Justice Denied

8

It is an old-fashioned hue and cry, the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to happen in New York anymore because people don’t care. The man in the blue shirt runs south on Hudson and turns east on Christopher, heading for the twisty little streets and alleys of the West Village. A half-dozen people run after him, shouting. The amazed faces of the tourist couple flash by his eyes as he runs, clutching the handbag under his arm like a football.

The block of Christopher east of Hudson is a short one. The man cuts sharply across the street, runs down Bedford, and turns east on Barrow. If he can get under cover before his pursuers reach the corner of Barrow and Bedford, he might be safe. A sunken courtyard at 58 Barrow catches his eye, and he dashes down its steps. There is a restaurant built partially out over the courtyard, casting it into deep shade. Two doors lead from the courtyard. He chooses the one on the right and pounds on it.

A young man opens the door. He is an actor expecting a delivery of moo goo gai pan from a nearby Chinese take-out. He smiles and says, “Hi. What do I owe you?” The killer pushes by him and runs through the small apartment. He is no longer thinking very clearly, or even as clearly as he normally does, which is not with any particular depth or lucidity. The idea of escape fills his entire mind. Here fortune favors him. There is a door opening into the interior of the building, and he goes through it and up two flights to where the stairs end in a small landing, under a skylight.

By now he is exhausted. He rests for a moment, panting, and rummages through the handbag. He tears a thin sheaf of currency from the wallet he finds there, seven dollars in all, and thrusts it into his pocket. He tosses the knife and the bag into a corner of the stairwell. He listens; the building remains silent. He begins to walk quietly down the stairs and stops, because he has just had a thought. He strips off his blue shirt and throws it into a corner with the other stuff. He is wearing a bright red T-shirt underneath it.

The killer walks down the stairs, past the door to the young man’s apartment, and down a dimly lit corridor. He sees a door, opens it, and finds himself again in the courtyard. The young actor is standing there. He has gathered around him a crowd of people, the remains of the crowd who had chased the man in the blue shirt from Hudson Street. They are exchanging experiences. The young man looks up, sees the killer, and shouts. The killer darts back through the door.

Continuing along the corridor, he finds the building’s boiler room, stifling hot and black as midnight. He lights a match. There are some large pieces of cardboard lying about. He uses these to make a nest for himself in the space under the boiler, and lies down in it, carefully pulling the cardboard around him.

The first officer to reach the crime scene was patrolman Ray Thornby, a sturdy black man in his fifth year on the force. He summoned a patrol car on his portable radio, and in a few minutes the dying young woman had been whisked away. Members of the crowd that had gathered vied to describe the assailant and the direction he had gone.

A thin young man on a bicycle came to a screeching halt at the edge of the crowd and shouted, “They got him!”

“Where?” asked Thornby.

“Building at 58 Barrow. He’s in the basement.”

Thornby follows the bike rider to 58 Barrow. He sees that there is a crowd, an angry one, in the center of which is the young actor. The actor approaches the cop, introduces himself as Jerry Shelton, and explains what has occurred. A patrol car rushes up to a halt at the curb, and a sergeant and a patrolman get out. The three policemen learn that the actor was the only one who had actually seen the fugitive.

“This man actually came through your place?” asks Thornby.

“Yes! He pushed right by me like a madman, ran through my apartment, and out the front door.”

“What, this door?”

“No, the back door. It leads to a hallway and the stairs. There’s no way out of the building from it except back through the courtyard. Then I saw him again, over there.” He points at the basement door, across the courtyard. The crowd murmurs assent.

“What did he look like?” Thornby asks.

“Around thirty, I’d say-not a kid. Shortish hair. About five-ten, maybe one-seventy.”

“What was he wearing?” asks Thornby.

“Oh, let me see-blue, I have a blue picture. It all went so fast. A dark blue shirt and jeans, or some kind of work pants. Sneakers. No hat or anything. He was carrying something too. I thought it was my lunch.”

“Race?” asks Thornby mildly. In the West Village you had to pry it out of them, especially if you were a black cop.

“Oh! He was black,” says the actor, reddening.

“Dark complexion? Light? Darker than me or not as dark?”

“About like you.”

“You’re sure he’s in the basement?”

