Resolved (31 page)

“I'm glad to see you, Lucy,” said David Grale. “You know, besides Father Dugan, you're the only person I miss up here in the world. And look at you! You've turned into a lovely young woman!”

Lucy felt herself blush and was glad of the night. At one time she had maintained a crush of gargantuan proportions on this man, when he was a Catholic Worker and a fellow servant of the poor. And she was not called lovely very often.

He turned to examine the twins. “And these are your brothers. All grown up, too, I see, and I see God has sent an affliction to…which one are you?”

“Giancarlo.”

“Great things often arise from the afflictions God sends. You're a believer, I think…yes?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. And your brother is not. Isn't that mysterious?”

Grale walked across the pavement and sat on the deep windowsill of an art gallery, right on the little sawteeth set there to prevent such sitting. They stood in a group in front of him, like tourists gawking at an exhibit.

“Dear, would you possibly have a cigarette on you?” he asked.

She did and he lit one up, inhaling luxuriously and blowing a column of smoke.

“I love these,” he said, “and, you know, I don't think I have to worry about lung cancer.” He grinned. “They said you were having some trouble,” he said.

“A little. You know about the Manbomber, right?”

He'd heard nothing but rumors. Grale did not do current events. She quickly filled him in, especially about the more recent revelations: that Felix Tighe was alive (and she had to explain who he was) and had set off a bomb that had killed a cop's wife in the presence of all the Karps; that a man of Latino or Middle Eastern appearance had tried to kidnap Giancarlo, and one other thing.

“I know Tighe. He called himself Larry Larsen and said he was a homeless ex-con, you know, down at Holy Redeemer. He was pretty curious about my connection with Tran. You remember who Tran is?”

“The Viet bodyguard, yeah. Why did he want to know about Tran?”

“I thought he was just making conversation. I mean it's pretty unusual to know someone like that and Tighe is a con artist. You know, they want to find out all about you so they have some kind of angle…that's all I thought it was. But now, that there's this connection with ibn-Salemeh, that explains it. They wanted to find out where he was, and they figured I'd know.”

“Do you?”

“Of course. And that was the reason for the snatch on G.C. They figured if they had him, I'd tell.”

“Would you?” asked Giancarlo.

“No, silly. I wouldn't care if they gave you a million nuggies,” she said, giving him one. “But there's another thing. You remember when we used to talk about spiritual stuff and about how dumb people were if they believed that ‘spiritual' meant ‘good'?”

He nodded. “Yes. I miss those discussions. As I recalled we talked about saints and demons…”

“Yes. Anyway, I think Felix is one. I mean he's inhabited. I told Father Dugan about it and he sent a guy around, a priest, and the guy agreed. He put a kind of zinger on Felix and Felix stayed away from the soup kitchen after that. I saw him in front of our place a little while later. I gave him some cash and he booked. But now, with all this, with the Arabs coming after us and him, too…and my parents can't know this is going on, they have enough to deal with right now, and…you were the only one I could think of.”

He finished his cigarette, stubbed it out carefully, and placed it in a tin box he took from his pocket, nodding all the while. “I see. So you want me to marshal the armies of the night to look after you and your brothers.” He grinned again, more wolfishly this time.

“Yeah, just until they catch them. Can you do that?”

“I'll need a little while to set it up. I'm sure Spare Parts will help out once he knows the story. Actually, I'd very much like to meet this Felix. I must say, I'm a little surprised at you calling on me. I thought you had scruples about…” He gestured vaguely, taking in all of society's norms and the corpus of Christian morality.

“I guess you were wrong,” she said. “About Felix, you'll be careful, right? I mean—”

“Oh, you think if I confront him and he happens to not survive, I'll be infected?”

“Yes.”

“Darling, who do you think lives down there where I live? What do you think I'm doing down in the deep tunnels?”

Actually, she hadn't thought about that at all. “So how do you keep from, you know…”

“Being infected? I don't. I trust to the Holy Spirit to keep them all under control.” He laughed and, lowering his voice an octave, said, “My name is Legion.”

