Reversible Error

TWO

Three months out of law school, Peter Schick sat in the outer office of the Criminal Courts Bureau, of the New York District Attorney's Office, watching the action and waiting to be called into his third job interview of the day. He crossed his legs and glanced at his watch and then at the round clock on the wall. His watch was running but the clock had stopped. At the two Wall Street firms where he had interviewed that morning, the clocks worked, the secretaries were cool and competent, and the furniture was polished wood and real leather, not painted metal and cracked vinyl. The office staff here looked toughened and tired, and drawn from the less prestigious minorities of the city.

He discovered he had been picking nervously at a crack in the covering of the tan couch and stopped. There were no magazines to read. He went back to staring at the woman sitting on the edge of a desk across a narrow aisle. She was making call after call on the desk phone. She kept the receiver crooked against her shoulder and made an occasional note on a yellow pad, afterward shoving the pencil into the thick mass of lustrous black hair that, from Schick's location, concealed her face from view. She was wearing a black skirt of some rustling material; it was slit and rode entrancingly up her thigh when she crossed her legs. The legs were marvelous, tapering without fragility, wrapped in shimmering mist-colored stockings. She wore a black kid glove on her left hand, like a gunfighter.

Schick adjusted his position slightly, so as to improve his view of inner thigh for the next leg cross. But something must have lit up the invisible radar that is the secret possession of the girls; she snapped her head around and gave him the stare.

He felt his jaw drop and a blush rising up his jaw. The woman was a classic cover-girl beauty-large black eyes over razor-sharp cheekbones, a wide lush mouth, the skin a delicate pink bisque. Schick took in that there was something wrong with one of her eyes, a crazy light in it, or perhaps it was slightly, but fetchingly, crossed. He felt the blush rising to his cheeks and pointedly looked away from her at the unmoving clock.

Just then, the door to the bureau director's office opened and Schick's interview walked out. Schick was over six feet tall, but the bureau director rose nearly four inches higher than that. He extended a big hand and Schick took it. Schick looked him in the eyes, which were a strange deep gray with little yellow flecks. They slanted slightly above broad cheekbones. Karp's nose was fleshy, his mouth full, his chin bold and knobby, his hair neatly cut, medium length, and ash-brown.

"Mr. Karp?" Schick said.

"Yeah. You're Schick. Let's go in my office."

The big man gestured toward the open door, and as he followed Schick he said something in a low voice to the dark-haired woman perched on the desk. She responded with a hearty guffaw. Karp stopped and said something else. Out of the corner of his eye Schick thought he saw the woman make a casual grab for the rear end of his prospective employer-if true, yet another sign that he was not on Wall Street.

Schick entered the bureau chief's office and looked around. In the center of the room a long scarred oak table was surrounded by a dozen or so miscellaneous chairs. At one end was a massive walnut desk, with a battered brown leather chair behind it and two straight chairs before. The desk was cluttered with a drift of russet case folders, assorted papers and yellow pads. Schick noticed his own resume floating on top of the pile.

There was a coat stand in the corner, from which hung a navy-blue suit jacket, a set of sweat clothes, a N.Y. Yankees hat, and a first baseman's mitt. On the wall behind the desk hung some framed photographs: one of a softball team (Karp in the third row), one, cut from an old newspaper, of a much younger Karp shooting a basketball through the arms of an opposing player (caption: "Karp Scores 26 Against UCLA"), a photocopy of a news photograph showing some horsemen in white uniforms charging with lances, and what looked like a "wanted" poster printed in a foreign language. Schick was just leaning over the desk to inspect this last more closely when the door swung open and Karp came in.

Karp threw his long, narrow frame down on the chair behind his desk and motioned Schick to sit across from him. He glanced at the resume for a moment and then looked directly at Schick.

"So. How come you want to work for the D.A.?"

