No Lesser Plea

Chapter 13

“I swore, I SWORE, I would never get involved with anybody where I worked. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I had a thing going with my contracts professor in law school. Nice guy, married, three kids. I sweated bullets in that course. I mean, we agreed that we were going to keep it separate, sex and grades. So like three people ever aced contracts since 1706, or something, and I got one. Needless to say, every piss-ant law-school wimp was smirking all over himself when they posted the grade. ‘Of course, she got one, snicker-snicker.’

“I had migraines for a month. What could I do, hang the marked blue books and papers from my lip? I make law review-the same thing, snicker-snicker. Anyway, I said, ‘never again’ and here I am, involved.”

They were dry and lying side by side on Karp’s bed, with a sheet over them. The window was open and a summer breeze rhythmically stirred the half-closed Venetians. Bars of sunlight moved across the bed, up the wall and back again. They had both called in sick.

“What makes you think we’re involved, snicker-snicker?”

“Oh, we’re involved, all right. Do you think I’d let you ravish my milk-white body for a cheap one-night stand? I’m a proud Sicilian maiden. Betray me and my brother will cut your balls off. Then I’ll dress in black and wear them forever in a little embroidered bag, around my neck.”

“I thought you said your brother was a dentist.”

“Orthodontist. Doesn’t matter though. He’s connected, heavy. The mob is queer for straight teeth, it’s common knowledge. Guys who know how to fix an overbite can write their own ticket with the dons.”

“You’re a nut, Ciampi, you know that?”

“Maybe, but I’m serious about keeping this whatever-it-is from getting around the office.”

“What? You mean I can’t boast of my conquest in the locker room?”

“No, really, Butch.” She was silent for a moment, then propped herself up on one elbow and looked into his face.

“I heard about your wife.”

“You heard about my wife! Shit, Champ, I just heard about my wife. Who the hell told you? Oh, Christ, Guma!” He pulled a pillow over his face and groaned.

“Well, what did you expect? Tell Guma, tell Jimmy Breslin, except Guma maybe gets the word around a little faster. We could talk about it, if you want.”

Karp peeked over the top of the pillow. “I don’t know what to say. I mean, I feel like a jerk. I thought I was in love, I thought I knew who with, and all of a sudden, it turns out that person doesn’t exist. It’s amazing, this year. It starts out, I have a job, a career that makes sense. I believe in it. I have a marriage, maybe going through some rough spots, but I believed in that, too. Now, Jesus, the DA’s office is heading for the garbage can, my wife is gay. I thought I got through the sixties, all that bullshit. I thought I knew the answers. You know, like an exam. Study hard, work out, clean mind, clean body. Fuck the answers-I don’t even know the questions anymore.”

“You should have taken more philosophy.”

“Yeah, right, instead of basketball. If I was five inches taller I wouldn’t need to know how to spell philosophy. Oh, well, I guess the great cosmic questions will always elude me, jock that I am. How about you, Ciampi, do they elude you too?”

“Well, I’ve always had some problems with ‘what is the ultimate ground of being’ and ‘what is the meaning of “meaning.” ’ And of course, the triune nature of the Godhead has kept me awake many a night. But right now, I believe the most important question is, ‘Do you eat pussy?’ ”

“Me? Never!”

“What, never?”

“Well, I do drag a slow kiss through it, now and again.”

Marlene threw back the sheet from their bodies and stretched luxuriously. “Then do so,” she said.

Much later, there were no longer any slats of light floating in the walls, just the bluish glow of a summer evening in New York. Marlene lit a Marlboro and sent a geyser of smoke up to the ceiling.

“Karp, the soles of my feet are sweating. They never did that before. God, what can it mean? Karp? Karp are you listening?” She knuckled him in the ribs.

“Ow. Marlene, why are you always abusing me physically? You’re always punching me.”

“Because you don’t give me your absolute attention at all times and do everything I want.”

“Oh, well, just asking. By the way, you also drool when you pop your rocks.”

“Yeah, it’s true, my dirty little secret. Karp!”

“What now?”

“Karp, I just realized we haven’t eaten anything all day.”

“So to speak.”

“No, food! I’m starving! What have you got?” She leaped off the bed and trotted into the kitchen, her buns winking in the dying light. Karp listened to the opening of cabinets and the slamming of the refrigerator door. In a few minutes she came back holding a plastic zip-lock bag.

