Justice Denied

17

Dropping five stories on a wire was not Karp’s idea of how to start a day when he was on a trial. It did not make him feel like Peter Pan, especially since the belt slipped during the descent and he had to dangle in mid-shaft for a half hour while two employees of the wire factory on the third floor labored, amid loud Spanish controversy, to repair the fault.

When he emerged from the shaft gate, his brow was dark, and his police driver decided not to express any of the several cute remarks he had thought of while observing these events.

Marlene remained in the loft. She had called in sick, although there was nothing physically wrong with her. But if she could not take a mental health day after a weekend during which her child had been assaulted by a gigantic felon, when could she? She spent the morning lounging comfortably in bed, drinking coffee and sharing TV cartoons and cookies with the baby.

Karp passed his morning less pleasantly, finishing up the official witnesses in People v. Russell: Thornby, the arresting officer; Marrano, the cop who had taken the famous blue shirt, the victim’s handbag, and the knife to the station house; Cimella, the detective who had received all this, plus the sales slip found on Russell; and two men from the medical examiner’s office, who established that Susan Weiner had died of stab wounds and that the wounds were consistent with the knife found on the stairway of 58 Barrow, and that the stains on the knife blade were human blood.

The cross went as Karp expected. Freeland pounded away at the time issue. The implication he was trying to plant in the jury’s collective mind was that the cops had found the handbag where the real killer (not Russell) had dumped it, found the sales slip within, and lied that they had found it on the defendant four hours or so before the bag had been located.

At least the trial was moving. Freeland had at last exceeded Judge Martino’s level of tolerance, and Martino had responded in a way that did the defense no good. After a particularly fruitless and time-wasting series of questions about an alternate blood-testing system addressed to the medical examiner’s blood pathologist, a man of magisterial expertise, Martino had called counsel to the bench.

“Mr. Freeland, what is the purpose of this line of questioning?” asked the judge.

“Your Honor, my purpose here is to draw out for the jury the failure of the medical examiner to test for blood type from the stains on the knife purportedly found.”

“The witness states that the amount of blood was too little for those tests.”

“Yes, but I’ve located articles in the Journal of Forensic Medicine-”

“Mr. Freeland, the witness has stated that those tests are not accepted by his profession.”

“Yes, Your Honor, but-”

“Mr. Freeland, do you know what an expert witness is?”

Freeland flushed, coughed, and said, “Of course, Judge.”

“I don’t think you do. An expert witness is assumed credible when speaking within the confines of his expertise. You have spent half an hour questioning him about the validity of tests that he says are garbage, despite repeated objections by the People, which I have sustained. If you wish to challenge the expertise of the People’s witness, the appropriate measure is to call an expert of your own. Do you plan to do so?”

“Uh, no, Your Honor, not at this time. But, Your Honor-”

“Be quiet, sir! Let me ask you, have you ever tried a homicide case before?”

Freeland’s face was brick now. “Uh, no, sir, this is my first.”

“It’ll be your last in my court if you don’t stop wasting my time. Unreasonable delay and contentiousness for its own sake are not acceptable strategies in this court.” Martino paused for a beat. “And I want to say that if you can’t cut it, I will have you replaced as counsel by reason of incompetence.”

Points for the judge, thought Karp, moving back to his seat. The threat of removal for incompetence would be particularly telling when counsel was the new head of the local Legal Aid Society office. He looked over at the defense table. Freeland was thumbing through notes and making marks. His color was back to normal, and he seemed relaxed for someone who had just had his shorts fried by a judge.

Marlene let the phone ring. It was lunchtime, and she was feeding the baby mashed bananas. But when the message machine clicked on and she heard the voice, she abandoned Lucy in her high chair and raced to the phone.

“Ms. Ciampi? I’m so sorry to disturb you at home, but I thought it was important.”

“No problem,” said Marlene. “What’s up, Mr. Sokoloff?”

“A gentleman called on me today. He presented himself as an associate of Mr. Ersoy’s, with similar contacts. He said his name was Nassif.”

“What did he want?”

“He had some things to sell. A very nice figured reliquary in silver-Armenian, fourteenth century. And some Byzantine coins ranging from the ninth to the fourteenth century. The reliquary is real, I believe, but the coins are not.”

“What did you do?”

“I, ah, said I had to consult with some potential customers. I invited him to call on me tomorrow.”

