Resolved

2

It was the kind of case that Karp would have liked to try, if they still let him try cases. Failing that, he thought Terrell Collins was doing a pretty good job for the People on this, the first day of trial. Collins was a tall, graceful man nearly the same color as the victim in the case, one Moussa Onabajo, late of Nigeria. On the stand was one of the several witnesses to the killing, a man named Touri. As Collins took him through the warm-up- who he was, how he knew the victim, what if anything he saw on the night of- Karp turned his eye on the defendants, Eric Gerber, detective third grade, NYPD, and Frank Nixon, detective second.

Only the backs of their heads were visible from the rear of the courtroom where Karp stood; Nixon had a full head of dark yellow hair, Gerber's skull was a thick blocklike object covered with short red bristles. Gerber should have picked different genes had he set out to be the defendant in this sort of case. He looked like the Nazi trooper in a dozen war movies. Nixon had a more intelligent look, but he could have played the SS officer, the one who lifts the heroine's chin with the riding crop. There was no evidence in either man's record of racism in action, but in their minds, who knew?

Collins and the People's case had nothing to say on the subject. Karp had made that decision early on, in the face of Keegan's broad hints and the rage of what seemed like a good two fifths of the city's population. Karp caught some eyes upon him, including some hard ones. He had the rep as someone insensitive to racial issues, a rep he shared with a recent mayor of the city. Karp had every right to be in the courtroom, to sit at the prosecution table if he wanted to, but he was turning heads now and he wanted all the heads to be turned toward Collins and the witness. He slipped out.

He knew what Touri was going to say anyway. That on a certain night six months ago, while standing outside the Club Balou on Greenwich Street, he had observed his friend, Moussa, being accosted by two men, the present defendants. That he had heard the two men try to buy dope from Moussa. That Moussa had grown angry, because Moussa was a good Muslim and didn't even use dope, much less sell it. That Moussa had pushed that man there, the defendant Nixon, and shouted abusive words and had engaged in a shoving scuffle with Nixon, and struck Nixon in the face with his fist. That the two men had then pulled pistols and shot Moussa dead. Thus the testimony of Bradley and three others was essentially the same. Against this was the defense's story, which was that the two undercover cops had identified themselves to Moussa as police officers and he had attacked Nixon physically. In the ensuing scuffle, Moussa had tried to grab Nixon's pistol, and that was when the shooting had begun.

None of the witnesses had seen or heard anything resembling this series of events. What Karp surmised was that the cops had made a simple mistake and compounded it into tragedy. They had picked the wrong guy, neither Gerber nor Nixon being experts at distinguishing among several Nigerians on darkened street corners, and when it had become perfectly clear that it was the wrong guy, since the right guy would have sold them dope if he hadn't made them or would have been cool if he had made them and been holding, neither of the two cops had possessed the sense to disengage, to stay in their tourist personae and drift off. Certainly there were plenty of actual dope deals going down along Greenwich Street that night. Instead, they had responded to the victim's outrage with outrage of their own, abandoned the rules of engagement set down in elaborate detail in the NYPD Patrol Guide, and blew the fellow away, using seven bullets from two guns to do it.

A stupid tragedy: that was what it actually was, Karp believed, but the law, that Great Ass, had no slot for stupid tragedy. Its only concern was culpability. Was the act criminous? The grand jury had determined that it was. Were the defendants culpable? That was what Collins and all of them were doing in there. Yes, they were, said the People. No, they weren't, said the counsel for the defense. Now, now, boys, said the judge, when necessary. It is as dignified and noble as a schoolyard punch-out, or the scuffle outside a mean little nightclub that had cost Moussa Onabajo his life.

Karp shook his head violently to clear it of these thoughts, unseemly ones for someone in his position, and drew a startled look from a passing clerk typist. Oh, great, he thought, now I'm twitching like a maniac in the courthouse halls. I'm going crazy, too. And this "too" his mind tossed up made him think of she to whom it referred, the one already crazy. This recollection hit him with the force of a blow, as it did several times in each day, and he paused at the door to his office and leaned heavily upon the doorknob to keep himself upright, to keep from falling to the floor and writhing in pain, howling. The spasm passed as always, leaving the perpetual dull ache, tinctured with resentment. Why did she have to be like that?

