“DID YOU TALK TO O’DOWD?”
Katz shook his head at Karp’s question. “No, spoke to her legal clerk, Elijah. He actually thanked me for the heads-up.”
“I imagine working for Megan O’Dowd is a challenge,” Karp said, and then sank his teeth into a potato knish he’d bought from the vendor cart in the park across Centre Street from the Criminal Courts Building. He was enjoying a rare, for late December, “balmy” day in the mid-forties with blue skies.
Street preacher Edward Treacher stood nearby on his milk crate, his eyes rolling wildly and his frizzy hair standing on end as he rained fire-and-brimstone biblical passages down on the heads of passersby. At the same time, he held out a hand for “donations to my Godly mission” and offered a smile and a “God bless you” for every charitable contribution. As Karp watched, Treacher climbed down and used some of his mission money to buy a warm cup of cocoa from a vendor.
The Walking Booger, an enormously filthy giant, was working the lunchtime crowd, too. His huge hands, protruding from the sleeves of multiple layers of shirts and coats, were covered with thick dark hair, as all parts of his body apparently were—at least, the exposed parts Karp could see, including his face—and he gave the impression of a large, very dirty bear. One of the Booger’s hands went up to his face, and he inserted a probing finger into a nostril. The demonstration of how he’d earned his nickname nearly cost Katz his lunch.
“I just don’t get how attorneys like Megan O’Dowd live with themselves,” Katz said to distract himself. As part of his training for the current case, Karp had him look at some of the more famous cases she’d defended, including the cop shooters he’d convicted. “There’s a complete lack of integrity, and I don’t understand why the black community puts up with her acting like she speaks for them.”
Before Karp could answer, a short, slightly stooped young man with a long, pointed nose, pale skin, and large, watery blue eyes magnified by thick glasses interrupted. “Missed you . . . fucking asshole whoop oh boy . . . this morning, Karp,” he said cheerfully.
“Sorry, Warren, was running late to a grand-jury hearing,” Karp replied. “I’ll buy two papers tomorrow.”
Dirty Warren smiled. He owned the newsstand in front of the Criminal Courts Building and, despite his outburst, was a friend of Karp. His unfortunate nickname was inspired by the fact that he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, a brain disorder that, along with facial tics and muscle spasms, interspersed his speech with obscenities.
Karp didn’t know much about Dirty Warren except that he was in his thirties, lived in an apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and, as one of a certain group of street people who either panhandled or worked around 100 Centre Street, was a conduit to David Grale and his army of homeless Mole People. Most people shied away from Dirty Warren with his tics and language, as well as his shabby clothes, scruffy face, and stringy hair that poked out from beneath a moth-eaten New York Yankees stocking cap. But over time, Karp had learned that looks were deceiving, and his friendly, verbally abusive news vendor was a bright, funny young man with a good heart who on several occasions had acted courageously to protect others.
“Oh boy oh boy whoop shit piss,” Dirty Warren said. “And by the way, the public doesn’t give a . . . flying fuck lick me . . . damn about integrity.”
Katz was taken aback. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
“Save your breath, Kenny,” Karp said with a smile. “Our clever friend here was trying to pull a fast one on me. Isn’t that right, Warren?”
The little man started hopping from one foot to the other, and his face went through a series of gymnastics. Then he grinned. “Damn, Karp, you’re sharp. But I want . . . oh boy oh boy ass tits . . . film, actor, character, and year.”
Karp shook his head. He’d been playing the movie-trivia game with Dirty Warren since they’d met years before. The little man had yet to win a round, but he was up against years of experience. When he was a boy, Karp and his mother had loved going to shows and discussing films and theater, and movie trivia remained an avocation in adulthood.
“You forgot the rest of the quote,” he said, “‘The public doesn’t give a damn about integrity. A town that won’t defend itself deserves no help.’ Way too easy, Warren, the cold weather must be slowing you down. It’s High Noon with Lon Chaney Jr. playing the character of Martin Howe. And the year was 1952.”
“Ah, crap,” Dirty Warren swore. “I didn’t expect to see you today, so I just came up with that one off the top of my head when I heard . . . oh boy whoop asshole . . . Kenny talking about integrity.”
“Well, a great film, one of my favorites,” Karp replied. “Okay, you finish the quote: ‘And in the end you wind up dyin’ all alone on some dusty street. For what? ’”
Dirty Warren grinned and, hooking his thumbs in an imaginary vest, said, “For a tin star. It’s all for . . . whoop whoop screwed your sister . . . nothin’, Will. It’s all for nothin’.”
