Depraved Indifference (20 page)

“Naturally, I want to tell Karp about this, get his sense of how to play the case. OK, I go to his office. I knock. He
unlocks the door
. He's locking himself in the office now, in case you don't know. I go in, he rushes back to the desk and clears some papers off, in a hurry, like he doesn't want me to see them. So I tell him the facts of the case. When I get to the part about the main informant being a priest, kaboom! He goes pale, jumps up, starts pacing back and forth. He starts asking all these crazy questions. Is Ted Catholic? Is Comer the cop Catholic? I ask him why he wants to know, he clams up. ‘Oh, just curious, you know.' In a pig's eye I know. And there's other stuff …”

Guma's voice faded. He scowled and chewed on his lower lip.

“Sounds grim,” V.T. agreed. “What do you think? You think he's flipping out from the strain?”

“Flipping out? You mean going crazy? Like he wasn't crazy already? I'd have to think about that. Guy who lives in an apartment with no furniture, works eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, at a job where his boss is looking to put the blocks to him any way he can, which also pays him around three tenths of what he's worth—I don't know what word you might use to describe such a person, but ‘crazy' might not be entirely out of line.”

“Not ‘dedicated'? ‘Devoted to justice in all its multifarious forms,' perhaps?”

Guma smiled. “Same thing in this shithole. But really, you know and I know that Karp is the best trial lawyer we still got around here, and he's been carrying the joint on major crimes since Garrahy kicked off. In the office the guy is ice. You've heard him on cross-exam. Other DAs, they can't resist the little dig at a hostile witness. Pisses off the judge, confuses the jury. And Butch? He treats these bastards like gold, gets the story, in, out, bingo. The jury thinks he's God,
they
wouldn't treat this obvious asshole that good. And so on.

“Now this. And it's connected to this goddamn hijack case, I know it is. But what I can't figure is, how come Karp is suddenly so interested in religious persuasion when as far as I know—and I've known the guy seven, eight years—he never made a peep about it before. The reason I ask is that if Karp is all of a sudden going to turn into a pain in the ass—and he is the only boss around here that isn't—then maybe I got to seek some serious career counseling. I'm too old to put up with assholes.”

“I see your point. Have you talked with any of the others? Roland? Or Marlene?”

“Roland? Who knows what Roland is thinking? Guy's a fucking animal. Roland thinks Karp's losing it, who knows what he'll do? You heard the expression, ‘If you have a Hungarian for a friend, you don't need any enemies'? That's Roland. They made it about him.”

“And Marlene?”

“Ciampi? She's not exactly your connoisseur of sanity at the present time. You know she heads for the can on a daily basis for a good honk? Or so my informants inform me.”

“Well, she's had her troubles.”

“So what? I got my troubles too. Am I carrying forty cases? Fuck, yeah. Is my ex taking me to court for the orthodontist bills for two kids: four, five big ones? Fuck, yeah. I'd a known that, I would've kicked their teeth out before the divorce. You see anything wrong with my teeth, V.T.? They work. They eat food. Women and children don't run screaming when they see me on the street. Well, theirs are just like mine, couple of gaps is all. Five grand, which I haven't got, she's taking me to court. So you see me sitting in the crapper bawling? No fucking way.”

“And the bottom line of this is … ?”

“Talk to him, V.T. He respects you. Talk to Marlene. Find out what's going on. He's got a hard-on for the pope? Fine, we'll fix it, anything. Butch goes off the rails, man, we might as well turn this place over to the mutts.”

Bill Denton finally caught up with Karp late in the week, after four rounds of telephone tag, which Karp had engineered by calling back when he was sure Denton would be away from his desk. A standard bureaucratic trick, but not foolproof if the person you are trying to avoid has your private number and doesn't mind using it.

“Karp, where've you been? I been trying to get you for days.”

“Oh, busy. You know.”

“That's the problem, I don't know. What's happening on Doyle?”

“We've started with the grand jury, just a couple of witnesses. I'm expecting to finish up the presentation tomorrow. There shouldn't be a problem getting an indictment, and we can arraign on the indictments early next week. One lawyer is representing the bunch of them, so there's only one set of motions to take up time. Assuming everything goes as expected.”

