ON MONDAY MORNING, Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi and several hundred other assistant district attorneys, the district attorney himself and his aides and assistants, learned judges by the dozens and clerks and secretaries in the hundreds, and brigades of police, and regiments of witnesses and victims, the bored and the anguished, squads of jurors good and true, and uncounted lawyers, young and harried or suave and grave, depending on whether they worked for the poor or the rich, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press, merciless and cynical; and, of course, a varied mob of criminals, the cause and purpose of this whole cavalcade, the petty thugs, the thieves and robbers, whether by stealth or weaponry or clever papers, the whores of both sexes, the cold killers, the hot killers, the rapists and torturers of the helpless, the justly accused, the falsely accused, together with their keepers, parole officers, social workers, enemies, friends and relations, converged, all of them, on a single seventeen-story gray stone building located at 100 Centre Street on the island of Manhattan, there to prod into sullen wakefulness that great beast, the Law.
The Law was having a bad year. Its mistress, the richest city civilization has ever known, was as broke as a piss-bum in the gutter. So among other things, the Law was starved and ill-housed and generally treated like a dirty dog. And the Law responded in kind. It sulked in its grimy kennel and refused to do its proper work, which is, after all, finding out who the bad guys are and giving them their lumps.
Instead it pretended. In that grim year, you could commit a felony in New York and have but a one-in-ten chance of being arrested, and if arrested, but a one-in-ten chance of being indicted, and if indicted, but a one-in-ten chance of actually going to prison. The people responsible for the Law refused to enforce it, instead attending only to its droppings, the criminal justice statistics.
Chief among these was the notion of clearance. Arrests were cleared by plea bargaining beyond all reason, which meant that the crooks knew you would give them almost anything to avoid going to trial, because nothing loused up the system like lots of time-consuming trials. Not to mention that there was no room in the prisons, which exerted back pressure on the system, like blockage in a toilet.
Karp’s boss, District Attorney Sanford Bloom, was the chief apostle of clearance, not the least of the reasons why Karp despised him. Bloom had instituted clearance quotas, which all the DA bureaus and individual assistant DAs had to meet.
Bloom’s sole purpose, it seemed, besides favorable publicity and garnering useful brownie points from those in power, was to keep the system moving at all costs. Never mind that the same people were arrested again and again for similar crimes and always went free.
It had not always been this way. A few years previously, the district attorney had been the legendary Francis P. Garrahy. Garrahy had been New York DA for nearly forty years, in which time he had created one of the finest prosecutorial offices in the world, mainly because he was a great trial lawyer and hired great trial lawyers. He liked trying criminals and putting them in jail for a long time.
Karp had joined this team because it was the best. With Garrahy as coach, young lawyers were scouted, encouraged, browbeaten, pushed to the limits of their talents, and then either chucked off the team or given their shot at the major leagues: prosecuting homicides in New York County. Garrahy was tough, brutal some said, but always concerned about the men he called “his boys.” Karp had loved him.
Not that the DA’s office had been a paradise; it had always been a suburb of Hell. But with Garrahy in charge, there was a small chance at something like salvation, the satisfaction of a well-done job for someone who knew what a well-done job was.
And in fact, the lobby of 100 Centre Street this morning and every weekday morning, did resemble Hell enough to fool the average demon. At eight-fifty it was already crowded with people who had business in court or who worked for the court, but also with those citizens who had no place else to go.
Pushing through the mob, Karp thought, as he often did, that it was always the same crowd. Weren’t there always those two obese black women with tired faces, the trio of pockmarked Puerto Rican youths, the tan dwarf with no arms, the same elderly colored gentleman with the worn gray suit and cracked wing-tips, talking reasonably to an invisible being named Clara?
And the sounds were always the same. A hundred transistors and boom boxes tuned to twenty different stations were punctuated by shouts from the ones who yelled at their lawyers, intermixed with the continuous rumble of arguments and excuses and threats in six languages.
