedly hold, being made of stainless steel and other stuff he did not particularly want to think about. Karp was six feet five, with long legs and very long arms, and the ends of which were wide, spider-fingered hands. His face was wide too, and bony, with high cheekbones and a nose lumpy from more than one break. He still had his hair at thirty-seven, and he kept it shorter than was fashionable then, at the start of the eighties. The two surprising features were the mouth, which was mobile and sensual, and the eyes, which had a nearly oriental cast and which were gray with gold flecks: hard eyes to meet in a stare, hard eyes to lie into. Karp walked out of his office, told his secretary where he was going, and (a daily masochism) took the stairs two flights up to the eighth floor, where the D.A. had his office.

  The man behind the D.A.’s desk was an older version of the sort of man Karp was, although of the Irish rather than the Jewish model. Jack Keegan’s skin was bright pink rather than sallow like Karp’s, and his hair was thinner and silver. The eyes were blue, but they had the same expression: bullshit me, laddie, at your extreme peril.

  Without preamble, when Karp walked into his office, Jack Keegan roared, “Rohbling, Rohbling, Rohbling, bless his tiny evil heart!”

  Karp came in and sat in a leather chair across from his boss’s desk. The furniture was as close a match as possible to the decrepit City-issued suites favored by the late Garrahy, and as far as possible in style from the slick modern stuff with which the awful Bloom had surrounded himself. “What now?” Karp asked.

  “Ah, nothing, I just wanted to blow steam at someone,” said Keegan. “Political crap. I just received a call from our esteemed Manhattan borough president, a credit to his race, as we used to say, who informed me that he would take it very much amiss if we agreed to a change of venue.”

  “And you informed him …”

  “I informed him, politely, that we had just nailed the little shit and his lawyer had not yet asked for one, but if he did there was no way we would go for it; nor was there a conceivable reason for any judge to grant it, this being New fucking York, and if you couldn’t pick a fair jury from that pool, good night, Irene.”

  “This is the race thing.”

  “This is. The black community is concerned. They see this nice rich white boy from the North Shore with a funny hobby that involves killing elderly black ladies. It makes them irate. They’re worried about what the esteemed gentleman called ‘legal tomfoolery.’ They want this guy dangling from a lamp post, and failing that, they want his white butt upstate forever.” Keegan took a Bering cigar from his desk drawer, pulled it from its silver tube, and stuck it in his mouth, unlit. “So. Anything new?”

  “Not much,” said Karp. “We ordered a psychiatric evaluation a
nd Bellevue says he’s competent. Grand jury should start next week sometime. I think we want to expedite this—”

  “No joke. Red ball on this one.”

  “Okay, it’s the beginning of November. Five counts of murder are going to take some time to present, so let’s say we arraign on the indictment before the end of the month, and then motions—say forty-five days?”

  “Say ninety days, if you’re lucky. This is Lionel Waley you got here on defense, the Duke of Delay.”

  “Okay, that rolls us well into next year. So we’ll figure jury selection to start up in March.”

  “Yeah, that’ll be a delightful experience too. It took a full month to select a jury for Bobby Seale. Count on at least that. Roland is going to do it, I presume. The actual trial.”

  Karp had been waiting for this. He met Keegan’s gaze and answered, “No. I’m going to take it.”

  Keegan’s eyes narrowed, and they stared at each other for an unlikely length of time. Then Keegan pursed his lips and examined the pale green wrapper of his cigar. He said, “You know, Butch, when I got to be D.A., I fondly imagined that my subordinates would do what I told them to do. I was mistaken, although I recall that when Phil Garrahy was in this chair, we all tried to do pretty much what he told us. Now, I think I’ve mentioned a time or two that as a bureau chief you can’t take trials—”

  “You used to take trials.”

  “May I finish? Thank you. And especially you can’t take a horrendous long trial like Rohbling is going to be, and rebuild the Homicide Bureau, and run it, and keep on top of everything else you have to do. And have a life. You’ve got three kids.”

