Irresistible Impulse bkamc-9

by Robert Tanenbaum

  In the boathouse, she saw that Bonito, the big Chris-Craft, was in its berth, looking tatty, with lines tangled and bottles and articles of clothing strewn on its decks. There was a noise from below decks. Sweety gave his warning growl.

  A young man Marlene did not recognize staggered out of the main cabin hatchway. He was wearing nothing but white tennis shorts and a gold razor blade on a chain around his neck. His face, tanned and handsome though it was, showed the signs of a bad hangover. He stared at Marlene and her dog blankly for a moment, then groaned and said, “Jesus shit! Where the hell is everybody?”

  “Probably back at Ginnie’s house?” Marlene offered.

  “Oh, Ginnie! She took off with Vince. Hell if I know where she is.” He blinked at her. “Do I know you?” “I don’t think so.”

  “I didn’t fuck you last night, did I? No, it was somebody … you got anything on you? Uppers? No? Coke? Fuck! I am flicked up! Started in Danceteria, somebody said, Ginnie Woo’s on a fucking boat, now where am I? Some place on the Island. These aren’t my shorts.”

  “Vince knows how to throw a party, hey?” said Marlene.

  “Oh, fuck, lady! The guy is out of his mind. I say that, I’m fucking out of my mind and I’m my father compared to Vince. Last Thanksgiving? Twenty of us, private seven-two-seven, Marrakesh. Jesus shit! Four days. Fucking Arabs never saw anything like it.”

  “On Thanksgiving I thought he would’ve taken you to Turkey, not Morocco.”

  “Turkey? What the fuck’s in Turkey? Nah, forget it! Fuckin’ Turks’re real down on fun, man … Christ, you got any aspirin, Empirin, Darvon … shit! You don’t got shit.”

  The man staggered back below. Marlene left the boathouse and went around to the dock. She wondered where Robinson and Ginnie had taken off to last night, and there was something else in what the jerk had said that disturbed her, but she couldn’t quite locate the itch. She went back to the house.

  Waley’s closing statement took up the whole morning, and at the end of which only the most wideawake observer would have known who the victim was in the case. For Waley the “real” victim was clearly the defendant. Unloved. Abused. Insane. Jane Hughes might just as well have been hit by a runaway truck. Waley ended with an impassioned rendition of his original theme: don’t compound this tragedy by punishing a young man who needs medical help.

  Karp went on in the afternoon. He fixed with his eye a juror in the first row, Mr. Domingo Corton, welding-machine operator, fifty-four, whom Karp had noticed nodding in agreement during Waley’s performance. He would speak like this directly to each juror in turn, giving each one that portion of his argument he thought would tell the most, based on his assessment of that juror’s personality and the extent to which he thought they favored either side.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this case is not about the sad life and personal troubles of Jonathan Rohbling. This case is about the brutal murder of Mrs. Jane Hughes, the beloved mother of five children, the grandmother of seven. You have heard a great deal of testimony from distinguished psychiatrists, which Mr. Waley has just ably recalled for you, as to the defendant’s mental state at various times in his life. This testimony may be interesting or not, but it is important that you realize that it is not the critical evidence in this case. Judge Peoples will instruct you that you must convict Mr. Rohbling of murder unless you find that owing to a mental disease or defect he was substantially incapable of comporting his conduct to the requirements of the law. That’s a fancy way of saying that you have to find that when he killed Jane Hughes, he did not know what he was doing or that it was wrong. How would he know this, what the defendant’s mind was like at the moment when he killed Mrs. Hughes? Well, with all due respect to the psychiatric profession, no test or method has ever been devised that will tell you what is in someone else’s head at a particular time. It is beyond the ability of science.”

  Mr. Corton was now nodding well enough for Karp too. He shifted his gaze to Mrs. Bertha Finney, sixty-four, retired postal worker, the jury’s lone female black elder.