Add in the smell of steam heat, stale tobacco smoke, acrid coffee from the first-floor snack bar, and you could understand why the people who worked at 100 Centre Street called this area the Streets of Calcutta.
“Hey, Mr. Karp, wanna magazine?”
The man who plucked at his sleeve was slight, with thick lips in a large, pale face. His watery blue eyes were wide and intense behind round glasses patched at the hinges with cellophane tape. Neatly dressed in a blue suit and tie, he was pulling a child’s red wagon loaded with old magazines.
“Yeah, sure, Warren, what you got? Sports Illustrated?” Karp asked amiably.
“Sure thing,” said the man, reaching down for a magazine. He handed Karp a three-month-old Sports Illustrated. Karp gave him a couple of quarters.
“See you later, Warren,” he said, moving away.
Warren smiled. “Thanks, you big asshole,” he said in a loud, clear voice. “And go fuck yourself!”
Karp had a warm spot in his heart for the man everybody called Dirty Warren. Although he realized that life was no picnic for him (Warren did not have many repeat customers, and occasionally picked up lumps from those unfamiliar with the brain malfunction called Tourette’s syndrome), he believed the home of the criminal justice system required the presence of someone with an uncontrollable urge to shout obscenities. And Warren was at least physically presentable, which could not be said of many of the other Calcutta regulars, the Scab Man, for example, or the Walking Booger.
Karp’s office was on the fourth floor. Since he was the Deputy Director of the Criminal Courts Bureau, he rated an enclosed office with a real window. The bureau director, a Bloom crony named Melvyn Pelso, was an elegant slug, whose main functions were lunching with the great, going to meetings, and spying on Karp for Bloom. On the good side, he rarely arrived before ten and often skipped Mondays altogether, which meant that Karp could use his vastly larger office for meetings of Karp’s Team.
Karp believed devoutly in rules, in Due Process, and Criminal Procedure, and the Rules of Evidence, and Probable Cause, in the Presumption of Innocence and the Punishment of the Guilty. That the management of the District Attorney’s Office was truly interested in none of these things made his life more difficult, but neither depressed him nor drove him into comfortable cynicism. It just made it necessary for him to organize, unofficially, and under the table, a Team of his own.
The members of the unofficial team had gathered, as they did every Monday morning, in the bureau’s outer office: a dozen young and a couple of middle-aged attorneys drinking bad coffee out of styrofoam cups and munching danishes paid for by Karp and brought in by Connie Trask, the bureau secretary.
He swung breezily in, waved, snagged a coffee and the last prune danish. “Give me five minutes,” he said.
Karp went into his own office and did bureaucracy. He grabbed a thick sheaf of paper out of his brimming in-basket and threw away anything not marked “special” or “urgent.” He read the survivors quickly, threw half of them away, and scribbled notes to Connie on the rest. Then he signed a group of documents having to do with promotions, requisitions of staff, expense reimbursements and supplies. They had all been initialed by his secretary, so he scrawled his signature across them. Connie never made mistakes in procedure.
Leaving his office, he dumped the finished work on Connie’s desk, and went into the bureau chief’s office to pursue his real job, which was making the criminal justice system produce some criminal justice, against all odds and the will of its masters.
At the long, shiny oak table the other lawyers had left a place for him. They were sitting at the table or on chairs dragged from other parts of the room. Marlene Ciampi was sitting behind Pelso’s desk, swinging gently back and forth in a massive black leather judge’s chair.
Karp sat and looked around the room. A few Old Guards—Ciampi, Roland Hrcany, V.T. Newbury—and the rest babies in their first or second year in the DA’s office. Karp recruited the best of the annual intake into the Criminal Courts Bureau, and tried to keep them sane and productive. Even so, the turnover was ferocious.
“OK, let’s get started,” he said. “You first, George. What’ve you got?”
George Sobel stood up, opened a brown manila folder, and began talking about the robbery and stabbing of a Korean convenience store proprietor in quiet, careful sentences, like a man describing symptoms to a physician. Sobel was a good lawyer, but unprepossessing. His auburn hair was badly combed, and he was dressed in a dusty blue suit flecked with dandruff. Karp made a mental note to speak to him about his appearance.
