Falsely Accused

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Dr. Fuerza was, in fact, a family doctor. Some fifteen years previously, he had settled in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, in the first wave of Puerto Rican migration, and started a pediatric clinic catering to Hispanic families, and had stuck it out through the growing blight. Early on he had learned how to corral public money, and his organization, El Centro de la Salud de los Ninos, had become a key principality in the City’s multibillion-dollar health empire. Money and politics being inextricably linked in the City, as elsewhere, Dr. Fuerza had become a politician too, a man who might be depended upon to deliver votes in return for largesse at budget time. He had survived several investigations, and it was inevitable that, when the time came to appoint the first Hispanic health commissioner, Dr. Fuerza would get the prize.

  Looking up at him now, Karp felt the stirrings of sympathy. Here, he understood, was a man who had done a lot of good, who, through thoughtless political loyalty, was about to fall into a blender in full public view. Karp did not much enjoy acting the whirling blades, but on the other hand the doctor had committed numerous perjuries and was doubtless about to commit others. Karp glanced over at the Health Department counsel, Ira Nachman, a thin, elderly man, also a perjurer. Nachman knew he was in trouble, if Fuerza didn’t. He kept licking his lips and shuffling documents.

  Karp consulted his master sheet one last time as Fuerza was sworn in. In a case as complex as this one, it was essential to tell the jury a coherent story, with well-marked chapters and conclusions. Fortunately, the defendants had done most of the job for him, for the two memos, one each from Fuerza and Bloom, with their neatly bulleted points, comprised the totality of the charges for which Selig had been fired. The Mayor had already testified that he had relied exclusively on these charges in forming his decision, and that otherwise he thought that Murray Selig was a prince. Each charge thus had to be isolated, examined, and proven false, and not only that, Karp had to show that, in devising and maintaining these charges, the defendants had acted with reckless disregard for what they knew to be the truth. Thus, as each charge fell amid a tangle of prevarication, Karp would be hammering ever deeper into the collective mind of the jury one critical fact: that the dismissal was an arrant frame-up.

  The first charge on the Fuerza memo was that Selig had demanded patient records from a Mt. Zion hospital drug clinic, violating federal confidentiality laws, and that he had made persistent demands for same in the face of the hospital’s refusal.

  Karp approached, had the witness identify himself, had the witness agree he had made the charges, read the first charge, had the witness confirm he had made it, asked the witness whether he knew that the patient whose records Dr. Selig had requested was deceased and the subject of a forensic examination (he did), and whether he was aware that such requests for patient records were routine (he did).

  Karp handed Fuerza a letter and asked him to read it and describe what it was about. Fuerza shifted in his seat and looked at his counsel.

  He read it and said, “It’s from me to Mt. Zion, asking for the medical records in this case.”

  “And in it you declare that such requests are not violative of federal confidentiality statutes, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, by this letter, you yourself obtained the records?”

  “Correct.”

  “So you believe that there was actually no violation of confidentiality law?”

  A slight hesitation. “It was my counsel, Mr. Nachman’s belief. I signed the letter on his advice.”

  “And did you believe at that time, when you signed the letter, that Dr. Selig’s request was violative?”

  “No, not at that time.”

  “Thank you. Now let’s move to July, when you wrote the memo to the Mayor. Did you believe then that Dr. Selig had violated federal confidentiality rules?”

  “I was following advice of my counsel, Mr. Nachman.”

  “Please answer the question, Doctor. Did you believe men that Dr. Selig broke the law in reference to this deceased patient?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your counsel changed his advice, then?”

  “No,” said Fuerza. His eyes, magnified behind the thick lens, were starting to shift at Nixonian velocities.

  “No?” asked Karp in the tone usually reserved for a schoolboy’s whopper.

  “I mean, yes. His advice was that it was a violation.”

  “Which one was a violation? Dr. Selig’s original request or the request that you yourself signed and sent to Mt. Zion?”

  “His,” answered Fuerza desperately.