“Yes, I told you, I just saw him,” says Shelton. The crowd murmurs assent again, although most of them have seen nothing.

The sergeant goes back to the patrol car to call for backup, and Thornby and the other patrolman enter the basement.

Karp got the call eighteen minutes after Susan Weiner had been pronounced D.O.A. at St. Vincent’s. Fifteen minutes thereafter, he was at the crime scene on Hudson, talking with the detective in charge, a short, saturnine man out of Zone One named Charlie Cimella.

Karp stared for a moment at the stain on the pavement.

“Who was she?”

Cimella said, “Woman named Susan Weiner. This is where she lived. The super ID’d her. She had a date with her hubby for lunch. Nice. Guy showed up just after it went down.”

“Witnesses?”

“Yeah, a couple of out-of-towners saw the whole thing. And a bunch of folks chased the guy around the corner. I got the word out to the portables to round them up.”

“Okay, when you get them, take them over to the Six. I’ll interview them there. Any chance we’ll pick up the perp?”

Cimella shrugged. “We could get lucky.” He looked at the bloodstain too. “Hell of a thing. Nice neighborhood, nice building. Pretty kid, young. The papers, TV’ll go batshit.”

Karp nodded and went back to his car. Susan Weiner. The name stirred a memory, but he couldn’t place it. A not uncommon name in the City. Maybe he had gone to school with a Susan Weiner. He told the driver to make for the Sixth.

In the lightless, sweltering boiler room of number 58 Barrow Street, Ray Thornby gets lucky. He checks the room with his flashlight beam and is about to leave when he spots the cardboard sticking out from under the boiler. He draws his pistol, kneels down, and tugs at the sneakered foot he finds resting on the cardboard. Slowly a man rolls out from under the boiler, blinking in the flashlight’s glare. Thornby backs away and points his gun.

“Get up and put your hands against the wall!” he orders.

A high, whining voice comes from the man: “Hey, wha’? Hey, man, ’m just sackin’ out, y’know? My daughter, she kicked me out-”

“Up!” says Thornby. The man staggers out and braces his hands against the wall, spreading his legs as he does so. An experienced mutt, thinks the policeman as he pats the man down and goes through the pockets of his grubby jeans.

No ID. Nothing but a crumpled wad of paper money, two singles and a five. And something else: a VISA counterfoil from Bloomingdale’s with today’s date made out to S. WEINER, crumpled up between the bills. Thornby puts the receipt in his own pocket and gives the money back to the man. At this time he does not know the name of the vic, but he knows it was a woman, and that Bloomingdale’s is a high-end women’s clothing store, and that the odds are long indeed that this man he has found under a boiler has just come from a spree in Better Dresses.

“What’s your name?”

“Hosie Russell. Hey, what is this? I was just sleepin’ off a drunk, man. C’mon, gi’ me a break, man. I jus’ got out of the joint. My daughter kicked my sorry ass out of the house.”

Thornby can smell the truth of at least part of that statement. He looks Russell over carefully. Close up, he is a lot older than the initial description, closer to fifty than thirty. And his shirt is red, bright red, not blue. Not a blue picture. He hesitates. Russell catches this and smiles, says ingratiatingly, “C’mon, blood, gi’ me a break. I’ll jus’ move along uptown …”

Thornby frowns. The guy could be just a wino, but Thornby doesn’t like that receipt; he hates the receipt. More than that, he doesn’t like being called “blood” by a skell. He whips Russell around and snaps the cuffs on him.

The crowd rumbled as they emerged. Some people clapped. There were two more blue-and-whites parked in the street, their lights flashing. Thornby brought his prisoner across the courtyard to the young actor, waiting with the sergeant.

“Is this him?” Thornby asked.

“Yes, definitely. Only he was wearing a different shirt.”

Russell rolled his eyes and said,“Bull-shit, man! He don’ know what the fuck he talkin’ about. I never was in his fuckin’ place. What he mean, all niggers look alike.”

As if to confirm this statement, an elderly white man in a rumpled tan suit, who was standing on the curb, shouted out, “That’s not the guy. I saw the whole thing. The guy who stabbed the girl was a different man.”

Russell nodded his head vigorously. “See? He saw it! It wasn’t me. Hey! What you doin’, man? Hey! It wasn’t me!”

