Falsely Accused

ELEVEN

Karp stared at the interview sheet and tried to decide whether Jerome E. Delaney, 66, of East 34th Street in Manhattan, a retired highway engineer, would or would not be constitutionally disposed to find for the plaintiff. He glanced up from the sheet at the man himself and, smiling pleasantly, inquired of him whether he had ever been a party to a lawsuit. He had not. The answer, like the man, was neutral; that is, flames did not issue from Delaney’s nostrils when he said it, implying that mere fate, and not an inveterate hatred of lawsuits and those who brought them, had so deprived him. Karp said thank you and made a note. Delaney would do. Karp seated himself and watched his rival, corporation counsel Josh Gottkind, rise for his crack at the venireman.

Karp allowed himself a moment to soak in the atmosphere of the federal courtroom, so different from the rotting premises of the county courthouse, where he had spent nearly all of his professional career. Here all the woodwork was beautifully tended oak, unimproved by etched graffiti; the murals told their allegories of justice triumphant unmarred by peeling paint and mildew stains. Even the judge, the Honorable Joseph C. Craig, seemed to draw from the august surroundings a dignity greater than that of his confreres of the lower bench, reflecting the acknowledged fact that decisions about serious money were inherently grander than deciding whether Joe had stabbed Phil forty times over a ten-dollar bet.

Of course, Craig would’ve been dignified anywhere, Karp thought as he studied the judge, a thin, small man in his middle sixties. He had a large head carried on a slender neck, and a long, thin nose that looked red and damp at the tip. With his sharp, bright blue eyes peering out of their nest of wrinkles, he seemed like nothing so much as a heron, a heron staring down at a pool full of frogs before deciding which one to have for lunch.

This was the first day of jury selection and would probably be the last. Federal jury selection was an expeditious process compared to that in the state courts, and Karp was happy that it was. The judge asked the basic questions that might disqualify jurors for cause, and the lawyers’ questions had to be submitted in advance. Karp was not himself a voir dire maven, although he knew that many lawyers believed it to be among the most critical aspects of a trial. Many lawyers said they could pick a plaintiff’s jury or a defendant’s jury; some lawyers didn’t try cases at all but merely advised others on how to select. In contrast, Karp’s belief was that once you had disposed of frank prejudice or special interest, all juries were more or less the same. His only selection rule, which he had learned at the feet of the old bulls of the long-lost Homicide Bureau, was “no singletons on a felony jury.” You shouldn’t, if you wanted a conviction, have one black, or one woman, or one of any identifiable caste, because the odd man out was more than likely to feel isolated and threatened and therefore to vote against a convicting jury, hanging it. This rule did not, of course, apply in a civil case.

And you could outsmart yourself with a too-clever selection strategy. Gottkind, for example, was now asking Mr. Delaney whether he felt that physicians were more credible than other people. A stupid question. What sort of answer did he expect, “Yeah, sure”? Delaney, if selected, would perhaps start the trial in the belief that the defense counsel thought him a jerk. Karp left one ear open and studied the next information sheet. They needed two more jurors to make up the six-person panel, plus two alternates, and Karp expected that this group of twelve veniremen or the next would suffice.

Gottkind finished with Delaney, and Karp rose again, to smile at, and briefly question, the next prospective juror. Her name was Sonia Delgado, a restaurant manager, who had also never gone to the bar of justice for any reason, but was clearly a person of Hispanic ancestry. It was obvious by now that Gottkind thought that a largely Hispanic panel would be favorable to at least one of his clients, Angelo Fuerza, at that time the highest-ranking Hispanic on the City’s payroll. Karp briefly wondered whether he should use one of his peremptories on Mrs. Delgado, and decided not to. For all he knew, Fuerza might be the spitting image of her despised first husband.

When the questioning of the current lot was complete, both Delaney and Delgado made it on to the panel, and that was it for the panel itself. It was now the second day of May. The suit had been filed the previous August. Judge Craig had studied all the motions submitted, the opposing interpretations of state statute and the precedents of constitutional law, and judged that the case had merit under law. He declined to dismiss; he had ordered the facts to be tried; and here they all were, only two hundred and seventy days later. Blinding speed.

