Marlene had just picked up Lucy and was looking for a parking place near D’Agostino’s on Sheridan Square when her beeper went off. Marlene cursed under her breath and turned to her daughter, sitting in the seat beside her.
“I’ve got to call Uncle Harry, Luce. You stay in the car and watch Sweety. And don’t leave it for any reason, understand?”
“Did that lady get found?”
“I don’t know, baby, I sure hope so.” Marlene double-parked and ran into a cigar store to make her call. It was inevitable that sooner or later one of Marlene’s clients would be attacked by a gentleman acquaintance. She knew that, but it did not diminish her wrath or her pain. The previous evening the actress Karen Wohl had left her East Fifty-second Street apartment, telling her roommate that she was going to meet some people at a restaurant. Her doorman got her a cab, and that was the last time anyone had seen her. There was an all-city search in progress, for the woman and for her admirer, Hubert Waley, whom Marlene had instantly fingered for the cops.
“They found her,” said Harry. His tone made her belly lurch.
“How bad?”
“Bad. He wrapped her and dumped her by the river in East Harlem. He’s in custody at the Two-Five.”
“I’ll go,” she said. Tears were flowing down her cheeks and she made no effort to hold them back.
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, my client, my fuck-up—I need to be there.”
“It happens, Marlene,” said Bello.
Marlene said an abrupt good-bye and hung up the phone. She did not wish for comfort.
“Where are we going, Mommy?” asked Lucy when the yellow car was speeding up the East River Drive and it was therefore clear that they were neither going shopping nor returning home. Marlene snapped a glance at her daughter. The child’s eyes were shaded under a grubby tan Stetson that she had taken over and which she was wearing with the only skirt she would willingly put on for school, a white leatherette garment with a fringe. A pink western shirt with pearl buttons and the flower-embroidered shawl she had borrowed from Isabella completed the bizarre outfit.
“I have to go by the police station.”
“That lady got killed, right?”
“Right.”
“Are you going to look at her dead body?”
“No. But they caught the man who killed her, they think, and they want me to look at him and say if it’s the right man.”
“Then they have to kill him too, right?”
Marlene sighed and wiped her eyes with a tissue. “No, honey, it’s too late for that. They’ll just put him in jail for his whole life. Maybe.”
There were several TV vans and a crowd of reporters on the street outside the Two-Five. Marlene parked in one of the spaces reserved for unmarked cop cars and placed on the dashboard an “NYPD Official Business” sign that Harry had saved from his former life. Holding Lucy tightly by the hand, she pushed through the crowd, identified herself to the uniforms at the door, and entered the building.
In the lobby, an officer with sergeant’s stripes on his arms and a rack of decorations over his breast pocket approached her and asked politely if he could help. Marlene introduced herself and said, “I’m here on the Wohl murder. They want me to ID the suspect as the man who’s been stalking the victim.”
“Okay, that’s Detective Mancuso, the second floor. Just go up …” He stopped, aware that the woman was staring at him strangely. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Ah, no,” said Marlene. “I just noticed your name tag. You’re Joseph Clancy, aren’t you?”
“Guilty,” said Clancy, smiling. He looked down at Lucy, who was staring at him wide-eyed, and wiggled his fingers. He said, “Hiya, cutie! That’s a neat outfit. You gonna be a cowgirl?”
“A cowgirl detective,” offered Lucy. “My mommy is a detective too.”
Clancy looked back at Marlene, wrinkling his brow. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”
“Not really. But you know a friend of mine, Ariadne Stupenagel. The reporter? You’ve been a subject of conversation at our house.” Marlene thought Clancy was less than pleased to hear this.
“Oh, yeah. I heard she got hurt. How’s she doing?”
“Much better. She’s writing away.”
“Anything ever come of that story she was doing?”
On impulse, and in service of some more pot stirring, Marlene replied, “God, yes! She thinks it’s going to be the biggest exposé since Knapp.”
But Clancy responded to this information with a noncommittal nod and a grave look. The massive Knapp Commission study of corruption in the early seventies was a familiar and painful memory to the cops. He turned his attention back to Lucy. “Hey, cowgirl—how about you and me go for some ice cream while your mom does her business?”
“Oh, that’s very kind of you,” said Marlene, “but …”
“No, really, it’s no trouble,” said Clancy, offering his hand to Lucy, who grasped it. “I got four of my own, and it might take some time to organize the lineup for this scumb—this suspect.”