Sobel went quickly through the details of the crime. It was not a very interesting crime, about as unusual as the arrival of the Times Square shuttle at Grand Central, and Karp wondered what the point of the case would be. In fact he was having a hard time concentrating on what Sobel was saying. He was still trying to put together the hijack case, which was becoming entirely too complex. Why was the real bomb in the locker and the fake one on the plane? Surely the other way around made more sense. Or did it?
“… Kim was taken to Bellevue by ambulance at twelve-thirty on the morning of the fifteenth. After surgery, he gave a good description of the assailant to police—”
Hrcany, who had been leaning his chair against the wall, pushed off and brought the front legs down with a bang. A powerfully built man, he sported a fierce blond cavalry mustache and had a dark tan that he boosted with a sun lamp in his office. He looked like a refugee from Muscle Beach, slow-witted and brutal, an impression that was only half correct. “Hang on there, George, I think you lost me,” he rumbled. “What does Manhattan Homicide have to do with it? I thought you said this Kim didn’t die. So we’re talking robbery and assault with a deadly weapon?”
“No, my Kim didn’t die. My Kim is Sun Kim. The other Kim, Nam Kim, was murdered on the third of August, and Kun Park, another owner, the week after. It’s a pattern. That’s the point. This guy Hornreade is going around knocking off Korean convenience stores and stabbing the owners.”
“How do we know this, George? And if we do, why aren’t we going for homicide?”
Sobel took a deep breath. Hrcany was well known for his merciless badgering of younger attorneys. “We know, but there’s no case on the murders. There was an eye on one of them: Park’s wife was in the store. But the mutt was in and out in a couple of minutes. She was in the back and didn’t get a real good look, and then when she saw what he did to her old man she went crazy. Ripped his belly open—same cut he used on both Kims. My Kim was lucky. Also, she doesn’t speak English.”
“The cops have hit the neighborhood?” Hrcany asked. “No other witnesses? Evidence? Prints? There must have been a lot of blood—”
“Yeah, we got prints on the register in the Park case, but they’re crappy, same as usual. Blood on Hornreade’s shoes; maybe it’s Park’s, maybe it’s Kim’s. The one who survived. That’s pretty thin, but—”
“It’s garbage for murder two,” Hrcany said grumpily.
“That’s what I thought, but the robbery assault is golden. Maybe attempted murder. We can blitz him on it.”
Karp nodded. This was, of course, the reason for these meetings. The complex system that adjusted the punishment to the crime had long since eroded. To replace it, Karp and a few of his peers had erected a form of rough justice. Everybody knew who the real bad guys were. If you couldn’t nail them for what they did, you nailed them when you could. Capone, after all, had died in prison on a charge of tax evasion. By carefully concentrating his resources, especially that rarest commodity, the attention of the police, and by cooking the figures when he dared, Karp could meet his clearance quotas and at the same time put a fair number of bastards behind bars for significant periods.
“Good thinking, George,” he said. “Who’s on defense?”
“Carcano.”
“He’s chicken shit. Wave the murders in his face, hint you got more than you do, and go for the max. Don’t roll. Get Judge Maldonado or Kapperstein. If you can’t, let me know. And let me know the hearing date, I’ll goose the judge before. OK, next case. Tony?”
Tony Harris was the pick of the litter in Karp’s opinion, a tall, rangy kid from St. John’s with long, unruly hair. He was bright, a beaver for work, and could hit to either field. He played third base for Karp’s Softball team.
“This could be a Spectacular,” Harris began. A chorus of groans came from the room. Spectaculars were politically sensitive but largely pointless cases that took up too much time, got plastered across the front page of the Daily News, and invoked the personal attention of the district attorney himself.