The monster in her lair. It is close, dank, fetid with the bones of her victims. In reality it is large, sunny, white-painted, a bedroom on the upper floor of a farmhouse near the shore on the north fork of Long Island. But what is reality? Marlene no longer knows. She lives alone now with a varying number of large fierce dogs and a dog trainer named Billy Ireland, with whom she is strenuously not having an affair, although she often wants to. Marlene has strong sexual desires, and a likely relief for them nearby and willing, but she denies herself this, and she denies herself also the solace of her children and her home. It's part of the punishment. Marlene is clever enough to organize a mass assassination and escape the grip of the law, but not clever enough to escape the guilt. She organized this crime to avenge an attack on her son Giancarlo. Giancarlo is blind as the result, or perhaps he is not blind at all. His vision tends to flick on and off, like an old bar sign. Her favorite child, the artist, blind: this was her thinking, and his brother, the twin, probably had murder down to his name at age eleven, although you couldn't tell what was going on inside him at all, you were lucky if you got three words a day out of him, Giancarlo does all the talking the two of them need. Maybe he's twisted inside there, that's her big fear, like Mom, thinks of nothing but guns, shooting, maybe we'll see him up on the tower one day, a sniper, one of those beautiful, smooth, deadly American boys. "The mother's fault" is what they always say, although in this case definitely true.

So, the deal is she has to stay away from the bunch of them, the boys to protect them from the Monster Mom, and far from Butch, to protect herself from that look he gives her without meaning to, a look of revulsion. No, she could take revulsion, it was her desert, after all; but he mixes it with the still-warm embers of love into an emotional slurry that she can't endure seeing. She doesn't have to avoid her daughter, because her daughter has removed herself from the maternal orbit. Or has she? She doesn't run away, she talks on the phone, but like a stranger, which is fine with Marlene, one less thing to strip off, although one would think that Lucy, of all people, would understand why she did it. Lucy has that rage, too, when the family is threatened, some kind of gene from Sicily? Although she has succeeded in keeping it under better control than her mother has. A real Catholic, Lucy, of the Saint Teresa rather than the Torquemada type. Marlene is pretty sure that Lucy has not actually killed anyone. Accessory, maybe, but not actually the trigger person yet, for which the mother is truly thankful.

She drags herself out of bed and steps over a huge black dog into the bathroom. Minimal ablutions, only a blurred look in the mirror. She has cut off her hair. Dressing is no problem. She has slept in her underwear and a faded Take Back the Night T-shirt. She pulls on greasy overalls and socks and goes down the stairs, the dog like a thumping shadow behind her. In the sink the evidence of her dinner, a can of soup eaten directly from the pot. Marlene lives now on soup, bread, cheese, and wine. She looks at the bottle she opened last night and its companion juice glass, sticky with red remains. A little aching here, ruthlessly suppressed. She will have a large glass of wine with lunch, which is European and permitted and then not a drop more until suppertime. She is not a lush. Drinking to oblivion after a good day's work is what a lush does. She can't have a family, but she can run a business, and she does. The dogs love her. Breakfast is black espresso made in an hourglass stove-top pot and a chunk of bread and sliced tomato from Giancarlo's old garden. She tries to keep the garden up, but the weeds are gaining on it. Symbolic.

After pulling on green Wellingtons, Marlene goes out the back door. She sees a large, sagging barn, white-painted and peeling, with the sun just rising over its roofline, and several outbuildings. The yard is covered with tanbark. This place used to be a dairy farm, but now it is a kennel and dog training establishment. She can hear the barks and howls as she steps out into the Sound-scented morning and lights her first cigarette. Wingfield Farms Registered Neapolitan Mastiffs is a non-no-smoking facility. She enters the barn and flicks on the lights. There is louder barking, panting, and whining, and the sound of many claws against stone. She checks the stock in leisurely fashion, caressing or admonishing as required, accompanied by her own private dog, Gog the mastiff, who is silent amid the barking as befits his exalted status. There are six Neapolitan mastiffs, several dobes and shepherds, and a bunch of smaller dogs, mixed curs and beagles, in training as dope and bomb sniffers. Business is good in that area.