“Very good, Mr. Sokoloff, that’s very helpful. Look, I need to talk to some people and then Ill get back to you.”

Clever man, thought Marlene after he had bid her good-bye. Just the right move to dispatch any lingering doubts about the complicity of Sokoloff Galleries in a set of art frauds that may or may not have led to a murder.

Marlene got on the phone then and spoke with V.T. and then with Rodriguez, the art fraud cop, setting up a sting. Then she called Sokoloff back and told him what he had to do.

Lucy during this period had managed to cover herself and every object within range of her flinging power with a thin slime of sticky banana. Marlene laughed, hugged the child to her, stripped both Lucy and herself, and plunged the two of them into the bathtub.

In the afternoon, Karp presented his last official witness, Tony Chelham, the jail officer for whom Russell had identified his blue shirt. This was critical because all the witnesses who had seen Hosie Russell fleeing the murder scene and entering 58 Barrow Street had seen a man in such a shirt: the Digbys from Lexington, the actor Jerry Shelton, and James Turnbull, the leather shop owner. Karp brought those forward during the remainder of the afternoon. They all did well, both on direct and on cross. Freeland’s only option, since they had all obviously seen someone, was to suggest that whomever they had seen, it was not the defendant.

He implied that, to the Digbys, all black people looked alike. He implied that Shelton, a homosexual actor living in Greenwich Village, was probably besotted with drugs as a matter of course-he actually asked whether Shelton had been smoking marijuana on the afternoon in question. He implied that Turnbull, who had spontaneously identified Russell in the police station and had attacked him as the murderer, had been put up to it by the police, which implication Turnbull, a man of immense dignity and presence, passionately rejected.

It was not a particularly good cross, thought Karp. Freeland appeared to be drifting; a lot of his questions didn’t lead anywhere in particular, as if he was just going through the motions. It didn’t help him that the witnesses were all solid citizens. Attacking such witnesses tended to piss off the jury, composed of the similarly solid.

After Turnbull stepped down, Karp said, “Your Honor, that is the People’s case.”

Martino excused the jury, Freeland made the expected motion to dismiss, which was rejected, and Karp was through for the day, at least with trials. He went back to his office and caught up on paperwork until seven, ordered take-out Chinese, ate it, and clumped off to the jail to take a shower.

He tried not to think about the trial. There is a certain letdown after the presentation of a major case, and it was entirely possible to drive oneself into a frenzy of doubt about the various errors that could have been made, and which might even now be bubbling in the minds of the jurors, cooking away at an acquittal.

The case had weaknesses, of course: no witness had turned up from the crowd who had actually followed Russell from the murder scene to 58 Barrow, although the police had seen dozens of people doing so. The guy on the bike-who had told Thornby that a man was hiding in that building-was a particularly unfortunate no-show, and the cops, urged on by Karp, had tried strenuously to locate him.

And, of course, Freeland still had his turn at bat. Karp had no idea what the defense was going to present; Freeland had flatly refused to tell Karp who his witnesses, if any, were going to be. There was no point in speculating.

Karp turned off the water and reached for his towel. He found himself, surprisingly, wanting the trial to be over. The whole thing irritated him: the stupidity of the crime, the arrogance and fatuousness of Freeland, the enforced isolation, the goddamned cast; he even regretted getting to know Russell in these after-hours meetings.

Here he was, mopping, as Karp emerged. Karp nodded curtly and began to get dressed.

“You got any smokes?”

“Sorry, I forgot,” said Karp. He sensed Russell staring at him, but he did not acknowledge it, or make any effort to start a conversation.

“Hey, man,” said Russell after some moments, “I heard some things.”

“Uh-huh, like what?”

“You know, stuff. Around the jail. Like you might wanna know about.” Russell had his pathetic sly expression on.

“Uh-huh. So, you going to tell me?”

“I could. Depends on what I get.”

Karp pulled his sweats on. Water had dripped down inside his cast and was itching. He said, “I got nothing to give you, Hosie.”

“You sure about that? This, what I got, it’s a big case.”

Karp got his crutches under his arms and stood. He looked Russell in the eye. “Well, here’s the thing, Hosie. First of all, like I said a while back, there’s no way I’m going to discuss your case in any way whatever without your attorney present. If you have something you want to deal for, he’s the guy to see.