  “So how do we tell? Members of the jury, this is no great mystery requiring years of graduate school, medical school. You know from your own lives that the major evidence indicating mental state is behavior-facial expression, speech, both tone and content, and action. We don’t need a psychiatrist to tell us if a loved one is upset or our boss is angry. Human society depends on our native ability to determine what is going on inside a person from the way they behave. Now, sure, there are frauds, there are cheats, there are con men in the world, but these people also depend on our ability to read mental states from behavior-they are skilled at imitating such behavior so as to give us the wrong idea of their sincerity.”

  Switch to Julio Meles, twenty-nine, courier service manager, refresh smile.

  “Now, let me assure you that if some poor soul being treated for schizophrenia wandered out of Bellevue in his underwear and pushed Jane Hughes under a train, raving all the while, and waited for the police to arrest him the odds are very good that we would not be here in a courtroom today. The State of New York has no problem accepting a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity when the behavior of the accused clearly warrants it. We are not in the business of persecuting the sick and helpless.”

  Karp turned his attention to Earlene Davis, forty-one, restaurant cashier.

  “But we know that such is not the case with Mr. Rohbling. We know it in the teeth of all the wild theories of all the psychiatrists that Mr. Waley can find in the telephone book and hire for generous fees, because we know how Mr. Rohbling behaved. You’ll recall me asking Dr. Persteiner about how we knew that Jonathan Rohbling did not suffer from schizophrenia, and he answered with one word: competence. Everything we know about the defendant’s behavior in the days preceding and following the murder of Mrs. Hughes shows competence, and not only that. We also see decision, alacrity, and guile. But let me make it absolutely clear, ladies and gentlemen …”

  Karp made it absolutely clear to Lillian Weintraub, fifty-nine, housewife.

  “… I am not saying that Mr. Rohbling is a model of mental stability. Here I find myself in agreement with Mr. Waley. I have no doubt that Mr. Rohbling is a sick man. But that is not the point. The People are not obliged to show that Mr. Rohbling is a well-balanced, happy person, able to live a full and rewarding life. I am certain that Judge Peoples will instruct you as to that. But there are many types of mental illness. Drug addiction and alcoholism are mental illnesses too, listed as such in Dr. Lewis Rosenbaum’s big DSM III book, which we all saw earlier, but we do not for that reason excuse the junkie who mugs or the drunk who kills with his car.”

  Karp focused on Theodore Spearman, the retired NYU chemistry professor promoted to the jury from alternate, a man who might be expected to know about proof.

  “No, all we are obliged to prove, and what we have proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that Jonathan Rohbling planned to kill Jane Hughes, that he costumed himself carefully so as to inveigle himself into her confidence, that he sought her out at her church, that he preyed on her decency, posing convincingly as a young black student lately come to the big city, and so got himself invited to her apartment, that he kept that appointment with murder at her apartment, that he killed her, knowing that he was killing her, for Jane Hughes fought hard for her life, she did not go easily as he pressed his suitcase down on her face, smothering her to death. And we have further proven that he escaped stealthily from the murder scene, and that when he was confronted by Detective Featherstone, as you heard, he cleverly and guilefully denied ownership of the suitcase, knowing that it contained damning evidence connecting him with the crime. Ladies and gentlemen, is this the behavior of an out-of-control maniac who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Give me a break!”

  Pause. Switch to Carmen Delgado, thirty-one, dry cleaner. Karp took a deep breath, summoning the beginning case into his head. He would now review all the significant evidence as it applied t
o the theme he had just laid out for the jury, boosting his triumphs, ignoring his slips, telling him a coherent, convincing tale that would stick, he hoped, to their minds more tenaciously than the one Waley had told in the morning.

  Late in the second hour of this grueling work, he noted out of the corner of his eye a young black woman he recognized as a clerk-typist in the bureau office enter the courtroom, walk up to the barrier dividing the well of the court from the spectator seats, attract the attention of Terrell Collins at the prosecution table, and hand him a folded piece of paper. The jury noticed it too, and their attention wavered for an instant. Karp suppressed a flush of rage. By far the gravest sin that any employee of the district attorney’s office could commit was to interrupt in any way a closing argument. Death in the family was no excuse, nor was the outbreak of nuclear war. Karp raised his voice a hair, pumped out a little more charisma, brought the jury back to full attention, and plowed on. He would have someone’s ass for this. Afterward.

