A terrible crime has been committed,” said Milton Freeland, looking at the jury, stoking the sincerity. “We all feel for Susan Weiner and her family. How can such things happen in broad daylight? we ask ourselves. We all want justice for Susan Weiner.”
Do we? thought Karp. He looked sideways at Hosie Russell, sitting at the adjoining table. He looked a lot better than he had in the harsh light of the locker room. He was neatly dressed in a suit and tie and wearing the glasses. Karp wondered whether their lenses were really ground to a prescription or if Freeland kept a stack of odd peepers in his desk for show.
Karp had thought that Freeland would go the emotional route. Karp had not done so in his own opening. He never did. The opening for the prosecution should be dry, like a table of contents: first I say what I’m gonna say; then I say it; then I say what I just said. You wanted the impression of a carefully woven, mutually supporting net of facts; leave the emotion to the defense. Good advice, given ten years ago by an old homicide D.A. who had helped train Karp.
Freeland was pacing slowly before the jury, drawing out the words, as if each one had popped that instant from the oven of his warm heart. “… yes, a young woman was brutally murdered—there’s no doubt about that. And the state will try to show that my client, Mr. Russell, is that murderer.
“Indeed, they must show it, beyond a reasonable doubt; that is Mr. Karp’s job. It is his show. I could sit here sleeping during the trial, and so could Mr. Russell, and it would not matter. My client is innocent until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt. That is what the prosecution must do. But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that proof will be impossible if you are the reasonable and decent people I know you to be. Because Mr. Russell is innocent of this dreadful crime.
“He stands accused today for one reason and one reason only—he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He fell victim to the fervid desire of the police to find a culprit, any culprit for this spectacular and highly publicized murder in the shortest possible time.
“Mr. Russell was ideal for this purpose. He is poor. He is homeless. He has severe emotional problems. And he is black.”
As Freeland said this, Karp knew, he would be looking directly and intently into the eyes of the three black members of the jury. Karp thought back to the voir dire. The jury selection had taken five days, probably longer than the trial itself would take. Karp thought the whole thing was a waste of time nine times out of ten, but the voir dire was dear to lawyers, especially defense lawyers, who almost always believed that they had a mystical ability to pick an acquitting jury. Also, it was to the defense’s advantage to drag the thing out as long as possible, especially in a case that depended as much as this one did on the testimony of witnesses.
Reasonable doubt—Freeland had to cultivate it like a gardener. All he needed to win was one tender green shoot, and time was the best fertilizer. What? You mean to tell us that you can remember a face you saw once, five weeks or ten weeks, or eight months ago? So Freeland had used all his peremptory challenges to fill the jury with people who might be swayed by the idea that the cops had dragged in the first available brother off the street, and Karp, of course, had tried for a group of solid taxpayers.
Neither had succeeded, of course; the jury was what might have been pulled out of a hat. Freeland had got his college student with collar-length hair and his matronly black woman. Karp thought that his black security guard captain and his black retired schoolteacher would provide a balance, and do the right thing. Freeland was going to play the race thing up, and so hadn’t objected to the two black men. That might have been a mistake, Karp thought. But he only had to hit once.
Freeland was well into his peroration. “… and I think, I know, you will conclude that Hosie Russell’s only crime was being one of society’s forgotten men. He is as much a victim as Susan Weiner, a victim of the desire of the police and the prosecution to find a scapegoat that would get the press off their backs. But the real killer of Susan Weiner still walks free. If you convict the wrong man, you will be denying that young woman justice. If you listen to the prosecution’s illogical tale of concocted evidence and mistaken, so-called, witnesses, if you give it a moment’s credence, then you will be compounding injustice and denying justice forever to the victim of this horrible crime. Thank you very much.”
Karp stood up. The crutches cramped his style. He liked to move forcefully from evidence table to witness stand to jury box during a trial, confident that his size and athletic movements would rivet attention and keep the duller jurors awake.
He called the first witness, a civil engineer. This was a departure from the usual practice. Since it was a legal necessity to show that a murder had in fact taken place in New York County, the early witnesses were generally those who could establish that fact—the medical examiner and other forensic experts. But Karp wanted first to establish the scene of Russell’s capture firmly in the jury’s mind from the outset, because the only reasonable defense was that the man found in the basement under the boiler was not the man whom the crowd had chased from the murder scene and who had briefly invaded the apartment of Jerry Shelton.
