No Lesser Plea (17 page)

But Karp was not the happiest person concerned with this particular case. The happiest person was a prostitute named Violet Buttons. She had checked into Room 10 of the Olympia Hotel with a trick about ten minutes after Preston Elvis had left. As she entered the room her quick eyes spotted the blue plastic bank envelope on the shelf above the sink. In an instant it was buried in her oversized handbag. Twenty minutes later, in a booth in the ladies’ room of a cafeteria on Tenth Avenue, she inspected her prize. Cash! Jesus! And what was this? Smack? It couldn’t be! But it was. She looked at the bank envelope. Uh-oh, better get shut of this. She took a straight razor out of her bag, reduced the envelope to confetti in seconds, and flushed the pieces away.

She got out her works and shot the stuff into a vein on the top of her foot. Goddamn, she thought, this is fine shit. And free, too. I have died and gone to heaven, she thought. And she was half right.

Chapter 9

T
wenty of the best prosecuting attorneys in the Western world sat in Jack Conlin’s office for the Homicide Bureau’s weekly meeting. It was the next Monday. Karp had been working nonstop on the Marchione case in preparation for this weekly event.

The meetings usually took place on Thursday, but somebody in the mayor’s office had scheduled a Bullets softball game with the Bronx DA’s office on the previous Thursday, in Yankee Stadium no less, which of course took precedence. The point of these meetings was to allow the assistant DAs to present their cases, and for the other assistant DAs, especially the half dozen or so senior ones, to tear them to shreds. This was done with acid wit and without pity.

Karp sat in the rearmost of two rows of straight chairs that had been set up behind the leather banker’s chairs around Conlin’s big table. The senior guys sat around the table, with Conlin himself, looking now like a large pink shark, at the head. The man presenting the case would stand or sit by the door at the foot end of the table. This was where Karp would be in a few minutes and present the liquor store murder case, after the bureau got through with chewing up poor Terry Courtney.

Karp was fibrillating with nervous energy. The room was overheated and he was sweating like a pig and hoping it wouldn’t show. Every few minutes, he casually wiped the heel of his hand across his face like a squeegee and wiped the collected sweat on his trousers. He thought, I can do this, the case is in my head, I did everything right, it’s OK to be nervous, this is just like before a game. Like a game, he thought, grimly, but I never played against Bill Russell.

Courtney was a good lawyer who had come to the bureau six weeks ago from Felony Trial; this was only his second homicide case. He’d won his first and had gotten cocky. Now he was meat.

Courtney felt as he imagined Angel Ramirez, the deceased in this particular case, must have felt, when the 4.3-inch blade wielded by his rival in love, Hector (Kid Benny) Benvenista sliced through his anterior abdominal musculature, inflicting a 2.1-inch perforating wound in the inferior vena cava, causing death by exsanguination and shock at approximately 11:30 P.M. on March 4, 1970 at 78 East 129th Street in New York County in the State of New York.

Angel was dead. Kid Benny had killed him. Courtney knew it. The crowd of witnesses who had observed the deed knew it. God knew it. But Courtney could not
prove
it, in the eyes of the law—and what was vastly more important—to the satisfaction of his colleagues in the Homicide Bureau.

Chuck Walsh and Sean Flaherty, who between them had nearly a half century in the bureau, were now taking turns exposing his incompetence.

“Wait a minute!” said Walsh. “How many witnesses did you say there were?”

“Ah … eight or ten.”

“Eight or ten? Eight or ten! Which was it? Eight? Or ten? You sure it wasn’t fourteen and a half?”

“No … ten. It was ten.”

“And of these ten, how many did you depose?”

“Um … three.”

“Three? Good work! What happened to the other seven? Did they die?”

“No, but ah … the three, the three that I got statements from, they ah, all agreed, and so I thought …”

Flaherty broke in. “You thought! You thought you could cut corners, save yourself a little time, right? But you didn’t think, did you, that maybe those other seven people saw something different. That maybe the defense is going to march in with evidence from those other seven people, who happen all to be solid citizens, while your three people turn out to be—surprise, surprise—asshole buddies of the deceased from birth and sworn enemies of the accused. How about that?”

