Depraved Indifference

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Depraved Indifference Page 9

by Robert K. Tanenbaum


  Karp felt himself growing angry. He was not supposed to be fencing with this bastard, especially not on the record. Karp glanced over at Pillman, who was struggling to retain an expression of innocence that would have seemed smarmy on an altarboy. Karp considered the possibility that Karavitch had in some way been coached. But no, there hadn’t been time. The suspects had been taken directly to FBI headquarters from the airport. Besides, who would have coached them? And why?

  Karp rearranged his face in a flat mask, and let a full minute of silence go by, while he counted the flecks in Karavitch’s irises. There was no way he was going to lose control of this interrogation. “True,” he said. “Could you state your full name?”

  With a series of piercingly brilliant questions, Karp got the suspect to admit his name, address, and occupation, and that he was involved politically with movements to liberate Croatia from the yoke of communism. He seemed willing to spout off about the miseries of the great Croatian people under communism until nightfall or until Rothman ran out of steno tape, but Karp cut him off.

  “Right. We’ve established you’re a great patriot, Mr. Karavitch. Now let’s talk about the bomb you placed in locker number 139 in Grand Central Station on or before Friday, September 10, of this year.”

  Karavitch stopped smiling. “I placed no bomb.”

  “One of your associates, then?”

  “No bomb. No one placed any bomb. We have hurt no one, no one!”

  “Well, that’s interesting to hear you deny that your bomb hurt anyone, Mr. Karavitch, since I don’t recall suggesting it. And you’re sure that none of your associates did, either? How come? Do you watch them every minute?”

  “We are an army. We are under strict discipline.”

  “Yes, and you’re the general, right? You are responsible for what your, ah, troops do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad we were able to establish that. Well, Mr. Karavitch, it turns out that there was a bomb in locker 139, and it exploded and killed a New York City policeman. Now, as you probably know, being so familiar with our legal system, the homicide of a police officer in line of duty is murder in the first degree. You and all of your associates are subject to such a charge, the most serious charge in our legal code. Mr. Karavitch, while I do not make any promises or guarantees whatsoever, it often happens that when people assist the law, the law is more inclined to treat their case favorably. Now, would you tell me please how you obtained the explosives and the other components of the bomb you left in locker 139 on or before September 10, 1976?”

  The tick of the stenographic machine went on for a few seconds. Then the room was silent, save for the creaking of chairs and the whir of the ventilation system. All eyes were on Karavitch, who remained as still as stone, his face pale and unreadable. Then he turned to Stepanovic and said something in Croatian. Karp noted that his tone when speaking that language was different from the one he used when speaking English: harder, more like the bark of command. To Karp’s horror, the FBI man answered in the same language, and Karavitch began to reply.

  “Stop!” Karp shouted. “Damn, Pillman! What is this? You guys are lawyers. You know the damn translator can’t engage in colloquy with a suspect on the record.” Pillman shrugged: “You can’t get good help these days.” Karp turned to Stepanovic. “What did he say? And what did you say?”

  “He said that he didn’t want to—” Stepanovic began mildly, but Karp cut him off. “No interpretations, Stepanovic! Give it to me verbatim.”

  The younger man flushed, then continued. “He said, ‘I do not want to answer his questions anymore.’ And I said, ‘Do you want to have a lawyer present? Will you answer questions with a lawyer present?’ Then he said, ‘Perhaps later. Right now I am feeling faint. I am an old—’ Then you cut him off.”

  Karp took a deep breath and continued in what he hoped was a level voice. “Thank you, Mr. Karavitch. You may go now. Please bring in Pavle Macek.” Pillman nodded at Stepanovic, who stood and went to the door. Following him, Karavitch looked about as faint as the Chrysler Building.

  When they had left, Karp turned to Pillman and said, “What kind of stunt was that, Elmer? No, don’t tell me. But if your boy tries that again, I’m out of here, with the prisoners. I’ll get my own goddamn translator, you understand me?”

  Pillman looked away, his eyes heavy-lidded. “You could get boring, Karp, you know that?”