As Judge Craig prepared to address the lucky winners, Karp turned to his client and said, “Murray, I heard something pretty disturbing the other night. Are you aware that there’s a corruption investigation going on out of the D.A.’s squad that involves the medical examiner’s office?”

Karp watched the other man’s face carefully as his words registered. He thought he saw puzzlement and dismay only; there was no telltale flush of uncovered guilt.

Selig said, “What investigation? What’re they investigating?”

“Some Latino kids, early part of last year, up at the Two-Five, died in custody. You guys did the autopsies and passed them as suicides, two of them, and the third as natural causes.”

Selig’s brows remained corrugated. “Yeah, I recall the incidents. I didn’t do them myself, but they were done under my supervision by competent people. The hangings were genuine. The marks made by a suicide hanging are completely different from those made by strangulation or garotting with a cord. It’s Autopsy 101-a no-brainer. Who told you we were being investigated?”

“Marlene, actually. She got it from a reporter friend of hers who’s looking into the deaths.”

Selig shook his head vigorously. “I’ve never heard anything about it,” he said, and then, seeing the doubtful look on Karp’s face, added with more heat, “I swear it, Butch! I never heard anything about any investigation-in general or in regard to those autopsies.”

Karp nodded and swallowed hard. He did not think Selig was lying, although that did not, unfortunately, mean there was no investigation. Selig, he had discovered in the past nine months, was a thoroughly decent man, but one whose reserves of observation and focus were entirely consumed by the narrow demands of his profession. At his work, literally nothing escaped his attention. Away from the steel tables, nearly everything did. It was actually possible for Selig to have missed being investigated.

Karp patted Selig on the shoulder and said, “It’s okay, Murray. I believe you. But something may be up and I need to check it out. I’ll let you know what I find.”

The new prospectives were seated. Karp turned his attention to the information sheets once again.

A short walk and a world of class away from the Federal Courthouse, Marlene sat in the chair provided for witnesses in Grand Jury Room B, in the New York County Courthouse, and told an assistant D.A. and the twenty-three members of the grand jury what Rob Pruitt had done to her. Pictures were exhibited of her damaged face. After she was done, Harry Bello got up and told his fable. There was no cross-examination, since grand juries have neither defense lawyers nor judges. They belong to the district attorney and represent the limpest possible trip wire against arbitrary prosecutions. Almost always, when the D.A. so requests, they bring in a true bill of indictment, and they did in this case, in less than five minutes.

Marlene lingered to share some thoughts with Ira Raskoff, the kid A.D.A. in charge of the case. Although most of the people who man the trenches in the D.A. last as long in the memory of the office as faces seen from a departing subway train, there were exceptions, and Marlene was one of them. As was Butch Karp. Marlene traded shamelessly on her notoriety and her husband’s still bright and fearsome rep to fix in young Raskoff’s mind that this particular case was not your ordinary bullshit barroom assault charge, of which he cranked through dozens each week, but special, and that its outcome would be observed. This particular defendant was going to do hard time, at least three years, which result would redound to Raskoff’s favor with the grandees of the Felony Trial Bureau, while failure to obtain it would have dire consequences. Raskoff got the point and promised to keep Marlene informed.

When Marlene and Harry left the courthouse, Foley Square was cold in the bone-withering way that March can be cold in New York and swept with sheets of chilling rain. Marlene had intended to walk home, but now she allowed Harry Bello to lead her to his old Plymouth, illegally parked in a judge’s slot at the side of the building.

They got in and Bello raced the engine to pump some warmth into the car. Marlene relaxed, fumbled out a cigarette, longed for it, and replaced it in her bag. She was over six months pregnant and slowing down a hair. Instead, she fiddled with the radio dial, searching for music to soothe her savage breast. She found someone singing a Puccini aria and left it on. The song ended. It was then that she realized that they had been traveling far too long. She looked out the window. They were on the West Side Highway heading north.

“Harry, where are we going?” she asked.

“Weehawken,” said Bello.

If Harry Bello had been a regular person, Marlene would have asked him why they were going to Weehawken and he would have said why, and they would have taken it from there. But Marlene knew that Harry expected her to know already why they were going, as if the trisyllabic name of the unlovely Jersey burg already contained, in the fashion of the ultra-fast code bursts sent down from spy satellites, the complete story. And she knew that if she just demanded an explanation in the conventional way, Harry would look at her funny and think she was slipping, and so the trust between them, which besides the person of Lucy Karp was the only thing that held Harry to the normal world, would fray a little and Harry would withdraw another notch into the chaotic depths of Harryland.

