Reversible Error

FIVE

Sugar Hill had fallen some from what it had been thirty years earlier, but it was still a pretty nice neighborhood, for Harlem. The apartment occupied by Tecumseh Booth was located in a still-handsome tan brick building on 149th off St. Nicholas Avenue. The class of the area was demonstrated by the brass mailboxes in the lobby, which had retained their doors, locks, and polish. Detective Jeffers read the name of Tecumseh Booth's girlfriend from one of them, and headed up to the third-floor apartment with Maus.

The two detectives drew their pistols and clipped their police identification to their breast pockets. Jeffers was about to knock on the door, but Maus stopped him and placed his ear against the door. It was the kind of hollow metal fire door that was good at transmitting certain sounds.

"Hear anything?" asked Jeffers.

"Yeah," answered the other. "Music. Earth, Wind, and Fire, I think. And a banging sound. And a kind of squealing. Maybe he's beating a dog to death with a stereo."

Jeffers placed his massive head against the door and listened. He smiled. "I think what you hearing there is Tecumseh on the job."

Maus raised his brows and pressed his ear more tightly to the door. "You think so? Making a lot of noise, ain't he?"

"You think that 'cause you unfamiliar with the sexual habits of my people. Being naturally more attune to the physical propensities of life, we get more juice out of the berry, so to speak, in the way of hump. Therefore the noises of ecstasy which we hearin now."

"Yeah, you keep telling me that, but I got to take your word for it, since I notice you haven't fixed me up with any of your sisters yet."

Jeffers laughed softly. "You not ready for that, boy. I got to bring you along slow, got to pace you."

Maus said, "1 appreciate that, Mack, I do, and meanwhile I'm working hard to overcome my objection to miscegenation. Meanwhile, what the fuck are we doing here? I'm getting horny listening to this shit."

"My plan, little man, is to wait until Tecumseh have pop his rocks and then we gonna swoop him up while he lie in the sweet afterglow. Besides, he ain't gonna be getting none of that for a long time where he goin. It's my act of Christian charity for the month."

They waited in the hall until the sounds stopped. Then Jeffers pounded mightily on the door and shouted, "Open up! Police!" He pressed his ear to the door again.

"Are they coming?" asked Maus.

"So to speak? No, I hear escapin noise. I think he's goin out the window."

"You going to take the door down?"

"Don't be funny, son. This a steel door. I go through a door like this, they better have my momma's ass on fire on the other side. No, we just gonna go downstairs again. Tecumseh ain't goin nowhere."

And indeed, when they arrived back on the street, they found Tecumseh Booth facedown on the ground, dressed only in a pair of slacks, with his hands cuffed behind him. Art Dugman had picked him up easily as he dropped from the fire escape.

Jeffers stooped and jerked Booth to his feet with a single yank on the handcuff chain. Booth yelped sharply and said, "Hey, what the fuck you want with me? I ain done nothin!"

Jeffers popped the rear door of the Plymouth open and threw the prisoner in. He got in himself and Dugman went around to the other side. Maus drove the car south toward the Twenty-eighth Precinct.

Booth sat between them calmly with his hands cuffed behind his back, waiting. He had learned, from a lifetime of arrests, the wisdom of the sages, that silence was the ideal state of being. He had also learned that cops made mistakes, and that in some mysterious way these mistakes had the power to cancel guilt, so that you could walk away from a crime that the cops and kids on the street and old ladies knew you had done, and they couldn't do shit to you. This had happened to him a number of times. The main thing was to shut up.

Booth became aware that the two cops on either side of him were staring at him. He looked straight ahead. After a while the older one said, "Turn off here."

The driver swung left, heading toward the blackness of Colonial Park. He stopped the car in the dark of a big tree.

The older cop said, "Look at his head. It's the perfect shape."

"Don't start that again!" the big cop said nervously.

"I'm telling you, it'll work this time," said the older detective. Booth felt the older cop's body shift, and looked to see why. He had drawn out his pistol.

The driver turned around in the front seat. "Damn it, not in the damn car! The last time it took me three hours to clean all the blood and crap off of the upholstery. You want to play games, do it outside!"

