No Lesser Plea bcamc-1

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Um, I’m not sure, Conrad. This is a little new to me. You seem to be saying that people who work for the criminal justice system, if they break the law, well, they can get a sort of special deal from the DA’s office, maybe cop an easier plea because the whatsit, the Trial Screening Profile, gives a low score to those particular crimes.”

  “I wouldn’t say a ‘special deal,’ actually. It’s a … more subtle ordering of priorities type of thing …”

  “No, I think I got it now. So it would mean that, if I were a cop sitting here, and you were to go over to Mister Cheeseborough there and start sucking his cock, and he said, ‘Let go of my hose, you little faggot,’ and then I arrested you for sexual battery, in such a case, because you were part of the criminal justice system, the Honorable Francis P. Garrahy or his representatives would be more inclined to let you plead to say, consensual sodomy. Is that how it would work, Conrad?”

  The Onion came up out of his chair so fast that his anti-hemorrhoid Komfort-Kushion squawked. “Damn you, Karp. You’re offensive!”

  “Not as offensive as what I’m hearing from him.” Karp jerked his thumb at Wharton, who was silent, with an expression of superior resignation on his cherubic face. “The law doesn’t say diddly-squat about goddam priorities, Mister Cheeseborough. It says everybody gets the same shake, the same day in court, and if we spend more time nailing a multiple killer than a sidewalk spitter, that’s part of the discretion of the assistant district attorney in charge-which is me- subject to the concurrence of the district attorney, from whom I have heard not one word on this matter-”

  “Karp, you’re way out of line now,” sputtered the Onion, his top knot lashing about like a palm in a typhoon. “I am …”

  “-and furthermore, behind all this happy horseshit about ‘optimizing throughput’ I detect just a taste of old-fashioned politics. You wouldn’t have gotten a call from a guy named Mervyn Stein, hey Conrad?”

  “That has nothing whatever to do with it,” said Wharton, coloring slightly.

  “Oh, Conrad, is that a blush of shame on your cheek, naughty boy! Does Mr. Garrahy know you’ve been using his office to make important friends for yourself on the Narcotics Control Commission?”

  Wharton sighed. “Karp, you’re getting carried away. This case has nothing. You have the word of four teenaged addicts, who were regrettably injured during an escape attempt, against the testimony of four reputable guards. In my view, you’re wasting the office’s resources because of some private vendetta that …”

  “In your view! The courtroom wizard speaks. When was the last time you tried a case, Wharton? In moot court?”

  “He’s right, Karp,” the Onion said nastily. “You haven’t got any evidence besides those scumbags’ testimony.”

  “You’re wrong there. I have complete documentary proof that the guards lied about their whereabouts during the time the inmates were beaten.”

  This was bluff. Karp had sent Hal Dooley up to the Drug Center to check on the movements of the guards on the day in question, but so far, he had come up with nothing. But there had to be that evidence.

  “Oh?” said Wharton, “what sort of proof?”

  “Come to court, you’ll find out.”

  “No way, Karp,” the Onion put in. “I’m still running this bureau, and I won’t have …”

  But they never found out what the Onion wouldn’t have, because at that instant there was a loud explosion from the direction of the outer office, followed by two more in quick succession.

  “Jesus! What the hell is that?” cried the Onion. And then several more sharp reports.

  Wharton’s pink face blanched and he croaked, “We’re under attack by radicals! That’s automatic weapons fire!”

  All three men rushed into the outer office, where Miss Kimple was crossing herself nonstop and begging forgiveness for her sins. Lurid flashes could be seen through the frosted glass of the hallway door.

  Luckily Wharton was there to take charge. He had spent four years in the ROTC and nine months in a logistic-support unit in Saigon. On two occasions he had flown in a helicopter over paddies where there were reliable reports of Vietcong sightings, for which exploit he had received a Bronze Star.

