Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp walked down to the kitchen zone. “Watch this,” he said. Marlene turned from the stove and watched as Karp performed an elaborate fake involving separate motions of his head, torso and legs and the whipping of the basketball around his body with blinding speed.

  Marlene rolled her eyes. “Very impressive. Where did you learn that?”

  “It’s a variation of something Meadowlark Lemon used to do on the Globetrotters. It’s a two-man fake for when you’re double-teamed and need to pass to the open man. I didn’t think I could still do it.”

  “Well, now you know and your heart can rest. And it was smart of you to keep this particular aspect of your behavior veiled during our courtship.”

  “Basketball is my life,” said Karp primly.

  “It will be your death too if I have to put up with that k-dunk, k-dunk, k-dunk for the next thirty years. What started this anyway?”

  “Hey, what can I tell you? You married a jock. I suppressed it since law school because of my knee and missing the pros, and it just popped out again.” He smiled wonderingly. “It gives me a lot of pleasure. And I don’t get much from the job anymore, so …” He looked at her and twisted his face into a goatish leer. “And not enough sex.”

  “Get away from me, you maniac,” she cried. “No, really, this is all ready. Sit down.”

  He sat. “What is it?”

  “It’s Chinese food,” ladling it out of a wok. “Beef and snow peas with oyster sauce.”

  “You ordered take-out?”

  “No, I made it, dear, with my own tiny, worn hands. Is it good?”

  “It’s great,” he said, amazed, and looked at her as if at a second Madame Curie. “I didn’t know you could make Chinese food in a house.”

  “Few people can, which is why the Chinese are so poor. I mean eating in restaurants all the time, with the tips and the baby sitters, I can see—”

  “OK, I get it. I bet Ariadne Stupenagel can’t make Chinese food.”

  Marlene sniffed. “I should say not. Is she still dogging your footsteps?”

  “Yeah, but today was the last day. She’s apparently sucked me dry,” he said between mouthfuls.

  “I trust that’s a figure of speech.”

  “I won’t dignify that with a reply,” he said. “But she certainly cut a swath through the office. Guma is in love. ‘Cunt to the eyes,’ as he put it.”

  “Charming. So what do you make of my old roomie?”

  Karp sat back and considered. “She’s quite a character. Smart as a whip, and sneaky. I told her I didn’t want her talking to the other people in the bureau, but I know she was doing it anyway. She spent a whole night in the complaint room; Guma got her in. She’s a great interviewer. She pisses you off, but you can’t help liking her. On the other hand, I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her. She reminds me of you a little—”

  “Thank you very much!”

  “Oh, didn’t mean about trusting. I mean she’s cocky, fearless, moves right in and does the job. Like that. What I don’t much like is the naked ambition. And the way she uses sex like a blowtorch. You don’t do that. I don’t think she keeps anything … private. A little scary, if you know what I mean.”

  Marlene nodded. “I do, I do. At lunch last week she was a little hincty about me being pregnant, mocking, like I was letting down the girls’ team. Still, I did like seeing her. She was one of those people in your life that you always wonder what became of them. When is the article coming out, or didn’t she know?”

  “This Sunday, as a matter of fact.”

  “So soon?”

  “Yeah, she said they had to kill the story that they were going to have as the feature, the cover story, and she jumped in and said she could have it ready, so they went for it.”

  “Wow, a cover story! You think you’ll be in it a lot?”

  Karp laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe. But Bloom staring up from the cover is going to put a crimp in my Sunday. Maybe I’ll go right to the crossword.”

  But in fact, when Karp that Sunday picked up the Times at his usual stop, a Chinese candy store on Mott, the face that stared up at him in full color from the front page of the magazine section was not Bloom’s but his own.

  Karp felt sweat break out on his face, and his knees went wobbly. Irrationally, as if from some obscure guilt, he looked up to see if anyone was watching him. The proprietor was, flashing a gold-toothed smile, nodding behind the counter, giggling with his wife in Cantonese. “You famous now,” he observed.

