“Deal,” said Karp, and then as an aside, “You almost might want to have a talk with the partner, Nash.”
“Why would I want to do that? Because he’s black?”
“No, but what you said, about doing some good, about counterbalance. You always kept pretty good track of rising black detectives. There could be trouble for him, if I’m right. I mean if I’m right, he told a couple of fibs there to cover his partner. Do you know him?”
“As a matter of fact, I do: one of my boys, as you guessed. A good guy, wife and kids, a solid cop. There is no way, I mean no way, I’m going to involve him in this crap.”
“Not even a friendly heads-up?”
“Nothing, because this conversation never took place.”
“But you will look at those calls?”
“Yeah. Give me a couple of days. I’ll call you,” said Fulton out the rear window, and the car drove off.
Murrow reported back to Karp late in the day. “Well?” asked Karp. He was comfortably seated with a pile of case files on his lap, feet up on the desk.
“As expected. No indictment, smooth as silk. Cooley and Nash are back in harness as we speak.” Karp just nodded and returned to his reading. “What are you going to do, boss?”
“What can I do? The wheels have ground, and the ham sandwich has not been indicted. Did you see this? Shawn Cisco Lomax’s epitaph. An inch and a half on page A20 of the newspaper of record.”
Murrow picked up the tiny clipping and saw it was from the one-column digest of regional news that the Times ran daily on one of its back pages. He read, “Police Shoot Car Thief on Henry Hudson Highway. Police officers in pursuit of a car thief opened fire when the fugitive turned the SUV he was driving around on the northbound West Side Highway and attempted to ram the unmarked police vehicle pursuing him. Shawn Lomax, 23, of 312 W. 127th Street, was pronounced dead at the scene. Police sources said that Mr. Lomax had a long criminal record. The two police officers involved were not injured.” Murrow put the clipping down on the desk. “Gosh, it’s in the papers, so it must be true.” Karp ignored the remark and kept reading. Murrow, usually sensitive to his boss’s moods, ignored the snub. He was oddly reluctant to leave, without . . . without what? Some assurance that the good guys were going to win? He was very young.
“Did you hear the latest? They found another dead street person.”
This time Karp looked up. “Where?”
“In a midtown parking garage. What does that make this month, six?”
“The same MO?”
“No, this one was shot, apparently. It could still be the same guy.”
“I doubt that very much. Murderers tend to be creatures of habit, and crazy murderers even more so. I wonder . . .” Karp shut down the emerging thought.
“Wonder what?”
“Nothing, Murrow, don’t you have something to do?”
“Go talk to your daughter,” said Marlene when Karp got home that evening. He was happy to see her by the stove stirring, which always gave him a shameful atavistic thrill. He was taken aback, however, by her tone.
“What happened?”
“You heard about the new homeless killing?”
“What, that shooting midtown? Oh, shit! Don’t tell me she was involved in that one, too?”
“No, surprisingly, but she knew the guy. She’s broken up about it, plus I told her if she kept hanging around those people, I was going to pack her off to live with Patsy in Santa Barbara. Unfortunately, they don’t allow us to lock them up in convents anymore.”
“A hollow threat, surely?”
“No, I was serious. She has to learn to listen, dammit!”
Karp let this go by. “Where are the boys?”
“I said they could stay at Matt Fleming’s until later. I’ll pick them up. I have to go out anyway.” She lifted the cover on a pot of potatoes and turned down the heat. “By the way, the famous David is coming to dinner tonight.”
“She invited him?”
“No, it was me.” Marlene gave an extra stir, more vigorous than the stew really needed, and shook off the wooden spoon on the edge of the pot, like a rim-shot in Vegas. “Another crime against my name. He seemed perfectly reasonable about it, though. Maybe he can talk some sense into her. She absolutely can’t go hanging out in dark alleys with bums until they catch this bastard.”