“This is great, Butch. I can eat the refrigerator instructions and you can have the warranty card. There is no food in this apartment. How can you live that way?”

“We of the planet Zarkon have no need of earthly foods. We get our sustenance from young females, whom we lure to our dens and drain of their vital liquids.” He made a clumsy lunge for her leg, which she avoided.

“Uh-uh, bozo. First eat. Marlene wants protein. Marlene want STEAK. If I don’t get to Max’s in five minutes, you will have to explain my shriveled corpse to the police. Let’s get cleaned up.”

So they had another shower, with appropriate soapings and rubbings and tickles, until Marlene pushed him away saying, “Oh God, don’t get me started again. I’m going to have to get my thing relined as it is.”

“Oh, yeah? There’s a guy on Coney Island Avenue does a good job. He’ll do your muffler for the same price.”

“Get away from me, you maniac,” she said, and jumped out of the shower.

There was a full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. While Karp dried himself, Marlene wiped the fog from the mirror. She made Karp stand next to her facing it. At five-two, her head barely cleared his breastbone.

“Christ, we look like two different species. What a giant! If you were wearing roller skates, I could practically give you a blow job without bending down.”

“Damn it, isn’t it funny how you never can find a skate key when you want one? Ahhhgh! Stop it, Marlene! I thought you wanted a steak.”

Later, as they were dressing, she asked, “What happened to your knee? It looks like Frankenstein’s face.”

“I hurt it playing ball in college. It was sort of a freak accident. I landed on my face with my leg sticking up over somebody’s back. Then a two-hundred-and-thirty pound forward came flying through the air and landed on my ankle. The lever effect. The only thing holding my leg to my thigh was skin.”

“Oh, yucch, poor baby!”

“Yucch is right. My orthopedist said it was the perfect knee injury. Everything that could rip out in a human knee ripped out. He had residents from all over the West Coast coming in to observe. Didn’t do a bad job, though. I can walk all right, mostly, even run a little. But big-time basketball? Finito.”

“How come? I read all the time about the pros getting hurt and still playing.”

“That’s different. First of all, practically nobody gets hurt in basketball as badly as I did. I told you, it was a freak. Then again, they’re already part of the team. They can wrap themselves up, shoot in some dope, and play a couple of minutes. It’s different if you’re trying to break in. You’re competing with guys who are in perfect shape … and well …” Karp was staring out the window as he said this, his voice dying away at the end. Marlene touched his arm.

“You still feel bad about it, huh? Were you really good?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t have that much natural talent, and I’m a hair short for the pros, but I worked at it. I can handle the ball. I’m a dead shot from anywhere on the court. I can, I could, jump better than most white guys. I think I would have had a shot at point guard or second guard someplace. Being a honky helps, there. The fans don’t like seeing ten black dudes running around. Hey, let’s change the subject. This is getting me depressed.”

“Fine. How come you live this way? I mean the place looks like a crash pad. No food, no furniture. Shit, you don’t even have a wastebasket.”

“I eat out a lot.”

“No, really, Butch.”

“Really? Because eating in is what you do at home, and this isn’t a home. You think I want to fix a little frozen Salisbury steak every night and eat it in front of the tube? I sleep here, and keep my clothes here, period. And every so often some hot little number insinuates herself into my life and I fuck here.”

“Every so often, eh? How often is that?”

“Just kidding, Marlene. The truth is, you are the first human being besides me to enter this apartment since I moved in. You have stolen the virginity of my Macy’s seventy-nine dollar box spring and mattress. OK?”

“Yeah? Well, keep it that way, Buster, if you know what’s good for you.” She poked him sharply in the midsection, and trotted out of the apartment. He followed, happy and enslaved.

They ate huge steaks at Max’s, oblivious to the glitter underground cavorting around them. They saw a movie. They talked. Karp spilled his guts; he had not talked so much outside a courtroom in years, if ever. For a loudmouth, Marlene was a surprisingly good listener. They walked. They shared an egg cream from a sidewalk stand on Canal Street near Broadway, the heart of New York’s bazaar, the junction of Little Italy, Chinatown, and SoHo. There was nothing in the world, legal or illegal, you could not buy within half a mile of where they stood: dried sea cucumbers from the Sulu Sea, a World War II bombsight, a Parmesan cheese as tall as a man, an abstract expressionist painting, a gram of cocaine, a ton of powdered cinnamon, a ton of cocaine, the services of a naughty masseuse, an acupuncturist, a fortune teller, an assassin.