Booth felt a cold touch at his right ear. His head jerked away by reflex, only to be stopped by a similar but harder pressure on the other ear. The big cop said, "Boss, I sure hope you know what you doin. You say this really works?"

"I know it," affirmed the older cop. "Now, just get it stuck in there solid, and don't be twitchin like you done last time."

Booth now could not move his head. He understood why. He had the muzzle of a.38-caliber revolver stuck firmly in each ear.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, what…?"

The driver leaned over the front seat and addressed him conversationally. "See, what he says, is if you do this just right, the two bullets will meet in the middle and cancel out. The same slug, the same load, same gun, understand. It's like physics. I happen to think it's horseshit, myself, but try and tell him anything!"

Booth's face twisted in a ghastly smile. "You shittin me, man. They can't do that. They's cops, they can't…"

The smile faded and Booth's jaw went slack, as if something more frightening than having a pistol in each ear had just occurred to him. A trickle of sweat fell into his eye. The older cop caught the change in expression.

"Say what? What can't cops do, brother?" Dugman asked.

Booth opened a dry mouth as if to say something, then shut it.

The cop in the front seat began to talk again, in the same tone of calm explanation. "Yeah, see, we know you killed Clarry, and we know there was cops involved. Now, ordinarily we would take you in, book you, and question you. We would figure, maybe we can make a deal-you give us the guy, we put in a good word with the D.A., and so on.

"But the word is, you don't deal. You're a stand-up dude. Fine. The problem is, we really need this guy. So we figured, you're no good to us on that, the best thing we could do is, maybe if we ace you out, your guy will-I dunno-get a hair up his ass. Do something dumb. Maybe he'll think we're in the same business, and he'll come after us. Or whatever. I mean it's pretty thin at this point, but I don't see the percentage in doing anything else, if you catch my drift-"

The older cop broke in, "That's enough. God damn, man, you ain't got to ask his fuckin permission!" He addressed the big cop on the other side of Booth. "OK, we gonna do it now."

"Just a second, lemme shift around here. Is this gonna fuck up my suit?"

"Not if you do it right. You lined up good?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"OK, squeeze off on the count of three," said the older cop.

"Um, hold it… you mean, right on three, or just after? Like, one-two-bang? Or one-two-three-bang?"

The older cop sounded exasperated. "Damn! I told you before; take up all the slack, then let go as soon as I say 'three'!"

Booth could hear surprisingly well, considering that his ears were full of gun. He understood the explanation given by the man in the front seat, and even sympathized with it, as much as he could, considering his position. He would have used the same reasoning himself. He heard the count, as from a great distance. Closer, more intimately, he heard the whisper of the revolver mechanisms as they brought the new bullets around to be fired. He seemed separated from his trembling body, floating above his own head. He heard the cop say "three" and, a pulse-beat later, the tiny snicks as the mechanisms released their hammers.

The hammers took a long time to fall. By the time they did, Booth was already far away.

"I don't think he believed us," said Maus, looking down at Booth's flaccid body.

"He ain't dead, is he?" asked Mack. Booth's head was resting on his knee.

Dugman reached out and touched Booth's neck. "Naw, he just fainted. God damn! He let go his business too!" Dugman flung open his door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. In another second, Mack cursed and did the same. They stood on either side of the car hooting and waving their hands past their faces.

"Say, Maus," said Dugman, "why don't you drive on down to the precinct and book the prisoner. Me and Mack got to do some detective work here on the street."

"Yo," said Mack. "We got to stay close to our people."

Maus rolled down his window. "Fuckin guys. I knew I was gonna have to clean the fuckin car again."

Marlene's bed sat on a high sleeping platform at one end of her loft, and from this vantage, at six-thirty on a workday morning, she watched the naked Karp drink water from her sink. He chugged a glass down, then filled another. Karp drank a lot of water, like a horse. It was the only healthy aspect of his diet, which consisted otherwise of junk food from cancer wagons and takeout windows-soggy pizza, elderly gray hot dogs, orange-colored knishes heavy as cinderblock, souvlaki oozing toxic oils, lukewarm eggrolls packed with substances mysterious as the East. Karp ate these in combinations and in quantities that would gag a wolverine, and washed it down with colorful, bubbled sugar-water.

