No Lesser Plea

Chapter 10

Conlin said, “Look at that Sussman. That’s what you get if you call Central Casting and order somebody to play a lawyer. Looks like he could blow Perry Mason out of the box. It’s a long way from Bensonhurst for Lennie Sussman.”

Conlin said this softly to Karp as the two men waited at the prosecution table for the trial of Mandeville Louis to begin. The courtroom was crowded. It was an important case, and the press was there in some strength. It was in fact why Conlin was there. Nothing like a nice homicide conviction at primary time.

Nearly six months had passed from the time Louis had been captured to the day the case had been called. It had taken another week to select the jury, with each side questioning, challenging, selecting the veniremen, throwing out those who might lean the wrong way, according to an arcane set of rules, which had as little to do with the desire to see justice triumph as the choosing of a team lineup had with the desire of a coach to see a good game. Winning counted, nothing else.

So there they sat, twelve citizens of Fun City, nine men, three women, a little whiter than a stratified random sample of New Yorkers, but reasonably representative. Some were pissed off at missing work, but most were mildly excited to be doing in reality-so they naively supposed-what they had read about in high-school civics texts, and seen represented on television shows. None of them were lawyers; none of them had ever been on a jury before.

Karp did look at Sussman. The defense attorney was arranging papers from his briefcase precisely, like a fortune-teller setting out the Tarot deck. A clean yellow legal pad and sharpened pencils were on the long table in front of him. He observed Karp staring at him and nodded pleasantly. Karp nodded back. They were gentlemen about their serious work. Conlin was right; it was a long way from Bensonhurst for Lennie, a long way from Calcutta for Karp.

At 9:05, Judge Frederick Braker entered the courtroom. He was sixty-eight, frail and bent with scoliosis under the shelter of his black robes. His eyes were bright blue, his nose long and sharp, his forehead domed and running back into close-cropped silvery hair. He still had-as he would say himself, if you asked him-all his marbles.

All rose. All sat. Braker discussed some details of the court calendar with the lawyers, and then two guards escorted Mandeville Louis into the courtroom and delivered him to the chair next to Sussman’s. Karp was startled by the change in Louis’s demeanor. He was clearly distraught. He kept removing and replacing his glasses and plucking at his yellow jumpsuit. He swept his head from side to side rapidly, as if searching the room for an enemy. His eyes were bulging, and every few seconds his tongue would protrude for a long, unnatural swipe at his lips.

Karp nudged Conlin, and whispered. “Jack, catch the defendant. This guy was an ice cube the last time I saw him. Now he looks like a basket case.”

Conlin glanced over. “It happens sometimes. Some guys, it takes a while for the penny to drop-that he’s really in a courtroom looking at Murder One.”

Braker cleared his throat. “Are the People ready, Mr. Conlin?”

“Ready, Your Honor.”

“Is the defendant ready?”

Sussman rose, removed his half-glasses, looked carefully at each member of the jury and then at the judge. He was not going to be tricked into a careless admission. “Ready, Your Honor.”

“Then please begin, Mister Conlin.”

Conlin rose gracefully, his suit jacket already neatly buttoned, and strode into the well of the court to face the jury. He met each of twelve pairs of eyes.

“Good morning,” he said. “May it please this Honorable Court, Mister Justice Braker, Mister Sussman, Mister Karp, Mister Foreman, and members of the jury.

“At this point in the trial, as the assistant district attorney in charge of presenting the evidence in this case on behalf of the People of the State of New York, the law imposes on me the duty of making an opening statement. Its purpose is to outline for you what the People expect to prove by way of the evidence in this case. Now, you should know that there is no corresponding duty for the defense.” He gestured casually toward Sussman’s table. “They may make an opening or they may not, as they see fit.”

