Karp sat down at the prosecution table. Judge Peoples said, “Mr. Waley?”
Waley rose and declined to open until later. Karp caught from the jury box a tiny sigh of disappointment, a fainter version of the sort heard at the theater when they announce that the star is to be replaced by an understudy. Karp, oddly, felt disappointed himself. At the judge’s direction he rose again and called city engineer Michael Constanzio to present a drawing of the crime scene.
“That went pretty good,” said Terrell Collins.
“Yeah, well, there’s not much you can do to screw up the obligatory witnesses,” Karp replied. “He’s not going to waste much time opposing the fact that a woman got killed in New York County.” They were gathering up their materials, cleaning off the long prosecution table.
“I thought he’d object more. When we showed the crime-scene shots-”
“No, he’s piling up treasure with Peoples,” said Karp. “Peoples likes a smooth run. And like I told you, he doesn’t need a different theory of the case. He’s going to walk the little turd on insanity.”
The hallway outside the courtroom was packed with the press and garishly lit by the lamps of the TV crews. Karp and Collins no-commented and body-checked their way through the throng to the elevators. Once in the car, Karp passed his folders to Collins and slipped out of the building via the D.A.’s back exit.
He trotted south through the chilly street to the Federal Building and went up to Menotti’s office, where a secretary directed him to a conference room.
He slipped in and sat in a chair against the wall, meaning to be unobtrusive, for someone as large as Karp always a difficult goal. In fact, everyone in the room looked up at him. Paul Menotti, sitting at the head of the table, glowered. V.T. Newbury smiled and waved. Cynthia Doland, at her boss’s right hand, regarded him with her usual neutral expression. Menotti paused and hastily introduced Karp to the three strangers at the table. The elderly black man in the dark jacket and clerical collar was Ephraim Coates, the chairman of the board of St. Nicholas Medical Centers, Inc. The thick middle-aged woman in the cerise suit and the gold jewelry was Dr. Sylvia Olivero, the director of the St. Nicholas clinic at 135th Street in East Harlem. The third stranger was Vincent Robinson.
The meeting continued. Karp was something of a connoisseur of interrogatory events, and before too many minutes had passed he realized that this one was not getting anywhere. It was, in the parlance of the prosecutorial bar, a mere circle jerk. Coates was clearly a respectable stooge who had no answers to the technical questions the federal prosecutor wanted answered. Olivero had the answers, but her performance seemed too pat, as if she had been rehearsed, and the answers she gave drove the meeting ever deeper into the bottomless morass of Medicaid regulations, an area in which the doctor had more experience than anyone else in the room. Robinson was polite and bored; they had nothing solid on him and he knew it.
Equally bored, and starting to feel the exhaustion of a day in court, Karp had started glancing at his watch and thinking about how he might gracefully retire when V.T. rose and walked out of the room, motioning Karp to follow him.
In the hallway, V.T. grinned and rolled his eyes. “Fascinating, isn’t it? All the thrills and glamour of Broadway as it used to be.”
“I’m uncharmed, V.T., and I’m beat. Like the old lady said, where’s the beef?”
“This is the vegetarian part, I’m afraid,” said V.T. “What do you think of Robinson?”
“He looks as bored as I felt. What’ve you got on him?”
“Between you and me? In the language of your people, bupkis. St. Nicholas is dirty, we know that, but welcome to the club. Whether they’re dirty like every other poverty health operation, or dirty dirty, felony dirty, is something that it’s going to take the usual eighteen months to determine. Meanwhile, my quasi-legal sources in the banking industry inform me that the doc has something like seventeen million dollars in accounts in various banks in Grand Cayman. The deposits started nine years ago when Robinson first got his Medicaid mills going, but approximately three-quarters of that total had been placed there over the last year-cash deposits. What does that suggest to you?”
Karp shrugged. “That he’s found some new way to scam Medicaid?”
“Uh-uh. Medicaid pays in attractive green checks. Robinson’s declared income is in the form of checks paid by private clients, and checks issued to him by St. Nick as a shareholder and medical adviser. He could conceivably have drawn cash off those, but we checked with his banks and he didn’t. So wherefrom all this cash? Who that we know runs an all-cash business?”
“What, he’s connected?” Karp laughed at the thought. “Robinson is a Mob guy? Come on, V.T., the guy may be slime, but he’s Park Avenue slime.”
“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” said V.T. huffily. “But it’s hard to explain those deposits any other way.”
“Okay, so what’s your theory? He’s moving coke to the upper crust?”
“No, not coke. He doesn’t need coke. He’s a doctor who runs a ton of drugs through a network of clinics. He’s also got a multimillion-dollar accounting system. I’m thinking prescription drugs, or money laundering, or a little of both. He lays off some of the cost of his product on the public fisc, and then sells to the wise guys for cash on the barrel.”
“Hm, put that way, it’s not too funny anymore,” said Karp. “It sure adds weight to the possibility that Robinson whacked that nurse. A white-collar fraud is one thing, assuming she was going to rat him on it, but now you’re talking Rockefeller Law minimum sentences for dope. Look, V.T.: let’s go back in there and you get Menotti to let me ask him a question.”
They did so. Newbury whispered into Menotti’s ear. He frowned, then nodded. After finishing the line of questioning he had under way, Menotti said, heavily, “The Homicide Bureau would like to ask Dr. Robinson a question. Mr. Karp?”
“Yes, thank you, Paul. Dr. Robinson, was Evelyn Longren ever involved in transferring payments of any kind for the St. Nicholas organization?”
Karp watched Robinson’s face very carefully when he said the name and was rewarded by a fascinating display. First, the quick involuntary flicker of alarm, which was what Karp was looking for, then a brief moment of calculation, the eyes blank, then the feigned innocent recollection, the handsome brow knotted. (The other two St. Nicholas people were genuinely puzzled. It was clear that they had no idea who Evelyn Longren was.)
“No, Miss Longren was my private nurse at my private practice,” Robinson said. “She had no contact at all with my work at the medical centers.” Robinson was looking Karp right in the eye as he said this, and after he said it he smiled and kept the stare. Karp had been lied to by experts, and he knew the signs, and he also knew well the arrogant gaze of the malefactor who knows you have nothing on him, who knows he’s going to get away with it, and loves rubbing the world’s face in it. Why can’t they ever resist showing off? Karp thought, and returned the smile. Deep in his prosecutorial heart, almost below the conscious level, he felt a familiar little sensation, a precise analogy to the beep that sounds in the cockpit of an F-15 when its missile has locked onto a target.