Steps on the stairs as Billy Ireland comes down from the apartment he occupies in the former hayloft. He is a small, well-knit man, of the type Marlene particularly likes, brass-haired, with pool green eyes and a cocky manner. (Of course, being Marlene, she married a completely different style of man.) He is an ex-junkie and a Mozart among dog trainers. They desire each other, but they play at being perfect lady and gentleman, while enjoying the pleasures of flirtation. Having him around enhances her self-disgust- a barely controllable slut after all- which is all to the good, a bonus in fact. They inquire as to each other's sleep, trade earthy innuendos, and discuss the day's program. Ireland is sleeping with Marjorie, one of the dog agitators; Marlene knows it, but he is careful not to flaunt it. The charade requires that he be smitten with Marlene, and he obliges, this being the best job he has ever had.

They work the dogs through the brief cool of the morning. Marlene does basic training, lead work, and the standard commands. Ireland works with Marjorie and Russell, the agitators. They are people who are skilled in annoying big dogs, and who don't mind being mauled and knocked down. Ireland does Kohler training, turning the mastiffs into guard dogs. It is simple, hard work, requiring concentration. The dogs know if you mean it, unlike most humans. Marlene sinks gratefully into the doggy world; she thinks these are her only purely honest relationships.

They work until one, when it becomes too hot to work out of doors. It is Marlene's turn to get lunch at the snack bar on the beach road. She drives there in her battered red Ford pickup. In years past, Marlene often spent a few summer hours lying at the beach while her sons played. No longer. She avoids the beach now. Her bikini tan has faded. Now she has a workingman's tan, face, neck, and forearms. She looks piebald and ridiculous, but what does it matter? No one is going to look at her body.

At lunch, the conversation among the four dog people is lively and mainly about dogs, although they tell junkie stories with self-deprecatory laughter and Narcotics Anonymous stories with simple sympathy. She thinks they are decent, damaged people and is happy to spend her life among them, in that she has a life.

After lunch they work the sniffer dogs inside the barn. Marlene has been supplied with baits by the law enforcement authorities with whom she has contracts: eau de coke, eau de smack, eau de Semtex, C-4, dynamite, black powder. This is even more concentrated work than the guard training. A dog is brought out, it finds the hidden bait, gets its lavish praise. Or else it becomes confused, and wanders sniffing around the barn, and signals at the wrong thing. He's a pet, says Russell after Morris the schnauzer has failed three times to find the hidden dope. "Pet" is not a compliment at Wingfield Farms. Some dogs get it right away, others never do. Part of the art is telling which is which, whether a little extra effort will create a working dog or whether the beast is doomed to chase the Frisbee in the 'burbs. Dog training is a profession that inspires a deep respect for the inexplicable differences between one beagle and a seemingly identical beagle. Marlene reflects that none of her five siblings is a rage-maddened criminal like her. Bloodlines or training, she can't figure it out. She worries about her children. Bad seed? Evil training? It doesn't matter anymore. She's out of all that.

Around four, Marlene goes into her office and does business, pays bills, talks to officials, takes orders for dogs, pitches dogs to prospective owners. In the late afternoon and through the early twilight hours they work the dogs outside again. The agitators menace, the dogs attack, the dogs always win. At dusk they leave. Marlene has her first drink and her second, from a bottle of wine identified only as being a product of California and being red. Billy Ireland goes off somewhere. Marlene makes herself a can of something, she who once could barely tolerate any canned food in the house, she the maker of sauce from scratch, the roaster of veal shanks for stock. Wine with dinner and wine after dinner, too. Ireland comes in around nine. Unbidden, he stands behind her chair and massages her neck and shoulders. He has good hands, he is skillful with the animal body, regardless of species. They have come close a time or two, when she was deep in the wine fog, but have never actually done it. The world's longest first date, Ireland calls it. He is slightly afraid of her, she knows, and he will not press it.