Marlene went upstairs and met Detective Mancuso, a quiet, burly man who reminded her a little of Harry Bello. He was brushing plaster dust off his desk. He grinned sheepishly and raised his eyes. Marlene followed the gaze and saw that the ceiling was falling down in chunks.
“The place is collapsing,” said Mancuso. “It’s worse by the cells and the interrogation rooms. It’s the beams—dry rot.”
Marlene was not interested in ceilings. She asked, “How did he do it?”
“A cab. He got himself hired by a cab company and cruised back and forth with his top light off until he saw her waiting.”
“He confess yet?”
“Nah. He loved her and he would never hurt her.”
Marlene hung around for three quarters of an hour, observing the detective work of the Two-Five. She looked for Jackson, but saw no one who answered the description given by Ariadne. She did see one person she recognized—the crime reporter Jimmy Dalton, a squat, bald man who gestured broadly with a dead cigar while he talked to one of the detectives. Dalton looked up, saw Marlene, clearly recognized her, and then pretended he hadn’t, which was odd.
She was wondering what to make of this when Mancuso came by and said that the lineup was ready. Marlene had no trouble picking the unremarkable little toad, Hubert Waley, out of the group.
When she went by Clancy’s desk to collect her daughter, she found Lucy sitting on the sergeant’s desk with a cop hat on in place of her Stetson, sucking on a lolly, her face liberally smeared with the remains of an Eskimo Pie.
“You’ve ruined her appetite for the next month,” said Marlene.
“I fingerprinted, Mommy,” said Lucy, holding up a smeary official print sheet.
“Not for the last time, the way you’re going,” said Marlene sourly. Turning to Clancy, she was about to offer conventional thanks, but, somewhat to her own surprise, she found herself lowering her voice and saying, “Look, Sergeant, I may be out of line here, but we need to talk.”
“About what?” said Clancy, frowning.
“You know about what. John Seaver. Paul Jackson. The D.A. covering for them. They looked at the autopsies again. The dead cabbies were murdered, right here, on your watch. The shit is about to hit the fan on this whole thing, and my friend Stupe says you’re a nice guy, and while I know about the famous blue wall, this might be a good time to get yourself some cover on the side, just between you and me.”
Clancy’s face was stiff. Marlene indicated with a movement of her head the large framed picture of a blond woman and four children on Clancy’s desk. “You need to think about them, Sergeant, not a pair of bent cops.”
An odd look came over Clancy’s face, one Marlene could not readily interpret. Resignation? Relief? In any case, he said, “Not here.” He scribbled something on a piece of paper and slipped it to her low. She looked at it: an address in Woodhaven, in Queens.
Karp was home when they arrived. Marlene heated some leftover pizza for Lucy, who begged and was allowed the rare treat of eating in front of the TV, and whipped up a brace of Spanish omelettes, which they had with big chunks of Tuscan garlic bread. They exchanged the day’s news.
“They brought out their old crock doctor today, Feinblatt,” said Karp.
“The one who heard Murray say the Great Man died in the saddle with his boots on?”
“That’s the one. I killed him on cross. It turns out that what he remembered was not what Murray actually said at the conference, but the newspaper speculation surrounding the death—the Veep was found alone in his town house with an attractive woman, he had his shirt off, stuff like that. We had three witnesses who were there testify that Murray never said anything like that. Besides, if the chief medical examiner had said publicly that the vice-president had died during sex, it would have made headlines around the world, and it didn’t.”
“How’s Murray holding up?”
“I think he’s recovered. It’s hard to shake up somebody who likes to dissect rotten corpses. He screwed up by not telling me all the jobs he’s taken since he got canned, but on the other hand, I had those big-time lawyers up there saying they wouldn’t touch him as an expert witness because of the firing. Plus, he didn’t get the Suffolk County job, which we brought out on cross. It may hurt us on damages, but not much. He’s still got badge of infamy with respect to getting any major C.M.E. appointment. Face it, they have no case on the facts, they have no case on the law; the only thing they can do at this point is smear.”
“That’s why Keegan,” she said.
“Yeah, Keegan,” said Karp glumly. He fell silent and pushed the food around on his plate.
“You’re going to have to tear him up?”
“Oh, hell, no! Keegan? What’m I going to do, impeach him? On what grounds? No, besides …”
“What?”
“I feel terrible for the guy. A man like that, sucking after Bloom.” He paused, thinking both of Keegan and of himself. “Ambition.” The word came out like a blasphemous oath.
“So what will you do?”