He led the engineer, a thin, scholarly man with wire glasses, through the layout of the apartment complex at 58 Barrow and introduced as an exhibit a large chart showing the building’s floor plans. Freeland peppered him with meaningless objections, all of which were overruled. Freeland still hadn’t caught on that Judge Martino liked dispatch and a thorough understanding of how trials got done in the big city.
Freeland’s questions on cross were, of course, directed at establishing reasonable routes of escape for the putative other man. He chose the one Karp had expected: the skylight at the top of the stairs.
Freeland asked, “Now, sir, there is a skylight at the top of the stairs there, leading to the roof, is there not?”
The engineer confirmed this and pointed it out on the exhibit when asked. He agreed that once on the roof there were a half-dozen routes down to the street or across other rooftops to other streets.
Then he asked whether a man could get up out of the skylight, and Karp snapped an objection, rising briefly on his good foot. Calls for a conclusion based upon speculation. Sustained.
The next witness was the police photographer—routine. The photographs of the murder site and the Barrow Street complex, then the knife were duly admitted into evidence. The next witness was Ray Thornby, the arresting officer. But it was by then four-fifteen, and Judge Martino adjourned for the day.
Not a bad start, Karp thought as he packed up his papers. He walked up the aisle and out of the courtroom, and suddenly there was The Sister, in voluminous black, staring at him. He tried a false smile and started to say something, but she turned away and left the courtroom. He felt unaccountably chilled. For some odd reason, he felt that The Sister was not on his side.
Harry Bello walked into the Izmir Restaurant from the kitchen, in the slack hour right after lunch, flashing his badge at the astounded and undoubtedly illegal scullions. He found Aziz Nassif, the cousin, punching away at an adding machine in a small storeroom-cum-office behind the main dining area.
Bello showed his shield. Nassif frowned. He was a stocky, strong-looking man of thirty-odd with a thick head of hair and a brush mustache. He said, “I got the door clear and the sprinkler fixed. What you bothering me again?” He had a guttural accent, quite unlike that of the elegant Mr. Kilic at the United Nations.
“I’m not from the building department, Mr. Nassif. I’m investigating a murder.” A little bombshell, but there was no dramatic reaction. Nassif paused and asked, “What murder?”
“Mehmet Ersoy. Sunday, March 13, this year.”
Nassif looked sorrowful and wagged his head. “I talked already with police. Then.”
“You knew the victim?”
“A customer. Very good, come here all the time. Very sad thing.”
“Yeah. He was here on the morning he was shot, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. Almost every day have breakfast here.” Nassif nodded vigorously to affirm this information. A young waiter came into the office on an errand. Nassif turned on him, his face contorting briefly, and snapped, “Çek arabaru!” The boy gaped and scuttled out.
“And where were you when the shooting took place, Mr. Nassif?” Harry continued as if nothing had happened.
“Where I was? Here. In restaurant.”
“All morning?”
“Yes, all. All day.” Harry stared into the man’s face, which remained blank and unrevealing.
“While you were here with Ersoy in the restaurant, did he say anything to you? Anything that would have suggested he was in danger?”
“No. Just hello, how are you. Like this. Is just customer.”
“Uh-huh.” Harry gestured broadly and said, “This is a nice restaurant. You own it?”
“Yes.”
“Expensive. East Side, nice neighborhood. Do you mind if I ask what you paid?”
Nassif opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and said, “Two hundred thousand.”
Harry registered surprise. “Whew! That’s a pile. Where’d you get the money? A loan?”
“I save.”
“You save. Good. Well, thanks for your help, Mr. Nassif.” He produced a card. “You think of anything else the victim said or did, give me a call.”
Nassif took the card mutely and looked at it without apparent interest. Harry paused at the door and said, “By the way, did Mr. Ersoy ever mention to you that he was running an art-forging operation?”
Blankness remained. A mute shrug, a shake of the head.
“No? Okay, thanks again for your help.”
