Outrage bkamc-23

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Sitting on the d train as it rattled North from Manhattan into the Bronx, Amy Lopez lifted her copy of the Post so that the young acne-scarred man with the peroxide-blond hair sitting across from her couldn’t see her face. He’d been staring at her since getting on the train at the 125th Street subway station, and she’d caught him glancing at her purse, which she had tucked closer against her hip. She read the headline that screamed from the front page.

  DA’S WITNESS COLLAPSES ON WITNESS STAND AT IMAM’S TERROR TRIAL

  She turned the page to read the report about the murder trial of a Harlem imam named Sharif Jabbar. It was one of those stories that had the city riveted to the various tabloids and the evening television news. A young woman had been decapitated in the basement of the al-Aqsa mosque in Harlem during some sort of frenzied buildup to a narrowly thwarted terrorist attack on the New York Stock Exchange the previous fall. And now, in April, the imam was being prosecuted for her murder.

  According to the story, New York district attorney Roger “Butch” Karp, who was prosecuting the case, had called an unindicted co-conspirator, Dean Newbury, the senior partner of an old, established white-shoe Wall Street law firm, to the witness stand the day before. And while testifying against the imam, the old man had toppled over and died. The “official” word from a court spokesman was that Newbury had succumbed to “an apparent heart attack.”

  However, the Post was reporting a more sinister possibility. According to a reliable source who was not authorized to speak on the record, Newbury had shown signs of having been poisoned. The source was quoted as saying, “He took a sip of water and kablooey, he’s on the ground frothing at the mouth and kicking around to beat the band. Then nothing. Nada. Dead as a doornail.”

  Amy finished the story and turned the page, dipping the paper ever so slightly and just in time to catch the young man watching her before he quickly averted his eyes. She looked down at the paper and a chill ran up her spine. The previous night, April 10, a woman named Dolores Atkins had been murdered in an apartment off Anderson Avenue in the Bronx. The police weren’t saying much, but according to another officially anonymous source, she’d been raped and “cut up pretty bad” by her attacker.

  “There were no apparent signs of a break-in,” an NYPD spokesman was quoted as saying. He’d declined to answer a question posed by the reporter, Ariadne Stupenagel, regarding the possibility that the murder was related to a double homicide that had occurred the previous July on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near Columbia University. The article had gone on to note similarities between Atkins’s death and the murders of the other two women-Beth Jenkins and her daughter Olivia Yancy. The cases remained open with no arrests made or imminent.

  When the train reached her stop at the 161st Street station near Yankee Stadium, Amy stayed in her seat as if she intended to continue riding. Then at the last moment, she jumped up and stepped through the open door. Hurrying along the platform, she glanced back just as she reached the stairs leading down to River Avenue. She cursed; the stalker had been quick enough to beat the door and was following her.

  She walked down the stairs as quickly as she could and started zigzagging through the late-afternoon crowd on the sidewalk. This time when she looked back, she didn’t see the young man and sighed with relief. She took him for a purse snatcher, and that would have made her a victim twice in two months. There wasn’t much money in her handbag, but replacing her driver’s license again, as well as having to put a stop on her checking and credit card accounts, would have been onerous.

  Oh, and my engagement ring is in there, she thought. She’d gained a little weight with her last pregnancy with baby A.J. and the ring had been uncomfortable, so she took it off and put it in her wallet. I’d hate to lose that…

  Amy’s last thought was interrupted by a violent tug on her arm. The young man suddenly materialized at her side and grabbed her purse. She tried to hang on as he took off running and screamed as she was pulled off her feet, losing her grip on the purse. “Help! Thief! Somebody help!” she cried as she scrambled to her feet.

  A few bystanders yelled at the purse snatcher, and a couple of men gave momentary chase, but the thief knew his game and that the pursuit would not last long. He dodged between the traffic on River Avenue and kept running until he was on the west side of the soon-to-be-demolished old baseball stadium. He slowed to a walk and began rifling through the purse, oblivious to the looks he got from passersby. This was the Bronx; asking a tough-looking, acne-scarred young man what he was doing pulling out the contents of a woman’s purse could only mean trouble.

