No Lesser Plea (12 page)

“Yeah, sure. I thought I was through with that garbage when I transferred to homicide. Anyway, I vouchered the purse, the chick says she’ll testify. The perp has a long sheet already; he’ll probably cop to petty with no trouble. Have you got that?”

Karp had been jotting notes on a yellow legal pad. He looked up and said, “Sure, Sonny, take off.” Dunbar flashed a smile.

“Thanks, Butch. I owe you one.”

Dunbar ran out and Karp dictated the language of the formal complaint to the typist. As he did so, he walked out of the booth to check on his handiwork. The Disneyland Principle had worked again. People were always happier on short lines, even if the waiting time was nearly the same as it would have been on longer ones. Much of the chaos and irritation had drained from the atmosphere in the Complaint Room; it now resembled a first-class bus station. Within an hour, there were scarcely a dozen people left on line.

Karp moved among the booths, listening to cops and victims, organizing the histories of human suffering and viciousness into the colorless language of the law. As always, he was torn between the natural impulse to sympathize and the requirement to keep the gears rolling. The gears had to win, of course, and not for the first time he reflected on the damage that continuous exposure to these experiences worked on the spirits of the people who made up the criminal justice system. This old lady now, telling him about being beaten bloody and robbed in the elevator of her building. It was the worst thing that ever happened to her. There was no way he could ever make her whole again. Certainly, putting the miserable kid junkie who had done it behind bars for—what, six months?—would hardly put her world back into balance. But he had heard it a hundred times. The cop had seen it fifty times. He looked at the face of the cop who had made the arrest. Young, curly-haired, wispy mustache, with a cynical old-man’s eyes. Armor, like Karp’s armor. He shook himself. He was letting the old lady ramble.

“Just a minute, Missus McGregor, let’s go over what the man actually said to you. Can you recall his words?”

As Karp dictated the tale of the mugging he heard a commotion at the front of the Complaint Room, loud female voices, and above them Ray Guma’s unmistakable barrelhouse laugh. Karp finished his dictation, left the booth, and went into the waiting area. Guma was standing in the center of a group of attractive young women waving his cigar and snapping off Groucho Marx one-liners. The women and the cops who were with them were cracking up. “Alright, ladies, I’d like you to remove your outer garments and go into the various booths we got here according to speciality. Booth One, fellatio. Booth Two, lesbian orgies. Booth Three, rim jobs. Booth Four, eyyahh-hah-hah,
UNSPEAKABLE PRACTICES!
Booth Five …” He caught sight of Karp. “Hey, Butch, the party’s on! What’d I tell you, hey?”

“Goom, what the fuck is going on here?”

“It’s the girls from the Two-Three Precinct. The kidnap victims I told you about at dinner. They’re here to make their complaint. I’m directing traffic.” He rolled his eyes, waggled his cigar in his mouth, and grabbed handfuls of buttock from the two women on either side of him. They squealed girlishly, like chorus girls in a Marx Brothers’ movie, being trained to pick up quickly on sexual fantasies.

“Goddam, Guma, this isn’t a whorehouse.”

Guma put a puzzled expression on his face. “It’s not? Gosh, I’m sorry, I thought this was One hundred Centre Street.”

“Hey, what’s going on?” said a new voice. “Guma! My man! You finally brought your sisters around to meet me.” Roland Hrcany was the other ADA working the Complaint Room. He looked less like a New York lawyer than a refugee from Muscle Beach; he was in fact a serious weight lifter, with a weight lifter’s big shoulders, broad chest, and wasp waist. He had white-blond hair, no stranger to Clairol, swept back to fall below his collar, baby-blue eyes, and a ferocious cavalry mustache under a large nose.

Guma clapped Hrcany on his massive shoulder. “Girls, this is it! Allow me to introduce Hunk Hrcany, the Hungarian Hustler and Heartbreaker. He will be servicing your every need in Booth Six tonight, for those who desire the crude and violent approach. And …” with a leer, “he has agreed to waive his usual fee. How about that?” Giggles. A few claps.

Karp broke in, “Guma, as long as you’re here, you might as well work. Take your little friends to Booth Eight and get their statements, OK? I’d like to get out of here before dawn.”

“Oh, no, Butch, do I hafta? OK, ladies, follow me.”

