Justice Denied

4

It took Denny Maher two and a half hours to finish the flattened Jane Doe. As he had feared, the teeth were all over the place, from the windpipe to the base of the brain. He gathered them carefully and placed them in a plastic bag. There was evidence of careful dental work; she had not been raised in poverty. Death had been instantaneous, of course, from massive brain damage, but the woman had at least been alive when she hit the ground. The hyoid and trachea were intact, and there was no sign that the woman had been strangled, stabbed, or shot. He examined the hands, which had been placed in plastic bags. He took samples from under the fingernails for later microscopic examination, and as he handled the cold fingers he noticed that there was extensive bruising around the wrists. That was an odd note, although nearly any mark could be explained by a falling-body death. Still, you got marks like that when someone’s wrists were tightly held.

He examined the woman’s vagina, a difficult and tedious procedure, for the organ was badly torn by bone fragments from the disintegrated pelvis. He took samples and put them aside for later microscopic and chemical analysis. Ordinarily he would have taken samples also from the rectum and oral cavity, but these were so badly damaged and contaminated by the explosive eversion of the viscera and by direct impact that such samples would have had little forensic value. What did have value was something he discovered on the inside of the woman’s thigh, high up near the crotch and protected by that location from the general ruin: the clear and unmistakable marks of human teeth. He rolled the body, first to one side, then to the other. More teeth. He got out the Polaroid rig and took photographs.

Maher secured and labeled his samples and covered and refrigerated what was left of the Jane Doe. Before going home, he stopped by his office and wrote a note to himself to call the police officers in charge of the case and, if what he now strongly suspected was borne out by the lab, the rape bureau of the D.A.’s office as well.

“Does that hurt?” asked the orthoped.

Karp, who had turned pale and nearly cracked a molar gritting his teeth, gasped, “Yeah, that hurts.”

“How about this?” said Dr. Hudson, twisting. Karp let out a shrill yelp.

“I’ll assume that’s affirmative,” said the doctor. Then he allowed Karp’s knee to relax back on the examining table. Dr. Hudson rolled a little distance on his stool and examined a chart. He was a squat, muscular man with a gray crew cut and a squared-off face that seemed accustomed to issuing bad news.

“I saw you what? Four years ago?” the doctor asked, reading from his chart. “I told you to come back every six months and you didn’t bother. So. What’ve you been doing with that thing?” He indicated the reddened lump that was Karp’s left knee.

“What do you mean, what’ve I been doing? I use it when I walk,” said Karp.

“No unusual strains? Falls?”

“Well, a little basketball.”

The doctor’s eyes widened. “Basketball? What, on asphalt? In the playground?”

“Yeah, that, and, um, I was on a pro team for a couple of months last winter as part of a murder investigation.”

“You’re joking! No, wait, you’re that guy! D.A. Karp, they called you-played for the Hustlers, right?”

“Right,” said Karp, an appeasing smile creasing his lips.

“Get the hell out of my office!” said Dr. Hudson.

“So did he really throw you out?” asked Marlene. It was lunchtime later the same day; they were seated in Karp’s office, and she had brought him a sausage sandwich and a root beer from one of the cancer wagons that plied Foley Square. She herself sipped coffee. She had a lunch date later.

“No, worse,” replied Karp, shoving bits of onion back into his mouth with his fingers. “He gave me a lecture. Apparently I’ve totaled the joint. He said he’ll need to do an arthroscopy to be sure, but he thinks I’m going to need another operation, maybe a complete arthroplasty.”

“That sounds pretty grim.”

“It’s grim, all right. I’ll be on crutches for six weeks at least after the operation, not to mention the fact of how we’re going to pay for it.”

“But you’ve got medical-”

“No, I don’t, not for this. It’s a prior existing condition. I checked already; they won’t pay.”

Marlene’s heart sank. “How much?”

“Um, we won’t get much change from a ten thousand dollar bill.”