Courtney opened his mouth to speak, or maybe to vomit, such was his expression, but neither words nor bile emerged. He had been caught being sloppy, the unforgivable sin in the Homicide Bureau. It was worse to be sloppy than to make a mistake. But Courtney, in his unthinking zeal, had also made a mistake.

It now turned out that he had botched the most important part of his work: the interview with the accused. Karp noticed, as Courtney stumbled through the close of his presentation, a pronounced tightening of jaws and tapping of fingers around the big table. Flaherty puffed his pipe like a locomotive getting up steam for a mountain run, always a bad sign. At last he removed the pipe and slammed his hand down on the table.

“You said what? What did you ask him?”

“I, ah, asked him if the victim had a knife, too?”

“And what did he answer, dear boy?”

“He said yes.”

Flaherty slammed his hand down again. “Jesus! What the hell did you expect him to say, you ninny? Don’t you realize you put the idea in his head and that you’ve established the possibility that he killed Ramirez in self-defense?”

Flaherty threw up his hands in a gesture of disgust and Walsh took over. “Did you establish in the witness statements that the victim was unarmed? Did you at least do that?”

Courtney shook his head, his mouth gaping in shock.

“How about defensive wounds. Did you check with the M.E. report to see if there were any? Were there any wounds or evidence of a fight on the person of the accused?”

Courtney looked from stony face to stony face around the table. Of course, he hadn’t done any of these things. He flapped his hands and made inarticulate noises. Nothing like this had happened to him in law school. His brain was numb. He began to think about how nice it would be to have a quiet real estate practice in Rahway.

Walsh turned to Conlin. “Jack, this man is wasting our time. The case stinks.”

Conlin nodded. “It does that. Courtney, this preparation is a disgrace to the bureau. More than that, you may have prevented us from trying a dangerous criminal for first degree murder. I’ll see you in my office after this meeting. Sit down. Karp, let’s hear from you next.”

Courtney took his papers in shaking hands and went to a seat in the rearmost row. Karp replaced him at the foot of the table, and opened his notes. He looked out at the faces before him and met Joe Lerner’s dark gaze. It was blank and uncommunicative. Although Lerner was the closest thing to a mentor Karp had in the bureau, it was clear that he would not budge to help if Karp floundered.

Karp cleared his throat and began. As he progressed, he became more confident and he did not falter even when the questions began. Chris Conover, Conlin’s head crony and the Homicide Bureau’s administrative chief, asked, “The two victims, do we know who was killed first?”

“Yes, we do. It was the older man, the store owner.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Angelo Marchione was killed with a shotgun at close range in a store full of bottles. There were bits of glass from those bottles and traces of his blood on his son’s shoes. I have copies of the police lab reports here.”

“OK. Go on.”

“The son was shot three times with a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Airweight, once in the abdomen and twice in the forehead. Any one of the shots would have been fatal.”

“Did you check with the M.E.?”

“Yes. I read the transcript and listened to the tape from both autopsies. They check. No problem.”

Conover grunted and sat back, waving at Karp to continue.

“The M.E. says he was shot in the abdomen first, at point-blank range. The slug went right through the victim and lodged in the wall of the store. Trajectory evidence, as well as deep embedded glass in the victim’s knees shows that he was most likely astride the killer when he was shot.”

Karp then proceeded to elucidate the strands of evidence that linked Mandeville Louis to the crime. The police ballistics evidence that connected the gun found in Louis’s attaché case—after a duly warranted search—with the slugs that killed Randolph Marchione. His fingerprints on the very cartridge cases that had held the slugs dug out of the victim. The fragments of cloth in the victim’s fingernails, that matched the cloth in the suit jacket found—again after a duly warranted search—in Louis’s apartment. The fragments of glass, shown to be the same as the kind of glass shattered by the shotgun blast that shattered Angelo Marchione’s head, in the trouser cuffs of the same suit. The eyewitness testimony of Mrs. Kolka, who had picked Louis out of a lineup. The testimony of Donald Walker.

When Karp had finished, Walsh said, “Very fancy, Karp. The Walker evidence is the key to the case, as I’m sure you’re aware. But tell me, did you promise Walker any leniency in his own case? Does he know about felony murder?”