As he continued to shout these and other protestations, he was muscled into a blue-and-white and driven off to the Sixth Precinct.

At a commandeered desk in the detective squad room of that precinct, Karp finished his preliminary interview with the Digbys. The couple were sensible, straightforward people, and they had seen the fleeing defendant at close range. They would have made superb witnesses had it not been for their Dukes of Hazzard accents, which for most New York juries indicated either slowness of wit or racial prejudice or both. Nevertheless, they had assured Karp that they could identify the man.

A detective walked over and said that Cimella was on the phone.

“We got him,” said Cimella. “He was in a basement on Barrow Street. One of the uniforms found him, and we got a positive ID from a tenant in the building-guy ran through his apartment a few minutes after the stabbing. Name’s Hosie Russell. They’re bringing him in now.”

“Great,” said Karp. “Okay, run him by a lineup with the Digbys and the other people who chased him. Then stick him in an interview room and make sure nobody talks to him before I do.”

Karp hung up and called his own office and asked Connie Trask to get someone to run a check on whether a black male named Hosie Russell had ever come to the attention of the law. Then he went over his interview notes until, ten minutes later, Cimella walked in with Hosie Russell and a black patrolman. They put Russell through a lineup, and the couple from Kentucky had no trouble picking him out. Neither did the young actor, Shelton.

Karp was introduced to Thornby, who filled him in on the details of the arrest.

“The funny thing was, the guy Shelton, he said Russell had a blue shirt on and was carrying something when he ran through the apartment, but he was wearing red when I found him. No shirt. No handbag. I thought for a minute he was just a piss bum on the coop. You think it really is the guy?”

“I don’t know,” said Karp. “We don’t have any physical evidence, and it’s hard to build a homicide case on just eyewitnesses, especially white eyewitnesses on a black perp.”

Thornby looked startled. “Homicide? Holy shit, she’s dead? I didn’t know that. I thought it was an armed robbery and assault. But I do have some physical evidence.” He handed Karp the receipt. “Does that help?”

Karp looked at the little slip of paper and then, sharply, back at the patrolman. “Where did you get this?”

Thornby told him.

“You didn’t find the handbag?”

“No, it wasn’t in the boiler room. The sarge got people out checking trash barrels and sewers. We didn’t find his blue shirt either. Or the knife.”

The phone rang, and it was Mel Channing, one of Karp’s junior attorneys, with a copy of Hosie Russell’s criminal record. Karp asked him to read it over the phone while he made notes. It took five minutes.

“What was that?” asked Cimella when Karp hung up.

“Our boy’s yellow sheet. From here to Mars. Fifteen felony convictions-robbery, assault, larceny, burglary. Guy’s fifty, can you believe it? He’s spent a total of-let’s see …” Karp made a rapid calculation on the pad he had used to take notes. “Twenty-two years in the slams, total.”

Cimella said, “Gosh, maybe our system of rehabilitation isn’t working. In any case, it looks good he’s the guy.”

“Oh, it’s him, all right,” said Karp. “He grabbed the cash out of her purse and didn’t notice that the receipt was crumpled up in it. But it’s nice to know he’s not a pillar of the church. Okay, let’s take a look at this sweetheart.”

Karp and Cimella went into the interview room. Russell stared at them blankly. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the room was full of his sour odor. Karp introduced himself and explained the rights of the accused.

“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Russell?”

“Yeah, the cops fucked up. They got the wrong guy.”

“Uh-huh. Tell me, what were you running from when you ran through Mr. Shelton’s apartment this afternoon?”

“Who?”

“You ran through an apartment at 58 Barrow Street. The tenant saw you clearly and identified you to the police. What were you running from?”

“I din’ run nowhere. I was drunk all mornin’. My head feel like shit. Could I get some aspirin?”

“In a minute. Let me tell you what we know for sure. At about twelve-fifteen you stabbed and killed a young woman named Susan Weiner in the doorway of 484 Hudson Street and took her purse. Reliable witnesses have identified you. Do you have any statement to make at this time?”

“Yeah, I want some aspirin. And a lawyer.”

Karp shrugged and walked out of the room. A cop took Russell to the holding cells. Karp and Cimella went back to the squad room.