Marlene had vaguely considered a campaign to change his diet into one that would enable him to survive into the coming decade. This was but one of the many such campaigns she had planned for after the Big Day. Karp, though a fountain of many virtues, could stand considerable improvement.

Once they learned about the baby, and Karp began to spend most of his time with Marlene, she had attempted to get her kitchen act together. She was a reasonably proficient cook, but like Karp, was no slave to the four basic food groups. Marlene subsisted largely on chocolate bars and yogurt.

Since she had started eating for two and began an effort to reform, Marlene had cooked a number of what she considered decent meals. Karp responded with enthusiasm, but he would have responded with equal enthusiasm to raw vulture, as long as there was enough of it.

More recently, she had been too exhausted to spend time in the kitchen, and on most evenings it seemed easier to take-out from one of the many grease joints, Italian, Chinese, or Greek, that perfumed the streets of lower Manhattan.

She watched Karp top off his tank and walk to the toilet. The diet hadn't affected his body yet, she thought approvingly. As large as he was, he was graceful and precise in motion, grounded and radiating contained power when at rest. The morning light flooding out through the big east windows of the loft lit up the hanging dust around his body like an aura.

The legs were long and smooth, the arms suspended from wide square shoulders down to those enormous hands, with their bony spatulate fingers. The scars-the Dr. Frankenstein mass of ladders from the knee operations and the smaller ragged ones in the shoulder where he had taken a couple of assassin's bullets-added somehow to the appeal. Scars: a real man!

What a nice butt he has, thought Marlene, scrooching around in the bed to get a better look. And how nice that he's retained that jockish habit of walking around naked all the time. How dull to be married to some lard-ass in a plaid robe. We like each other's asses, she mused; is that a really solid basis for a life relationship? Because although she knew his body nearly as well as she knew her own, her knowledge of what went on within that high and narrow skull remained vague and confused.

The light moved slowly across the floor of Marlene's loft. The big skylight in the center of its patterned tin ceiling was beginning to glow as well, like milk glass. The loft was one huge room, a hundred feet long by thirty-three, divided by portable screens into a living area, a kitchen, a dining area, and then the Limbo, a dusty zone occupied by athletic equipment- Karp's rowing machine, Marlene's body and speed bags-assorted junk, and the huge motors that ran the building's freight lift. Under the west windows, at the far end, Marlene had set up a little office, and about a hundred potted plants, ranging from African violets to giant ficus trees.

The place was entirely Marlene's creation, and waking up in it always gave her a little charge. The summer she had moved in she had taken on the herculean task of cleaning out the remnants of a defunct electroplater, heaving great tangles of wire and scrap down the freight shaft, scraping, sanding, painting, until it was as she wanted it, a great white, calm room, high above the street, flooded with light.

That summer, eight years ago, barely twenty-five people had lived full-time in the old industrial area south of Houston Street. Now they called it SoHo, the hottest property in New York. Recently a thin creature with black clothes and white hair had offered Marlene thirty thousand dollars for the key.

Marlene sighed and got out of bed, wrapped a frazzled pink blanket around her shoulders, and scooted down the ladder from the sleeping platform. She walked across the wide-planked white-painted floor, dropped the blanket, climbed four steps, and plunged into the hot water of the thousand-gallon hard rubber electroplating tank that served her as a bath.

Seated on the floor of this tank, perfumed water to her chin, she could not see over its rim. She heard the toilet flush, a door open, the sound of heavy naked steps toward the far end of the loft.

She stood up and began soaping her body and hair with almond liquid soap. She saw that Karp had pulled an old pair of sweatpants on. Now he sat down on his ancient rowing machine and began to pull at its wooden handles.