“Any reason it shouldn't?”

“Not aside from the stuff you know about already. The FBI acting up. People intimidating witnesses. Riots. Cops trying to mess with the evidence. Nothing we can't handle. Expect the unexpected, as you always say.”

“Yeah. I've been looking into that. I've got to admit, it could be you were right. Something funny is going on, and it's connected to this case.”

“Oh? Any hot leads?”

“Some stuff,” Denton said vaguely, “it hasn't jelled yet. By the way, you're still holding the physical evidence, aren't you?”

“Some of it. We have the stuff from the homicide scene. Your guys are still holding whatever they pulled out of the defendants' apartments and business premises. Which I'd like to see, by the way. I've asked Spicer about it, more than once.”

Denton grunted indifferently. “You think it's safe? Where you've got it, I mean?”

“Yeah, it's safe, Bill. And where it is, that's where it's going to stay. And since we're talking about the evidence in the case, maybe you could lean on old Fred to come across with what he's got. It might be helpful to know what the evidence is before the trial.”

“You got it, Butch,” Denton said. He paused. Then he said, “Is there something wrong, Butch? You sound funny all of a sudden.”

“No, nothing. Just working hard.”

“Oh. Well, take it easy, then. We wouldn't want anything to happen to you.”

“No, we wouldn't, would we, you fucking hypocrite dirt bag!” Karp said to the dead phone after Denton had broken the connection. This is great, he thought, talking to myself. Me and Dirty Warren. I wonder how much he clears from the magazines? Maybe it's not too late to think about a second career.

He dialed Marlene's office number. He let it ring ten times and then put it down. He looked at his watch: six-ten. He had a date with Marlene that evening, during which, he had just about decided, he was going to tell her the whole tangled story and show her his diagram. If she bought it, he would at least have an ally and be done with dissembling to the woman he loved, and if she didn't, she could take him over to Bellevue and have him committed. Or laugh. Maybe a good yuck would blow the paranoia away. But it couldn't come from inside him. He was void of yucks.

His phone rang, and when he picked it up it was Marlene. “Hi, I'm home. What a day! I'm totally finished.” Her voice sounded thin and distant, like a tape played on a cheap Walkman ripoff.

“You OK?”

“Not really. This Moore thing is getting me down.”

“Did you happen to look into the source of that defense check in Karavitch? At those lawyers, Shannon Shannon and so on?”

“Oh, Christ, I knew I forgot something. Damn. Look, I'll get on it tomorrow.”

“No, that's OK, I'll get one of the cops on it. It's their job.”

“OK, great, thanks. I'm sorry, but this case is just draining the crap out of me. For some reason I can't cope with it.”

“What's the problem? I thought it was open and shut. Depraved indifference homicide, Form Two. They claim somebody else sneaked in late at night, put the kid in the oven?”

“It's not a technical problem, Butch. It's not a legal problem, putting asses in jail. It's an emotional problem. It's
my
problem; I can't get it out of my head. The scene. The corpus of the crime, as we say. She's trying to get mellow with Cecil in the bedroom, but little Taneel is crying. Four, the kid is. She won't stop. She whips the kid with a belt. Still no good: damn kid won't stop. She can't stand the noise. She drags the kid to the kitchen and puts the girl in the oven, and she wedges the door closed with a chair. She turns on the flame. How come? How come she turned on the flame? I asked her that, ‘Doreen, how come?' Shrug. Dunno. Story of her life. Goes back to the bedroom, suck on some 20-20, do a little skag, Cecil puts it to her, she so fine. All the time the little girl is shrieking, roasting alive. She can't hear the screams too well, but the stench—”

“Marlene, stop. It's a case. Do your job. Put 'em away and move on.”

“Right. Stay cool. I'm getting this advice from Mr. Uninvolved here. One of the great obsessives of the Western world. Sorry, no can do. This one has got to me. Put 'em away? Sure. Doreen Moore is eighteen. That means she had the kid when she was fourteen. Fifteen in the slammer will do her a lot of good, learn her not to burn up her babies. Case closed. Oh, yeah, you want to hear the cherry on top? Doreen is preggers again. I love it. Dickens was right, you know. You spend every day swimming in shit, the smell rubs off. Not in those words, of course.”