Karp said, “125.25; 160.15; 265.04, okay?”

Cimella said, “Sounds good,” and so they booked Russell for murder in the second degree (two counts, one for murder in association with a felony and one for intentional murder), first-degree robbery, and first-degree criminal possession of a weapon.

“What’s wrong?” asked Cimella, observing the tight expression on Karp’s face. “You expected him to confess?”

“Hell, no. I’d just like to have the shirt and the bag and the knife.”

“Why? We got the slip Thornby found on him.”

“Yeah, but that’ll be challenged on probable cause. Why did the cops pick on a poor innocent derelict? We’ll probably win that, but we could lose it too … what’s all that?”

There was a commotion, sounds of shouting and crashing furniture from the lower floor of the precinct house.

Cimella trotted down the stairs, and Karp limped after him. There they found police officers holding back a large, conservatively dressed black man who had apparently been trying to attack a prisoner. Approaching, they saw that the prisoner was Hosie Russell.

“What the hell’s going on here, Maury?” Cimella demanded of the uniformed sergeant.

“Damned if I know, Charlie. This guy”-indicating the large black man-“came in and asked the desk who was on that Hudson Street thing, so I gave him your name and he headed upstairs. Then Ryan and Hardy came through with this mutt on the way to the cells, and the guy sees the mutt and yells, ‘You swine!’ and goes for his throat.”

The man now seemed calmer and, in fact, embarrassed at his outburst. The officers restraining him released him, and Russell was removed to the cells without further incident. Karp introduced himself to the man, who turned out to be James Turnbull, the proprietor of the leather shop on the ground floor of Susan Weiner’s building.

“Mr. Turnbull,” asked Karp after steering the man to a quiet corner of the station-house corridor, “what was that all about?”

Turnbull shook his head, as if amazed, and spoke in a soft West Indian accent. “I just lost it, I guess. You see a woman, a neighbor, slaughtered before your eyes. When I saw him, I just wanted to smash his damned face in.”

“Him? You mean the man in custody?”

“Yeah. He killed Susan.”

“You’re sure? You’d make a statement to that effect?”

“Of course. That’s what I came down here for. I was too shaken up earlier.”

They walked off to find a stenographer, found one, and Turnbull dictated a statement and signed it. As Karp was about to find the officers who had witnessed the altercation and obtain statements from them, Cimella hailed him.

“Look what I got,” the detective said. He held up three sealed evidence bags, two large, one smaller. The two large bags held a dark blue shirt and a woman’s leather purse. The small one held a short kitchen knife.

“Where did you get those?” asked Karp.

“Our friend Shelton. It turns out he was visiting a friend on the second floor of his building and found these under the stairwell. He called the house, they sent a car out, and they found the stuff. Cop just gave them to me.”

“That’s Susan’s bag,” said Turnbull. “I made it.” He looked close to tears. Cimella said to Karp, “So, we got it all. Are you always this lucky?”

“It’s clean living, Charlie,” said Karp, grinning. “Luck has nothing to do with it.”

“Yeah, well, in that case, you can go talk to the jackals. There’s fifty of them outside the house. I told you they’d eat this one up.”

Karp’s shift on call lasted until eight. There were no more murders in Manhattan during its span, for which he was profoundly grateful. He had the police driver take him home and limped up the stairs.

The sound of heavy thumps and energetic grunting issued from the far end of the loft. Karp shouted a greeting, which was returned with a breathy “Hi.” He then sat down on the couch, removed his clothes, put on a bathrobe; and applied a chemical cold pack to his knee.

He had just bought a carton of these, and kept them near the old red couch, which he had taken over as a dressing room and bed. He could no longer bear to climb the ladder to the sleeping loft. After a half hour, with the knee partially anesthetized by the cold pack, he clumped down to the gym, an ill-defined area beyond the wall of the dining room. It held, among other things, Karp’s rowing machine and Marlene’s speed bag and body bag.

She was pounding away at the latter, dressed in baggy red shorts, a cut down T-shirt, and sneakers. Karp watched her in silent admiration as her muscles bunched and played and shining sweat bounced off her face. The baby was in her recently purchased playpen, bouncing, cooing, and rattling her bars. Karp took a towel and played peek-a-boo with his daughter until Marlene finished her workout and began to strip off her speed gloves. When she turned at last to face him, he saw that her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.