“I don’t know,” said Karp, suddenly blithe. “Appeal to his better nature, I guess.” He looked at his wife benignly, and seemed to absorb for the first time that she had not changed out of her downtown outfit, that and the hurried meal.
“You’re going out?”
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m going to Queens to talk to Joe Clancy.”
“Uh-oh. That sounds serious.”
“We’ll see how serious. I think mainly he’s thinking about jumping ship and he wants to know how long is my rope.”
Sergeant Clancy lived in a post-war brick bungalow in Woodhaven that was barely distinguishable from the post-war brick bungalow in Ozone Park, a mile or so to the southeast, that was still home to Marlene’s parents. And although Clancy was about her own age, or a little older, she found his home more like that of her parents than her own. There was a living room, in which she was now seated, with the good set of furniture, the blocky sofa, the two graceless armchairs, all covered in a chicken-blood satin, the mahogany coffee table, the china cabinet, and side tables. The Clancys had gone for the fake Duncan Phyffe instead of the fake French Provincial her folks had. Marlene had a glass of Pepsi in her hand, with a cocktail napkin around the base and a coaster for the coffee table. Mrs. Clancy, a worn, pale, blond lady, with a tendency to speed, had supplied this, together with five minutes of small talk. Kids, schools, and churches. The Clancys were Holy Family people; the Ciampis were St. Joseph’s. Oh, you must know …
The two girls and the older boy were trotted past for admiration; the retarded child was not, nor was he mentioned, although there he was in the large color photo portrait of the whole family (the sergeant in uniform, with decorations, the rest of the family dressed for Easter at church) that hung over where the mantel would be if the house had been grand enough to have a fireplace.
“I’ll go get Joe,” said Nora Clancy when the conversation flagged. Marlene was studying the portrait when Clancy walked in.
“That was a couple of years ago,” he said from behind her. “James, that’s the baby, is in the Southampton Institute, out on the island.”
“For Down’s syndrome?”
“He had hydrocoele too,” said Clancy too quickly. “Water on the brain. He needs a lot of care. Everyone else is just fine, though, like you saw. Can I get you another drink? Or something stronger?”
“I’d love one, Sergeant …”
“Hey, I’m home—call me Joe.”
“Okay, I’m Marlene. I’d love one, Joe, but I can’t drink right now—I’m six months gone.”
A peculiar look came over Clancy’s face when she said this, and Marlene briefly wondered whether he found something accusatory in her remark, as if the Clancys’ prenatal regime had been short of perfection and there was the result, the gnomelike creature up on the wall. But the look faded in an instant, and Clancy plopped himself down in an armchair, waving Marlene at the sofa.
“So, why are we here?” he asked.
“Because the shit is about to hit the fan, Joe. D.A. or no D.A., those guys are going down. And we got two dead kids in jail. On your watch.”
Clancy rubbed his face and looked at her bleakly. “Jesus God, what a mess! Okay, how much do you know already?”
Marlene told him about the autopsy photos and what they revealed, about Stupenagel being shaken down by Jackson and Seaver, about her interview with Seaver, about the reasons for believing in the complicity of Bloom in protecting the two men, about Bloom having had Selig fired to ensure that the medical examiner would be incapable of uncovering the true fate of the cabbies. All she left out was that it was Selig himself who had examined the autopsy photographs. Clancy listened in silence, nodding, his face grave and pale.
When she was done, he said, “Okay, let’s say I’m disgusted but not surprised. Jackson I know pretty well; we were in uniform together at the Two-Seven before I made sergeant and he got his gold potsy, but I just know Seaver by rep. Paul’s got a little problem with his hands. He likes to tune up the skells; you know, perps and the lowlifes.”
“And others as well?”
“Yeah, that too. Generally not an equal-opportunity kind of cop. He got some reprimands, but it never went further than that. The guy had something like seventy-five good felony collars. So they balanced it off.”
“You never wanted to be a detective yourself?”
Clancy rolled his eyes. “Get real! I like regular hours. I have a life. You got any idea what the divorce rate is in plainclothes? Besides, the promotion’s faster in uniform, and there’s more slots open for you at the top. I’d like to be chief of patrol.”
He said this calmly and without arrogance. And why not? thought Marlene. A hero, a good Irish family man; it was entirely possible, provided he had an effective rabbi up at Police Plaza. Somehow, Marlene figured Clancy had taken care of that too.
She said, “Okay, Jackson was rough. Was he always bent?”
“Yeah, Paulie took. Not like guys in narco, not big-time, but he took. The problem with Paulie, though, is in the brain department. He’s not too swift there, you know?”