  “I see. Let me understand this. His request was illegal. Your request supporting his request for the identical records was not. Is that what you’re telling us?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry. Then exactly what are you saying, sir? It’s right when you do it and wrong when Dr. Selig does it? Or that it’s right for both of you in January, but wrong for Dr. Selig in July?”

  “I relied on advice of counsel,” said Fuerza weakly.

  “So I gather,” said Karp. He paused to let the jury get a full whiff of the horseshit. “Turning now to the next charge …”

  Things went in similar fashion throughout that day and the morning of the next, Karp working the witness like a big tuna on a hook, using the past testimony of the minor witnesses and Fuerza’s own deposition to sink the barbs deeper, throwing up the astounding paper trail that Fuerza had left, a trail that up until early July of that year demonstrated that Angelo Fuerza was as happy with Murray Selig as a boss could be with a subordinate. As the hours dragged, the tuna weakened, it lolled by the boat awaiting the gaff. Fuerza’s voice became duller. He misspoke, contradicting himself. He hardly seemed to care what he said, if only the torment would end. Gulfs opened between what he had said at deposition, and what the witnesses had said, and what he was saying now. He became sulky; he took refuge in advice of counsel, blaming the lawyers, making himself look like a puppet, and a stupid puppet at that. The tuna knew it would never see blue water again; it was thinking Star-Kist, Bumble Bee, Chicken-of-the-Sea.

  The final charge was the “leaving town without notification charges,” an anticlimax that left several of the jurors rolling their eyes and shaking their heads. Karp trotted out the file of letters that Selig had written documenting his absences from duty, inquiring of Fuerza with respect to each one whether he had seen it (the redoubtable Mrs. Ortiz having confirmed this in detail) and, getting an affirmative answer to each, asked on what specific occasion Dr. Selig had been absent without leave. To which Fuerza replied that he could not name any. No further questions. Karp turned his back and walked stiffly back to his seat.

  Naomi Selig was in court that day, and after Fuerza was dispatched, she and her husband and Karp went to nearby Chinatown for lunch. Naomi chose Lee’s, a big, touristy Cantonese joint on Mott that Karp, who practically lived in Chinatown, had never been to, and also took charge of the ordering, informing Murray what he liked and what didn’t agree with him, and promising Karp that he’d love whatever arrived. She also gave a stream of advice to the waiter about how she wanted the food prepared. Karp thought that he would have strangled the woman after a week of marriage, but it was clear that Selig doted on her, and didn’t mind, in fact positively enjoyed, being managed.

  “I think we’re doing very well,” said Naomi after the food had arrived, looking at Karp. “You wiped Fuerza off the map, the rat.”

  “Well, he was an easy target,” Karp allowed. “There was documentary evidence contradicting all the charges except one …”

  Naomi uttered the name of the vice-president who had died under odd circumstances.

  “… right, that one,” Karp continued. “But even there we had two docs who’d been at the meeting and contradicted the charge. But we can expect them, when it’s their turn, to drag in some guy who’ll swear Murray carried on for an hour about how the great man spent his last moments popping his rocks.”

  “This
duck is too soggy,” said Naomi. “It should be crispy on the outside. Even if they do, it’s their witness against ours.”

  “True, but …”

  Naomi caught his tone and returned a sharp look. “But what?”

  “Scuttling Fuerza was the easy part. The Bloom charges didn’t leave a paper trail. Bloom’s a better bureaucrat than that. Also, we have the where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire problem with the jury. Even if we’re able to show that the charges per se are all trumped up, the jury’s going to be thinking, if this guy’s such a sweetheart, why did all these senior public figures go out of their way to screw him? We don’t have the answer to that.”

  “I do,” said Naomi. “Sandy Bloom, that momser!”

  Karp nodded, suppressing irritation. “Yes, I agree. And we’ve said that to one another over and over again, and we’re still not any closer to anything I can tell a jury. I can oppose the individual charges, like I did with Fuerza, but at the end of the day I’d like to be able to stand up there and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, these momsers tried to screw an honest man because …’ and it can’t just be ‘because he’s a son of a bitch according to the plaintiff’s wife.’”