“He didn’t get any promises. The officer who interrogated him first didn’t even believe there were any accomplices. I established that in my interview. Let’s see, it’s right here.” Karp read from the transcript of his interview. “OK, I say, ‘Mister Walker, as regards your own prosecution for this crime, we will inform the court of your cooperation in the investigation, but I want you to understand before you offer any answers to my questions that I make no promise whatsoever about any case that the District Attorney’s Office may make against you. Is that clear.’ Then he says, ‘yes.’ And I say, ‘Have any promises in this regard ever been made to you by any member of the District Attorney’s Office or any police officer or any other person in authority regarding this case?’ And he says, ‘No, nobody ain’t promised me nothing.’ ”

There was no comment when Karp finished speaking. I rest my case, he thought. He looked at Lerner, who at last cracked a broad smile. Lerner began to clap and the rest of the members of the bureau joined him in a brief round of applause. As always, Conlin asked for a show of hands on whether the case should be sent to the Grand Jury with a recommendation for indictment. All hands went up. The Grand Jury’s decision was largely a formality. On a recommendation over Francis P. Garrahy’s signature they would have sent George Washington to trial for the murder of Abe Lincoln.

Then the cases resumed. As Karp sat down, Terry Courtney whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Nice job, Karp. My first one went OK too.” This sour remark did nothing to dismay Karp, who was the next thing to floating. But by the end of the meeting, he was considerably brought down.

The trouble was too many cases. The discipline and morale of the bureau, of which the weekly meetings were the living symbol, rested on the assumption that the bureau had the resources to give each case the attention that homicide cases deserved. This was no longer true. New Yorkers were killing each other at a rate four times that of thirty years ago. As the crime rate rose, people clamored for more police. More police they got, but the courts, the prisons, the DA’s office did not grow apace.

As the meeting wore along toward noon, Karp noticed that the questions were both less numerous and less sharp. The aging heroes wanted their lunches. Karp realized he was seeing the early stages of what was already rampant in the lower reaches of the system. The house Garrahy had built was rock-solid when each bureau member was handling ten or fifteen cases. Now the caseload was closer to forty. Dry rot was creeping in and the foundations were cracking. Karp knew in his heart he had done as well as he had today because he had only one case to prepare. Could he do the same with forty? Probably not. He thought of what had just happened to Courtney and shuddered. Even worse, he realized that being picked at the beginning of a meeting insured tougher questioning. For him it had been an advantage, since it gave him the chance to show off his brilliant prep. For Courtney, struggling with dozens of cases, it had been a disaster. He felt again the same disquieting sense that he was being manipulated.

That afternoon, around two, Conlin summoned Karp to his office. When Karp knocked and stuck his head in the door Conlin was on the phone, but he waved Karp in and motioned him to take a seat on the couch. Conlin was reclining in his gray-green leather judge’s chair, in shirt-sleeves and unbuttoned pinstripe vest. Karp waited while his boss poured charm over the line, punctuated by hearty laughs.

He hung up and turned his chair around to face Karp.

“The county chairman. An asshole, but he’s
our
asshole.” He smiled deprecatingly. “Politics … unfortunately, part of the job. Butch, I just wanted to tell you personally what a fine job I think you did on the Marchione thing. This is an important case to me, to the bureau, and while I don’t mind telling you that I was a little worried when Joe told me he was handing the prep over to you, I have to say that his confidence was well-placed.”

Karp mumbled a thank-you and waited for the other shoe. Bureau chiefs in Homicide did not call junior DA’s in for personal congratulations on case preps.

Conlin lifted a La Corona from a walnut humidor on his desk and lit it as he spoke. “You know, I feel that development of young prosecutors is one of the most important things we have to do here. It’s good for the bureau and it’s good for them. Take a young tiger with a good head, a couple three years in Homicide, hell, there’s no limit to where a man like that could go. Tell me, do you know anything about politics?”

“Not much. I was president of my senior class in college. Does that count?”

“Sure it does, sure it does. Stanford, right?”

“Um, Berkeley, actually.”

“Right, well, there’s an election year coming up. You have any thoughts about that?”