No Lesser Plea (19 page)

Newbury looked surprised. “Washington? Oh, it’d be fun for a couple of years, but, I mean New York is … where we
live.
” He waved his hand in a global gesture to encompass Sam’s, Foley Square, Manhattan, the entire great, wet, smelly metropolis. “I mean, we’ve been here over three hundred years. I’m related to half the people the streets around here are named after.”

“Yeah? Like Izzy Chambers and Morris Broadway?”

Newbury laughed. “Up yours, Karp. No, really,” he said, gesturing again, “this is our … I don’t know, our … fief.”

This conversation disturbed Karp more than he understood at the time. Newbury’s attack on Garrahy had irritated him for reasons he could not quite fathom. It was all stuff he knew. Why did he so resist acknowledging it? Then there was Newbury’s confidence and security. His fief! Karp’s fief was an eight by eight office and a pile of papers, a job, and his brains. Family? His wife had flown off in her own orbit and who knew if she would ever come around again? His mother had died when Karp was a child, his father made corrugated boxes, and was not interested in a son who was not interested in sweating Puerto Ricans to make even more corrugated boxes. His two brothers consisted of annual phone calls.

Karp compared himself to his friends. They all seemed to have a center—aside from work—around which their lives revolved. Guma chased women. Hrcany immersed himself in the social life of his vast Hungarian family. V.T. had noblesse oblige and was engaged to a young lady of suitable background. He looked out of his window at the gray slanting rain over Chinatown. He felt the walls closing in. He shook himself and crumpled up the sheet of yellow legal paper he was writing on and threw it across the room to join half a dozen other sheets in the wastebasket. Two points. He thought, there’s someone in my head, but it’s not me. He got up and took his jacket off the hook and went out of the office.

There was a greasy snack bar on the ground floor of 100 Centre Street. Guma called it the Cancer Ward. Karp went in and had a cup of coffee and a cheese Danish. Then he stood in the lobby and looked out at the rain. The crowds in the Streets of Calcutta were damp and ill-tempered. The noise level was higher than usual. The fresh smell rain gave to New York’s streets did not penetrate here; it stank of damp dishrags.

Without thinking about it, he found himself at the door to his old office bay in the Criminal Courts Bureau. “Hey, look who’s slumming,” said a voice behind him. He turned and looked into the black eyes of Marlene Ciampi.

“Hi, Champ. No, just wandering.” She smiled and made to go past him into the office, but he stopped her by saying, “Say, has Conlin or anybody from Homicide called you yet?”

She frowned. “No—is there any reason why they should?”

“Oh, it’s just that I was talking to Jack Conlin the other day and he asked my opinion about you. I think they’re thinking about you for Abondini’s slot.”

Her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped in astonishment.

“What! What did you tell him?”

“What could I tell him? I said you had a great ass and liked to talk dirty.”

Marlene jabbed him in the belly with a rigid forefinger. “Goddamit, Karp, are you pulling my pork about this?”

“So to speak. No, really, he asked me and I told him you were a sharp little lawyer …”

“Little!” Poke.

“Ouch, Marlene! No, I told him the truth: I said you worked hard, knew what was what, and had plenty of guts. Then he said Garrahy was worried that your sensibilities might be offended by the rough-and-tumble of the Homicide Bureau, and I said he didn’t have to worry about that. That’s it.”

Marlene let out a shriek of delight. “I can’t believe it. I’m throwing up. Butch, this is great! Oh, God, what time is it? I’m late for court.” She ran two steps down the corridor, then stopped, turned, ran back to Karp, gave him a solid hug and planted a firm kiss on the side of his neck. “Thanks, Butch, I owe you,” she said, and then broke loose and ran off, weaving through the crowd like a racehorse breaking for daylight.

Karp stood still and waited for his groin to rejoin the rest of him. He thought, for the first time in many months, no wonder my head’s fucked up. I’m horny.

Chapter 10

C
onlin said, “Look at that Sussman. That’s what you get if you call Central Casting and order somebody to play a lawyer. Looks like he could blow Perry Mason out of the box. It’s a long way from Bensonhurst for Lennie Sussman.”