  Karp thought of a number of replies to this, but held his tongue as Stepanovic entered the room with Macek. The hijacker seemed excited. His lanky, thin hair was plastered to his scalp, and he stank of sweat.

  The questioning began as before. Macek, it turned out, was also a citizen and needed no translator. He was also a Croatian patriot. He also knew nothing about any bomb. The hijacking was a demonstration, no one had been hurt. He resented the accusation that he had had anything to do with the killing of a policeman. He wanted a lawyer.

  Cindy Wilson Karavitch identified herself, hid behind her sunglasses, and asked for a lawyer. End of session.

  Vlatko Raditch spoke no English, but smiled a lot. He maintained he had boarded the plane as a lark with his buddy, Milo. He thought the whole thing was a joke. Bombs? What bombs? He didn’t ask for a lawyer, but it was obvious to Karp that he needed a nanny.

  The last interview was with Milo Rukovina. Karp regarded him hopefully: he had the look of a weak link. During the initial questions, with Stepanovic translating, he ducked his head and removed his thick spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose and wiped his forehead with a large, soiled handkerchief.

  Karp spoke slowly and carefully, trying to control his frustration. He listened carefully to Rukovina’s answers, hoping inanely that the grammar and vocabulary of Serbo-Croatian would spring miraculously into his head.

  Karp read him his rights and then led him through a series of questions about the hijacking. Then he asked, almost casually, “Mr. Rukovina, who was responsible for assembling the bomb that you placed in locker 139 in Grand Central Station?” After this was translated, Rukovina shook his head violently from side to side, and a torrent of words poured from his mouth. “I am not, I was never responsible for the technique, for the technical details. I am the political theory, theoretician.” Stepanovic translated. “I have no knowledge in this area.”

  Karp nodded, smiling, fixing Milo with his eyes. Then he said, very slowly, “Mr. Rukovina, who does have such knowledge?” Karp caught the “Gospodine Rukovinu—” and then Stepanovic was off with at least two dozen words, delivered rapid-fire in a low, even voice. Milo squeaked back a phrase, and then Stepanovic said something, and then Milo gasped out two words. Karp’s fist crashed down on the table; Milo jumped like a rabbit.

  “That’s it! Mr. Rukovina, thank you. You may go now. Murray, mark the time and put away the machine. We’re through. Let’s have those transcribed first thing tomorrow morning, huh?”

  Stepanovic left with Milo, and after packing his machine and tapes, so did Rothman. Pillman stood up, stretched, and yawned. “It’s been fun, Karp. Now buzz off, I want to get home. Maybe I can still catch some of the game.”

  “You total shit,” Karp said in an even voice. He stood up and loomed over Pillman. “I can’t believe you would deliberately screw up an investigation. I can’t fucking believe it. A cop got killed, and you’re trying to queer the case.”

  “Up your ass, Karp. Don’t blame me if you can’t handle an interrogation.”

  “Pillman, in my last question there were five words besides the guy’s name. Your boy comes out with the Gettysburg Address, and Milo looks like he swallowed a peach pit. The fucking translator is coaching the suspect.

  “Now, I don’t know what’s going on, who’s jerking your chain, but it’s going to come out, sonny. What is it, Pillman? What’s the dirty secret?”

  “I don’t have to take this shit from you, Karp. Get the fuck out of my office.”

  Karp’s foot lashed out and kicked a chair across the ro
om, a willful abuse of U.S. government property and a misdemeanor offense. Pillman did not arrest him. Then Karp careened out the door and almost collided with the returning Stepanovic in the corridor. The smaller man tried to get by, but Karp blocked his path. “Stepanovic, tell me, what does ‘knees nahm’ mean?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what it sounded like, the last thing Rukovina said in there, his last two words.”

  “Oh, you mean ‘ne znam.’ It means ‘I don’t know.’”

  “Thanks, Joe. You know, I think I’m really picking up the language.”

  “Oh?” Stepanovic said with an uncertain smile.

  “Yeah. Ne znam, huh? He said it, all right. But you said it, too, didn’t you, Joe? Twice, in fact, during your little chat. How about that?”