Karp was not in the market for any of those exotica. He thought, I have what I need. Then he thought, be careful, this is a classic rebound situation. He looked at Marlene leaning against the metal serving counter, a Marlboro clenched in her teeth at a jaunty angle, observing the midnight ramblers on Canal Street. He thought about rebounding, about rebounding in basketball. An image popped into his head, of himself jumping high into the air and catching Marlene, naked and curled into a ball, rebounding off a backboard, snatching her away from half a dozen grabbing hands. He laughed out loud. But when Marlene asked him what he was laughing about, he said, “Nothing. You had to be there.”

They strolled back uptown to Karp’s place. The air remained warm and not as humid as it would be later in the summer. Marlene went into an all-night emporium and bought, over his protests, a metal wastebasket with the Statue of Liberty and other New York scenes printed on it.

Toward dawn, they were in bed, pumping each other to yet another Big O. Remarkable how Marlene, filthy mouthed in the office, in deepest sex would say only “oh gosh” and “oh dear” like a barely fallen Carmelite. Now, though, she was even passed the “oh gosh” stage, sweating and flushed, her head lashing back and forth across the pillow like the tail of a harpooned eel, at which point the telephone rang. Around the sixth ring, the sound penetrated into Karp’s brain. He let ten more rings go by, until he realized both that the phone was not going to stop and that he was conditioned, like Pavlov’s dog, to stop what he was doing, no matter what, and answer a ringing phone.

“Sorry, I got to answer that,” he gasped.

“Sure, yeah. But make it snappy,” said Marlene.

He rolled off and picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Karp, is that you?”

“No, it’s Henry Kissinger. Who is this?”

“Butch, it’s me, Sonny Dunbar. I been trying to get you all night.”

“Well, you got me now. This better be good, Sonny.”

“No, it’s bad, real bad. Donny’s dead.”

“Dead? When … what happened?”

“They called us from Vorland about ten-thirty. He was dead in his cell at bed check. They think he got hold of some dope and OD’d. I’m over at his house-we just got my sister to bed. I still can’t believe it, you know? Anyway, I thought you better hear about it.”

“Thanks, Sonny. Look, I’m sorry as hell about this … let’s talk later, see where we stand.”

Karp hung up and flopped back on the pillow. He hadn’t thought about Mandeville Louis and Donald Walker for some time. He was carrying a full caseload now; it was hard enough to keep abreast of current cases, not to mention the strain of the Garrahy campaign. Tomorrow he would have to pull the file and rethink the case. But these thoughts were interrupted by a small, warm hand gliding down his belly to his groin.

“Ding-dong! Remember me?”

“Oh, yeah. Where was I?”

“Right here. Just a little higher. Ahh, that’s marvelous,” she said. But he couldn’t get Donald Walker’s frightened face out of his mind. That man was scared shitless, he thought, and he was right.

At the office the next day, Karp felt sleepy and sated, and found himself staring out the window at nothing. Shortly after noon, Sonny Dunbar came into his office, looking ashen and drawn.

“Pretty rough, huh?” said Karp. “You feel like going for coffee or a drink?”

“Nah, I got coffee up the wazzoo.”

“OK, what’s the story?”

Dunbar told a fairly common tale, but a sad one nonetheless. Donald Walker had drawn three-to-five for his role in the Marchione killings. Because he had no record of violence-and because Karp put in a good word-he was sent to the minimum-security facility at Vorland, in the Hudson Valley, about ninety minutes out of the city.

At Vorland, he was supposed to receive therapy and rehabilitation in the company of other young men who had gotten into trouble but were not regarded as dangerous, and whose crimes did not seem to warrant a ticket to the hell of Attica.

Or so it was supposed to work. Because of the peculiar distinction the law makes between adult and juvenile offenders, many individuals in Vorland’s population had half a dozen years of ferocious criminality behind them when their slates were wiped clean on their eighteenth birthdays. They may have been adult first offenders, but they were hardly simple lads in their first bit of trouble.

