These people met throughout the day in the corridors and offices of Centre Street, which they made into a continuous legal bazaar. Things were especially bazaarish toward the end of the day, when the overworked representatives of both the accused and the People attempted to dump whatever they could of the next day's business before the resumption of court in the morning, and the new intake of cases from the coming night's criminal escapades.
Marlene bought a cardboard cup of coffee from the snack bar and opened her stand in the hallway just outside its steamy portal. Word got around; Legal Aids with cases for which she was designated prosecutor found her and made their offers, which Marlene either accepted or rejected. Within broad limits, the rest of the ponderous system would support her in these decisions. The Legal Aids understood that too. Those who played hard-ass for their clients would be brought up short by their own management, who just as much as the ADA's had to stay on the good side of the judges, who insisted above all else on the expeditious clearing of their calendars.
So Marlene flipped through the case files with practiced speed, looking for the decisive detail. Was there serious violence, was this the second or the thirty-second arrest, did the cops seriously want the guy off the street, was the guy in jail, and for how long?
Here was a kid, ripped off a tourist's gold chain in front of Grand Central, arrested, in Rikers Island for six weeks. The tourist was back in Missouri. OK, go for a six-months-suspended, the weeks in Rikers were enough. Thus spake Marlene, playing judge and jury with the authority and aplomb of an Ottoman pasha.
After an hour or so, the crowd thinned out. Marlene stepped into the main hallway. One of the advantages of having an enormous boyfriend, Marlene reflected, was that you could spot him at a mile: he was, in fact, standing at the opposite end of the block-long hallway. She waved to him, but he was locked in a Mutt-and-Jeff tableau with a short portly man in a pin-striped suit.
As she approached, she heard Karp say, "In that case, I guess I'll see you in court, Mr. Simoney." The man opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, nodded curtly, and stalked away.
As Marlene walked up, she was struck once again by the haggardness of Karp's face, like that of a fighter about to lose a fifteen-round decision. There were circles under his eyes that hadn't been there a few years ago, and lines carving down from the high cheekbones. He was looking Lincolnesque, in a Jewish sort of way. The pile of her own crap that she was about to lay on him drifted away, and she put on a happy face.
Karp brightened when he saw her. "Hi, cutie," he said. "Having a nice day?"
"Assistant D.A.'s never have a nice day, as you well know," replied Marlene grumpily. "I see you made Simoney mad again. He ran away without even saying hello, and he's one of my favorite slime molds."
"He's the defense for Lattimore."
"The pusher who shot his partner? Is there a problem? I thought you had a good confession."
"We do," said Karp. "But while he was resisting arrest the cops bopped him a couple on the head. He came to, the cops were there, read him his rights, and he voluntarily confessed. Good procedure for a change. Simoney is now claiming the confession was offered when Lattimore was not in his right mind due to the severe beating he got. He's waving Jackson-Denno at me."
"I thought the decision in Jackson was based on coercion-the guy was in pain, the cops wouldn't give him water-like that."
"Yeah, it's horseshit legally, but I still don't love taking it to a jury. It's too easy for the defense to make the case be about the injuries at the time of arrest and the validity of the confession, not about the murder. Also, I don't have a good witness, the physical evidence is ambiguous, the vic was a scumbag… what I have is a confession with a cloud. Another 'he did it, but…' "
"So you'll cop him?"
"Maybe. I don't know. I can't think about it right now. Harris told me, by the way, that we just passed eight hundred homicides this year, and it's only June. We're gonna set another record."
"Calls for a celebration."
Karp grinned and rubbed his face. "Yeah, how about a good meal, a hot bath, a back rub, and a terrific piece of ass?"
Marlene twitched her eyebrows. "Sounds great! Why don't you go out and get all that, and I'll meet you back at my place for a hand of rummy."
Karp laughed. "Fuck you, Ciampi."
She twined her arm through his. "Actually," she said, "you took the words right out of my mouth."
FOUR
The bar and dance hall known as Adam's occupied a large brick-built, iron-fronted former warehouse at the foot of West Houston Street off Seventh Avenue. For the first hundred years of its existence it had stored the spices of the gorgeous East; on damp days the wooden floors still gave off a pale redolence of cinnamon and cloves. More recently, with the emergence of the district below Houston Street as a residential and artistic center, it had shifted to commodities that were only figuratively spicy: sex, romance, adventure, driven by flashing lights, the beat of the music of the moment-disco, salsa, punk, metal-and the availability of drugs.
The establishment was one huge high-ceilinged room painted black and equipped with a stage for live acts, a raised platform supplied with chairs and small tables, a long bar and, at the center, a dance floor. Between the bar and the tables was a long narrow zone which, by custom, was occupied by masses of people of both sexes moving slowly to the music, drinks in hand. These announced by their presence in this zone their availability for an approach by a member of the opposite sex. The demographics of New York in this era dictated that most of the people in the meat market of Adam's would be women.
The rapist sat on a bar stool and allowed the parade to circulate slowly beneath his gaze. The image of a hawk sitting on a tree limb, waiting for the rabbits to venture within range was one that had occurred to him, and despite its triteness, it still amused. Choosing his victim in this way filled him with delicious feelings of power and was quite the most amusing part of his whole enterprise. Adam's was not his only haunt. He had been away from it for some time, making the broad circuit of the city's singles bars, and was pleasantly surprised by the richness of the night's pickings.
He had particular standards. No cows, for one thing; no fleshy, smothering, maternal women. He liked small, compact women, women who looked like they could be tossed around by a man of moderate size. And no blonds. Blonds were dumb, he believed, and so many of them were phony. He thought hair dyeing was just that kind of disgusting treachery that was so typical of women in general, and which tended to justify anything he might care to do to them.
So he was looking for small, dark, and lithe- and something else. There had to be a certain look, a high carriage, an aloofness. Anything that appeared to say "I'm too good for you"-or what he called privately the my-shit-doesn't-stink look-was intensely attractive to him. He realized that it was comparatively rare in the singles bars he hunted. He often cruised the campuses of the city's many colleges, and the theaters and museums, where women of this type were apt to be found in greater concentrations, feeding his fantasies, exciting himself almost beyond endurance.
Yet he never approached any of these women in such places. Like a forest predator, he was uneasy away from his territory, where, sitting on his bar stool, he was in control. The women he desired were perhaps uncommon in this ambit, since what he liked, his true meat, was that sense of social competence, of inviolability and pride, that would typically lead a woman to avoid a place like Adam's.