  “You had four kids and you did it.”

  Keegan’s face dropped a shade into the red zone. “Yes, damn it, back in the sixties, when we had half as many homicides, and a dozen men in the bureau with twenty, twenty-five years’ experience, who didn’t need their noses wiped like your people do, and, frankly, before Warren and the Supremes got into the act, when we could do things to move cases through that we can’t do now. There’s no comparison.” He held up a meaty hand to check the expostulation he could see forming on Karp’s face. “Look, there’s no point in discussing it. I think I’ve made myself clear on this. On the other hand, you’re the bureau chief; I don’t intend to second-guess you. But here’s something to think about: if this case goes sour, there will be a shit storm of uncontrollable fury directed at both you and me. I have to face an election in a year’s time in a city where nearly half the electorate is non-white. So all the things we’re trying to do to bring this office back from perdition will be at risk. You need to understand that aspect.”

  “I do,” said Karp. “I can handle it.”

  Keegan replaced the cigar in his mouth and stared at Karp down its length, as along a gun barrel. “You ever go up against Lionel T. Waley?” he asked.

  “No. You?”

  “I did. In 1963. This is before he became the nation’s greatest criminal lawyer, as I believe he actually calls himself.”

  “Is he?”

  Keegan grinned. “Well, he wins a lot of cases. He’s up there with Lee Bailey and Nizer. You know what they say: if you can’t get Bailey, get Waley. Of course, Lionel says it’s the other way around.”

  “Did you win?”

  “I did not. He whipped my young ass. This was the Sutton case, a classic society killing. Is that a blank look? Babs Sutton, department store heiress? No? How soon they forget. Jesus, that whole world is gone. Cafe society, so called. In any case, Babs, or as the society columns used to say, the Princess Radetsky, was married to this playboy, Prince Ladislas Radetsky, and of course the prince continued to play, and Babs found him in their suite at the Waldorf, on top of a sixteen-year-old whore. She took out, if you can believe it, her pearl-handled .32 and gave him five through the chest.”

  “She walked on this?”

  “Oh, yeah. Waley gave them the defending the sanctity of the home horseshit. Driven to madness by the violation of the nuptial bed was how he put it. Had a jury full of decent Catholic women too, and he dressed the defendant like an understudy for the Little Flower. Oh, it was rare! My mistake was thinking that the facts spoke for themselves. Wrong, at least with Waley. You’re sure you don’t want to think it over?” He shot Karp another gunsight look over the cigar.

  “No, and this is going to be a team thing too. I don’t intend to do it all myself.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a relief,” said Keegan and laughed. “Jesus! Well, I knew you were a stubborn Jew son of a bitch when I hired you. I have only myself to blame. What I should do is call Marlene and get her to bang on your head. How is she, by the way?”

  “Fine, I guess. We tend to pass in the night.”

  “I presume she’s still … you know.” He made a shooting gesture with his hand.

  “Uh-huh. Apparently the business is flourishing.”

  Keegan shook his head. “What a world! And her a mother with three children!”

  “What can I say, Jack? It’s important to her. I’m married to her. I love her. Case closed.”

  “Well, yes,” said Keegan. “I didn’t mean to pry. Except, if there’s any mercy left in the world, the next time she shoots someone, it’ll be in Brooklyn. Outside the fucking County of New York.”

  “It’s my daily prayer,” said Karp.

  TWO

  Marlene Ciampi, wife of Karp, was at that moment standing in a shop in Chinatown buying a dozen pork kidneys for her dog, with any thoughts of shooting, in Manhattan or elsewhere, far from her mind. The dog, a Neapolitan mastiff only somewhat smaller than a Shetland pony, was outside on the sidewalk, slavering. Marlene’s daughter, Lucy, aged eight, was wandering through the rear of the store, where the butcher shop faded into a dusty sundries emporium. Marlene watched the counterman wrap her dog food, feeling, as ever, the pang of guilt that came from purchasing for this purpose meat meant for Chinese humans. And she knew the counterman knew it, although the hostile glare with which he greeted her was no different from the same expression worn by nearly all of the merchants in the little Mott Street shops when they had to deal with the guai lo, the white ghosts.