Marlene finished her coffee and tossed the cup in the trash. She rose. “You mean, there goes our exclusive condo in the heart of one of New York’s most desirable neighborhoods? Maybe, but I can’t think about it today. I have to see this woman about our kid.”

“The parole officer?”

“And her sister, the one with the kid. It’s sounding better and better, and I know we’re going to get in because we absolutely have to get a break right now.” She blew him a kiss and whirled out the door.

Karp waited. Thirty seconds later she stuck her head in the door again, looking stunned. “Hey, if you’re on crutches for six weeks, how are you going to get up to the loft?”

“The penny drops,” said Karp. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know how I’m going to get up the stairs. But I can’t think about it today.”

She grinned. “Smart move. See you around, cutie,” she said, and closed the door.

Marlene took the elevator down from the sixth floor, where Karp had his office, to street level, and walked out of the special entrance reserved for the D.A.’s staff onto Leonard Street. She walked up Leonard to Church and a half block down Church to a branch New York State Parole office.

Inevitably, it was painted in the official bureaucratic colors, green to shoulder height and tan above, a scheme designed by famous scientists to increase suicidal tendencies, especially when lit by dim fluorescents. There were rows of plastic shell chairs in pleasing shades of avocado and pink, and a heavyset clerk with streaked black and blond hair who sat behind a glassed-in counter munching corn chips and talking on the phone. Four of the chairs were occupied by the kind of people who have to visit their parole officers on a regular basis.

Marlene went up to the clerk’s window and asked to see Geri Stone. The clerk continued talking and munching. Marlene asked again, louder. The clerk scowled and said, around a bolus of chip debris, “She’s with someone. Take a seat!”

Marlene sat on her anger and decided not to flash her ID and make a scene. This was, after all, a private mission. She took a seat. The clerk talked on behind her window. Time stopped.

At least twenty minutes later, the door opened again, and a pretty young woman entered, who belonged in such a place far less than even Marlene. She had her black hair cut in an artful shingle, she wore a mannish tweed suit that did not make her look mannish, and had that air of entitlement and confidence that even the City cannot strip from some bright and successful young women. Marlene checked the shoes and bag, found them expensive and tasteful, and thought, the girl’s made a mistake-probably looking for a brokerage.

But no, the woman advanced on the clerk’s station and, smiling, said, “Hi, Mavis, is Geri free?”

The clerk paused in her conversation and returned the smile. “Hi, Susan. I’ll buzz her.” Magic.

Marlene rose and went over to the woman. This had to be the sister, the one with the kid, thought the trained investigator, and so it was. Susan Weiner, mother of a three-year-old, an industrial designer, married to a rising TV producer, and a woman who obviously knew how to make New York sit up and beg. This information and this impression were conveyed to Marlene in a giddy rush as they walked together down a green, dimly lit hallway.

Weiner stopped by a frosted glass door, which opened, allowing the passage of a bullet-headed black man in his thirties, who glowered at them and brushed by so forcefully that they both had to jump back a step.

“A satisfied client,” laughed Weiner, and went into the little office.

Geri Stone was the older sister, by perhaps five years, which made her early thirties. She was rounded, blurry, where Susan was crisply cut and lean, and had adopted a stern proletarian plainness in contrast to her sister’s stylish flair. Her hair was a nondescript brown frizz, and she had on a lipstick that was too bright and a fuzzy sweater of an unfortunate blue shade that greened her sallow complexion.

She greeted her sister effusively.

“God, you look gorgeous. Get away from here, you’re so thin.”

“That’s a gorgeous sweater,” responded Susan. “Where’d you get it?”

And similar cooings. At length they noticed Marlene. Geri shook Marlene’s hand in a formal, manly grip. They were all to go to lunch, Geri’s suggestion when Marlene had called her to make contact with Susan. An odd arrangement, Marlene had thought at the time-why was Geri inviting herself along for a discussion about day-care? Now, of course, the reason was clear, a set of family dynamics you could explicate on the back of a business card. The dowdy social worker was in love with her glamorous sister.