“That's not funny.”

“No. It's a shame. It's hard to be in polite company anymore.” He rose and hoisted his pack onto his shoulders. “It was nice seeing you, Lucy. Boys. Don't worry, we'll keep an eye on you all.” His mad eyes met hers. “God be with you,” he said.

“And also with you,” she replied.

He walked over to the manhole and lifted it with a tool he took from his jangling belt. In a moment he was gone. The lid clanged dully into place.

“Boy, that was great!” exclaimed Zak. “God, Luce, you know all the cool people. How come I don't get to meet cool people like that?”

“He's an insane serial killer, Zak,” she said.

“Yeah, wow!” Zak exclaimed, his face shining. “Neat!”

 

It is dark by the time Marlene enters Manhattan. Policemen and camo-clad Guardsmen populate the entranceway to the Battery Tunnel, and trucks of various types are pulled out of line for inspection, including Marlene's. There is an altercation between Gog and the NYPD's bomb dog, which Marlene has to sort out, with much exhibition of identity papers.
Vere are your paperz?
No longer an ironic line, it seems, in New York. They clear her without a thorough search of her truck—silly them—and she creeps through, her many felonies unrevealed.

As she turns east on Houston her cell phone buzzes. One of her street informants: Cherry Newcombe is on the move. Marlene drives into the Lower East Side on Essex, parks in a certain lot near Delancey. It's still a little early, so she goes into the camper and lies down on a foam pad with her dog, who is transported by this act to paradise. She allows him to nuzzle her face and then wipes herself off with a towel kept for that purpose. She stares into his brown eyes and hopes that she may come back as a dog: a short intense life where morals and ethics are reduced to mere loyalty seems good to her just now. “Why was I not made a dog, like thee?” she purrs. Oh, shut up and rub my belly, the dog replies.

She dozes and wakes with a start. Voices and the occasional sound of thumping music. She strips her clothes off and gets into the jumpsuit, sneakers, and balaclava. She loads her pistol and screws in the suppressor. Peering out the camper's side window, she sees that a black Lincoln Towncar with custom gold trim is sitting in a dark corner of the lot. A white guy is leaning in the passenger window. He walks away and she slips out.

There is a black man sitting in the driver's seat listening to Usher sing “U Remind Me.” Marlene looks in the passenger window and taps on the frame with the butt of her weapon. “Get out of the car,” she says politely.

Smoke Belknap looks at her without expression. “It's in the glove. You want the money, too?”

“I don't want either. I'm not after dope or money. I want you out of the car.”

“Well, then fuck you, bitch! You want to cap me, go the fuck ahead. You not getting my ride.”

Marlene shoots Belknap twice in the car stereo to make her point. The pistol makes a thirty-decibel sound, about the same as clearing your throat in church.

“I don't want your car, either. Get out now. Take your keys.”

Belknap gets out, slamming the door. “Then what the fuck
do
you want?”

“I want you to make a call to one of your customers.”

After some protest, Belkap places the call, and after a good deal more protest, he himself is placed in his car trunk. When Cherry Newcombe comes out of the nearby nightclub on the promise of a sachet of particularly pure and cheap cocaine, Marlene kidnaps her and forces her into the back of the camper. There she is introduced to Gog, who does his insane carnivore act, which is not entirely an act, while Marlene explains what she will let the dog do if Cherry does not tell her right now the truth about Paul Agnelli, Mr. Fong, the ex-wife, the phony rape charge, how Agnelli's DNA had arrived on Cherry's underpants, and how Cherry's fibers and other traces had arrived in the back of Paul's car.

After urinating in terror on Marlene's foam pad, and after she stops crying, the girl is forthcoming into a tape recorder for some time. It is a complex plot, and Cherry does not know all the higher details, but enough. She's been paid three thousand dollars for her participation, which amounted to her testimony, a used pair of panties, and a selection of hair and secretions. A Chinese man had paid the fee and taken the stuff; that is all she knows.