Karp changed out of his lawyer costume and into jeans and a worn sweatshirt. He announced himself at Lucy’s door and received a grumbled admittance. Once inside, he made that quick, near-furtive inspection familiar to all parents of teenagers, a forbidden window on the secret life. As usual, the room was neat as a nun’s cell, a little too neat, to Karp’s thinking, betokening a compulsive mind, perhaps unhealthily so. The room contained a simple box spring and mattress, a Door Store desk and swivel chair, a Tabriz carpet of some value on the floor, and on two of the walls modular birch bookshelves stretched from the floor to the ceiling, solid with books, almost all of them dictionaries and works in languages Karp couldn’t read. Over the bed hung a large polychrome crucifix in the Spanish style, dripping blood drops and radiating agony, that always gave Karp the willies when he saw it. The wall over the desk was corked, and on it were pinned pictures and documents of various kinds, all secured with four pushpins at the corners and lined up square: family photos (numerous), school awards (few), Polaroid snaps of pals (fewer), a reproduction of a painting of Cardinal Mezzofanti, the Pete Rose of language, who could translate 114, and one of Francis E. Sommer, the DiMaggio, who was fluent in 94. Raised above these was an oval photocopy of Simone Weil, which disturbed Karp nearly as much as the vivid crucifix. All Karp knew about Weil was that she was a French Jew who, having escaped the Nazis, starved herself to death in sympathy with concentration camp victims, which in Karp’s view was not the sort of role model appropriate for a seventeen-year-old. His gaze shifted quickly to the center of the cork and the large world map, which showed with pins how the kid was gaining on the language superstars. There seemed to be more every time Karp looked, pushing forty by rough count. The competition with Weil, if any, was not apparent to the paternal eye, which noted again the absence of rock stars, kittens, Garfields, or other normal teenage-girl stuff.
The abnormal was at her desk. Her head, round, shorn, and vulnerable, was drooping like a spent blossom on her long, thin neck as she wrote in a notebook. From the cassette machine on the desk came the voice of a man speaking a language curiously like English, but incomprehensible to Karp.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She switched it off and swiveled around to face him. “Dutch. The text on the list. It’s easy.”
“Say something in it.”
“Ik weet dat je het niet goed vindt, maar ik doe het touch.” “Which means?”
“‘I know you don’t think it’s right, but I’ll do it anyway.’”
“That seems to be your motto.” Karp sat on the bed. “What’re we going to do about this, Luce? You’re driving her nuts.”
“She’s driving me nuts. My gosh, if she wanted me to be a nice, regular little kid, she should have paid some attention a little earlier.”
“She just wants you to be safe and happy.”
“No, what it is, she’s guilty that she neglected me while she ran around protecting women with firearms, and, mamma mia, look how I turned out. It’s an embarrassment.” She flung back in the chair, making it squeak. “And then she goes and . . . oh, God! I can’t believe she called him, like I was a little kid and she was making sure he wasn’t a molester. I’ll die!”
“No dramatics, please,” said Karp. Then they heard the elevator arrive, which they both decided to ignore. “Look, at the risk of being overly rational, this is the situation you’re in, and so my advice is make the best of it for the couple of years you have left at home. Everyone has a cross to bear, so to speak. Like you all say, offer it up.”
Lucy glared at him, then sighed, closed her eyes briefly. “Okay, I’ll try. You’re right. It�
�s just . . . I was really upset is all. I tend to lose it when my friends get killed.”
“You knew this guy well?”
“Oh, yeah, as well as any of them let you know them. Desmondo Ramsey. Early twenties, got into the crack business as a teenager, went to jail, tried to live at home but . . . he comes . . . he came from a respectable family, by the way, over in Newark. Three sisters, all college grads, mother runs a dry cleaner’s. Anyway, he couldn’t stand the pressure, his family guilting him out all the time, so he split and came to the city. Hustled things—not stealing, I mean street trade, hauling stuff for street merchants, like a lot of them do, laying stuff out, holding good sidewalks for them. That was his big ambition, to have a table. He was a good salesman, too, friendly, a nice smile. Once in a while one of his merchants would give him something to sell, a pen set or a watch or a radio. He read books, too, you know, not a dummy at all. We used to talk about stuff, Malcolm and Fanon, and the Church. And business stuff, like how to succeed, stuff like that.” She sighed. “And now he’s dead, someone just shot him down like a dog.”
“It’s a rough life,” said Karp.
