“I’m taking notes,” said Collins, watching him. “This is great, the secrets of trial prep revealed. By the master.”
“No, the secret is, wear three pairs of underpants. Also, rub the Speedstick over your whole face, so they don’t see you sweat.”
“You’re kidding,” said Collins.
“Yes, I am.” Karp looked at his watch, again. “Okay, last minute: what did we forget? Witnesses all here, we’re missing witnesses …”
“Yes,” said Collins,” they were all here ten minutes ago, the last time you asked, but I sent them down to Coney, get some hot dogs, some beers, relax a little.”
“Nobody likes a wiseass, Collins,” said Karp, not unkindly. He had grown to like and admire the young man. Without being asked, Collins had taken over all of the tedious tasks involved in trial preparation-the marshaling and scheduling of witnesses, sending the cops of the D.A.’s squad on necessary errands and ensuring these were accomplished, tracking down and securing physical evidence, and keeping in order the mass of paperwork associated with any major trial. As a result of having this work taken from his hands, Karp had arrived at the first day of trial tired but not utterly exhausted.
Collins replied, “Especially not a preternaturally handsome Negro wiseass. I know it. I try to deal with it.”
“Try harder,” said Karp. He shuffled through Collins’s carefully done backgrounders on the defendant and the witnesses, reflexively, to do something with his twitching hands. He was reading through Rohbling’s brief biography for the twentieth time when the thought finally emerged, like a bubble in thick soup. He snapped his fingers. “Oh, I know what I wanted to ask: did a nanny called Clarice ever show up as a subject in any of this?”
Collins thought for a few seconds. “Not that I recall. Where did you get the name?”
“Perlsteiner mentioned it. It could figure later, so why don’t you dig a little-find out what happened to her. She apparently made our boy what he is today, or helped.”
Collins scratched a note. Karp resumed his pacing and breathing. Collins said, “You think that between your opening and Waley’s we’ll take the whole morning?”
Karp stopped and turned. “Oh, Waley won’t open now.”
“He won’t?”
“No, why should he? He doesn’t have a theory of the case that’s different from ours. He’s not out to show there’s a reasonable doubt that Rohbling killed Jane Hughes. He’ll let us go ahead and do that, and stress the bizarre aspects of the case on cross, and then when we conclude, he’ll get up and say yes, yes, this terrible crime, but it could only have been committed by a madman.”
Wolfe came in just before noon, looking haggard and worried. Marlene asked him what was wrong. “You talk to Edie yet?”
“No, what happened?”
“The guy came in last night, into her bedroom.”
“Oh, Jesus! Did he do anything?”
“No, just stayed there and stared at her. Sat on the bed. He had a stocking on his face. Didn’t say anything.”
“Was it Evarti?”
“She couldn’t tell who it was, but it wasn’t Evarti. I checked. He’s in L.A., playing piano. Anyway, she didn’t recognize the guy. She was pretty freaked out.”
“You saw her? Last night?”
Wolfe did not answer immediately. He rubbed his face and cleared his throat. “Well, what it was … I was following Robinson. Guy left a club downtown, not Cuff’s, another one on St. Mark’s, about eleven. Got in a cab, going uptown. I followed him in the car. I think he made me. He must’ve, because he got off at Lex and Forty-first and ran into the subway. I parked and tried to chase him, but you know-it’s a big station. I went up to the street again and I saw a guy go by in a cab that I thought was him and I followed that, but it turned out it wasn’t. So then I went by her apartment to check, and he’d already been and gone. The doorman didn’t see anyone. I feel real bad about it, Marlene.”
“Don’t. It takes three people to set up a real tail, which means twelve for a continuous job. We’re not set up to do stuff like that. You did good, Wolfe. At least now we know for sure who it is.”
“She called him,” said Wolfe.
“Oh, crap, she shouldn’t have done that!”
“Yeah, I said. She said he just laughed at her and told her to relax and enjoy it.”