“So Seaver came up with the plan, you think?”
“No question. Paulie just liked to pound meat, but Seaver needed money bad.” Marlene looked a question and he added, “He likes sports action. Compulsive. The guy bets on soccer games, for cryin’ out loud! His wife ditched him, so he’s got child support to pay. By the way, this is all hearsay. Neither of them exactly unburdened themselves. But it’s known around the house. I even heard they got themselves a string of girls on the stroll over by ’Tenth, near the park.”
“Okay, they were bent,” said Marlene. “They shook down gypsy cabbies and some of the poor bastards started to make waves. So they yanked some of these guys off the street to put a little fear into them, and ended up killing Ortiz and Valenzuela. So, the question is, how did they get the D.A. to cover them? What did they have on the D.A.?”
Clancy made a helpless gesture. “Hey, I’m not in on the whole story, Marlene. This I don’t know, but you got to figure, everybody needs money, right?”
“Oh, come on Joe! Sanford Bloom rolling over for a couple of hundred a week? The total of what they ripped off in a year wouldn’t pay the maintenance fees on his duplex. No, they caught him doing something real bad. In the spring of last year, around April, May. Anything ring a bell?”
Clancy shook his head. “Not a blessed thing, Marlene.”
“What about Stupenagel getting beat up?”
“The same—not a whisper. Of course, the kind of job I have, I wouldn’t hear much from the detectives. As far as seeing something? You got to understand, a patrol sergeant’s practically a railroad train. It’s a clockwork job—roll call, paperwork, make your beat tour, coffee from the same joint every night. It’s not hard to keep something from a patrol sergeant. In fact, you could say it’s a well-developed art.” He paused, smiling slightly at his joke. Then he said, “I wouldn’t put it past Jackson, though. Seaver, I don’t see him involved, in that or in any murders.”
“Why not?”
“Because the guy had a name as a candy ass. A bleeding heart. I mean, he might let Paulie do whatever, but he wouldn’t touch any rough stuff himself.”
Marlene nodded. This only confirmed her impression of John Seaver as a man without the cold-bloodedness necessary for violence. Ariadne’s story of Jackson shaking her down also supported that view; Jackson had used his hands, Seaver had stood by.
“So you think Jackson hanged those two kids by himself?”
“If they got hanged, Jackson could have done it. The guy’s strong as an ox. He could have cuffed the kids flat on the ground and then tied a shirt or a sheet around their necks and stood on a table or something, and then just hauled up. Was that how it was done?”
“Something like that.” Marlene felt no need to tell Clancy about the ankle abrasions Selig had found on both victims.
“What do you think will happen now?” asked Clancy, worry in his voice.
“What I guess is that once I.A.D. gets another look at those two autopsy reports and puts it together with the other information—and that story about the D.A. squad running a big investigation won’t hold up—then they’ll move to suspend Seaver and Jackson. Seaver will crack. He almost cracked with me, and I’m nobody. The state A.G. will suspend Bloom, or maybe he’ll be forced to resign, and then the merry show will begin.”
“You went to I.A.D. with this?” asked Clancy, his face growing tight.
“No, of course not,” said Marlene, growing somewhat stingy with the truth. “My sole concern is with Dr. Selig’s civil case. But clearly the cover-up led to the firing that’s the basis of the case. Once that comes into the open, the defendant’s case collapses totally.”
“And Selig wins big bucks.” Clancy uttered a rueful snort. “This is all about money, isn’t it? Just money.”
“Of course,” said Marlene, as innocently as she could contrive.
Jack Keegan looked smaller up on the stand than Karp remembered him being in his office. He still had the blocky, Irish good looks, the iron jaw, the big nose, and the bright silver wavy hair. Maybe everyone looked smaller on the stand. Or maybe it was what Keegan was doing up there that shrank him, at least in the eyes of his one-time disciple.
It was now what Karp estimated to be the last week of the trial. Spring had returned, signaled in the windowless courtroom by the flowering of light print dresses on the three female jurors and on the spectators, and by the absence of that close odor, compiled of steam heat and disinfectant, that permeates New York’s public buildings in the winter, and also by a certain quickening in the pace of the trial. After Selig’s long agony on the stand, in which, as Karp had predicted, the defense had asked him to account for every penny he had earned since his dismissal, to the end of demonstrating that being fired was the best thing that ever happened to the Selig bank account, the others called by the defense had been quickies: the crock doctor and a set of anti-character witnesses, of whom Jack Keegan was the best and last.
