Justice Denied (37 page)

Lucy during this period had managed to cover herself and every object within range of her flinging power with a thin slime of sticky banana. Marlene laughed, hugged the child to her, stripped both Lucy and herself, and plunged the two of them into the bathtub.

In the afternoon, Karp presented his last official witness, Tony Chelham, the jail officer for whom Russell had identified his blue shirt. This was critical because all the witnesses who had seen Hosie Russell fleeing the murder scene and entering 58 Barrow Street had seen a man in such a shirt: the Digbys from Lexington, the actor Jerry Shelton, and James Turnbull, the leather shop owner. Karp brought those forward during the remainder of the afternoon. They all did well, both on direct and on cross. Freeland's only option, since they had all obviously seen someone, was to suggest that whomever they had seen, it was not the defendant.

He implied that, to the Digbys, all black people looked alike. He implied that Shelton, a homosexual actor living in Greenwich Village, was probably besotted with drugs as a matter of course—he actually asked whether Shelton had been smoking marijuana on the afternoon in question. He implied that Turnbull, who had spontaneously identified Russell in the police station and had attacked him as the murderer, had been put up to it by the police, which implication Turnbull, a man of immense dignity and presence, passionately rejected.

It was not a particularly good cross, thought Karp. Freeland appeared to be drifting; a lot of his questions didn't lead anywhere in particular, as if he was just going through the motions. It didn't help him that the witnesses were all solid citizens. Attacking such witnesses tended to piss off the jury, composed of the similarly solid.

After Turnbull stepped down, Karp said, “Your Honor, that is the People's case.”

Martino excused the jury, Freeland made the expected motion to dismiss, which was rejected, and Karp was through for the day, at least with trials. He went back to his office and caught up on paperwork until seven, ordered take-out Chinese, ate it, and clumped off to the jail to take a shower.

He tried not to think about the trial. There is a certain letdown after the presentation of a major case, and it was entirely possible to drive oneself into a frenzy of doubt about the various errors that could have been made, and which might even now be bubbling in the minds of the jurors, cooking away at an acquittal.

The case had weaknesses, of course: no witness had turned up from the crowd who had actually followed Russell from the murder scene to 58 Barrow, although the police had seen dozens of people doing so. The guy on the bike—who had told Thornby that a man was hiding in that building—was a particularly unfortunate no-show, and the cops, urged on by Karp, had tried strenuously to locate him.

And, of course, Freeland still had his turn at bat. Karp had no idea what the defense was going to present; Freeland had flatly refused to tell Karp who his witnesses, if any, were going to be. There was no point in speculating.

Karp turned off the water and reached for his towel. He found himself, surprisingly, wanting the trial to be over. The whole thing irritated him: the stupidity of the crime, the arrogance and fatuousness of Freeland, the enforced isolation, the goddamned cast; he even regretted getting to know Russell in these after-hours meetings.

Here he was, mopping, as Karp emerged. Karp nodded curtly and began to get dressed.

“You got any smokes?”

“Sorry, I forgot,” said Karp. He sensed Russell staring at him, but he did not acknowledge it, or make any effort to start a conversation.

“Hey, man,” said Russell after some moments, “I heard some things.”

“Uh-huh, like what?”

“You know, stuff. Around the jail. Like you might wanna know about.” Russell had his pathetic sly expression on.

“Uh-huh. So, you going to tell me?”

“I could. Depends on what I get.”

Karp pulled his sweats on. Water had dripped down inside his cast and was itching. He said, “I got nothing to give you, Hosie.”

“You sure about that? This, what I got, it's a big case.”

Karp got his crutches under his arms and stood. He looked Russell in the eye. “Well, here's the thing, Hosie. First of all, like I said a while back, there's no way I'm going to discuss your case in any way whatever without your attorney present. If you have something you want to deal for, he's the guy to see.

“Second, right now I'd say that if you gave me the guy who did JFK, you'd still be looking at twenty-five to life. The time to deal is past. You decided to go for the trial, and you got the trial. They find you not guilty, you walk; you're guilty, it's the max. That's how it works.