Besides that, Vorland had been designed for a high ratio of correction officers to inmates. That ratio was consumed-like so many other good ideas-by the implacable grinding of the criminal justice machine. Vorland had twice as many inmates as it had been designed for. It was better than the Tombs; it was better than Attica, but that wasn’t saying much. It was also one of the easiest places in the state of New York to cop drugs. The prison dealers just got on the phone and arranged for a friend to take a pleasant drive upstate, take a stroll along the eight-foot chain-link fence that bounded the facility, and flip a package over the top at a prearranged time and place.

Apparently Donald Walker had gotten a phone call the previous evening. It was from a woman claiming to be his sister; this was later discovered to be a lie. Walker had talked with her for a few minutes and the next day had been seen walking near the fence in the area known to the inmates as the Holy Land, because of the good things that fell out of the sky. By nine that evening he was dead, his belt around his arm, an empty syringe sticking in his vein.

“The little jerk,” Dunbar went on, “he was clean for most of a year and then he goes and pulls a dumb trick the first time somebody, some ‘friend’ lays some shit on him. Go figure!”

“You know what they say, ‘when the needle goes in, it never comes out.’ Any lead on the supplier?”

“Who the fuck knows? Could be anybody-a friend of a friend …”

“I’m thinking who might want him dead.”

“Who, that what’s-his-face, Louis? He’s still in the funny farm, right?”

“Right. But he could have set it up.”

“Come on, Karp. You been reading too many books. The mob maybe does stuff like that. We’re talking a mutt, a shooter, with no organization, no record. Besides, he’s still nailed-you still got the old lady and the gun, the other evidence too.”

“Yeah, but Donny was the linchpin. And, you know something? I’m not so sure that Mr. Louis is such a mutt. This bastard, I don’t know, he stinks, from the word go. There’s wheels within wheels going on there. Look, Sonny, I think it’s important that we try to find the third man.”

“What third man? The other guy in the car? Give me a break, Karp. It’s been near two goddamn years. How’m I going to start looking? Walk down Lenox Avenue, bracing dudes: ‘Say, scuse me bro’, you happen to be in a car somewheres back in Nineteen-seventy with a guy who wasted a coupla honkies in a liquor store? No? Well, have a nice day.’ Fuck me, Jack! You know how many cases I’m holding?”

“OK, Sonny, don’t get your balls in an uproar. Just a suggestion. We got the gun, we’ll go with that. On the other hand, you stumble on something, give me a call, OK? I want this shithead bad.”

“I can tell that. It’ll have to be stumble though, I’m warning you. Meanwhile, I got to go to a funeral.”

After Dunbar left, Karp leafed through his beautiful file on the Marchione case. He had his doubts. An old lady witness on a dark street. A gun. Some bits of glass. Juries liked eyewitnesses, despite their notorious unreliability. Sussman would tear this shit apart- without Donald Walker to weave it together.

Karp got up and stretched. He decided to go down to the evidence locker to check over some material from a case he was preparing for presentation to the bureau on Friday. Karp liked to physically handle the evidence. He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but the sight and feel of the guns, knives, chemicals, and blunt instruments with which New Yorkers ended one another’s lives enriched his presentation of a case. For the same reason, he forced himself to visit the morgue and look at the victims. Also, there was always the chance, however slight, that something would pop out at him from the dreadful stuff and change the meaning of a case.

In the evidence locker Proud Mary was looking glum.

“What’s happening, Mary?”

“I swear, Karp, that Guma ever come by me again I better not have no gun, or no knife in my hand. It took me the whole damn day to straighten out the mess you all made. Gettin’ stuff back in the right boxes, fixin’ tags … damn, I musta been pure crazy givin’ him my key.”

“That, or drunk. I hear it was quite a party, not that I remember much of it.”

She let out a loud chuckle. “Shee-it! It was a party though. Dance? I was hurtin’ all the next day. But you don’ wanna hear ’bout no old lady miseries-what can we do for you today?”

Karp consulted a slip of paper. “I need Veliz,” he said, and read off a case number. Then, as an afterthought, he said, “Oh, and give me Louis, too.” On that one he had the number memorized. In a few minutes, Mary had returned with two covered cardboard boxes.

Karp signed them out and hefted the boxes. Immediately, he knew something was wrong. The boxes were too light a load. Veliz was a razor job. But there should have been a heavy.38 in the Louis box. He tore off the lid, his heart pounding. Plastic bags, a liquor bottle, no gun.

“Mary, where’s the gun?”

“What gun is that, Mr. Karp?”

“The gun that’s supposed to be in this box. Look, read the box inventory. There’s supposed to be a Colt.38 Airweight here. Where is it?”