Tottering a little, she climbs the stairs and falls into bed. Another day, barely distinguishable from the day before. Gog the mastiff licks her face and thumps his two hundred pounds down in the doorway, rattling the windows. She weeps briefly, clutching a photograph of her children, and falls asleep.

Karp left the courtroom and climbed down the stairs to his office, one at a time now, where once he had taken flights in three bounds. Karp always used the stairs, up and down, and never the elevator. He hated being trapped in conversation during the painfully slow rides. He had nightmares about being trapped on a slow elevator that, when its door opened, revealed that it was on the same floor from which it had departed so long ago. Too much like his life.

In the office, he disposed of some bureaucratic details swiftly and efficiently and then turned to the pile of case reports he had selected for review. Karp thought that this was the most important part of his job and the one he enjoyed the most. He could review only a small fraction of the cases that the various bureau chiefs thought worthy of trial, but the fact that Karp was looking over their shoulders kept them honest and kept standards from sliding too far. Or so Karp believed. He picked up the case file from the homicide bureau. Husband kills wife, a no-brainer. What was interesting was why the guy wouldn't deal, since he had clearly done it and would go down for it. Middle-class guy, a furrier. Everyone thinks they're O.J., they can walk with a good lawyer. Not today, not in New York County. He made some notes and moved on. Narcotics. Why did he bother? He didn't know the heroin was in his apartment, the cops planted it. Another race thing, the defendant's lawyer was one of the ones who figured if he stacked the jury with enough black faces, they'd walk his guy to piss off the Man. Maybe he would. Karp spotted a flaw in the chain of evidence record and made a note. Check it out.

Next, the rape bureau. More interesting: a doctor was the D, the victim a patient, the charge sexual abuse, first degree. Not completely unusual that, but unusual to try it. Usually, their main interest was in getting past it as quickly as possible, cop a plea to misdemeanor and try to smooth things over with the state medical board and the hospitals. A little public penitence, too: yes, a terrible problem, I'm in therapy, my wife supports me, ask for the forgiveness of God and the victims, etc. An actual trial would do the opposite, keeping the case in the public eye for a week at least, and revealing all the juicy details to the press. Kevin Hirsch, M.D., was the guy, a gastroenterologist. No priors. The alleged crime had taken place at the Aurora Community Health Center, located in a semidecrepit zone of upper Manhattan, where Dr. Hirsch volunteered. The alleged victim was one Leona Coleman, forty-four. According to her statement, on January 12 of the current year she had gone to the clinic to have a colonoscopy. She suffered from bowel problems and chronic diarrhea. The accused had sedated her and begun the procedure, in the midst of which she had suddenly become aware that the physician had his head between her legs and was tonguing her vagina.

Karp read through the file and then thumbed back through it again, thinking he had missed something, but he hadn't. The rape bureau was apparently going to try this fellow on the completely unsupported word of the alleged victim. According to the police report, the alleged assault had taken place on an examination table shielded from a busy ward only by curtains. Was this at all likely? And the act itself, a colonoscopy in progress, diarrhea, the smell… Karp was not at this stage capable of surprise at any of the acts that people chose to relieve the sexual itch, but this still seemed extreme.

There was a pattern of abuse alleged in support of the state's case. The rape bureau had put out an 800 number: call if Dr. Hirsch diddled you or worse. He paged through the testimony. Four women had responded. Two thought something had happened during deep anesthesia but weren't sure what. One felt she'd had her breast touched inappropriately. The last claimed that Dr. Hirsch had seduced her in his office and they'd had a wild affair for six months and that he'd promised he'd leave his wife for her and then didn't. No tonguing of vaginas during colonoscopies. A dozen years back, Karp's wife had been the founding chief of the sex crimes bureau and so Karp knew more than most about the particular difficulties of prosecuting such cases. If this guy had done it, why hadn't he copped to a lesser? Why did he want a trial? Why, come to that, did sex crimes want a trial? Little bells were going off. Karp put the file to the side and reached for his phone.