She was used to this, however, and it took her less than a minute to figure it out and respond, “I said, I don’t need one.”

Because she had gone back to the last substantive conversation she had had with Bello, over the phone, during which she had told Harry about Mattie Duran and what Mattie wanted her to do, and Harry had said, “You need a gun,” and she had declined and this was Harry not taking no for an answer.

“She’s got a sheet,” said Harry, dismissing her last statement and making another jump. This was an easy one. Of course, Harry would have used his cop sources to check out Mattie Duran. Marlene was not surprised at what he had learned. She waited.

“Forty-six months in Texas for bank robbery,” Harry added, switching to Real Mode. “Guy I talked to down in El Paso said she popped her old man too, but they didn’t prosecute.”

“Why not?”

“It’s Texas. They thought the guy needed killing. Had a couple of partners in the bank thing. Both killed in a shoot-out with the Rangers. They never recovered the loot. Something like eight hundred K.” Harry looked at her significantly and she moved her head slightly, indicating that she hadn’t known all of that. He seemed about to say something, but at that point he had to maneuver the tricky exit from the West Side Highway and onto the ramp leading to the Lincoln Tunnel.

Marlene ruminated as they sped through the filthy tiled pipe. Harry’s information explained a lot about Duran: how she was able to run the shelter without public money, why she was wary of the authorities. The parricide thing was a bit of a shock, though. Marlene did not recall ever meeting anyone- socially-who had killed one of their parents. She wondered whether she should, and by what means she might, bring it up in conversation with Duran. Meanwhile, it was clear that Harry thought that her relationship with Mattie required an increased level of protection, and she wondered why.

Harry read her mind, of course, and said, as they emerged into gray daylight and rain, “People disappear.”

“That’s her job, Harry. It’s for the women’s protection.”

“Men too,” said Harry.

“Wait a minute, Harry. You think she does hits on people?”

Harry did not deem this worthy of an answer, and left Marlene to her unpleasant thoughts as they emerged into freezing rain in Weehawken. After a drive of about ten minutes through broken and deserted industrial streets, Harry pulled the car through a sagging gate in a chain-link fence topped by rusty barbed wire. There was a low concrete-block building on the site, which bore a small, faded sign announcing that it was the home of the Palisades Rod and Gun Club. Harry parked and led Marlene through a door marked OFFICE.

A chubby man in his late fifties rose from behind a cluttered desk and shook Bello’s hand. Bello introduced him to Marlene as Frank Arnolfini. Marlene looked around the small, veneer-paneled room. For a rod and gun club, it was remarkably light in the rod department. Shelves held shooting trophies and the little banners they give out at conventions. A glass showcase counter was full of handguns, and a rack held rifles and shotguns. The walls were decorated with posters supplied by arms and shooting accessory manufacturers, and the sort of plaques and photographs that people accumulate during a long career with the New York Police Department. Arnolfini was an ex-cop and a part-time gun dealer.

After some chat about how bad the weather was and how they were both doing in retirement, Arnolfini turned to Marlene and said, “Harry tells me you’re interested in a weapon.”

“Actually, Harry’s interested in me getting a weapon. I can’t stand the idea myself.”

Arnolfini chuckled understandingly. “Yeah, well, a lot of ladies are that way. But there’s really nothing to be scared of if you have the proper training. We run a pretty good handgun course here for women.”

“Uh-huh, but as it happens, I’m not scared of guns, and I’m a natural shot.” Arnolfini and Bello exchanged looks. Arnolfini shrugged and said, “You want a carry gun, you’re probably in the market for a semiauto, a nine, right?”

“How big is it?” asked Marlene shortly.

Arnolfini smiled in a way that confirmed Marlene’s impression that she was about to be patronized.

“Well, that would depend,” he said. “There’s all different kinds.”