Schick smiled nervously, thought of an idealistic answer, looked at Karp, who was not smiling, rejected the idealistic answer, which was in any case not true, decided to blurt it out, and said, "I want to try cases. I can't afford to set up my own practice, and if I work for a big firm, I won't get to stand up in front of a jury for years. So…"

Karp's mouth twitched in what might have been the shadow of a grin. Schick noticed again that his eyes had little yellow flecks in them, and were set in his broad face at an almost angle. Not a companionable face. Schick could not help contrasting Karp with the senior lawyers with whom he had interviewed that morning. They had been smooth, confident men, strong, but with their strength buoyed by the power of a deeply established order, symbolized by polished wood and thick carpets. Karp's strength seemed to be an interior toughness, owing little to the tacky office or whatever status he happened to have at the moment.

Karp said, "OK, so you want to use the D.A.'s office for a little legal practice before you go out and get rich."

"I didn't say that!"

"Yeah, but it's not unusual. We don't get many career people here. In fact, it's a seller's market right now. A lot of the bureaus will take anybody who isn't actually drooling." He looked down again at Schick's resumed "Good grades. Law review at NYU. Very impressive. You're a friend of Tony Harris, right?"

"Yeah, we grew up together. He's a little older than me, more my brother's friend, but the same crowd and all."

"He recommends you. He says you can hit."

"Excuse me…?"

"Hit. As in baseball. You did play varsity ball at Pitt?"

Schick nodded, confused.

"So I got a hole at third base I could use you in. You look puzzled. Here's the deal. We have a team, the Bullets, in the city rec league. We play law firms, the sanitation guys, the cops; it's a big thing around here. When Mr. Garrahy was the D.A., he used to come to every game. We try to keep it alive, and we win a lot, which is more than you can say for what happens in court. What do you think of that?"

"You hire lawyers because they play ball?"

"Of course. If possible. This is jock country, Schick. If we had a guy in a wheelchair, I'd expect him to want to come out and cheer. I need people who are competitive and aggressive and can keep coming back and playing even if they get beat every day. Which is not unusual, by the way. You get the picture?"

"Yeah. Sounds OK by me."

"OK. Let me tell you something about the job. The Criminal Courts Bureau was set up to deal with minor crimes, and that's still most of the work, but a lot of the crimes we tend to deal with are technically felonies. When Criminal Courts was set up, in the old days, cops had time for a lot more of the petty shit. Now they don't, unless the individual is making a particular pain in the ass of himself. Selling blowjobs in a car at night is one thing; if you try it in the skating rink at Rockefeller Center in broad daylight, they'll bring you in.

"So most of what we do is workaday small crime: purse snatches, pross, pickpocket, larceny, assault, some sex crimes, drunk driving. All the Fun City stuff. Felony Bureau gets the heavy crime, the armed robbery, arson, safe and loft ripoffs, hijacking. About ninety-eight percent of our work is stoking the system. New York County racks up around 130,000 felony and misdemeanor charges every year. Only about one out of a hundred felony charges in New York actually makes it to trial, and it takes an average of fifteen court appearances of one kind or another to clear a single felony case. So what do we do?"

Schick realized that this was not a rhetorical question, that Karp expected a response. He cleared his throat. "I don't know-I guess the cases back up."

"Of course, but only to a point. Speedy trial rulings mean we got to run the cases through at a certain rate whatever, or else some people are going to walk, and you never can tell who. It's never the guy who kicked his landlord in the ass, it's some mutt who killed six people. Big scandal.

"No, what we do is plea-bargain. The defendant's lawyer cops him to a lesser plea. Burglary goes to trespass, attempted homicide goes to simple assault, and so on. The mutt's been sitting in jail a couple of months, he gets out with time served. Case closed. It sucks, but what can you do?"

Karp paused and fixed Schick with a fierce stare. "But there's a right way and a wrong way to run the game. The first rule is to keep respect. You got to have the trial slots, so that if the defense holds out for some outrageous deal, you can spit in their eye and go to trial. Which means you have to prep cases like you were going to try them, and then not be afraid of going to court if you have to. And the second rule is: nobody gets away with murder."