Guma led the call girls away. Hrcany looked after them with a laugh. “Fuckin’ guy!
I’m
a sex maniac. He’s off the charts. Hey, Butch, I heard about homicide. Good for you, baby.”

“Yeah, thanks, if I live through tonight.”

As they turned back to work, the bomb exploded.

Out of the large number of people opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam War a small proportion had become convinced that the only way to stop it was to bring down the entire structure of the state—literally—with explosives. A good place to start was the criminal justice system, and so that day a former cheerleader from Larchmont had dropped off a package containing a dynamite bomb in the fifth floor women’s toilet at 100 Centre Street. The bomb was not powerful enough to bring down the American state, but it sufficed to bring down the ceiling of the Complaint Room, a good beginning.

Karp was still on his feet, but bent over with his arms over his head. Plaster chunks and bits of masonry rained down on the room and the air was opaque with steam and gray dust. The lights had gone, except for the battery-operated emergency lanterns over the exit. Screams of dismay were coming from the direction of Booth Eight. A figure stumbled toward Karp through the murk. Blinking the dust out of his eyes, Karp saw that it was Debra Tiel.

“Butch! You OK? What the hell happened?”

“Damned if I know, but I think it was a bomb. Look, Debra, stand over by the exit and start yelling for people to come to you. I’ll check the booths and make sure nobody’s hurt. Good thing this didn’t happen two hours ago.” She moved off and began to call people to the exit. Karp picked his way through the wreckage, passing stumbling people made anonymous by the pall of dust that covered their faces and clothes. He bumped into Guma leaning against a wall, trying to get the dust out of his eyes.

“Goom, you OK?”

“Butch, what the fuck! I can’t see for shit.” Karp gave him his still-damp handkerchief, and Guma cleaned his eyes.

“Goddam, justice is blind, but this is too much!” He called out to his prostitutes, “Let’s move it, girls. Next stop my place and a nice shower.” They followed him in a bunch, looking now like so many pillars of salt.

There seemed to be no panic and few serious injuries. Karp saw two cops carrying the mugged Missus McGregor, who was out cold and bleeding from another head wound. Not her day, thought Karp. In the last booth, he found a typist, still sitting at her table, staring at a chunk of masonry and tile that had crushed her machine and missed her head by inches.

“Miss Park, time to go. Miss Park … ?”

She was frozen, like a rabbit mesmerized by a snake. There was a rumbling sound and more bits of plaster fell down. Karp could hear sirens in the distance. He kicked the typing table away, swept the typist up in his arms, and walked out of the Complaint Room, down the corridor and down the stairs.

The stairway was full of smoke and the smell of drains. Two men, from the Bomb Squad judging by their flak jackets, raced past him. Then came three masked firemen carrying hoses. Karp yelled, “Fifth floor, I think,” to their backs and then continued down the four flights to the street.

The square was full of fire engines, police cars, and ambulances, and lit with flashing red and blue lights. He deposited his burden with one of the ambulance crews and then began to walk home. A perfect end to a perfect day, he thought. He’d lost his suit jacket and the evening was getting chilly. He began to jog up Broadway. At Canal Street, he stopped at Dave’s, an all-night sidewalk-service joint for a knish and an egg cream. The counterman gave him an odd look. “What happened to you, man?”

“I was bombed,” said Karp. He felt giddy with the release of tension. He related the story of the bombing to the counterman, who was unimpressed.

“That’s New York,” he said.

Later, back in his apartment, after a long hot bath, he called his wife at her parents’ home in Los Angeles. He told her about his transfer to the Homicide Bureau.

“That’s very nice, Butch.”

“It’s more than that, Susan. I don’t think anybody has ever made homicide with as little time in the office as I’ve had.”

“OK, it’s great, cosmic. What do you want me to say, Butch? I guess this means you have no immediate plans to change what you’re doing?”

“Come on, Susan, don’t start all that again.” He thought of telling her about the bomb. He knew she was frightened of New York, and ordinarily he would not miss a chance to play on her natural sympathy for him. But he let it pass, and said instead, “How are you getting along?”

“OK. Still a little confused, I guess. My mother’s driving me batty, trying to find a villain in my marriage. I keep telling her we both needed some space. She says, ‘What space? You’re married, you’re married, you live with your husband. You’re not married, you’re not married, you get a divorce.’ ”

Karp laughed at his wife’s imitation of her mother’s characteristic tone. “Well, I just wanted to tell you that I miss you and I wish you were back here.”