  “Miss Kimple!” he barked, “get down behind the desk! Everybody, take cover!” They all got down on their knees behind the secretary’s desk, Kimple half dead with terror, the Onion red faced with rage (this was not covered under Civil Service regulations), and Karp feeling foolish. Wharton pulled the phone down and dialed 911. For a wonder he was connected at once and began shooting vital information down the line in clipped military tones: “This is the DA’s office, One hundred Centre Street, fourth floor. We’re under attack by a group of armed radicals. They have automatic weapons, probably Kalashnikovs, grenades, and rocket launchers …” Suitable background noises for this dramatic report continued to come from outside: explosions, the sound of breaking glass and now a woman’s voice screaming hysterically and a man’s hoarse shouts.

  Wharton concluded his report: “… my name is Conrad Wharton, I’m Mister Garrahy’s special assistant. For God’s sake, hurry! They’re getting closer. Send the SWAT team!” As he hung up the telephone there was an unusually loud BANG-WHOOOOSH-BANG! outside the door and the room was lit with a hellish red glare, which died and was then replaced with a blue light and then a green one. Finally, the loudest explosion of all went off, the door shook, its glass rattled and a wave of harsh actinic white light, like a welder’s torch, came through the door glass. Miss Kimple screwed her fists into her ears, shut her eyes, and commenced to scream at the top of her voice.

  Green light? Karp had never seen combat, but he doubted that light shows were part of the standard repertoire of the militant left. He rose to his feet and walked toward the hallway door. “Get down, you fool! You’ll draw their fire,” croaked Wharton, still prone. “Doyle! Can’t you shut her up!” The Onion grabbed Miss Kimple’s shoulder and shook her. The screams continued. Then he made his big mistake. Trained by dozens of B-movies as to the appropriate masculine behavior in such situations, he sat up and slapped Miss Kimple across the face. It stopped her screaming. She opened her eyes wide, brought down her fists and delivered a right cross that would not have embarrassed Willy Pep smack on the Onion’s nose. He fell back across Wharton’s body gushing blood. Kimple closed her eyes, plugged her ears and began screaming again.

  Karp left the office and walked out into the hallway. He already had a pretty good idea of what had happened, and it was confirmed by the charred and glowing cardboard cylinders that littered the floor. The passage was smokey and thick with the acrid fumes that recalled childhood summers and Tuesday night fireworks at Coney Island. People were beginning to emerge cautiously from the other offices in the hall. Karp spotted Roland Hrcany and waved.

  “Karp? We have to stop meeting like this. What the fuck’s happening, man? Another bombing?”

  “I doubt it. It seems to be coming from Guma’s.” Karp pointed to Guma’s door, two doors down from the Onion’s and across the hall. As one of the senior ADA’s in the bureau, Guma had his own office. Its door glass was shattered and it now appeared to be the source of the smoke, the continuing red glow, an occasional BANG! and the noise of a violent argument between a woman shrieking in a foreign tongue and a man speaking Low Middle Brooklynese.

  Now there was a rumble of footsteps on the fire stairs. The fire door burst open and half a dozen big men dressed in black uniforms and helmets and carrying riot guns and Armalite rifles charged into the hallway. The office workers backed against the walls to let them by. The SWAT sergeant shouted, “Where are they?” Silence from the crowd. “OK, you three men check the offices on this floor. Camello, Rasmussen, check the fifth. What the hell is all that screaming?”

  Karp stepped forward. “Uh, Sergeant, I think there’s been a mistake.”

  “Who’re you?”

  “My name’s Karp. I’m a DA. Look, I think what we’ve got here is an accide
ntal explosion of some fireworks.” Karp held up a large cardboard tube on which still fluttered some colorful tissue paper printed with Chinese characters. The sergeant swore. “Alright, but what’s going on in there?” He gestured to Guma’s office. “It sounds like a broad getting raped by a wild pig.”

  Karp said, “You could be right, Sarge. Let’s check it out.”

  The two men went over to Guma’s door. Hrcany and a dozen or so spectators followed and crowded around. Meanwhile, one of the SWAT officers had liberated the Onion’s fortress. Miss Kimple was being ministered to on the office couch by another secretary. The Onion and Wharton had come out into the hallway, both spattered with blood from the Onion’s nose. The Onion still held a red-sodden handkerchief to his face and leaned on Wharton for support.