Conlin paused and moved closer to the jury box, almost belly up to the rail. He resumed, in his rich baritone, a little more intensely. “You may consider this opening as a preview of what we plan to present as evidence, like the table of contents of a book, so that you can follow the testimony more easily.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the People will prove that this man,” (here he pivoted sharply, and pointed the classic accusing finger directly at Louis), “this man, the defendant, Mandeville Louis, during the night of March Twenty-sixth of this year, while committing an armed robbery of A amp;A Liquors, in Manhattan, at 423 Madison Avenue, brutally and callously snuffed out the life of the proprietor, Angelo Marchione, by shooting him in the head with a sawed-off shotgun.”

Karp watched in fascination, taking professional note of the way Conlin held himself, the way he modulated and pitched his voice. This was the reality, worth twenty years of law-school lectures. But as Conlin launched into a gripping description of how Randy Marchione had been done to death, Karp was distracted by a whining sound, a low “uh-heh, uh-heh, uh-heh” like a child getting set to throw a tantrum, from the direction of the defense table. He turned his head and observed Louis bouncing up and down in his seat. The defendant held his arms bent at the elbow, rigid, his hands like blades, moving them in a chopping motion in time with each bounce.

The jury was distracted from Conlin’s speech. Conlin himself stopped talking and turned around, fury and confusion on his face. All eyes were on Mandeville Louis. Sussman plucked at his sleeve; Louis yanked his arm away and rose to his feet, jerking like a puppet. His glasses hung askew from one earpiece, his mouth gaped wide and from it now came a dribble of saliva and a loud inarticulate wail.

The judge tapped his gavel. The wail grew louder, reached a crescendo and stopped. A confused babble from the spectators; more banging of the gavel. Louis pointed a finger at the judge. “You hurt my momma,” he shrieked, and with that he overturned the heavy defense table, climbed over it, and jumped the rail. The two court officers were stunned; in the seconds it took them to react, Louis had cleared the well of the court and thrown himself at the judge’s high presidium, which he attempted to scale like a commando on an obstacle course. A woman began screaming. A man yelled, “Stop him! Stop him!”

Judge Braker had seen many odd things during his forty years on the bench, but these barely prepared him for the sight of a foam-flecked, raving lunatic face heaving over the cliff-edge of his domain. “Ah get you, ah get you, you hurt mah momma,” said Louis, with accompanying groans and shrieks. The judge rolled his chair away as far as he could, and prepared to defend himself with his gavel, returning that symbolic instrument, for perhaps the first time in six hundred years, to its literal role as the defender of the physical security of the judiciary.

Fortunately, he did not have to defend himself against the defendant. To his relief, the grotesque face and clutching hands were yanked away. Two court officers and a police officer fell on Louis, cuffed his hands and his ankles, and carried him feet first through the door to the holding pen.

Judge Braker wiped his face with his handkerchief and waited for the unaccustomed, but not entirely unwelcome, flood of adrenaline to dissipate from his system. The murmurs in the courtroom died away. “Mister Conlin,” he said wryly, “it appears to me that your opening statement has upset the defendant.” Conlin said nothing. What could he say?

The judge turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to adjourn this court for a few moments. In the meantime, I ask that you not discuss what you have just witnessed among yourselves, and that you do not draw any conclusions from it.” To the lawyers he said, “I would like to see all counsel in my chambers-right now.”

In Braker’s chambers it was neat Chivas all around, except for Karp, who declined. Conlin was wary and silent, Sussman looked genuinely stunned, Braker looked exhausted as he knocked down his first belt in a single gulp, and poured himself another.

Sussman said, “Fred, I honestly had no idea … I mean, the man gave no indication …”

Braker smiled. “Relax, Lennie, nobody thinks you’re putting on an act. Everybody knows it’s not your style. But, we obviously …”

Sussman nodded vigorously. “Obviously, I will move to declare him unfit to stand trial.”

The judge choked on a swallow of his Scotch, recovered, gave Sussman a bleak look. “No shit, Lennie, no shit.” He turned to Conlin. “No objection from the People?” Conlin seemed about to say something, then shook his head. “Then I will have the orders drawn up and send him to Bellevue.” Braker sat back in his chair with a sigh. “See you in court, gentlemen.”