She felt a wave of bitchiness rise within her. She didn’t want to be here, she didn’t like guns. That she was here, and that she probably was going to buy a gun, and carry it, stemmed from her decision to go into an enterprise that might require her to shoot somebody. Having to lie in a bed she had made was not something Marlene was fond of doing.

Arnolfini went to the handgun cabinet, took out a selection of semiautomatic pistols, and arranged them on a felt pad on top of the glass.

“These are all good nines,” he said. “Your Browning Hi-power, a little old but still a classic, your Beretta 92F, pricey but a great gun, your Heckler P9S, very pricey but the best; I can give you a deal on this one. And here’s your Smith 669 in stainless. A good piece, and under six hundred bucks.”

When Marlene made no move to handle any of the weapons, Arnolfini picked up the Smith and held it out to her.

“Try it. It’s real light.”

Marlene took it and let it dangle from her hand like a wet dish towel. “It’s a brick,” she said.

“It’s only twenty-six ounces empty,” replied Arnolfini. “Look, here’s something maybe you don’t get. The heavier the pistol, the easier the recoil. For a woman that’s something to think about.”

Marlene put the Smith down on the pad. “Smaller. I’m not going to carry anything that big all the time, and if I don’t have it on me all the time, I might as well not have one at all.”

“You ain’t going to get much smaller than that in a decent nine.”

“What about an Astra Constable. A.380?”

Arnolfini shook his head. “Nah, you don’t want anything smaller than a nine, Marlene. Believe me. You need the stopping power.”

“I shot a man through the lip once with a Constable. It stopped him pretty good.”

The gun dealer gave Bello a look and Bello nodded gravely. The gun dealer shrugged and bent down behind the counter again.

“I don’t carry any Astras, but you want light, this is light.” He put a small, angular pistol on the pad. “It’s a Colt Mustang Pocket Lite in aluminum alloy. Twelve and a half ounces.”

Marlene picked up the gun, worked the action, and squeezed off a dry-fire shot. “Fine. I’ll take it.”

“You don’t want to fire it?” said Arnolfini.

“I’ll trust you it works,” she said.

“Shoot it, Marlene,” said Harry.

She met his eyes and looked away. He was serious about this, and it came from his concern about her safety, which it was not in her heart to despise. She nodded and said, “Okay, let’s shoot.”

Arnolfini led them through a hallway to a firing range, a four-stand affair that took up most of his building. He turned on the lights, a rack of space heaters, and a blower. An icy breeze wafted over them, its chill hardly deflected by the gusts from the heaters. Arnolfini broke open a box of.380 semi-wadcutters, and they all worked silently for a few minutes loading three clips. The gun dealer snapped a silhouette target to a traveler and sent it twenty-five yards downrange.

Marlene bellied up to the barrier, slipped muffs over her ears, and without preamble, in her usual casual way, began firing. She shot two clips of five into the target’s chest and, for a lark, shot the last clip into the head. Arnolfini flipped the traveler switch and brought the target back.

“Very nice,” he said with new respect in his voice. The chest shots fell into two neat patterns, neither larger than a playing card. The five head shots were somewhat more dispersed, but still impressive shooting.

“Of course, it’s a lot different on the street,” he added. “The guy’s moving, it’s dark, maybe he’s shooting back. That’s why you want a weapon that’ll put him down with one hit, which this little thing probably won’t do. It’s really a backup gun.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a sort of a backup person, Frank,” said Marlene lightly. “Harry’s going to do the heavy killing, aren’t you, Harry?”

She saw the shock on his face, and immediately wished she were a thousand miles away with her tongue cut out. How could she have! Bello turned away and walked out of the range.

Back in the office, Marlene took out her checkbook and examined her bill for the Mustang, two extra clips, a nylon belt holster, and a box of Federal 90-grain jacketed hollow points. Arnolfini explained that she was getting the cop discount since she was with Harry. It made her feel worse.

“You want one of these?” the dealer asked. He was holding a shiny.22 revolver. “For the price of a box of rounds? I bought out a guy last month. Made in Brazil. Not a bad little gun for plinking, but I can’t sell ’em.”

Marlene was too tired to refuse. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “throw it in.” But the shiny gun had reminded her of Lucy’s cap pistol-and the reality of keeping weapons in the loft. “Have you got a gun box, a safe, with a lock?”