  Selig chuckled at this, but Naomi was not amused. She gave Karp the Look, to which he responded with a disarming grin. She decided to return to the original subject. “Assuming we never learn the reason, what happens?”

  “Well,” said Karp, “in that case, after we destroy the substantive charges, they get a free throw at Murray. I’ve explained this, right, Murray?”

  “Yeah,” said Selig around a mouthful of lobster Cantonese, “the chickadees. And the snake.”

  Naomi’s eyes widened. “What? Chick-a-whats?”

  “These are legal terms, Naomi,” said Selig with a wink at Karp. “Butch thinks they’ll bring something in from left field to blacken my name. Like, I beat my wife.”

  Mrs. Selig’s unamusement increased; she was not used to being winked at, nor was she accustomed to remarks of that nature from her husband. She moved to redress the balance. “Well, if that’s the case, we’re home free; Murray’s only vice is leaving his dirty underwear for the maid to pick up.”

  Murray blushed and coughed and swallowed some water, and Naomi breezed on to topics of more general interest. “Speaking of beating, you remember, Murray? That woman whose name I can never remember got beaten in the park the other night, the one who wrote that piece in the Times about Butch. She had something in the Voice late last year. Terrible! This city …” She lifted her eyes to heaven and expertly snagged the last sweet-and-sour shrimp.

  “Irene somebody,” offered Selig.

  “No, it wasn’t Irene, Murray. Something much weirder.”

  “Ariadne Stupenagel,” said Karp.

  “That’s it,” said Naomi. “As a matter of fact, that article was the reason we thought of you in the first place. You’d think somebody like that would be smarter than to go into that end of the park in the middle of the night.”

  Naomi and her husband then drifted into a common upper-middle-class New York topic, Nothing Is Safe Anymore, including the usual vignettes about previously “safe” buildings raided by no-goodniks, friends who’d been mugged, and the extreme measures they all had to take to protect themselves. Karp nodded and put in a phrase or two, not really listening. Something nagged at the edges of his mind, some connection waiting to be made. He began to feel slightly dizzy and claustrophobic, but whether from the MSG in the food or Naomi’s chatter he could not tell.

  They finished eating; the waiter came and cleared. Selig wanted to order pineapple ice cream; Naomi mentioned his arteries; Selig asked who was the doctor. Naomi said it was his funeral, but not to expect her to attend. Selig asked Karp whether it would hurt his chances if he beat his wife just this once. In this way the conversation came around to the phrase Karp was waiting for, all unknowing.

  “Speaking of damaging material,” said Selig, “did you ever find out whether there was anything to that story about a D.A.’s investigation of the M.E.?” Karp didn’t answer. “Butch?”

  “Huh? Oh, right—no, that seems to have been a rumor …” He stopped talking, his face slack, his eyes staring at nothing. The Seligs shared a concerned look.

  “Butch, is … something wrong? Need a Gelusil?”

  Karp snapped to, showing intensity now. “No, I’m fine,” he said. “Look, Murray, I want you to come back to my place after court this afternoon. There’s something I want you to take a look at.”

  FOURTEEN

  Karp and Marlene sat at their round dining room table and watched Murray Selig look at photographs of corpses. Marlene had turned the track lighting up to its highest setting and brought her halogen desk lamp in from her office, so that the cozy domestic space shone with the unforgiving light of the autopsy room. As Selig studied each picture with the aid of a hand lens, Karp studied Selig. The man was not happy. Oddly enough for someone who had been fired for purported deviations from procedure, Selig was in fact a procedural fanatic. He did not at all like being asked to view unofficially obtained autopsy snaps, and even before he sat down to look at them, he had argued vehemently against the possibility of coming to any valid conclusions from photos alone.