They ate at a local bar. Geri turned out to be one of those people who justified their caloric intake by informing you about how little they had been eating for the past week. Marlene was not particularly hungry, but decided to order a cheeseburger with fries and a beer just for spite.

They chatted. Susan was witty and flippant, a game Marlene played back at her. Geri was more serious, in fact something of a bleeding heart. When Susan mentioned the guy who had almost knocked them down in the hall, Geri launched into his pathetic case history: mildly retarded, alcoholic, abused as a child, dragged through foster homes, a juvie sheet that went back to age twelve and a record of stupid petty crime that turned violent when he had a load on. She had struggled mightily to get him an early release from his last stretch and into a program that specialized in helping people with what she called “institutional malaise.”

“Hmm, interesting,” said Marlene, not really interested but making an effort to be polite in the face of a certain hostility she sensed coming from the parole officer. She was not sure whether this stemmed from her own job, as the kind of person whose delight it was to put poor, misunderstood victims of society in jail, or if it was a kind of jealousy for the attention of Susan Weiner.

Their food came. Geri fussed and harried the waitress over the crispness of her salad and the provenance of the salad dressing. Weiner caught Marlene’s eye and rolled her own slightly, along with an indulgent smile. We the Thin.

It would have been easy to dislike them both, Geri for her fussy self-righteousness, Susan for her air of unthinking entitlement, but Marlene found herself warming to them, not as individuals precisely, but to the relationship.

These two sisters had something that Marlene had only read about in books, the kind of spiritual closeness that had entranced female writers in the nineteenth century. Marlene had two sisters of her own, whom she loved, of course, but conventionally. Annie was a housewife with a brood of kids out on the Island. Pat was a city planner in Philadelphia. She saw them at birthdays and holidays, and there was warmth then but no real intimacy.

Marlene did not envy them, precisely. If she had been Susan, she would have found Geri’s combination of mother-hen advice and effusive praise unbearable. And as Geri, Susan’s blithe princess act would have driven her to violence. But it was oddly pleasant to bask in the warmth of their relationship, which was as rare in the circles Marlene frequented as hot-chestnut vendors in Midtown.

The lunch ended, not without (as Marlene had expected) an unbearable niggling over who owed what on the check, presided over by Geri, wielding a pencil. At the point when she was calculating the tip, to the nearest cent, Marlene whipped a twenty out of her wallet, snatched the check from Geri’s fingers, slapped the check and the bill on the table, and clunked a sugar dispenser down on both.

“My treat,” she said. “Let’s move, Susan.”

“God, yes,” said Weiner, glancing at her watch. “I already missed my Jazzercise.”

“Your Jazzercise-” said Geri. “Honestly, it’s like a religion with you.”

“You should try it, Geri, seriously, I’m always trying to get her off her behind. Do something! Marlene, you work out, right? What, aerobics?”

“I box,” said Marlene. A snuffle of unbelieving mirth. “No, I don’t mean I get in the ring. I have a body bag and a speed bag, and I jump rope and curl dumbbells. My dad taught me, and I’ve kept it up.”

“Really?” from both.

“Yeah, he was a welterweight contender at one time back in the forties, or thought he was before he spent six minutes in there with Kid Gavilan. He stuck to plumbing after that.”

Polite smiles, but Marlene caught the little look that passed. The sisters Stone did not know people whose fathers were ex-pugs or current plumbers. One of the nearly invisible injuries of class that aren’t supposed to happen in America, but which make up much of the grit in the national gears. Sacred Heart and Smith and Yale Law had taken much of the sting out of it for Marlene; still, she could recall very much the same look on her own dear one’s face when she had first told him about where she came from, under the fancy veneer. A brief thought, and a familiar one, brushed across her mind: that Karp might have been, not happier maybe, but more content with another perfect Jewish princess like Susan Weiner. She was glad now she had sprung for the lunch.

