“So why’re you doin’ it, then?”
Karp shifted his shoulders and settled his bad leg more comfortably. “I don’t know-I’m stuck here. You’re sure as hell stuck here. I could go watch TV at the guard station, but I’d have to watch what they were watching, which I’ve done already. You could finish mopping and go back to your cell, but you probably don’t find that much of a thrill anymore. Or we could just sit here and shoot the shit for a while. No big thing.”
“They come for me, I don’t get back there in a little.”
“No problem. I know the captain. I’ll cover it. No, the thing is, I’m curious. I must’ve put ten thousand guys like you in jail, and I never spent any time talking with them-just enough to make the case. And they sure as shit didn’t want to talk to me.”
Russell’s face stiffened, and he threw the butt of his cigarette hissing into a damp corner of the locker room. “Well, fuck your ‘curious’! I ain’t no fuckin’ museum.”
Karp nodded and extended his lower lip in the have-it-your-way expression, finished tying his sneaker, got his crutches under his armpits, and stood up. “In that case, see you in court, Hosie,” he said amiably, and carried himself, careful of the wet patches, out the door.
The same evening, Marlene, entering her shadowy loft, was greeted by a scene of touching, if unconventional, domesticity. Harry Bello was lying asleep on the red sofa, and his goddaughter was sleeping facedown on his chest, her face resting on his neck and her little butt stuck up in the air.
Actually, she observed, coming nearer, Harry was not sleeping at all, or perhaps he had awakened, instantly and without motion, just as she entered. She could see tiny glints of the pale evening glow from the skylight reflected from his eyes.
Without a word Marlene scooped up her daughter and put her in her crib. When she returned, Harry was up, standing and rolling his shoulders to release the kinks. There was a damp patch of baby drool around his collar. He walked over to the rack above the stove that held Marlene’s pans and utensils and retrieved his revolver, which he had hung there to keep it away from Lucy’s tiny trigger fingers.
“World’s safest baby-sitter,” said Marlene. “Thanks, Harry. A buck fifty an hour all right?”
Harry made a hmmp and said, “Do any good?”
Marlene told him the good they’d done at Kerbussyan’s.
Harry didn’t comment on this information but said, “I saw our guy, that Duane, today.”
“Yeah? Where?”
“Right here, when I brought the kid home. He was sitting on his bike, corner of Crosby and Broome. I called it in, but he took off before the blue-and-white got here. I wasn’t gonna chase him with Lucy.”
“She would’ve been thrilled, probably. The youngest assist on a collar in NYPD history. She could’ve whined at him until he gave it up.”
Harry was not amused. “It’s you. He’s checking you out for the other one.”
Marlene did not want to hear this. In general, prosecutors are, oddly enough, the safest of the participants in criminal justice. Witnesses get killed, cops get killed, mutts shoot their own lawyers, occasionally somebody goes after a judge, but the D.A.’s don’t seem to attract much violence. It is as if the nature of the job-that D.A.’s are by profession prosecutors-prevents, by a sort of vaccination, the violently inclined from seeing them as maliciously inspired, and fit subjects for vengeance.
On the other hand, Marlene had been blown up (if mistakenly) and kidnapped, and Karp had been shot, although if the truth be told, they had been asking for it by straying from the safety of jurisprudence and into direct contact with the criminals in question on the street.
She said, “You don’t know that, Harry. He could live in the neighborhood. Tribeca, SoHo-good places to get lost.”
“I’m staying,” said Harry.
Marlene was about to object, reflexively, but stopped herself. It was actually a terrific idea-good for Harry, good for her and the baby. And he had a car.
She made up a bed for him in the gym, on a stack of exercise pads, good for the lower spine. As she was about to leave him, he said, offhand, “I forgot to tell you. Our Turk’s got a cousin.”
“Which Turk, the vic?”
“No, the one with the high life. Djelal.”
“So? He has a cousin, what about him?”
“Guy runs a restaurant on East Forty-six. Vic ate there all the time. Ate there the day he died. The Izmir.”
“And?”
“Guy used to manage it, but he bought the place three months ago. Paid cash. Nobody I talked to could figure out where he got the money.”
Marlene grinned nastily. “Yeah, and he doesn’t work for the U.N.”
14
A terrible crime has been committed,” said Milton Freeland, looking at the jury, stoking the sincerity. “We all feel for Susan Weiner and her family. How can such things happen in broad daylight? we ask ourselves. We all want justice for Susan Weiner.”
Do we? thought Karp. He looked sideways at Hosie Russell, sitting at the adjoining table. He looked a lot better than he had in the harsh light of the locker room. He was neatly dressed in a suit and tie and wearing the glasses. Karp wondered whether their lenses were really ground to a prescription or if Freeland kept a stack of odd peepers in his desk for show.
Karp had thought that Freeland would go the emotional route. Karp had not done so in his own opening. He never did. The opening for the prosecution should be dry, like a table of contents: first I say what I’m gonna say; then I say it; then I say what I just said. You wanted the impression of a carefully woven, mutually supporting net of facts; leave the emotion to the defense. Good advice, given ten years ago by an old homicide D.A. who had helped train Karp.
Freeland was pacing slowly before the jury, drawing out the words, as if each one had popped that instant from the oven of his warm heart. “… yes, a young woman was brutally murdered-there’s no doubt about that. And the state will try to show that my client, Mr. Russell, is that murderer.
“Indeed, they must show it, beyond a reasonable doubt; that is Mr. Karp’s job. It is his show. I could sit here sleeping during the trial, and so could Mr. Russell, and it would not matter. My client is innocent until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt. That is what the prosecution must do. But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that proof will be impossible if you are the reasonable and decent people I know you to be. Because Mr. Russell is innocent of this dreadful crime.
“He stands accused today for one reason and one reason only-he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He fell victim to the fervid desire of the police to find a culprit, any culprit for this spectacular and highly publicized murder in the shortest possible time.
“Mr. Russell was ideal for this purpose. He is poor. He is homeless. He has severe emotional problems. And he is black.”
As Freeland said this, Karp knew, he would be looking directly and intently into the eyes of the three black members of the jury. Karp thought back to the voir dire. The jury selection had taken five days, probably longer than the trial itself would take. Karp thought the whole thing was a waste of time nine times out of ten, but the voir dire was dear to lawyers, especially defense lawyers, who almost always believed that they had a mystical ability to pick an acquitting jury. Also, it was to the defense’s advantage to drag the thing out as long as possible, especially in a case that depended as much as this one did on the testimony of witnesses.
Reasonable doubt-Freeland had to cultivate it like a gardener. All he needed to win was one tender green shoot, and time was the best fertilizer. What? You mean to tell us that you can remember a face you saw once, five weeks or ten weeks, or eight months ago? So Freeland had used all his peremptory challenges to fill the jury with people who might be swayed by the idea that the cops had dragged in the first available brother off the street, and Karp, of course, had tried for a group of solid taxpayers.