  Down in the lobby, Karp called Marlene’s office, but got no answer. Then he dialed his own office. While he listened to the phone ring he thought about calling Bill Denton and about what he would say. The interrogation had shaken him. Karp knew more about corruption than most. He was an agent of a system that was corrupt in its every limb. But he was not himself a conspirator and was uneasy in the presence of conspiracies. He liked to be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

  And Denton was a good guy. He had to be. But cops were being bent in this case, and Denton was brass, the highest. The possibility that Denton was not leveling with him, that his concern for bringing Terry Doyle’s murderers to justice was in some way a fraud, gave Karp the screaming jitters. It meant he was absolutely alone. He decided to wait before calling Denton.

  The phone in Karp’s office was answered by Roland Hrcany, a fellow assistant district attorney and a friend.

  “DA’s office, we doze, but never close.”

  “Who’s that? Roland?”

  “Hey, yeah, Butch? What’s happening, man?”

  “I’m down at the FBI. I just got through interviewing the hijackers.”

  “Great! Did they do it?”

  “Yes, hijack; no, locker bomb. Very adamant and they want to see a lawyer.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah, right, and there’s more. Listen, Roland, Marlene got you down to do the interviewing?”

  “Yeah, we’re having a great time. Got a case of beer and the little TV. We’re watching the Yanks at KC in between; four-two, Yanks, top of the fourth.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Besides Marlene, that kid, Tony Harris, and Ray Guma.”

  “She got the Goom down to depose witnesses on a Sunday?”

  “It was me. I said I’d fix him up with a piece of ass afterward.”

  “Thanks, buddy. Roland, do you think we’re the only district attorney’s office in the country with a full-time pimp on the staff?”

  “Far from it. Most have nothing but. Hey, here’s Marlene. You want to talk to her?”

  “Yeah, but Roland, do me a favor. Arrange to get custody of the hijackers. I’d like them in Riker’s by tonight. I want those guys buried, so nobody gets to them but us. And Roland, this case has weird shit all over it, so use cops you trust, personally. You know what I mean?”

  Hrcany laughed. “Yeah. Married ones who play around. OK, will do. Here’s Champ.”

  “Hey, cutie. How’s it going?”

  “Cutie, my ass. You ought to see this place, Butch. Beer on the floor, the game blasting out of the TV. Roland is showing Guma Polaroid beaver shots of women, and the great connoisseur is making his selection of the evening. For two cents I’d join the Carmelites and piss on all of you.”

  “If you did, could we still fuck?”

  “Ah, Butch, that’s the kind of sensitive remark that warms a lady’s heart. I got to go. One more interview and then home and self-immolation.”

  “Wait, seriously—how’s it going?”

  “No problems. We’ve pretty much established that the plane was hijacked, so kidnap, umpteen counts. Assault? There was a lot of yelling and threats, but the passengers and crew were left alone physically. Except Alice Springer, one of the stews. She said this asshole Macek had his hands up her pants for half the flight.”

  “Did she come?”

  “No, Sensitivo, she did not. She was scared shitless the whole time. Unfortunately, she seems to have accepted Karavitch as her personal savior.”

  “What, Stockholm syndrome?”

  “Yeah, downtown Stockholm. Apparently, charismatic isn’t the word. The other stew, West, agrees, except she hates the bastard’s guts. By the way, what’s your make? Did you see him?”

  “Yeah, I did. I’m inclined to agree too. A tricky, mean, tough son of a bitch. Straight-faced denies all knowledge of the locker bomb, same with his troops. I kind of doubt we’ll roll any of the others if it means putting the blocks to the old bastard. I don’t think anybody wants to fuck with him, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Oh? That sounds interesting.”

  “Yeah, but a long story. Anything else?”

  “Just one item. West also swears she spotted Macek and Mrs. Karavitch slip into the lavatory together during the flight. And she doubts they were washing their hands.”