“Jack,” said Karp, “didn’t anything strike you as odd about that scene?” Conlin and Karp were walking in the corridor toward the bureau offices after the dismissal of the jury.

“Odd? Yeah, I guess it would strike me as odd when a defendant goes off his nut and attacks the judge. What the hell are you talking about, odd?”

“No, no, not what happened-I mean the details. Did you spot that Louis sort of stopped fighting when the court officers had him? I always thought that maniacs-I don’t know-fought like maniacs. None of the officers even had their hair mussed.”

Conlin snorted. “Hey, how should I know? Am I a shrink?”

“And another thing. His glasses. When he threw over the table they were hanging off his face. When the guards carried him out he had them in his hand. That’s what I mean by odd. Protecting eyeglasses is not something you expect a psychotic to do.”

“What are you getting at? You think he pulled a scam on us?”

“It’s a possibility.”

Conlin made a contemptuous noise. “Boy, have you got a lot to learn! Listen, forensic psychiatry is the biggest tar pit in this business. Go near it, and you get dirty.” He started to walk away.

“But …”

“No buts, Karp. Hey, don’t you think I’m pissed off? This was a perfect trial-did you see the press in the courtroom? Now we’ll be lucky to get three inches of ink back by the car ads. But there’s fuck-all we can do now. They’ll examine him at Bellevue, they’ll give us their report. Then we’ll know where we stand. Meanwhile, we’ve got other things to do.”

He left Karp alone in the hallway, confused, feeling like a fool, clutching his meticulously prepared case file, now transformed by the morning’s events into so much scrap paper.

He still couldn’t believe it. He thought, this asshole walks into a store, heavily armed, kills two people in cold blood, throws a patently phony crazy fit in court, and walks away from his trial. Karp knew that delay almost always favored the defense, and he was pretty sure Louis knew it too. Once again Karp thought about how society in its happy idiocy continued to believe that murderers would play the game by the rules, and assist in their own conviction. He also thought about the calm and rational Louis he had met in the Tombs, the man who knew his rights. There was no way that person could have become the flaming lunatic of the courtroom except by way of the underworld equivalent of the Actors’ Studio. But Karp reckoned without the marvelous explanatory power of modern psychiatry.

Dr. Edmund Stone, plump, balding, owlish, thirty-three, a second year resident in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, was dictating his initial report on Mandeville Louis. Stone found court interviews an unpleasant task. They made it necessary for him to spend time in the presence of crazy people, whom he detested. Stone had not become a psychiatrist to talk to crazy people. That was better left to Freudians and other nincompoops. Stone had become a psychiatrist because that was the only way they would let him give experimental drugs to human beings.

“Patient is thirty-eight-year-old Negro male, referred to Bellevue as a result of a violent outburst in court during his trial for murder,” Stone said to his Dictaphone. “I have had one thirty-minute consultation with patient, and this was patient’s first consultation with a psychiatrist since being admitted to hospital yesterday.”

This interview, Dr. Stone reflected, had been more than usually unpleasant. Louis was black, in the first place, and violent. He had thrown a plastic chair across the office, causing in Dr. Stone a disturbing and unprofessional rush of fear. Dr. Stone was not prejudiced. He considered himself a liberal, in that he believed that when black people were violent and committed crimes it was not really their fault. Nothing, in fact, was anybody’s fault. Behavior, so Dr. Stone believed, was merely the result of differences in the flavor of the rich soup that everyone kept in the cauldron on top of their neck. One flavor was Albert Schweitzer, another was Jack the Ripper. When he met a violent black person like Mandeville Louis, something which, as a psychiatric resident at Bellevue, he could hardly avoid, Dr. Stone always thought how wonderful it would be if such people could be given to science, for experimental purposes, drugs or implants or surgical procedures, so we could at last discover the real causes of violence and antisocial behavior, and cure them, and so people like Dr. Stone could walk the streets without fear.