  Karp paid and left the place in a rush, sticking the paper under his arm and reading the magazine section as he walked through the streets of Chinatown. It was worse on the inside: Ariadne Stupenagel had based the entire piece on Karp and his career: the hundred straight wins, the spectacular and dangerous cases, his ideas and ideals. The title of the article was: “Karp for the Prosecution: One Man’s Fight Against Crime in New York.”

  Back at the loft, Karp paced the floor muttering while Marlene read avidly and rapidly through the article.

  “This is great,” she said. “According to Stupe, you’re ‘rough-hewn, towering, Lincolnesque, with piercing gray eyes.’”

  “It’s a disaster,” he wailed.

  “Why do you say that? It’s all true, as far as I can make out, and she doesn’t particularly dwell on your fights with Bloom. In fact, she hardly mentions him.”

  “That’s just the point. He’s going to go bananas over it.”

  Marlene looked at him strangely. “Since when do you give a shit what Bloom thinks?”

  “I don’t! It’s just that … it’ll look like I was whoring after p.r. like he does all the time. And he’ll be able to be slimy and sarcastic about it, and everybody will nod and grin, like, yeah, we knew Karp was just another glory hound. Like that. And people, scumbags that I don’t even know, will be sidling up to me with ‘Great story, Butch,’ and I’ll have to grin back. And what I’m trying to teach the staff about being cool with the press, not to have the press influence cases, that’ll all go out the window. It’ll seem like total hypocrisy.”

  “That’s all in your head,” Marlene said breezily. “You have this whole thing about getting credit for what you do. God, didn’t you have your picture in the paper a lot when you played ball?”

  “Yeah, but that was different,” said Karp, knowing it but not really being able to say why.

  “I don’t see how. You deserve some recognition, for chrissake! Like my dad always says, ‘Whosoever tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.’ Besides, fame is fleeting.” She waved the magazine section. “This will be wrapping garbage in a couple of days, and a week after that nobody will remember it.”

  “Yeah, well, anyway, it’s not going to be a fun couple of days,” he said gloomily.

  Nor was it. Karp’s staff was, of course, joyful and mocking by turns for a week, which Karp could not stifle without appearing boorish. The secretaries framed the magazine cover and hung it in the outer office. Guma made enlarged Xerox copies of the face from the cover portrait, and when Karp walked into his regular staff meeting, every attendee was wearing one as a mask and spouting quotes from the article, amid unseemly glee.

  Bloom, at his staff meeting, was snidely cutting, but in a new way, as if he now had something dirty on Karp, as if he had walked in and found Karp in bed with his own mistress, as if they were fuck-buddies now. Karp found this more distasteful by far than Bloom’s usual naked enmity.

  Karp’s cup of woe spilled over when a sleazebag pimp in high heels and a floor-length leopard coat stopped him in the hallway and asked for his autograph on the magazine cover. He was extremely rude to this person at some length, and afterward stalked head down with a brow of thunder back to his office, slamming the door so that the glass rattled, at which moment his secretary put through the call that was to prove the most remarkable of the damned article’s sequelae.

  It was Bernie Nadleman, the coach of the New York Hustlers. He began to introduce hims
elf, but Karp, still feeling ornery, cut him off abruptly. “I know who you are, Bernie. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, that article in the Times … I heard you were working in the city when I got here, but I never realized you were such a superstar. And I thought I’d make contact again.”

  This was lame and both of them knew it. Bernie Nadleman was three years older than Karp, and their only contact had been about fourteen minutes of court time total in a single Pac-10 season, plus a short, unmemorable conversation at a dinner thrown by sports-writers. Nadleman wanted something. Karp waited for it, and after a few moments of desultory conversation about the NBA season, it came.

  “Well, look, Butch, the thing of it is, I could use some help on this Simmons thing.”

  “What sort of help?”

  “I don’t know—just find out what’s going on. Put a bug up somebody’s ass. I can’t get a straight answer from the cops here.”

  “Have you talked to the Queens D.A.?”

  “Yes, but I get nothing but stalling and horseshit. That’s why I’m calling you. I figured it was better if I had an in.”