Afterward, she starts crying again and asks Marlene what will happen to her, what the cops would do, what Fong will do when he finds out. She starts to cry again. Marlene looks at the girl, the absurd sex-ruined child in her expensive tiny dress, and finds that she feels nothing at all.

“I don't care,” she says honestly. “There's a trunk-latch button inside the car. Go let your dope dealer out and maybe he'll give you a freebie.”

Marlene climbs into her truck and drives away. As she drives she feels that something is amiss, that she has forgotten to do something. When she has parked and is walking toward her door, she realizes what it is. In the past, when Marlene participated in acts of violence, she always became nauseated, and threw up. But she's not nauseous now. She feels fine. She feels nothing at all.

D
R
. S
HAH WAS A GOOD WITNESS
. W
HEN ASKED A QUESTION
he would cock his head slightly to one side and knot his brow, demonstrating that he was making an effort to utter the whole truth, and in his answers he was precise, answering just what was asked. His diction was precise, too, featuring the clipped accent of the vanished empire. His mien was distinguished without being threatening: a pale brown man of about sixty, slightly overweight, with graying sides to his full head of dark hair. He was heavily diploma-ed as a forensic pathologist, and had worked as an assistant medical examiner for fourteen years. Karp watched the courtroom as he took his seat. He felt a tension that had not been there yesterday. All the jurors were alert and staring.

“Dr. Shah,” said Karp, “when you first appeared here as a witness some weeks ago, what was your goal, in your testimony?”

“Why, my goal, as required by the law, was to attest to the cause and manner of death.”

“And so you discussed those wounds of the victim that taken together produced the shock and exsanguination that were the immediate cause of death, and only those, correct?”

“That is correct.”

“But there were other wounds, were there not?”

“Yes, there were.”

“Doctor, I would like you to tell the jury about one of those wounds, the wound from the bullet that we have been calling during this trial ‘bullet number two,' which was the second bullet shot from Detective Nixon's weapon. What was the path of that bullet and what damage did it do?”

Dr. Shah said, “Yes, well, based on the transcript of my notes, that bullet entered the anterior deltoid muscle at an oblique angle and struck the anatomical neck of the humerus, shattering it, and then rebounded back into the axillary region of the torso, striking against the posterior surface of the clavicle. It caused a greenstick fracture of that bone, and came to rest two centimeters from the medial end of the clavicle, where it was retrieved by me during autopsy.”

“Thank you. Now, in plain language, Doctor, what were the physiological results of this damage?”

“The damage was localized, of course, and not life-threatening, but neurologically quite severe. No major blood vessels were damaged—the brachial and subclavian arteries and veins were intact. But the bullet shattered a large bone mass, sending a hail of bone splinters down and medially—that is, toward the body. The ulnar nerve, the median nerve, and the radial nerve of the left arm were all completely severed proximal to the insertion of the deltoid.”

“And what would have been the medical results of such damage?”

“The voluntary muscles of that arm would have been paralyzed.”

“I see. And after such damage, would the victim have been capable of exerting a powerful grip on something with his left hand?”

“Oh, there is no question of powerful. He would not have been able to grip at all. He would have had no control of that arm whatsoever. It would have been hanging like a dead fish.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Karp nodded to Hrcany. “Your witness.”

Karp had to give Roland game. When confronted by a hostile expert who is not bullshitting at all, the only strategy is to get him to tell a slightly different story than the one he provided for the opposition, and hope that the jury will take this as reasonable doubt. So Roland had the doc go through the list of nerves in the arm and to say yes or no as to whether those nerves were cut. He was able to prevent Shah from expanding on his answers, to point out, for example, that these other nerves didn't matter, that the major motor nerves were the only ones that counted. Unfortunately, Dr. Shah bridled under this treatment, and became more and more impatient, so that when Roland finally said, “So, Doctor, it's not correct to say that Mr. Onabajo's arm was entirely deprived of neurological impulse, is it?” the medical examiner did not give a simple “no,” but burst forth with, “Not relevant, sir, not at all. The left arm was completely paralyzed.” After which Roland had to ask the judge to direct the witness to answer the question asked, and to tell the jury to disregard the doctor's answer.