Harris grinned pleasantly, showing an assortment of large, crooked teeth. “The facts of the case are briefly told,” he said. “On September 11, Jerold Weaver, male Caucasian, an unemployed pipe fitter from Long Island City, got his load on at the White Rose on Eighth and Forty-fifth, during which time he was heard loudly complaining about, if I may quote, ‘these goddam rich nigger pimps’ unquote. At around eleven that night, Weaver was seen in an altercation with a well-dressed Negro male, named Milton C. Weems, who was in the company of a female Caucasian named Molly Frumpton. Weaver was pushed violently to the pavement by Weems, after which Weems and Frumpton entered a 1976 white Cadillac convertible owned by Weems and drove off.
“Weaver then entered his ’64 Dodge pickup, pursued Weems up Seventh Avenue to 56th Street. Weems stopped for a light, Weaver got out of his truck, shot Weems five times in the head with a .38 caliber revolver, got back in his car, drove off down 56th Street, ran a light, and collided with a garbage truck. The cops picked him up unconscious, with the gun on his lap.” Harris then spent fifteen minutes detailing the case, its evidentiary basis, and the state of the depositions from witnesses.
Karp said, “Good presentation, Tony. Any questions, gang?”
Hrcany laughed. “I’ll bite. What’s the punch line, Tony? A citizen blowing away a pimp is a Spectacular? A celebration maybe, but …”
Harris grinned again. “Yeah, we wish. It turns out that Milton C. Weems was—you ready for this?—a deacon at Ebenezer Baptist, the owner of a sizable dry-cleaning business, and father of four. Miss Frumpton was his secretary of many years.”
More groans. Karp cut in. “What do we do with it, Tony?”
Somebody cracked, “Send him to pimp recognition classes and get him another box of shells.” Everybody laughed, a thin, callous laughter with no joy in it.
“Straight murder two as the top count,” Harris said. “Defense is a Public D., name of Rafferty. He’s talking extreme emotional as the affirmative defense, the guy was drunk and so on.”
“Which is bullshit. He hated pimps so much it made him crazy? He was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing, but he followed a car, parked, aimed, and shot?”
“Don’t blame me, Butch, I’m just telling it. Of course, I understand the big question is, what’s the deacon doing with his lily-white secretary in Sleazeville late Saturday night?”
There was an odd tone to Harris’s comment, and Karp shot back quickly, “You ‘understand’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, Wharton called me to—how did he put it? —fill me in on the political ramifications. And to remind me we had nearly six hundred homicides pending trial. And that maybe Mr. Weems was not all he was cracked up to be in the morality department. He was pretty subtle, but the message was that there was no point in, quote, stimulating racial tensions unnecessarily, and that the district attorney would not lose any sleep if we accepted manslaughter one on this.”
“What! What is this, fucking Alabama?” Karp said loudly to the room at large. Conrad Wharton was Bloom’s administrative bureau chief and hatchet man. He was the one who kept the clearance numbers and enforced them.
“Tony,” he said, controlling his anger, speaking in a tired, precise voice, “Section 125.25 of the New York State Penal Code is written in English. It’s very short. Even Wharton could read it. Somebody sticks a gun in a guy’s face and pulls the trigger is either intending to cause that person’s death, section one, or, section two, evincing depraved indifference to human life. So let’s get a Form Two indictment upstairs, huh? And let Mr. Rafferty worry about the defense for a change instead of the district attorney.”
Karp could see in the faces of the younger attorneys that he had given them something valuable, probably the only thing he could give them, since they certainly weren’t going to get promoted hanging around him. He knew he could expect a nasty, exhausting phone call twenty minutes after the indictment hit Bloom’s desk.
He caught Marlene’s eye, as tired as his own felt. He forced a weak smile and said, “OK, Marlene, case of the week. Let’s have it.”
Marlene began briskly, flipping through the large index cards she used for case notes, cards covered with her small, elegant handwriting. She now wore huge, round tortoise-shell spectacles for reading, to prevent the deterioration of her good eye.
