As the meeting wore along toward noon, Karp noticed that the questions were both less numerous and less sharp. The aging heroes wanted their lunches. Karp realized he was seeing the early stages of what was already rampant in the lower reaches of the system. The house Garrahy had built was rock-solid when each bureau member was handling ten or fifteen cases. Now the caseload was closer to forty. Dry rot was creeping in and the foundations were cracking. Karp knew in his heart he had done as well as he had today because he had only one case to prepare. Could he do the same with forty? Probably not. He thought of what had just happened to Courtney and shuddered. Even worse, he realized that being picked at the beginning of a meeting insured tougher questioning. For him it had been an advantage, since it gave him the chance to show off his brilliant prep. For Courtney, struggling with dozens of cases, it had been a disaster. He felt again the same disquieting sense that he was being manipulated.
That afternoon, around two, Conlin summoned Karp to his office. When Karp knocked and stuck his head in the door Conlin was on the phone, but he waved Karp in and motioned him to take a seat on the couch. Conlin was reclining in his gray-green leather judge’s chair, in shirt-sleeves and unbuttoned pinstripe vest. Karp waited while his boss poured charm over the line, punctuated by hearty laughs.
He hung up and turned his chair around to face Karp.
“The county chairman. An asshole, but he’s our asshole.” He smiled deprecatingly. “Politics … unfortunately, part of the job. Butch, I just wanted to tell you personally what a fine job I think you did on the Marchione thing. This is an important case to me, to the bureau, and while I don’t mind telling you that I was a little worried when Joe told me he was handing the prep over to you, I have to say that his confidence was well-placed.”
Karp mumbled a thank-you and waited for the other shoe. Bureau chiefs in Homicide did not call junior DA’s in for personal congratulations on case preps.
Conlin lifted a La Corona from a walnut humidor on his desk and lit it as he spoke. “You know, I feel that development of young prosecutors is one of the most important things we have to do here. It’s good for the bureau and it’s good for them. Take a young tiger with a good head, a couple three years in Homicide, hell, there’s no limit to where a man like that could go. Tell me, do you know anything about politics?”
“Not much. I was president of my senior class in college. Does that count?”
“Sure it does, sure it does. Stanford, right?”
“Um, Berkeley, actually.”
“Right, well, there’s an election year coming up. You have any thoughts about that?”
“Nationally? I don’t know. With Nixon in there the Republicans …”
“No, not the national bullshit. I mean here. The DA’s office.”
“The DA’s office?” Karp shrugged. “What’s to think? Mr. Garrahy will run and be elected by ninety-eight percent of the vote, as usual.”
Conlin regarded the younger man inquiringly through a cloud of cigar smoke. “He’s seventy-three. Have you looked at him lately?”
Karp remembered the day at the Bullets’ game and what he had seen, and what he had said to Guma and what Guma had answered.
“Yeah, but somehow it’s hard to think of the New York District Attorney’s Office without the … well, without the DA. Are you suggesting he might not run?”
Conlin leaned back in the judge’s chair and blew a stream of smoke at his high ceiling. “He’s been making noises in that direction. The question is, who replaces him if he decides to retire?”
Karp waited. This was obviously the other shoe. Conlin resumed.
“There’s what’s-his-name, Bill Vierick in the Mayor’s Office: lawyer, very big with the liberals; never argued a criminal case as far as I know, but ran the Mayor’s Task Force on Criminal Justice. I know he’d like to be DA. Like JFK said about Bobby when he made him attorney general, give him a little legal training before he goes into private practice.
“Then we have Bloom over in the Southern District. Good political connections on the state level, hard charger, ambitious as sin. Rich fucker, too. On the other hand, he comes on like a nun. Our party leaders don’t like that, so that could be trouble for Mister Sanford L. Bloom.”
“OK, who else …?” Conlin mused, as if to no one in particular.
My cue, thought Karp. “There’s you,” he said. And it was true. Jack Conlin would make a fine DA, but Karp could not help resenting the manipulation.
Conlin pursed his lips and drew on his cigar, as if this notion had never occurred to him before. Then he laughed, a short bark. “I guess you do know something about politics, Butch. OK, let me cut out the blarney. I want to be the DA. But not at Phil Garrahy’s expense, and not at the expense of splitting the Party vote. I happen to know Vierick has already organized a committee and that the mayor will support him, whether Garrahy runs or not.”
“What! Garrahy will blow his doors off. Who gives a damn who the mayor endorses for DA? The only endorsement worth squat in an open DA race would be the one from Francis P. Garrahy himself.”
“Assuming he doesn’t run, in which case I can’t see him endorsing anyone but me.”
Karp did not like the way the conversation was going. He did not care to examine that closely what went on under the hood in the DA’s office. As long as it let him get on with putting bad guys in jail, he was content to let others get greasy hands. He was also a little confused about what Conlin wanted of him.
“Yeah, but he is going to run, isn’t he? I mean, nobody is telling him not to, right?”
“Of course not. I’ve been asking him to declare as a candidate at every bureau chief meeting for the past six months. No, he’s just being cagey. I think he’s feeling his age and wants everybody to tell him he’s still the man he used to be, and all.”
“Hell, I’ll tell him that.”
Conlin chuckled. “Well, you may get the opportunity some day. Meanwhile, if he doesn’t run, and it does come to a primary fight, I’d like to be able to count on your support.”
“Uh, sure. I mean, for what it’s worth …”
“No, don’t go undervaluing yourself. You happen to be among the most respected of the younger men in this office. People listen to you. They think you’ve got a good head on your shoulders.” Conlin let go a flashy smile. Karp smiled back. An inane song of the period rattled through his head-“I’m in with the In Crowd, I know what the In Crowd knows.” Conlin was looking through some papers on his desk. Karp sensed the meeting was over and got up to leave.
“Oh, couple more things, Butch,” Conlin said. He consulted a piece of paper on his desk. “This Marlene Ciampi. You ever work with her?”
“Yeah, some. She’s hard to miss.”
“The bureau has been getting some pressure about hiring a woman. Abondini’s leaving next month, so we’ve got a slot. What d’you think?”
“I think she’s a great lawyer. Works hard, knows her procedure, plenty of guts.”
Conlin grunted. “Yeah, well Phil is a little uneasy. You know how old-fashioned he is. Thinks maybe a woman might have, how did he put it? Sensibilities too delicate for the rough-and-tumble of the Homicide Bureau. What about that?”
Karp barely restrained a giggle. “Ah … I think Mr. Garrahy can put his mind at ease in the sensibilities department.”
Conlin made a few notes and then turned to Karp again.
“Oh, and on the Marchione case? You’ll be happy to learn that our defendant has hired Leonard Sussman.”
Karp whistled. If you were a society matron and you found your husband in the rack with the upstairs maid and shot him five times in the head with your pearl-handled.32, you might hire Leonard Sussman to get you off, or if you were a Mafia chieftain and a number of your business associates had died under circumstances so unusual that the police suspected foul play, then you would definitely want Sussman to be your man in court. But Sussman did not work for armed robbers who shot liquor store owners.