Neither had succeeded, of course; the jury was what might have been pulled out of a hat. Freeland had got his college student with collar-length hair and his matronly black woman. Karp thought that his black security guard captain and his black retired schoolteacher would provide a balance, and do the right thing. Freeland was going to play the race thing up, and so hadn’t objected to the two black men. That might have been a mistake, Karp thought. But he only had to hit once.
Freeland was well into his peroration. “… and I think, I know, you will conclude that Hosie Russell’s only crime was being one of society’s forgotten men. He is as much a victim as Susan Weiner, a victim of the desire of the police and the prosecution to find a scapegoat that would get the press off their backs. But the real killer of Susan Weiner still walks free. If you convict the wrong man, you will be denying that young woman justice. If you listen to the prosecution’s illogical tale of concocted evidence and mistaken, so-called, witnesses, if you give it a moment’s credence, then you will be compounding injustice and denying justice forever to the victim of this horrible crime. Thank you very much.”
Karp stood up. The crutches cramped his style. He liked to move forcefully from evidence table to witness stand to jury box during a trial, confident that his size and athletic movements would rivet attention and keep the duller jurors awake.
He called the first witness, a civil engineer. This was a departure from the usual practice. Since it was a legal necessity to show that a murder had in fact taken place in New York County, the early witnesses were generally those who could establish that fact-the medical examiner and other forensic experts. But Karp wanted first to establish the scene of Russell’s capture firmly in the jury’s mind from the outset, because the only reasonable defense was that the man found in the basement under the boiler was not the man whom the crowd had chased from the murder scene and who had briefly invaded the apartment of Jerry Shelton.
He led the engineer, a thin, scholarly man with wire glasses, through the layout of the apartment complex at 58 Barrow and introduced as an exhibit a large chart showing the building’s floor plans. Freeland peppered him with meaningless objections, all of which were overruled. Freeland still hadn’t caught on that Judge Martino liked dispatch and a thorough understanding of how trials got done in the big city.
Freeland’s questions on cross were, of course, directed at establishing reasonable routes of escape for the putative other man. He chose the one Karp had expected: the skylight at the top of the stairs.
Freeland asked, “Now, sir, there is a skylight at the top of the stairs there, leading to the roof, is there not?”
The engineer confirmed this and pointed it out on the exhibit when asked. He agreed that once on the roof there were a half-dozen routes down to the street or across other rooftops to other streets.
Then he asked whether a man could get up out of the skylight, and Karp snapped an objection, rising briefly on his good foot. Calls for a conclusion based upon speculation. Sustained.
The next witness was the police photographer-routine. The photographs of the murder site and the Barrow Street complex, then the knife were duly admitted into evidence. The next witness was Ray Thornby, the arresting officer. But it was by then four-fifteen, and Judge Martino adjourned for the day.
Not a bad start, Karp thought as he packed up his papers. He walked up the aisle and out of the courtroom, and suddenly there was The Sister, in voluminous black, staring at him. He tried a false smile and started to say something, but she turned away and left the courtroom. He felt unaccountably chilled. For some odd reason, he felt that The Sister was not on his side.
Harry Bello walked into the Izmir Restaurant from the kitchen, in the slack hour right after lunch, flashing his badge at the astounded and undoubtedly illegal scullions. He found Aziz Nassif, the cousin, punching away at an adding machine in a small storeroom-cum-office behind the main dining area.
Bello showed his shield. Nassif frowned. He was a stocky, strong-looking man of thirty-odd with a thick head of hair and a brush mustache. He said, “I got the door clear and the sprinkler fixed. What you bothering me again?” He had a guttural accent, quite unlike that of the elegant Mr. Kilic at the United Nations.
“I’m not from the building department, Mr. Nassif. I’m investigating a murder.” A little bombshell, but there was no dramatic reaction. Nassif paused and asked, “What murder?”
“Mehmet Ersoy. Sunday, March 13, this year.”
Nassif looked sorrowful and wagged his head. “I talked already with police. Then.”
“You knew the victim?”
“A customer. Very good, come here all the time. Very sad thing.”
“Yeah. He was here on the morning he was shot, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. Almost every day have breakfast here.” Nassif nodded vigorously to affirm this information. A young waiter came into the office on an errand. Nassif turned on him, his face contorting briefly, and snapped, “Çek arabaru!” The boy gaped and scuttled out.
“And where were you when the shooting took place, Mr. Nassif?” Harry continued as if nothing had happened.
“Where I was? Here. In restaurant.”
“All morning?”
“Yes, all. All day.” Harry stared into the man’s face, which remained blank and unrevealing.
“While you were here with Ersoy in the restaurant, did he say anything to you? Anything that would have suggested he was in danger?”
“No. Just hello, how are you. Like this. Is just customer.”
“Uh-huh.” Harry gestured broadly and said, “This is a nice restaurant. You own it?”
“Yes.”
“Expensive. East Side, nice neighborhood. Do you mind if I ask what you paid?”
Nassif opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and said, “Two hundred thousand.”
Harry registered surprise. “Whew! That’s a pile. Where’d you get the money? A loan?”
“I save.”
“You save. Good. Well, thanks for your help, Mr. Nassif.” He produced a card. “You think of anything else the victim said or did, give me a call.”
Nassif took the card mutely and looked at it without apparent interest. Harry paused at the door and said, “By the way, did Mr. Ersoy ever mention to you that he was running an art-forging operation?”
Blankness remained. A mute shrug, a shake of the head.
“No? Okay, thanks again for your help.”
Harry went out into the street. It was muggy late August weather. In Bed-Stuy, where he used to work, and around the less desirable addresses in Manhattan, blood would be flowing. Harry didn’t miss it much. He walked across the street and lounged in a shady doorway.
He wore a shabby gray seersucker suit, a white shirt and black and tan tie, and heavy, rubber-soled black cop shoes. He stayed still for twenty minutes. Harry was good at staying still. Sometimes, off-duty, he would just zone out, perfectly aware of everything but feeling no need to stir, a man literally with nothing to do. In his doorway he was as invisible as a leopard in an acacia tree.
Here he waited for an hour or so, to see what Nassif would do with the little zinger that he had just received. Nassif did nothing. No panicked race out the door, looking over his shoulder, no hurried arrival of the cousin to consult. Nassif was either innocent or cool, Harry didn’t know which.
Karp hobbled back to his office from the courtroom, looking forward to a nice cool Coke and a lie-down. As soon as he entered the secretarial bay, however, Connie Trask informed him that he was not about to get it.
“He wants you,” she said with that upward tilt of the eyes and head that identified the He Who Wanted.
Karp sagged, let out a breath, dropped his fat folder on Trask’s desk, pivoted on his crutches, and went back out the door.