  Only fifteen lousy bucks, he thought. He could probably get a little more for the credit cards and checkbook, though his victim was sure to report them stolen and close the accounts. He was well aware that sometimes victims didn’t act as fast as they should, and he might be able to make a few quick purchases posing as the husband of Amy Lopez. He’d eventually sell the cards to those who had ways of using them still-mostly knowing which businesses didn’t run them through electronic billing. He stared down at the driver’s license dismissively-it was worth only a couple of dollars.

  He opened the coin purse of the wallet. Seventy-three cents and a ring with a small diamond. Less than a half carat, he thought. Maybe worth a few hundred brand-new. He looked at the inscription on the inside of the ring: Always, Al. The sentiment could stay, but he’d file the “Al” out of it. I might get thirty bucks, if I can find the right loser.

  The thief found a buyer two hours later, standing with a dozen others in Mullayly Park near 166th Street and Jerome Avenue. He’d seen the Puerto Rican teenager around the neighborhood but had never talked to him. Skinny and awkward, with long, wavy dark hair and soulful brown eyes, which looked even larger behind the thick glasses he wore, the young man wasn’t like the others who hung out at that particular part of the park.

  Mostly loud punks and their slutty girlfriends, the thief thought. His target was shy to the point where he couldn’t look anyone in the eye for more than a second, even if the conversation was friendly. And he constantly shifted from foot to foot when nervous, as if he wanted to run away.

  I think somethin’s wrong with his brain, the thief thought, but he had to admit that the young man did seem to have one talent that got him tolerated by the others: he could repeat word-for-word seemingly every hip-hop recording ever made. Except for a slight Puerto Rican accent, he even sounded like the originals, although he had none of the attitude or hand gestures. I think his name is Felix, the thief thought as he watched the young man finish his improv rap and fall silent.

  “Felix, my man, you look like an hombre who needs a ring for his girl,” he said, sidling up to his target. “I got just the thing.” The thief produced the ring. “It’s worth four hundred, but since we’re compadres, I’ll let you have it for a hundred.”

  “I… I… I don’t have that much money,” Felix stammered, surprised that the acne-scarred man had spoken to him at all.

  “Hell, Felix ain’t got no money, and he ain’t got no girlfriend,” said a large black youth standing close enough to hear the exchange, guffawing.

  “I… I… I have a girlfriend,” Felix replied, looking down at his feet.

  “Hell yeah, Raymond, haven’t you heard, Felix is the dude that knocked up your cousin Cherise,” a short Hispanic girl with too much makeup said. “Ain’t that right, Felix? You the daddy?” She laughed. The locals hanging out at the park teased Felix, an easy target, every chance they got.

  “No… no no,” Felix replied, shaking his head swiftly from side to side and turning red as he shifted faster from one foot to the other.

  The large black youth, Raymond, scowled. “That right, Felix? You im-preg-nate Cherise?” He moved over so that he was only a few inches away from Felix and towering over him, then turned his head to the side and winked at the Hispanic girl. It was obvious: there was no Cherise, pregnant or otherwise.

  But Felix didn’t know that. He was begi
nning to look desperate. “No! It wasn’t me!”

  “You sure?” Raymond growled. He looked over his shoulder to make sure the others were watching and grinned. “Now, tell me the truth, is you the one who diddled Cherise?” he asked belligerently, turning back to Felix, his face set as if he was about to fly into a rage.

  Suddenly, Felix nodded so vigorously he had to push his glasses back up his nose. “Yeah, sure… okay. I… I… I diddled Cherise. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-”

  “You didn’t mean to?” the big youth roared. “What did you think you was doing with that little pecker?”

  As the other youths laughed at the joke, Felix looked behind him as if he’d heard somebody call his name from a distance. “I… I… I got to go,” he stuttered.

  “You… you… you better,” Raymond said, mimicking Felix. “Cherise is trying to figure out which one of you peckerwoods forgot to use pro-tec-shun. Now that I know, she’ll be comin’ after your ass.”

  Felix looked like he might cry, then he turned on his heel and began to walk quickly away.