Laura Rachman, chief of the sex crimes bureau, was a big blonde who dressed in colors more flamboyant than were usually seen in the courthouse, the colors of national flags. Today she was wearing a crisp linen suit of an eye-challenging green with a white blouse. Her hair was arranged in sprayed waves around her wide oval face, which she had carefully painted in matte fleshtones to resemble human skin. Karp did not like Rachman particularly and was unfailingly polite to her as a result.

"You wanted to see me?" she asked. Wonted. Rachman's vowels were artificial, like her face. She had escaped Queens and did not wish to be mistaken for an outer-borough person.

"Yeah, have a seat." He gestured, she sat, crossing her legs. The short skirt of the suit rode up over her nylon-covered thighs. Karp focused his eyes on her face. "It's this Hirsch thing. What's the story there?"

"What do you mean, story? It's pretty clear. He's a serial sexual abuser and we're going to hit him with the max. You have a problem with that?"

"Yeah, I do. What did you offer him?"

"Sex abuse two and six months. He spit in our eye. He says he didn't do it."

"Uh-huh. Well the thing is, I don't see that you've got a trial here. That's my problem."

Little patches of natural color appeared under the blusher. "You're questioning my judgment?"

"It's my job, Laura. I question everyone's judgment. Basically, the whole thing rests on Coleman's testimony, with no corroborating evidence or witnesses…"

"It's a sex case. There's never corroborating testimony in sex cases."

"Not often, right, but here you've got a doc doing an unlikely act in a place where it'd be easy for him to get caught. You've got nothing solid that he's not a Boy Scout…"

"That's not true. We've got three other women."

Karp waved a hand. "You've got two women who think something happened when they were under anesthesia. The third woman says she had an affair with him, he seduced her, but I don't see any background on her. Is she cool?"

"She's fine. She'll stand up."

"Great, but I want to see it in writing that someone checked that she's not a fruitcake who also had passionate affairs with the mayor, the pope, and Warren Beatty. Also, your defendant, the guy's done nine thousand colonoscopies, according to his statement. And he's never indulged his taste for fecally flavored cunnilingus until now? Until your victim came along? What's she like, the victim?"

"Wait a minute, we're blaming the victim now? I'm sorry, when did the middle ages come back?"

Karp suppressed a sigh. "Laura, the defense is going to attack the character of the complainant because that's your entire case. The woman has to be squeaky, and I don't see from this file that you've made a significant effort to determine that. Does she have a grudge against the doc? Is she trying to muscle him on something? Is she a flake? Does she have any pattern of complaints against docs for this kind of thing?"

But Rachman was not listening. "I can't believe I'm hearing this crap. I'll tell you what the problem is. The problem is the D is a nice Jewish doctor and the victim is black."

"No. The problem is that the case is not prepped for trial, and I'm not going to sign off on a trial slot until it is."

She stood up and yanked her skirt down. "Fine. I'm going to Jack on this."

"Go ahead," said Karp, "and I'll tell him the same thing I told you: The case isn't ready."

After she was gone, Karp spent a few moments predicting what would happen if Rachman took the wretched thing to Keegan. She would get on his calendar, Keegan would call him and ask what it was about, Karp would tell him, and Keegan would yell at Karp for not handling it at his level, meaning that Keegan wanted to be protected from having to make decisions on cases that would rile either the blacks or the liberal bleeders, the two squishiest elements of his political support. And Karp would therefore need something else, something that wasn't in the case file, to give the DA.

"Murrow!"

In a moment the man appeared. Karp understood that Murrow was out and about much of the day on his master's business, but it seemed that whenever Karp called him, he materialized, like a djinn. Karp thrust the Hirsch file at him.

"Look this over," said Karp and explained his problems with the case. "There could be something fishy about the vic here. Ask around."

Felix opened his eyes upon blackness. He was stiff and crampy and didn't know where he was. It took a few seconds for him to recall even who he was. He tried to sit up and bumped his head. His exploring hands told him he was in a box, his ears said he was in a vehicle of some kind. He pushed upward against a slightly yielding stiffness slick against his palms. Waxed cardboard?