“Yes, I know. They’re out there getting murdered, and my social role is to be protected and sheltered in the upper-middle-class cocoon, according to her, get good grades, have respectable middle-class friends, go to a good college, shop, chatter . . .”
“Lucy, when I rank sheltered middle-class girls, you are not in the top ten, I hate to tell you. You’re not probably in the top million. I mean you’ve done your lower-depths adventure already, you’ve been shot at and kidnapped, and God knows what else. Don’t you think it’s time for a rest, maybe catch your breath a little?”
“No, I don’t.” Lucy sprang to her feet, a false and cheerful look on her face. “I should help set the table, shouldn’t I?”
7
“ACTUALLY, IT WENT A LOT BETTER THAN I EXPECTED,” SAID KARP. “ALOT better, for example, than this bagel.” He was in a rear booth at Sam’s, near the courthouse. Sam’s was an antiquated joint of the type that used to be called a luncheonette in New York. It was dark and cozy, and the red leatherette of its booths was nearly black with age, except where patched with Mystik tape, and the air therein was dense with the scents of coffee, toast, bacon, and the extra something that once made all places smell exactly the same. He was having breakfast with his old pal, V. T. Newbury. Newbury worked in Washington now, for Treasury, doing something fairly cryptic about big-time money laundering. He had worked for Karp for over fifteen years at the DA, and whenever he was in town arresting distinguished bankers, he arranged to spend some time with Karp. Karp prized V.T.’s judgment, although not necessarily in reference to the doughy oval.
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Newbury. He was a small, ridiculously handsome man with the chisel-cut features of a twenties cigarette-ad drawing. A scion of venerable New York wealth, he had nothing whatever in common with Karp, except deep mutual affection and a mordant sense of humor about the criminal justice system.
“It’s not a bagel. It’s white bread in a doughnut shape. An abomination. It’s like . . . like . . .”
“Ladies no longer wearing gloves out of doors. Yes, the decline of a once great tradition. My commiserations. Tell me more about this fellow. Did you like him?”
“Well, sort of, as much as I could like someone with whom my daughter spends every available moment and who is ten years older than she is. He seemed pretty decent, and everyone was on their best behavior. Got a scruffy beard, dresses down-market, but clean. Well-spoken. He’s from upstate somewhere. I guess he’s the kind of guy, a woman sees him and wants to fatten him up or something. That kind of appeal. He’s a Franciscan.”
“A priest?”
“No, what they call a Tertiary, like a lay order. I didn’t know they had them. He lives in a Catholic Worker hostel on the Lower East Side. According to him, he’s been in some rough places. That was what we mainly talked about, Bosnia, Sudan. He’s dying to get back there, if you can believe it. Like I said, everyone was being their charming selves, even Marlene. Their charming Catholic selves. Many references to the Holy Spirit.
“You felt left out.
“I did, a little. Off-base. I mean if your kid is hanging out with a bum, that’s one thing. You can give him the bum’s rush. If she’s hanging out with . . . I don’t know . . . a saint practically, what can you say? Be a little more evil, honey?”
“You’re thinking maybe this guy is taking advantage of her?”
“What, sexually? Lucy?” Karp let his jaw drop. “You know, that’s the one thing that never occurred to me. Never entered my mind.”
“The dad is always the last to know.”
“Uh-uh, that’s not the worry with Lucy, especially not with this guy. The worry is we’ll get a postcard from the Congo some day: ‘Dear Mom and Dad, taking care of lepers in the middle of a guerrilla war here. Don’t worry.’” Karp laughed. “Go have children! Now I know.”
“I wish I could give you some advice,” said V.T., “but, as you know, Anabel and I have not been blessed. I was always threatened with military school, myself.”
“Not an option,” said Karp, “although Marlene gets on a tear sometimes she’s going to ship her out of town if she doesn’t get her school act together.” He pushed his half-eaten pseudo-bagel aside and signaled the waitress for more coffee. Newbury took the moment to examine his friend more closely. Not a happy man, he thought, and not because of his daughter either. The skin of his face had the stretched and sallow look that, experience taught, indicated tension and frustration. His smiles seemed forced, as if having to push up through a membrane of suffering.
“How’s work?” Newbury asked in a casual tone.
“Oh, the usual. Putting asses in jail.”