Dr. Stone pulled himself away from these thoughts, and from his perpetual fantasy that one day he would be the scientist to discover the secret of the soup, and resumed his dictation.

“Psychiatric nurses on patient’s hall state patient has been calm. They state patient has been generally lucid, but with three recorded episodes of incoherent shouting, with delusional aspects. On these occasions patient received standard dose of one hundred milligrams of Thorazine, i.m. Response to this medication normal and satisfactory.

“When I first entered the consulting room, patient was seated and appeared calm. I introduced myself but patient did not respond. I asked him if he knew why he was in hospital. Patient sighed and nodded his head. I asked him if he remembered what had transpired in the courtroom. At the word ‘courtroom’ the patient leaped to his feet, shouted ‘No!’ and began to pace the room. Affect agitated and fearful. He began to mumble something about ‘someone telling him to do it’ and the judge ‘trying to get his momma.’ Patient then became violent and threw his chair at the wall. This episode similar to those observed by ward nurses.

“Violent episode lasted about three minutes, after which patient appeared confused, disoriented, and subdued. He picked up chair and sat in it when asked to. Patient responded well to reality-testing questions: name, current date, present location, common facts. On questioning, patient gave lucid responses as to subjective state during ‘seizure.’ He believes something is taking control of his body against his will. He says he ‘feels it coming’ but is powerless to stop it.

“General impressions: Patient appears to be suffering from some acute, episodic, delusional syndrome associated with courtroom proceedings. During these episodes, patient is uncontrollably violent. After them, he appears confused and states that he lacks all recollection of what occurred during the episodes. Recommend patient be retained for further observation. Referred case to Doctor Werner.”

Dr. Stone flipped off his Dictaphone. He picked up Louis’s case file and wrote out a medication order for a daily dose of 40 mg. of Thorazine, orally, four times a day. That should hold the little bastard, he thought.

Dr. Werner, unlike Dr. Stone, was delighted to have Mandeville Louis as a patient. Unlike Dr. Stone, Dr. Werner was not just passing through forensic psychiatry on the way to the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. The study of the criminal mind was his whole life. Dr. Werner was a portly man in late and comfortable middle age, heavy of jowl, beetled of brow. He wore black horn-rims and a white coat over his vest, which sported a gold watch chain and a Phi Beta Kappa key. Although born and raised in the Bronx, Werner cultivated a middle-European manner. When he spoke on a professional matter, for example, he might occasionally look up to the ceiling and wave his hand as if hard-pressed to ferret out, from among his many languages, the correct English idiom.

As he read Dr. Stone’s report, Dr. Werner became increasingly excited. The purity of the reaction! Here was a man whose insanity was triggered exclusively by the prospect of trial and punishment. Louis was a living representation of everything Werner thought was wrong with the way society treated criminals. It was perfectly clear to him that criminals, especially violent ones, were mentally ill. Take such a person and place him in an environment in which everyone assumed he was mentally competent-in, say a courtroom-and the mental disease could not help but get worse. Dr. Werner had observed the most extreme form of this reaction once before, in a rapist named Ganser, and had written a paper about it. Now, to his delight, he was observing the Ganser syndrome once again, in Mandeville Louis. He regarded it as a confirmation of his theory.

Dr. Werner continued to be delighted when he met Louis in person. In an interview he set up the following day, Louis was intelligent and articulate about his mental and emotional states. In this he resembled the people seen by Dr. Werner’s Park Avenue colleagues more than he did the typical rubbish of the Bellevue criminal ward. All Dr. Werner had to do was to hint at some aspect of the Ganser syndrome and in a short while Louis would confirm it in extravagant and inventive detail. Dr. Werner saw a major journal article developing.