Karp laughed, then his face grew serious, and he lowered his voice. “Speaking of all for nothing, is there any word on the street about what happened to Andrew Kane?”
For a moment, Dirty Warren’s face looked troubled. A wealthy white-shoe lawyer, Andrew Kane had once been the darling of New York and a candidate for mayor. But Karp and others had revealed him as a sociopathic monster who, as a member of the clandestine Sons of Man, stopped at nothing, not even mass murder, to achieve his savage goals. He’d been thwarted again—this time failing to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge—but had since disappeared, as had the assassin Nadya Malovo, who worked with Kane and the Sons of Man.
Dirty Warren shook his head and scratched the end of his long nose. “Not a . . . balls whoop ass . . . peep.”
“And nothing from Grale?” Karp asked.
Dirty Warren began hopping from one foot to the other again, like a little boy who needed to take a piss. “Haven’t . . . lick me bastard . . . seen him,” Warren said, and pointed to his newsstand across the street. “Got to go. Have a business to run, ya know.” He turned and left, dodging through traffic to reach the other side.
Karp’s eyes narrowed as he watched him go. Then he shrugged and stuffed the last of the knish into his mouth and washed it down with orange soda. “Ready to get back to work?”
“Champing at the bit,” Katz replied.
Ten minutes later, they were sitting in Karp’s office on the eighth floor, talking about the arraignment the next afternoon, when there was a knock at a side door that led to a private elevator. “All hope abandon, ye who enter here,” Karp called out.
The door opened, and a good-looking man, with a gray crew cut that complemented the clean angles of his tan face and equally gray eyes, entered the room. “Quoting Dante Alighieri, are we?” he said with a smile.
“Agent Espey Jaxon,” Karp said, standing. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
Jaxon crossed the room, moving with the grace of an athlete—nothing forced, smooth as silk—and held out his hand, which Karp shook warmly. “Just thought I’d stop by and see how things went with our friend Jabbar.”
“We have an indictment and will be arraigning him tomorrow. And by the way, thanks for the Christmas present.”
Jaxon gave him a puzzled look, but before he could say anything, there was a loud knock on the office main door, followed by the entrance of two more men. The first was Assistant District Attorney V. T. Newbury, a New England blue-blood whose blond hair still flourished, as did his boyish face and bright blue eyes. Somehow he was beating the aging process. He’d just rejoined the DAO as the head of the Frauds Bureau after successfully infiltrating his own family’s law firm to bring down his uncle Dean Newbury for the murder of V.T.’s father.
The second man actually appeared older than his age, which was close to the others’, with his white hair and frail body. Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma, formerly known, at least in his own mind, as the Italian Stallion, had once been the proud owner of a thick, curly mane of black hair and a thick, muscular body. A bout with an intestinal cancer had aged him almost overnight, but he’d retained his acute mental faculties—specializing in cold cases for the DAO—and his legendary libido, which he was exercising now by pausing at the door to say something to Karp’s unseen receptionist, Darla Milquetost.
“We’ll see you later, my little sugar blossom,” Guma said, which elicited giggles from the woman. He turned and saw the other men looking at him with amused expressions, which caused him to grin and say with his thickest New Jersey accent, “What? What? Can’t a guy say something to his girlfriend without the world eavesdropping? You jealous or somethin’?”
“Most certainly,” Newbury replied in his driest patrician voice. “We all wish we could be you.”
“Well, that’s obvious,” Guma replied. “But there is only one Goom.”
“Thank God,” Karp added. “Anyway, we seem to be having an impromptu meeting. I just asked this of Espey, too, but what brings you here this afternoon?”
“Turn on the TV,” Guma replied. “Your old pal Megan O’Dowd is going to be letting loose, live in front of the courthouse, any moment. We were watching the tube in V.T.’s office and saw a news teaser. We think she’s probably going to rip you a new one, and I wanted to watch your face when she calls you a racist pig.”
“Like I should care?” Karp said, though he picked up a remote and pointed it at the small television mounted in the corner next to the bookshelf. A moment later, the angry face of the defense attorney appeared on the screen. She was standing in front of the courthouse and holding up a piece of paper that Karp thought was a copy of the indictment.