She watched the muscles in his back work as he pulled. He would row for exactly fifteen minutes, take a short wash in the tub, and be dressed and ready to leave ten minutes after that, impatiently pacing while he waited for her to complete her more complex preparations for the outside world. Then they would walk down the five splintery flights and the two grim industrial streets to the BMT subway at Prince and Broadway, or, if it were nice out and she felt up to it, they would hoof the distance, a little over a mile, to 100 Centre Street.

A routine. Marlene thought, ambivalently, about it going on indefinitely, with, eventually, a stop at the day-care to drop off the kid. Or kids, as it might turn out. She looked down at her belly. Only a slight rise as yet; she could still see her mop of pubic curls. If her mother could be believed, she would carry high and small, like all the women in her family. And have an easy labor, to hear her grandmother tell it. According to her grandmother, her Uncle Marco had been born late one night with so little trouble that he barely woke her up.

An easy slide into a stable life. Something tugged in a different direction. Watching Karp work out, the dense muscles rolling under the glowing skin, a familiar feeling spread through her groin. Her fingers began soaping more deeply between her thighs than proper hygiene strictly required.

It's been a while, she thought. She could hide in the bath and then when Karp appeared for his dip, she could spring on him, soapy and hot, and they could spend a delicious morning messing around.

But no, that would require calling in to the office, and a massive rescheduling of appointments and appearances. She could seduce Karp from his duty, but he would be racked with guilt for days afterward, and take it out on her. Besides, the staff, being skilled investigators, would soon figure out what was going on, with both of them out for the morning, and so they would also have to put up with the leers of their coworkers, ace leerers all: Uncle George and Aunti Mabel Fainted at the breakfast table This should serve sufficient warning Never do it in the morning.

No, on second thought, better later. She rose from the bath, thinking, I'm getting to be a horny old lady. Not too surprising, since I was a horny young lady too. Tonight, then, or earlier-maybe I can inveigle him into my office. Hard and fast on the desktop, amid the papers. The thought warmed her and brought a giggle to her throat as she reached for the towel.

Dressed and primped, she in black linen suit, he in his eternal blue pinstripe, they thundered down the stairs, Karp way in the lead, Marlene feeling like Winnie-the-Pooh bumping along after her gigantic Christopher Robin.

Out in the already dieseled air, Karp bought two newspapers, the Times and the Daily News. He stuck the Times and the brown accordion folder he used as a briefcase under his left arm and flipped through the News as he walked along. He was looking for crimes, and this morning he didn't have to flip long.

"Ah, shit!" he snarled, half under his breath.

"What's happening?" asked Marlene.

"They got another one. Jason Brown, twenty-seven. AKA Joker Brown."

"A personal friend?"

Karp gave her a look. "A dope dealer. Or 'drug lord,' as they now get called in the papers." He showed her the front page. The photograph was of the type familiar to Daily News readers for five decades: cops standing around appearing hapless, a shrouded form on the ground, black splotches on the white covering, an arm sticking out, palm up, rivulets of what you knew was blood, looking like shiny tar.

"You're right, 'drug lord slain, this makes eight,'" read Marlene from the huge black letters of the headline. "The same guys doing it, you think?"

Karp shrugged. "I don't know. Clay thinks so. I'd like to talk to him about it, if he would ever get back to me. What I'm worried about is his excellency the district attorney. This is the kind of crap Bloom lives for. Guaranteed he'll have a fucking press conference this morning and promise to set up a special unit to bring the perps to justice. Bloom loves special units."

"And he'll put you in charge?"

"No, dear, he won't put me in charge. Bloom doesn't put me in charge. He'll put some crony of his in charge and I'll get to do all the work and get axed if something goes wrong."

Marlene assumed a sympathetic expression. "Poor Butch! Maybe when you grow up you can be D.A. and do all the work and get all the credit."

Karp snorted and stared away south down the length of Broadway, as if sizing up the run to a pole vault. Marlene caught the look and said firmly, "I'm taking the subway. Momma needs a sit-down."

"C'mon, kid, it's a nice day. And the subway's supposed to be dangerous."

"Walking with you is dangerous. You go twenty miles an hour reading the paper and you think walk signs are for wimps."

