No Lesser Plea (43 page)

A teenager in pimp clothes bumped into him. “Have a nice day,” said Karp. “Ah, fuck ya!” snarled the pimplet. Karp laughed merrily and headed north. For the rest of the day he sat in Washington Square Park and looked at people. Everything looked scrubbed and new, and impossibly detailed, glowing. He exercised his compassion, and mourned, joyfully, his lost innocence.

“And the thing of it was,” Karp explained to Marlene that night, “I didn’t change my
ideas
at all. I mean, I didn’t become a bleeding heart all of a sudden. I just was conscious, really
conscious,
for an instant, that me, and Louis, and Sussman, and shit, even Wharton, were just playing roles, and inside us there was something huge laughing at us all. Not cruelly, or mocking, but, like, ‘when are you people going to wake up?’ It was uncanny.”

“It sounds like it. You and the Grand Inquisitor.”

“Right. I’ve got to read that sometime. And the funniest part is, I don’t care about the trial. I mean, I want him to go to jail for a long time. And he probably will, even though he’s crazy as a loon. But I realized that what got me about him, what he was doing was a violation of the game. He wouldn’t play the game. He wouldn’t suffer with the rest of us. That’s what made him a monster. And I destroyed that. Or something did. Something did.” They were silent for a long while, thinking about how it had all played out.

She was sitting in his lap on a plastic couch in the patients’ lounge. After a while, Karp felt her stiffen and she made a little noise.

“What is it, Champ? Pain?”

“No. I’m scared, Butchie. They’re coming to show me the Face tomorrow.”

“Oh, God! Do you want me to be there?”

“No! I mean, I’ll need, I guess I’ll need some time for myself, you know?”

“Look, Marlene, I got to say this, umm, whatever it turns out …”

She put her hand over his mouth. “No, don’t say anything. Just squeeze me.”

The next day, it was a Friday, she called Karp late, around five.

“Hi.”

“Well?”

“I’m at your place. I let myself in.”

“My place? Don’t move, I’ll be right there.”

It was rush hour, and Karp had to put a body check on a distinguished elderly member of the bar to get a cab.

The door was open. Karp rushed through the apartment to the bedroom.

She was standing at the foot of the bed in a long-sleeved tan summer dress. She was completely transformed. Her ordeal had stripped the softness from her, and the planes of her face showed clear, through the taut skin. The right side of her face was discolored in patches and covered with a quilting of fine white scars. A black patch covered her right eye. Her hair was cropped short, and some peculiarity of the wounding had created a white blaze through her black hair from the forehead to the crown.

The cover girl was utterly lost. Instead, she had a face out of archaic imagination, like something painted on terra-cotta on an Aegean island or cut into bronze at Mykonos, for a hero’s grave.

As Karp stood there, his heart pierced and full at once, staring, her mouth, which was perfectly still, hardened into a grim line, and her one eye flashed defiance like a hawk’s eye, out of her hawk face. Her hands were clenched at her hips, in her old way, and Karp saw that her left hand was clad in a tight black kid glove.

Karp slowly raised both hands above his head. “Don’t shoot,” he said weakly. “I give up.”

Then he went toward her and picked her up, placed her on the bed, and pinned her beneath him. And he kissed her face, starting with the scarred part, and then her mouth, for a long time. He kissed every scar and the bad eye and the good eye.

Marlene started to cry. She cried so hard she couldn’t breathe on her back. She wriggled out from under him and went into the bathroom to sob great, whooping, wracking sobs for nearly ten minutes, while Karp stood outside and said her name, and she said, “Just a second, just a second.”

She came out, and said, “Whoosh! OK, that’s over. Christ, I think my patch shrank.” She walked over and examined herself in the long mirror on the bedroom door. Karp came and stood behind her. She saw his reflection looming over her own, and suddenly she giggled.

“What?” he asked.

“Belmar. I just thought of Belmar, for no reason.”

