Karp shuffled through his message slips after lunch, arranging them in order of importance. Most of them were bureaucracy at work, it being a fine habit of bureaucrats to call during lunch hour, passing the buck, but not having to actually come to any closure on the issue at hand. Karp, as the chief of the homicide bureau, got a lot of these calls.
In turn, he would spend the odd lunch hour in his own office, eating a greasy sandwich and returning the calls to vacant offices, leaving his own messages. One slip popped out at him because it had an area code in front of the number. A Bert Crane called While You Were Out. Karp pulled the phone book out of a bottom drawer and found that the code was for Philadelphia.
Oh, that Bert Crane. In the narrow world of prosecuting attorneys, Crane was something of a star-or had been. Karp seemed to recall that he had resigned as district attorney in Philadelphia some years back and was now a prominent member of the criminal bar. His reputation was based largely on a case against the assassins of an insurgent union leader, in which he had convicted not only the killers but the racketeering Teamster boss who had hired them.
He's going to offer me a job, thought Karp. This happened at least once a month, mostly from white-shoe law firms in the city who wanted a name prosecutor to handle the criminal stuff that occasionally came their way, as when the drunken heir runs the Ferrari over the old lady. Occasionally, Karp would get a serious offer from a big-time criminal lawyer, the kind who write books about their own genius. Like Lucifer with Christ, they stood him on a mountaintop and showed him the treasures of the earth. Karp had always turned them down, for reasons he could not quite articulate.
It was, after all, past time for him to leave the DA's. He had been there twelve and a half years, ever since law school; it had been his only real job. It was more or less expected that after a period of seasoning in the DA, lawyers with ambition would go private, or switch over to the federal side, or, after a little longer, become judges. He looked around his office. It was a small spare room with a frosted-glass-windowed door that gave on the bureau's outer office, where the clerks and secretaries sat. It contained a battered wooden desk, a leather chair behind the desk and two in front for visitors, and behind these a long, scratched oak table with a miscellany of chairs around it, for conferences.
These furnishings were part of the original equipment of the criminal courts building, which had been constructed in 1930. The leather of the chairs was cracked, and gushed white stuffing. To the right of the desk were two large windows looking out on a short street and the New York State office building across it. If you stood at the window and leaned out you could see the trees of a tiny park, beyond which was Chinatown. It was the office's best, or rather its only good, feature.
Karp was no sort of status hound, but he understood that the tattiness of his personal surroundings and the even worse conditions with which his staff had to contend were petty symbols of the contempt for Karp and all his works that steamed perpetually in the heart of Karp's boss, the district attorney, Sanford Bloom.
Bloom had not the guts to fire Karp outright, but neither Karp nor anyone who worked for him would ever get a new office or new furniture. The paint would rot off their walls. Their promotions would be delayed and their personnel records screwed up.
Everyone in the DA's office knew this. As a result, only the intrepid came to work for Karp in the homicide bureau, and what should have been the cream of the DA's prosecutorial staff grew milky with the years.
People didn't stay long, and those who did were mostly the hacks, or those too uncouth for private firms. Fanatics like Karp, who lived only to try cases and put asses in jail, were fewer and fewer as the years passed.
Karp didn't want to be a judge. He wanted to be twenty-four and working, as he had then, for the finest prosecutorial office in the known universe. He sighed and looked at the little yellow slip, and dialed the long-distance number.
He gave his name to the woman who answered and she put him through to Crane instantly. Crane's voice was deep and confident, and "cultured" in the style of classical music announcers on FM radio.
Crane got quickly to the point. "Joe Lerner gave me your name. As you probably know, I've been appointed chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations."
Karp didn't know. He had almost no interest in political news and restricted his newspaper reading to the crime reports and the sports pages. Nor did he watch much television. But he had a vague recollection that Congress was reopening the investigations into the murders of both Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And he knew who Joe Lerner was.
"How is Joe?" Karp asked.
"Fine. He's working for me now."
"No kidding? Doing what?"
"I'll have two assistant chief counsels. Joe is going to be running the Martin Luther King side of it. He recommended you highly."
"That's a surprise," said Karp, genuinely surprised.
"Oh?"
"Yeah, Joe and I had a little bit of a falling-out just before he split from the office. He was my rabbi when I was breaking in and I guess he assumed I'd keep following his lead."
"This was about some case?"
"No, it was a political thing. Joe thinks I lack political judgment."
A pause. "Well, he thinks you're a hell of a prosecutor, anyway. The best is what he said, actually."
"Next to you, of course. And him."
Crane had a booming laugh. "Of course! Look, maybe the best thing would be if you could run down here to Philadelphia and we could discuss it face-to-face. I'd like to meet you and I'm sure Joe would like to see you again. I know you've got a tight schedule, but could you make it, say, Thursday, day after tomorrow? We could have lunch and talk."
The man's diffidence was starting to annoy Karp. Just once, he wished one of these guys would call him up and say, "Hundred and ninety grand a year for defending scumbags, plus you kiss my ass. Yes or no?"
"And what would we be talking about, Mr. Crane?" Karp asked.
"Please-it's Bert. Well, of course, about you joining our team. Joe suggested that you might be interested in new pastures. Something with more scope for your abilities."
"You mean as Joe's assistant?"
Crane chuckled. "No, no, of course not. I want you for the Kennedy half. In charge of it."
"Oh," said Karp, and then couldn't think of a bright rejoinder.
"You're interested?"
"That's a good word," Karp admitted.
"Fine. I'll expect you in my office Thursday, eleven-thirty." Crane passed on some details about how to get to his office and then closed the conversation.
Karp made the rest of his calls and then futzed around for the remainder of the afternoon, irritated that he was unable to maintain his usual focus. His job consisted largely of supervising the work of thirty other prosecutors, which meant that he had to be passably familiar with several hundred homicide cases at once.
There was a man talking to him who suddenly stopped. Karp realized with a start that the man was waiting for a reply. He was a junior prosecutor and he had just asked Karp for some direction on a case.
Karp felt an embarrassed sweat blossom on his face.
"Sorry, I was somewhere else. Hit me with that again."
The young man said, "This is Wismer. Defendant beat his estranged wife to death with a blunt instrument. The case… the charge is murder two…"
The kid was nervous. Karp recalled that this was probably his first murder case solo, and could be his first homicide trial. It did not occur to Karp that the kid was nervous because he was presenting an issue to a demigod. Awe made Karp uncomfortable, and so he simply refused to recognize that it existed.
Collins, his name was, Karp recalled. A neat, strong-looking black kid from upstate somewhere, and an athlete, like nearly all the people Karp hired. He had a pencil mustache he kept fiddling with. From time to time he glanced at his watch.