“What’s wrong?”

“You were on the news.”

“What? Oh, yeah, the West Village thing. That made you cry? My performance?”

“No, dummy, the vic. Susan Weiner.”

Karp now recalled where he had heard the name. “Oh, shit, the woman from the day-care!” He went over and hugged her. “I’m sorry, babe-but at least we got the guy.”

Marlene leaned against him and sighed deeply. “Yeah, I’m sure that’ll make her family feel better. Her husband can sleep with a copy of the indictment.”

She shook herself and wiped some sweat from her face. “I didn’t mean that. Sure, it’s great you caught the guy. I don’t know why it’s affecting me like this. I wasn’t particularly close to the woman. It’s just that her life … she seemed so on top of it all, like the grime didn’t stick to her. You know how everybody in the City seems sour and cynical and paranoid? She had a shine on her that made you think, yeah, she’s making it, she’s happy, with a job and a kid and a nice place to live, and she doesn’t look like a survivor of the Long March. So it’s, hey, she can do it, maybe I can do it too. Now she’s a piece of meat on a slab.”

“Speaking of meat, what’s for dinner?”

She pushed him away and slapped at him with her towel. “Oooh, how could you say that? I can’t believe you said that.”

“What? What?” sputtered Karp, taking a step back. “Hey, what do you want? I’m sorry your friend got killed, but-”

“She wasn’t my friend.”

“Okay, I’m sorry your acquaintance got killed. What should I do, go into mourning eleven hundred times a year? Beat my breast? I’d be paralyzed in a week if I did that, and so would you. People get killed and sometimes, not very often, they’re people like us. The only thing we can do is find the bastard who did it and make sure he won’t do it again. Does this make a difference? No, there’s ten more where he came from. Are things getting better? No, every year they get a little worse. It’s useless and stupid, but we keep doing it because that’s what we do. We’re pros.”

“What’s your point, Spinoza?” snapped Marlene.

“I don’t have a point,” Karp admitted. “I just hate it when you get like this. You get pissed off about how shitty everything is, and you bring it home and take it out on me.”

“Who else is there? But yes, you’re right! I was wrong. I wavered for an instant from the absolute control you have every right to expect.” She slapped her own cheek, twice. “There! I needed that. Now I can make your dinner in an orderly manner-”

“Come on, Marlene,” he sighed, “don’t do a number-”

“-while you provide your daughter with forty-six minutes of fatherly attention as per contract.” She stomped away in a stiff robot-like walk. Clattering of pots. Karp picked up the baby, who needed changing, badly. A perfect day.

They ate dinner in an atmosphere of chill correctness. They were just clearing the dishes away, and Karp was struggling to think of some magic language that would get them out of marriage hell, when the phone rang.

He picked it up. A woman’s voice: “What’re you going to do to him?” She sounded drunk or drugged.

“I’m sorry, who is this, please?” said Karp.

“I killed her. I killed her. I let him out, the fucking nigger scumbag bastard fuckhead. I let him out and he killed her …”

The woman’s voice dissolved into sobbing. Then there was a loud crash over the line as if the phone had been tossed against something solid, followed by a hollow cacophany of wailings and things being smashed, picked up by the unattended receiver. Karp hung up.

“Who was that?” Marlene asked, seeing the odd expression on her husband’s face.

“I don’t know. I think it was about the Weiner case. A woman, claims she had something to do with letting Russell loose.”

Marlene went white and sat down on a kitchen stool. “Oh, shit, it must be her sister. The parole officer I told you about-the one I had lunch with when I met Susan. Russell must be one of her parolees. In fact, Christ, I think it was the guy she was talking about when we had lunch-the prize pupil. He had a weird first name, didn’t he? Foley? Mosie?”

“Hosie Russell.”

“Yeah, Hosie. Oh, God, what a nightmare! The poor woman!”

Karp embraced his wife and didn’t say a word, and this time she clung to him fiercely.

“Who is this guy Kerbussyan?” asked Roland Hrcany, “and why did Karp go to see him this morning?”