She had done a good job on the Doyle case. She called it that, rather than the terrorist case or the Croatian case or the hijack case, which was what the papers were calling it. Marlene was emphasizing that the dead cop was the fixed star around which the increasingly bizarre case revolved.
She concluded with an analysis of the gravamen of the crime: the placing of a booby-trapped bomb in a public locker constituted depraved indifference to human life under the statute, and then went on to the indictment strategy.
“We intend to indict all five participants for second-degree murder under 125.25, section two. Since Doyle was a police officer killed in L.O.D., we could go for murder one, under 125.27. That might be supported by the fact that the terrorists called the police and so might reasonably be held to suppose that the victim of the booby trap would be a police officer. On the other hand, it could be a tricky proof—it’s not like a mutt gunning down a blue suit. Also, we want to sweep them all in under the felony murder clause of 125.25, which is why murder two is a better bet.
“Our position is that the crime is a direct result of a conspiracy to draw attention to a political cause by violent action. That assumes they were all in it; they all knew about the locker bomb; they’re all culpable in the murder. As I said, we would also indict under section three, felony murder in connection with kidnapping, since we can construe the bombing as being in furtherance of the lesser included offense.”
As she stacked her cards and resumed her seat, half a dozen people began to talk at once. Karp banged his knuckles on the table to restore order, and nodded at Roland Hrcany, who said, “It still doesn’t hold up, Marlene. How do we know who planted the bomb? How do we know one of these bozos wasn’t playing a solo?”
“We don’t. The point of the group indictment is to keep the pressure up. They’re hanging together now. They may start coming apart once it occurs to them that they’re looking at going up for murder. If it was a solo, and unless they’re a lot less flaky than they appear, one of them should deliver the trigger man.”
“What about the affirmative defense on the felony murder?” asked Hank Schneerman, one of the junior ADAs. “They could each claim ignorance of the real bomb. They could say they thought it was going to be a phony, like the one in the plane.”
“Yeah, they could. They could say the devil made them do it, too. But the job right now is to show the arraigning magistrate and the grand jury that a crime took place and that the suspects did it. And to do it in a way that will put the maximum pressure on them to improve their individual positions at their buddies’ expense, which I think this strategy does.”
“Butch, are we really going all the way on this one?”
All eyes turned to V.T. Newbury. He rarely spoke at these meetings, except to exercise his acerbic wit. He was a short, slightly built man with a chiseled profile and the kind of huge, luminous blue eyes that John Singleton Copley depicted in portraits of eighteenth-century gentlemen.
“What do you mean, V.T.?” Karp asked irritably. He was not getting the enthusiastic support he expected on this case.
“I mean that this is potentially an incredibly complex case. If we push for trial on this, I have the sense that you and Marlene both are going to be investing a huge proportion of your personal time in it. I’m asking whether it’s worth it.”
“Worth it? Shit, Newbury, they killed a cop! Worth it, my ass! What do you think these meetings are for? How come all of a sudden you’re talking ‘worth it’?”
“Calm down, Butch. Your virginity is safe with me. I know what we’re doing here. We nail the shitheads who think they’re getting away with major crimes. OK, I’m just asking if these guys are in that class. Sure, they have to be put away. But a dickhead fresh out of South Orange Law is going to go for a plea on this. The point is, do we push for the top count or not? Or is there something else going on?”
Karp was, characteristically, about to say something nasty to his best friend, who had, also characteristically, been so unwise as to stand between the wolf and its prey, when the door flung open and a rumpled, barrel-shaped man with the face of a frenzied orangutan rolled into the room. A chorus of boos and cheers burst from the assemblage. Ray Guma, the Mad Dog of Centre Street, grinned broadly and waved. “Hey, gang, stand by! I got a great case—”
“Guma, goddamn! You got a helluva nerve coming in here an hour late looking like shit,” said Karp, relieved to have a less tricky outlet for his annoyance.