  “Can I have this, Ma?”

  Her daughter was holding up a bag of dried lichees wrapped in the peculiar stiff cellophane, never seen anywhere else, that was used to package much of what was sold in Chinatown. Marlene assented to the treat, paid the surly cashier, and they left the shop. As they did so, there was a burst of nasty laughter from a group of young men loitering outside. Leaning against the wall and sitting on plastic milk crates, they were the type of young men often to be seen lounging in Chinatown, almost always dressed in black, their trousers loose and pleated, and silky, their hair worn long and artfully swept back, the fingernails on their little fingers at least an inch long. They were laughing because they were discussing, in Cantonese, the sexual uses to which Marlene might be put. While Marlene was untying Sweety, the mastiff, from a sign pole, Lucy turned to the young men and said, calmly and without heat, in reasonably fluent Cantonese, “Dead things! Impotent turtles! Your grandfathers disown you.”

  After a moment of stunned silence the young men howled in rage and came off the wall and up from the milk crates. Lucy stood by Marlene and stuck her tongue out at them. Two elderly women passing in the street, who had heard the exchange, giggled and hid their mouths with their hands.

  “What’s going on, Lucy?” asked her mother, giving the young men the eye.

  “Oh, nothing, Mom, we were just talking,” said Lucy, with the confidence of one who has a 220-pound attack-trained dog standing by as well as a literal pistol-packing mom.

  The Chinese youths mumbled and glowered and pretended nothing had happened, like embarrassed cats. Lucy and Marlene moved on, Lucy cracking lichees and sucking on the intense sweetness of the fruit, and the slick, heavy seed within, crunching the fragile shells into fine sandy grains and scattering them as she walked. It was the best hour of her day, the only time she had he
r mother to herself, as in the blessed past, before the advent of Them. Lucy went to P.S. 1, where the Chinatown kids went, along with a handful of gringo children from SoHo, whose parents liked the idea of their offspring inhaling solid Confucian values with their lessons. The advantage of being able to speak with her friends a language that her mother did not understand had early appealed to her, and, discovering in herself a remarkable gift for tongues, she had avidly learned Cantonese from her little gang of bilingual schoolmates.

  They were walking north on Mott, toward Canal.

  “Are we going to Tranh’s now?” Lucy asked.

  “Uh-huh. What was all that back there, Lucy? With those punks?”

  “They’re gangsters, Mom.”

  “I know, honey, that’s why you shouldn’t talk to them.”

  “They were talking bad about you. Sex stuff.”

  “Yeah, I figured. Nevertheless …”

  “If they give us any heat, you could shoot them.”

  “You shoot them, Luce. I’m through with shooting people,” said Marlene, and changed the subject to the events of the past school day.

  Chatting amiably, they came out onto Canal. Here Chinatown had flowed past its historic barriers, pushed by the new immigration attendant upon the partial collapse of the Bamboo Curtain and the oriental misadventures of the American government. Much of this immigration was not, strictly speaking, Chinese, for it included Thais, Filipinos, and Vietnamese, of which Tranh, of the eponymous noodle shop, was one. It was a tiny, narrow place, with steamed windows, rich garlicky smells, a counter and four shaky tables.

  “Oh, here you are,” said Tranh from behind the Formica barrier, when Lucy ran in. “Usual?” asked Tranh.

  They agreed that it would be. Marlene had been bringing Lucy here for her after-school gouter, as they used to call it at Sacred Heart, for a little over a year, or just after the twins had arrived and Marlene had thought her daughter in need of a special daily treat. The place was nearly always empty at this hour, and unlike many of the proprietors of hole-in-the-wall Asian joints, Tranh did not treat them like lepers. He was grave, correct, and polite, although his English seemed limited to the two phrases he had just used plus “everything okay?”, “thank you,” and “goodbye.”