Everyone looked at Roland, who sat, working his jaw, saying nothing, as the seconds passed heavily by. Finally he observed, “You don’t have much. No gun. The mask and parka don’t mean a lot. Same with the car. And I thought Nassif had an alibi.”
“Yeah, from the workers in his restaurant, who’re scared shitless of him,” said Bello. “They won’t hold up once we start pushing, start yanking their phony green cards around.”
Some more silence. Everybody there knew that Roland’s case against Tomasian was not that much more impressive than the case against Nassif. At last Karp spoke up. “Guma, what’s the story on the tap?”
“The deal is still set for Thursday, day after tomorrow,” Guma replied. “Aside from that, nothing new.”
“Why don’t we give them something new? Goom, do you think you could arrange to have Joey Castles learn that we picked up Nassif for fraud? If it comes through in the phone tap, then at least we’ll know that we’re talking about the same Turks.”
“I think I could arrange it,” said Guma.
“Do that. The next thing to do is to talk to Nassif. We’ve got him next door. V.T.? And …” Karp paused and looked at Roland. It was the critical moment, akin to the first time you sit down in a divorce lawyer’s office with your erstwhile sweetie. Roland had every right to interrogate Nassif. It was his case, and he was arguably the best interrogator in the office. The question was, would he?
The expressions raced across Roland’s face, and Karp thought he could read them like stock quotes on a tape. If he didn’t go after Nassif, Karp would do it himself, and then, if it turned out that the Turks really had done it, Roland would look like a complete asshole. Whereas if Roland got a confession out of the Turk, he’d still be the man on a hot case, the TV lights would still shine on him. Of course, the Turk could be a dud too, but then he still had Tomasian.
“Okay, let’s take a look at him,” Roland said at last.
“Terrific,” said V.T. “I’ll be the nice guy.”
The two men left the room. Frangi got up to go with them, but Karp gestured for him to remain. Marlene said, “I notice Roland didn’t mention his jailhouse snitch. What about that?”
“Yeah, what about that?” said Karp. He stared at Frangi, who was down at the other end of the table, looking ill at ease.
Frangi shrugged. “Hey, all I know is, I got a call from the jail captain said this cell mate Medford, wanted to talk about Tomasian for a deal. I told Roland and we talked to the A.D.A. on the guy’s check kiting and then we went and talked to Medford. That’s all I know.”
“Well, if we’re right about Nassif,” said Karp, “it looks like the guy’s lying.”
“Snitches lie,” said Frangi.
“Yeah, they do, but it’s hard to believe a mutt like Medford would’ve come up with a hoax like that on his own.” Frangi started to protest, but Karp held up his hand and continued, “I don’t mean it was you. Or Roland either.”
“Who, then?” asked Marlene.
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter at this point,” Karp said quickly, although he thought it did matter a lot. A suspicion was growing in his mind, but he couldn’t do anything about it at present. It would have to wait. He said, “Thanks, Joe,” and Frangi left, followed soon by Guma.
Karp said, “Djelal, guys. How do we get him?”
“Not a prayer,” said Marlene, “unless his cugine rats him out, or unless you want to totally shit on the D.A. and harass Djelal’s butt and start an international incident. Even then he’s clean. We don’t have anything on him we could put on a warrant. Renting a locker and buying a jeweler’s furnace? Having a sleazy cousin? On the other hand, I’m dying to know what he has in that locker.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Karp, “but we’re going to have to keep dying, because we got no way into it legally.”
Marlene and Bello exchanged a look, so brief that no one else saw it, but one that compressed megabytes of data, like a satellite transmission.
As they walked out of the office together after the meeting, Harry said, “I got a delivery truck I can borrow, with a lift on it.”
“Good,” said Marlene. “Don’t hurt your back.”
Roland stopped by Karp’s office at ten that night. Karp was on his cot, memorizing his summation notes for the next day.
“You look comfy,” said Roland. “Comfy but lonely. Want me to send somebody up?”
“I’ll survive. This is the last day. What did you get?”