Guma’s face fell and he looked down at his outfit. His suit was unpressed, his tie untied, his shirt unbuttoned, a day’s growth of beard stood out on his swarthy face, and his curly black hair stuck out in oily disorder. “Shit? Hey, it’s Monday, I had a great weekend. Give me a break.” Everybody knew that after twenty minutes in the men’s room he would emerge, as always, a reasonably presentable greasy Italian lawyer.
Karp looked at his watch. It was almost time to dismiss the meeting and let the ADAs go off to court. Karp was not anxious to pursue the Doyle case in greater detail, given the reception it had already received. He waved his hand, yielding the floor to Guma. “OK, Goom,” he said. “Spit it out. And make it snappy.”
Guma paused to tuck in a shirttail and pull up the zipper on his fly before plunging into a rapid-fire outline of his case. He spoke, as always, without notes, in a Brooklyn accent that Fordham Law had done little to improve. Guma’s memory was legendary; he never forgot a face, name, or citation.
“The victim, girl named Elvira Melendez, attests her boyfriend, Alejandro Sorriendas, attempted to kill her by beating her with a kitchen chair and then throttling her with his hands. Who the hell knows how she survived, but she did, and she’s in Bellevue and pissed off and willing to press. They picked up Sorriendas the day after, where he works out in Queens. Scratches all over his face, nice prints on the chair, it’s a lock. So what I want to do is—”
Karp cut in, annoyed again. “Guma, what is this bupkes? We’re trying to keep fucking cutthroats from walking here, you’re selling a domestic assault?”
Guma held up his hands in protest. “Butch, for chrissakes, let me finish? This guy Sorriendas, he’s a Cuban. OK, you know Pinky Billman?”
“No, is he a Cuban too? What are you talking about, Guma?”
“Pinky Billman. I know him from when he used to be a detective in Chinatown. A good guy. Now he’s a sergeant in Queens narco. He says this particular mutt, Sorriendas, is tight with Sergio Ruiz. You know who he is, right?”
“No, I don’t. Should I? Look, Goom, we got like five minutes. These guys got to make court, so—”
“Wait, wait! Sergio Ruiz. They call him ‘The Serpent.’ The big-time Cuban heroin and cocaine importer. Really big time.”
“I know him,” V.T. said mildly.
“You do?” Karp exclaimed.
“Well, not personally. I get my smack from an Episcopalian bishop. But I’ve been working with the federal strike force on money-laundering operations connected with narcotics traffic. Ruiz’s name comes up in a bunch of places. Import-export joints in Miami and Tampa, a couple of brass-plate banks in the Caymans, Bahamas, the usual. He came here about five years ago and set up an outfit called—what is it? Tel something?”
“Tel-Air Shipping, out in Queens,” Guma put in.
“Yeah, right. Tel-Air. Anyway, he’s big and he’s smart. Nasty too, from what I hear.”
“Right!” Guma agreed. “We’re talking a serious scumbag. The other thing is, the Feds have clamped the lid on Tel-Air. They’re building some kind of megacase, and Pinky can’t get near it. So what I want to do is squeeze this Sorriendas, try to get a hook into Ruiz. I figure, go forward on the attempted murder. They’ll try to cop to simple assault, but I want to wave a serious threat of trial for the attempted in their face. Whaddya say?”
Karp squirmed. He knew Guma was, quite properly, proposing the oldest trick in the prosecutor’s book: squeezing a suspect for a lesser offense in hopes that he would turn his pals over for a bigger crime. But such strategies depended on a credible threat of going to trial, and the pressure on Karp to produce clearances had almost eliminated his ability to do this.
“Sorry, Goom, no can do,” he said at last.
“Aww, Butch, come on!” Guma yelled, slamming his hand on the table.
“Guma, look, you can wave anything you want, go ahead. But unless your Cuban’s lawyer can’t read a court calendar it ain’t going to get you much, because I’m not going to push Bloom for a trial slot on this one, which I would have to do because right now I’m tapped. I’m not going to let a New York County murder case, of which I got about six hundred pending, fly out the window to try a domestic in the hope that it’ll help out a Queens drug bust, which according to you the Feds have got locked up. Capisce?”