Harry went out into the street. It was muggy late August weather. In Bed-Stuy, where he used to work, and around the less desirable addresses in Manhattan, blood would be flowing. Harry didn’t miss it much. He walked across the street and lounged in a shady doorway.
He wore a shabby gray seersucker suit, a white shirt and black and tan tie, and heavy, rubber-soled black cop shoes. He stayed still for twenty minutes. Harry was good at staying still. Sometimes, off-duty, he would just zone out, perfectly aware of everything but feeling no need to stir, a man literally with nothing to do. In his doorway he was as invisible as a leopard in an acacia tree.
Here he waited for an hour or so, to see what Nassif would do with the little zinger that he had just received. Nassif did nothing. No panicked race out the door, looking over his shoulder, no hurried arrival of the cousin to consult. Nassif was either innocent or cool, Harry didn’t know which.
Karp hobbled back to his office from the courtroom, looking forward to a nice cool Coke and a lie-down. As soon as he entered the secretarial bay, however, Connie Trask informed him that he was not about to get it.
“He wants you,” she said with that upward tilt of the eyes and head that identified the He Who Wanted.
Karp sagged, let out a breath, dropped his fat folder on Trask’s desk, pivoted on his crutches, and went back out the door.
After the customary maddening wait in an antechamber, Karp was ushered into the D.A.’s throne room. Bloom was sitting in his special raised chair at the end of the conference table. Next to him sat Conrad Wharton. Karp’s heart sank; this was going to be a crappy administrative matter, something that could have been handled with a phone call. It served to confirm his suspicion that Wharton liked to see him dashing around the building crippled.
Therefore he was surprised when Bloom, after the usual false pleasantries, asked, “How’s the Weiner trial going?”
“It just started. Openings and a couple of official witnesses.”
“But he’ll go down for it, for murder two, this guy, uh …”
“Russell. Yeah, he’ll go for it.”
“Yes. It’s an important case. Lots of press on this one. The ‘seven-dollar killer’ they’re calling it. It’d be a disaster if he walked out of there. You’re sure?”
Karp wondered what this was all about. The D.A. seemed nervous. Wharton had on his usual unreadable plastic-doll smile and a fixed stare. Karp answered, “Well, no jury trial is ever a lock. But we have a good case. And the guy did it.”
“And you always win murder cases,” said Bloom. “Well, good. I’m happy to hear it. Good work.”
This statement amazed Karp more than if the district attorney had leaped up on the table and done the dance of the seven veils. He tried to recall the last time Bloom had complimented him, and came up blank. He nodded and murmured an acknowledgment.
“Well, is that it? Anything else?” said the D.A. breezily. Wharton still hadn’t said anything. Karp wrinkled his brow, confused. It was their meeting.
Bloom rose to his feet and so did Wharton. Karp heaved himself out of his own chair. Bloom walked him cordially to the door of the conference room, another first.
“Lucky break on that Tomasian thing, huh?” Bloom said casually. “That’ll nail it down.”
He meant the jailhouse snitch. Karp was noncommittal. “If it’s legit,” he said. “I haven’t really followed the details since I’ve started this trial. I could get Roland to give you a ring and fill you in.”
“No, that’s okay,” said the D.A. quickly. “I’m sure it’s in good hands.”
Karp left, puzzled, as if he had just finished a conversation in a foreign tongue in which he was not quite fluent. I missed something, he thought. What was Wharton doing there? What was Bloom afraid of?
It was by now past five, and Centre Street was moving into its evening routine. Karp had a list of things to do, prepared by Trask, which, of course, he had not done, having been stuck in court all day. At the top of the list: call Ray G.
He called, figuring only an even chance of finding Guma in. Guma kept odd hours. Long divorced, he maintained a Queens high-rise apartment that he rarely visited, preferring to crash in the Manhattan apartments of one or another of his many girlfriends. If he didn’t have a court appearance, he was likely to take off early and go to the track or a ball game, or hang out in a bar. On the other hand, when a case struck his interest, he might be found working at midnight.
He was in. Karp asked what was up, and Guma said, “I’ll come by.”
“It’s this Joey Castles thing,” said Guma when he had settled himself in one of Karp’s chairs, “I can’t figure it anymore.” Karp was stretched out on his cot with his casted leg elevated. Guma did appear more than usually disheveled. His enormous tie knot was pulled down to the third button, and his thinning, greasy curls were awry and flying, witness to many runnings of fingers through them. He had a heavy five o’clock shadow.