  7

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi and several hundred other assistant district attorneys, the district attorney himself and his aides and assistants, learned judges by the dozens and clerks and secretaries in the hundreds, and brigades of police, and regiments of witnesses and victims, the bored and the anguished, squads of jurors good and true, and uncounted lawyers, young and harried or suave and grave, depending on whether they worked for the poor or the rich, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press, merciless and cynical; and, of course, a varied mob of criminals, the cause and purpose of this whole cavalcade, the petty thugs, the thieves and robbers, whether by stealth or weaponry or clever papers, the whores of both sexes, the cold killers, the hot killers, the rapists and torturers of the helpless, the justly accused, the falsely accused, together with their keepers, parole officers, social workers, enemies, friends and relations, converged, all of them, on a single seventeen-story gray stone building located at 100 Centre Street on the island of Manhattan, there to prod into sullen wakefulness that great beast, the Law.

  The Law was having a bad year. Its mistress, the richest city civilization has ever known, was as broke as a piss-bum in the gutter. So among other things, the Law was starved and ill-housed and generally treated like a dirty dog. And the Law responded in kind. It sulked in its grimy kennel and refused to do its proper work, which is, after all, finding out who the bad guys are and giving them their lumps.

  Instead it pretended. In that grim year, you could commit a felony in New York and have but a one-in-ten chance of being arrested, and if arrested, but a one-in-ten chance of being indicted, and if indicted, but a one-in-ten chance of actually going to prison. The people responsible for the Law refused to enforce it, instead attending only to its droppings, the criminal justice statistics.

  Chief among these was the notion of clearance. Arrests were cleared by plea bargaining beyond all reason, which meant that the crooks knew you would give them almost anything to avoid going to trial, because nothing loused up the system like lots of time-consuming trials. Not to mention that there was no room in the prisons, which exerted back pressure on the system, like blockage in a toilet.

  Karp’s boss, District Attorney Sanford Bloom, was the chief apostle of clearance, not the least of the reasons why Karp despised him. Bloom had instituted clearance quotas, which all the DA bureaus and individual assistant DAs had to meet.

  Bloom’s sole purpose, it seemed, besides favorable publicity and garnering useful brownie points from those in power, was to keep the system moving at all costs. Never mind that the same people were arrested again and again for similar crimes and always went free.

  It had not always been this way. A few years previously, the district attorney had been the legendary Francis P. Garrahy. Garrahy had been New York DA for nearly forty years, in w
hich time he had created one of the finest prosecutorial offices in the world, mainly because he was a great trial lawyer and hired great trial lawyers. He liked trying criminals and putting them in jail for a long time.

  Karp had joined this team because it was the best. With Garrahy as coach, young lawyers were scouted, encouraged, browbeaten, pushed to the limits of their talents, and then either chucked off the team or given their shot at the major leagues: prosecuting homicides in New York County. Garrahy was tough, brutal some said, but always concerned about the men he called “his boys.” Karp had loved him.

  Not that the DA’s office had been a paradise; it had always been a suburb of Hell. But with Garrahy in charge, there was a small chance at something like salvation, the satisfaction of a well-done job for someone who knew what a well-done job was.

  And in fact, the lobby of 100 Centre Street this morning and every weekday morning, did resemble Hell enough to fool the average demon. At eight-fifty it was already crowded with people who had business in court or who worked for the court, but also with those citizens who had no place else to go.

  Pushing through the mob, Karp thought, as he often did, that it was always the same crowd. Weren’t there always those two obese black women with tired faces, the trio of pockmarked Puerto Rican youths, the tan dwarf with no arms, the same elderly colored gentleman with the worn gray suit and cracked wing-tips, talking reasonably to an invisible being named Clara?

  And the sounds were always the same. A hundred transistors and boom boxes tuned to twenty different stations were punctuated by shouts from the ones who yelled at their lawyers, intermixed with the continuous rumble of arguments and excuses and threats in six languages.

  Add in the smell of steam heat, stale tobacco smoke, acrid coffee from the first-floor snack bar, and you could understand why the people who worked at 100 Centre Street called this area the Streets of Calcutta.

  “Hey, Mr. Karp, wanna magazine?”

  The man who plucked at his sleeve was slight, with thick lips in a large, pale face. His watery blue eyes were wide and intense behind round glasses patched at the hinges with cellophane tape. Neatly dressed in a blue suit and tie, he was pulling a child’s red wagon loaded with old magazines.

 

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