“We got shit. Nassif wouldn’t talk. I don’t mean he wouldn’t confess. I mean he wouldn’t talk, literally. And he was scared too. I never saw anyone in that much terror. His teeth were actually chattering.”
“Well, he does have the right to remain silent,” said Karp. “I guess he took it seriously.”
“No, he was waiting for us to start the tortures. Isn’t that Turkey where they hang you upside down and beat your feet with sticks? Frangi and me were screaming at him and dancing up and down, and he must’ve thought we were the good cops.”
“So you think they did it? The cousins?”
Roland frowned. “I didn’t say that. I think they did something, but I got noreason to believe that Tomasian wasn’t part of it.”
Karp nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay? That’s it?”
“Yeah, Roland, that’s it. It’s your case, like I’ve always said. We’ll see how things develop. Meanwhile, we’ll book Nassif for the fraud and see how he likes jail, with his cousin running around free. Maybe he’ll come around.”
Karp shaved and took a whore’s bath in the hall john that night. He was too tired to walk over to the jail; more than that, he didn’t want to see Russell again, except in court.
The next morning, of course, he did. Russell did not look well: even older than his years and his cheap suit was loose around his neck. Perhaps Freeland was giving him lessons in appearing pathetic and harmless, or maybe the reality of his situation was finally coming home to him.
Freeland led off on summation, as tradition demanded. He spoke for twenty-two minutes, a shortish speech, but then he didn’t have a lot to say. His own evidence was fairly weak: Tyler’s it-wasn’t-him and Ashakian’s gymnastic feat and the Sister. He spent most of his time pointing out the various places where the authorities might have lied. If you believed in conspiracies, it was a good story.
Karp spoke for nearly three times as long, but then, he had a lot more material to cover. He started off with James Turnbull’s testimony, the dramatic scene in the police station—Russell sitting there without his blue shirt and Turnbull leaping at him, accusing him with no prompting at all, the man who was physically the closest witness to the actual murder. You swine! This was the guy.
Then the chain of police testimony—Thornby’s adventure in the stifling black basement, the hiding fugitive, the sales slip found. Then Jerry Shelton’s identification—this was the man who had fled from the pursuing crowd.
Then the discovery of the purse and the knife and the shirt, and the identification of the shirt in the jail by the defendant himself.
He disposed of Tyler: a ridiculous witness—a one-second, impossible full-face glance at thirty, or was it forty-five, feet, compared to people—the Digbys, Shelton, Turnbull—who had positively and independently identified the defendant.
Karp walked over to the evidence table and picked up the sales slip from Bloomingdale’s and walked back to stand in front of the jury box.
“Susan Weiner is dead, her life cut short on a summer’s day at twenty-eight years of age. But in a way she is here in this courtroom right now. Because when she bought a pair of stockings at Bloomingdale’s in one of the last acts of her young life, she did something that was very human. She might have been in a hurry to come home to have lunch with her husband, so when they gave her her charge slip at Bloomingdale’s, she grabbed it and shoved it down among three bills, two ones and a five, that were in her purse.
“Hosie Russell murdered her f
or that seven dollars, but when he tore the wages of his crime out of her purse, he didn’t notice the VISA receipt wrapped in the currency; he was in a hurry too. And Officer Thornby found it in his pocket.”
Karp fluttered the little piece of white paper in front of the jury.
“This is Susan’s last message to us all. It doesn’t just say ‘six-ninety-five plus tax.’ It says, ‘Hosie Russell murdered me on my doorstep for seven dollars.’ It says, ‘Give me justice!’
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the evidence in this case is overwhelming and conclusive. It demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt, to a moral certainty, that Hosie Russell stabbed Susan Weiner to death in the course of a robbery. And so, in the name of the People of New York, I ask you to find Hosie Russell guilty of felony murder and guilty of intentional murder: guilty as charged.”
Karp waited a few beats, looking at each face in turn, and then spun on his crutches, walked over to his seat, and sat down.