“What’s the problem?”
“What it is, is they, Joey and Little Sally, they keep talking Turk this, Turk that. So, like I told Marlene the other day—she told you, right?—uh-huh, I figured Minzone was in deep on it. That was the theory. So I think to myself, let’s see what old Turk is up to. Raney checked it out for me.
“Turns out, for the last three weeks Minzone’s been in Madison Park hospital, getting carved. The Big C. I was fuckin’ amazed—the guy was an ox, you know?”
“Maybe there’s justice after all.”
Guma looked pained. “Hey, Minzone whacked some people in his time, but cancer … besides, he’s about my age. I mean, have a heart.”
“All those guinea stinkers caught up with him. So, if it’s not Minzone, who’s the Turk?”
“Damned if I know. An out-of-town thing? The point is, they’re getting anxious. Little Sally is. Joey is telling him not to worry, that the whole thing’ll be wrapped up by Thursday next week, Friday the latest. Eddie Scoli is gonna move the stuff, he says—”
“Scoli the fence? Where’d he come from?”
“Yeah, see? It’s like that. Look, go back to the beginning. Joey ran the operation lifting stuff from the airports. The Viacchenzas went into business for themselves. Joey didn’t like that, so, we figure, he had the Viacchenzas whacked. We got Jimmy Cavetti for it.
“Little Sally is real pissed at Joey, but Joey sets up a deal on the side that’ll take some of the pressure off him. Sweeten the pot for the Bollanos. That’s what all this Turk talk is about. Only we don’t know what the deal is. Drugs? A big diamond deal? We don’t know.”
“If Eddie Scoli’s involved, it could be diamonds,” Karp mused.
“Yeah, right, but, again, who’s the Turk? I hit the records. I talked to Safe and Loft. In town, outa town, I can’t find any big-time heavy theft guy with that street name.”
Karp said, “You know, this may sound crazy, but there’s a possibility that they’re talking about an actual citizen of Turkey. That’s why I was curious in the first place when I heard that tape in your office. I got Turks out the ears on this other thing, the U.N. hit.”
He was silent for a moment, reflecting, running isolated events and discoveries from the past four months through his mind. A pattern, unlikely at first and then increasingly plausible, came into focus, like a photographic image rising out of blankness in a tray of developer. He snapped his fingers and pointed one of them at Guma. “Look, here’s what we need to do. You, me, Roland, Harry Bello, Raney, Marlene, and, um, V.T. need to sit down and talk. I think we’re stepping on each other’s jocks here. Let’s set it up for tomorrow, right after court. And meanwhile, why don’t you have a chat with Jimmy Cavetti?”
“Jimmy? Why? He won’t say shit.”
“I don’t mean about the murder,” Karp replied. “Just ask him exactly what it was that the Viacchenzas ripped off.”
Guma left, and ten minutes later Marlene came in, bearing a large, flat box.
She said, “You awda a pizza?”
“Yes,” said Karp. “If that’s the one with pepperoni and mushrooms and a hot girl to squirm on my lap and bite my neck and give me the kinda kisses that I’d die for.”
Marlene glanced at the ticket taped to the box. “Yeah, check: pepperoni, mushrooms, squirm, bite, kiss. What you want, the pizza foist or afta?”
“Afta,” said Karp. She sat on his lap and delivered. “Watch your hands, I don’t want to get all runny and gasping,” she said, gasping.
“Why the hell not?” Karp breathed into the hollow of her neck.
“Because,” she said, straightening, “I’m a mom. I have to function. I have to tear myself from your embrace, gulp down a cooling pizza, race home, have an Alka-Seltzer, and get the baby fed and ready for bed, not to mention talking to her so she remembers that I’m her mom and not somebody who tears her away from the nice day-care lady.”
Karp looked at his watch. “Speaking of the kid, where is she? I thought day-care closed up at six.”
“Harry’s got her. He’s been picking her up the last couple days.”
“Good for Harry,” said Karp. “He doesn’t mind?”
“He adores it. It makes him feel temporarily human. And Lucy loves him. It’s the most perfect deal in the City.”