Conlin said this softly to Karp as the two men waited at the prosecution table for the trial of Mandeville Louis to begin. The courtroom was crowded. It was an important case, and the press was there in some strength. It was in fact why Conlin was there. Nothing like a nice homicide conviction at primary time.

Nearly six months had passed from the time Louis had been captured to the day the case had been called. It had taken another week to select the jury, with each side questioning, challenging, selecting the veniremen, throwing out those who might lean the wrong way, according to an arcane set of rules, which had as little to do with the desire to see justice triumph as the choosing of a team lineup had with the desire of a coach to see a good game. Winning counted, nothing else.

So there they sat, twelve citizens of Fun City, nine men, three women, a little whiter than a stratified random sample of New Yorkers, but reasonably representative. Some were pissed off at missing work, but most were mildly excited to be doing in reality—so they naively supposed—what they had read about in high-school civics texts, and seen represented on television shows. None of them were lawyers; none of them had ever been on a jury before.

Karp did look at Sussman. The defense attorney was arranging papers from his briefcase precisely, like a fortune-teller setting out the Tarot deck. A clean yellow legal pad and sharpened pencils were on the long table in front of him. He observed Karp staring at him and nodded pleasantly. Karp nodded back. They were gentlemen about their serious work. Conlin was right; it was a long way from Bensonhurst for Lennie, a long way from Calcutta for Karp.

At 9:05, Judge Frederick Braker entered the courtroom. He was sixty-eight, frail and bent with scoliosis under the shelter of his black robes. His eyes were bright blue, his nose long and sharp, his forehead domed and running back into close-cropped silvery hair. He still had—as he would say himself, if you asked him—all his marbles.

All rose. All sat. Braker discussed some details of the court calendar with the lawyers, and then two guards escorted Mandeville Louis into the courtroom and delivered him to the chair next to Sussman’s. Karp was startled by the change in Louis’s demeanor. He was clearly distraught. He kept removing and replacing his glasses and plucking at his yellow jumpsuit. He swept his head from side to side rapidly, as if searching the room for an enemy. His eyes were bulging, and every few seconds his tongue would protrude for a long, unnatural swipe at his lips.

Karp nudged Conlin, and whispered. “Jack, catch the defendant. This guy was an ice cube the last time I saw him. Now he looks like a basket case.”

Conlin glanced over. “It happens sometimes. Some guys, it takes a while for the penny to drop—that he’s really in a courtroom looking at Murder One.”

Braker cleared his throat. “Are the People ready, Mr. Conlin?”

“Ready, Your Honor.”

“Is the defendant ready?”

Sussman rose, removed his half-glasses, looked carefully at each member of the jury and then at the judge. He was not going to be tricked into a careless admission. “Ready, Your Honor.”

“Then please begin, Mister Conlin.”

Conlin rose gracefully, his suit jacket already neatly buttoned, and strode into the well of the court to face the jury. He met each of twelve pairs of eyes.

“Good morning,” he said. “May it please this Honorable Court, Mister Justice Braker, Mister Sussman, Mister Karp, Mister Foreman, and members of the jury.

“At this point in the trial, as the assistant district attorney in charge of presenting the evidence in this case on behalf of the People of the State of New York, the law imposes on me the duty of making an opening statement. Its purpose is to outline for you what the People expect to prove by way of the evidence in this case. Now, you should know that there is no corresponding duty for the defense.” He gestured casually toward Sussman’s table. “They may make an opening or they may not, as they see fit.”

Conlin paused and moved closer to the jury box, almost belly up to the rail. He resumed, in his rich baritone, a little more intensely. “You may consider this opening as a preview of what we plan to present as evidence, like the table of contents of a book, so that you can follow the testimony more easily.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the People will prove that this man,” (here he pivoted sharply, and pointed the classic accusing finger directly at Louis), “this man, the defendant, Mandeville Louis, during the night of March Twenty-sixth of this year, while committing an armed robbery of A&A Liquors, in Manhattan, at 423 Madison Avenue, brutally and callously snuffed out the life of the proprietor, Angelo Marchione, by shooting him in the head with a sawed-off shotgun.”

