“They’re pretty good,” admitted Collins. “Dense argument, the guy knows the law.”
“Pretty good? Terry, you’re pretty good, I’m very good. This”-he tapped the motions-“is fucking Mozart. I’m reading this, and I’m thinking, yeah, he’s right, we don’t have much of a case. Peoples is eating this up, I know it. Do you know him at all well? Peoples, I mean.”
“Just by rep,” said Collins, settling himself on the edge of the desk. “He’s real smart, a little arrogant maybe. No nonsense in the courtroom. Hates to be reversed on appeal. In general, a prosecutor’s judge; I mean, you present a decent case, he’ll support you, he’ll resist the usual defense scams pretty well.” He shrugged. “That’s about all I know. All in all, I think it was a good break getting him for Rohbling.”
“Maybe,” said Karp. “I notice you left out the first thing an average person would mention about him.”
Collins wrinkled his brow for a second or two. “You mean that he’s black? Jesus, Butch, the guy’s to the right of Reagan. He hates affirmative action, he never gives any credence to race-based exculpatory arguments …” He checked himself and then added, “Oh, I get it. The bend over backward to be fair to the white kid accused of killing black women. You think that’s going to be important?”
“I don’t know, but I would bet on Peoples taking the concept of fairness to its extreme limit. If we win one on the merits, it’s going to take twice as much to win the next one, because Peoples is going to want to keep the score even. On the other hand, we won’t get any freebies; we can forget the ‘prosecutor’s judge’ business, especially with Waley in there. Not a cheap-trick guy, Waley.”
Karp massaged his chest and took several deep breaths to relieve the tension he felt growing in his chest. Then he stretched and said, “My head’s too full of details. I need to step back and see how it’s fitting together. Why don’t you tell me the case?”
“Tell you …?”
“Yeah, tell me the case. Why do we have this mutt behind bars? Tell me a story. Amuse me.”
Collins smiled and got to his feet. As he spoke, he paced back and forth, four feet in one direction, four in the other, as if he were in court.
“Okay. Saturday evening, April 20, a disturbance is heard by neighbors of Jane Hughes, age sixty-eight, of 1718 St. Nicholas Avenue. A witness sees a slightly built, short-haired, neatly dressed black man leaving that building at around ten-thirty. He’s carrying a blue fabric suitcase. The following day Mrs. Hughes’s son arrives to take his mother to church-”
“Right, cut to the evidence at the scene.”
“Okay, Hughes is found lying in the wreckage of a coffee party-she was entertaining someone, two cups and so on. Stuff is smashed, she put up a struggle. She was a good-sized woman, by the way, a retired practical nurse. Gordon Featherstone catches the case, and right away he notices that Hughes has long nails and some of them are broken off, and he makes sure the hands get bagged. Autopsy shows she died from being smothered by an object made of heavy blue cotton canvas. She’s got the fibers way up her tubes. No sexual assault, by the way, but forensics finds blue fibers, skin, blood, and body hairs under the nails. Skin is brown in color, but the hairs and the blood ID as Caucasian. They analyze the skin fragments, and they find commercial brown dye. So we have a white man disguised as a black man.”
“Stop a minute. You talk to Featherstone yet?”
“On the phone, not face to face.”
“You ask him was he surprised it was a white guy?”
Collins smiled and nodded. “As a matter of fact, I did. He was amazed. Never happened before.” Collins seemed to share the detective’s feeling.
“Okay, go ahead.”
“Well, Featherstone does the usual canvass, the vic’s friends and relatives. Turns out she was a church lady, her life tended to revolve around the Zion Baptist Church up there at 125th and Lenox, and Featherstone found people who had seen Hughes leave a social on Saturday night with a slight young black man carrying a suitcase. The guy said he was a stranger in the neighborhood. He offered to walk Mrs. Hughes home, which everyone thought was real nice of him. Nobody got his name. So, Featherstone smells a wacko-I mean, what else could he be? — and he figures wackos repeat; this guy is going to try to prey on older church ladies. Okay, lots of churches in Harlem, but he puts the word out to the ministers, we’re looking for a white man in disguise, maybe with a suitcase, a stranger.”
“But he didn’t get a tip,” said Karp. This was the crux of the problem.
“He did not. What happened was, this was around three weeks after the Hughes murder, Featherstone was cruising along 125th, late afternoon, when he saw this kid at the bus stop at Twenty-fifth and Seventh. He just happened to stop for a light, and there the kid was, waiting on line there. And there was the suitcase, blue cloth. So the picture flashes in his mind: slight kid, suitcase. He checks the kid out-this is in the minute or so the light’s red. The kid looks … wrong somehow.”
“He didn’t articulate how the kid was wrong.”
“No. Just a feeling. He parks and walks over and studies the kid at close range, and he has to make a decision right away because here comes the bus and the kid’s going to get on it and disappear. So he goes over to the kid and identifies himself as a police officer and asks him, ‘Is that your suitcase?’ And the kid says, ‘No.’ And then Featherstone asks a couple of people standing there on line if it was theirs and they all say no.”
“And no one, of course, volunteers that they saw this kid walk up to the bus stop carrying the suitcase,” said Karp.
“No, this being Harlem, no, they didn’t. And here comes the bus and Featherstone says, quote, ‘Sir, I would appreciate it if you didn’t leave right now. I think you could help the police with an investigation.’ And he grabs the suitcase.”
“But not Rohbling physically?”
“He says not. Rohbling doesn’t, in fact, get on the bus. That’s the focus of their motion to suppress the physical evidence. The police had no reasonable suspicion to stop the suspect. There was no Terry v. Ohio activity on Rohbling’s part-he wasn’t acting in a suspicious manner, wasn’t casing a jewelry store. He was just waiting for a bus.”
“Cortez,” said Karp, half to himself.
“Yeah, we would argue Featherstone met the Cortez test of a quote particularized and objective basis for suspecting. Anyway, the legal stop took place when Rohbling did not get on his bus. They say. He felt he could not leave. Under Mendenhall that’s a stop. Featherstone takes the suitcase over to a bench and zips it open.”
“We’re, of course, saying this is a McBain situation here,” Karp put in.
“Right, U.S. v. McBain: when a suspect when questioned about ownership denies ownership, he surrenders possessory interest in the property, and has no Katz privacy rights to be violated by police. Although, of course, they maintain that what Featherstone actually said was ‘Can I take a look at that suitcase?’ and when Rohbling said no, he meant ‘No, you can’t look in it.’ Do you want me to cover the suppression-of-evidence case points here?”
“No, skip it for now,” Karp replied. “Just run through what happened.”
“Okay, in the suitcase Featherstone finds a number of fascinating items: an old blue baby blanket, a ceramic candy dish, a white orlon cardigan sweater, a doily, a glass tumbler with a picture of a steamboat on it, a plastic hair ornament, and a Mammy doll.”
“I saw that. What the hell is a Mammy doll?”
“A cultural artifact. They don’t make them anymore. It’s a cloth doll about ten inches long. On one end it’s a white lady with blond hair, and when you flick the skirt the other way, it’s a black servant in a kerchief and apron. They used to be pretty popular. Not among black folks, of course.”