“And there's no point you looking at me like that. It's nothing personal. You can't be on the street. You're a career criminal, you've already spent most of your life in the slam, and now you're going to spend the rest of it inside. That's your part in the play. It's my part to put you away, and it's Freeland's part to try to stop me. It's a puppet show. Or like a mechanical bank—you put the penny in the slot and the little clown spins around.”

“It's like that, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Karp after a sigh. “Sometimes I think it is.”

“Whatever you do to me ain't gonna bring her back.”

“There's that. You know, when I was in law school, I heard a guy lecture on the philosophy behind punishment. What he called ‘the supposed justification.' He did a pretty good job of proving that there wasn't any—rehabilitation is a joke, deterrence is unethical, revenge is immoral.”

“Didn't convince you much.”

Karp smiled. “No, it didn't. Or to tell the truth, I saw the logic of what he was saying, but it didn't feel right to me. You hurt someone, you got to suffer. There has to be justice or the world doesn't make sense. I'm talking gut level, not all the legal horseshit.

“So let me give you some advice. You heard something in the cells. Maybe somebody admitted doing something that somebody else is going down for. Or somebody has some information about a crime that the cops don't know about. You figure you can use it to get a better deal, because you're a hustler. You're looking out for number one. That's what you've always done, your whole life. Well, look around. Here you are. Here you're gonna stay. That's what hustling got for you.

“What I'm saying is, think about it; maybe you should start doing the opposite. Do something for somebody else, a stranger maybe. You can't fuck up your life any worse than it's already been, and who knows? It could change your luck.”

He stumped out leaving Hosie Russell looking at him blankly, as if he had been speaking Armenian.

Marlene, baby on hip, pounded on the iron door of Stuart Franciosa's loft, which, after a considerable wait, was opened by the proprietor, looking harassed. He wore a heavy reflective apron over his usual black sweatshirt and black canvas pants, and he had a pair of dark goggles pushed up on his forehead.

“Sorry, I'm in the midst,” he said. “What's up?”

“I'm going shopping,” said Marlene. “You want me to pick anything up?”

“How considerate! How about the severed head of the odious Lepkowitz?”

“Oh, God, don't remind me. The deadline's getting close, isn't it?”

“Less than a month. How're you doing on it?”

“Doomed. I'm starting to get my head adjusted to the possibility that the fucker could actually kick me out.”

“Oh, you'll think of something. But, really, shopping? Thanks, but we want for nothing. We eat like birds, as you know. Say, I heard about what happened Saturday. You really have to stop being attacked by criminals, Marlene. It's bringing the neighborhood down.”

“I'll think about it. What're you doing in there, by the way?”

“Casting. Want to see? It's quite
dramatique.
”

The big workroom was hot and smelled of burning.

“It's just a little bronze, a test really,” said Stuart. “I just got this neat little electric furnace. It was starting to be a pain in the ass to go up to the foundry for every little thing. Don't look directly in the door.”

Stuart used a set of tongs to open the door of the squat cylinder. Harsh yellow light and a blast of heat shot out. He reached in with the tongs and drew out a glowing crucible and poured a stream of liquid bronze into a small mold, throwing a shower of sparks and a cloud of smoke.

Marlene and Lucy watched with interest. Lucy was fascinated by the fireworks. Marlene was looking more at the metalized label stuck to the side of the device. “Where'd you get that thing, Stu?”

“Pearl Paint, the artist's venal friend. Why?”

“Nothing. I've just been a jerk. See you.”

Later, her shopping done, the baby fed and napping, Marlene worked the phone, trying to locate Harry Bello. She finally had to leave her number with the police dispatcher, saying it was an emergency.

Harry called back within ten minutes, concern thick in his voice.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong, Harry.”

“They said it was an emergency. I thought, the kid—”

“The paint, Harry. It wasn't paint.”

“This you give me a heart attack for? The paint isn't paint?”

“Where was it, the store you saw the Turks at?”

“On Canal, that Pearl's Paint.”