Mary’s mouth hung slack for a moment and her eyes were wide with fear. “Oh, Jesus God, Mr. Karp, I don’t know! I found all these guns here in a trash can, and I put them … I put them back in the plastic bags in the right boxes, but that’s all there was. What’m I gonna do?”

“I don’t know, Mary, but we got to find that gun. Look, you’re going to have to search every box in this locker. I’ll check with some of the people at the party.”

Tears shone on Mary’s cheeks. “Mr. Karp, I got twenty-five years in. I got retirement in three years. They could fire me for this …”

He patted her shoulder. “Nobody’s firing anybody, and nobody has to know about this. Don’t worry, we’ll find it. Just start looking, hey?”

He nailed Guma outside of the fourth floor courtrooms.

“Hey, Butch, some party!” said Guma, leering like a gargoyle.

“Yeah, right. Especially the part with the evidence guns. Guma, I mean, do you ever fucking think about what you’re doing? You got any idea of how much shit you put me in with that dumb trick?”

Guma’s smile faded. “What’s wrong with you, man? Relax!”

“Relax, my ass! I just checked the evidence room and the pistol in the Marchione case is gone. You remember the Marchione case?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy who pulled the wacko act, the one you got a hard-on for.”

“That’s right, I’m a little quirky that way, I don’t like seeing cold-blooded multiple murderers get a free walk.”

“What walk? I thought you had an eye on that, and his buddy snitched, right?”

“Right, but the snitch is dead, and the eye is about a hundred and two. The gun is my case, man, and you fucking lost it.”

Guma chewed his lower lip and averted his eyes from Karp’s smoldering gaze. “OK, OK, let me think. Look it’s bad, but it’s not that bad. If it’s not still in the Gym, then Luis and his crew probably picked it up.”

“Who the fuck is Luis?”

“The head of the night cleaning crew. I slipped him fifty to come back after the party and clean up, and turn the place back into an office. You know, move the partitions and shit. We always do it after a Gym party. I can check with him when he comes on at six-thirty tonight.”

“Great, Guma. Let’s hope he didn’t loan it to his cousin to knock over a bank.”

“Hell, no, Butch, Luis is all right. In fact, he was telling me how he wanted to be a cop. He’s a law-and-order dude right down the line. Trust me, it’ll be OK.”

“It’ll never be OK, Guma-the goddamn chain of custody for the goddamn gun is blown to hell. What am I going to do, depose the goddamn janitor? Your honor, we’re pretty, fairly sure we got the right gun here as People’s Exhibit 1-tell ’em, Luis! Too bad he’s not a cop-what is he, too short?”

“Nah, he had a little history of breaking and entering, but …”

“Guma, NO MORE!” Karp put his hands over his ears and backed away. “Just find it, hey? I don’t want to know another fucking thing about who got it or where it’s been.”

“By tonight, guaranteed!” yelled Guma, as Karp vanished into the Streets of Calcutta.

But Karp was no longer thinking about the gun. He was thinking about the third man. He had to have the third man in the car, and get him with something so heavy that the guy would turn on Louis. He didn’t know how to find him, or how to turn him if he did find him. All he knew was that Louis wasn’t going to be allowed to slip through the cracks. He thought, at least he’s in Matteawan, at least we know where he is.

In fact, Mandeville Louis was nowhere near Matteawan at that moment. He was in a holding pen in that very building, waiting for a hearing, trying to slip through the cracks.

The cracks were pretty big. At about two o’clock that afternoon Louis was called into Part 30 of the Supreme Court. Part 30 was a calendar court, a gritty switching yard of the criminal justice system. No trials were held there. Instead, defendants were brought before a judge, asked for a plea, and, if they pleaded not guilty, the judge set bail and calendared a trial date in another part. All returnees from Matteawan were brought to Part 30.

Calendar courts handled about a hundred cases a day. Their only purpose was to promote efficient movement in the system. The ADAs assigned to Part 30 were always the youngest, the most inexperienced from the ranks of the Criminal Court or the Felony Trial Bureau. In general, they learned about the case in the few seconds between the time the clerk called it and the time the judge asked what the People wished to do.

The People today in Part 30 was Dean Pennberry, a bright enough young man, but the ink on his bar exam was still damp. He favored bow ties and sober three-piece suits, which his mom bought for him. He was just getting over acne and still got the shakes when he had to talk to a judge.

