No Lesser Plea (40 page)

“Well, Miss Higgs. Do you still feel Preston Elvis is going to take care of you? Or would you like to tell me what really happened?”

Vera Higgs wiped her nose with a scrap of tissue. “I guess,” she said. “Goddamn him. An’ goddamn you, too. Goddamn you all to hell!”

Two hours later, Hrcany was smoking a thin celebratory cigar, with his feet up on his desk. Kaplan was slouched in a side chair. Vera Higgs had been formally deposed of her revised testimony about Preston Elvis, and driven back home. Kaplan had called Karp and told him the news. Karp had been ecstatic which hadn’t made Kaplan feel any better. Hrcany looked over at the younger man.

“What’s the matter, kid, you look like shit.”

“I feel like shit. I feel like there’s a thin crust of old turd over my whole body.”

Hrcany laughed, not nicely. “A thin crust? Don’t worry, it’ll thicken up. A couple of years it’ll go right down to the bone, like me.”

“Yeah, I can tell. God, that woman! Did you get how she asked what would happen to Elvis? She still cares about that rat.”

“Right, it’s that Frankie and Johnnie bullshit. So what else is new? Hey, as soon as I saw that Polaroid on the tripod in the bedroom, I knew we had pay dirt. I wish I had kept some of them. By the way, how was old DeVonne, stud? Hot stuff?”

“Marvelous. I worked a chess problem in my head the whole time.”

“No shit? Did you win?”

“I lost. But, really, what will happen to Elvis? Will he cop one if he gives us Louis?”

“Damned if I know,” said Hrcany, grinding his cigar out in a glass ashtray. “It’s Karp’s case.”

Dr. Werner was ecstatic. Another perfect example of Ganser syndrome. He regarded Lennie Trevio—the squat figure across the desk from him—with something like affection. He envisioned an international symposium on Ganser syndrome, an event that would make forensic psychiatric history, with himself at the center of it all.

He continued the interview. “So tell me, ahh, Lennie, have you ever had hallucinations or seizures—like the one you had in court today—outside of court?”

Guma said, “No doc, I never had nothin’ like that before.”

“Good. Now please go on. You say you saw the judge change into a giant chicken?”

“Yeah, right, more like a rooster. So he started squawkin’ and then, and then I heard this voice, like it was coming from the ceiling, sayin’, ‘I will turn you into, ah, bread crumbs.’ ”

“Bread crumbs?”

“Yeah, you know, like the rooster was gonna eat me?”

“Ah, yes, I see.”

“So I started making a fuss, y’know? So here I am.” He laughed.

“Yes. Well, Lennie, I think that will be all for today. You will have to see another doctor, but I think what’s troubling you is clear enough.”

“Doc, will I have to go back to the trial?” asked Guma, in as nervous a tone as he could manage without cracking up.

“No, of course not. It would be inhuman. No, Lennie, you’re in good hands now.”

“Aw, thanks, doc, you’re a saint!” exclaimed Guma.

Werner beamed. This was why he had gone to med school. That, and power.

The next day Guma sat in the dayroom of Bellevue’s lock-up ward, reading the
Post
and feeling grumpy. He had breakfasted on what tasted like warm, damp clay and he hadn’t had a beer or a cigar in more than twenty-four hours, a violation, in his view, of the constitutional safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment. And he was no closer to getting the goods on the docs. He had seen Werner, who was a dingbat, but they already knew that.

He looked up from his paper and glanced around the dayroom. He saw a couple dozen people, a cross section of male New York. Some guys talking to the air. One or two jerking off. A guy peeing in the corner. Most of them sitting and watching TV or playing cards. Nothing you couldn’t see any day in Times Square or on the subway. It seemed only happenstance could explain why these men were here and not on the southbound IRT.

Guma noticed a small, skinny old man in a shiny dark suit wandering through the crowd. He carried a notebook and a stack of file folders. Guma watched him approach a large black man who was arguing with the ceiling. The old man argued with the ceiling for a while, too. The madman paused in his ravings and the two of them had a brief conversation. They smiled and shook hands. The black man went over and sat down in front of the TV. The old man spoke with some of the other inmates in a cheerful and conversational manner. Then he came over to where Guma was sitting and pulled up a chair.