  Karp in his office, drained, rubbing an icy can of Coke across his eyes.

  Collins was there for his usual postmortem, this the very last one. He could tell by the twitching of his boss’s jaw that something was wrong (talk about bahavior!), but he didn’t have a clue as to what it was. He thought that the closing had gone splendidly. Karp had brilliantly defused the whole dueling-shrinks aspect of the case, finessing Waley’s strongest card. The press-they had been yelling something about another granny-killer victim, but they had rushed down the gantlet so quickly that he hadn’t been able to make out what it meant.

  Karp chugged three-quarters of the soda and snarled, “Now, what the fuck was that business with passing papers in the middle of the goddamn closing?”

  “Hell, Butch, I don’t know. Look for yourself. I wasn’t going to get into a damn discussion with the woman, so I just took what she gave me.”

  Karp read, “Fulton says call Homicide 28th IMMEDIATELY.”

  Karp punched in a familiar number. Fulton came on the line right away, as if he had been waiting by the phone.

  “You heard yet?” the detective asked.

  “Heard what? For fuck’s sake, Clay, did you tell my office to interrupt me in court?”

  “I did. Get this. A woman named Margaret Evans did not show up for work this morning. When a coworker checked on her at one-fourteen this afternoon, she found her in her apartment, dead, with a blue cloth suitcase over her face. M.E. says it looks like smothering. Time of death, last night sometime. Woman is black, age 58, two kids, four grand kids.”

  “Oh, shit!” said Karp. “And the press has it already? How the hell …?”

  “Somebody tipped them, is what I heard. How we going to play this, Stretch?”

  Karp did not reply for a moment. He was trying to figure out if there was any way of keeping this news from the jury, and decided that there was not. Had he known about it sooner, he might have been able to make a case for sequestration, but by now the jurors were at home, sitting in front of the tube or looking at the evening paper.

  “I want you to handle it, Clay,” he said at last. “You need me to call zone command or the Chief of D., I will.”

  “No problem. By the way, I checked. He was in Bellevue, in case you were wondering.”

  “Oh, that’s a relief,” said Karp. “I guess we should thank God for small favors. What’s your thinking, off the bat?”

  “Off the bat? A copycat. Rare, but it happens. A psycho, or someone who just wanted to whack his mother-in-law, but was stuck for inspiration until the trial. So we’ll do the usual canvass, check on the relatives, the love life, the neighbors. Who knows, it could be a grounder-”

  “It’s not a grounder, Clay,” said Karp, his tone flat and resigned. “Have you thought about the possibility of something nastier?”

  “Like?”

  “Like, Jonathan’s got a pal, a disciple? My shrink called it his hobby. Maybe there was a club.”

  “Maybe you’re getting paranoid in your old age,” said Fulton. “We’re talking about Rohbling here, son. The lone pine tree. Kid don’t have a friend in Jesus, he got no friends at all. Oh, yeah, this’ll amuse you. You know where the vic worked?”

  “Don’t tell me … for Rohbling, right?”

  “Uh-uh. For that sweetheart you had me trailing around after last winter.”

  “Robinson?”

  “Yep. She was a medical-records specialist. Small world, huh?”

  “Tiny. What was Doctor Death doing the night of, by the way?”

  “Oh, he’s clean. According to his office, he was out on some little island in the Sound. Wait a second, I got it written down here somewheres …”

  “Wooten Island,” said Karp.

  “That’s it.” Pause. “Wait a second, how the hell did you know that?”

  “You said it was a small world. Don’t ask,” said Karp.

  Karp’s mood was not improved when, upon arriving home, he found the press thicker and more importunate than ever, the Evans murder having lashed them into a frenzy of speculation, and the pickets louder in their invective for the same reason. Thus, when he discovered that his daughter was missing, had been missing since noon, he was not his ordinary calm and reasonable self. He was cruel and abusive to Posie, in the most intemperate language. She wailed and ran to her room, from which issued the sound of disorganized packing. The twins burst into sympathetic tears. In the midst of this shrieking hell, while Karp was attempting to form some productive thought as to what to do next, the telephone rang. Karp let the machine pick it up and heard Marlene’s voice saying, “She’s here.”