“Harry, Pearl Paint is the biggest art-supply store in lower Manhattan. You saw them carrying a heavy box out, say about the size of a big TV?”

“Yeah. So?”

“My next paycheck says that wasn't a set of watercolors. It was an electric jeweler's furnace.”

“They're gonna melt that thing, the mask,” said Harry, no flies on him.

“Not if I can help it,” said Marlene.

The defense's first witness in
People
v.
Russell
was, to Karp's surprise, a familiar face. Paul Ashakian took the stand and was sworn in. He looked young and blank-faced up there.

Freeland took him through the usual background material, schools, profession, the fact that he was not a bodybuilder or involved in any athletics at present, and then on to the meat. Freeland had set up an experiment. He had taken Ashakian up to the stairway in 58 Barrow, and there Ashakian had propped up the skylight, jumped up, grabbed the lip of the skylight base, and chinned himself up to the roof. He testified that once up on the roof, he had observed numerous ways to leave the building.

Freeland asked, “Now, Mr. Ashakian, is there any doubt in your mind that a person of approximately your height and build could enter the skylight as you did and escape from the roof in any of the ways you have described?”

Karp objected. “Speculative.”

“Sustained.”

Freeland asked, “Well, then, did you yourself have any difficulty whatever pulling yourself up through the skylight to the roof?”

Ashakian said it had been easy.

Karp rose for cross. He had been about to ask that the entire testimony be stricken as speculative and irrelevant, but a memory flashed into his mind and he approached the witness.

“Mr. Ashakian, you testified that you attended St. Joseph's High School. While there, did you participate in any sports?”

“Yes, I was on the gym team.”

“You started for the St. Joseph's gymnastic team?”

“Yes.”

“And during that time, were you ever required to perform on the high bar?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Did that entail leaping up for a bar set nine feet above the ground, pulling yourself up so that your legs were on the bar, and rotating your whole body rapidly around the bar?”

“Yes, it did,” said Ashakian. To his credit, he seemed embarrassed.

“No further questions,” said Karp.

Freeland's second witness was a thin, elderly man named Walter Tyler. Tyler testified that he had been walking down Hudson Street and that he had seen Susan Weiner stagger, bleeding, out of her doorway and a man running away from that scene. The man had glanced over his shoulder as he ran, and Tyler had seen his “full face.” The running man had not been Hosie Russell.

Tyler testified further that he had gone with the crowd to 58 Barrow, had shouted out that Russell was not the right man, and had been ignored. Later he had gone up to a cop and had given his story, which the cop had written down. When he saw that the police were continuing to charge Russell, he had gone to Freeland. Karp looked over at the jury. They were listening with interest. Wrinkles of doubt appeared on their faces. They had all watched enough Perry Mason to believe that the defense could pull in a secret witness at the last moment to overturn the prosecution's carefully constructed case. Disaster loomed.

Marlene, dressed in her best black, perfumed heavily, attempting to radiate class, sat in an uncomfortable Louis XV chair in Stephan Sokoloff's cozy office and looked at Aziz Nassif, who was sitting in a similar chair. Sokoloff sat behind his desk smiling genially upon the supposed transaction taking place. On the desk, on a tray covered in black velvet, were four coins.

“Thirty thousand for the four,” said Marlene. “It's my best offer.”

Nassif licked his lips, hesitated, then nodded. Sokoloff's smile broadened. He said, “I've taken the liberty of preparing a bill of sale. I'll just write in the price, here, and Mr. Nassif, if you'd just sign it …”

Nassif read the document and scratched his name on the appropriate line. Marlene took it, folded it, and put it in her bag. The door to the office opened. Ramon Rodriguez and Harry Bello walked in and arrested Nassif for art fraud.

Rodriguez took the protesting Turk away. Marlene pulled a paper out of her bag and gave it to Bello.

“Okay, Harry, this is a search warrant for Nassif's restaurant and his apartment. It's for the art fraud charge. You're looking for phony art objects or other evidence of fraud. Just like it says on the warrant. Of course, if you should happen to find any evidence of other crimes not named in plain sight, then you can seize that too.”