Barney Wayne and Joe Frangi did not know, nor did they particularly care, after a long day. The Ersoy murder was a clearance as far as they were concerned. They had the guy. Hrcany’s thing with Karp was his own business, and while they were willing to go some extra for Roland, seeing as how he was an okay guy, they had other stuff on their plate. Wayne pointedly looked at his watch. Frangi got out of his chair and looked out the window of Roland’s office at the gathering dusk.

“Why don’t you ask Karp?” Frangi replied.

Roland said, “I did ask him. I just this minute got off the phone with him.” Roland could not keep a satisfied grin off his face as he said this. He had, of course, learned of Karp’s morning expedition indirectly from his driver, a detective, via the Centre Street police grapevine, into which he was well plugged. That he had thereafter felt free to call his nominal boss at home after hours to pump him for information had given him considerable pleasure.

Roland continued, “That’s why I want him checked out. According to Karp, he’s some kind of Armenian political. He claims that Tomasian had the guns because he was a gun runner.”

“You believe that shit?” snapped Frangi.

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. It’s a plausible story for a jury. We need to find out if it’s true, and also whether Kerbussyan’s ever been mixed up in any funny business. Speaking of which, Karp thinks that Kerbussyan knows something about the victim’s little treasure chest.”

“For instance …?” asked Wayne.

“Karp doesn’t know. But we should check it out. Why don’t you guys go up to Riverdale and find out what you can about this guy?”

Unenthusiastic grunts of assent issued from the two detectives.

“The other thing,” continued Roland, unfazed, “what’s the latest on the girlfriend?”

Frangi brought out his notebook. “On that, we got a woman answering her description getting off a plane at San Francisco and renting a Hertz car on a credit card made out to Gabrielle Avanian. We got credit card charges in San Luis Obispo, stores and a motel, the following day. Then we got charges in Disneyland, Huntington Beach, Monterey, and San Francisco. Looks like she’s on a vacation.”

Wayne said, “I don’t know. Disneyland: she could be targeting Mickey.”

“Yeah, or a terrorist assault on the Turkish taffy stand,” said Frangi. “I think we should all go out there, Roland. We might save countless lives.”

“Very funny. Okay, we assume the girl is either too incredibly cool or else not involved. Also, assuming she reads the papers, she doesn’t seem in any hurry to get back and spring her sweetie, which could mean the alibi is a piece of shit. In any case, will you do me one favor? Let’s pick her up when she gets back. Just to dot the I’s.”

Frangi made a notation in his pad. “Dot the I’s. Pick up girlfriend. It’ll be soon. MasterCard says she’s running close to her credit limit.”

The next day Karp went for his arthroscopy in Dr. Hudson’s office. His knee was shot full of dope, but he could still feel the conducted vibration of the instruments rattling up his skeleton, informing him that someone was working inside his living flesh. He sweated bullets.

After the procedure, Dr. Hudson was characteristically blunt: massive destruction of cartilage, bone abrasion, chronic inflammation of the bursa. The whole thing would have to be replaced, and soon. Karp told Hudson to set up the operation.

In a somber mood Karp was driven to his next appointment, which was with Milton Freeland at the Legal Aid Society offices on Leonard Street. The offices were suitably shabby, to go with the clientele, but Karp observed that Freeland had replaced Dora, Tom Pagano’s old secretary, with a shiny new model. Karp was ushered into the presence. It was wearing a yellow tie and yellow suspenders and a good false smile. Karp sat in an uncomfortable wooden visitors’ chair without being asked.

“We have a problem, Milton,” he said without preamble.

“Oh? What problem is that? Butch.”

“Well, specifically, that stunt you pulled the other day on Tony Harris in the Devers homicide, but-”

“It’s not my fault if your people don’t know the law,” Freeland interrupted.

“But,” Karp continued, “but, I just wanted to get together with you at the beginning so as to make sure that the good working relationship that my office had with Tom’s office continues.”

“And what was that, pray tell?” Freeland was smirking. He could tell Karp was embarrassed and was enjoying it.

“A certain respect. A certain understanding of the position of the formal adversary. We don’t break our word. We don’t pull funny stuff in court. I don’t railroad people or accept phonied evidence. You don’t yell racism and police brutality when none exists-”

Freeland laughed out loud, unpleasantly. “Oh, be serious. The next thing you’re going to tell me is that all the people you bring to trial really did it.”