He had several, and Marlene bought a green one about the size of a file drawer, with a push-button combination lock. Harry helped carry it out to the car.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” she said when they were sitting in the car. “There’s absolutely no excuse for me saying that kind of shit to you.”

“Forget it,” mumbled Harry as he started the car.

“No, listen, you need to hear this! Look at me, Harry!”

Bello stopped the car and looked at her, his face its usual mask. Marlene spoke quickly and in a low tone, as in a confessional. “I have problems with this, Harry. And they’re coming out in sneaky little digs like that in there. It’s driving me up the wall, and I don’t like the way I’m acting and feeling behind it. This gun thing. First, it’s going to drive Butch crazy all over again, having a gun in the house, and I’m going to have to deal with that, and then, for me personally, I don’t like being armed, or maybe it’s I like it too much. Maybe it’s the same thing, if you know what I mean. It was one thing, sort of exciting work, getting Pruitt and stopping the other guys we’ve been handling this past couple of months, but it’s something else completely, dealing with guys who want to kill their girlfriends and we might be in the way, and we might have to shoot them first. I killed one guy, and it almost wrecked me and I had dreams about it for weeks-did I have to do it, did it have to go down that way …?”

“The way I heard it,” said Harry, “was you didn’t have a choice. The guy was shooting at a cop.”

“Right, right, of course, but you always think, maybe you set up the situation. Anyway, that’s the point, what you just said, this business might put you in a situation where you’re getting shot at, and I have no right to be in a position where I can’t help you out. So I’m packing, but …” She shook her head, as if trying to jar sense into it, and then made a gesture of futility with her hands, saying, “It’s a fog, Harry. I mean, what the fuck … what’m I doing? What’re we doing?”

“One day at a time,” said Bello.

“That’s a platitude, Harry,” she snapped.

He stepped on the accelerator and moved the car down the street. They drove back to the runnel in silence. In the roar of their passage through the tube, he said, and his words were low-pitched so that she had to strain to hear them, “You’ll get used to it. You’ll probably never have to use it. Frank, there, the gun expert? Thirty-five years in Bed-Stuy, never shot one. You have to, you’ll do the right thing.”

“You say that, but how do you know that, Harry?”

“I’m here, right?” he said.

The rain did not let up all that afternoon, and when the sun went down it changed to sleet, driven by a nasty east wind. It was, however, positively halcyon compared to the weather within the loft when Karp discovered how Marlene had spent her Jersey morning.

“You brought guns into our home? Guns?” was his anguished cry. This was at the dinner table. Marlene had made a favorite dish of Karp’s, veal parmigiana, which that barbarian considered the epitome of Italian cuisine and which she rarely degraded herself to prepare, but did this time, feeling queasily like Lucy Ricardo.

“Don’t raise your voice!” she said.

“Why not? You’ll shoot me?” he shouted.

“Lucy, dear,” Marlene said, “if you’re finished, you can go to your room now.”

“Can I see your gun, Mommy?” Lucy asked, her eyes widening.

“May I see your gun, Mommy?” said Marlene automatically.

“May I see-”

“No, you can’t,” said Marlene. “What you can do is get ready for your bath, and then you can watch Gilligan’s Island.”

“Oh, why don’t you show it to her, Marlene?” said Karp nastily. “Let her play with it, even. She will anyway, sooner or later.”

At this Marlene turned upon her husband a look of such bone-chilling malevolence that he shut up. After Lucy had run off, she said, “How dare you suggest that I’m endangering my child! How dare you!”

They locked gazes and ground teeth for an interminable-seeming moment. Then Karp sprang to his feet, knocking over his chair with a clatter. He had his big fists clenched and appeared to be looking for something to break.

“Shit, Marlene!” he shouted. “Why are you doing this? Why are you fucking up our life with this shit?”

“I am not doing any such thing,” responded Marlene in a voice unnaturally calm. While Karp gaped and glared and shot flames from his nostrils, she continued, “You object to what I’m doing. It upsets you. A couple of years ago, you dragged this family off to that hellhole in D.C., taking Lucy away from her friends and her relatives without a moment’s thought …”

“Wait a min-”

“… without, as I say, a moment’s thought, and as I recall I did not scream or yell or insult your integrity or your love for your daughter, or me …”

“I didn’t-”

“… whereas I have given this a great deal of thought. Are you going to sit down and listen?”