"Murder? But I thought you said, um…"

"Yeah, minor crimes. Well, it turns out we do a lot of work on murders too. And some rape when there's violence attached. Not the easy ones, either. The reason for that is me." Karp caught the inquiring look and held up his hand. "A long story," he continued, "which somebody will convey to you if you're interested. The main point here is that our current D.A., Mr. Bloom, and I don't particularly agree about how the office should be run. Not to get into details, but Mr. Bloom, he basically doesn't like trials. He's not a trial lawyer himself and he doesn't understand how trial lawyers operate. What he understands are committees and deals.

"He wants the machine to run smoothly-that's his main thing. So we drag these mutts into the building, wave some hands, run them through a courtroom, and cop them out. A murder trial is like sand in the gears. A lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of publicity, and-you could lose. Bad publicity, questions of competence are raised, people start to remember that the point of a prosecutor's office is to prosecute, so how come Bloom is fucking up? Impossible! Much better to avoid it all and plead the goddamn killer to second-degree manslaughter. A year in the slams and another case closed."

As Karp spoke on this subject, his face darkened with angry blood, his heavy brow bunched, and little sparks seemed to flicker around his strange eyes. Schick unconsciously hunched a little in his seat. His thought was that he never wanted to be on the receiving end of that kind of anger.

Karp seemed to catch himself then. He sat back and grinned and shook his head ruefully. "I'm on my toot again. I was talking about our work. Yeah, we do murder trials. There used to be a Homicide Bureau, but there isn't anymore. What I try to do here is to do what the old Homicide Bureau did really well, which is to train lawyers to try cases, eventually to try homicide cases.

"So if you want to learn that, this is the best place to be. The down side is, if you work for me, you will not have a happy time with the powers upstairs. You will have the shiftiest little office, you will have the slowest promotions, and if you ever need an administrative favor, you'll hang by your eyelids before you get it. Sound good?"

"Who could ask for anything more?"

"Good. Any questions about the job?"

"A million, but nothing urgent. Anything else you want to know about me?"

"Yeah," said Karp. His smile melted back into the rock of his face and his jaw set hard. "How come you were staring up my girlfriend's dress out there?"

Schick goggled and felt the red rise up his throat. "I… didn't… um…" he stammered.

"Schick," said Karp in a gentler tone, "if you get red when you lie, you'll never make a trial lawyer. Work on it! Meanwhile…"

There was a sharp series of raps on the office door. Karp looked annoyed at the interruption, but said, "Yeah? Who is it?"

The door opened and a stocky mustached black man in a sharp tan chalk-stripe suit came in. Karp's face lit up. "Clay Fulton! What's happening, baby!"

The man noticed Schick. "Am I interrupting something?"

"No," said Karp, "we're just finishing up. This is Peter Schick, our new third base. Peter, Detective Lieutenant Clay Fulton."

After mutual handshaking, Karp said, "OK, Schick, go out there and see the bureau secretary-Connie Trask, the good-looking black lady on the center desk-and tell her you're hired. Tell her I said she was a good-looking black lady too. She'll give you a pencil and a yellow pad and somewhere to sit. You might even get paid eventually. And go find Tony Harris. He'll give you some stuff to do." Thus dismissed, Schick mumbled good-byes and nice-meeting-yous and left the office. It was only later that he realized that Karp had never considered that the offered job would be refused. In an odd way, Schick took that as a compliment.

When Schick had left, Fulton gestured toward the closing door. "What is he, twelve?"

Karp laughed. "God, it looks that way. But that's a law-school graduate. We're getting old, friend."

"Older but still tough. Speaking of old, I got your invitation."

"You'll come…?"

"Yeah, me'n Martha'll be there. I can't believe it, you and Marlene, the end of an era. I saw her outside just now, still a fox… still a dirty mouth. You gonna make her stop cursing that way when you got her legal? Slap her upside the head?"

Karp whooped. "It would be my last act on earth. But let me say this, Clay: if she ever does kill me, I want you to catch the squeal. Might as well keep it in the family."