The jury did not like this at all. Karp could see it on their faces. They had heard a solid impeachment and they were shocked. A pair of cops had lied under oath and had been caught in a lie by the testimony of a patently decent man who clearly had no interest in anything but the truth. You need to sit down now, Roland, Karp thought, take the hit and move on and try to fix it in summation, but even as he thought it, he knew Roland would not: it was his one failing as a lawyer. Karp had spoken to him about it any number of times when Roland worked for him in the homicide bureau.

“Dr. Shah,” said Roland, “you're a Muslim, are you not?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, puzzled, “but what does—”

“Objection, Your Honor, relevance,” said Karp instantly.

“Withdrawn; nothing further,” said Roland and sat down, with the courtroom burbling around him.

The judge called a recess after that, and Karp went back to his office. In a normal case, this would be the time when a defense attorney who had just seen his case go up in smoke would call and propose a deal, because juries did weird things. For an ADA a bird in the hand was often better than taking even a small chance that it would fly away, and also, with a plea, you got to see the defendant stand up there in court and unravel all the lies. But he knew Roland would not call. The clients would not press him, because they had slipped into hallucination—they believed the story they were telling. It was truth for them, and they had a whole culture backing them up, rather like the Southerners who maintained in the face of all evidence that the Civil War was not about slavery. But the real reason was that Roland Hrcany could not ever admit that Karp had beaten him in a direct head to head. You wanted courtroom lawyers to be scrappy, but Roland carried it to extremes, and his rivalry with Karp, twenty years in the festering, had become toxic.

So there was no call, and the court assembled again. There was no chance of a surrebuttal, because the medical facts could not be disputed. Roland needed to make the jury forget Dr. Shah and his clarity, and concentrate instead on the confusion in the nightclub parking lot. And he did. And he was good, too. He did the little speech about how much we owe to the people who protect us,
especially in these trying times,
and went on to compare Nixon and Gerber struggling with the gun to the desperate struggles that went on all over the city all the time,
especially now that we've been attacked by people who don't share our values
. Maybe people like Dr. Shah, hm? Which was not said, but left lying there like a wrapped gift of garbage for anyone to pick up.

And then the usual about the state's obligation to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and then a list of all the reasonable doubts—the conflicting on-scene witnesses, the disagreement about the ballistics, and who knew what a desparate individual might be capable of, doctors didn't know everything, look at what they told you was healthy, and then unhealthy, and then healthy again! Against that you have testimony from two experienced, brave, decorated officers. They didn't have to come up on the stand; the law cannot compel any defendants to appear as witnesses. They came voluntarily because they wanted you to hear the truth from their own lips. Their testimony agrees in every detail. The man was hanging on, he was grabbing the gun, he didn't let go even though shot twice.

It was rare, and when Karp rose to begin his own summation, he could see concern on the faces of some of the jurors. It was time for a Mark Antony opening. Karp utterly abjured any hostility in his mind or heart regarding New York's Finest. Cops were great and glorious and everyone knew that, and everyone wanted to support the police. Unfortunately, however, cops were human, and humans make mistakes, like the two defendants did on the night they killed Moussa Onabajo. What they should have done then was to say, Oh my God, we made a mistake, no, a whole series of mistakes. Karp counted these off on his long fingers. One: we accosted an inebriated man in the dark because we thought he was somebody else and we tried to get him to sell us narcotics. Two: because he wasn't a dope dealer he felt insulted and he abused us, but we persisted until he struck at Detective Nixon with his fists. Three: we did not identify ourselves as police officers. Four: in our anger we violated the police department's own rules of engagement—we drew our guns. Five: we panicked and shot a defenseless, harmless man seven times and killed him.
That
would have been telling the truth, but these men did not want to tell the truth. They feared the sanctions that the law provides for mistakes of this magnitude. So they made their final mistake: they lied. You did not hear the truth from their lips, but only self-serving lies.