“Well, she’s for sure the world’s safest baby,” said Karp, opening the pizza box. Marlene brought two cans of soda out of her bag, and they ate.
“Anything new on the loft?” Karp asked as Marlene lit up one of her rationed cigarettes.
“Oh, just that we are going to be thrown out on our asses for sure now. Stuart says Lepkowitz has raised the ante. Now it’s a quarter mil. And considering the hit from the surgery and the five grand you blew with Roland—well, hi ho! I could sell my white body on the mean streets …”
“Who gave you the nickel?”
“What?”
“You know, Morris’s business is on the rocks, so he sends his wife out to trick, and she comes back in the morning with fifty dollars and five cents, and he says, ‘Who gave you—?’”
“Oh, yeah, ‘Everybody!’ Honestly, it’s not a joking matter, Butchie. We could be under the bridges this time next year.”
“Well, first of all, I haven’t blown my five large yet. The case isn’t over.”
“No? I thought Roland had a snitch who dropped one on little Tomasian.”
“Yeah, I thought it was kind of peculiar they got a snitch this late in the game and off a guy like Tomasian.”
“You thinks it’s a ringer?”
“Got to be. And no, it wasn’t Roland who set it up. It could’ve been the skell himself, heard some shit on the jailhouse telegraph, figured to cut a deal. I don’t know.”
“So what do we do?”
“Same same. Find the real guy.” He told her about what he had learned from Guma and about the brainstormer he had organized for the next day.
“I’ll be there,” said Marlene, “and another thing—tomorrow’s Friday, and I am not going to spend another weekend by myself.”
Karp mimed desolation and clunked his cast against the desk.
She said, “And fuck your cast too! I will find a way; count on it!”
After Marlene left, Karp saw that she had “forgotten” an almost full pack of Marlboros on his desk. That was part of the reduced-smoking campaign. She left packs of cigarettes behind her wherever she stopped, like the spoor of a deer. Without thinking, he scooped the pack up.
To his mild surprise, Hosie Russell was waiting for him when he arrived at the staff locker room for his shower. Karp had thought that after their last interview, Russell would avoid him, but there he was, glowering, hesitant, yet exhibiting an expectant attitude. What did he expect? Karp wondered.
“You bring any cigarettes?” he asked.
Karp handed him the Marlboros. Russell broke off the filter on one, lit it, and sucked greedily. Karp stripped, took his one-legged stance under the shower, and emerged hopping from the steam, wrapped in a towel. He always tried to keep his cast dry in the shower, but since this was virtually impossible, it had started to become spongy on the outside and to unravel around the toes. The bright messages written on it by his co-workers had run, becoming indecipherable, if decorative, swirls of color.
“So,” he said when he was seated on the bench, “what’s happening, Hosie? They treating you okay? How’d you like your day in court?”
Russell said, “That lawyer’s fucked up big-time, man.”
“Freeland? Why? I thought he did pretty good.”
“I don’t mean how he did. I mean how he is. Treat me like a dog. A dog fool.”
“Well, you know, you have the right to ask for another attorney. I mean, it’s your case, not his.”
“Wouldn’t do no fuckin’ good. Jew lawyers all the same. Fuck ’em all!”
“Suit yourself,” said Karp, beginning the difficult process of working the leg of his sweatpants over the lumpy cast.
Russell said, “You want some help with that?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind.”
Russell helped Karp dress. Karp thanked him. Russell sat across the locker room aisle on a bench and smoked. The mumble of the imprisoned and the burble of water pipes blended distantly, a background to their silence.
Then, out of nowhere, Russell began to talk, disjointedly, in spasms, interrupted by long pauses and the snap of matches as he chain-smoked.
It was a complaint. He had never had a break. He was the second youngest of seven children, and the only survivor. The others had died, in wars, in jails, of suicide and murder. He had been brought to New York by his parents at the age of four with his younger siblings and raised in Harlem, the glittering Harlem of the thirties and forties.
Hosie had not participated in the glitter. Someone had dropped a load of bricks on his father. The family had sunk to the lowest echelon of poverty. They were “nigger poor.” He had “scuffled.” He had dropped out of school in the fifth grade and run numbers. He had tried to become a pimp and failed. His first theft was recalled, a purse-snatching. He had been grabbed and pounded by the cops and done juvie time.