  Moving as fast as he had ever moved on a basketball court, he raced to the phone and snatched up the receiver.

  “Marlene? Jesus, I was going crazy!”

  “I bet.”

  “Oh, God, I’m fucking shaking here.”

  “What’s going on? It sounds like crying.”

  “Yeah, well, I yelled at Posie.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and called out the news to Posie, who came out smiling through the tears. Karp apologized, and the girl, who, like the sages of the Orient, dwelt in the eternal Now, swept the weeping twins up and away with kisses. Into the phone Karp said, “Marlene, tell me you didn’t plan all this out without letting me know.”

  “Of course not. It was a misunderstanding. I told Lucy that when my business was finished, she could come out here and spend a day or two, and she thought that meant the tennis thing, so when I told her it was finished, she arranged everything.”

  “Arranged …?”

  “Yeah, she came out with Tranh. Of course, he asked her if I was expecting her, and of course she said yes, which was true as far as she could see, and they took the train and a cab and the livery boat, and here they are. Tranh is paralyzed with embarrassment. Edie Wooten was a little surprised too. Lucy, of course, puts the whole thing off on me. And when I pointed out to her that you didn’t know and would be going crazy, she said she left you a note, and then she said, oops, I forgot the note, sorry. The brat is incorrigible.”

  I wonder where she gets it from, thought Karp, fuming. “So you’ll send her right back?”

  “Well, as long as she’s here, she might as well spend a day or so.”

  “What! Are you out of your fucking mind!” Karp yelled. “You’re guarding that woman against a dangerous stalker, and you’re going to keep Lucy there?”

  “Well, you know, I made just that point to Lucy,” said Marlene in a distinctly cooler tone, “and do you know what she said? She said that if a stalker could get past me, and Tranh and the dog, we better hang it up.”

  “Marlene, that’s ridiculous!”

  “And, she said, you’re grumpy because you’re losing your trial and everyone’s miserable at the loft, and that’s why she decided to come. She said, and I quote, I don’t want to stop liking Daddy.”

  Karp could not think of a suitable riposte to this. Marlene resumed, after a moment of silence, “How is the trial going?”


  “Down the toilet. There’s a killer copycat-ing our defendant, but the jury’s going to think … God knows what the jury’s going to think. I thought it was even money on a hung, and maybe a tiny chance of a win, still, but … you know the background on this was always that he was a serial killer. We couldn’t try it that way, but it was in the air, the jury understood that-you know how it is. Now, with this out, it sours the case. They’re not thinking we got the wrong guy or anything, but maybe he had help, it’s not straightforward anymore.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” said Marlene with genuine sympathy, mixed with relief that the subject had changed from parenting to the law. “And you worked so hard. Do they have any leads on the copycat?”

  “Not yet. Woman seems to have been employed by your pal Robinson, by the way. I thought that was significant.”

  “Is it?”

  “Apparently not, since he was away on your island paradise at the time of the murder last night.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” said Marlene. “He took off with his merry band last night on a yacht, and I know they made it to the City because I talked with a guy who started the evening clubbing downtown.”

  “Well, well,” said Karp. “The plot thickens.”

  “It does indeed,” said Marlene.

  “Daddy was mad, wasn’t he?”

  “Furious. But I calmed him down. Did you apologize to Tranh?”

  “Yes. I said that the dishonor was mine. He said I was an ignorant monkey, not worth drowning.”

  “I concur with that. Never again, Lucy, I mean it, although …”

  “What?”

  “I suppose I should take pride in your resourcefulness. At least you didn’t get lost.”

  “I’m socially precocious,” said Lucy with a casual drawl.

  “Yes, and intellectually retarded. Now that you’re here, how do you like it?”

  “I love it. It’s like a fairy castle on the sea. Could we go swimming now? I have my suit on underneath.”