“Wait a second, in a suicide-watch cell?” “Yeah, with the windows up high and no sheets. What he did was he tied a pencil to the end of his rope and flung it up so that it caught on the window grille. Then he jiggled it until it pressed through the steel grille and fell down again. So now he had a double thickness of rope. He made a noose, slipped it around his neck, grabbed the double rope and heaved himself up the wall like the commandos do in the movies. When he got to the grille, he hung on with one hand, made a clinch knot around the grille with the other, and just let go. He fell about three feet, not enough to break his neck, but he squashed the hell out of his larynx.”
“Marvelous. You know what this whole thing’ll look like if we have to go on with the trial?”
“It won’t help,” said Karp. “Most people think a sincere suicide attempt is a pretty good indication that the guy is deranged. On the other hand, Rohbling knows that. So does Waley.”
Keegan raised an eyebrow. “Meaning …?”
Karp shrugged and sipped coffee. “Meaning that Rohbling dropped just before the orderly reached his cell. He could have heard the guy moving down the hall. We should not rule out the possibility of a scam. Yeah, he hurt himself, maybe he miscalculated the damage …”
Keegan was silent and looked Karp over as if he were a used car of doubtful provenance. The look went on for an uncomfortable while. Finally Karp said, “What?”
“Oh, just trying to figure out where you’re going with this, and how loose a cannon you really are. I get the feeling you don’t want to quietly arrange for a plea here, send our boy off to the funny farm for an indefinite stay?”
“Do you?” Karp tossed back, and without waiting for a reply, said, “There’s a principle here. We spend ninety-five percent of our time pleading out pathetic scumbags, generally of the black and Hispanic variety, and when we do go to trial, we’re up against mostly Legal Aid kids who’ve spent a day prepping the case, and of course we win almost all the time. Okay, that’s what we get paid for, putting asses in jail, but-we get to run this assembly line because there’s an assumption that the law functions the same for everyone. It may be real dim sometimes, and it’s real easy to be cynical about it-hell, I’m cynical about it-but we both know it’s still there, ticking over, and it’s the reason why the communities that produce the big crops of criminals put up with the system. We don’t have a Casbah in this city, not yet: we don’t have a place the cops stay out of, where anything goes. Because on the rare occasions when we get a bastard from the ruling classes in our sights, we put the screws to him the same way we do for the skinny black kids, and we go up against his high-priced lawyer and his high-priced shrinks, and we do our best to whip their ass. If we buckle on it, if we say, hey, white boy, uh, too bad about killing those old ladies, not a good choice for a hobby, there, Jonathan, but no hard feelings, here’s a pass to a country club for, say, five years, and when you’ve had a nice rest we’ll let you out to resume your rich boy life, and Jonathan? In the future, think stamps, think coins, think trout fishing …”
Keegan snorted and clapped, heavily, slowly, four times. “Very impressive. Did I teach you to do that?”
“Partly,” said Karp, feeling a trace of shame at letting himself go. “Some of it is my own work.”
Keegan chuckled and said, “Besides the noble sentiments, it might also have something to do with Waley, beating his particular ass.”
A slight acknowledging inclination of the head. “I’m a competitive fellow, what can I say?”
“Your case, your funeral,” said Keegan, rapping his knuckles gavel-like on his desk, as if formally closing off the issue. “When do you figure you’ll be back in business?”
“Hard to say. When the docs declare him fit to stand. Could be a week, maybe more.”
“So … we’re talking late April?”
“At least,” said Karp. “Assuming nothing else goes wrong.”
An overly sanguine assumption, as events proved.
The suicide attempt of the rich-boy granny killer was widely reported. Karp assigned Terrell Collins to field questions, and learned that the New York and national press are a lot less disinclined to beat up a well-spoken black person than a white one, which discovery did not make him particularly proud of himself, but neither did it make him throw his own body into the breach. Waley also held press conferences, and hinted broadly that the tragedy largely resulted form Karp’s personal intransigence in opposing bail when all evidence had pointed to his client’s suicidal state. The black press, such as it was, supported Karp. There were a few spontaneous street celebrations in Harlem when the news about Rohbling got out and a transient fad for draping nooses over lamp posts. The cops tensed, but a spell of damp, cold weather suppressed whatever tendencies may have existed toward anything more violent.
By May 1, Rohbling could croak speech, and it appeared that his brain was not damaged, or not any more damaged than it was originally. Bannock, the private psychiatrist, issued a report claiming that his patient was in deep depression and could not aid in his own defense. Karp sent Perlsteiner to examine him, and, to Karp’s surprise and disappointment, he concurred.
Thus was Karp reminded once again that although criminal justice is often dramatic, and is in fact the subject of an immense genre of fictional accounts, the actual thing more often than not violates the traditional dramatic unities, most especially that of time. What we like is to see the chilling crime, the sleuth in pursuit, the exciting chase, the final conflict, and justice done in the end, preferably without the boring legal details, all within a few hours, but that is not what we get. Karp too had allowed himself to be caught up in the drama of the case, like any spectator, and was now sadly deflated.
Running the Homicide Bureau, he found, now had less charm than in the past, was even more like public sanitation than it had been; the training of young lawyers seemed somehow less urgent. The essential nastiness of its major work (the locking up of society’s rejects for murdering other rejects), the fervid preparation against the always faint possibility that a harassed public defender would deflect by some legal brilliance the virtually certain conclusion, the constant and faintly sordid plea bargaining that greased the system, all these seemed increasingly unbearable. Going from Rohbling back to the stream of nearly identical People v. Assholes was like going from the sunny uplands of the law into its fetid outhouse. Roland Hrcany had taken over the bulk of the work of the bureau chief, and Karp made no serious effort to reclaim it. Roland liked the meat grinder. He enjoyed flogging the young A.D.A.’s so that they would flog the system’s vicious-but-pathetic captives the harder. Karp withdrew his spirit from the work, supervised vaguely, came late, left early, and waited for winter to pass and his trial to start again.
On May 8, Rohbling was examined again and certified as fit to stand trial. Lionel Waley objected to this finding but was overruled by Judge Peoples. The trial was scheduled to resume on May 11, a Monday. Two days before that, however, a man named Amos Harder, a retired New York Central warehouse manager, stood up at the dais during a fraternal association dinner in Harlem and made a brief speech. Harder was a sober man, generally, but he had had a few that evening. In his remarks he noted that it was just a little over a year since Jane Hughes had been put to rest, and observed that, despite his tricky lawyer, Jonathan Rohbling would burn in hell, but before he did, he would spend the rest of his life in prison for murder, if Amos Harder had anything to do with it. Which he did, being one of the jurors.