Louis was even more delighted with Dr. Werner. He had studied forensic psychiatry as he had the Bible in his father’s house, as an aid to exculpation, his abiding and lifelong interest. Becoming an exemplar of Ganser’s syndrome was in fact much easier than accepting Jesus as your personal savior. For starters, you didn’t have to kneel and spend a lot of time praying. Also, those church ladies, some of them, were pretty sharp, and it took a bit of doing to jerk them around to the proper Christian forgiveness. Werner, on the other hand, did half the work for you.

As Louis spun out the fantasy of his mental incompetence, his mind drifted. It was pleasant in Bellevue Hospital, far more so than the Tombs. It was less noisy and the food was better. As a violent patient under observation, he had a room of his own. He expected they would send him to Matteawan for a while, and he didn’t mind that either. As a mental patient, he had better access to the phone, for example. He had already called DeVonne Carter and got her to stay in his apartment, so the place wouldn’t get ripped off while he was away. He would lay low in Matteawan for a while, let the case get stale. Maybe something would happen to the witnesses. He made a mental note: in a couple of weeks, maybe call up old Elvis. He’ll be anxious to get back on my good side after the way he fucked up his delivery.

Louis figured he had experienced an unusual run of good luck during his years as a robber and was not particularly surprised that he had at last been caught. Now it seemed his luck had changed back. How else could you account for falling into the care of such a perfect asshole as Dr. Milton C. Werner?

When Karp had finished reading Dr. Werner’s report on Mandeville Louis, he was almost nauseated with fury. He called Conlin.

“Jack, have you read this incredible bullshit they sent us on Louis?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“What about it? What about it? It sucks, that’s what! They, this Werner character, they want to send him to Matteawan until he’s competent to stand trial. The guy’s a fraud, him and the shrink both.”

“Karp, I’ve explained to you about Bellevue. What do you expect me to do?”

“Fight the report, that’s what. Jack, this guy is gaming the system, he’s malingering. We can’t let him get away with it.”

“He’s off the streets, Butch.”

“Until when? Hey, they do some marvelous cures up in Matteawan. One of our witnesses is seventy-six. The other one is a junkie who’s probably going up for three-to-five. What if somebody knifes him in prison? His porch light is a little dim in the first place. Give him a year or two and he won’t remember shit, and Sussman will eat him up on the stand. Come on, Jack, this bastard is setting himself up to stale the case and walk.”

Karp listened to Conlin breathe on the line for a few moments. “Butch, let me tell you straight out, I’m not going to get caught in a pissing contest with Bellevue on this case. It’s not worth it to the bureau.”

“Why not? Look, Jack, we can win on this. I got the transcript of the voir dire here. Louis was participating in his own defense like a son of a bitch on practically every page. We can blow Werner away in two minutes on the stand. Did you read this crap he wrote? Ganser syndrome, my ass! Listen to this, on page three: ‘Mister Louis shows all the signs of sanity, because, ironically, he is generally sane.’ Get that ‘ironically?’ And it gets worse.”

Karp continued, “ ‘However, the defendant suffers from delusional constellation of pathogenic paranoia arising from his fear of impending imprisonment. Given the proper stimulus, the defendant invariably exhibits psychotic behavior. In the present case this stimulus may be seen to be a courtroom during a trial. Mister Louis can be expected to maintain appropriate affect and rational behavior absent this stimulus.’

“Jesus, Jack, this is like, like a criminal saying we can’t incarcerate him because he suffers from claustrophobia. This asshole is saying that Louis will never be competent to stand trial because he goes crazy when we try him. No judge in the world will fall for that.”

Conlin sighed. “You’re wrong there, Butch. No judge is going to take on Werner within his field. It ain’t done.”

“Then let’s get another shrink to say that all this Ganser business is bullshit.”

“Uh-uh. Butch, it’s not just Louis. I’m not, the bureau is not, taking on the mental health establishment to nail one scumbag. We’ve got thousands of psycho reports every year. There’s one for just about every other damn homicide. You got any idea of how badly they could fuck up the criminal justice system if they thought we were second-guessing their professional expertise? They’d go batshit. And the bastard is black-that’s the cherry on top. Can you see the papers? DA’s office persecutes poor mentally ill nigger, hospital administrators fight to get underprivileged shithead the treatment he needs. No thank you!”

