No Lesser Plea (31 page)

Lerner glared at him for a couple of beats, then pushed past Karp into the hallway. “Call the girl and set it up,” he snapped.

“Maybe I should get out of this too,” said Karp.

“Oh, bullshit!” replied Marlene Ciampi. Karp was sitting in her old wooden swivel chair in her tiny office in the walled-in hallway, and Ciampi was sitting cosily in his lap. It was about seven o’clock that Monday evening. Karp had just finished telling Marlene about his day, and was feeling mildly sorry for himself.

“Why is it bullshit? Move your ass, you’re squashing my keys into me.”

“Sorry. It’s bullshit because the last thing you need is another giant upset in your life, on top of your wife and Garrahy. Give it a year with Bloom, or two. How bad could it be?”

“Real bad. Gelb’s got me doing all the administrative work. I’ll be an old man before I see a courtroom again. Also, I’m in charge of recruiting and training, which I’ve never done before. I mean how the hell do you tell if somebody is going to make a good ADA?”

“Ask them to tell you a lie. If you fall for it, they’re in. Do you mind if I stroke your fevered brow?”

“No, go right ahead. OK, then I go to see my friend Joe Lerner, we’re talking about homicide cases I’m handling, and I tell him I want to keep following this business with the Marchione killer. No way, he says—get this—because he thinks I’ll throw the case to feed the numbers. Me! I fucking
invented
that case.”

“So what happened?”

“Ah, we worked it out. A little screaming and yelling, clenched fists, tight jaws, your basic locker-room fight. He’s really a good guy, just being a hard-ass because he’s pissed at me from the Garrahy campaign. But he knows it’s my case, and if he can get it lifted from Homicide’s effective caseload for free, it’s gravy to him. He saw the light.

“Oh, yeah, and this is the cherry on top—Gelb told me I have to represent the bureau on Wharton’s fucking task force. Can you believe this?”

“I don’t know, you might do some good. You can’t slay dragons all the time. Sometimes you have to polish your sword, or whatever. Anyway, you’ll survive. Between me and Corncob, this is the year you get your character built.”

“Thanks, Marlene, I needed that. What was your day like?”

“Dreamy. I spent the morning with the bomb squad out at Hunts Point. Just little me and all those big, brave, macho police officers. Those guys are real men, not paper-shuffling candy-ass lawyers like you.”

“Oh yeah? What were you out there for?”

“My terrorists, remember? The cops set up a demo of different kinds of explosives and devices, fuses, detonators, timers—the works. They were falling all over themselves to show me what kind of daredevils they were. I’m surprised I wasn’t blown to
smithereens.
Smithereens! I’ve always loved that word. Maybe I was a bomber in a previous life. Look, I got souvenirs!”

She reached out to her desk and scooped up several objects. Holding up a sphere of tan puttylike material, she said, in a deep-voiced, heavy Queens accent, “This here’s a genuine piece of C-4, size of a golf ball, it’d blow yer ass to Canarsie, it ever went off, heh-heh. Now this here’s yer primacord. Looks like something you’d hang yer undies on, hey? You wrap a piece a this aroun’ a telephone pole, set it off, wham—cut that mother right off at the knees.”

“Marlene, this is real stuff? They gave it to you?”

“Shit, no! I ripped it off. It’s my payment for handling five hours of patronizing chauvie bullshit with unrelenting cheerfulness.”

“What’re you going to use it for?”

“I don’t know—I’ll think of something. Oh, here’s the best one. It’s a fixed-time detonator.” She held up a finger-long black plastic tube with a knurled end and a metal ring dangling from its side. “What you do is, you take the primacord and stick it in this little hole here, like this. Then you wrap the cord around the C-4, like this. Instant bomb. When you twist the end of the detonator, it breaks a vial of acid, which eats through a wire in a fixed time—this one is for two minutes—which releases a spring, setting off a cap, which explodes the primacord and the plastic. You can’t stop it going off once it’s set. Even works under water. Neat, heh?”

“Marvelous. Now put it away. It gives me the willies.”

Her face broke into a fiendish grin. “The willies? I’ll give you willies.” With which she raised herself up, twisted the detonator, pulled Karp’s waistband out, and dropped the bomb down his pants.