The two men talked easily for the next few minutes, the man-trivia of sports and politics. They were friends from Karp's earliest time with the D.A.'s office, when he had been the most junior member of the fabled Homicide Bureau, and Fulton, already the owner of a glowing reputation as a detective, had taken him under his wing, taught him police procedure, and provided the evidence and witnesses that enabled Karp to make his own reputation as a prosecutor.

"So," said Karp after a pause, "they still killing people in Harlem?"

Fulton's face grew serious. "Yeah, that's what I need to talk with you about. Somebody aced Larue Clarry last night."

Karp searched his mind for the name and came up empty. Fulton saw the blank look and explained, "The dope dealer. Ran coke for the flashy set. Somebody killed him in his own car and left it under the FDR at 120th. Left the gun he done it with too."

"Any reason why we should especially mourn Mr. Clarry's passing?"

"No, unless you his momma. But look here. The last three months we had five major dope wholesalers knocked off in Harlem. Clarry's number six. Listen to this." He consulted a notebook. "April 2, Jimmie Williams, shot in the back of the head with a large-caliber pistol in a vacant apartment, Harlem. Nobody saw nothing. April 28, Togo McAllister opened the door to his apartment, Morningside Heights, and walked into a shotgun blast. Nobody saw nothing.

"May 12, Sweets Martin, found in an alley, Lower East Side, hands tied, throat cut, puncture wounds all over him, ditto. May 16, Bowman 'Heat' Fletcher, shot in the heart with a large-caliber pistol, also in his apartment, Upper West Side, also ditto. June 3, Ollie Bender, found in a construction site, Eighth and 43rd, with his head bashed in: fucking ditto."

Fulton put his notebook away and looked at Karp. "Anything strike you as odd about that set?"

Karp thought for a moment, then shook his head. "I don't see any pattern, except that there isn't any pattern. It just looks like a bunch of guys in a tough business got taken out in a short period of time. Their number was up. I mean, what's the average life span of a dope dealer? Three, five years? Or do you see something I don't?"

Fulton grimaced, a comical wrinkling of his heavy brow and broad nose, as if he smelled rottenness, and began pacing to and fro in front of Karp's desk. "I don't know what I see yet. Like you say, it looks like a normal couple of months in the dope scene. Maybe that's what's bothering me: it's too normal, too-I don't know-miscellaneous. Like somebody was painting a picture for the cops that's saying, 'Ain't nobody doin nothin special down here, boss!'"

"Like in Sherlock Holmes," Karp put in, "the unusual incident was that the dog didn't bark in the night."

"Yeah, like that! And look here: six different M.O.'s, in four different detective zones, and not a single witness in any of them worth a damn. Like somebody was designing the set so that it wouldn't be seen as a set, somebody who knows how cops think."

"Who benefits?" asked Karp abruptly.

"How do you mean?"

"Well, you say 'somebody,' implying that there's a single agent responsible for all six crimes. Assuming you're right, and that you've got no good leads, why don't you start with whoever you think might want to have all six of these guys killed?"

Fulton shook his head. "Yeah, I thought of that. It could be any of a dozen, twenty people, guys who could move in on the business with the dead dealers out of the way. That's in the city. God knows about out-of-town gangs, Colombians, Cubans, Jamaicans… where to start?"

"So you're stumped?"

"Yeah, and I can't stand it. God damn, I hate a mystery! Some slick fucker going around getting off on spitting in my eye. I ain't whipped yet, but I need help. That's why I'm downtown. If I'm not crazy, the only chance we got is on this Clarry hit. It's fresh and the guy made his first mistake."

Karp made an inquiring sound, and Fulton went on. "He left his gun on the seat of the car. It's a cheap piece of shit, a twenty-two, but it's something."

"Prints?"

Fulton snorted. "Not that good, but we got a serial number. Something could turn up. I want to squeeze the street hard on this. I'm gonna put the King Cole Trio on it, full-time."

Karp grinned and raised his hands in mock horror. "Uh-oh. Are they gonna be good, or am I gonna have 'police brutality' all over my cases?"

