Depraved Indifference (12 page)

“Up your ass, Karp. Don't blame me if you can't handle an interrogation.”

“Pillman, in my last question there were five words besides the guy's name. Your boy comes out with the Gettysburg Address, and Milo looks like he swallowed a peach pit. The fucking translator is coaching the suspect.

“Now, I don't know what's going on, who's jerking your chain, but it's going to come out, sonny. What is it, Pillman? What's the dirty secret?”

“I don't have to take this shit from you, Karp. Get the fuck out of my office.”

Karp's foot lashed out and kicked a chair across the room, a willful abuse of U.S. government property and a misdemeanor offense. Pillman did not arrest him. Then Karp careened out the door and almost collided with the returning Stepanovic in the corridor. The smaller man tried to get by, but Karp blocked his path. “Stepanovic, tell me, what does ‘knees nahm' mean?”

“What?”

“That's what it sounded like, the last thing Rukovina said in there, his last two words.”

“Oh, you mean ‘
ne znam
.' It means ‘I don't know.'”

“Thanks, Joe. You know, I think I'm really picking up the language.”

“Oh?” Stepanovic said with an uncertain smile.

“Yeah.
Ne znam
, huh? He said it, all right. But you said it, too, didn't you, Joe? Twice, in fact, during your little chat. How about that?”

Down in the lobby, Karp called Marlene's office, but got no answer. Then he dialed his own office. While he listened to the phone ring he thought about calling Bill Denton and about what he would say. The interrogation had shaken him. Karp knew more about corruption than most. He was an agent of a system that was corrupt in its every limb. But he was not himself a conspirator and was uneasy in the presence of conspiracies. He liked to be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

And Denton was a good guy. He had to be. But cops were being bent in this case, and Denton was brass, the highest. The possibility that Denton was not leveling with him, that his concern for bringing Terry Doyle's murderers to justice was in some way a fraud, gave Karp the screaming jitters. It meant he was absolutely alone. He decided to wait before calling Denton.

The phone in Karp's office was answered by Roland Hrcany, a fellow assistant district attorney and a friend.

“DA's office, we doze, but never close.”

“Who's that? Roland?”

“Hey, yeah, Butch? What's happening, man?”

“I'm down at the FBI. I just got through interviewing the hijackers.”

“Great! Did they do it?”

“Yes, hijack; no, locker bomb. Very adamant and they want to see a lawyer.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah, right, and there's more. Listen, Roland, Marlene got you down to do the interviewing?”

“Yeah, we're having a great time. Got a case of beer and the little TV. We're watching the Yanks at KC in between; four-two, Yanks, top of the fourth.”

“Who else is there?”

“Besides Marlene, that kid, Tony Harris, and Ray Guma.”

“She got the
Goom
down to depose witnesses on a Sunday?”

“It was me. I said I'd fix him up with a piece of ass afterward.”

“Thanks, buddy. Roland, do you think we're the only district attorney's office in the country with a full-time pimp on the staff?”

“Far from it. Most have nothing but. Hey, here's Marlene. You want to talk to her?”

“Yeah, but Roland, do me a favor. Arrange to get custody of the hijackers. I'd like them in Riker's by tonight. I want those guys buried, so nobody gets to them but us. And Roland, this case has weird shit all over it, so use cops you trust, personally. You know what I mean?”

Hrcany laughed. “Yeah. Married ones who play around. OK, will do. Here's Champ.”

“Hey, cutie. How's it going?”

“Cutie, my ass. You ought to see this place, Butch. Beer on the floor, the game blasting out of the TV. Roland is showing Guma Polaroid beaver shots of women, and the great connoisseur is making his selection of the evening. For two cents I'd join the Carmelites and piss on all of you.”

“If you did, could we still fuck?”

“Ah, Butch, that's the kind of sensitive remark that warms a lady's heart. I got to go. One more interview and then home and self-immolation.”

“Wait, seriously—how's it going?”

“No problems. We've pretty much established that the plane was hijacked, so kidnap, umpteen counts. Assault? There was a lot of yelling and threats, but the passengers and crew were left alone physically. Except Alice Springer, one of the stews. She said this asshole Macek had his hands up her pants for half the flight.”