  “Well, I’m not much of an in with the Queens D.A. It’s a completely separate operation. We’re all in the same business, but there’s usually not much need for cooperation once somebody takes jurisdiction. It’s like different basketball teams.”

  Nadleman gave a sour laugh. “As bad as that, hey?”

  “Worse. But what’s the problem anyway?”

  “The problem is nobody’s doing shit on the case. They’re still hooked on this crazy idea that Marion was selling dope. I get the feeling they’re not exactly putting the full press on the case. They got one detective on it—one! And the asshole doesn’t even return my calls.

  “The league is going crazy too. Every time one of my guys takes a leak there’s a schmuck in a lab coat hanging around with a little bottle. It’s fucking killing the team.”

  “I presume you don’t believe Marion was involved with dope?” Karp asked.

  “Shit, no, he wasn’t involved with dope. He was the cleanest kid I ever worked with. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t chase pussy: the kid lived for basketball. Anybody offered him cocaine, he would’ve cold-cocked them.”

  Karp, who was familiar with the degree of self-delusion practiced by basketball coaches about the strangely configured beings on whom their personal fortunes depended, said nothing to this, but simply grunted and replied, “OK, Bernie, what I’ll do is I’ll make a couple of calls over to Queens, see what I can find out, and get back to you.”

  Nadleman thanked him effusively and offered two passes to the Hustlers’ game with the Sixers on Friday. Karp accepted gladly. He hadn’t been to a pro game in years.

  Dutifully, Karp made the calls. Quite aside from the favor to Nadleman, he was himself curious about the unlikely association between an NBA pro and a big bag of coke. He called a Queens D.A. bureau chief he knew slightly, who was not in, and then called Shelly Nowacki, who had worked in the Manhattan D.A. during Karp’s early years. Nowacki was generous with what he had, but he didn’t have much.

  “Funny thing,” Nowacki said ruminatively. “You would think, a big star like that, they would put the max on it, but no. Nobody here is pushing the cops, and the cops, what I hear is that they gave the case to some rummy. It’s the dope angle, is what I think.”

  “What angle is that, Shelly?”

  “Well, you know, the kid gets into dope, he figures he could sell some, at least make his jones, somebody finds out, and blam. This ain’t the South Bronx here, but we got a pretty heavy set of Jamaicans down in St. Albans. Colombians too. If it was Colombians, we’re lucky they didn’t do the whole team. So—some prick zapped him and got away clean, and unless a snitch rolls out and says, ‘I hear Lefty had a hard-on for Simmons,’ we’re at square one. That’s how the cops figure anyway; and anyway, they’re not going to particularly bust hump for a coke fiend. As you know.”

  “As I know,” said Karp. “Are we so sure he was a coke fiend? What did the autopsy say?”

  “This I don’t have on me. You could check with the DT in charge. But figure: who the fuck is going to leave fifty K worth of prime nose candy on the corpse to give a mistaken impression?”

  “Who indeed?” said Karp. “So what’s this guy’s name?”

  “What guy?”

  “The DT. The rummy.”

  “Oh, him,” said Nowacki. “Name’s Bello. Harry.”

  Karp wrote it down. “Who’s his partner? Anybody else on the case?”

  “Nope, far’s I know. He’s solo. Like I said, low priority.”

  “OK, thanks, Shelly. This is good. And would you let me know if anything breaks?”

  “Yeah,” said Nowacki. “But don’t hold your breath.”

  The Danny Boy Bar on Bell Boulevard in Bayside, Queens, on a Monday afternoon served perhaps half a dozen serious drinkers at tables and a couple at the bar, not at all like the wild scene on a weekend night. The blinds had been pulled down lest the light of day disturb the concentration of the patrons on their shots and drafts, and wan shafts of sunlight provided the appropriate film noir effect.

  The day bartender was not busy and had plenty of time to chat with the big stranger at the bar.

  “It must pick up at night,” said the stranger.

  “Yeah, we get a nice crowd, especially Friday, Saturday.”

  “Does Francine still come by?” the stranger asked.