The day-care was on Lispenard off Church, a few blocks north. They walked up Church. Susan Weiner did most of the talking, much of it about herself and her nice life. Marlene let the talk wash over her, content to just swing along the street. It was a pleasant day in the City. That is, the sky was the color of a lizard’s belly and the air stank of petroleum byproducts, but at least it wasn’t raining ice.

And she had high expectations. A perfect being like this could not have found anything less than the perfect day-care.

And so it proved. The woman who took care of six children in her large, sunny loft was a matronly soul named Lillian Dillard, who affected an embroidered smock and a plait of gray-blond hair down to her butt. She made quilts and wrote poetry and would someday finish her dissertation on early childhood behavior. The children, ranging from eight months to three, obviously loved her. Susan’s three-year-old boy barely acknowledged his mother’s presence, which Marlene took as a good sign. There was no TV in the large front room, another good sign. Marlene turned on the charm, was accepted, and wrote out a check for the first month in advance.

Back at her desk, feeling pleased with herself, she flipped through her messages, returning calls.

“Morgue, we doze but never close, Maher.”

“Denny? Marlene.”

“Ah, the pearl of Centre Street. How nice to hear your voice.”

“Likewise. What’s up?”

“Hmm. We’ve got a Jane Doe here. A splatter case. Went off a six-story building in Alphabet City. Some marks I don’t like on the body, and the vaginal and esophageal smears are positive.”

“You think rape and he killed her?”

“I wouldn’t go that far yet,” said Maher. “The girl was fairly torn up. On the other hand, I have some anomalous results on the secretion tests. We have more than one sperm donor here.”

“What do the cops think?”

“They think a pross. They think suicide.”

“They would. They made her for a pross? No, you said a Jane Doe.”

“Right. Her face is jam. But the kicker is, I have clear human tooth marks, three bites, same guy, and deep enough to draw blood. That always makes me steer away from either a trip to the moon on gossamer wings or a straight commercial transaction. Of course, I don’t date much anymore …”

“Drugs?”

“No tracks. Tissues are negative for barbs, amphetamines, and opiates. No booze either.”

“Who caught the case?”

Marlene heard paper shuffle. “Camano. Ninth Precinct.”

She wrote down the name and the phone number Maher gave her, thanked the medical examiner, and hung up.

The call from the M.E. was supposed to be automatic, but some of the medical examiners thought it too much trouble to call the D.A.’s office directly. They figured the cops were in charge and that it was their call. Besides, they had a lot to do.

Marlene looked at the name she had written down and wondered if it was even worth making the call. The cops had a lot to do as well, and so did she. About three thousand rapes were reported to the police in Manhattan every year, out of which Marlene would be glad if she secured fifty convictions. Of course, the woman had been murdered too, which meant the cops had to give it more attention. Lucky her.

The problem was that there were good and bad rapes. The good rapes were when the age, race, or social class of the perp and the victim were widely disparate, or when there had been notable violence. Rapes of prostitutes were, however, the worst rapes of all. The casual murders that were part of the occupational hazard in the City’s sex trade were only slightly better. If the cops had decided that Jane was a whore who had taken early retirement, then convincing them that she was a whore who had been raped and killed would not get all that much more action out of them. Sighing, she made the call.

The homicide bureau occupied a small suite of offices on the sixth floor of 10 °Centre Street. Only Karp and a few senior people like Hrcany had actual offices. These gave on to a large common area jammed with secretaries’ desks, the domain of Connie Trask. The rest of the A.D.A.’s were stuck in glass cubicles in a large bay a short distance down the main sixth-floor corridor.

It was Karp’s habit after lunch, and before court started again in the afternoon, to prowl his turf, poking into papers and confronting malefactors. This habit obviated any number of formal meetings, which he abhorred. In this way, emerging from his office, faintly redolent of Italian sausage, Karp made the discovery that brought him back into People v. Tomasian.