Gottkind put him through his paces through the late morning hours. Yes, Dr. Selig had been abrupt; he had been arrogant; he had often not returned phone calls. Your witness.
Karp rose. “Your Honor, it is five past twelve. I wonder if it would be convenient to break for lunch at this time, so as not to interrupt my cross-examination of this witness?”
It was fine with Craig. The defense did not object. The judge gaveled the adjournment and turned to converse with a clerk. The jury filed out and the courtroom filled with the familiar rattle of chatter. Karp walked over to Keegan, who stuck out his hand. Karp took it and looked into the older man’s eyes. They were almost of a height, Keegan somewhat shorter but bulkier, a football rather than a basketball guard.
“Come and talk to me for a minute, Jack,” said Karp.
Keegan nodded gravely and started to follow Karp out of the courtroom.
“Your Honor!” Gottkind was dancing in front of the presidium and waving his hand, like a third-grader asking leave to go pee. “Your Honor, I must protest. Plaintiff’s counsel is interfering with my witness.”
Craig looked up from his conversation, annoyance on his face. He focused his heron’s stare at Karp. “Mr. Karp?”
“Judge, Mr. Keegan is an old friend and colleague. I only wanted to have a few words with him, of a personal nature.”
“It’s irregular, Your Honor, and I will register a protest on the record.”
“That is your right, Mr. Gottkind,” said the judge dismissively. Amusement crept into the sharp blue eyes. “Mr. Karp, may we trust you not to suborn, bribe, or intimidate the witness during this colloquy?”
“I will not, Your Honor.”
The judge nodded and went back to his conversation. Karp led Keegan to a quiet corner. They traded compliments on how well each other looked, and chatted briefly about old friends. Keegan asked about Marlene, Karp asked about Mary Keegan. A nervous silence; then Karp said, “Damn it, Jack, what the hell are you doing up there?”
“They asked me,” said Keegan lightly. “Would I say that Murray Selig is an arrogant son of a bitch? Yeah, he is an arrogant son of a bitch.”
“So am I, Jack. So are you. So was Phil Garrahy, for that matter. It’s a character flaw of people who know what the hell they’re doing. But Selig wasn’t canned for being arrogant. He was canned because he ran afoul of one of Sandy Bloom’s dirty little schemes. And you’re up there giving credence to it. Why?”
Keegan’s face started to flush dangerously. “You said it right, Butch. You are an arrogant son of a bitch, and self-righteous with it. Sometimes you need to go along to get along—you still haven’t learned that, son. You’re growing a little long in the tooth to be an enfant terrible.”
“It’s the judgeship, isn’t it?”
There was a long stare after this. Keegan dropped his eyes first and assumed an amused look. He held out his hand. “Good to see you again, Butch,” he said. Butch shook the proffered hand, convinced he had seen for an instant a flash of shame in Keegan’s eyes.
After the lunch break, Keegan took the stand.
“Mr. Keegan,” Karp began, “when you served as head of the Homicide Bureau, I was one of your assistant district attorneys, was I not?”
“Yes.”
“And you had the responsibility of training me to prosecute homicides—I was your student, in a sense, and you were my teacher, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” He paused, smiled. “You were my best student.”
“Thank you.” Karp turned slightly so that his remarkable peripheral vision could take in the jury. They were lapping it up. “And part of that training was in how to work well with the medical examiner’s office, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“And as part of our work we had much to do with Dr. Selig when he was a senior assistant medical examiner there? Hundreds of cases?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Now, as part of your teaching, did you ever warn me that Dr. Selig was hard to work with, incompetent, and lacking in any respect whatsoever?”
A longer pause. Keegan seemed to square his shoulders. He answered, “No, never.”
“And was there ever, to your knowledge, a homicide case involving Dr. Selig in which he did not carry out his duties with the very highest professional standards?”
“No, none.”
“And did any of the problems you adverted to this morning in your testimony, the missed phone calls, the so-called ‘arrogance,’ ever, to your knowledge, hinder in the slightest degree the successful prosecution of a single homicide case?”
“No. None that I can recall.”
Karp waited three beats and said, “Mr. Keegan, would it surprise you to learn that many of the young lawyers who sat at your feet during those years, being trained to be the best homicide prosecutors in the world, may have considered you yourself somewhat abrupt and arrogant?”
Keegan smiled broadly. “No, it would not surprise me in the least.”
Karp grinned back. “Thank you. No further questions.”
