“This is a junkie, Mark,” said Davidoff, his voice now quaking with rage. “What the fuck are you trying to get me into?”
“She’s not, she wasn’t a junkie! I told you, she was a troubled girl. I was trying to help.” He turned to face Davidoff, and he seemed a different person from the elegant figure Davidoff had envied for a dozen or more years. He was literally wringing his hands, and his eyes were wet and red rimmed. “She has a family, Mark, you know? A mom and dad? I just … I want her to go out decently. I loved her. Mark, I’m begging you … do you want me to go down on my knees?”
Davidoff believed that he would have. He felt a wave of loathing, and an intense desire to get out of this apartment, away from this man, and, what was worse, he felt a tincture of self-loathing too, because some part of him was enjoying the sight of Vincent Fiske Robinson brought low.
They stood that way in silence for what seemed a long time. At last Davidoff let out his breath in a huff and said, “Okay, shit, give me the thing and I’ll sign it. I presume you have one.”
“Yeah. God, Mark, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“Viral pneumonia, huh?” said Davidoff as he cast his eye down the single-sheet form that Robinson handed him. “Why not?” He signed his name and dated the death certificate in the spaces provided.
“Well, Vince,” he said, handing over the paper. “I wish I could say it was nice seeing you, but …”
“Thanks a million, buddy,” said Vince, the famous perfect smile appearing for the first time that afternoon. “Look, I’ll call you, we’ll have lunch.”
Davidoff said nothing, nor did he offer to shake hands. Outside the apartment, in the fresh, cold air again, he took several deep breaths. Vince Robinson had never called him for lunch before, although they had been working in the same city for at least a decade. He doubted Robinson would call him now, and found that he was glad of it. He would have been even gladder had he observed the expression on Robinson’s face as he walked out.
There were only four people who were allowed to interrupt, by a phone call, a bureau meeting of the Homicide Bureau of the New York District Attorney’s office: the district attorney himself, John X. Keegan; the bureau chief’s wife; a detective lieutenant named Clay Fulton; and the chief medical examiner of the City of New York.
“Excuse me, guys, I got to take this,” said Karp, the bureau chief, to the twenty or so people assembled in his office as he lifted the phone and punched the flasher.
“Butch? Murray Selig,” said the voice.
“What’s up, Murray? I’m in a meeting,” said Karp.
“Yeah, sorry, but I thought you should hear about this one personally.”
Karp turned to a fresh page on his yellow pad and poised his pen over it. “Okay, shoot.”
“The dead woman is a nurse, Evelyn Longren, twenty-eight, cause of death, viral pneumonia. All right, that’s the first thing. Pneumonia, they call it the old man’s friend; it takes the debilitated, the elderly, and babies. We don’t expect to see a twenty-eight-year-old woman die from it. Next, the attending physician was Mark Davidoff, who, let me tell you, has a rep as one hell of an internist. His dad is Abe Davidoff, head of internal medicine at Columbia P. and S., for years. Next, we have the death took place in a private residence, not a hospital. And finally, the date of death was this past September 21. Davidoff signed the death certificate on September 21. Interesting, no?”
“No. Murray, I’m not following you. What’s so special about the day?”
“What’s so …? Oy vey, what a Jew! Schlemiel! It was Rosh Hashonah. So I’m asking myself, Why is a Jew, one of the biggest internists in the city, attending a woman with viral pneumonia in a private house on Rosh Hashonah? Believe me, Mark Davidoff don’t make house calls.”
“She was a friend. He was doing a favor.”
“Uh-uh, Butch. If it was a friend, and she was developing complications, he would’ve had her in a hospital before you could turn around. And he would have seen the complications in time. This is a young, healthy woman. There are no contributing factors on the certificate either-no fibrosis, no asthma, no staph.”
“So he made a mistake. I know you think doctors are perfect, Murray-”
“Mistake? Butch, listen, if you saw Larry Bird pass to the other team six times in one game, what would you say? He made a mistake? No, you’d say something was fishy. The Mark Davidoffs of this world do not lose young, healthy viral pneumonia patients in private houses.”
“So what happened, Murray?”
“Hey, you’re the investigator. I’m just passing it on. But I’d like to cut that lady up.”
“I bet. Okay, Murray, thanks for the tip. I’ll look into it and let you know.”
Karp hung up and turned back to his meeting, focusing his gaze on a nervous young man standing at the foot of the long table whose head was occupied by Karp himself.
“Okay, Gerry,” said Karp, “take it from the witnesses again.”
Gerald Nolan, the young man, resumed his explanation of the evidence in a homicide case called People v. Morella, one of the thousand or so ordinary killings that ran through the New York County D.A.’s homicide bureau in the course of an ordinary year. This particular one was: felon gets out of prison, finds his wife shacked up with another man, kills both. That was the People’s story. The defendant Morella’s was different, hence the forthcoming trial. The purpose of the exercise, and of the withering criticism that Karp and his senior assistant D.A.’s would shortly apply to the young man’s case, was to bring home to the people in the room, and the criminal justice system, and to the city at large, that murder was never ordinary, that it retained its unique status among crimes.
Watching the young man do his spiel, Karp reflected, not for the first time, on the peculiar historicism of the scene. Fourteen years ago, more or less, the infant Karp had been standing down at the end of this very table, presenting his first homicide case to a group of men (men only then, of course) who were accounted the best criminal prosecutors in the nation, and the current D.A., Jack Keegan, had been sitting in the chair, the actual chair, that Karp now occupied as head of the Homicide Bureau. One of Keegan’s first acts on assuming the position on a gubernatorial appointment had been to track down the chair and the table. The office was the same old bureau office too, a much better office than Karp had occupied the last time he had run the Homicide Bureau. Keegan wanted to send a message too about the unique status of homicide and that a new day had dawned at the D.A.’s, or rather a reprise of the old days, when the legendary Francis P. Garrahy had reigned as district attorney.
This public presentation of homicide cases had been part of the tradition then, and Karp was trying to reestablish it in all its brutal splendor. He looked down the row of faces to see how they were reacting to the young man’s presentation. Doubtful but still polite expressions adorned most of the faces. A rather more various bunch of faces nowadays, of course. When Karp had started in the late sixties, the bureau had been staffed with the gentlemen who had started in the Depression, when a steady job at the D.A. had been among the best places a young Jewish or Irish lawyer out of Fordham or N.Y.U. could find. Under Tom Dewey and Garrahy they had faced down and broken Murder Incorporated, and challenged the Mob, when the Mob ran New York. These old bulls had all left when Garrahy died, left or been driven off by his successor, the exiguous and unlamented Sanford Bloom. Karp thought that this Nolan kid was lucky not to have been up there back then; by this time the old bulls would have been hooting and throwing balled-up papers at him.
Karp still had a couple of people on his staff who remembered the golden age. Ray Guma, sitting just to his left, was one of them; Roland Hrcany, Karp’s deputy bureau chief, sitting halfway down the table, was another. Most of the other A.D.A.’s were young, eager, bright, and, in Karp’s opinion, almost completely unprepared to try homicide cases. Training had not been a big priority of the previous management; for that matter, neither had homicide trials. This was changing, but slowly, painfully, and in the nature of things, it was these people who were going to bear most of the pain. Fortunately, Karp had a willing sadist in Roland, whose current twitchings, subvocalized profanities, and nostril flarings informed Karp that the bomb was about to go off.