  “Holy shit,” said Hrcany, noticing them. “This looks like the relief of Khe Sanh. Butch, what the fuck …”

  “Wait, wait,” said Karp, “here comes the payoff.”

  The SWAT sergeant rattled the knob to Guma’s door. It was locked. The shouts from inside ceased. “Open up!” shouted the sergeant. More silence. The SWAT man then knocked the rest of the glass out of the door with the butt of his shotgun, reached in, and released the lock. The door swung open and the spectators leaned forward and peered through the smoke still rushing out through the doorway.

  Guma was standing in the middle of the small room. He held up his pants with his left hand and with his right held the arm of a very large, very angry, very blonde, and very naked woman. The surface of his desk was cleared of everything except a green blotter and a gooseneck lamp. Smoke still poured from the waste can near the desk. A black lace brassiere hung from the lamp. When the woman saw the crowd she cried out something incomprehensible and slapped Guma’s face with her free hand. She broke free, snatched various items of clothing off the floor, and, clutching them to her middle, bent over double to shoot out through the doorway and down the hall before anyone could stop her. The last part of her they saw was a set of generous white buttocks twinkling away through the swirling smoke.

  Karp spoke first. “Sergeant, this is obviously not a job for the SWAT team.”

  The sergeant laughed. “I guess you could say that. But what’ll I do about my report? I gotta say something.”

  “Just say it was … a case of DHE, that’s detonative hysterical ecdysiasm.”

  “What?”

  “Here, I’ll write it down for you. Detonative hysterical ecdysiasm is an uncontrollable desire to undress in front of lawyers while setting off fireworks. We have two or three cases of it every week.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sure, Sarge,” said Hrcany. “We usually handle it quietly, but this was worse than usual. That poor woman! I’ll see that she gets the appropriate treatment.”

  The sergeant appeared satisfied with this explanation. He had once worked in the East Village and had heard a hundred stranger stories. He gathered his commandos together and left. The crowd began to disperse; it was after five and most of them were on their way home anyway. Karp and Hrcany went into Guma’s office. Guma was straightening his clothes.

  “OK, Mad Dog, spill!” said Karp.

  “Holy shit, Karp, what the fuck am I going to do about this office?”

  “More to the point, what are you going to do about the Onion?” said Hrcany.

  “He won’t do shit,” said Karp. “Corncob Wharton will convince him to keep it quiet because he won’t want it known that he called out the SWAT for some firecrackers. It might prejudice his machismo, and the Onion won’t want the world to know he was cold-cocked by his secretary.”

  In fact, they could hear the Onion bellowing in the corridor, a bellow transmuted by the tissue jammed into his nostrils: “I wonk to know the meanbing of this! What is gonking ong here?” They also heard Wharton talking rapidly to him and then the closing of the Onion’s office door.

  “See?” said Karp. “OK, Guma, what is gonking on here? Who was that bimbo?”

  Guma collapsed in his swivel chair and sighed deeply. “That was no bimbo, that was my witness, Christa Spirotekas. She’s a Greek, runs a bar on Eighth Avenue. I just nailed some guy who burgled her place and she wanted to show her appreciation. So I let her. I sat in my chair smoking a cigar and she did the horniest strip act I ever saw in my life. Then she sat on my lap and started torquing my tool. What could I do?”

  “What, indeed?” said Hrcany.

  “So she cleared off the desk-”

  “Except for the blotter.”

  “-except for the blotter and lay down on her back, and I dropped my drawers and got to work. Mama mia! What a piece of ass! Did you catch those mazoomas?”

  Karp said, “I can see it coming.”

  “Right. I tossed my cigar into the shit can. I guess I forgot that’s where I stashed my fireworks.”

  “And the rest is history,” said Hrcany. “One thing, Goom, since me and Karp saved your butt with our quick thinking, I figure you owe us something.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Guma suspiciously. “Like what?”

  “Goom,” said Hrcany, “I don’t know what Karp wants, but I want that blotter. I’m going to have it framed.”

  “Terrific, you can have it.”

  Karp went to the door. “Guys, it’s been real, but I gotta go.”

  “Stay, Butch, we’ll go for beer and pizza. You’re not gonna work now, are you?”

