Falsely Accused (2 page)

Naomi Selig had enormous black eyes, and as she said this they flashed sparks, and her bony jaw became set in a grim line. She was a small, tightly knit woman with a perpetual tan and a thick cap of dense black hair that flipped as she nodded her head twice, with vigor. Half the charity committees in New York, not to mention the staff of the P.R. agency she operated, knew that look and those nods. It meant that an object stood between Naomi Selig and something she wanted, which object could expect shortly to be reduced to glowing radioactive ash.

Selig had not missed the significant “we” in his wife's last statement. He didn't mind in the least; in fact, he was relieved. His marriage was based on a reasonable division of labor: he cut up dead bodies, and Naomi took care of nearly everything else, especially politics, at which Selig had to admit he was less than talented.

“So what do we do?” he asked, and then, in the pregnant silence, uttered the distasteful monosyllable: “Sue?”

“Goddamn right we sue. Not only are we going to get your job back, but we're going to make those slime-meisters stand up in public and admit they lied about your performance.”

Selig sat heavily on the couch and finished off his drink in a gulp. His stomach was feeling hollow, and there was a vile taste in his throat. “God, lawsuits! One of the things I thought I wouldn't have to screw with when I became a pathologist. I guess this means your cousin Sidney?”

“Oh, Sidney!” said Naomi contemptuously. “It's Sidney if you break your leg in the hospital driveway. No, we need a much heavier hitter for this one. I want Bloom to writhe.”

She sat for a while thinking, and Selig watched her think, very happy that he was not on the business end of those thoughts, if the frighteningly stony, calculating expression on her face was any indication of their content.

“Karp. We'll get Karp to do it,” she said at last.

Selig's head snapped back in surprise. “Butch Karp? God, that's a shot from out of left field. Isn't he still in D.C.?”

“No, he's been back for ages. He works for Bohm Landsdorff Weller. Steve Orenstein got him the job when he came back to town.”

Selig looked at his wife in amazement. “My God, Naomi! How do you know this stuff?”

“Because I'm on Cerebral Palsy with Jack Weller, and once in a while I let him pat my fanny accidentally-on-purpose and he tells me stuff. Karp's been there since, oh, around March of last year. Apparently he's a hell of a tort lawyer, although Jack says he'll never be a truly great one.”

“Why not?”

“Because he doesn't lust after money enough. He has a killer instinct, though, especially when he thinks some little schmuck is getting a royal screwing.”

“That's why we want him, because I'm a little schmuck getting screwed over?” Selig snapped, coloring brightly.

His wife's jaw dropped briefly, and then she laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “Of course not, you kugelhead! No, we want Karp because he's got a reason to get Sandy Bloom. It'll be a blood match.”

Selig knotted his brow; this was getting hard to follow, and it seemed to him that his wife had entirely too much information at hand, as if she had been preparing dossiers to be consulted in the event of a whole range of potential catastrophes. “Karp has a thing against Bloom?”

“Of course he does! The whole town knows it. It's a famous feud. There was an article in the
Times
magazine a couple of years ago. It was supposed to feature Sandy, but she wrote almost entirely about Karp. Sandy went ballistic. That reporter did it—big gal with a funny name …”

“What's it about? The feud, I mean.”

“Who knows?” she replied with a shrug. “With Sandy, you hardly need a reason. In any case, you'll call Karp.”

It was not a question. Selig nodded. She really was better at this stuff than he was. He rose and picked up the remote control from where it had landed and examined it closely. Besides cutting up bodies, he was in charge of fixing things around the house; this seemed to him a sufficient load. The gizmo appeared undamaged. He pressed the power button and the television flashed on. For some unexplainable reason, this tiny success made him feel better than he had all day. Still, something nagged him.

“Okay, say Karp'll do it—he's a homicide prosecutor. What if he doesn't know anything about defamation or employment law? That stuff.”

“So he'll learn,” said Naomi Selig blithely. “How hard could it be? He's a sharp cookie, according to that article. God, what was that woman's name? Maybe we should contact her. As I recall it, she didn't like Bloom much either.”

“Contact her?”

“Dirt, darling, dirt. On Sandy. They flung enough at you, we'll fling some back. Oriana? Ariel? Something like that. I'll get the girl to look it up tomorrow.”