  Forty minutes passed. Karp got up once to go to the bathroom, and Marlene went to her office to call her service and answer some calls. Business was brisk, although many of the calls were from women who wanted their exes beaten up on general principles or frightened into coming across with child support. Returning to the dining room after several unpleasant conversations with angry women, Marlene found that Selig had put his magnifier down and removed his glasses.

  “Done?” she asked.

  Selig rubbed his eyes and looked up at her bleakly. “As done as I’m going to get. Are you two going to tell me what this’s about? I’ll tell you right now, I don’t like it at all.” In his mild way, he was quite angry.

  Karp said, “Murray, first you have to tell us, is there anything fishy about the finding of suicide in these?”

  “Fishy?” Selig looked away. Karp knew from past experience that Selig was extremely loath to contradict the findings of other pathologists, especially any who had worked for him in his former position.

  “Yeah, fishy,” Karp pressed. “Did the two kids who supposedly hanged themselves really do it?”

  Selig put his glasses back on and furrowed his brows. “It’s really impossible to state authoritatively without an examination of the bodies,” he said sententiously, lifting the stack of photographs and letting them drop.

  “Murray, damn it!” Karp said, his voice rising. “You’re not in court on this. You were clucking like a mother hen looking through those pictures. Will you please for crying out loud tell us what you saw!”

  “I don’t see why—” Selig began huffily, but Karp cut him off with a look and a warning snarl.

  “Okay. There was no reason for Dr. Rajiv to have noticed it, but seeing the Ortiz and Valenzuela shots together … look, here are the posterior photographs. It’s the ankles.”

  Both Karp and Marlene stared at the backs of two pairs of dead men’s legs.

  “What are we supposed to see?” asked Marlene.

  “You can see them better with the lens. Notice the transverse bruising on the posterior surface of the Achilles tendon. The bruising runs around the foot just distal to the medial malleolus.”

  They looked and agreed that there was a mark there, in the same place on both corpses.

  “What does it mean?” asked Karp.

  “Well, the funny thing is, the marks on the throats of the two men are just right. They were made by hanging: that is, their bodies, the neck tissues, that is, were pulled with their own weight, at least, against the suspending fabric. There’s the characteristic inverted-V bruising. But the marks on the ankles are like mirror images, if you will, of the neck bruises. Which could suggest that, well, a rope was passed around the ankles and force applied in a direction opposite to that exe
rted at the neck.”

  “Murray, in plain English,” said Karp, “are you suggesting that there might have been foul play here?”

  “Let’s say it’s a plausible hypothesis,” said Selig carefully. “If you wanted to fake a suicide hanging, there are two ways you could do it. One is, you tie somebody up and actually hang them from a fixed point, like in an old-style execution. The other way is do the whole thing horizontally. You tie a rope around their neck, tie that to a solid object, tie a rope to their feet, and heave. You’d need considerable strength to do that, though, or some mechanical help. To get the neck bruises to look right you’d need to exert a force equal to the weight of the victim, in these cases in the hundred-and-thirty-pound range.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Marlene. “Why would anyone go through the trouble of killing someone that way?”

  Selig shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. People do funny things to people. If you just showed me the picture cold, without knowing it was a prisoner, I would’ve said a sexual ritual gone wrong. Knowing it’s a prisoner, I’d guess … torture? A little sadism? The killer wanted to be in control. The pulling part, I mean.” He cleared his throat and there was a moment of silence while they all thought.

  “Gone wrong,” said Karp at last, almost to himself.

  “Yeah,” said Selig. “And now that you’ve dragged me up here to show me this stuff and bullied me into speculation, would you mind telling me what this is all about?”

  “One more question, Murray,” said Karp. “You didn’t do these autopsies yourself. Why not? A prisoner death? Two prisoner deaths?”

  “When did they occur?”

  Marlene told him the dates.

  Selig wrinkled his brow. “Oh, right. It’s because in late April and early May I was laid up. I threw my back out playing tennis. I played two sets with no problems and then I reached down to pick up some balls and that was it. For about a month I couldn’t take standing up to do an autopsy.”