No Lesser Plea (9 page)

John Conlin was the Homicide Bureau chief, and a reputed ball-buster. That was OK. Karp wasn’t afraid of work and knew he was good. He looked forward to the interview.

McFarley called the next case and Karp slipped back into gear. Assault, no priors, steady job, released on own recognizance. Maybe the guy would show for the trial, maybe not. You had to play the odds if you were a judge. You had to keep the jail space free for the real bastards, which meant that the average lawbreaker was in small jeopardy of spending any time locked up. Each year tens of thousands of people were released on their own recognizance; thousands were never heard from again, unless they were arrested on another charge. It was every judge’s secret fear that he would walk some bozo who would later turn up on the front page of the
Daily News
as a gently smiling mass murderer. It happened, but there was nothing you could do about it. ROR was the Drano of the criminal justice system.

Thirty-two cases later it was noon, and Yergin recessed the court for two hours. Karp gathered his stack of papers and left the courtroom. It was lunch-time in the Streets of Calcutta. People were eating snack-bar specials out of greasy paper containers. An immense Puerto Rican woman was feeding her three children on Twinkies and Pepsi. Karp steered through the mob to a bank of pay phones and called a couple of witnesses who hadn’t shown that morning. One of them was the woman who had appeared five times and had been sent home five times when the defense had asked for an adjournment. Karp convinced her that this time she would get to testify, and arranged for a cop to pick her up at her office. The other one had left town; they didn’t know when he would be back. Scratch that case.

After dumping his papers in his cubicle, Karp took the elevator down to the ground floor and walked out of the courthouse into the real world. It was still spring. Foley Square was full of lunchtime strollers.

Karp walked across the square to a food vendor and joined the line of customers. He was something of a connoisseur of New York street food, since he bought most of his weekday meals off wheeled vehicles of one kind or another. He knew that all Sabrett carts were not equal. He sought out the ones that grilled the hot dogs before putting them in the steam box, so that the skin became crisp and chewy; the ones that had fresh, steam-soft buns, and crisp hot sauerkraut, and real deli mustard. He knew one guy who sold real potato knishes with paper-thin layers of pastry over peppery filling, not the usual hard square kind that looked and tasted like brake pads for a heavy truck.

Today he ordered three hot dogs, mustard and kraut, a salted pretzel, also with mustard, and a can of orange soda. He ate standing at the curb, his fellow citizens flowing past him like breakers around a jetty. Karp ate the hot dogs with four chomps each. Garbage, but good garbage. He drank his soda and walked back up to the courthouse chewing on the pretzel. Elapsed time for lunch: fifteen minutes.

He went back to his office to familiarize himself with the afternoon’s cases. The offices given to assistant district attorneys in the Criminal Courts Bureau were not elegant; strictly speaking, they were not offices either, just glassed-in cubicles, each containing a file cabinet, a gray metal desk, a swivel chair designed to produce hemorrhoids as quickly as possible, and a wooden chair for visitors. Karp had just begun reading when a knock on the frosted glass made him look up. It was Tom Pagano, the Legal Aid bureau chief for the Criminal Court and responsible for the hundred-odd public defenders who were Karp’s usual adversaries. Karp tried to think of what case on the day’s calendar would merit a personal visit from the captain of the opposing team.

“Hello, Tom. Hey, if this is about the Rankin mugging, I told your boy we’re going for trial on the armed charge. No copping to larceny anymore for this baby …”

Pagano waved his hands to shut Karp off. “Stop, stop, this has nothing to do with any defense case. Can I sit down for a sec?”

“Sure, what’s it about?”

Pagano sat down in the hard wooden chair. He was a stocky, well-groomed man of about forty, with short dark hair, swarthy skin, and high cheekbones. He stared at Karp for a moment with large, intelligent eyes, as if undecided about whether to proceed. Finally he said, “I’ve got a case for you.”

Karp grinned. “Sure. You have a hundred and fifty cases for me every day. So what else is new?”

Pagano didn’t return the smile. “No, this is serious, and frankly I’m coming to you personally, rather than going through the system, because you seem like somebody who cares about people getting fucked over, which is what we have here.”

“I’m listening,” said Karp.

The other man took a folded sheet—from a yellow legal pad—out of his breast pocket and consulted it.

“Four kids—Sheldon Goldstein, Victor Cruz, Willie Martinez, and Tony Ocha—were remanded to the Narcotics Addiction Control Commission Center in West Harlem in December of last year. Two weeks ago they tried to escape, unsuccessfully. They want to press charges against the guards who captured them.”