“This,” she said for the camera, shaking the piece of paper, “isn’t about the unfortunate death of a young woman in the mosque where my client is a respected leader and spiritual guide. This is about freedom of speech and freedom of religion and the lengths our government will go to to suppress those freedoms, especially as they apply to the formerly enslaved men and women of African descent. We all know my client is no fan of this government and courageously speaks out against the oppression of people of color, especially the ‘new niggers’ of the white establishment, black Muslims.
“This,” she said, again shaking the indictment document, “is how the government seeks to silence that voice. It seeks to shut him up and take away his freedom by suggesting that he took part in the activities of a small, misguided group of men who, while understandably frustrated, sought to bring attention to the bloated cow of capitalism and its role as the white man’s chief mechanism of oppression, the economy, by carrying out a protest against a symbol of that oppression, the New York Stock Exchange.”
“Protest?” Jaxon scowled. “Murdering nearly a dozen people in cold blood and trying to destroy the lives of millions of Americans was a protest?”
O’Dowd looked down and dramatically shook her big head before looking up again for the cameras, her eyes glittering with indignation. “What do we know about what occurred in the basement of the Al-Aqsa mosque? We know that a woman whose husband finally could not tolerate the abuse any longer and, regrettably, took his life to make a statement was murdered. We also know that at least two federal agents were in the mosque at that time, but we don’t know why, and their presence at the mosque might very well be unconstitutional. What were they doing there? Was the murder an act of revenge by our government? A way to silence my client, Sharif Jabbar, while sending a message about the lengths white America will go to in its misguided, oil-driven, racist, so-called War on Terrorism? These are the questions my client and I look forward to answering in court.”
“Ah, the old ‘agent provocateur’ defense,” Guma noted. “Government agents committed the crime and are trying to pin the blame on someone else to destroy them. It’s a setup, a frame job.”
“She’ll be looking to seat that antigovernment juror,” Newbury added. “A member of the Tinfoil Hat Society who believes in UFOs and massive government conspiracies.”
“Or an angry black man or woman,” Katz said.
A question was shouted by a member of the press. “Are you saying your client is innocent?”
“Sounds like a planted question,” Guma said.
“My client is innocent of this charge,” O’Dowd replied. “He wasn’t even present in the mosque when this incident allegedly took place, and we can prove it, and he in no way participated in its planning or execution.”
Another question was shouted. “When Imam Jabbar was first arrested at the airfield in New Jersey, why was he carrying a suitcase full of money?”
“And the answer,” Karp said, “to the sixty-four-million-dollar question is . . .”
“He was leaving for Yemen with money that had been raised on behalf of several Muslim charities, including one for orphans,” O’Dowd answered. “It was perhaps unwise and even a way to circumvent the government of the United States from getting its greedy hands on the cash, but his intentions were good.”
“Admit to tax evasion to deflect attention from the more serious crime,” Newbury said.
“What about his association with the terrorist Amir Al-Sistani?” another reporter yelled.
O’Dowd scowled. “First of all, Mr. Al-Sistani has yet to be convicted of any crimes in the United States, which the last time I looked at our Constitution meant he should be considered an innocent man. But even if the allegations against Mr. Al-Sistani are true—and I have my doubts—my client hardly knew the man. Mr. Al-Sistani was introduced to my client as the chief financial officer of Prince Esra bin Afraan, who was visiting the mosque. As we will prove in court, my client was kept out of the meetings between Mr. Al-Sistani and Dean Newbury, a man who suspiciously will likely be one of the government’s primary witnesses. Of course, Newbury, who is facing a number of charges, including murder, just happens to be a wealthy, white lawyer with familial ties to the New York DAO. But what else would you expect of this particular district attorney, who, if memory serves me right, has been justifiably known in the past as . . .”
“Uh-oh, here it comes.” Guma chortled and looked at his boss.
“. . . KKK Karp because of his racist policies.”
Guma waited for a reaction, but when Karp’s expression didn’t change, his smile faded. “Spoilsport,” he grumbled.
Karp pointed the remote at the TV screen, and it went blank. He turned to Guma and winked. “Wouldn’t give you the satisfaction, Goom.” He turned his attention to Katz. “Okay, what did we just learn?”
“Well, as Guma pointed out, I think we can assume that the defense might try to create a scenario in which government agents—Tran and Jojola—infiltrated the mosque for illicit purposes and might have even contributed to, or caused, Miriam’s death.”
“And what obstacles can you foresee for us in countering that?”
Katz furrowed his brow and thought for a moment but then shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not sure what you’re driving at.”
