The driver let Karp off at the Leonard Street side of the Criminal Courts, where there was a direct elevator to the D.A.’s office and he didn’t have to negotiate any steps.
She got out of the car and hugged him tight.
“What’s this about?”
“I miss you, you bum. We have to figure out some way of getting you home.”
“How about moving to an elevator building?”
“I mean besides that. I don’t think a respectable married lady should have to whip off a quickie in her husband’s office after hours, and then have to go pick up her baby, absolutely oozing, and of course, everybody knows. I might as well be having an affair.”
“You only did that once. The quickie.”
“Yeah, once was enough. I mean seriously. This sucks!”
“We’ll always have Paris. Shweetheart”
“Idiot!” She reentered the car with a slam, and it pulled away.
Back in his office, Karp took off his jacket and tie and spent a pleasant ten minutes chasing down itches under his cast with a long bamboo back scratcher. Then he spotted a folded sheet of paper stuck in the dial of his phone. A message from Roland-call him at home, important. He called.
“What’s happening, Roland?”
“Lots. Where were you?”
“We were out seeing Kerbussyan. Interesting stuff.”
“Oh, yeah? Like what?”
“The vic was selling him art objects. That’s where the money in the safe-deposit box came from. He’d just made a payment of a million on a fancy statue, a holy object of some kind-worth thirty mil apparently.”
“Ersoy double-crossed him and he had him aced,” said Hrcany confidently.
“Not according to Mr. K. He claims the deal never went down.”
“I bet,” said Roland, a sneer in his tone. “And speaking of bets, kiss yours good-bye, sucker. Tomasian admitted the whole thing.”
Karp’s stomach roiled, and bile filled his throat.
“What?!”
“Yeah, today. His roomie in the Tombs gave him up. A check kiter named Dave Medford. Came forward like a good citizen, contacted Frangi, and made a statement.”
“And you bought it?” Karp said, incredulous.
“Yeah. Why shouldn’t I buy it?”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Roland! The guy denies everything for months, in jail, and then all of a sudden unburdens to a cell mate? What do you think this Tomasian guy is, a mugger with a sheet? Have you got any corroboration for this guy? Anybody else who heard Tomasian spill his guts? Or any information that wasn’t in the papers?”
Roland laughed. “I’m hearing a sore loser.”
Karp struggled for a moment with his growing temper.
“Roland, tell me I shouldn’t be thinking what I’m thinking right now. Just tell me!”
“What, you think it’s a plant?” Roland yelled over the phone. “I planted Medford? I set up phony testimony?”
Karp thought, and it made a sick sweat break out on his forehead and run down his sides beneath his arms. What he thought was that he could not really believe that Roland Hrcany had conspired to suborn perjury, to concoct a fake jailhouse witness. Both he and Roland had trained in Francis P. Garrahy’s hard school, a school that had turned out tough but straight prosecutors for nearly thirty years. Roland’s straightness was perhaps a little wavy on the edges, but if he was truly bent, then the whole business, everything Karp believed in, was meaningless.
Karp swallowed and said, “No, Roland, I wasn’t accusing you of anything, or even implying. It just seemed, um, overly convenient. This Medford, there’s no deal with him, is there?”
“I didn’t make any deal. Shit, of course when he goes up, his counsel’s gonna tell the court the mutt did a good deed, maybe get him some slack on sentencing, but what else is new? That’s how it works in snitch land.”
Which was true. Karp’s head felt full of grout; he was void of any sensible ideas, but he didn’t think that this lapse required him to listen to Roland’s crowing. He cut short the conversation, hung up, and called a local place for a pizza and a Pepsi and a pack of Camel filters. The guard at the main desk called when it arrived, and he hobbled down to get it.
Fed, he crutched himself slowly through the passageway to the Tombs, to wash the day’s grit off his body. In the steaming shower, he heard the clanking sounds of a man with a mop and steel bucket in the locker room, and when he emerged he saw, as he had expected, that it was Hosie Russell.
Russell looked at the pack of Camels when Karp proferred them, then at Karp, suspicion in his eyes. But he took the pack and opened it and lit one up, drawing gratefully at the smoke.
“What you want with me?” Russell said after a few deep puffs.
It was a good question, but one that Karp could not easily answer. At least he could not give the real answer, which was that he had come to feel, over the past weeks of confinement and isolation, that he and Russell were fellow prisoners.
He shrugged and said, “I appreciate you being around. If I fell or lost my crutch like last time, I’d have to lie on wet tile until the shift changed. It wouldn’t be much fun.”
Russell nodded and walked back to his bucket. He swished the mop with practiced ease while Karp clumsily pulled on his clothes. Then Russell stopped and looked carefully at Karp. “I know you,” he said.
Karp, surprised, smiled and said, “Yeah, sure you do. I’m prosecuting your case.”
“Naw, not that. I mean from somewheres else.” He thought for a few seconds, his eyes narrowed, his mouth slack. Then he smiled, “Yeah! You that ball player! You played for the Hustlers, in the NBA. Last year. I saw that game you shot that sixty-footer, the Celtics.”
“Yeah, that. It was a fluke shot.”
“Yeah, but it went the fuck in. That how you bust your leg, playin’ ball?”
“In a way. I fucked it up in college ball. Then when I played pro for that little while, it went bad on me.”
“I played me some ball,” said Russell, smiling. “I played with the Helicopter, that Knowings. Sixty-two, back then, sixty-three. You ever see that man play?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact. I guarded him in Rucker ball once. Summer of sixty-three, I think. Just before I hurt my knee.”
“You guarded the Helicopter? How’d you do?”
Karp laughed. “Not too good. I think he scored about forty off me. Guy got a three-second whistle once, he was in the air all the time.”
Russell laughed too and sat down on the bench across from Karp. “Shit, so you played Rucker League, huh? I pro’lly played you a time or two.”
“It’s possible, if you were any good.”
“I could jump over your head, man! I could cut you up.” He stood up abruptly and did a little basketball dance, miming the ball-fake, shift, pump fake, jump, release.
“You convinced me,” said Karp. “Anyway, those days are gone forever. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to walk right on this piece of junk, much less play ball.”
“Yeah, but at least you got a shot in the pros. How the fuck you do that, old as you are?”
“It’s a long story,” said Karp. “How’d you get into the mugging business?”
Russell shot him a dark look, then relaxed. “How? Well, first I didn’t get into fuckin’ Harvard, then my daddy lost his millions in the stock market. How the fuck you think, man? Just scufflin’, tryin’ to get by. Like everybody else up in the ghet-to.”
“Not everybody. It was everybody, this place’d be the size of the Chrysler Building.”
“Hey, you don’t know what you talkin’ about, white man,” snapped Russell, his voice rising.
“You’re probably right,” said Karp equably. “So tell me. What’s it like? The mugging business.”
“Why the fuck you care? You tryin’ somethin’?”
“No. There’s nothing I have to try. I got my case against you, and I think it’s a good one, and next week I’m going to prosecute it and try to send you away for twenty-five. I can’t talk to you about the case. Nothing that passes between us can come out in court. In fact, if your counsel knew I was sitting here talking to you, he’d have a shit fit.”