“Sussman is doing pro bono? Stop the presses!”
“Nope. The little shit is paying regular rates. Where’s it coming from, I wonder? What do we know about this Louis guy, anyway?”
“Next to zip. No record, for one thing-that’s unusual as hell. No family in the city. Apparently works as a proofreader when he’s not shooting. Just a guy who decided to be an armed robber, it looks like. Say, is Sussman going to be any trouble on this case?”
Conlin said with a laugh, “Oh, he’s always trouble, some way or another. But, really, we built a great case. It’s a lock. I mean, what can he do?”
Which was precisely what Leonard Sussman was wondering at this moment.
Seated across from Mandeville Louis in the small lawyers’ meeting room in the Tombs, Sussman radiated the solid confidence that was his great professional tool. What he felt was irrelevant and invisible. He was a silver man: curly silvery hair, pale eyes, silver-rimmed half glasses, silvery-gray pinstriped suit, and silk tie. His skin might have been pale and silvery too, had it not been bronzed by a recent week of skiing in Gstaad.
Sussman was about to become annoyed with his client, something he never did. He considered it bad for business. But, of course, Louis was not part of his usual clientele. He was black, for one thing, and he wasn’t frightened, for another. In fact, he was maddeningly confident. Sussman tried again.
“Mister Louis, I seem to be having a great deal of difficulty communicating to you the gravity of your present situation. You’re being charged with murder in the first degree. Walker places you at the scene with a loaded shotgun. Another witness also places you at the scene. Your pistol killed one of the victims. I am a very good criminal lawyer, as you know, but I doubt that even I will be able to fix in the mind of a jury the possibility that in the fifteen or so minutes you were gone from the car somebody else killed the Marchiones with your weapons. Yet in spite of the strength of this evidence, you refuse to countenance negotiating a plea to a lesser offence, nor have you been forthcoming in offering me any extenuation, any scrap of …”
Louis broke in, saying, “Mister Sussman, I am not going to prison. Not now. Not ever.”
Sussman regarded his client coldly. Louis was dressed in a yellow jail uniform too large for his thin frame. His hazel eyes, discomfortingly odd in a black man’s face, glittered back at the lawyer from behind round, gold-framed glasses. Sussman felt himself becoming unsettled under this gaze and glanced down at his papers. Rich and recently widowed women did not treat him this way.
“Yes, yes, of course, that’s what I’m here for. Now I can of course delay the date to some extent, and I have in fact taken the liberty of entering a number of motions to that effect, but at some time we will undoubtedly have to go to trial, and I can assure you that …”
“There will be no trial.”
“No trial?”
“That is correct.”
Sussman stared at Louis over his half glasses. “Mister Louis, are you, ah, planning something?”
“Yes,” said Louis.
“Don’t you think you should discuss it with your attorney?”
“No, I do not.”
“You’re being impossibly difficult, Mister Louis.”
“Yes. That’s why I hired you,” said Louis with a cold smile. He rose and knocked on the door for the guard. “Good day, Mister Sussman. See you in court.”
Some weeks later Karp was having breakfast at Sam’s with V.T. Newbury.
“Anyhow,” said Karp, “I love the work, you know, but I’m getting nervous. Conlin makes me nervous. I mean I’ve always had a lot of respect for the guy, and all, a great lawyer, but this political shit is making everything wacky. I mean, he leaks stuff to the press all the time, stuff about cases that shouldn’t get out. But if it makes him look good, there it is on the front page. And, there’s cases he won’t go to trial on, cases we have good chances to win, but no, he’s thinking about the track record. It’s got to be a sure thing or he lets them cop to a lesser. This is homicide I’m talking about now …”
“And Homicide should be above reproach-and immune to the sort of corruption the rest of us are sunk in?”
Newbury finished his soft-boiled egg and dabbed his lips with a napkin. “I think you’re learning that the bureau is not King Arthur’s Round Table, is that it?”
Karp bridled. “I never expected that.”
“Yes you did. But the bureau is made up of human beings. Human beings are fallible, frightened and prone to corruption. ‘In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.’ Conlin wants Garrahy’s job; why shouldn’t he jerk chains to get it?”
“It isn’t right.”
“Yes, that’s the correct Old Testament position. But look, how long did you expect Homicide to survive as an elite unit when the rest of the system is crumbling like cheese? The cops are rotten, the jails are rotten, the lower courts are rotten: it’s got to touch everything-Conlin, Garrahy …”
“Never. Not Garrahy.”
“No? There are different kinds of corruption, you know. There are sins of omission.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look around you, damn it! The criminal justice system of this city is operated like a third-class whorehouse. It would be a scandal in Venezuela. Not enough prosecutors, not enough office or courtroom space, not enough judges, not enough jails. Police corruption? I see cops wearing clothes and driving cars I can’t afford and I’m pig rich. And when was the last time you saw Garrahy making a stink about any of that on television or the front page?”
“Hell, V.T., you can’t blame the whole bad business on one man.”
“No? Who else is there? He doesn’t have the clout? The man’s got more political power than God Almighty, and as far as I can see he does fuck-all with it.”
“Jesus, Newbury, calm down! Would you prefer Jack Conlin in there? Or Bloom?”
Newbury drew a couple of deep breaths and then grinned sheepishly. “God help us! No, I guess it’s eight generations of outraged civic virtue. Good government DNA is in my genes. Look, Butch, it’s not that I don’t respect him, I mean as a person. Sure, who wouldn’t, he walks on water. But, I mean, look at the institution. Why hasn’t he groomed somebody to take over? Why does he tolerate that total shit, Wharton?”
“How should I know, V.T.? Maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on …”
“Oh, yeah. If only the czar knew how his people suffered, surely he would do something! Did I ever tell you about my Uncle Parker? A crucial event in my young life. Actually he was my great-uncle. Had a big place out in Sag Harbor where I used to spend the summers. I was crazy about that man. He had a room full of toys for all the cousins, and he would actually spend hours, playing with us down on the carpet. He was, I don’t know, everything you want your parents to be, but they never are: wise, kind, patient, unbelievably funny. A marvelous man. I was his absolute dog.
“He died when I was fourteen. I cried for a week. They thought I was bonkers-nobody cries in my family. OK, the scene switches to Newbury in college. I’m in American studies. I’m doing my senior thesis on labor organization in West Virginia in the twenties. You ever hear of the Highland Coal War? No? Not many people have. It was a little bit of Vietnam in our own dear land. For three years the Highland Coal Company carried on what amounted to a war of extermination against striking miners, their union, and their families.
“The miners fought back-dynamite, ambushes, sabotage-but Highland Coal had the county and state governments in their pocket and they had a private army of goons who used to whip through the hollows up there on fucking search-and-destroy missions. Finally, they imported blacks as scabs and kept them in locked stockades under unbelievable conditions-practically slavery. That broke the strike, but the hatred those people had-there are even songs about it-‘P.C. Highland, you got blood on both your hands. You done starve my children, you done shot down my good man.’ And so on. OK, here’s the kicker. You know who P. C. Highland was?”