"Come on, Butch, these are changed men. They've seen the light. They're gonna treat every skell in Harlem like their momma. The thing of it is, I need to run everything that anybody finds out on all the investigations of all these killings through me. If there's a pattern, that's the only way to find it."

"That could be a problem."

"No shit! I made the case to the zone commander and he shined me on to the borough commander and he said he agreed 'in principle' that I should coordinate, but whether he'll do fuck-all about it, I don't know."

"Anything I can do?"

Fulton flashed a bright sudden smile. "Hey, I resent you implying that this wasn't just a social call. But since you ask, yeah. Just keep your ears open to anything that fits in the pattern. I might miss something. Also, I'd like just one ADA on all six cases: somebody good. And if the Chief of D. happens to call you, you might put a word in."

"No problem, Clay," said Karp, although they both knew it was in fact a considerable problem to juggle cases around like that.

But Clay Fulton was one of only a handful of people whom Karp considered to have a blank check on his help, and he did not begrudge the effort, although he personally believed that Fulton was chasing shadows. Karp was not a hunch player. He liked evidence in plastic bags and sworn depositions. He liked witnesses.

Was there a hidden conspiracy to kill drug dealers? Maybe, but thinking about it did Karp no good. At a certain level, he well knew, he found it all too easy to imagine that the whole city was engaged in a conspiracy. Karp's tendency toward paranoia was well-established and familiar to him, fed daily by the hostility of his management, and nurtured by the environment of the criminal justice system, itself a vast lie. He felt for the detective, his friend, but was not about to give him any enthusiastic encouragement.

The business done, some desultory conversation followed and then Fulton looked at his watch and stood up. The two men shook hands warmly. "Take care, man," said Karp.

"Watch your own butt, hear?" answered Clay Fulton. Fulton went back to his office, the office of the Zone 5 homicide squad, which operated out of the Twenty-eighth Precinct on 135th Street off Lenox Avenue, and was responsible for homicides occurring in the northeastern section of Manhattan Island, a chunk of territory that included most of Harlem. Fulton ran the squad. It was rarely at a loss for work.

There were three detectives waiting for him in the squad room. They were the best men he possessed and as good as any team in the city. They had been famous when he had taken over the squad, and he had left them more or less alone. They were known on the street, for obscure reasons, as the King Cole Trio.

Fulton perched on a desk and looked inquiringly at the most senior of the three, a lean, intense man of about fifty, with skin the color of black coffee, yellowish eyes, and cropped natural hair growing gray on the sides. "What've we got, Art?"

The man, Detective Sergeant Art Dugman, pulled a spiral notebook out of his suit jacket pocket and placed a pair of cheap reading glasses on his nose. When he spoke, it was in a voice dry but vibrant, dressed in the accents of prewar Harlem. "I went down with Mack as soon as we heard the squeal. Got there about, oh, two this morning. The first officer was still on the scene. Couple of D.T.'s from the Two-three showed up; I told them it was ours, orders from downtown. They split."

He peered at Fulton over his glasses. "We do got the case, am I right?"

Fulton nodded and motioned him to continue.

"OK. Man was shot in the face at close range with a twenty-two-caliber revolver, sitting in the back seat of his own car. The shooter probably was in the front seat when he did it. Initial M.E. report says he'd been dead no more than four, five hours when they examined him, which puts the crime around midnight, day before yesterday.

"Crime Scene dusted the car; nothing but Clarry's own prints in the back. The front's been wiped. The gun's wiped too. The RMP cop found it sitting on the seat of the car. It's a little piece-of-shit gun. The lab's checking it out now. The driver's-side door was left open. That's what attracted the RMP to the scene-the door light."

Fulton said, "Looks like the shooter took off in a hurry. Something must have spooked him. Did the RMP see anything?"

"Didn't see shit. Nobody saw shit. We did a canvass the next morning…"

"Nobody heard the shots?"

"No. But I don't think he was popped there."