  “Yeah, Goom, I got to clear up some stuff.”

  Karp went directly to his cubicle and dumped the contents of his desk drawers into a waste basket and stuffed all his books and papers into his briefcase. He went out into the hall, found a janitorial cart and took a couple of brown plastic trash bags. These he filled with the rest of his things and the briefcase. Then, burdened like a pack mule, he staggered to the elevator and rode it up to the sixth floor.

  He went directly to Joe Lerner’s office. The secretary had gone home, but he knew Lerner would be there. The man was famous for working late. He was also famous for not tolerating bureaucratic bullshit. Twenty minutes later Karp was unpacking his stuff in a tiny office-tiny, but with a real door and walls that reached to the ceiling. He had just hung up his Polish picture, when Lerner came in with a fat sheaf of papers and dropped them on the desk.

  “What’s that?” asked Karp.

  “Coram nobis petitions.”

  “Oh, crap.” Coram nobis are postconviction appeals filed by people in prison demanding retrial on the grounds that a witness had changed testimony or that evidence had been illegally seized. Answering them is a boring, thankless, endless, and necessary task-and the job was always given to the lowest scullion in the bureau’s kitchen, which at this point, was Karp.

  “You’ll love it,” said Lerner. “No, really, I know you’re a hotshot, but Homicide is a slightly different league than what you’ve been doing. You’ll see. You’ll come to the meetings, go on call, see the way we do things. Then, after a while, they’ll let you second-seat on a case. Unless they stop killing each other out there, you’ll be up to your ass soon enough.”

  Karp gestured around. “No, it’s OK. I like the office. Thanks.”

  “Yeah, it used to be a supply closet in the old days. When it gets damp, you can still smell the Lysol. By the way, what was all that commotion downstairs a little while ago?”

  “Nothing much,” said Karp. “One of the DAs was fucking a witness on his desk and set off a bunch of fireworks.”

  “Oh,” said Lerner. “The usual.”

  Chapter 8

  Two weeks later, Karp was still in the little office, answering coram nobis petitions. It used to be somebody got caught, and convicted, they went to prison and, mostly, stayed there for the time they were sentenced, or until paroled. “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” the cons said, and in a weird way, they were proud of it. But now, as Karp realized more and more, wading through the piles of petitions, that subtle agreement between the bad guys and the good guys had entirely vanished.
Although very few of the thousands of felons in New York City were ever caught, and although few of those few were ever sentenced to long stretches in prison, and although it was absurdly easy to cop a plea to a lesser offense, the small number of people actually sentenced for killing somebody seemed to be spending their entire lives behind bars looking for legal technicalities that would free them.

  In general, there was no question here that these people were killers. Here was a guy, for instance, who quarreled with his neighbor about a gambling debt, went home, brooded about it, got liquored up, took a steak knife from the kitchen, went next door, stabbed his neighbor four times through the heart, went back home, rinsed off the knife, and went to sleep. Next day, the cops come. Hey, there’s a trail of blood leading from the corpse to the house next door. The cops go in, brace the dude (“I din do nothin’ ”), they find the knife-he washed the blood off the blade, forgot about the handle, also forgot about his shirt and pants. The blood’s a ten-point match with the victim’s. Case closed, right? Wrong. On the advice of his cellmate, the guy does a coram nobis on the grounds that the evidence was illegally obtained, because the cops did not have probable cause to enter his castle.

  There were a lot of them like that. Law was a game, sure, but there used to at least be agreement on the rules. Now it was as if, at a basketball game, one side would argue about whether the court or the ball was exactly the right size until the other team got pissed off and left, giving them the win on a forfeit.

  Karp soldiered on through most of the morning, with the sunlight from the bright day moving slowly across the piles of forms on his desk, making jagged shadows like springtime in the Rockies. He was starting to think about breaking for lunch, when he heard a couple of taps on his door and Lerner came in.

  “How’s it going, kiddo?”

  “I’m dying. How about yourself, Joe?”

  Lerner chuckled. “This too shall pass. Actually, I’m bringing you some relief. How would you like to do something for me?”