“That sounds Like Robinson. I should call her.”
She did. It was a brief conversation. When Marlene put down the phone, she said, “Well, well, that’s interesting.”
“What?”
“She wants somebody to sleep in, dog her steps. Doesn’t care what it costs.” She looked at Wolfe. “Interested?”
She saw his Adam’s apple move as he gulped. “Um, yeah, I guess. If you think it wouldn’t be, you know …”
“What, improper? For crying out loud, Wolfe, the sister is the town pump! High society isn’t going to worry if Edie’s got a live-in guard.”
He shrugged and bobbed his head. “Then, okay, I guess. Sure.”
She laughed. “Gosh, Wolfe, you sound like somebody was twisting your arm. You get a nice room on Park Avenue, get to mix with the culture vultures, travel to exotic places-” She stopped. His jaw was tightening. She said, “There’s a problem here that I don’t see. What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just, you know, being around classy people. It’s, um, I keep thinking I’ll do something dumb.”
“Hey, ninety percent is don’t drink from the finger bowls, don’t fart too loud, and always flush. The rest you’ll pick up. So, can I tell her you’re the guy?”
He nodded.
“Great! One thing, though. If Robinson is serious about this, and he feels blocked, he could try to get through you. I need to know that you’re ready for that. Whatever it takes.”
“Oh, yeah. That part I got no problem with,” said Wolfe with a ghostly smile, and then Tranh came in and announced that he had made lunch.
Karp was into his peroration, rolling, feeling good, feeling the jury was focused, attentive, with him. He had told them what the crime was, had told them Rohbling had done it, and now he was about to defuse, to the extent he could at this point, the only possible defense.
“This is an unusual crime, ladies and gentlemen, something you don’t see every day. Some would even call it bizarre. But throughout this trial I would like you to keep one thing clear in your minds. We are not here to examine the inner workings of a human mind. The law does not trouble itself with reasons. We all have dark feelings, fears, rages, worries. I do. You do. But we are civilized, decent human beings. We don’t let ourselves be carried away by our obsessions. And so we must try to concern ourselves exclusively with Jonathan Rohbling’s actions. We will show in the course of the trial just exactly what the defendant did to Jane Hughes. We will show how he planned to disguise himself as a black man, so that he could walk freely around Harlem and insinuate himself into the confidence of Mrs. Hughes. We will show that, far from succumbing to any spontaneous mad rage, he brought into the apartment of the unsuspecting victim his murder weapon, a cloth suitcase, with which he planned and intended to smother her to death. We will show that after the crime, far from surrendering himself to the police, shocked at what he might have done in a moment of uncontrollable rage, or in the derangement of his mind, he stealthily and carefully made his escape. We will show that days later, when confronted by a police detective on the trail of Mrs. Hughes’s murderer, as you will learn, he steadfastly denied that the suitcase he had used in the murder was even his. He was fully aware of the evil he had done, fully aware that it was wrong. He didn’t want anything to do with that suitcase, because he knew that it connected him with the crime. He knew, as you will learn, that in that suitcase there was evidence that placed him in Jane Hughes’s apartment, that announced him as the murderer. And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when you have considered all the evidence we will present, we believe that you will find that the defendant, Jonathan Rohbling”-here Karp paused and looked for a scant three beats at the defendant. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the jury looking too, which was the point. Rohbling appeared scrawny in his nice gray suit. His glasses were still smudged, and his lips were still flecked with the white crust. In the moment that the eyes turned on him, the muscles on the side of his face gave a decided twitch. Karp twirled on his heel and faced the jury, selecting at random the eye of juror number four, Mrs. Ethel McNamara, to hold with his own, and continued- “… planned to murder Jane Hughes, did murder Jane Hughes, and sought to escape from the consequences of a horrible crime that he knew he had done, that he knew was the worst crime one human being can perpetrate against another; and therefore, the People expect that you will find the defendant guilty of the crime for which he has been indicted, the crime of murder in the second degree.”