The judge was Mervyn Stein. His devoted service on behalf of the Narcotics Control Commission and several other city agencies had earned him a lifetime job on the bench. One hundred Centre Street was a small world. The same characters appeared in different roles, defender one day, prosecutor the next, judge the week after, like characters in an interminable Chinese opera.

Judge Stein did not have a distinguished bench, but it suited him. Stein liked to make deals; he prided himself also on his case flow. Part 30 was hardly anything but deals. He had a talent for avoiding the legal niceties-like justice, which might slow things down in his court. As a result, from his first weeks as a judge he had been known as Merv the Swerve.

“How does the defendant plead,” Judge Stein asked Leonard Sussman. He was surprised to see so distinguished a defense counsel in his courtroom, surprised but pleased. Not only did the lawyer add tone to his generally undistinguished circus, but Stein was glad of the opportunity to do a good turn for someone with powerful political connections.

“Not guilty, Your Honor,” said Mandeville Louis earnestly. He was dressed in a yellow Tombs jumpsuit again, and to all appearances sane as a brick.

Stein glanced over the case file before him. “OK, wait a minute,” he said, “this is a two-year-old case. Is that right, Mister Pennberry? The crime was Nineteen-seventy and this is seventy-two?”

“That’s correct, Your Honor, ah … two years this past March.”

“Mister Sussman, have you discussed this case with the People?”

“Yes, Your Honor. My client would be willing to plead guilty to a charge of manslaughter in the first degree, with a sentence of zero to twelve years.”

This offer sounded fine to Stein. If accepted, it meant that he would get credit for a felony conviction and a twelve-year sentence. Oddly enough, it was also fine with Louis, who had directed Sussman to make it. This was because in New York State there is a thing called a Max-out Rule, which states that a convict may be incarcerated for only two-thirds of the maximum sentence handed out by the judge.

But the zero was what counted. Louis would be up for parole immediately. In most cases with a zero-to-twelve sentence, the Parole Board would insist on at least a year in prison, but here was a man who had “served” two years in Matteawan. With Sussman’s help, the Parole Board might quickly dispose of Louis’s case. It was, after all, under considerable pressure to relieve the monstrous overcrowding of Attica. He could be out walking in a matter of weeks. The board had its own numbers game.

Pennberry was uncomfortable, not so much about Louis walking but about how the twelve-year max would look. He swallowed hard and cleared his throat.

“Judge, this man is charged with two common law intentional murders, two felony murders and armed robbery. I think the minimum acceptable plea is zip to fifteen.”

Sussman returned to the defendant’s table and spoke softly to Louis: “Well, Mister Louis?”

Louis glanced over at Pennberry, who was nervously fiddling with his bow tie. “No. Stick with the twelve. I don’t want a fifteen-year sentence confusing the parole board.”

Sussman spoke from the table. “Your Honor, in light of the fact that the defendant has spent over two years in a mental institution, we still think that zero to twelve is a reasonable sentence.”

Stein did not like the way this was going. He looked at the wall clock. He was falling behind schedule. He frowned at Pennberry and asked both counsels to approach the bench.

“Dean, let’s be reasonable. This is a stale case, one, and two, this is what we usually give to cases of this type, Matteawan returnees. I mean, face it, what else can you do? There’s no way you’re going to get a conviction on a two-year-old case. Now go back and take another look at the file and see if we can’t get a disposal on this right now.” He flashed a false and paternal smile and winked at Sussman.

Pennberry trotted back to his table. He glanced at the defendant, who looked like a clerk or a schoolteacher. Pennberry thumbed through the file. He was starting to sweat. Every eye in the courtroom was on him; this was a lot worse than being called on to answer a question in law school. The file was a blur.

Then salvation swam up to him in big red letters. He cleared his throat and said in a loud voice, “Your Honor, I see here that I am instructed to accept no lesser plea than Murder One.”

“What!” said Stein. “Where does it say that? Who instructed you?”

“Ah, Judge, that would be Mister Karp, of the Homicide Bureau.”

Pennberry shrugged and tried a nervous smile. “I’m sorry, Your Honor. There’s nothing I can do. It’s Karp’s case.”

Stein glanced again at the wall clock. “Get Karp down here. Now!” he snapped to his clerk.

Sussman went back to Louis and explained what was going on.