Karp looked over at Jaxon. “Care to explain?”
Jaxon, who had once worked for the DAO as an assistant district attorney before becoming an FBI agent, said, “I think you’re talking about that in all likelihood, Tran and Jojola will not be able to say much about why they were present in the mosque if it leads to a discussion of the attack on the stock exchange. Jabbar is not being tried in this instance for his participation in the attack, only the death of Miriam, and therefore, any mention of crimes committed in association with the NYSE attack will be prohibited by the judge. Our guys might be able to say that they were working undercover on a federal antiterrorism case, but even then, O’Dowd will probably raise hell about their connecting the word terrorism to the mosque and Jabbar.”
“Anything else?” Karp asked the agent.
“Well, because of the secretive nature of my little group, they also won’t be able to say much about who they work for or in what capacity,” Jaxon added. “We tried to keep our existence completely secret for as long as we could, but we’re pretty sure that our enemies are aware of our presence. So now our hope is to keep them guessing about our mission and who we report to.”
“Which means that not answering questions on national-security grounds or being too vague will make them appear to be uncooperative, secretive, and sinister,” Newbury said.
“Just the sort of thing a conspiracy buff would latch on to,” Guma added. “And I don’t know how far O’Dowd will get with Tran, but I’d guess it’s going to be a little problematic that he’s a Vietnamese gangster, too. Shades of mob involvement in the Bay of Pigs sort of thing.”
“Exactly,” Karp agreed. “O’Dowd will try to use the fact that John and Tran can’t tell the whole truth to make it look as if they’re covering up and lying about the rest. And of course, she’ll be looking for anything she can find to impeach their characters . . . if I can’t keep it out of the testimony.” He turned to Katz. “What else?”
Katz furrowed his thick eyebrows. “She said her client wasn’t present at the murder and they will prove it. So I guess that means he’ll have an alibi witness.”
“Correct,” Karp said. “But they’ll have to abide by reciprocal discovery rules and detail for us the alibi with witnesses’ names, addresses, and whereabouts.”
“Well,” Katz said, “I gather from that little diatribe about our wealthy white witness Newbury and her poor oppressed black client that she will press the racism button whenever she can.”
“Which is why Dean Newbury gets zippity-do-dah from this office in exchange for his testimony.” Karp nodded. “If she asks him what, if any, ‘deals’ he received, all he’ll be able to say is that he will be entering guilty pleas in this case, as well as for the murder of V.T.’s dad, with no deals. And that I have agreed I will tell the judge at his sentencing whether or not he told the truth at this trial. That’s all. What the feds do with him after this trial will be up to them, but he will be a convicted felon in the New York State corrections system.”
The meeting broke up just as there was another knock on the door and Clay Fulton walked in. “Well, this gives me a chance to wish you all a happy new year,” the detective said. “And a late Merry Christmas to those I missed last week.”
“That reminds me,” Jaxon said to Karp. “What was that about a Christmas present? You’re Jewish; I didn’t buy you a Christmas present.”
“Okay, my Hanukkah gift.” Karp laughed. “I’m saying thanks for tipping us off that Jabbar was going to be moved Christmas morning.”
Jaxon’s mouth dropped open. “We didn’t call you.”
“Sure you did. On Christmas Eve,” Fulton replied. “My telephone ID said the call came from the federal lockup at Foley Square.”
Jaxon shook his head. “Not me or my gang. Wish we could take credit for that, but the people handling the transfer for the State Department kept it real quiet. We didn’t hear about it until the car was already on the move Christmas morning. I thought Butch was going to have my head after promising to keep tabs on that son of a bitch. Did the caller identify himself and say he was with my group?”
“No,” Fulton replied. “And it was a she. But she didn’t identify herself. Just said that Jabbar was being taken to Fort Dix in the morning, and the transport would be going through the Holland Tunnel.”
“Remember anything else?” Jaxon asked.
“Well, she spoke funny, like she was trying to disguise her voice a little,” Fulton replied.
“Somebody with another agency?” Newbury asked.
“Well, I know the marshals weren’t real pleased about the assignment,” Fulton said. “I think Jen Capers would have hog-tied him and tossed him into the Hudson if I’d asked.”
“It could have been one of the guards, for all we know,” Guma said. “There’s not a lot of affection for terrorists in this city. What do you think, Butch?”
All eyes turned to Karp, who shrugged. “I think I don’t know enough to hazard a guess.”