"OK, candy ass, suit yourself. I'm walking. Here's the Times. I'll see you downtown." He squeezed her shoulder and kissed her lightly on her head, and turned and sped away. Arriving at the office, Karp found it was as he had feared. Connie Trask lifted her chin skyward as he came into the bureau office. "He wants to see you," she said, holding out a short stack of yellow phone slips.

"The TV guys were going up in the elevator when I came in," she continued. Karp grunted and turned toward his office. "Say, Butch, how come we never get to be on the TV? I'd like to be on the TV once."

"Stick around, Connie," said Karp over his shoulder. "You could be the one who gets to find my dead body."

He slammed into his office, put down what he was carrying, hung up his suit jacket, sat down behind his desk, pulled two toasted bagels (one butter, one cream cheese) and a container of coffee out of a brown bag, and began his day.

First the phone messages. Bloom's office, defendant's lawyer, ditto, ditto, ditto-they all could wait. Nothing from Clay Fulton: a pain in the ass, that. He checked the schedule of appointments Trask had typed up for him. It was clear that a meeting with Bloom was in the offing, and, if precedent held, it would be a nice long one.

Everything was going to have to be shoved around, people were going to have to be marshaled to fill the court dates and appointments he would miss, and of course their own appearances and appointments would have to be shifted around too. Bloom didn't get much affection or respect from his troops, but he was at least able to stir the ants' nest around in this way. Karp suspected it was one of the things he enjoyed most about the job.

He sighed and called Bloom's office, was put on hold for a considerable period to teach him his place, and then his reluctant ear filled with the district attorney's mellow, fruity voice.

"Hello, Butch! How's the guy?"

How's-the-guy was new. Bloom was trying to incorporate a snappier Nelson Rockefeller-type lingo into his front, and this was the latest.

Ignoring it, Karp said flatly, "I heard you wanted to talk to me."

"Yeah, yeah-terrible thing these killings. I was on the Morning Show today about it. Did you catch it?"

"No, I didn't," said Karp in the same tone. "Was that it?"

"Was what it?" asked Bloom, puzzled.

"Was that what you wanted to talk to me about? Whether I saw you on TV?"

"What? No, of course not! I told the media I was making these drug-lord killings my top priority." A pause for effect: "You know about the big breakthrough we've had in the case. I announced that too."

Karp felt his face grow warm. "Oh? What breakthrough was that?"

Even over the phone, Karp could hear the tone of relish with which Bloom informed him that the killer of Larue Clarry had been arrested the evening before last and was now in the custody of the police. "I guess you didn't get the word," Bloom concluded.

"No, I guess I didn't. I should watch more TV, so I'll know what's going on in the D.A.'s office."

This was ignored and Bloom went on: "I'm organizing a task force on these drug-lord murders. Blue ribbon all the way. We're going to use this breakthrough to blow the whole mess open."

"Un-huh. When's the meeting?"

"Call my girl," snapped the man of action, and hung up.

Karp called, and learned that the meeting was scheduled for ten o'clock, less than an hour away. Karp then buzzed Connie Trask and told her to get busy shifting people around, canceling and rescheduling, and also told her to get Roland Hrcany for him as soon as possible.

Ten minutes later, Hrcany appeared at Karp's door, heralded by two glass-rattling knocks. Roland Hrcany was a man of average height, but was so heavily developed in his neck, chest, and shoulders that he appeared squat. He had a face that at first glance seemed unlikely to belong to a lawyer, or even a highschool graduate. It was ruddy, hawk-nosed, heavy around the brows and jaw. The eyes were vivid blue and small. His hair was white-blond and worn swept back and collar-length, in the manner of professional wrestlers. His eyebrows and lashes were similarly pale and nearly invisible, which only added to his disturbing appearance.

"Sit down, Roland," said Karp. "I think I have a treat for you."

"Yeah?" Hrcany grinned, showing long yellowish teeth. "You're gonna let me have a crack at Marlene before you tie the knot?"

"You know, Roland," said Karp mildly, "it's remarks like that make you unpopular around the office. We were going to work on your popularity, remember?"

Hrcany laughed and leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands behind his head and flexing his football-size biceps. "So what's this about?" he asked.