Conlin’s voice had turned loud and gravelly, a sign the bully in him had emerged and the courtly and distinguished public servant had taken a hike. Karp realized there was no way Conlin was going to court negative publicity while he still entertained the notion of running for DA. Karp thought of his Polish lancers picture. Time to cut and run, he thought. Hey, great, I’m getting corrupt.

“Fine, OK Jack, whatever you say. You want the case file back?”

“Nah, just give it to my girl. Hey, Butch, chin up now-there’ll be other cases.”

After Karp had hung up, he sat in a frozen rage for about twenty seconds, then flung Werner’s report as hard as he could at his open window. It sailed out into the warm spring air and fluttered down on to Foley Square, where it was snatched up by a passing bag lady. At last, she thought, my message from God.

Karp grabbed up the Marchione murder case file and stormed out of his office. As usual when he was angry-which occurred more and more often recently-he had to move. Maybe I’ll run over to the East Side, to Yonah Schimmel’s and get a kashe knish. I haven’t had a kashe knish in months-no wonder I’m depressed.

He was about to trot down the stairs when on impulse he stuck his head through the door of an office, which had been recently constructed out of painted plywood, in what used to be waste space in the hallway past the fire stairs. It was Marlene Ciampi’s, and she was in, sitting behind her desk, frowning and answering coram nobis petitions. She had been in Homicide a month.

“Champ, you want a kashe knish? I got to get out of here.”

“God, that’s the best offer I’ve had in weeks. I’ll give you some money.” She reached into a desk drawer for her handbag.

“Hell, no. My treat. Don’t you love those petitions?”

“Yes, indeedy. I was just thinking that I gave up the opportunity to be a plumber in a Tijuana whorehouse to come to work in the New York DA’s office and sort through this garbage.”

“A plumber?”

“A figure of speech. That’s what they call the girl who does the stuff that nobody else will touch for any amount of money.”

“Champ, how do you know all this shit?”

She gave him an evil grin. “It’s my Ivy League background. So what’s with you? Getting any?”

Karp laughed. “Only up the ass. Conlin just put it to me.”

He related the story of Louis’s trial and the Werner report.

“Poor Butch! I always thought our fearless leader was just a tiny bit of a slime ball. However, things will be different when I run the bureau, which I will not get to do if we sit here bullshitting all day. I promised myself that if I got through two more of these, I would treat myself to a cigarette and a trip to the ladies’ room for a nice pee and, perhaps, a vomit.”

“See you, Marlene.”

“Knish me, big boy.”

Karp left her office and was about to go down the stairs when he realized he was still holding the Louis case file. He walked back to the big room where the Homicide clerk kept the bureau’s files. The clerk, a largish black woman of immense civil service seniority, was sitting at her desk, and Karp dropped the folder like a dead rat in front of her.

“Wrap that in plastic, please, and refrigerate it,” he said.

“Why, what’s wrong with it?”

A light went off in Karp’s head. “What’s wrong with it? Cora, it’s just missing one little detail. Have you got a red pen?”

She rummaged in her desk and pulled out a red ballpoint.

“That do?”

“No, something bigger.”

“I got a Magic Marker.”

“Great, let’s have it.”

Karp had realized that there was a way to scam Louis’s scam. The criminal had read the system too well. He knew that delay worked in his favor because the system was so overloaded that there was no continuity. Judges changed, prosecutors changed. He expected that when he came out of Matteawan in six or eight months, “cured,” he would face a cast of characters for whom his case was just another unit to move along the assembly line, people who would be more than willing to let a poor sick man from a mental institution cop a plea to a lesser crime than murder in the first degree. Karp thought, you scumbag, nice try, but no cigar.

He opened the file. On the first page he wrote, for all future prosecutors to see, in letters three inches high: “CALL KARP-ACCEPT NO LESSER PLEA!”