Karp came out of the chair like a rocket, dumping Marlene on the floor, bellowing and trying simultaneously to grab the thing by reaching down his front and to shake the bomb down his pants leg by dancing on one foot. But the irregularly shaped device had hung up somewhere in the crotch area, and Karp had to drop his trousers and pick it up. He was about to heave it over the partition toward what he prayed was a deserted hallway, when his brain started to function again, and he looked around to see what Marlene was doing.

She was still sitting on the floor, shaking in a paroxysm of silent laughter. “Oh, God,” she gasped, “It’s OK! I didn’t … I didn’t … remove the safety pin with a … Oh, God … look at you … with a sharp downward pull on the ring.”

Karp was not amused. He put the bomb down on the desk and pulled up his pants. Then he took off his belt.

“OK, Ciampi, this is it,” he snarled.

“Ahh, come on, Butch, it was just a joke. This is me, Marlene, your main squeeze. You think I would blow my favorite genitalia to smithereens? Besides, you wouldn’t want to make marks on my lush, milky-white thighs, or my adorable perfectly rounded buttocks, would you?” She spread her raised knees a few inches, waggled her hips, and contorted her face into a parody of cross-eyed lust.

Karp swung the belt menacingly for a moment. Then he sputtered into laughter, too, and reached his hand down to help her off the floor. She gave him a hot squirmy hug.

“Forgive?” she asked into his ear.

“Not only that, but I’m going to do you a good one. After I move my stuff down to Criminal Courts, I’ll help you move yours into my old office.”

“Oh goodie, a window! Is it legal?”

“Who gives a shit? Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

“Ah, Butchie, when you do lawyer talk like that it makes me all shivery inside. OK, I’ll get packed up here. Then can we go out?”

“Absolutely. The usual dinner, movie, sex?”

“Yes, yawn.”

“Boring, huh. How about all three simultaneously? We could get take-out Chinese and go to Radio City.”

“Now you’re talking, Buster!”

“Champ,” he said, “some day you’re going to go too far.”

“When I do,” she said, hugging him harder, “you’ll be the first to know.”

By the tail end of that summer, Karp came to realize that the new regime was both worse and better than he had expected. Worse, because under Bloom, a brainy man with high political ambitions and no particular attachment to the notion of justice, the rule of numbers became absolute. As always, the rule of numbers meant rule by men who were comfortable with numbers, who believed that the neat boxes on their organization charts could somehow order and wash clean the screaming social chaos of crime in the City of New York. The lawyers called them data weenies.

Wharton ruled these men. He set targets for what he called “throughput” and his troops broke these out into specific targets for each bureau and for each individual attorney. Since a certain number of cases came in each week, each assistant DA was obliged to move a certain number out, and would get dinged if he came up short. This meant that plea bargaining became virtually the only way by which cases were ever
disposed.
There were of course standards governing the acceptability of bargains, based on the initial charges and the circumstances of the crime. But the way it turned out was that nobody ever got dinged on failure to meet standards, just on failure to meet clearance targets.

Trials virtually disappeared under this standards system, and so did the old guard of seasoned prosecutors who had grown up in the Garrahy era, the lawyers to whom trials were the center of their professional lives. One by one, and then in clumps, they left for private practice, the bench, the beach. Six weeks after taking office, Bloom dissolved the Homicide Bureau, thus abolishing the true church of the Garrahy religion. It was a natural consequence of the new order: silly to make a big deal about homicide, if a killing was just another occasion for a plea bargain, another felony clearance, another digit to keep the data weenies off your back. But oddly, in this unpromising situation Roger Karp flourished.

On a morning in late August, Karp was standing at the counter buying coffee in Sam’s when someone pinned his arms from behind, and said, “Hey, big shot! What’s going on? You don’t fucking talk to your old friends, now that you’re a padrone. I got him, Roland, let’s punch him out!”

“Guma, you jerk! Let go, I’m spilling the coffee here.”

Guma released his grip. “How’d you know it was me?”

“Stumpy arms. It could’ve been V.T., but he cleans his nails. How’s it going, Roland?”

Between time on the new job and time with Marlene, Karp had seen neither Guma nor Hrcany much since the start of the summer.

“Sucks, as usual. I’m about ready to quit. Sit down, Butch, let’s hear what you’re up to.”

“I can’t. I got a meeting with my staff in five minutes.”

“ ‘My staff,’ my ass! Listen to this guy, Roland. We taught him everything he knows, now he gets a little rank, he gets snotty with us.”