“What’s Belmar?”

“It’s a resort town on the Jersey shore. It’s part of the ethnic Riviera—we used to go there when I was a kid. They had this severed head, it was an attraction on the Boardwalk that would tell your fortune. Anyway, there were all these blue-collar bungalow resorts, little hotels, too. Italians around us, Russians to the north, Polish, Irish.

“I just had the image of you and me walking up the Boardwalk in Belmar.”

“Do they allow Jews?”

“Only with a responsible adult. Karp, let’s go sometime. Jesus, I haven’t been there since Christ was a corporal. We’d blow their pants off—Pirate Jenny and the Giant Jewboy. They’d be strolling the sand in their Jockeys.”

“It’s a deal. However, right now this minute …”

She turned toward him. “What do you think of glass eyes? Tacky, right?” She still had tears in her voice.

“No, I think a glass eye can be tasteful,” said Karp conversationally, close to tears himself. He said, “Champ, I want you so much, I’m nauseous.”

She held her hands out, palms up. “Well,” she said, “here I am.”

A Biography of Robert K. Tanenbaum

Robert K. Tanenbaum is the
New York Times
bestselling author of twenty-five legal thrillers and has an accomplished legal career of his own. Before his first book was published, Tanenbaum had already been the Bureau Chief of the Criminal Courts, had run the Homicide Bureau, and had been in charge of the training program for the legal staff for the New York County District Attorney’s Office. He also served as Deputy Chief Counsel to the Congressional Committee investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. In his professional career, Tanenbaum has never lost a felony case. His courtroom experiences bring his books to life, especially in his bestselling series featuring prosecutor Roger “Butch” Karp and his wife, Marlene Ciampi.

Tanenbaum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the University of California at Berkeley on a basketball scholarship, and remained at Cal, where he earned his law degree from the prestigious Boalt Hall School of Law. After graduating from Berkeley Law, Tanenbaum moved back to New York to work as an assistant district attorney under the legendary New York County DA Frank Hogan. Tanenbaum then served as Deputy Chief Counsel in charge of the Congressional investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The blockbuster novel
Corruption of Blood
(1994), is a fictionalized account of his experience in Washington, D.C.

Tanenbaum returned to the West Coast and began to serve in public office. He was elected to the Beverly Hills City Council in 1986 and twice served as the mayor of Beverly Hills. It was during this time that Tanenbaum began his career as a novelist, drawing from the many fascinating stories of his time as a New York ADA. His successful debut novel,
No Lesser Plea
(1987), introduces Butch Karp, an assistant district attorney who is battling for justice, and Marlene Ciampi, his associate and love interest. Tanenbaum’s subsequent twenty-two novels portrayed Karp and his crime fighting family and eclectic colleagues facing off against drug lords, corrupt politicians, international assassins, the mafia, and hard-core violent felons.

He has had published eight recent novels as part of the series, as well as two nonfiction titles:
The Piano Teacher
(1987), exploring his investigation and prosecution of a recidivist psychosexual killer, and
Badge of the Assassin
(1979), about his prosecution of cop killers, which was made into a movie starring James Woods as Tanenbaum.

Tanenbaum and his wife of forty-three years have three children. He currently resides in California where he has taught Advanced Criminal Procedure at the Boalt Hall School of Law and maintains a private law practice.

Tanenbaum as a toddler in the early 1940s. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

A five-year-old Tanenbaum in Brooklyn, near Ocean Parkway.

Tanenbaum’s family in the early 1950s. From left to right: Bob; his mother, Ruth (a teacher and homemaker); his father, Julius (businessman and lawyer); and his older brother, Bill.

Tanenbaum’s high school varsity basketball photo from the ’59–’60 season. He played shooting guard, center, and forward, and earned an athletic scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, where he continued to play.

Tanenbaum shooting during a basketball game his junior year of high school. He wore the number 14 throughout high school and college.