The offices of Bohm Landsdorff Weller were located in a red-brown sixty-year-old building at 113 William Street. The firm occupied two floors, eighteen and nineteen. The building was undistinguished, as was the firm itself. A very small nuclear blast set off at the junction of Wall and William would destroy several thousand such firms, each with their one or two floors of offices, their ten or so partners, their tax or merger or tort departments, their fake English paneling, their Aubusson or oriental carpets, their well-framed
Spy
caricatures or Daumier prints or sporting paintings, their starched secretaries and exhausted paralegals, their remarkable annual incomes. Such firms almost never have their names displayed in the pages of the
Times
or the
Wall Street Journal;
nor do they appear as the main contestants in the famous cases of the day, where giant corporations meet in titanic battle. Yet so incalculably immense is the river of money that flows through lower Manhattan that even the most delicate, pigeon-like sips from it, of the sort taken by such modest enterprises as Bohm Landsdorff Weller, were sufficient to keep the twelve partners thereof in stupefying wealth.

These firms are like wildebeestes or buffalo in a herd, all the same yet all slightly different to the naturalist's trained eye. Some are preeminent in taxes, others in trusts or torts or contracts; some will destroy a union for you, others will be happy to create a corporation. (But if you're thinking of getting rid of your spouse, by murder or divorce, or selling the story of how you did it to the movies, you want a different kind of law firm. If you are a good client, firms such as Bohm Landsdorff will supply you with a reference to lawyers of that sort from the fat Rolodexes they all maintain.)

In this office, in a cherrywood-furnished room on the nineteenth floor, Karp worked, not happily, but well and lucratively. He was making more money than he ever had in his life, except during the six weeks he had spent as the twelfth man on an NBA basketball team, investigating a murder and getting paid to play the game.

Karp was unhappy because he had in his life found only two things that he could do a lot better than most people and that he genuinely enjoyed doing: playing basketball and prosecuting criminals, and fate had dealt him a hand that prevented him from doing either. It was basketball, however, that had, in an indirect way, landed him his present job. He had been shooting baskets one Saturday at the Fourth Street courts in the Village, and a slight man with a friz of ginger hair around his bald pate had approached him on the asphalt with a “you won't remember me” and a look of something close to worship on his thin face. It was certainly true that Karp didn't remember him, but Steve Orenstein remembered Karp. Orenstein had spent one season warming the bench on the suburban high school team of which the young Karp had been the chief ornament. That morning they played an easy game of horse while chatting and discovered that Orenstein was working at Bohm Landsdorff Weller, or B.L., as he called it, and that Karp was at liberty. Orenstein asked whether Karp had ever thought of going into civil litigation, to which Karp had frankly replied that it had never once crossed his mind, and Orenstein had mentioned that if it ever did happen to cross, his firm was badly in need of someone who knew what to do in a courtroom. Two weeks after that, Karp, bored with unemployment and stony broke, had come by for an interview and been snapped up.

At B.L., Karp found that he was as much a specialist as the little men that NFL teams hire to kick field goals. Most lawyers of the type that populate downtown law firms never come anywhere near a trial. There are quite distinguished and successful lawyers in that milieu who have never once argued a case before a jury during a long career. Among such lawyers, therefore, trials signify a breakdown of the gentlemanly process of negotiation whose aim is settlement out of court, during which agreeably long process both sets of clients can be gently fleeced and neither law firm embarrassed by the possibility of a public defeat. But this glowing surface of collegiality is, of course, underpinned by the grim cast-iron structure of the trial system, and so it is necessary for the firm to have at its disposal at least one litigator who is not strictly speaking a gentleperson at all, and who, it may be given out along Wall and William and Pine streets, is kept chained in a tower room and fed raw meat against the day on which he will be unleashed against the firm's rivals in an actual courtroom, to raven and destroy. At B.L., this was Karp.

