Karp stepped forward. “Uh, Sergeant, I think there’s been a mistake.”
“Who’re you?”
“My name’s Karp. I’m a DA. Look, I think what we’ve got here is an accidental explosion of some fireworks.” Karp held up a large cardboard tube on which still fluttered some colorful tissue paper printed with Chinese characters. The sergeant swore. “Alright, but what’s going on in there?” He gestured to Guma’s office. “It sounds like a broad getting raped by a wild pig.”
Karp said, “You could be right, Sarge. Let’s check it out.”
The two men went over to Guma’s door. Hrcany and a dozen or so spectators followed and crowded around. Meanwhile, one of the SWAT officers had liberated the Onion’s fortress. Miss Kimple was being ministered to on the office couch by another secretary. The Onion and Wharton had come out into the hallway, both spattered with blood from the Onion’s nose. The Onion still held a red-sodden handkerchief to his face and leaned on Wharton for support.
“Holy shit,” said Hrcany, noticing them. “This looks like the relief of Khe Sanh. Butch, what the fuck …”
“Wait, wait,” said Karp, “here comes the payoff.”
The SWAT sergeant rattled the knob to Guma’s door. It was locked. The shouts from inside ceased. “Open up!” shouted the sergeant. More silence. The SWAT man then knocked the rest of the glass out of the door with the butt of his shotgun, reached in, and released the lock. The door swung open and the spectators leaned forward and peered through the smoke still rushing out through the doorway.
Guma was standing in the middle of the small room. He held up his pants with his left hand and with his right held the arm of a very large, very angry, very blonde, and very naked woman. The surface of his desk was cleared of everything except a green blotter and a gooseneck lamp. Smoke still poured from the waste can near the desk. A black lace brassiere hung from the lamp. When the woman saw the crowd she cried out something incomprehensible and slapped Guma’s face with her free hand. She broke free, snatched various items of clothing off the floor, and, clutching them to her middle, bent over double to shoot out through the doorway and down the hall before anyone could stop her. The last part of her they saw was a set of generous white buttocks twinkling away through the swirling smoke.
Karp spoke first. “Sergeant, this is obviously not a job for the SWAT team.”
The sergeant laughed. “I guess you could say that. But what’ll I do about my report? I gotta say something.”
“Just say it was … a case of DHE, that’s detonative hysterical ecdysiasm.”
“What?”
“Here, I’ll write it down for you. Detonative hysterical ecdysiasm is an uncontrollable desire to undress in front of lawyers while setting off fireworks. We have two or three cases of it every week.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure, Sarge,” said Hrcany. “We usually handle it quietly, but this was worse than usual. That poor woman! I’ll see that she gets the appropriate treatment.”
The sergeant appeared satisfied with this explanation. He had once worked in the East Village and had heard a hundred stranger stories. He gathered his commandos together and left. The crowd began to disperse; it was after five and most of them were on their way home anyway. Karp and Hrcany went into Guma’s office. Guma was straightening his clothes.
“OK, Mad Dog, spill!” said Karp.
“Holy shit, Karp, what the fuck am I going to do about this office?”
“More to the point, what are you going to do about the Onion?” said Hrcany.
“He won’t do shit,” said Karp. “Corncob Wharton will convince him to keep it quiet because he won’t want it known that he called out the SWAT for some firecrackers. It might prejudice his machismo, and the Onion won’t want the world to know he was cold-cocked by his secretary.”
In fact, they could hear the Onion bellowing in the corridor, a bellow transmuted by the tissue jammed into his nostrils: “I wonk to know the meanbing of this! What is gonking ong here?” They also heard Wharton talking rapidly to him and then the closing of the Onion’s office door.
“See?” said Karp. “OK, Guma, what is gonking on here? Who was that bimbo?”
Guma collapsed in his swivel chair and sighed deeply. “That was no bimbo, that was my witness, Christa Spirotekas. She’s a Greek, runs a bar on Eighth Avenue. I just nailed some guy who burgled her place and she wanted to show her appreciation. So I let her. I sat in my chair smoking a cigar and she did the horniest strip act I ever saw in my life. Then she sat on my lap and started torquing my tool. What could I do?”
“What, indeed?” said Hrcany.
“So she cleared off the desk-”
“Except for the blotter.”
“-except for the blotter and lay down on her back, and I dropped my drawers and got to work. Mama mia! What a piece of ass! Did you catch those mazoomas?”
Karp said, “I can see it coming.”
“Right. I tossed my cigar into the shit can. I guess I forgot that’s where I stashed my fireworks.”
“And the rest is history,” said Hrcany. “One thing, Goom, since me and Karp saved your butt with our quick thinking, I figure you owe us something.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Guma suspiciously. “Like what?”
“Goom,” said Hrcany, “I don’t know what Karp wants, but I want that blotter. I’m going to have it framed.”
“Terrific, you can have it.”
Karp went to the door. “Guys, it’s been real, but I gotta go.”
“Stay, Butch, we’ll go for beer and pizza. You’re not gonna work now, are you?”
“Yeah, Goom, I got to clear up some stuff.”
Karp went directly to his cubicle and dumped the contents of his desk drawers into a waste basket and stuffed all his books and papers into his briefcase. He went out into the hall, found a janitorial cart and took a couple of brown plastic trash bags. These he filled with the rest of his things and the briefcase. Then, burdened like a pack mule, he staggered to the elevator and rode it up to the sixth floor.
He went directly to Joe Lerner’s office. The secretary had gone home, but he knew Lerner would be there. The man was famous for working late. He was also famous for not tolerating bureaucratic bullshit. Twenty minutes later Karp was unpacking his stuff in a tiny office-tiny, but with a real door and walls that reached to the ceiling. He had just hung up his Polish picture, when Lerner came in with a fat sheaf of papers and dropped them on the desk.
“What’s that?” asked Karp.
“Coram nobis petitions.”
“Oh, crap.” Coram nobis are postconviction appeals filed by people in prison demanding retrial on the grounds that a witness had changed testimony or that evidence had been illegally seized. Answering them is a boring, thankless, endless, and necessary task-and the job was always given to the lowest scullion in the bureau’s kitchen, which at this point, was Karp.
“You’ll love it,” said Lerner. “No, really, I know you’re a hotshot, but Homicide is a slightly different league than what you’ve been doing. You’ll see. You’ll come to the meetings, go on call, see the way we do things. Then, after a while, they’ll let you second-seat on a case. Unless they stop killing each other out there, you’ll be up to your ass soon enough.”
Karp gestured around. “No, it’s OK. I like the office. Thanks.”
“Yeah, it used to be a supply closet in the old days. When it gets damp, you can still smell the Lysol. By the way, what was all that commotion downstairs a little while ago?”
“Nothing much,” said Karp. “One of the DAs was fucking a witness on his desk and set off a bunch of fireworks.”
“Oh,” said Lerner. “The usual.”
Chapter 8
Two weeks later, Karp was still in the little office, answering coram nobis petitions. It used to be somebody got caught, and convicted, they went to prison and, mostly, stayed there for the time they were sentenced, or until paroled. “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” the cons said, and in a weird way, they were proud of it. But now, as Karp realized more and more, wading through the piles of petitions, that subtle agreement between the bad guys and the good guys had entirely vanished. Although very few of the thousands of felons in New York City were ever caught, and although few of those few were ever sentenced to long stretches in prison, and although it was absurdly easy to cop a plea to a lesser offense, the small number of people actually sentenced for killing somebody seemed to be spending their entire lives behind bars looking for legal technicalities that would free them.