  The bartender smiled broadly and lifted his eyes. “Hey, old Francine! You know Francine?”

  “A while back. I ain’t seen her in a couple three years. She still a redhead?”

  “Fuck, no—a brunette. You’re sure we’re talking about the same Francine?”

  “I guess,” said the stranger, sipping his beer. “I know she used to hang out here. A piece of ass.”

  The bartender laughed again. “Yeah, that’s Francine. Tits out to here.”

  The stranger nodded and smiled. “I remember. I’d sure like to get next to her again. Funny, I can’t recall her last name. Began with a P or a D or a …”

  “Del Fazio,” said the bartender. “Francine Del Fazio. She’s in here every Tuesday and Thursday night just about. Her old man works the night shift at Grumman. God damn! The shit’s gonna fly if he ever figures out what she’s doing while he’s humping rivets.”

  The stranger got off his stool and left a ten on the bar to pay for his two beers and waved away the proffered change. The bartender grinned and said, “Hey, thanks! You want me to tell her you’re looking for her?”

  “No,” said the stranger, “I’ll find her.”

  Peter Schick was panting and sweaty when he got to the room in Bellevue’s prison ward where they did the mental health competency hearings. It was a hair past ten in the morning. Schick was often out of breath in his job, which consisted largely of having to be in widely separated places at close to the same time to deliver formalized statements on issues he barely understood. This was called representing the People. He had been told that everybody had done this on first arriving at the D.A., and that they had survived. He was young and tough and thought he would survive too, if barely.

  The room he entered was painted institutional green and floored with shiny brown linoleum. The windows were barred with heavy grilles. The room was, in fact, a ward day room, which was this day being devoted to competency hearings. It had in its temporary function none of the usual trappings of the law’s majesty, being furnished, at the front, with a large rectangular table and wooden chairs and at the rear by several battered brown couches and an assortment of plastic chairs. It stank of steam heat and Lysol.

  At the table sat a judge, a stenographer, a court officer, a Legal Aid lawyer and a psychiatrist. There were vacant chairs for a defendant and an assistant district attorney. On the couches sat a dozen or so men in bathrobes and paper slippers, waiting their turn to be told if they were crazy or not.

  Schick introduced himse
lf to the gathering. The judge, a grumpy black gentleman in his late sixties, scowled at him and said, “Call the first case.” The judge was anxious to move through his list of defendants because when he had disposed of these hearings he would be free for the day. The competency-hearing duty was a prize distributed by rotation, and the judges regarded it as the next thing to a day off.

  Schick sat at his place and arranged the stack of files he had brought with him. He shuffled through them to find the one the bored psychiatrist was talking about: Mendez. OK, Mendez, here it was. He read the complaint sheets while trying to concentrate on what the shrink was saying, and glancing briefly at the dulled-out tan man in the defendant’s chair.

  What he was hearing made no sense. Shit! The wrong Mendez. More shuffling. The doc finished. The judge said, “All right, on the basis of this report I’m going to rule this man competent to stand trial. Objections?” Schick found the right file, heard the Legal Aid say, “No, sir,” and heard himself say the same. The judge said, “Next case.”

  After six cases had come and gone, Schick was somewhat more on top of his job. They were mostly of a piece: the individuals had committed crimes of violence or passion while under the influence of booze or drugs or both, or when driven by some irrational impulse, such as (in one case) a fixed belief that his wife was having sexual intercourse with every male person of his acquaintance during every waking moment she was not in direct sight. Nevertheless, they all could, according to Bellevue, assist in their own defense, and so were competent to stand trial, if not to live life to its fullest.

  The court officer called, “Phelps.” This was what Schick had been waiting for, and for once he was well prepared. A gray-haired, chubby man in a white coat sat down in the psychiatrist’s chair and consulted his notes through half-glasses. Schick searched the couches for the spare, dark-haired figure of the Chelsea Ripper. There were only eight men left and none of them was Phelps.

  The court officer called the name again. The judge looked at the shrink, who shrugged. The judge said, “Put him on second call. Next.”