Memories arose now, like the ghost images on photo paper rising to sharpness in the developer bath. The Arab. Injections. He touched his chest and felt the hardness of staples in the Y-shaped pattern made by an autopsy. But his own organs were intact. He was alive; it had worked; he was out.

The vehicle slowed, turned, and came to a halt. Felix felt himself lifted, carried, heard the grunts of men and short bursts of a foreign tongue. There were clicking sounds. The cover of the cardboard coffin rose up. He blinked in the sudden light. A face came into view, tan, with a short beard and thick hornrims over dark eyes.

"Are you all right?" The voice was soft and slightly accented.

Felix sat up, wincing a little at the pull of the staples. There were two other men in the room. The smell of gas, gray concrete walls- it was some kind of garage. The other two men were darker than the first one, with close-cropped heads and hard features, one meaty, the other a whippet. The muscle, Felix thought, and wondered briefly if he could take them. One at a time, maybe. The two hard men grabbed his arms and helped him out of the coffin. The third man brought a striped cotton robe for him to wear. Felix felt rubbery and weak. "I got to piss," he said. His voice sounded strange to him, shaky and hollow. They had to almost carry him to the bathroom.

It took Felix three days to get back on his feet. It was the drugs, Rashid said. Rashid was the one with the beard and the glasses. The others were Carlos (big) and Felнpe (thin). Felix didn't figure that an Arab would hang with a pair of greasers, and they were definitely that, because he heard them jabbering away in Spanish. Felix knew enough jailhouse Spanish to deliver an insult or make a demand, and so he knew they were for real. They were out of the house all day working, Rashid said. Rashid had a little home business, something to do with computers. He had a couple of machines in a room on the top floor of the house, at which he sat and tapped when he wasn't hanging around Felix, making sure he was all right and bringing him food and smokes. Felix figured him for some kind of faggot butler, not a real player.

On the fourth day, Rashid let him out in the yard, a patch of ragged grass surrounded by a chain-link fence and equipped with a picnic table and a couple of aluminum lawn chairs. The house was a three-story structure sheathed in gray asphalt shingles, one of a row of identical houses, with alleys leading back to small yards and detached garages. He could see the backs of another, similar row through the trees and foliage of the adjacent backyard. It was, he learned, in Astoria, Queens.

Felix sat in one of the chairs, and basked in the afternoon sun. They had supplied him with jeans and T-shirts, in the right sizes, and socks and sneakers, as well. Rashid sat on the edge of the other chair and handed him a beer.

"I thought Arabs didn't drink," Felix said. "I thought that was a big Muslim no-no."

"It is as you say. But here we are obliged to fit in and act like Americans. We drink, we eat swine, we look at women's bodies."

"I'd like to look at some of that. What about throwing a little party?"

"Perhaps later. When our work is done."

"What kind of work is that?"

"We are going to blow some things up. Our friend believes you would not object to this kind of work."

"Our friend? You mean the Arab?"

"Ibn-Salemeh, yes. Was he correct in this?"

"Hey, if there's any money in it I don't have a problem. What're you going to blow?"

"We'll tell you when the time comes. We have a number of targets. Some will be of interest to you personally."

"Meaning Karp."

"Yes, him," said Rashid. "But first his family, one by one."

"Uh-huh," said Felix. "And what's the story with you? You're what, the butler?"

"I have a number of functions."

"Yeah, bring the beer, cook the food, make the beds. What about the money. You got it here, right?"

"It is where I can get it, Felix. And you cannot." Rashid stared into his eyes. "So you must put out of your mind any thought that you can, ah, get what you want and disappear. Rip us off, as you say. We require an American to travel around and go places where someone who looks like me would draw suspicion. That's why you are here and not rotting in that prison. There will be eyes on you all the time, Felix. And I would keep in mind if I were you the fact that you are already a dead man. And that you can be easily replaced. There is no shortage of Americans. Am I making myself perfectly clear now?"

Felix shrugged. "Whatever," he said, and pulled his eyes away. Not a butler, Rashid, that was a mistake, but the fucker had no call to talk to him like one of his niggers. Felix added him to the long list of people he would get if the opportunity presented.