"I thought you said he got it in the car."

"Yeah, yeah, in the car, but not at the place-under the FDR."

"How do you know that?"

"The blood. From his face-it was streaked back along the side of his head, like when it rains against the side windows of a car and the speed of the car drags it backwards. And there was a big mass of clotted blood piled up against where the deck behind the back seat meets the back window. They shot him somewhere else and drove him there and dumped him. Took all his stuff too-wallet, jewelry. Look like a deal gone bad or a ripoff. Tricky fuckers, whoever."

Fulton worried his mustache with his lower teeth. "Yeah, but not tricky enough, this time. What about his place?"

Dugman looked across the room at a stocky white man in a brown nylon jacket, gray work pants, and a blue plaid shirt. The man was in his early thirties and had a lumpy face with a strong jaw. The dark eyes were slightly too close together, but his mouth was wide and humorous. His dirty-blond hair was worn as long as the police department then allowed; the picture was redneck, working stiff, union-card-carrying, not a bright light. It was a picture he cultivated. His name was Lanny Maus, and he had been a detective-third for a little over ten years.

Maus was leaning backward in his chair against the scarred police-station-green walls and had his feet propped up on his desk. He wore the kind of heavy tan leather shoes favored by construction workers. He removed the wooden match on which he had been sucking and consulted his own little book.

"We tossed the place at five-ten P.M. on the night of. Ton of coke, some smack, pills. Could he have been a dope dealer? Man had a gun, a nice nine, didn't take it with him. Glass on the table in the living room, fresh prints, not Clarry's. We're checking that out.

"Moving to the bedroom, we find signs of recent sexual activity. Clarry apparently got one last piece of ass before he checked out. Bed sheets gave us head hair, female, Caucasian, dyed red, pussy hair ditto, not dyed, brown. She wears purple lip gloss, assuming the Kleenex in the wastebasket belongs to her. That's about it, except a lady in a front apartment said she thought she saw two men get into a big black car parked in front of the building and drive off a little past twelve."

Fulton acknowledged the report with a nod and said, "Ok, the girl left, then Clarry left with somebody who drove him someplace and shot him and drove the car with the body in it under the highway, and left on foot." He stood up and started pacing back and forth in front of the three men.

"This is looking good. This is the first time we got anything on these killings. We need that girl."

Maus cleared his throat. "Loo, I'd like to volunteer to go up to every redhead in the city and ask them what color is their snatch. I'd have to verify their answer, of course."

Fulton gave him a look. The fourth man in the room, who had been silent up to now, said in a voice so deep and rumbling that it was like the noise made by a piece of heavy machinery, "Clarry like them young."

They all turned toward him. Detective Third Class Mack Jeffers was a very black and extremely large man, was, in fact, as large as it is possible to be and still be a member of the police force in New York. He was just under the six-foot-seven limit and weighed over 285 pounds. He was the youngest member of the Trio, not yet thirty, and had made detective with record speed because, it was said, they had run out of blue cloth. He was taciturn, patient, and like many big men, friendly and even-tempered.

"He got his girls from Slo Mo," Jeffers continued. "You know Slo Mo, Art?"

"Yeah, he pimps down on the Deuce. Picks the moppets up at the Port Authority. OK, we'll check it out."

Fulton said, "Good, that's a start. Now, on these other dope-dealer hits, we're taking all of them over."

Groans all around. Dugman said, "Loo, what the damn hell! We don't pull enough murders in Harlem? You got to drag in stale fucked-up cases from all round town?"

Fulton set his jaw. "Can it, guys! This is real, and this is big, and I want complete control of it all. I want every one of those case files squeezed until the juice comes out. There's a pattern here, and you're gonna find it. That's all!"

He turned and strode into his private office, slamming the door behind him.

The three detectives looked at one another, their expressions exhibiting mixed feelings of disbelief, annoyance, resignation-the standard cop expressions. But there was also the beginning of something else, a kind of fascination, the first faint scent of prey in the air. The King Cole Trio hated mysteries too.