"The dope-pusher killings. Apparently we have an arrest."

"Let me guess. A gentleman of the Afro-American persuasion with a yellow sheet from here to Canarsie?"

"I don't know, Roland. It could be an Episcopalian minister's wife. Or a Hungarian. I just found out about it ten minutes ago from our maximum leader."

"A Hungarian wouldn't have gotten caught," answered Hrcany. "So what's in it for me?"

Karp said, "Bloom is organizing what he calls a blue-ribbon task force to coordinate the work on the whole set of killings. Needless to say, a crock of shit, but I need somebody I can count on to hold their hands and make sure they don't fuck things up."

Hrcany stood up and straightened the already wrinkleless belt line of his white shirt. Smiling, he said, "Well, Butch, it's been a pleasure, as always, but I got to run-I'm having a thin glass tube inserted in my penis and I don't want to be late."

"Roland, don't give me a hard time," said Karp wearily.

"Hey," said Hrcany, pointing a stiff finger at Karp. "I'm not giving you a hard time. I ask only the same. Butch, this is Roland-I'm not a hand-holder, I'm an ass-kicker. Whyn't you ask V.T. to do it, he's the big-time diplomat."

In a patient voice Karp explained, "Because V.T. is not a homicide prosecutor and you are, and you are the best I got in that line of work, and this is a multiple homicide case. Not only that, but if I recall, the last time V.T. got some exposure I heard all kinds of whining from certain parties about how nobody ever paid any attention to them, and how V.T. got all the goodies-"

"Butch, that's different-"

"If I can finish-so when this opportunity came along, to shine in a major case, and to bask in the light of favorable publicity, and to mingle with some of the most powerful folks in the city, naturally, naturally I thought of you, Roland."

Hrcany held up his hands. "OK, Butch, OK, I give. But if I get cornholed during this operation, I would expect you to apply the Vaseline."

"A deal, Roland. You can count on me, as you know. I knew I could count on you. OK, see you in the throne room at ten. I got to call the elusive Lieutenant Fulton and find out what the fuck is happening before we go up there." Hrcany laughed loudly and left, slamming the door behind him. Karp pushed the intercom button. "Connie? You know Bill Denton's secretary? Can you make yourself sound like her? Yeah? No, you won't get into trouble, I promise. Yeah, not more than six months in the slam for a first offense. Look, here's what you do: call Clay Fulton and tell whoever answers the phone that the chief of detectives is holding. When Fulton picks up, switch him in here."

Three minutes later, Karp's phone rang. Clay Fulton's voice said, "Chief?"

"No, Clay, it's Butch Karp."

"Sorry. I thought Chief Denton was calling me."

"Yeah, something must be fucked up with the phones. But while I got you, talk to me-I've been trying to get you for days."

"Yeah, well, I've been real busy, Butch. You know…"

"So I understand," said Karp as calmly as he could. "You had a big arrest in the Clarry case. I had to find out about it from the ruby lips of the D.A. himself. I had kind of hoped that with that conversation we recently had you would've kept me up-to-date on those cases."

"Well, yeah, Butch, but… it's kind of hard to explain right now."

"It sounds like it. Look, Clay-this is Butch. Remember? I understand things might be tentative. I been around. Just tell me who you arrested and what the situation is. We don't have to go to the grand jury this afternoon."

"Oh, that. It's bullshit. Guy named Tecumseh Booth. He's no killer. We're just cooking him on Rikers. We really got nothing on him."

"Wait a minute, Clay. Why'd you arrest him? What's the connection with Clarry?"

"Ah, one of my guys thought he was driving Clarry's car. Some skell spotted him on the night. It's no big deal."

"Sounds at least a solid medium-size deal to me, you got a guy who maybe drove for the shooter. When am I going to get to meet what's-his-name, Pocahontas?"

"Tecumseh. Yeah, well, when I get a chance I'll set something up. Look, Butch, I got to run now. I got another call."

"Fuck your call! What the fuck is going on here?" Karp shouted this into the phone, but he knew that it had already gone dead.