Karp had tried but one case in the sixteen months he had been at B.L. This was an affair in which an investment house had run an initial public offering of stock in a technology firm known to have a set of potentially lucrative patents. It turned out that the firm did not quite have all the said patents and that the ones they did have were not quite as succulent as advertised. The investors cried foul when later the stock prices went into the toilet; the investment house claimed breaks of the market. B.L.'s negotiators offered an out-of-court settlement—restitution plus interest. When the investment house declined this civilized deal, B.L.'s people sighed and rolled out Karp. Six months later, he had won not only restitution plus interest but a punitive award, of 4.3 million dollars. It turned out that the investment house had known all about the defective patents before offering the stock. A criminal fraud case was pending, and the head of the investment house, whom Karp had treated, during a hideous day and a half on the witness stand, to the sort of cross-examination usually reserved for members of the unmanicured classes, was resting in a convalescent home.

Since then it had not been necessary to use Karp again. He kept busy, however, keeping track of a variety of cases where the threat to go to trial was a useful ploy, much as the men who, in those waning days of the 1970s, sat in North Dakota missile silos and practiced the annihilation of Kiev.

The major on-deck case at the moment was
Lindsay et al.
v.
Goldsboro Pharmaceutical Supply Company,
a cat's cradle involving tainted insulin, three multinational drug companies, the largest insurer in the nation, eight thousand or so aggrieved diabetics, their families, heirs, and assigns, and approximately 1.6 billion dollars in claims and counterclaims. Karp had mastered the case with a speed that amazed his colleagues and had expressed confidence that, should the elaborate negotiations then ongoing break down, he was prepared to try the case and win. Nobody at B.L. wanted that to happen, least of all Karp. Such a trial could take three to five years, and he preferred the challenge of the new. When he had been in charge of the Homicide Bureau, he might, during an average killing year, have been involved in several hundred trials and might have actually prosecuted as many as twenty.

Being a sort of utility for B.L., Karp was considered part of the overhead and was not expected to drum up business. Nor did he. Thus he was startled when Murray Selig called him on the phone to say he needed a lawyer. After recovering from his amazement, Karp was actually pleased, and told Selig to come by and chat.

Selig came in the next morning. Karp rose from behind his desk and greeted him warmly and invited him to sit. Selig was glad to do so. Like many men of less than moderate size, he was made uneasy on a visceral level by males the size of Karp. Karp was a little taller than six foot five, with big shoulders and long arms and legs and first baseman's mitt-sized hands. The two men made small talk for a few minutes—sports, their families, mutual friends. They had any number of these, since Selig had worked closely with Karp on dozens of cases when Karp had been with the D.A. and Selig was an assistant C.M.E. During this time Selig took the opportunity to focus his keen observer's skills on the figure of his interlocutor.

Karp had cut his crisp brown hair shorter since D.C., and Selig noted with rue that it did not seem to be climbing back along his forehead with the velocity to be expected in a man past thirty-five. Underneath the forehead was a nose that had started out as something of a beak, but Selig's practiced eye estimated that it had been broken at least twice. It now resembled several small potatoes in a sock. The face had in general an odd, nearly oriental cast—high cheekbones and eyes set aslant in their deep sockets. The skin was rough and yellowish. If Karp had been dead on a slab, Selig might almost have called him a central Asian.

Selig began now to recite the reason for his visit. Karp's eyes fixed on him as he spoke, which the doctor found unsettling. Officially hazel, Karp's eyes had yellow flecks in them that seemed to glitter, like those of a feral animal. Selig thought that it would not be much fun trying to slip a lie past those eyes.

Selig came to the crux of his story, the two letters of complaint on which his dismissal had been based, and Karp stopped him.

“You have copies of those letters, Murray?” Selig did and handed them across the desk. Karp read through them quickly. “Any of this crap true?” he asked. “For example, did you actually say that this purported rape victim might have inserted snails in her vagina?”

“Oh, for Pete's sake, of course I didn't say that,” Selig cried. “The thing happened in
People
v.
Lotz.
That was when you were in D.C. Lotz was a junkie burglar who broke into an apartment in Peter Cooper. He thought it was empty, but the tenant was at home. A woman named May Ettering. Lotz panicked and strangled her. They caught him about ten hours later buying stuff on her credit cards. Not exactly a rocket scientist, Lotz. So they had a good circumstantial case, but this kid D.A., Warneke, wanted to make it even better by making it out that Lotz was a rapist besides being a strangler and a burglar.”