“Brutality? Against guards in the course of an escape attempt? Tom, give me a break.”

“Yeah, I know, but this is a real one. Look, do one thing for me. I’ve got them in a pen on the fourth floor. Come down and listen to their story.”

A few minutes later, Karp, feeling like a sucker, was sitting in a questioning room across a battered oak table from Sheldon Goldstein. Pagano was leaning against the wall near the door. In a corner sat Hal Dooley, a detective assigned to the DA’s office for investigations. Karp had worked with Dooley before; the two men respected one another, but Dooley was the kind of cop who trusted only cops, preferably those over forty-five. He thought the country was going to the dogs. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he thought Goldstein was one of the dogs.

Karp looked at the nineteen year old across from him. He was a weasely faced, skinny kid with acne and bad teeth. As a junkie, at nineteen, he had a life expectancy of approximately three years—and looked it. He wore a Grateful Dead black T-shirt and tattered jeans and kept picking nervously at a scab on his forearm. His face was covered with bruises, his lip had stitches in it and a white bandage covered his left eye.

After introducing himself and Dooley, Karp said, “Alright, Mr. Goldstein, please tell us what happened in the Drug Center on the night of, let’s see … Saturday, February Twenty-eighth, Nineteen-seventy. Take your time. I want to hear the whole story.”

Goldstein began in a reedy voice that grew louder as he warmed to his tale. “See, we was all watching this movie on TV in the Rec Room. Tony says, ‘Fuck this shit, let’s get outa here. Who’s comin’?’ So we all said OK. Tony had this plan, an’ all. Before the show, fuckin’ guy rips off a fire extinguisher from the hallway by the bedrooms and stashes it in the can by the Rec Room.

“So we all go to the can. One by one, see. Tony gives me the fire extinguisher. Him an’ Willie got these pennies rolled up tight in paper in their hands. Victor goes out to where these two screws are sitting, you know, watchin’ TV, an’ says the toilet’s stopped up, shit all over the place, an’ all. So one of the screws comes in to check and I blast him inna face with the foam. He’s blind. Willie clocks him a couple of times and he goes down. Tony grabs his billy club an’ we all run out into the hall.

“OK, so Victor runs down the hall and gets another fire extinguisher. The other screw comes toward him, gonna bat him with his stick, but Victor blasts him inna face an’ Tony cold-cocks him with the stick he took offa the other screw. So he goes down.

“Then we run through the kitchen. There’s another screw there an’ he goes for his piece. Victor and me we both blast him with the foam inna face, same like before. Willie knocks his piece outta his hand with the stick an’ we run past him out to the foyer. The alarm’s ringin’, everybody’s yellin’ like a muthafucka, two more screws jump us. Me an’ Victor bust our way through and get out the door. Then two cars of pigs pull up an’ grab us.”

Goldstein stopped and Karp looked a sharp question at Pagano, who said, “Wait, the best is yet to come.”

Dooley lost it at this point, and bellowed at Goldstein, “You little shit! You beat up three guards, trying to escape, and you have the fucking nerve to press charges? You wish!”

“Hold on, Dooley,” Karp said. “Let’s hear the whole story first. Well, is that it, Mister Goldstein? You tried to escape, pounded on some guards, and picked up some lumps in return?”

“No, that
ain’t
all,” said Goldstein indignantly. “It’s the
next
day we’re complainin’ about. The next day!”

“What are you talking about?” Karp asked, more alert now.

“The next day. Two guards came into our cell and beat the living shit outta us. They handcuffed me and Victor and kicked us around the floor.” He pointed to his bandage. “They kicked my fuckin’
eye
out, man.”

There was a moment of silence. Dooley cursed. “Those goddam assholes,” he said. Pagano added, “Ocha has three cracked ribs and a broken jaw, Martinez has a cracked vertebra, and Goldstein, as you see, has lost his eye.” He looked at Karp. “Well, Counselor, you going to take the case?”

Karp took a deep breath. “What do you think, Pagano, I’m going to bury this shit?” He turned to Dooley. “Hal, I’m going to write up the guards involved for felonious assault. Go up to the Drug Center and look around. Talk to the guards. See what kind of cover-up they’ve got going. Tom, I’ll get Goldstein’s story down on paper and signed and then get the statements of the others in the next couple of days, alright? Good. See you guys, I’m in court in about twenty seconds.”