“Did she come?”

“No, Sensitivo, she did not. She was scared shitless the whole time. Unfortunately, she seems to have accepted Karavitch as her personal savior.”

“What, Stockholm syndrome?”

“Yeah, downtown Stockholm. Apparently, charismatic isn't the word. The other stew, West, agrees, except she hates the bastard's guts. By the way, what's your make? Did you see him?”

“Yeah, I did. I'm inclined to agree too. A tricky, mean, tough son of a bitch. Straight-faced denies all knowledge of the locker bomb, same with his troops. I kind of doubt we'll roll any of the others if it means putting the blocks to the old bastard. I don't think anybody wants to fuck with him, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Oh? That sounds interesting.”

“Yeah, but a long story. Anything else?”

“Just one item. West also swears she spotted Macek and Mrs. Karavitch slip into the lavatory together during the flight. And she doubts they were washing their hands.”

7

O
N
M
ONDAY
MORNING
, Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi and several hundred other assistant district attorneys, the district attorney himself and his aides and assistants, learned judges by the dozens and clerks and secretaries in the hundreds, and brigades of police, and regiments of witnesses and victims, the bored and the anguished, squads of jurors good and true, and uncounted lawyers, young and harried or suave and grave, depending on whether they worked for the poor or the rich, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press, merciless and cynical; and, of course, a varied mob of criminals, the cause and purpose of this whole cavalcade, the petty thugs, the thieves and robbers, whether by stealth or weaponry or clever papers, the whores of both sexes, the cold killers, the hot killers, the rapists and torturers of the helpless, the justly accused, the falsely accused, together with their keepers, parole officers, social workers, enemies, friends and relations, converged, all of them, on a single seventeen-story gray stone building located at 100 Centre Street on the island of Manhattan, there to prod into sullen wakefulness that great beast, the Law.

The Law was having a bad year. Its mistress, the richest city civilization has ever known, was as broke as a piss-bum in the gutter. So among other things, the Law was starved and ill-housed and generally treated like a dirty dog. And the Law responded in kind. It sulked in its grimy kennel and refused to do its proper work, which is, after all, finding out who the bad guys are and giving them their lumps.

Instead it pretended. In that grim year, you could commit a felony in New York and have but a one-in-ten chance of being arrested, and if arrested, but a one-in-ten chance of being indicted, and if indicted, but a one-in-ten chance of actually going to prison. The people responsible for the Law refused to enforce it, instead attending only to its droppings, the criminal justice statistics.

Chief among these was the notion of clearance. Arrests were cleared by plea bargaining beyond all reason, which meant that the crooks knew you would give them almost anything to avoid going to trial, because nothing loused up the system like lots of time-consuming trials. Not to mention that there was no room in the prisons, which exerted back pressure on the system, like blockage in a toilet.

Karp's boss, District Attorney Sanford Bloom, was the chief apostle of clearance, not the least of the reasons why Karp despised him. Bloom had instituted clearance quotas, which all the DA bureaus and individual assistant DAs had to meet.

Bloom's sole purpose, it seemed, besides favorable publicity and garnering useful brownie points from those in power, was to keep the system moving at all costs. Never mind that the same people were arrested again and again for similar crimes and always went free.

It had not always been this way. A few years previously, the district attorney had been the legendary Francis P. Garrahy. Garrahy had been New York DA for nearly forty years, in which time he had created one of the finest prosecutorial offices in the world, mainly because he was a great trial lawyer and hired great trial lawyers. He liked trying criminals and putting them in jail for a long time.

Karp had joined this team because it was the best. With Garrahy as coach, young lawyers were scouted, encouraged, browbeaten, pushed to the limits of their talents, and then either chucked off the team or given their shot at the major leagues: prosecuting homicides in New York County. Garrahy was tough, brutal some said, but always concerned about the men he called “his boys.” Karp had loved him.