Keegan left the stand. Karp didn’t know whether the expression on Conrad Wharton’s face was worth a judgeship, but it was one of life’s sweet moments nonetheless.
“The defense calls Dr. James T. England,” said Gottkind.
Karp felt a sinking sensation. He grabbed his tattered yellow note sheets, looked in vain, tossed them aside, shuffled up the list of defense witnesses he had been supplied. No England. He stood. “Your Honor, this witness is not on the witness list, nor on the list of deponents.”
Craig beckoned him forward with a thin finger. He advanced, followed by Josh Gottkind. At the bench Gottkind said, “Your Honor, Dr. England came forward voluntarily. He called me yesterday and said he had important evidence relevant to the plaintiff’s character.”
“This is outrageous, Your Honor,” said Karp hotly. “Are defendants to be permitted to drag smearing witnesses out at the very last moments of the trial?”
“They did not ‘drag,’ Mr. Karp, nor pursue, it seems, if what Mr. Gottkind says is true. Is it true, Mr. Gottkind? This is a spontaneous appearance by a concerned citizen?”
“Yes, Judge,” Gottkind answered quickly. “He’s been following the case in the papers. He felt obliged to come forward.”
“I take exception, Your Honor,” said Karp formally.
“Exception noted,” said Craig. “Bring on your witness.”
“Who the fuck is this guy, Murray?” asked Karp in a whisper between clenched teeth as the witness took the stand.
“He’s a big shot on the state medical board,” Selig whispered back.
“What did you do wrong that he knows about?”
“Nothing! No, really, Butch, I got no idea why the guy is up there.”
They soon found out. Dr. England was a man in his late sixties, dressed in an old-fashioned and unseasonable brown three-piece suit and extremely shiny brown wing tips. His face was white and long, the thin silver hair combed tightly over the skull. With his wire-rimmed glasses he looked just like the antique doctor in the ads drug companies ran in glossy medical journals, the one sitting at the child’s bedside.
Dr. England testified that he had chaired the Committee on Professional Conduct of the State Board of Medicine in the revocation hearing of a Dr. Stephen Bailey. Bailey was one of the many Dr. Feelgoods who had sprung up in the seventies, dispensing various reality-altering pharmaceuticals essentially on demand to a well-heeled clientele. It was alleged that Bailey had taken to attending house parties in upstate Sullivan County bearing little bags of such meds, distributing them freely to all who asked. Dr. Selig had been called before the board as an expert on toxicology; the board had to determine whether some of the doses of diet pills and such that Bailey had administered were, in fact, dangerous.
“And did Dr. Selig think that Dr. Bailey had prescribed dangerous doses?” Gottkind asked.
“He did not,” said England with a tone and a look that showed what he thought of the opinion. “Dr. Bailey retained his license, largely as a result of Dr. Selig’s testimony.”
“And during that testimony, what, if anything, did he say regarding dosage of the drug amphetamine?”
“He said that he did not know what all the fuss was about, because he had taken massive doses of amphetamine in medical school to help with studying and it hadn’t harmed him any.” Murmurs spread briefly through the court.
“What did you think of that?”
“I thought it was gratuitous, frivolous, and unprofessional,” said England, his face glowing with righteous satisfaction.
Karp whispered to Selig, “Did you say that?”
“Oh, God, of course I didn’t say that.”
“What did you say, then?”
“Hell, Butch, how can I remember my exact words? It was nearly five years ago.”
England’s testimony ground to a halt. The defense rested. Karp checked the wall clock. He rose. “Your Honor, I have no questions at this time, but I would like to call Dr. England back first thing on Monday when court reconvenes.”
The judge’s eyes flicked at the clock too. He knew the pickle Karp was in. He also knew that it was a gorgeous spring day and that if he left now he could roll up a mess of paperwork and get in a full set of tennis before dark. And it was Friday. And the jury could use a little break; he had driven the case hard for eight weeks.
“Well, I don’t see why we can’t break now, as Mr. Karp suggests. You can do your cross Monday, Mr. Karp, and then we can begin summations. I trust that neither of you will be so long-winded as to make me regret this indulgence.” The court tittered politely. The gavel fell.
“How bad is this, Butch?” asked Selig nervously.
“How bad? It’s a disaster, Murray. It’s the end of the trial and I got no way to impeach the fucker, because the transcripts of license revocation hearings are sealed, and there’s no time to get an order to unseal them, and it’s the weekend anyway, and what’s in their minds now is you’re a junkie who let a dope pusher keep his license.”