Close up the man looked even older than he had across the room: a thin fringe of silver hair around a speckled scalp; a sallow, wrinkled face; a large, lumpy nose that looked as if it had been broken at some time in the remote past; bad, yellow teeth; and deeply sunken brown eyes with heavy grayish pouches beneath them. But the eyes were sharp and bright.

“Well, young man, how do you feel today?” he asked. Unlike the psychiatrists he had met previously, this guy seemed genuinely interested in the answer. He had a slight German accent.

Guma gave him the Ganser syndrome cover story. The old man listened carefully, occasionally making a note with a fountain pen in a cheap spiral-bound notebook. He said “mmm-ahh” from time to time, to keep the story moving. When Guma had finished, the old man sighed and pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up on his forehead. He held out his hand.

“Perlsteiner.”

Guma shook hands and gave his cover name. The old man’s grip was surprisingly strong. Dr. Perlsteiner looked through his files and pulled one out. He read it and let out a little snorting laugh.

“Ach, so we have Ganser syndrome again.
Ganser syndrome.
” He made it sound like the name of a cartoon character on Saturday morning TV.

Perlsteiner looked at Guma sharply, but his eyes still held an amused twinkle. “Mister Trevio,” he said, “you would be surprised how little real mental illness there is in the world. And of that, how little is associated with criminal behavior. Irrationality, we have, plenty. And evil, oh my, we have enough, more than enough of that. But the poor crazy people: They suffer, you understand? They can barely take care of themselves. Plot a crime? Nonsense! They cannot do it. Oh, perhaps, in a frenzy they hurt someone, yes, but as I say, this is rare.

“You know, Mister Trevio, when I was much younger, I had the opportunity to observe, at close hand, a great deal of criminal behavior, people being murdered and tortured, robbed, and so on. And afterward, when people said, ‘This was madness, this was insanity,’ I would say, ‘No, it was not. Evil, surely. Hate and greed, yes, lust for power, yes, fear, perhaps. But not insane. This is a libel on the poor madmen.’

“But, you know, they don’t listen. They wish to make a medical thing of evil. Madness is also such a useful metaphor, for that which we would rather not face, eh? So. I am didactic again. Forgive me. Now, you, my dear man—I see here by your record—wished for some money, heh? And you took it. Very sane. And you were caught, but you do not wish to pay for your crime, heh? Also, very sane.”

Perlsteiner capped his pen, put it in his breast pocket, and got slowly to his feet. “So. I have examined you. You are sane as bread. I will write my report, which I am sure will be ignored, as were the others. But no matter.” He looked around the dayroom and gestured to the inmates.

“You see, I make my examinations here, instead of in my office. Doctor Werner gives me a very small office, which is very inconvenient also. And damp. Much like a cell, you understand? So I do my examining in the open ward. We did the same in the
Geisteskrankheitshaus
in Vienna. And at Treblinka, of course.”

Perlsteiner made to go and then began to pat and poke all his pockets. “My eyeglasses … ?”

“On your forehead,” said Guma.

Dr. Perlsteiner laughed delightedly and adjusted his glasses. “So they are. Thank you very much. Carl Jung was always doing the same. Look, let me give you some advice. We don’t see the delusions characteristic of florescent schizophrenia situationally, with no prior history of the disease. Only in literature. In real life, once you got them, they don’t go away so easy, you understand? Roosters! Ha! Good God!”

Guma watched the old man walk away, humming. He smiled and strolled over to the payphone, put in some coins and dialed.

“V.T.? Good, you’re in. Time to spring me. I think I got a lead.”

The next morning Karp was back in his office, trying without much energy to plow through the piles of paperwork accumulated in his absence. Frank Gelb had dropped by, smiling, to say he had been appointed to the bench and was leaving immediately for a vacation in Europe before assuming his new duties. Karp was acting chief as of that morning.

Karp stared glumly at a set of large computer-generated charts laid out on his desk. They told a worse-than-usual story. Of the fifteen hundred cases arraigned by Karp’s assistants every week, almost seventy percent were removed from the courts immediately, either through plea bargains or skips after release. Of those that got past arraignment, only three percent were ever brought to a full trial, the rest being plea bargained away.

The most depressing figure, however, was the conviction rate. Karp got out the folder that held several sheets of graph paper on which he had plotted the trial rates and the conviction rates in the months since Bloom took over. He added the appropriate points. In Garrahy’s last month, ten percent of the cases passing through the Criminal Courts Bureau reached trial; eighty percent of the trials had ended in conviction, usually for the top count. This past month it had dropped below thirty-five percent. The golden age is gone, thought Karp, ring in the age of brass. Or toilet paper.