“No. But I’d say if I bring them, I believe they did it.”

“What about Morales?” Freeland sneered. “Do you believe in that piece of shit case?”

Karp’s stomach lurched and he suppressed a sigh. “Between us? No, and I didn’t mean to imply we didn’t ever screw up. But there’s a good example. If Tom were still here, when he saw Morales he would’ve called me up and chewed my ass for a while and we would’ve worked it out some way.”

“What way?”

Karp stared hard at the smug little face and looked for something that he was more and more sure was not there. “Are you asking hypothetically,” he inquired calmly, “or are you interested in working something out?”

Freeland seemed to consider this for a while, leaning back in his swivel chair, with his feet on the desk, staring at the corner of the ceiling, tapping with a pencil.

At last he faced Karp and said, “Actually, no. I’m not interested in working something out. We intend to fry your Mr. Bergman’s shorts publically, in open court, and do the same in every case in which an innocent defendant is framed. Especially homicide. And especially when your cops have picked some poor black or Hispanic at random. And from what I can see, in even the short time I’ve been here, there are plenty. And this West Village murder-the body wasn’t even cold, before they dragged some pathetic piss bum out of a cellar and pinned it on him. It sucks, Karp! And it’s not going to go on. I don’t care what cozy little deal you had with my esteemed predecessor.”

“Good speech, Milton,” said Karp, “but allow me to point out one difference between Morales and the Weiner killing. In all probability Morales didn’t do it. Russell definitely did it. That strikes me as significant.”

“Oh, please! It’s another FAN job. A white woman gets stabbed and it’s grab the first available nigger.”

“Well, since we’re on the subject already, I presume that you won’t be pleading guilty to the top count in Russell.”

“The plea is not guilty.”

Karp rose slowly to his feet and looked down at Freeland as at something adhering to his shoe. He said, “In that case, Counselor, I’ll see you in court.”

He started to leave, but Freeland said quickly, “Wait a minute! You mean you’re trying Russell?” There was something flickering across his pale face: anticipation, excitement? Karp couldn’t be sure. He said, “Yes, the luck of the draw. Why?”

“Nothing. It’s a bullshit case. You’re gonna get creamed. Well. Maybe I really will see you in court.”

Karp walked across the small office, but paused at the door. “Tell me,” he said, “I’m curious. This is about winning to you, isn’t it? I mean, that’s basically all it is to you, a game to win?”

Freeland snorted. “You mean it’s not to you? What the hell are we doing here, then?” He gestured at his dingy office. “Making lots of dough?”

Karp ignored this. “You didn’t play any ball in school, did you?” he asked mildly. “I mean letter ball. Varsity.”

“No. Why?” Freeland seemed genuinely puzzled at the question.

“Just curious,” said Karp, and left.

He went back to his office, spent the rest of the morning on routine paperwork, and was about to break for lunch when he got a call from the Tombs. It was Tony Chelham, the captain of the day shift. Karp listened to what the man had to say with growing disbelief.

“Hold on a minute, Tony, Russell wants what?”

“He wants his blue shirt. We had him signing for his stuff, you know? And he says, ‘Where’s my blue shirt? I ain’t signing without my blue shirt.’”

“Holy shit! Um, did he want the knife he killed her with too?”

A booming laugh. “No, but I thought it could be something, the shirt. He said the cops had it down by the Six. So I called.”

“You did great, Tony. Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Get with Charlie Cimella at the Six. Have him bring the shirt. Get Russell in a cell by himself. Show him the shirt and say, ‘Is this the blue shirt you asked for, Russell?’ Let him handle it, sniff it, whatever. If he says, yeah, it’s mine, just say something like, okay, but we have to hold it for a while-you’ll get it back, we’ll put a note saying that in the effects bag. Then leave. Don’t say anything else at all, no questions, nothing. Make sure Charlie understands that too. Then both of you get over here and we’ll make out a statement.”

“Okay, check. I’ll get right on it.”

An hour later, Karp watched as the two officers signed statements to the effect that Hosie Russell had positively identified the shirt as his, amid much rolling of eyes all around.

“You know, guys,” Karp said, “this is what makes this job such a challenge-matching wits with Professor Moriarty.”