Louis had forgotten who Karp was. Sussman reminded him.

“Oh, him. The big muthafucka.”

“Yes, him,” said Sussman, wondering how long this endless and quite unpleasant case was going to drag on. “I think we may have a little problem, Mister Louis.”

Karp took the call in his office, and was standing in Part 30 three minutes later. Stein gave Karp a long, sour look. “Mr. Karp, we are trying to reach a fair and equitable disposition here. The defense has agreed to plead guilty, but we seem to have run into some problems.”

“What problems, Judge? A plea of guilty to Murder One is perfectly acceptable to the People,” said Karp mildly.

“The plea is to Man One, Mister Karp, with zero to twelve.”

“Oh. Well that plea is totally unacceptable to the People.”

Karp smiled. Stein glared. “Mister Karp, will you approach the bench?”

Karp didn’t move. “Your Honor, everything can be kept on the record.”

Stein turned his glare on the stenographer. “Karp, you’re obstructing the orderly progress of this court. What is this goddamn crap about no lesser plea?” The stenographer’s flashing fingers halted. There was more than one way of keeping things off the record.

Karp was unperturbed. “It’s simple, Your Honor. We are ready to try this case, unless the defendant wants to take a murder plea.” Murder was the one exception to the Max-out Rule. By statute, fifteen years was the absolute minimum time a convicted murderer had to serve in prison. The Parole Board liked to add another five to the fifteen, to show it was on the job, which meant that pleading guilty to murder meant at least twenty years in Attica.

Sussman explained this to Louis, not without some satisfaction. “Mister Louis,” he whispered, “your current strategy seems to be in ruins. Go to trial. You can beat this in court. Can I change your plea to ‘not guilty’?” Louis shook his head and said nothing, but began toying with the zipper of his jumpsuit.

Stein said, “Mister Karp, I’m sure we all appreciate your diligence, but surely you’re aware that this is a two-year-old case. You still have evidence and witnesses?”

“The People are ready, Your Honor. All we need is a two-week adjournment to prepare for trial. And that’s what we intend to do, unless the defendant is ready to plead guilty to the top count of the indictment.” He turned and looked at Louis: “Murder One.”

Louis’s response to this was to stand up, pull down his zipper, and urinate onto the neatly stacked papers covering the defendant’s table. “Aiiiie! They’re after me! They’re after me!” he shrieked in a loud falsetto voice.

He then climbed up on the table and began stripping off his jumpsuit. Two guards leaped forward to control him, trying to avoid the stream of urine that sprayed in all directions. Sussman jumped backward in panic, but not before a row of dark stains was drawn like a sash across his immaculate pearl-gray suit coat.

The guards at last pinned Louis facedown on the table and cuffed his hands behind his back. His body was still thrashing about, arched backward like a bow. His face was contorted, mouth open and drooling ropes of saliva, eyes rolled up into his head, showing only yellowish whites. Karp noticed again that Louis had somehow removed his glasses before throwing his fit.

Stein was pounding his gavel. The packed courtroom was in pandemonium, the spectators and the eternal waiters on justice delighted with this amusing break in their mortal boredom. Somebody yelled, “Shit, boy, if you hadna run out of piss, you coulda got away.”

Finally, Stein was able to stop gaveling. Louis’s heavy breathing could be heard above the shuffling and coughing of the crowd. “Get that man out of here,” Stein told the guards and they picked Louis up by his shoulders and ankles and began to carry him across the well of the court to the holding-pen door.

As they carried him past Karp, he said, “Hey, Louis, take care of those eyeglasses, now.” For an instant, Karp thought he saw Louis’s eyes snap down and focus on Karp’s own. Karp grinned. The eyes disappeared, and in half a minute, so did Louis.

“Mister Sussman, I am remanding your client to Bellevue Hospital, for observation,” said Judge Stein. “Next case.”

Karp strolled over to Pennberry and patted his shoulder.

“Thanks for keeping awake, kid. I know it’s hard.”

“That’s all right, Mister Karp, ah … Butch. Thanks,” said Pennberry, feeling for the first time like Mr. District Attorney.

Sussman was gathering his papers, dabbing at the damp ones with a wad of tissues. As Karp walked by him he said, “Your client’s quite the pisser, hey, Mister Sussman. So to speak.”

Sussman looked up bleakly. “It’s a dirty business, Mister Karp.”