“Second, right now I’d say that if you gave me the guy who did JFK, you’d still be looking at twenty-five to life. The time to deal is past. You decided to go for the trial, and you got the trial. They find you not guilty, you walk; you’re guilty, it’s the max. That’s how it works.

“And there’s no point you looking at me like that. It’s nothing personal. You can’t be on the street. You’re a career criminal, you’ve already spent most of your life in the slam, and now you’re going to spend the rest of it inside. That’s your part in the play. It’s my part to put you away, and it’s Freeland’s part to try to stop me. It’s a puppet show. Or like a mechanical bank-you put the penny in the slot and the little clown spins around.”

“It’s like that, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Karp after a sigh. “Sometimes I think it is.”

“Whatever you do to me ain’t gonna bring her back.”

“There’s that. You know, when I was in law school, I heard a guy lecture on the philosophy behind punishment. What he called ‘the supposed justification.’ He did a pretty good job of proving that there wasn’t any-rehabilitation is a joke, deterrence is unethical, revenge is immoral.”

“Didn’t convince you much.”

Karp smiled. “No, it didn’t. Or to tell the truth, I saw the logic of what he was saying, but it didn’t feel right to me. You hurt someone, you got to suffer. There has to be justice or the world doesn’t make sense. I’m talking gut level, not all the legal horseshit.

“So let me give you some advice. You heard something in the cells. Maybe somebody admitted doing something that somebody else is going down for. Or somebody has some information about a crime that the cops don’t know about. You figure you can use it to get a better deal, because you’re a hustler. You’re looking out for number one. That’s what you’ve always done, your whole life. Well, look around. Here you are. Here you’re gonna stay. That’s what hustling got for you.

“What I’m saying is, think about it; maybe you should start doing the opposite. Do something for somebody else, a stranger maybe. You can’t fuck up your life any worse than it’s already been, and who knows? It could change your luck.”

He stumped out leaving Hosie Russell looking at him blankly, as if he had been speaking Armenian.

Marlene, baby on hip, pounded on the iron door of Stuart Franciosa’s loft, which, after a considerable wait, was opened by the proprietor, looking harassed. He wore a heavy reflective apron over his usual black sweatshirt and black canvas pants, and he had a pair of dark goggles pushed up on his forehead.

“Sorry, I’m in the midst,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I’m going shopping,” said Marlene. “You want me to pick anything up?”

“How considerate! How about the severed head of the odious Lepkowitz?”

“Oh, God, don’t remind me. The deadline’s getting close, isn’t it?”

“Less than a month. How’re you doing on it?”

“Doomed. I’m starting to get my head adjusted to the possibility that the fucker could actually kick me out.”

“Oh, you’ll think of something. But, really, shopping? Thanks, but we want for nothing. We eat like birds, as you know. Say, I heard about what happened Saturday. You really have to stop being attacked by criminals, Marlene. It’s bringing the neighborhood down.”

“I’ll think about it. What’re you doing in there, by the way?”

“Casting. Want to see? It’s quite dramatique. ”

The big workroom was hot and smelled of burning.

“It’s just a little bronze, a test really,” said Stuart. “I just got this neat little electric furnace. It was starting to be a pain in the ass to go up to the foundry for every little thing. Don’t look directly in the door.”

Stuart used a set of tongs to open the door of the squat cylinder. Harsh yellow light and a blast of heat shot out. He reached in with the tongs and drew out a glowing crucible and poured a stream of liquid bronze into a small mold, throwing a shower of sparks and a cloud of smoke.

Marlene and Lucy watched with interest. Lucy was fascinated by the fireworks. Marlene was looking more at the metalized label stuck to the side of the device. “Where’d you get that thing, Stu?”

“Pearl Paint, the artist’s venal friend. Why?”

“Nothing. I’ve just been a jerk. See you.”

Later, her shopping done, the baby fed and napping, Marlene worked the phone, trying to locate Harry Bello. She finally had to leave her number with the police dispatcher, saying it was an emergency.

Harry called back within ten minutes, concern thick in his voice.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Harry.”

“They said it was an emergency. I thought, the kid-”

“The paint, Harry. It wasn’t paint.”

“This you give me a heart attack for? The paint isn’t paint?”

“Where was it, the store you saw the Turks at?”

“On Canal, that Pearl’s Paint.”

