“How do you mean?”
“Focus on the psychology. What ‘made’ him do it. It’s the sly way into the irresistible-impulse defense.”
“But there isn’t an irresistible-impulse defense, not in this state anyway,” Collins objected.
“Not legally, but it’s there, in the jury’s mind. Look, what’s his real game plan, Waley? The D. got a trauma so overwhelming that he couldn’t help going after black old women. Hence the witness testifying to the specific trauma, an eyewitness to the supposedly exculpatory events. Now, this is horse-shit legally. The law doesn’t care what happened to Rohbling back then. It doesn’t care what his mental state was back then or what it was at any moment aside from the moment when he committed the crime. But the jury does. It’s like looking at clouds. Look, there’s a horsy, there’s a bunny! Juries like vivid stories, and irresistible impulse is the story Waley’s selling, although he’ll never use the phrase out loud. It’s great too, because everyone’s experienced a moment of blinding rage, a time when they thought about doing something really horrible. Waley’s saying, imagine not being able to resist that. What we have to do, on the other hand, is focus on the crime-was he crazy at that moment? A hard sell, which is why the insanity defense is fucked. Ordinarily, I mean.”
“Well, you took the starch out of al-Barka’s part of it, anyway. You discredited him-he just came for a soapbox and for money. And the D. wasn’t crazy as a kid.”
“Yeah, but it was a nice-to-have for him and a had-to-win for us, as bad as we’re doing. He’s got the big mo right now.” Karp sipped the dregs of cold coffee in his cup and made a face. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got to go home.”
“Me too,” said Collins. “Good day, though.”
“Fair day.” Karp gave his colleague a sharp look and went on, “We’re not going to win this one, I hope you’re prepared for that.”
With an uncertain look Collins said, “What do you mean, we’re not going to win?”
“Just that. We’re fighting for a hanger here and a rematch.”
“You’re joking! I mean, we’re not doing that bad.”
“No, just bad enough. I don’t know how many times I’ve said it in bureau meetings, and here’s the practical demonstration. A murder prosecution has to be as perfect as human beings can make anything. And I wasn’t. But you will be, ace.”
“Me?”
“Uh-huh. When we retry this fucker, if we get the chance, it’ll be all yours. Sit down, Terry, you’re turning white.”
Collins laughed explosively, a release of energy, but he did not appear to be amused.
“What did you think,” said Karp benignly, “that I was going to repeat? You know the difference between a man and a rat? If you put a rat in a maze and every time he turns to the right you shock the shit out of him, after a while he starts turning left. I aspire to rathood in my old age. I learned my lesson: the bureau chief can’t do major trials, or maybe this bureau chief with a wife and three kids can’t. Yeah, Connie … what?”
The secretary had burst into the office without her usual brief knock, her face pulled into deep grooves by concern. She said,” Butch, is Marlene out on the Island, at some tennis tournament?”
Karp had to think. “Yeah, she is. Why? What happened?”
“Jerry O’Bannion from Part 41 just called and said he was watching TV in the court officers’ coffee room and they had a news flash. Some maniac attacked a tennis player. They caught him, but they said he cut up some security people, and Jerry thought they said one of them was Marlene. He said he thought he saw her on the TV with-” She stopped, her voice breaking.
“What? With what?” Karp demanded.
“With blood all over her.”
Marlene was covered with blood-her hair was matted with it on one side, and it had granulated in the creases of her neck. She had wiped her face with her hand so she could see, but her blue blazer and shirt and bra were soaked through with blood, heavy, sticky, congealing gore, pulling at her skin in the most disgusting manner. Her nose filled with the reek of it, that nasty butcher-shop stink.
Her head hurt too. When the blow hit her, she thought for a moment that it was Stolz’s machete, and that her skull was split and that she was going to die. She fell into that dark, reverberating place where you go in the first seconds after a physical trauma, and she thought briefly, with sadness, of Lucy, and how she would grow up without a mother, and then she felt a weight crushing her into the pavement. She could hardly breathe, but this feeling itself gave her some confidence that she was not in fact lying on the ground with her brains indecently exposed.
Suddenly, the weight was off her. She raised her head, then went up on her elbow. There was grit in her eye, and she started to rub it out. She was aware of grunts and a heaving mass a few inches from her face, and the sound of screams and running footsteps, and someone was shouting, “Get her away! Get her away!”
And then she heard a peculiar bubbling, whistling sound that she had never heard before and never wanted to hear again, and instantly her face and the upper part of her body were covered in hot liquid. She was blind. A second or two later Harry was at her side. He had scooped her up, and before she could fully catch her breath, she was in the ambulance that had been parked in the lot for the tournament, and rolling at speed with its siren screaming.
Now she was in a little screened-off area of the emergency room of Southampton Community Hospital. A doctor had come in to see her, had found that there was nothing seriously wrong, had given her two Darvon and left her alone. Marlene’s mind was more or less frozen solid. She would have sat in that cheap plastic chair until it was time for her to be moved to the geriatric ward, or so she thought.
Then Harry Bello came in carrying a Styrofoam cup. He handed it to her. She drank the warm liquid and found that it was a scant ounce of coffee on top of what tasted like John Jameson’s.
“Oh, God, Harry, thank you!” she sighed. “This will earn you three hundred years’ remission in purgatory.”
“I need it. How do you feel?”
“Oh, I bet I feel a lot better than I look, and I feel like shit,” she said. They both smiled. She drank some more and felt humanity flooding back into her. “How’s Wolfe?”
“Cut. His arms’re cut, his chest. Lots of stitches but nothing seriously wrong.”
“That’s terrific! And … I presume Herr Stolz is no longer with us?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Harry. “I think you got the whole five quarts.”
“Did you see it go down? It’s still a blur to me.”
“Yeah, more or less. The whole thing took five seconds. Stolz charged, waving that machete. By the way, he’d been working there three months. Phony name. He really was a groundskeeper, in Germany. Fucking Griffin-”
“Forget it, Harry. Then what?”
“Okay, as soon as he made his move, Dane picked up Speyr and started running with her toward the car. It was incredible. He practically tucked her under his arm, like he was going for a first down. Wolfe knocked you out of the way with his forearm and climbed all over you to get to Stolz. Fucker missed his first shot, and then came backhand and cut Wolfe up, and then Wolfe grabbed his arm and popped him one in the face, but he tripped over you and dragged the both of them down on top of you. Then they rolled off and wrestled for the thing, and Stolz got his throat cut. Wolfe can’t remember doing it.”
Marlene’s beeper went off. “Oh, Christ, that’s my husband,” she moaned.
“The fucking blade was sharp enough to shave with,” Harry finished.
Karp calmed down appreciably when he understood that she was not hurt. Then he got mad.
“I can’t stand this, Marlene.”
“I know.”
“I love you!”
“I know. I love you too, but it’s not enough.”