“For what, Butch? Tell me for what? You’re never home. You never talk to me. I have no friends …”

“We had friends.”

“
You
had friends. Cops and ADAs, sitting around drinking beer and talking hard-boiled about all the nasty things that happened to you that week. And
you’re
hard-boiled—that’s the worst part. You’re getting, I don’t know … brutal. We stopped talking, you know that? We had about four conversations the whole time I was with you in New York. Three about furniture and one about lamb versus roast chicken. I’m not going to live my life that way.”

“How are you going to live your life, Susan?”

“I don’t know. I went up to Stanford the other day and saw Phil at the Poli Sci Department. He says he can get me a research assistantship starting next month. Maybe I can get back to work on my thesis.”

She talked on for a while about her plans, and mutual friends, but Karp wasn’t really listening. There was a pause on the line. She had asked him a question and he had no idea what it was.

“Butch, are you still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.” Another pause.

“No, you’re not. Good night, Butch.”

He stared at the receiver for a moment after she had hung up. He almost called her again, but couldn’t think of what he could say that would extract them from the knot they were in. He replaced the telephone and slipped under the covers of the bed.

He had built a wall around himself. It was part of his working equipment, like his legal pads. He couldn’t survive without it, and he couldn’t leave the job that required him to build it. Susan didn’t understand that part. He was not sure he did either. In his mind, he started to rehearse the conversation that would finally, convincingly explain to her why things had to be the way they were and why, despite that, she ought to come back to him. But he fell asleep.

Chapter 7

M
onday was the first of April and Karp kept expecting somebody to yell “April Fool” in his ear and tell him that the homicide appointment had been a big joke. On his arrival at Centre Street he discovered that he was still scheduled to take a full load of cases in Criminal Court. The dead hand of the Mad Onion was evident in this, Karp thought.

His weekend, in contrast, had been not that bad, not the usual restless, boring intermissions they usually were. He’d awakened that Saturday missing Susan intensely, remembering their conversation with shame. His head was of course full of heartfelt, logical, and compelling arguments which would have been marvelously appropos last night, but which now cluttered up his head like a stack of dusty magazines that don’t get thrown out because you might want to read one of the articles again, someday.

He lay in bed as long as he could stand it, then had a scalding long bath and got ready for playing softball with the DA office team, the season’s first game. He spent two minutes dressing in old blue sweats and high-top sneakers, after spending twenty minutes wrapping his knee in layers of wide tape and Ace bandage.

It felt fairly robust as he began walking up Sixth Avenue to Central Park, with his big glove tucked under his arm and his old-fashioned all-wool Yankee cap on his head. Playing first base he didn’t have to run much, but he ran—so it seemed to him—like a camel on eggs. And he still couldn’t risk any dramatic slides on the base paths. But maybe it was getting better.

For breakfast he stopped at the sidewalk window of a Greek joint on 14th Street for a sausage sandwich with peppers and onions and a Diet Pepsi, which he consumed while walking north. The day had clouded over and turned chilly. Spring, scheduled to appear the previous week, had reneged. At 43rd Street he bought a couple of egg rolls and an orange soda from an Oriental lady with a push wagon. He ate one and drank the soda while walking, and kept the other one in the front pouch of his sweatshirt, as a temporary hand warmer and for later snacking.

It was not a bad game. The DA’s team was called the Bullets, after the slang for a year in the pen, and because the DA liked to hire athletes, it was a good one. Today they were playing a tough team from the New York City Department of Sanitation, officially named the White Knights, but known to the city leagues as the New York Stinkees.

Pitching for the Bullets was Big Joe Lerner, the Homicide Bureau’s star trial lawyer. Lerner was taller even than Karp, and about as ferocious a competitor as one can be in slow-pitch softball. Guma at short, naturally; Karp at first; Hrcany caught and played the outfield. As they flipped the ball around the diamond before the game, Karp felt centered again. Sometimes it seemed to him that his real life was just this: leaping around on a patch of ground with ruled lines, flinging a ball around with a bunch of other guys. Everything else—marriage, family, work—was to a greater or lesser degree merely a pain in the ass.