Karp picked up his chair and sat down in it, after the manner of men who are tied into similar chairs with paper targets on their breasts.

“As I say,” Marlene resumed, “a great deal of thought. I didn’t want to get a gun at all. Harry thought I needed one-let me finish this, please! — because he was concerned for my safety. I decided to get one because I was concerned for his safety. We’re going to get in the way of domestic violence from time to time, and I intend to back him up just like he backs me up, and I need a gun for that. As far as safety goes around here, I have a gun safe, in which the guns will sit, locked and unloaded when they’re not attached to my body. I also intend to show them to Lucy and let her handle them so she knows what they are and what they can do.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms.

“Is that it? You’re finished?”

“For the nonce,” she replied.

He sighed and rubbed his face. It had taken Karp a long time to learn that in domestic disagreements, the point was not, as it was in the courtroom, to win, but rather the restoration of felicity. This apparently required a different set of skills from those he had honed to a diamond edge, and it was clear to him that he had still not got it right. “I said/she said, “I was sorry a million times about Washington, and you keep bringing it up whenever I give you shit about something you want to do. It’s not fair.”

Marlene thought about that for a little. “You’re right,” she said, “it’s not. I’ll try to lay off of that.”

“Okay, and I’m sorry I said that about Lucy and the gun. It was a cheap shot.” He sighed again. “But.”

“Yes?” she said, a long, drawn-out yes.

“I don’t know what ‘but.’ Sometimes I think I’m inside this, ah, plastic bubble, and if I can just push through, everything will be clear and I’ll just accept everything. I mean, I’ll stop worrying about you and the kid the way I do. I mean, if you’re here, I’ll love you, and if you’re gone, you’re gone and I’ll be sad. But no churning stomach all the time. And sometimes I think, I’ve done it, and I’m through, but then something like this goes down and I realize there’s another bubble outside the one I just went through. And I think things like, she’s acting crazy because she wants me to stop her. That’s not true, is it?”

“No. Of course, if I was really crazy, I wouldn’t tell you the truth, would I? Or would I? Tell me, do you trust me?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said immediately. “With my life. I trust your integrity. I trust your decency. However, it’s my learned opinion as a professional criminal justice guy of long standing, and some reputation, that you’re into something that’s way over your fucking head. That’s not a trust thing, that’s a judgment thing. I could be wrong.”

“Thank you for that opinion. I will consider it in my chambers.”

“You do that,” said Karp.

Both of them had on their faces the kind of shy smiles they wore when they realized that they had yet again escaped the shoals and riptides and were back on the fair, broad seaways of marriage.

“So,” said Karp brightly, “what kind of gun did you get?”

“A Colt Mustang.380. The guy threw in a cheap revolver too.”

“Well, mazeltov,” said Karp with a bland smile. “Use them in good health.” He stood up. “I think I’ll help Lucy with her bath.”

In all, a good day, was Marlene’s thought when, toward midnight, she floated into the antechamber of sleep. Karp had given her one of those violent fucks she dearly loved, and which she thought one of the ways in which a good marriage discharges otherwise unappeasable aggression and discontent. She was sore and lightly bruised, and Karp, now breathing huskily beside her, had numerous flaming bite marks on him, at least one of which, she hoped, would show above his collar the next morning.

At this point the phone, her closely guarded private number, rang next to her ear. She snatched it up on the first ring. There was a woman on the line.

“Is this Marlene Ciampi?”

“Yes?”

“This is Harlem Hospital Center Admitting. Do you know a person named”-she pronounced it wrong, carefully-“Ariade Stupenagel?”

“Yes, Ariadne. Has something happened to her?”

“Yes, she’s in the E.R. now. She doesn’t have health insurance, and when we asked her for a responsible party, she gave us a card with your name on it.”

“What happened to her?”

“Urn, ma’am, are you the responsible party? Otherwise, you know, I can’t, um, discuss-”

“Yes, yes, I’ll be responsible,” Marlene snapped. “What was it-an accident?”

“Uh, no, ma’am,” said the woman. Marlene could hear paper rustling. “We have police involvement in this case. This is an assault case.”