“You can't do this to yourself, babe. The Doreens aren't your problem.”

“No, you're right. They're not. It wasn't my baby either. I don't have any babies.”

“Marlene, I'm coming over. We'll go out, get some dinner, we'll talk—”

“Butch, no. I'm wiped. You don't need me this way. Look, call me this weekend, we'll get together. But not tonight.”

Karp stared at the dead phone for a while, then dialed her number again. He hung up before it had a chance to ring. Then he packed his briefcase, grabbed his coat, locked his desk and his office door, and went out.

Karp walked the two miles from Centre Street to his building on Eighth Street almost every evening when the weather permitted. His route home took him up Broadway through SoHo. One of Karp's secrets was that he occasionally hung a right on Grand, walked up Crosby, past Marlene's loft, and stood in the deep doorway of the building across the street, watching her lit windows. Once or twice in the summer he had seen her sitting on her fire escape. He had hidden, feeling like a fool, unable to help himself.

He did this again that evening, leaning back in the shadows, watching, thinking about whether it was remotely possible that—no, not Marlene, it was too enormous to contemplate. He must be losing it, even to form such a thought.

Just as he was about to push off, he saw a blue Ford pull up outside her doorway. A stocky middle-aged man with a gray crew cut got out and rang her bell. A minute later, Marlene came out, got into the front seat with the man, and was driven away. For some reason he was not particularly surprised. Automatically he wrote the license plate number down in his pocket diary and slowly walked home. Once there, he took off his shoes and his tie and ate three aspirin. Then he lay down on his bed and looked at the ceiling. This is it, he thought. Rock bottom.

The next day, a Friday, Karp took
People
v.
Karavitch et al.
to the grand jury. Taking a case before the grand jury was not a difficult task. Quite the contrary. Prosecutors like grand juries, and grand juries return the favor. The ADA presents his evidence that a crime has been committed within the jurisdiction and that a certain person has committed it. The grand jurors, twenty-three sober citizens, almost always nod gravely and bring in the indictment. The certain person alleged to have committed the crime is neither present nor represented.

The actual proceedings were about as exciting as applying for a driver's license. The grand jury met not in a regular courtroom, but in a dim chamber with a curious resemblance to a law school lecture hall. The jurors yawned and shuffled in a row of seats facing a raised platform for the DA, the stenographer, and any witnesses that might be called.

The room was void of judge, defense lawyer, spectators, or press: a prosecutor's paradise.
Karavitch et al.
was but one of ten-odd indictments Karp had to deliver that morning. When the jurors were ready, Karp called his witnesses: Detective Jim Hammer, a bomb squad member who had been at Grand Central on the day Terry Doyle removed the pot from the locker; Captain Arthur Gunn, the pilot of the plane; and Sandra Mollo, a passenger, the woman Karavitch had slugged. After they had finished their various tales, Karp asked if any of the jurors had any questions. They did not.

Thanking them for their attention, Karp left the grand jury room and waited in the antechamber, a room with the ambiance of a bus station, filled with witnesses, ADAs, and cops. The grand jury took about as long to consider the indictment as the Supreme Soviet takes to consider a proposal by the Politburo. In a few minutes a loud buzzer sounded once in the antechamber: the jurors had indicted. Two buzzes meant rejection, three that they wanted to see the ADA again.

The five hijackers were thus duly accused of “the crime of murder, committed as follows: that the defendants in the County of New York, on or about September 10, 1976, under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, recklessly caused the bomb blast death of the deceased, Terrence James Doyle, who at the time was performing his lawful duties as a police officer, by leaving an explosive device, to wit: a bomb, inside locker number 139 in Grand Central Station.” Next case.

Which was, by coincidence, that of Billy Brannon, boy burglar, a coincidence that unfroze Karp's brain and started him thinking aggressively again, his natural mode, with the result that at the end of the morning's work he emerged from the grand jury room a new man.

The new man went back to his office and rummaged in a side drawer Uttered with the pink telephone-message slips pertaining to every call he had returned over the past year. A primitive system, but it worked. He found the one he wanted and made an appointment for the following morning with Monsignor Francis Keene.