“Yeah, Karp, fuck your staff. You’re the boss, let ’em wait.”

They muscled Karp into a booth.

“OK, give!” said Guma. “Where the fuck you been? Getting any gash?”

“Who has time?”

“I’m cryin’ my eyes out. Nah, you’re getting it somewhere. It shows. Who is it? Somebody we know?”

“Guma, you think I’d ball anybody you knew?”

“Don’t be so wise, Karp. OK, tell us about life in the big time. What’s this guy Gelb like to work for?”

“Damned if I know. I never see the guy. He’s cruising all day looking for another job, like everybody else.”

“You, too?” asked Hrcany.

“No, although I thought I’d never say this. I’m having a good time.”

“See, it’s the gash,” said Guma.

“Nah, he sold out to the weenies,” said Hrcany, in a not entirely facetious tone.

“Look,” said Karp, ignoring this, “they’re trying to control the whole office with numbers. But you can’t really control anything with numbers unless you have a sense of what the numbers mean. Which they don’t. Bloom and Corncob, they don’t know jackshit about what really goes on. It’s like that story about the Russian chandelier factory. They get a quota from Moscow every year—make six tons of chandeliers. So they make one six-ton chandelier and take the rest of the year off.

“So what they want out of the Criminal Courts Bureau is clearances. You got to have a certain number every week, every month, based on what comes into the system through the Complaint Room, a percentage, right? The felony hearings are the choke point of the whole system—where we get the plea bargaining—so the pressure is on my guys to clear at any cost. The data weenies are calculating percentages right and left.

“Naturally, it takes about twenty minutes after Bloom’s system goes into effect before every skell and every skell lawyer in town knows the score. Why should they take a hard deal, right? They know the kid ADA
has
to deal, or his own people are on his ass. Hey, my client shot four old ladies, we’ll cop to simple assault and time served, right?”

“Yeah, right,” said Hrcany.

“No, wrong. We got standards for cases like that, signed by Bloom in his own blood. The skell goes up for five to seven or we try.”

“But how can you do that, Butch? What about the percentages?”

“Easy. We’re supposed to clear a set proportion of what comes in through the Complaint Room. That’s the base. And who controls the Complaint Room?”

“You do,” said Hrcany, “but what does that matter, if … oh, I see, said the blind man. You sly devil, you, you’re cooking the Complaint Room books.”

Karp placed a finger next to his nose, like old St. Nick. “That’s a shocking accusation, Roland, and impossible to prove. None of the weenies ever sets foot in the Complaint Room. They might see a victim and have to throw up from the degradation of it all. I
will
say that although we have a terrible crime wave in New York, we of the New York District Attorney’s Office are keeping the cases moving through the system at an ever increasing rate. I quote our fearless leader.”

“Amazing. But how much can you fudge?”

“Not a lot. Enough so that when we get a case that would break our rate if we had to try it—but which we can’t let the assholes just walk away on—we can hold out for a tough plea. I won’t say it’s winning. It’s just losing slower. And it lets my guys keep their self-respect, which otherwise would be down the drain the first day. Look, it’s been real, folks, but I got to go.”

“But, Butch, what’s the fucking point. How long can you keep it up?” asked Hrcany.

Karp slid out of the booth and stood up. “I don’t know, but I’m building my character. Look, you know that old John Wayne movie, where he’s got only four bullets left and he’s in this cabin with about two hundred bad guys surrounding him. They figure he has to be out of ammo, so they send a bunch of guys up to flush him out. Wayne lets them get close and then, pow, he shoots one and they all run down the hill again. He can’t beat them, but he sure as hell can make them keep their distance until the cavalry comes. It’s the same thing.”

“But how long can you hold out if there’s no fucking cavalry,” asked Guma.

“I don’t know, Goom,” Karp said with some asperity as he walked away. “I guess that’s why the Duke doesn’t wear a watch.”

There were nearly thirty lawyers waiting for Karp when he walked into the bureau training room. Besides shafting the system, and putting at least the very worst of the asses in jail, training young lawyers was the other thing that made Karp’s job worth doing.

He was a good teacher, and teaching lawyers how to win cases was not all that different from teaching kids how to play basketball, which Karp had spent his teenaged summers doing at a camp in New Jersey. His current crop of young attorneys looked to him now about as old as those campers. Karp was five or six years older and felt like the ancient of days.