Karp worked for the remainder of the afternoon with the knowledge that this might be one of his last days in the criminal court system. A grin kept breaking out on his face, so it was hard to maintain the correct prosecutorial mien, which was grim and full of righteous indignation. His last case involved Dickie Waver, an exhibitionist, a graying pleasant-faced little man who had been arrested twenty times before—and probably would be many times again—who enjoyed being arrested almost as much as he enjoyed showing his penis to schoolgirls. Another little psychological service of the criminal court system. The defendant pleaded guilty and was fined. Bang. Justice triumphed. But soon, soon, without Butch Karp.

He went back to his office, dumped his stuff. The phone rang. It was Lannie Kimple, secretary to Doyle Cheeseborough, the chief of the Criminal Courts Bureau and Karp’s immediate (and, he prayed, soon to be former) boss. Lannie was a thin, thirtyish lady who wore horn-rimmed glasses, and translucent blouses over plain slips. She wanted to marry a lawyer and wore a tiny gold cross around her neck to show her sincerity. “Butch, the boss wants to see you—now.”

“I’ve got something I’ve got to do. How late will he be there?”

“Uh-uh, he said
now,
and he’s all bent out of shape about something.”

“What else is new? Tell him I’ll be there in about five minutes.”

“Five minutes ain’t now, Butch.”

“For Crissakes, Lannie, I’m going to pee first, alright?”

There was a silence on the line; then Lannie said, “Five minutes,” and hung up.

True to his word, Karp went to the men’s room, relieved himself, then washed his hands and face. There were no paper towels; there rarely were. Karp dried himself with his pocket handkerchief, then smoothed his hair into place in front of the mirror with a damp hand. He examined the reflected face. He went through a repertoire of expressions. Stern—eyes narrowed, brow furrowed, lips compressed; sterner—eyes staring intensely, brows rolling in knots, jaw tight, lower lip bent under, tense, chin protruding; sternest—(maximum-time-bad-mutha-put-your-ass-in-jail-for-a-thousand-years) eyes popping from sockets, nostrils flared, lips in a snarl, teeth bared and grinding. “Is this the face of a HOMICIDE DA? said Karp, the words whistling through his clenched teeth, “ IS IT? IS IT? YOU BET YOUR ASS IT IS! You’ll talk, Rocky, you’ll talk. Your pal ratted on you, Rocky, it’s all over …” Then, a switch to Sincere—eyes large and almost brimming, face relaxed, big shit-eating smile. “Hi,” he said, in a passable imitation of Liberace, “my name is Karp. I’m with the Homicide Bureau. I’d just like to ask you a few questions. But first, are you comfortable? Can I get you anything? Cigarette? Sandwich? Coffee? A hit of smack? A piece of ass?”

Karp stopped suddenly with a jolt of panic. What if there was somebody in one of the booths listening to all this? He checked. All empty. He returned to the mirror, tightened his tie, put his official face on and left for the Criminal Court Bureau Chiefs Office.

This was not going to be pleasant, thought Karp. Doyle Cheeseborough was a twenty-nine-year veteran of the DA’s office. His tenure had given him dyspepsia, piles, and a rampaging intolerance for anyone who disagreed with him, or for anyone who differed from him in any aspect of philosophy, personal taste, or physical appearance. This intolerance included virtually all of the human race, but it was especially focused on minorities, Jews, tall people, and anybody at 100 Centre Street who appeared to be having a good time.

Karp entered Cheeseborough’s outer office and nodded to Lannie Kimple.

“What happened, did you fall in?” she asked.

“No, it took me a while to coil it up. Cut the shit, Kimple, what’s this about?”

“I don’t know, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t care. I am out of here in two weeks.”

“Oh, when did this happen?”

“I gave him my notice today. I’m going over to work for Judge Calabrese in Appeals.”

“Good for you. You get a better class of people over there.”

She regarded him coldly. “I’ll say. It wouldn’t be hard either. You’d better go in.”

Cheeseborough was sitting behind a massive wooden desk as Karp entered. As usual, he made the visitor wait while he shuffled papers. He had a round head perched on a round body, with skinny arms and legs and white, papery skin. He was nearly bald, but kept a patch of graying hair combed up over his dome, which, by day’s end, was usually pointing straight up, specked with dandruff. Because of this appearance and his personality, he was universally known around 100 Centre Street as the Mad Onion.