“Not. Really, what’s wrong?”
“You got time for this?”
“Oh, a long story?”
“Semilong,” said Karp, and plunged into the Cooley affair, and the situation with the election, and the execrable Norton Fuller, and what Karp proposed to do about it. At the end Karp asked, “So . . . what do you think?”
“I think you have a serious problem. Has Clay called you back yet?”
“Not yet, no.”
“An interesting moral situation. Both of you want to stay in jobs where you think you can still do some good, and where the alternatives, like letting yet another incompetent bozo take your place, seem even worse. But you might have to ignore some bad stuff to keep in there, and then you have to ask, where do you draw the line? The old Schindler’s list business, the good Germans . . .”
“That’s hardly a fair comparison,” said Karp. “Whatever happens, no one is sending me to Dachau.”
“No, when you leave the DA, you’ll be sentenced to private practice and the chance of enormous wealth, and this will keep you out of heaven. Some people, maybe including Lucy, would say that by comparison a jolt in Dachau is a day at the beach.”
“You’re not being very helpful,” said Karp a little grumpily.
“No, and that’s because this is the four hundred and twelfth time we’ve had this conversation, or a similar one. You’re an essentially honest and decent man working at the top levels of a system that’s essentially dishonest and indecent. You have authority enough to acquire responsibility, but not enough to change things much for the better. So your choices are, also for the four hundred and twelfth time, either, one, quit and earn an honest living; two, get off the pot and run for DA or political office, where you can put on your silver armor and fight the good fight with no holds barred; or, three, do a couple of ass-kissing favors for some pols and get appointed to the bench, where you can make the kind of law you want until senility takes hold, and even beyond. But this continual angst around a DA who doesn’t want to play by your rules has not made you happy, is not making you happy, and will not make you happy in the future. Granted, Keegan is in a different moral universe from Bloom, but he’s obviously stil
l not pure enough for you, and so, until the second coming of Francis P. Garrahy, you’re always going to be harassed by political types like Fuller. It’s part of the system.”
“I know it’s the system, V.T. I wasn’t asking for a review of my entire life, I was soliciting your advice as to how to carry out a sneak.”
“Me being a sneaky guy? Thank you. Okay, here’s my advice. It’s a good plan as far as it goes. But if you’re fighting a political battle, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty in politics. You have to manipulate your boss into a position where it’s less worse for him to do what you want him to do than what Fuller wants him to do.”
“Oh, crap! If I do that, I’m as bad as Fuller!”
“Yes, and if you don’t, you’ll lose, so why bother in the first place? Sorry, pal, you asked me, and that’s the way I see it.” Newbury drained his coffee cup and looked at his watch. “I’d love to share some moral agony with you, but I’m due across the street to terrorize a clutch of certified public accountants. Is that the correct noun of venery? A slick of accountants? A cheat? Whatever.” He shook Karp’s hand warmly. “Love to the family. And, Butch? Lighten up . . . it’s not like it was real life.”
Karp watched his friend walk down Baxter Street and felt a stab of envy, not a very familiar stab, and more irritating for that. He did not, of course, envy Newbury’s wealth or family or status. What he wished he had was his light heart, his ability to accept the world as he found it, its infinite absurdities amusing, its injustices bearable, its corruptions a given, like the changes in season, without becoming nastily cynical or corrupt himself. As he walked back to the office, he tried unsuccessfully to wriggle out from under the opinions V.T. had laid out, and it must have shown on his face because those of his staff he encountered gave him serious nods in greeting, and the few smiles that dawned as he passed were stillborn. And that was another thing, which he hardly dared admit. He was lonely. Unlike the lost age when he had started at the DA, when a lawyer commonly spent a whole career in public prosecution, the present was an era of flux. Except for Roland Hrcany, and Keegan himself, everyone Karp had started with was gone. Keegan could not be a friend, of course, and as for Hrcany—as Roland himself often remarked, when you had a Hungarian for a friend, you didn’t need any enemies. Karp stifled the self-pity, however, like the good stoic he was and stood nobly with his hand out in front of his secretary’s desk while she slapped a short stack of early phone messages into his hand. “And Himself would like to see you when it’s convenient.”
Enemy Within Page 13