Not that the DA's office had been a paradise; it had always been a suburb of Hell. But with Garrahy in charge, there was a small chance at something like salvation, the satisfaction of a well-done job for someone who knew what a well-done job was.

And in fact, the lobby of 100 Centre Street this morning and every weekday morning, did resemble Hell enough to fool the average demon. At eight-fifty it was already crowded with people who had business in court or who worked for the court, but also with those citizens who had no place else to go.

Pushing through the mob, Karp thought, as he often did, that it was always the same crowd. Weren't there always those two obese black women with tired faces, the trio of pockmarked Puerto Rican youths, the tan dwarf with no arms, the same elderly colored gentleman with the worn gray suit and cracked wing-tips, talking reasonably to an invisible being named Clara?

And the sounds were always the same. A hundred transistors and boom boxes tuned to twenty different stations were punctuated by shouts from the ones who yelled at their lawyers, intermixed with the continuous rumble of arguments and excuses and threats in six languages.

Add in the smell of steam heat, stale tobacco smoke, acrid coffee from the first-floor snack bar, and you could understand why the people who worked at 100 Centre Street called this area the Streets of Calcutta.

“Hey, Mr. Karp, wanna magazine?”

The man who plucked at his sleeve was slight, with thick lips in a large, pale face. His watery blue eyes were wide and intense behind round glasses patched at the hinges with cellophane tape. Neatly dressed in a blue suit and tie, he was pulling a child's red wagon loaded with old magazines.

“Yeah, sure, Warren, what you got?
Sports Illustrated
?” Karp asked amiably.

“Sure thing,” said the man, reaching down for a magazine. He handed Karp a three-month-old
Sports Illustrated
. Karp gave him a couple of quarters.

“See you later, Warren,” he said, moving away.

Warren smiled. “Thanks, you big asshole,” he said in a loud, clear voice. “And go fuck yourself!”

Karp had a warm spot in his heart for the man everybody called Dirty Warren. Although he realized that life was no picnic for him (Warren did not have many repeat customers, and occasionally picked up lumps from those unfamiliar with the brain malfunction called Tourette's syndrome), he believed the home of the criminal justice system required the presence of someone with an uncontrollable urge to shout obscenities. And Warren was at least physically presentable, which could not be said of many of the other Calcutta regulars, the Scab Man, for example, or the Walking Booger.

Karp's office was on the fourth floor. Since he was the Deputy Director of the Criminal Courts Bureau, he rated an enclosed office with a real window. The bureau director, a Bloom crony named Melvyn Pelso, was an elegant slug, whose main functions were lunching with the great, going to meetings, and spying on Karp for Bloom. On the good side, he rarely arrived before ten and often skipped Mondays altogether, which meant that Karp could use his vastly larger office for meetings of Karp's Team.

Karp believed devoutly in rules, in Due Process, and Criminal Procedure, and the Rules of Evidence, and Probable Cause, in the Presumption of Innocence and the Punishment of the Guilty. That the management of the District Attorney's Office was truly interested in none of these things made his life more difficult, but neither depressed him nor drove him into comfortable cynicism. It just made it necessary for him to organize, unofficially, and under the table, a Team of his own.

The members of the unofficial team had gathered, as they did every Monday morning, in the bureau's outer office: a dozen young and a couple of middle-aged attorneys drinking bad coffee out of styrofoam cups and munching danishes paid for by Karp and brought in by Connie Trask, the bureau secretary.

He swung breezily in, waved, snagged a coffee and the last prune danish. “Give me five minutes,” he said.

Karp went into his own office and did bureaucracy. He grabbed a thick sheaf of paper out of his brimming in-basket and threw away anything not marked “special” or “urgent.” He read the survivors quickly, threw half of them away, and scribbled notes to Connie on the rest. Then he signed a group of documents having to do with promotions, requisitions of staff, expense reimbursements and supplies. They had all been initialed by his secretary, so he scrawled his signature across them. Connie never made mistakes in procedure.

Leaving his office, he dumped the finished work on Connie's desk, and went into the bureau chief's office to pursue his real job, which was making the criminal justice system produce some criminal justice, against all odds and the will of its masters.