Karp watched in fascination, taking professional note of the way Conlin held himself, the way he modulated and pitched his voice. This was the reality, worth twenty years of law-school lectures. But as Conlin launched into a gripping description of how Randy Marchione had been done to death, Karp was distracted by a whining sound, a low “uh-heh, uh-heh, uh-heh” like a child getting set to throw a tantrum, from the direction of the defense table. He turned his head and observed Louis bouncing up and down in his seat. The defendant held his arms bent at the elbow, rigid, his hands like blades, moving them in a chopping motion in time with each bounce.

The jury was distracted from Conlin’s speech. Conlin himself stopped talking and turned around, fury and confusion on his face. All eyes were on Mandeville Louis. Sussman plucked at his sleeve; Louis yanked his arm away and rose to his feet, jerking like a puppet. His glasses hung askew from one earpiece, his mouth gaped wide and from it now came a dribble of saliva and a loud inarticulate wail.

The judge tapped his gavel. The wail grew louder, reached a crescendo and stopped. A confused babble from the spectators; more banging of the gavel. Louis pointed a finger at the judge. “You hurt my momma,” he shrieked, and with that he overturned the heavy defense table, climbed over it, and jumped the rail. The two court officers were stunned; in the seconds it took them to react, Louis had cleared the well of the court and thrown himself at the judge’s high presidium, which he attempted to scale like a commando on an obstacle course. A woman began screaming. A man yelled, “Stop him! Stop him!”

Judge Braker had seen many odd things during his forty years on the bench, but these barely prepared him for the sight of a foam-flecked, raving lunatic face heaving over the cliff-edge of his domain. “Ah get you, ah get you, you hurt mah momma,” said Louis, with accompanying groans and shrieks. The judge rolled his chair away as far as he could, and prepared to defend himself with his gavel, returning that symbolic instrument, for perhaps the first time in six hundred years, to its literal role as the defender of the physical security of the judiciary.

Fortunately, he did not have to defend himself against the defendant. To his relief, the grotesque face and clutching hands were yanked away. Two court officers and a police officer fell on Louis, cuffed his hands and his ankles, and carried him feet first through the door to the holding pen.

Judge Braker wiped his face with his handkerchief and waited for the unaccustomed, but not entirely unwelcome, flood of adrenaline to dissipate from his system. The murmurs in the courtroom died away. “Mister Conlin,” he said wryly, “it appears to me that your opening statement has upset the defendant.” Conlin said nothing. What could he say?

The judge turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to adjourn this court for a few moments. In the meantime, I ask that you not discuss what you have just witnessed among yourselves, and that you do not draw any conclusions from it.” To the lawyers he said, “I would like to see all counsel in my chambers—right now.”

In Braker’s chambers it was neat Chivas all around, except for Karp, who declined. Conlin was wary and silent, Sussman looked genuinely stunned, Braker looked exhausted as he knocked down his first belt in a single gulp, and poured himself another.

Sussman said, “Fred, I honestly had no idea … I mean, the man gave no indication …”

Braker smiled. “Relax, Lennie, nobody thinks you’re putting on an act. Everybody knows it’s not your style. But, we obviously …”

Sussman nodded vigorously. “Obviously, I will move to declare him unfit to stand trial.”

The judge choked on a swallow of his Scotch, recovered, gave Sussman a bleak look. “No shit, Lennie, no shit.” He turned to Conlin. “No objection from the People?” Conlin seemed about to say something, then shook his head. “Then I will have the orders drawn up and send him to Bellevue.” Braker sat back in his chair with a sigh. “See you in court, gentlemen.”

“Jack,” said Karp, “didn’t anything strike you as odd about that scene?” Conlin and Karp were walking in the corridor toward the bureau offices after the dismissal of the jury.

“Odd? Yeah, I guess it would strike me as odd when a defendant goes off his nut and attacks the judge. What the hell are you talking about, odd?”

“No, no, not what happened—I mean the details. Did you spot that Louis sort of stopped fighting when the court officers had him? I always thought that maniacs—I don’t know—fought like maniacs. None of the officers even had their hair mussed.”

Conlin snorted. “Hey, how should I know? Am I a shrink?”

“And another thing. His glasses. When he threw over the table they were hanging off his face. When the guards carried him out he had them in his hand. That’s what I mean by odd. Protecting eyeglasses is not something you expect a psychotic to do.”

“What are you getting at? You think he pulled a scam on us?”