Karp then went on to enumerate the lies and the testimony that established that they were lies beyond a reasonable doubt, focusing on the ballistic and medical evidence. He explained that Nixon was just as guilty as Gerber, even though he did not fire any fatal shots: they were acting in concert, and Nixon had started the assassination. He just wasn't as good a shot as his partner.

After that he said, “These facts are incontrovertible. For whatever reason, in whatever nighttime confusion, these two defendants at some point decided to kill Moussa Onabajo, and they did kill him, in violation of the law, for no reason except that he had made them angry by insisting that he was not a dope pusher and thereafter assaulting one of the officers, who never identified himself as a policeman, with his fists.”

Karp moved to one side of the jury box, so that the jurors had a clear view of both him and the defendants at their table. “Now, let me confess something, ladies and gentlemen: if these policemen had come forward in the trial with the truth, if they had come forth crying, “God forgive us! It was dark, we were frightened, we made a terrible mistake, we violated our oath and our department's rules and gunned down an innocent, harmless man,' then I believe that the state would have had an almost insurmountable task in bringing in a conviction for second-degree murder. Not in this season, and not in this wounded city. But they did not do that, they did not do the decent and honorable thing, they did not emulate the brave men who died wearing the shield of New York's Finest. Instead, they came before you arrogant in their lies. They sought not expiation or healing, but impunity.
Impunity!
Look at them! They don't think they did anything wrong.”

Karp spun and pointed his long arm at the defendants. Gerber had the look of a stunned ox. Nixon, bless him, had an actual half smile on his face, the gelid expression of a schoolboy caught in a fib. Karp gave it a couple of beats—not a sound but the whirring of fans—and went on.

“Ironically, Mr. Onabajo came from a nation where policemen and soldiers assault citizens, and kill citizens with impunity all the time. And it is likely that if Mr. Onabajo had been on the streets of Lagos and not New York he might not have defended his reputation with such vehemence. He might have run away. He might have confessed to a crime he didn't commit in order to avoid a worse fate. But he thought he was in a different kind of country, a country where even a struggling street merchant like Mr. Onabajo had dignity, and the protection of the law, where he could practice his religion, and earn an honest living, and care for his family, a country where despite his race and religion he was safe from being murdered by police officers just because they didn't like the way he behaved. Was he wrong about our country? I don't think so. I think we still have that kind of country, despite the terrible pressures of recent events. I hope you think so, too. If you do, if you think we still live in a nation where the police cannot shoot down a man with impunity, then on the basis of the evidence you must find, beyond a reasonable doubt, to a moral certainty, that Eric Gerber and Frank Nixon are guilty of murder in the second degree.”

Judge Higbee's charge to the jury took another two hours, a fair and unobjectionable charge, right out of the book. Prosecutors usually take pains to define reasonable doubt and moral certainty, but Karp thought that the facts were so heavily on his side that he felt free to omit this part, confident that the judge would cover the points sufficiently, as he indeed did. Higbee was taking no chances of being reversed on that score. The jury trooped out at 4:10, looking serious, even grim, as homicide juries mostly did. Karp hoped the jury room was cooler than the courtroom. He figured on a fairly long deliberation, because he sensed that it would be difficult for them to reach consensus in a case this troubled and controversial. Therefore, he left the office at about 6:30 and walked slowly home. For once, he had not needed a reminder to take his cell phone with him.

To his surprise, that instrument sang out just as he was about to enter the elevator that went up to his loft. It was a court officer. They were back. Karp trotted over to Lafayette and grabbed a cab in front of the Holiday Inn, taking it the six blocks back to the courthouse. The pack of placard-carrying protesters in Foley Square had grown larger—hundreds and hundreds of people—and there were cops in helmets setting up gray crowd-control sawhorses in the streets. The press had been alerted and was lying in wait at the DA's entrance. Policemen had to help him through that mob. Cameras, reporters, and technicians packed the hallways outside the courtroom. They shouted for his attention like feeding gulls.