He hung out on the street, doing casual labor, getting fired a lot, sometimes for petty theft, sometimes for drinking. He drank heavily. He got hooked on heroin.
He became a small-time burglar. No rough stuff, he added; he had never carried a gun.
He had fathered children with several women, all of whom had betrayed him, abandoned him. A daughter had turned whore. A son had been shot to death in a dope deal. Another daughter had cast him out.
He was as incompetent at crime as at everything else. He had spent twenty-two years of his forty-odd years behind bars. He had missed the Korean War in prison on a six-year robbery stretch.
Karp listened quietly, noting that the criminal justice system had had at least one effect on Hosie Russell. It had given him an alternate language to describe his life. His speech was peppered with sociologist’s jargon. He said, “I’m a recurrent alcoholic.” He said, “I got low self-esteem.” The tale had a rehearsed quality, as if he had told it any number of times before, to parole boards, to social workers. He had probably told it to the sister of the woman he had murdered.
He went on and on. He was sorry for all his crimes. He regretted them. But what else had life offered him? He said, “I never got a chance to reach my potential.”
When this last came tumbling out of his mouth, Karp asked, “What do you think your potential was?”
“Say what?”
“Your potential. If you hadn’t had to scuffle, if you’d had the money, what would you have done?”
Russell thought for a moment. Then he said, “A artist. I always liked to draw and paint and shit like that. I did a lot of that in the can, like when I was in Lex for the dope thing, I had this therapy—they let you alone. You could paint. They said, the lady there, said I had a talent for it.”
“Do you still do it? Draw?”
Russell snorted. “Yeah, on the fuckin’ floor with a mop. What you think?”
Karp shrugged. “You could take it up again. You’ll have plenty of time.”
Russell bristled at that, the confidential mood broken. “What good’s that gonna do? All y’all care about, put the nigger away. What damn good is it?”
“No damn good at all,” agreed Karp affably.
“But you do it anyway? What the fuck, man. I go in, there’s fifty little jitterbugs out there pick up the slack. You pathetic.”
“Uh-huh. But it’s my job. It’s what I do. And you’re right—it is pathetic. People shouldn’t grow up like you did. I shouldn’t have crippled my knee. Susan Weiner shouldn’t have died on the street with a knife through her heart. Life stinks. On the other hand, we’re supposed to at least try to make it better, or leave it so that our kids have a shot at making it better, God help them.”
“That’s what’s gonna make the world better? I go upstate fuckin’ forever?”
“Well, yes,” said Karp, as if making a discovery, “it will. You won’t kill any more young women. It’s not much, but that’s all we got.”
“I never killed nobody,” said Russell, almost to himself, almost as if he didn’t expect anyone to believe him.
“Uh-huh, and if the jury buys that, you walk out.” He stood up in his crutches. “Big day tomorrow. Got to go.”
Russell said, “You ain’t gonna give me no break or nothin’, are you?”
Karp paused and looked carefully at the other man, and shook his head. “Here’s the thing, Hosie. This is nothing personal. I mean, if you weren’t a criminal, I’d probably enjoy going down to the courts with you, shoot some hoops, crack jokes, and so on. I mean, I don’t think you’re a devil or anything. I understand why you turned out how you did, the story of your sad life and all.
“Okay, I understand, but what good does that do? Doesn’t do me any good. Somebody once said, ‘To understand all is to forgive all.’ Fine. I understand you, and I forgive you. Maybe her family can forgive you too someday.
“But then what? Acts have consequences. You drop a brick, it falls to the ground. You couldn’t live in a world that didn’t have some physical order in it. There’s a moral order too; it’s dim but it’s there. Or maybe we just have to pretend that it’s there so we can get out of bed every day. I don’t know. You following me here, Hosie?”
Nothing.
“And here’s another thing: understanding never helped you out. It probably hurt you, come to that. You figured it as part of a hustle, get you out of a jam. I mean, you been hustling me, in a way. We all figure that, you understand somebody, you go easier on them. But why? Maybe when we understand, we should be harder, not softer. Maybe that would fucking work.”