By noon, about two-thirds of the pile of papers had shifted from the in-basket to the out-basket. The door banged open and Guma stepped in, smoking a larger-than-usual cigar and holding a cardboard carton.

“All right! Lunch for the cripple. You like corned beef? We got corned beef. You like pastrami? We got pastrami. I got celery tonic, cream, black raspberry. I got dibs on the cream.”

“Goom, glad to see you! I hear you’re not crazy anymore.”

“Yeah, well, that Werner’s a helluva shrink. He’s got the magic touch.”

The door opened again, and V.T. Newbury walked in, followed by Sonny Dunbar. Newbury was wearing a long white lab coat with a stethoscope sticking out of the side pocket. He had a sheaf of manila folders under one arm.

“Looking good, V.T. Where’d you get the outfit? Hey, Sonny.”

“Denny Maher lent it to me. The name tag too,” said V.T.

V.T. leaned over so Karp could read the white plastic tag pinned to his breast pocket.

“Doctor Frankenstein?”

“Yeah. It got me into Bellevue to spring Guma. I guess that says something. And to rifle Werner’s files. And make copies.”

“So what did you learn? Give,” said Karp around his corned beef sandwich.

“What we got is this,” said Guma, pointing to the folders that Newbury had placed on the desk. “Each time Louis was examined, Werner sent up a report. His opinion is that Louis was incompetent, with a confirmation by another psychiatrist. A guy named Edward Stone. The same thing happened to me.”

“So? Where does that get us?”

“Butch, I was examined by three shrinks. Count ’em, three. The third guy was this old dude, Perlsteiner. He’s old but he don’t miss much. He said there was nothing wrong with me.”

“Little does he know,” said Newbury.

“Up yours, Newbury. And, we find, on examining these records here, that Perlsteiner also examined Mandeville Louis on three occasions, and wrote reports saying that Louis was faking it. Reports that never made it into the file.”

“Goom, this is great!” Karp exclaimed. “Great! Werner doesn’t know we have this. We’ll subpoena him for all documents relating to Louis. He’ll never turn over the dissenting opinions. Witholding evidence! I’ll tear him a new asshole on the stand.” Karp turned to Dunbar. “What is that, Sonny? The sworn question and answer statement from Elvis’s girlfriend?”

“Yeah, it looks solid. We got him good, now.”

“Right. He’s looking at so much time now he’s got to give us Louis for a walk.”

“What?” Dunbar said, his voice rising. “Tell me you didn’t say ‘walk.’ ”

“Well, you know we’ll try to get the best deal we can on him, but if he holds out, I’ll tell you right now, I’ll walk him to get Louis.”

“Let me understand this. I bust my black ass hunting down this muthafucka, who has blown up one of your people,
your
people, and killed my brother-in-law, and near killed you, and you tell me that after all that, you’re thinking of giving him a free ride?”

“Come on, Sonny. Louis is the goddamn target here. Elvis is a tool. It’d be like, in a vehicular manslaughter, putting the car in jail instead of the driver.”

“Don’t give me ‘tool,’ man. I want his ass in jail.
His
ass.”

“For chrissake, Sonny, the son of a bitch is blind, or close to it. You think he’s going to go back to armed robbery in Braille?”

“Fuck that, man! What, are you the judge and the jury all of a sudden? You saying he’s suffered enough? I thought this was the law around here. You think I sat up with my wife night after night, her crying her eyes out about Donnie, for a deal? I want his ass in jail!”

Karp was pale and his jaw was tight. Very quietly he said, “I’m sorry you feel that way, Sonny. Like I said, I’ll try to get the best deal I can, but if not … it’s my case.”

Dunbar glared at Karp for a long moment, his teeth clenching. “Ahh, fuck you all!” he shouted, and strode out of the office, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the glass.

“Listen, don’t worry about him, Butch,” said Guma into the stunned silence. “He’s a good guy. He’ll come around when he cools off.”

“You think so?” said Karp bitterly. “How about me, you think I’ll come around? Get used to it all?”

Nobody said anything for a bit, as Guma and V.T. got to their feet and started cleaning the lunch scraps and papers off Karp’s desk. Karp sighed and tried for the millionth time to scratch under his cast. “Guma,” he said, “could you draw up the subpoena for Werner’s records? I’m swamped here.”