“Harry, Pearl Paint is the biggest art-supply store in lower Manhattan. You saw them carrying a heavy box out, say about the size of a big TV?”

“Yeah. So?”

“My next paycheck says that wasn’t a set of watercolors. It was an electric jeweler’s furnace.”

“They’re gonna melt that thing, the mask,” said Harry, no flies on him.

“Not if I can help it,” said Marlene.

The defense’s first witness in People v. Russell was, to Karp’s surprise, a familiar face. Paul Ashakian took the stand and was sworn in. He looked young and blank-faced up there.

Freeland took him through the usual background material, schools, profession, the fact that he was not a bodybuilder or involved in any athletics at present, and then on to the meat. Freeland had set up an experiment. He had taken Ashakian up to the stairway in 58 Barrow, and there Ashakian had propped up the skylight, jumped up, grabbed the lip of the skylight base, and chinned himself up to the roof. He testified that once up on the roof, he had observed numerous ways to leave the building.

Freeland asked, “Now, Mr. Ashakian, is there any doubt in your mind that a person of approximately your height and build could enter the skylight as you did and escape from the roof in any of the ways you have described?”

Karp objected. “Speculative.”

“Sustained.”

Freeland asked, “Well, then, did you yourself have any difficulty whatever pulling yourself up through the skylight to the roof?”

Ashakian said it had been easy.

Karp rose for cross. He had been about to ask that the entire testimony be stricken as speculative and irrelevant, but a memory flashed into his mind and he approached the witness.

“Mr. Ashakian, you testified that you attended St. Joseph’s High School. While there, did you participate in any sports?”

“Yes, I was on the gym team.”

“You started for the St. Joseph’s gymnastic team?”

“Yes.”

“And during that time, were you ever required to perform on the high bar?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Did that entail leaping up for a bar set nine feet above the ground, pulling yourself up so that your legs were on the bar, and rotating your whole body rapidly around the bar?”

“Yes, it did,” said Ashakian. To his credit, he seemed embarrassed.

“No further questions,” said Karp.

Freeland’s second witness was a thin, elderly man named Walter Tyler. Tyler testified that he had been walking down Hudson Street and that he had seen Susan Weiner stagger, bleeding, out of her doorway and a man running away from that scene. The man had glanced over his shoulder as he ran, and Tyler had seen his “full face.” The running man had not been Hosie Russell.

Tyler testified further that he had gone with the crowd to 58 Barrow, had shouted out that Russell was not the right man, and had been ignored. Later he had gone up to a cop and had given his story, which the cop had written down. When he saw that the police were continuing to charge Russell, he had gone to Freeland. Karp looked over at the jury. They were listening with interest. Wrinkles of doubt appeared on their faces. They had all watched enough Perry Mason to believe that the defense could pull in a secret witness at the last moment to overturn the prosecution’s carefully constructed case. Disaster loomed.

Marlene, dressed in her best black, perfumed heavily, attempting to radiate class, sat in an uncomfortable Louis XV chair in Stephan Sokoloff’s cozy office and looked at Aziz Nassif, who was sitting in a similar chair. Sokoloff sat behind his desk smiling genially upon the supposed transaction taking place. On the desk, on a tray covered in black velvet, were four coins.

“Thirty thousand for the four,” said Marlene. “It’s my best offer.”

Nassif licked his lips, hesitated, then nodded. Sokoloff’s smile broadened. He said, “I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a bill of sale. I’ll just write in the price, here, and Mr. Nassif, if you’d just sign it …”

Nassif read the document and scratched his name on the appropriate line. Marlene took it, folded it, and put it in her bag. The door to the office opened. Ramon Rodriguez and Harry Bello walked in and arrested Nassif for art fraud.

Rodriguez took the protesting Turk away. Marlene pulled a paper out of her bag and gave it to Bello.

“Okay, Harry, this is a search warrant for Nassif’s restaurant and his apartment. It’s for the art fraud charge. You’re looking for phony art objects or other evidence of fraud. Just like it says on the warrant. Of course, if you should happen to find any evidence of other crimes not named in plain sight, then you can seize that too.”

Harry raised an eyebrow. “Smart.”

“I thought so,” said Marlene.

Karp stood and addressed the bench. “Your Honor, since this witness was not known to us before now, I request that Mr. Freeland turn over to the People all notes and statements pertaining to Mr. Tyler.”