A clerk had just brought in a pile of Xeroxing, which she distributed among the wire baskets arranged for that purpose, one for each attorney, on a table in the corner of the secretaries’ bullpen. Karp wandered over and thumbed through some of the still warm papers. One of the folders in Roland Hrcany’s basket was labeled TOMASIAN. It contained copies of material produced by the arresting officers, mostly DD-5 forms, which cops used for describing in some detail what they had done to pursue the investigation and the results, if any. Karp skimmed the reports and the list of items seized under the search warrant. He dug deeper. The autopsy report. Deeper. A description of the items found on the victim. Here he stopped, puzzled, and leafed through the stack more carefully. Then he tossed the folder back into the basket and, frowning, strode off in search of Roland Hrcany.

Roland was not in his office when Karp looked for him there. He was in court, as it happened, for a bail hearing on the case in question. Karp sat in the back of the courtroom and watched Tomasian’s defense counsel, a stocky, grave man who really did look a lot like Raymond Burr, move for the setting of bail. He pointed out Tomasian’s clean record, the presence of a large and caring family, the defendant’s gainful employment in a family business, his ownership of a condo. Roland rose to rebut and argued with equal vehemence that the defendant was accused of a particularly heinous crime; he had resources and contacts outside the country; he was part of an international terrorist network.

Karp sympathized with the judge. Justice was at least partially sighted in cases like this one, and able to read the papers and watch TV. Poor kids from the lower orders of the City who gunned down people on the streets were invariably remanded to jail without bail. On the other hand, the well-dressed and harmless-looking man sitting before him was supposedly innocent until proven guilty, and had a constitutional right to reasonable bail.

The judge was not used to jailing people in nice suits with, as the saying went, roots in the community. He pondered for a few seconds and, using his years of experience on the bench, pulled a number out of the air: “Bail is set in the amount of five million dollars.”

Sighs from the small group of people sitting behind the defense table. Karp thought it a reasonable out for the judge. Bondsmen would not touch a bail like that, which meant that Tomasian and his near and dear would have to raise the face amount, which meant in all probability that the guy was going back inside.

Karp waited at the head of the aisle. When Roland reached him, he said, “Nice work, Roland. The City sleeps safer tonight.”

Hrcany’s face twisted. “It should have been a no-bailer. These are diamond people, for chrissake! Who knows what they’ve got squirreled away?”

“Maybe. Meanwhile, I’m glad I caught you, Roland. I was just curious: what did you find in the vic’s safe-deposit box?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“The box. The vic had a box key on him when he went down. What’s in it?”

Roland’s eyes narrowed slightly and his body tensed.

“What is this, Butch? You checking up on me?”

“No, it just happened to cross my eye. I have to go and sit down with Bloom this afternoon and tell him that the case is a wrap, which is the only thing he wants to hear. So I needed to know if it is.”

A flush began to rise under Roland’s jaw. “Wait a minute! Since when did you give a shit about Bloom?”

Karp ignored this and pitched his voice to its maximally calming tone. “That’s not the point, Roland. The fact that a victim has a safe box suggests a repository of information that could bear on the case, and I need to know what was in it before I go talk to Bloom. So what was it?”

Roland, of course, had noted the box key first thing, but in the flush of success had neglected to follow up on it. He covered himself now by blustering. “How the fuck do I know? Cuff links? His birth certificate? What the hell does it matter?”

“You haven’t checked it,” said Karp.

“I don’t believe this! You still don’t get it. This is the guy. It doesn’t fucking matter what’s in the box. We don’t have to trace the victim’s movements or his fucking associates, or find out what he ate for his last meal. It ain’t no mystery, Butch.”

Karp shifted gears. “The alibi didn’t check out, huh? You talked to the girlfriend?”

