Marlene’s ears were ringing from the shots. She turned slightly, and there was her whole family in a line on the sidewalk, looking at her, as in a dream. Her husband was shouting something at her, and there was an expression on his face that she did not recall ever seeing before. She had to sit down. She tottered on legs that had gone quivery over to a lawn chair and sat down on it. She put her hands on her knees and dropped her head down between her legs and fought to control the nausea. When she lifted her head back up, she saw two police officers pointing their pistols at her.
“Don’t tell me Rohbling tried it again,” said the district attorney over the phone.
“No,” said Karp, “and I wouldn’t have called you this late, but I got a real mess here and you need to know about it. Marlene just shot and killed a guy on Sullivan Street.”
A pause and a whispered “Jesus Christ!” Then, “Where are you now?”
“At home. I had the kids to handle also … I didn’t think it was smart for me to get involved down at the precinct.”
“Right. She’s being held at the Six?”
“Uh-huh. I called Joe Lerner. He’s going to go over there.”
“Good move. Okay, as of now I’m suspending you from supervisory tasks in the Homicide Bureau, except as they relate to Rohbling, until this case is resolved. You’re out of the chain of command. I also officially tell you not to discuss this case with anyone in this office. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly.”
“Good. Now, as friends, off the record, how bad is it?”
“Fairly bad. She shot the guy four times in the back. Name was Nobili. He was going after one of her clients with a pistol. The cops have the pistol, one shot fired, no injuries, also no client. The woman took off running. They’re looking for her, but …”
“You were there, you saw all this?”
“Right, I did. But, Jack … God, I can’t think straight anymore. It went down so fast! One second we’re standing there eating fucking zeppole, the regular happy family at the fair scene, and the next she’s off after this guy who went past us and the next, it’s bang-bang-bang.”
“Okay,” said the district attorney, “try to put it out of your mind. You have Rohbling on Monday, focus on that. I’ll take care of everything else. Oh, yeah: what’s the situation with the press?”
“They’re on it,” said Karp tightly. “Drooling.”
SEVENTEEN
Karp was not popular with the courthouse press, who among themselves referred to him as N.K. Two, which stood for No Komment Karp. He considered that he had absolutely no obligation to inform the press about the progress of anything whatever sub judice. Since, in the nature of things, Karp controlled access to some of the hottest items on the calendars of crime, and since the defense bar was generally loquacious, it was difficult to compose a decent war story with balancing quotes from either side, which is all that distinguishes journalism from P.R. and writing about Elvis sightings for the checkout counter press. This rankled, and so the press was more than delighted to learn that the wife of the chief of the Homicide Bureau, and the prosecutor of the biggest case of the year, had herself just been arrested for killing a man on the street.
There were reporters and a TV crew lying in wait for him on Crosby Street when he came down in the morning. He had expected this and had arranged for a car and driver. It was extremely unpleasant, especially since he had Lucy by the hand. Just as they were about to enter the car, a hard-faced blond woman stuck a tape recorder in Lucy’s face and shouted, “How do you feel about your mom going to jail for murder?”
In a clear voice Lucy replied, in Cantonese, “Demons will suck your brains out through your eyes, pestilential cockroach.”
This ran taped on the CBS morning show (translated with some glee by a Chinese-American anchorperson), and for Karp this took some of the sting out of the succeeding shot of Marlene doing the perp walk out of a van toward her arraignment along with a string of whores.
In Rohbling, the morning was consumed by the next defense witness, Dr. Martin M. Morland, a child psychiatrist who had treated the young Rohbling. Karp objected to the witness on the grounds that Rohbling’s mental condition as a child was irrelevant to the issue of his current sanity, but Peoples cut him off sharply.
“That was harsh,” whispered Terrell Collins.
“Yeah,” Karp replied, “the judge figures since he gave us the big ones on the mistrial and the change of venue, he owes Waley. Waley’ll run wild for a couple of days.”
Morland was a small, cheerful, avuncular man with a monastic fringe of silver hair around his bald head. Waley got him to paint Rohbling as the sickest little boy who ever lived. At present he harbored an all-encompassing obsession with elderly black women, the result of the childhood traumas imposed by Clarice, the nanny. The crazy little boy still lived in the young man and took control, hence the crimes.
At the lunch break, Karp pushed silently past the press gauntlet and went to his office. He knew he needed something to eat, although his appetite was gone, and called down to a local deli. While waiting, he read the papers. The Times had given the shooting story page one below the fold, an unusually high status for a crime story in the Times, but it was an unusual shooting. The reporter referred to Marlene’s colorful past, noted this was the third person she had killed, and quoted the D.A. as saying that the office would offer no special treatment and that Karp had recused himself from any involvement. The News devoted its front page to a big photograph of the dead man on the sidewalk and the headline vigilante “hit” shocks fair.
Karp was eating his pastrami sandwich when Roland Hrcany and Ray Guma walked in and sat down at Karp’s conference table, carrying their own brown bags. They nodded to Karp, and Guma said, “So, Roland, what’s the story with Marlene?”
Karp said, “Guys, I can’t talk about this.”
Guma put on an affronted expression. “Excuse me, I don’t believe I was addressing you. I was talking to my pal Roland, here.”
Roland said, “Yeah, you can’t grab lunch in privacy anymore without somebody sticking their nose in. Anyway, Marlene got R.O.R. She’s probably home by now.”
“That is truly amazing!” exclaimed Guma. He spoke with exaggerated precision, like a rube reading a testimonial for a patent medicine. “She shoots some citizen in the back on a street full of people, and she gets to walk with no bail? What’s the city coming to? Probably it was favoritism, she being a former D.A. and the wife of a big shot.”
“It might look that way, but nothing could be further from the truth,” said Hrcany in the same stilted tone. “First of all, the vic had a violence sheet on him. Second, he had a gun and fired it. Third, we found the vic’s intended target, the lovely Miss Tamara Morno.”
“Remarkable!” said Guma. “How was this feat accomplished?”
“It seems that Dead Harry dragged her into the complaint room this morning, and she wrote out a full statement before the acting bureau chief of the Homicide Bureau-”
“Yourself, that is.”
“Myself. And from this it appeared that Miss M. was indeed threatened with death by the vic, who, even when shot twice by the aforesaid Mrs. Karp, still tired to point his weapon at her. The facts of the case support a finding of justifiable homicide, since Mrs. Karp acted to prevent a violent felony. Of course, the grand jury will still have to render a finding, but …”
“We can rest assured that the grand jurors, guided by yourself, will find likewise with no trouble?”
“I’m confident of it, Raymond,” said Hrcany. “And you know what? It’s such a nice sunny June day that I think we should take our lunches outside to the park.”