Freeland rose instantly and said, “Your Honor, the only records I have from this witness are personal notes, personal working notes, which I don’t believe I am under any obligation to turn over.”

Martino beckoned them to the bench. He addressed Freeland.

“You have no statement from this man?”

“No, sir.”

“No statements? You interviewed this witness without taking notes about what he told you?”

Freeland said, “Well, yes, but they’re just rough notes-”

“That’s what I want,” said Karp.

“I don’t have to give them,” said Freeland, petulance creeping into his tone.

The judge said, “You have all Mr. Karp’s material, notes, police reports, statements from witnesses….”

“That was Mr. Karp’s option in that he thought those materials fell under Rosario, which he was obligated to give up. I am under no such obligation.”

“I am directing you to turn them over.”

“Your Honor, I’d like to know under what rule of discovery, or case you are directing me to.”

Martino squinted his eyes in thought. “Rule of discovery, it’s … what?” He glanced at Karp.

“Dolan, Your Honor,” said Karp.

“Right, Dolan. That’s Dolan, Mr. Freeland: D-O-L-A-N.”

“I’m not familiar with that case, Judge.”

“Not my problem, Mr. Freeland. I’m going to recess now for five minutes, during which you can peruse the law, and during which you will turn that material over to the People.”

It was as Karp had expected. Eight sheets of yellow paper covered with scribbling that contained almost none of the testimony that Tyler had just given, except for his insistence that the man who had committed the crime had worn a blue shirt. The actuality was easy to reconstruct. An elderly man had seen something dramatic, a murder. He’d seen a figure race away. He’d followed the crowd to 58 Barrow. When the cops dragged out a man wearing a red T-shirt, he’d called out, “That’s not the guy.” Somehow Freeland had located him, or he had drifted in to Freeland, and the original story had been fertilized by suggestion and encouragement and the desire to be important, and Freeland’s unprincipled ambition, until the current testimony had appeared, like a gross and noxious weed. Perjury.

“Mr. Tyler,” said Karp, “could you stand up and come down here where I am?” As Tyler did so, Karp continued, “Your Honor, could we have Mr. Tyler demonstrate for the jury how the man was running and how he turned his head?”

The judge assented.

“Mr. Tyler,” Karp continued, “now, this man you saw, was he running fast or slow?”

“He was running fast.”

“All right, could you do that, could you just run away from the jury box and show the jury how the man was running and how he turned his head?”

Tyler broke into a clumsy trot across the well of the court and, after a few steps, threw his head back over his shoulder, then continued on for a few more steps. It was a good demonstration that if a man is running away from you and he looks over his shoulder, you can’t see his full face.

Karp said, “Now could you tell us exactly how far this man was away from you when he turned his head?”

“Thirty feet. I said thirty feet.”

On his crutches Karp backed slowly away from Tyler. He stopped at the rail dividing the well from the spectators. “About here?”

“No, farther than that.”

Karp opened the little gate and moved up the aisle. “Here?”

“Yeah, that’s good,” said Tyler.

Karp turned his back on the witness. “Mr. Tyler, can you see my back?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Tyler, you see that I can’t run very well now, but I’m going to look over my right shoulder at you. Was this how the man on Hudson Street looked over his shoulder?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Mr. Tyler, can you see my full face?”

A pause. “Well, it wasn’t just like that … he sort of stopped a little.”

“Answer the question,” said Martino.

“No, I can’t.”

“And it follows that on Hudson Street that day, you couldn’t really see the full face of the man you saw running away, isn’t that true?”

“Yes.”

“So what you actually saw that day was a portion of a man’s face at a distance of perhaps thirty feet for about one second, isn’t that true?”

Tyler agreed that it was.

Karp said, “Mr. Tyler, when Mr. Freeland first interviewed you, didn’t you say that you were forty-five feet away from the man when he turned?”

“No, thirty feet.”

“But Mr. Freeland’s notes, which I have here and which I now submit in evidence, state clearly forty-five feet. Is this the incredible shrinking distance?”

“Objection!” from Freeland.

“Withdrawn. Did you say you were forty-five feet away from the over-the-shoulder glance when you first spoke to Mr. Freeland?”

“Objection! These are personal notes. What I wrote down there may or may not be what Mr. Tyler told me, and they shouldn’t be used to cross-examine the witness.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and the judge gave Freeland one of his long looks. “Mr. Freeland, are you stating that Mr. Tyler did not just testify to the same facts that he told you originally, or that you didn’t write down what he said then correctly?”