“The girlfriend is gone,” replied Roland with an unpleasant smile. “Her office says she’s on leave. So I got a warrant to search her place, knowing, knowing, that you would bug me about her. They found a VISA counterfoil for a ticket to San Francisco. We checked with the airlines: she was on a flight that left late that Sunday. I wonder why.”

“You think she’s involved?”

“I know it. Her place was full of Armenian nationalist literature, some of it copies of the stuff we found in Tomasian’s office. They were in it together. In fact, it wouldn’t blow me away if we found out that she was the other gun.”

“So we’re looking for her.”

“Yeah, she’s out on the wire. But whether she turns up or not, it shoots the shit out of our boy’s alibi.”

Karp nodded agreement. “Yeah, it does, provided he needs one.”

“What?”

“Roland, what happens to your open-and-shut case if there’s five kilos of Turkish heroin in his box? Or a letter from a shark that says, ‘Pay up or else!’?”

“This is horseshit, Butch!” cried Roland, going red again.

“Just open the box, Roland,” said Karp, and walked away.

Detective Camano turned out to be one of those cops who had retired on the job. The Jane Doe from Avenue A was an easy clearance, one of hundreds of miscellaneous bodies and parts of bodies that turned up in the City every year.

“It ain’t homicide to get a bite on the ass,” he told Marlene confidently. “The M.E. says there was no sign of foul play.”

“Biting isn’t foul play?”

“I mean not a cause of death. Look, honey, there’s no knife wound, there’s no gunshot wound, she wasn’t strangled, or tied up-”

“You haven’t considered the possibility that she was raped and thrown out of a window?”

A long-suffering sigh on the line. “We checked the houses on both sides of the street. Nobody saw nothing, and there’s no woman missing from any of the apartments.”

“What about the street girls?”

A laugh. “They haven’t missed a trick, is what I hear. Look, we got forty, forty-five homicides on the chart here that we know are homicides. We don’t need to invent any, especially when the M.E. isn’t ready to call it.”

“What about the rape part?”

“We don’t know that either. I got nobody on the block saying they saw this chick dragged into the bushes. Nobody’s coming around saying where’s my Mary. So what am I gonna go on? Fingerprints? Sperm samples? You know how I figure it? This chick gets off a bus, tries the sporting life, a customer gets a little rough, and she decides to take a jump.”

It was a dead end with this guy. Marlene decided to waste no more time. She said, “I hope you’re right, Detective Camano. On the other hand, if we get three more women’s bodies turning up with bite marks in the same places, and one of them is the mayor’s niece, I’ll remember this conversation and bring it up whenever I can with whoever will listen.”

She slammed her phone down and reached for the next call message in the stack.

After fuming in his office for a half hour and being rude to everyone within easy reach, Roland called Frangi at Midtown South and told him to get over to the bank where Mehmet Ersoy had maintained a safety-deposit box, with key to same. Roland stood impatiently over a secretary while a warrant was typed out, whipped into a judge’s office, got it signed, and left immediately for the bank.

Frangi was already there. He had identified himself to the bank branch manager. Roland flashed his warrant, and they were allowed to follow a uniformed guard into the vault.

“What’s going on?” asked Frangi.

“Nothing. My boss got a hair up his ass about this case.”

It was one of the large kind, a smooth steel box nearly the size of a bus station locker. The guard used Ersoy’s key and the bank’s key to remove the box, and carried it with dignity to a little room, where he placed it on a table and departed.

Frangi flipped up the lid of the box. He let out a wordless exclamation. Hrcany looked inside and cursed and stamped his foot.

“How much you figure?” asked Frangi.

Both men had considerable experience in judging large volumes of cash. Roland rummaged in the box, flipping stacks of bills at random. They were hundreds, all of them, in fresh bank wrappers marked “$10,000.”

“A million,” said Roland, “at least. Maybe a little more.”

“Thrifty guy,” said Frangi glumly.