“You were in there a long time, Mommy,” said Lucy, who was waiting for her on a stone bench.
“Yes, well, I’ve been a very wicked woman lately.”
“It doesn’t matter how wicked you are. If you’re really sorry, God will forgive you,” intoned Lucy in her most sacerdotal voice.
“Yes,” said Marlene, “that’s the catch.”
After church it was the tradition of the Catholic Karps to switch cultures and stop off at Samuel’s on East Houston to buy fresh bagels, lox, cream cheese, whitefish, and carp, this last from an early age Lucy’s special delight (That’s us, right, Mommy?). When they arrived home with their aromatic burdens, Karp (the man) was, as usual, sitting at the kitchen table with the fat Times, in his frowzy blue plaid robe, unwashed and unshaven. She plunked her shopping bag down on the table and kissed his ear.
“Euueh! Take a shower,” she said, and kissed him again, on the neck.
“How was church?” he asked surprised at the attention. He pulled at the bagel bag.
“The usual. God loves us all, and the pope knows what’s what. There’s a new priest I’d like to get to know.” Marlene continued her nuzzling and ran her hand inside his robe. Karp groped bagels.
“Would you rather have a bagel, or me?” she breathed into his ear.
“That depends on whether you’re covered with crunchy little bits of onion,” said Karp and held up an onion bagel to demonstrate. He got up and pulled a knife from the rack.
“It could be arranged,” said Marlene, as Lauren Bacall.
“That must have been quite a sermon,” said Karp dryly. “What was it on? Marital duty? The proper subjection of wife to husband?”
“The Immaculate Conception, if you must know. Jesus, Butch, how can you cut bagels like that!” It was an old argument.
“You mean, holding them in my hand against my chest with the razor-sharp knife cutting toward my heart? My mom always did it that way, and so did her mom. I always thought it bespoke an attractively cavalier disregard of death. Anyway, we are going back to being friends now?”
“I’m sorry,” said Marlene, seeing the possibility of an egg-free reconciliation. “It was my fault, I take full responsibility. I should have talked it out with you when it happened. The thing is, I think Tranh either whacked, or helped Carrie whack, the guy.”
“The noodle guy? He told you this?”
“He’s not a noodle guy; he’s a stone killer. And he didn’t tell me, and there’s no evidence-no, actually, Lucy saw some blood and a gun in his room. So he was probably involved, although I don’t see how you’d ever prove it in court.”
Karp took a deep breath. This was not the time to ask what the fuck his darling daughter was doing rummaging in the rooms of armed stone killers. He said, “Proving it in court is not the point.”
“No, you’re right. The point is, I need you to know I didn’t set it up. I didn’t hire a murder.”
Karp sighed, a noise that represented the myriad frustrations of his life with this woman, as well as recognition that he had asked for it, and that he was not about to make any waves. He put down the bagel and the knife and hugged her. Lucy came in, changed out of her church clothes into jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt. She said, “Yuck! Mushing again? Where’s the food?”
Karp waited behind the prosecution table in Part 46 while the next panel of veniremen filed in. It was late in the eleventh day of what the Post had called in a big black headline, the jury selection from hell. Karp kept his expression neutral as he looked the new group over. They had gone through eighteen panels already and had agreed on but two jurors. Judge Peoples was being liberal with challenges for cause, and generous with the range of potentially disqualifying questions he allowed. Mr. Fair.
There are, generally speaking, two sorts of lawyers with respect to the voir dire: those who think that the selection of the right jury is tantamount to winning the case, and those who think that a properly constructed case will win with any but a blatantly prejudiced jury. Karp was of the latter persuasion; Lionel Waley was enthusiastically, famously, of the former: he had even written a little book on the subject, which Karp had, of course, read: Choosing a Winning Jury. It had not changed Karp’s mind, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t play Waley’s game, and right from the opening gun at that. It made him irritable, a mood he had to hide behind a mask of genial, bland interest (“Do you have any friends or relatives with emotional problems, Mrs., ah, Perkins? Your nephew? Could you tell us about him?”). That might, in fact, have been part of the reason why Waley did it.
In any event, the man’s selection strategy was not hard to fathom. He wanted a jury composed of non- black people with crazy relatives whom they felt sorry for. This was somewhat unusual, since defense attorneys representing the average felon of whatever race typically wanted a “Bronx jury,” that is, one composed of blacks and Hispanics inclined to take police testimony with enough salt grains to cause cardiac arrest. In Rohbling, however, the police were not the issue (although Waley would fling as much dirt at them too as he could); the issue was which psychiatrist you believed. Waley had made the not-surprising judgment that the people he wanted on the jury would have to combine low sympathy for the victims and high credulousness when it came to shrinks.
What Karp wanted was not as clear. He would have liked educated people, of course, people to whom an M.D. degree did not signify the shadow of God on earth, but he had scant chance of getting anyone brainy past Waley, whose attitude toward the well-schooled (on juries, at least) was similar to that of the Khmer Rouge. Waley was not going to allow any elderly women on there either, if he could help it, especially not elderly black women. What Karp had to look for, then, were bright undereducated people, skeptics about psychiatry and believers in justice, even for old black ladies. There were limits on Waley’s design, of course; the judge was clearly determined to end up with a sexually and racially balanced jury, a little scale model of the people of New York that no one could challenge.
Within those limits, then, Waley and Karp were like a pair of poker players, each with the same number of chips, each chip a preemptory challenge that would scuttle one juror. The jurors were the cards they were betting on. Should Karp, for example, let this oyster-eyed white woman with the retarded kid on the jury? A dunce maybe, and doctors had helped her kid, hence a likely defendant’s juror. If he challenged her, on the other hand, he might run out of chips and be unable later to bump someone worse. Karp passed her, in the event, and then, four hours later, they got another one, a pipe fitter, the first black on the panel. Karp hoped he had loved his mother.
Marlene finished reading Wolfe’s report on Edith Wooten’s associates and then looked up at the man himself. Today he was wearing a nubby gray sports jacket over a gray and orange plaid shirt buttoned to the neck. His tan hair had been recently trimmed to maintain the hard edge of geekiness he seemed to favor.
She tapped the report. “This is good, Wolfe. Very complete.” She smiled.
Wolfe, whose face had worn a look of apprehension while she read, now broke into one of his rare smiles, showing gum and a set of bad ochre teeth. Not a regular flosser, Wolfe.
“You put in some overtime on this, yes?”
Head bob. Worried look. Marlene wondered once again why a big guy who looked like he could walk through bricks should bear himself with so diffident a mien. Dane, and most of her other troops, all much smaller men, left damp trails of testosterone behind them. Of course, Wolfe had never been a street cop….
The thought faded. She continued, “Well, you’re supposed to get it authorized first.”
“Sorry.”
He seemed so. “But we’ll let it slide this time,” she said. “The client’s loaded, and she wants closure on this real bad. I doubt she’ll bitch about the extra.” She leafed through the pages, all neatly typed and well organized. He wrote plain, grammatical English, with correct spelling, unusual in someone with his job history. As a rule, she had to rewrite the reports of her people. “This Felix Evarti looks interesting. The piano. What do you think?”