“Uh, no, Your Honor, I was not saying that.”

The judged turned to Tyler. “Answer the question.”

“It was thirty feet.”

Karp then questioned him about the cop who had purportedly interviewed him. Tyler couldn’t remember the cop’s name or give a convincing description of him, or explain why he hadn’t gone to the police, or the D.A. or a judge with his testimony. Karp dismissed the witness, feeling confident that he had creamed him pretty well. Freeland declined to recross, which was a good sign.

“Defense calls Geri Stone.”

It took Karp a moment to comprehend who Geri Stone was. When he did, he rose and said, “Offer of proof on this witness, Your Honor?”

Freeland said, “This witness was the defendant’s parole officer. She knows the defendant quite well and was in fact instrumental in obtaining his release from prison. She will testify as to the defendant’s propensity for committing this type of crime.”

“Approach the bench, Your Honor?” said Karp.

Martino beckoned them forward.

“Your Honor, this witness is the dead woman’s sister. It strikes me as … obscene, to trot her in here as a character witness for the defendant.”

“She’s an expert, not a character witness,” Freeland retorted, “and her relation to the deceased has no legal bearing on her suitability as a witness.”

Martino looked at the two counsel bleakly. He had seen it all, and it hadn’t improved his view of human nature or the imperfections of the law. “I’ll allow the witness.”

Karp protested, “As an expert only?”

“Yes, as to her expertise.” To the court officer: “Swear her in.”

The Sister was no longer in black. She wore a blue linen suit over a white blouse with a complicated scarf at the neck. She was heavily made up, and her hair had been recently done over with reddish highlights. She looked like a waxwork in the bureaucrats’ hall of fame.

Freeland took her through her professional qualifications and her relationship with the defendant. Then they began on what a swell guy Hosie Russell was. Freeland read copiously from the parole officer’s notes Stone had written, how Hosie was the victim of society and his own weaknesses, how he had tried so hard and, more to the point, how she believed that he was basically nonviolent, a disorganized, dissociated alcoholic, a sneak thief, not an armed robber. Stone confirmed her agreement with these opinions, her voice a low monotone.

Karp waited for the payoff, and he was not disappointed.

“Ms. Stone,” Freeland asked smoothly, “have you or a member of your family ever been a victim of a violent crime?”

“Yes, my sister is the victim in this case.”

“Objection!” cried Karp. “Irrelevant to the expert testimony.”

“Sustained. The jury will disregard.”

The damage, of course, was done. If Karp now tore Ms. Stone apart on the stand, tore apart the victim’s sister, the jury would never forgive him. They would walk Jack the Ripper.

Freeland said, “No further questions.”

Karp stood and said, “No questions, Your Honor.”

Martino said, “Members of the jury, that completes the testimony in this case. All that remains are the summations by the respective counsel, after which the court will charge. Have a pleasant evening and do not discuss the case among yourselves.”

The courtroom emptied. Karp gathered his papers.

“Need a hand?” It was Marlene.

“A leg, you mean.”

“How’d it go?”

“Were you here?”

“No, I just came in. What happened?”

“Oh, nothing, just fucking Freeland called Geri Stone.”

“As a defense witness?”

“Yep. As the parole officer, to the effect that Hosie was God’s gift to New York. And she did it. She sat up there and mouthed that crap about the guy who knifed her sister. I can’t understand it. I mean, I could understand Freeland doing it-it’s brilliant in a filthy way. Getting the vic’s sister to stand up for the mutt charged, and of course he slipped it in that she was the sister. But I can’t see why she would agree to it.”

“Oh, I can,” said Marlene. “I mean, what else does she have anymore? She loved her sister and, God help us all, she loved her work. She thought she was doing good. She got Russell out on the street and he did her sister, what’s she going to do-admit she made a mistake, that her whole approach to life is fucked? That this mutt she made a pet of and patronized and manipulated was really manipulating her? No way.”

Karp sighed. “You think so? Maybe. It’s hard to believe, though. I mean, we’re not that crazy-about all this, I mean.” He gestured wildly at the courtroom, taking in the legal profession and the law’s grim majesty.

“Speak for yourself, dear,” said Marlene unhelpfully.