Martino charged the jury. It was a good, fair charge, but in the nature of things, as he went over the points of evidence, explaining how the law applied to each one, it was inevitable that he mentioned prosecution evidence more than that of the defense. Karp had no problem with the charge, but Freeland did. All of his motions were, however, denied, and the jury marched out to deliberate at 4:45.
“How did it go?” Marlene asked.
“The usual.” They were in his office.
“You were brilliant and the other guy was an asshole?”
Karp laughed. “Needless to say.”
“What do you think?”
“I think we’ll get felony murder. It’s a toss-up if they’ll go for intentional murder on the second count. Man one’s more likely. The poor scumbag probably really didn’t want her dead—he just wanted the purse.”
“Will they be out long?”
Karp considered this. It was an endless topic of debate among lawyers whether a short or a long deliberation had anything to do with the outcome, and on that topic, at least, the jury was still out. He said, “Not an all-nighter. I think five, six hours.” He paused and smiled. “Then I’ll get someone to drive me home. I’ll honk and you can hoist me to heaven like a side of beef.”
“Oh, cripes, that’s right, you’ll be home,” said Marlene.
Karp noticed her expression and gave her a quizzical look. “Where’d you think I’d be? Look, you got plenty of warning. Just enough time to whip off a quick one and kiss him good-bye.”
“Oh, don’t be a jerk,” said Marlene, too quickly. “It’s just … well, I guess I was thinking I should’ve prepared some sort of official homecoming celebration.”
“Just don’t let the winch slip this time,” said Karp, wondering what his wife was up to now.
They came back at 8:50. Karp straightened his tie in the reflection of a bookcase and heaved himself down to Part 52 for the orgasm.
He had judged rightly. The jury found Hosie Russell guilty of felony murder and guilty of manslaughter in the first degree. Martino thanked the jury, set a date for sentencing, and the courtroom cleared.
Karp sat in his chair and watched them take Russell away. Their eyes met for a moment, and Russell seemed about to say something, but the moment passed, and the convict shuffled out between two court officers, head bowed at the traditional angle.
Susan Weiner did not spring miraculously to life after this transaction, and Karp felt the familiar quasi-post-coital letdown.
“Christ, I hope I get dealt a better hand next time.”
Karp looked up. It was Freeland, smiling, extending his hand for a collegial handshake. Karp ignored the hand. He stared silently at the other man until he dropped his hand and shrugged.
Freeland said, “Hey, the schmuck admitted that blue shirt—what could I do?”
“You could have refrained from suborning perjury,” said Karp quietly. “You could have refrained from dragging the sister up there for no goddamn reason.”
“Hey, just a minute there, Karp! Suborning … ?”
“Uh-huh. Or the next thing to it. The old fart never saw anything, and you know it. That’s why you didn’t take a statement off him when he waltzed in. You worked him until he gave you a story.”
Freeland smiled coldly. “Believe what you want. I thought it was worth a shot. I mean, the jerk admitted he did it. I wasn’t going to put him on the stand to make me look like shit, so all I had was the other-guy defense.” He looked at his watch. “Well, it’s been a joy, Counselor—”
“Wait a minute!” Karp snapped. “Hosie told you he did it?”
“Sure.” Freeland smiled again, as at a joke. “You’re not going to tell me that only the innocent are entitled to representation?”
“No, I was going to tell you you’re a real scumbag, Freeland. And I’m going to give you a piece of advice. You got two jobs here. One is cutting pleas, cranking the system. The other is keeping the cops and the D.A.’s honest. The way you do that is the way Tom Pagano did it—by being squeaky clean yourself. You want to play cute tricks, go private. Because if I ever catch you again doing something like you did on this one, I’m going to put your cute white ass in jail.”
A brief staring and jaw-clenching contest then ensued, with no clear winner. Freeland turned and stalked away. Karp sighed. A nasty, faintly crooked Legal Aid director was just what he needed. It made a matched set with his nasty, faintly crooked boss, Sanford Bloom.