Guma gave Karp an eloquently disgusted look and walked out, slamming the door. After a brief embarrassed silence, Karp sighed and said, “OK, that’s it, gang. Time to fight crime.” The attorneys rose and drifted out of the room, murmuring and upset. Karp looked at Marlene, hoping for some support, but she just shrugged and started to pack her files away in a leather attaché case. The loneliness of command, Karp thought. He touched her arm.
“Say, Marlene, you’ll draw up those indictments? I want to get them to Bloom today.”
“They’re almost drafted. I’ll have them around noon. See you later.”
Karp went back to his own office and began gathering up the case folders for the day’s sessions. For the next six or so hours Karp would be constantly on the move, appearing at arraignments, racing upstairs to one of the six continuous grand juries to present indictments, then picking up on preliminary hearings for any of his troops that were out sick or busy with trials. This was in addition to trying to supervise two dozen inexperienced ADAs.
He arranged the folders in ordered stacks tagged with strips of foolscap and began listing exactly where he had to be at what particular moment of the day. On several occasions he noticed that he had to be in two places at once. He made a note to talk to a couple of the court clerks and get them to adjust their calendars so he could cover everything. Karp remembered birthdays and bought a lot of good scotch at Christmas so that they would do such things when he needed them, which was almost daily.
He was just packing his files in his briefcase when his door opened and a woman entered. “You’re supposed to knock, Rhoda,” Karp said tiredly.
“Yeah, and you’re supposed to return calls from the front office.”
“Is this going to take a long time?” he asked. “I’m going to be late for court.”
She looked at him aggressively, her head cocked and her dark eyes narrowed under the lavender eyeshadow. A smile close to a sneer showed on her generous mouth. Rhoda Klepp was also an ADA, but not the sort who would ever attend Karp’s meetings. On arriving at the DA’s office eighteen months ago, she had shrewdly observed where the power lay and had attached herself to Conrad Wharton, serving him in much the same manner as he served Bloom. As a result, she was relieved of most courtroom duties, while still continuing on the roster of the Criminal Courts Bureau, thus adding to Karp’s coverage problems. It was one of the ways Wharton got back at him for failing to meet his clearance quotas.
“The boss wants to see you, Karp.”
“Mr. Bloom wants to see me? That’s funny, I don’t have a message slip from him.”
“I mean Chip.” Wharton liked people to call him “Chip,” but most people agreed with Ray Guma’s observation that he walked like he had a corncob up his ass, and called him “Corncob.”
“Oh, Chip. Chip is not my boss. See you later, Rhoda,” Karp said, and, grabbing his briefcase, made to leave his office. Klepp blocked his way. This she could do well, since she was built, as they say in New York, like a brick shithouse. She had a figure of overwhelming lushness, mounting immense, perfectly conical breasts, which she enclosed in steel-girded brassieres, mighty structures that could have passed the midtown building code. As she favored frilly, semi-transparent blouses, these were literally her salient feature.
“I’d see him if I were you, Karp. He wants to talk about the Weaver thing, one. And you were supposed to get in touch with Monsignor Keene on the Brannon case last Friday. He called Bloom and he’s pissed. You get the Powerhouse down on you and you’re dead in this town.”
Karp vaguely remembered having to call somebody from the Archdiocese of New York about a nice Catholic boy from an upstanding family who had been caught supplementing his clothing allowance with a string of B and E’s on the Upper East Side. He looked down at Rhoda and for a mad instant wondered what would happen if he honked her cones, one, two. Then he turned sideways and squeezed past her overhang. “I’ll make the call, Rhoda,” he said, “but tell Corncob if he wants to see me, he can make an appointment. I don’t work for him yet. And no deal on Weaver.”
As Karp trotted down the hall to court he reflected mildly on the fact that in three short days he had managed to piss off the Federal Bureau of Investigation, his own staff, his boss, and the Catholic Church. I must be doing something right, he thought.