  The purse snatcher, who’d been laughing along with the others, saw his opportunity leaving and hurried after him. “Yo, Felix, wait up,” he said. “That was just plain wrong back there. You didn’t really get Cherise pregnant, did you?”

  Felix shook his head again as he continued to walk at a fast clip. “No. I don’t even know her.”

  “Then why’d you say you did?”

  Felix shrugged his shoulders and slowed down. “That’s what they wanted me to say.”

  “Well, it was wrong of them, dude,” the thief said sympathetically. “So, tell ya what I’m going to do. I know you got a girlfriend stashed away from those jokers, and she ain’t no whore like Cherise. Fine-looking young man like you-and by the way, I like the mustache you’re trying to grow there, brother, makes you look older, classy. Tell you what, I’ll sell you that ring for fifty bucks… and that’s a steal, bro.”

  Felix stopped walking. His face twisted with doubt. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled bills and coins. He counted what he had and shook his head. “I only got twenty-three dollars and sixteen cents.”

  “Oh man, you trying to rob me?” the thief said, rolling his eyes. He paused before adding, as though reluctant, “Well, ’cause I don’t like what those pendejos was doing to you, I’ll take it.” He held out his hand and accepted the cash, and then handed over the ring. “You gonna make some bitch happy, she gonna take care of you reeeaaaal good.”

  Felix smiled shyly as he inspected the ring, then frowned. “It says, ‘Always, Al.’ Who’s Al?”

  The thief thought fast. “Why, I am. Al Guerrero. My bitch decided to dump me and I got the ring back. That’s how come I knew it was a five-hundred-dollar ring.”

  “You said it was worth four hundred.”

  “Whatever, now it’s yours,” the thief replied. “All you got to do is get a little file and take off my name and you’re set with your lady friend. Now I got to go.”

  Felix felt a pang of guilt as he watched the man trot quickly in the opposite direction. He knew that his parents wouldn’t approve of what he’d just done. Especially his dad, who never approved of anything he did.

  His mother was always worried that others would take advantage of him and get him into trouble. It was true that they sometimes liked to play jokes on him-like committing some minor offense and then saying he did it, knowing he’d confess under pressure. Like the time at school when Raymond flushed firecrackers down the toilet, wrecking the pipes. Or when the police were called in to investigate when some other kids broke the front window of the Korean market on Anderson Avenue. Confronted, Felix had admitted he was the culprit in both instances even though he’d been nowhere near either scene.

  Felix didn’t know why he confessed to things he didn’t do. He was, his mom always said, “a people pleaser,” but more than that, he didn’t like it when people were angry with him, especially the people in charge, like his dad, teachers, and the police. He’d discovered at an early age that it was easier if he just went along and did and said what other people wanted him to. In the case of his dad, if Felix denied some transgression and waited for the old man to really get worked up, the beating was much more severe than if he confessed quickly and just got slapped around a little bit.

  Plus, as in the cases of the school prank and the Korean grocer, the authorities had quickly determined that he wasn’t involved. So other than a mild strapping with a belt from his dad “for lying,” which wasn’t out of the ordinary, nothing had ever come of his confessions.

  Felix reasoned now that he’d paid the owner for the ring and got a good deal, and that there was nothing wrong with that. Still, his parents would never believe that it was an honest transaction, so he was just going to have to keep it a secret.

  He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with the ring, but he was tired of everyone making fun of him because he’d never had a girlfriend. There was this one girl he liked. She worked as a waitress at the Hip-Hop Nightclub on West Thirty-eighth Street in Manhattan. Maria Elena. He was going there next week to perform for open mic night at the invitation of his friend Alejandro Garcia, who was a big-time rap artist.

  Maybe she’ll notice me, he thought happily as he stuffed the ring in his pants pocket and headed for his family’s apartment on Anderson Avenue.

  3

  “Mr. Karp, that newspaper reporter Ariadne Stupenagel is here to see you. She says she has an appointment,” Karp’s receptionist, Darla Milquetost, said over the office intercom.

  “Tell her I’m not in,” Karp replied, loud enough that Stupenagel could hear him not only through the intercom but also through his open office door. He winked at his wife, Marlene Ciampi, who was visiting and waiting for her old friend Ariadne.