“It is that, Mister Sussman. It is that,” said Karp.

“Mister Karp, if you have no more business in this courtroom, I will ask you to leave forthwith,” said Judge Stein from the bench.

“Your Honor, my business is concluded,” said Karp, and trotted up the center aisle.

“Sonny? Butch. I’m sorry to disturb you at home, especially now, but … ah … we got to talk.”

“Sure, that’s OK. By the way, thanks for the flowers.”

“No, it’s the least-how was the funeral?”

“The usual. Ella and my mom took it pretty hard.”

“Sonny, the reason I called is, we lost the gun, the pistol in the Marchione case.”

“You what!”

“It was a fuck-up in the evidence room-it’s a long story, but we can’t build the case on it anymore. We got to find the other guy.”

“Butch, I really mean this now. This is bullshit. Let me tell it to you again, and I hope it sticks this time. We do not have the horses to find people who we know killed folks and are walking around on the street, much less chase around after people we don’t even know if they’re still in town, where we at least got the mutt who did the job locked up. We got priorities. My lieutenant got priorities. The fucking chief of detectives got priorities, and baby, this ain’t one of them.”

“Sonny, don’t give me that jive about ‘locked up!’ Matteawan isn’t Attica and you know it. I just came this minute from Part 30. Louis was trying to cop to Man One, zip to twelve. If I missed the call, he’d be walking by the end of the month. I got to go …”

“Butch, you got your problems and I got mine. It don’t change the priorities.”

“Come on, Sonny, you sound like Wharton. Priorities, my ass!”

“That’s the way it is, Butch, sorry. Hey, let me give you a little example. At the funeral now. Your basic regular black working-stiff family. I’m sitting drinking a bourbon and ginger and listening to these old ladies jawing, right? My Auntie Jess, and her cousin Helen, and my mom’s cousin Bella. They keep the books on the old neighborhood, OK? They’re talking about how many of the kids they know have gotten dead off dope, and not only dead off dope, but dead after they killed somebody with a goddamn shotgun.

“They went through, it must have been, six, seven kids, ripped off some dude, wasted him, took the money, bought dope, shot up, checked out. OK, that’s the personal knowledge of one goddamn family. That give you some idea of what it’s like up in the ghet-to? What we got on our hands in Fun City?”

“Sonny, I work in Homicide, I know what it’s like.”

“Yeah, well stop busting my horns on this thing, then.”

“Hey, Sonny?”

“What.”

“Donald didn’t kill anybody with a shotgun.”

“Right, he had a buddy did the job. So what?”

“Think, Sonny! The car, the phony plates, the phone call-Louis was setting Donald up, right? OK, suppose he didn’t have a brother-in-law in the cops. Suppose somebody found him dead three days with a needle in his arm and some evidence strewn around connecting him to the liquor store. What happens then, Sonny? You’re the cop, what would you do? Case closed, right? Shit, Donald was alive and he had a hard time convincing us that Louis even existed.”

“What are you talking about, Karp?”

“Sonny, what the old ladies were saying. Figure the odds of that pattern repeating itself that many times. Even in New York it’s off the charts. But, Sonny, what if it’s an M.O. He uses junkies. He runs a bunch of robberies, kills the witnesses, sticks the junkies with the evidence, and slips them a hotshot or something, and sets up the overdose. Do the cops want to clear cases? Does a bear shit in the woods? He gives you clearances on a plate, dammit!”

“Karp, that’s crazy. How the hell you going to go to court with that shit?”

“That’s the point, Sonny. I don’t have to. I can nail this motherfucker for life in Attica with the Marchiones. He’s only got the one life, hey? But I got to have the other guy.”

“I can’t buy this, Butch, it’s too weird.”

“OK, do me a favor. Run a check. Pull files. Find out how many cases in the last five, ten years match the pattern. Shotgun murder of victim and any witnesses on the scene; probably a sizable score; case cleared when junkie is found dead of OD with incriminating evidence. Maybe there’ll be a helpful anonymous tip leading the cops to the so-called killer. Just do it, Sonny. I’m right, I can feel it. That son of a bitch! Crazy, my ass!”

“Butch, if you’re right …”

“Yeah, Louis got to Donny in Vorland. That’s another lead. Find out who threw the stuff over the fence, you’re getting close.”

“This’ll take a couple days to check out.”

“I don’t care how long it takes, just do it!”