Karp went back to his office and placed the case file in the glass bookcase and closed the door on People v. Russell. He sat there in the dark for he did not know how long, listening to the distant sounds of late traffic and the hum of the building itself. Centre Street never slept; night court would be going on, and the complaint room, and babies just out of law school would be scurrying through the halls, learning how to cop felonies to misdemeanors with dispatch.
The phone rang. Karp waited for whoever it was to go away. At the eighth ring he picked it up.
“Karp.”
“This Russell. Hosie.”
“Yeah, Hosie, what is it?”
“Trial’s over.”
“I’m aware. What can I do for you?”
“Song like that, trial’s over, all my trials.” There was a pause. Then Russell cleared his throat noisily. “I can talk to you now, can’t I?”
“Yeah, Hosie, talk away. What’s on your mind?”
“They’s a dude here, name of Medford? Talkin’ about gettin’ loose on account of he snitched out this fella supposed to’ve killed some big shot over by the U.N. Said he heard this guy admit it.”
Karp felt a tingling in his belly. “Go on, what about him?”
“It’s bullshit, that’s what about it. Medford in a cell with me, not this other guy ’Arasium, somethin’ like that.”
“Tomasian. Aram Tomasian.”
“Yeah! That’s the dude. Anyway, Medford, he ain’t nowhere near this guy. Guy in some other cell. He tol’ me, like he some sharp motherfucker, this big shot from the D.A. set the whole thing up. He rat on Tomasian, he get to walk. Then they move him out, put him in the right cell, with Tomasian. And he calls the cops. Cops don’t know nothin’ till he tells them. It was all set up before by the D.A.”
“Urn, did Medford give you a name for this big shot?”
“Yeah, he ack like this motherfucker was his own cousin. Name Wharton.”
Karp got the night-duty driver to take him home to Crosby Street. He mounted the absurd contraption and rode upward in the warm, dark shaft. Mercifully the winch did not slip, and he arrived safely in the bosom of his family.
“So, tell me!” said Marlene.
“It went the way I thought.”
“My hero! You don’t seem very hyped by it. When I saw your face, I thought maybe they walked him. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I’m pissed off generally. I got into a stupid cat fight with fucking Freeland after the trial. And Roland came by and told me he didn’t get anything out of Nassif. And I
got this thing on my leg. The usual.”
He clumped across the loft and collapsed on the red couch.
“And the whip cream on the charlotte russe was I got a call from my old buddy Hosie Russell. He told me who worked the scam on Tomasian. The jailhouse witness.”
“You made a deal with Russell?”
“No, that’s the weird part. He just called me up after the trial and spat the whole thing out. For free.”
“Why’d he do something like that?”
“I don’t know. I gave him a stupid lecture once about trying to just do something because it was right. I guess it sank in. Miracles happen, or maybe it was just an extra clever scam because I will do something for him after all. I’ll make sure he gets old in some nice medium-security joint. There’s no point in putting him in Attica. He’s not violent unless he’s loaded, and he’s not a runner. I think he likes prison, as a matter of fact.”
“Don’t we all, each in our own way. So who was it?”
“Wharton, who else?” said Karp dully.
“Shit! What’re you going to do?”
He rubbed his face. “I don’t know. But he’s gone—out of the office, that’s for sure. I’ll go to Bloom. He’ll do the right thing once he knows the story. I mean, he likes Conrad, but not nearly as much as he likes himself. It’ll be quiet and quick.”
“What’ll happen to him, not that I give a shit?”
Karp laughed bitterly. “They’ll probably make him a judge.” He fell back against the cushions and closed his eyes. Marlene looked at him with some alarm. She had never seen him so wan and diminished.
She said, “Poor baby! Did you eat?”
“No. You know I never eat when the jury’s out. Why? Are you going to cook me something?”
“I might open you a can,” said Marlene.
Which she did, a can of Progresso black bean soup with cheese ground thickly on top and a plate of olives and salami and provolone and egg tomatoes with olive oil on it and a chunk of warm, fresh bread rubbed with olive oil and garlic. He ate it like a wolf. Marlene drank black coffee and watched him eat.
Justice Denied Page 30