  Karp was kicked back in the leather office chair with his size-fourteen feet up on the ancient battle-scarred mahogany desk that had occupied the inner sanctum of the New York district attorney’s office since the days of his mentor, the legendary district attorney Francis X. Garrahy.

  He stood and stretched his still-trim, six-foot-five frame. It had been a week since the jury had come back with a guilty verdict in the murder trial of the Harlem imam Sharif Jabbar, and he was still enjoying the release of all the tension that came with such an undertaking.

  There was no gloating over the verdict. The way he saw it, the advantage was with the prosecution. As the chief prosecutor, he knew he would prevail if he did his preparation and was certain of the defendant’s factual guilt going into the trial, and if he had legally admissible evidence to convict beyond any and all doubt. Otherwise, the defendant never should have been charged in the first place, he thought.

  However, with Jabbar convicted, it was as if Karp had passed through the perfect storm. Now the sky was blue, the ocean a lake, and he was relaxed and starting to catch up on some of his administrative duties, as well as what was going on at the DAO while his focus had been fully occupied by the terror trial.

  The only thing rocking his boat at the moment was the impending court battle to make sure that Jabbar served his sentence of life without parole in New York and wasn’t whisked off by the feds into a witness protection program in exchange for information, thus escaping punishment. Even if he could keep Jabbar in a New York state prison for the rest of Jabbar’s life, Karp was still torn over whether the punishment fit the crime. He thought back to some of the discussions he’d had with several of the senior members of his staff over whether to pursue the death penalty for Jabbar.

  There was no doubt in Karp’s mind that Jabbar had deserved the death penalty-the victim had been cruelly tortured for hours before her execution, which had itself been painful, horrific, and slow. However, there’d been other considerations. One was that there was no evidence to prove that Jabbar knew about, or participated in, the victim’s torture-one of the aggravating factors necessary to warrant the death penalty. And two, witness testimon
y and the evidence clearly showed that the terrorist Nadya Malovo actually wielded the murder weapon; Jabbar had been more planner, facilitator, and cheerleader than executioner.

  This had not stopped Karp from prosecuting the anti-U.S. firebrand imam. For his role, Jabbar was just as guilty in the eyes of the law as Malovo. But when deciding whether to seek the death penalty, Karp had to weigh the possibility that jurors would make a distinction between Malovo and Jabbar.

  On the one hand, it wouldn’t make a difference; if they found Jabbar guilty but refused to vote for the ultimate punishment, Jabbar would automatically be sentenced to life without parole. However, in the past there had been death penalty cases in which jurors knew that a conviction might subject the defendant to an execution they didn’t believe the defendant deserved specifically because he or she wasn’t the “real killer.” Jurors finding themselves in this position sometimes balked at rendering a guilty verdict. And all it took was one holdout for a hung jury.

  Unwilling to take that chance in this case, Karp knew he had to be satisfied with the life-without-parole sentence… as long as it was served in New York. However, if he got the chance, Karp knew he would pursue the death penalty against Malovo, the always elusive, daring, and vicious assassin. She’d been apprehended in Manhattan by U.S. Marshal Jen Capers after murdering one of his star witnesses, Dean Newbury, near the end of the Jabbar trial. But for the moment, it looked like he wasn’t going to get the chance to prosecute her in a New York City courtroom. She was locked away in a federal maximum-security penitentiary awaiting trial on a variety of federal charges and he couldn’t get at her.

  The situation made him uneasy on a personal level, too. Malovo had a grudge against him and his family, and he’d be able to keep better tabs on her if she was locked up in New York.

  In the meantime, the Karp-Ciampi household was in a state of flux. His wife was casting about for “something fulfilling” to do as she contemplated the last of their children leaving the home in a couple of years. An attorney herself, she’d recently successfully represented “Dirty Warren,” the vendor operating the newsstand in front of the Criminal Courts Building at 10 °Centre Street. He had been charged with murder in Westchester County. Flush with victory, she was considering taking on the occasional case in which she felt an injustice was being perpetrated; however, she wouldn’t take on cases in Manhattan to avoid any perceived conflict of interest with her DA husband.