Justice Denied (11 page)

Karp said flatly, “No, no one could.”

Pagano was looking down the table at the two men. He shouted out, “Hey, Freeland, that's the guy to beat.”

“I intend to,” said Freeland quietly. Karp nodded politely at this and stood up. He tapped on a glass with a swizzle stick and raised his beer.

“I'd like to propose a toast. To Tom Pagano, a great lawyer and a great guy—a man who could defend scumbags year in and year out without ever becoming a scumbag himself—well, hardly ever—the guy who, next to Francis Garrahy, taught me more about trial work than anyone else, and doesn't he regret it! Best of luck, Tom!”

Tom Pagano laughed, the table applauded, and after a few minutes spent in the usual raillery, Karp was able to slip away.

Marlene felt a touch on her upper arm and turned to look into a pair of familiar swimming-pool-colored eyes.

“Raney! What are you doing here?”

“A little security detail. Lots of important people wandering around drunk.”

“Yeah, it would be a tragedy if anything happened,” said Marlene. “Somebody tossed a bomb in here, it'd set criminal justice back four days. Well, it's been months! You're looking spiffy. That's quite a suit.”

Jim Raney was a detective with the NYPD, with whom Marlene had a history going back several years. The suit—a double-breasted number in a very pale tan—did look good on his slim figure. He grinned and pirouetted. “You like it? I got a deal.”

“From whom? Roscoe's Fashions for the Heavily Armed?”

“I wore it for you, Marlene,” he said, rolling his eyes and batting his eyelashes, and placing a warm hand on her knee. He had them to bat, thought Marlene. Raney had never made a secret of his attraction to her, but hers to him was something she preferred not to think about. Those wild Irish boys! Their milky skin, their big blues, their golden hair, their crazy-making attitude toward women! Which was why, although ever on the cusp of falling for Peter Pan, Marlene had married Captain Hook.

She laughed and patted the erring hand. “Wanna dance, Raney?”

There was a three-piece combo playing tunes derived from the youth of Tom Pagano and his contemporaries. Later, when drunkenness was more general, they would play Italian kitsch—“Way, Marie!”, “Hey, Comparé,” “Come-onna-my-house”—and wizened judges would sway to the music and shout the words, whether they were Italian or not.

Raney and Marlene danced to “Dancing in the Dark.” He was a good dancer, and she liked to dance more than she usually got to, married to Karp. He held her tightly, and his right hand slipped lower than its official position at her waist.

“So what's new, Raney? Any hot cases?”

“I passed the sergeants' exam.”

“You did? Good for you. Does that mean a transfer?”

“Yeah, they got me slated to move into the Nine next month. They want me to finish up on this airport task force first.”

“How's that going?”

“Umm, not all that great. The usual wise-guy horseshit. A couple of guys that've been boosting stuff from air freight for years got themselves whacked outside a bar on Ninth Avenue. We got the guy, or anyway, a guy who'll go down for it. Besides that, domestics and drug shit. The usual. How about yourself? They still raping them pretty good?”

The hand was now gently cupping her right buttock. She did not object, because she had just thought of something she wanted from Raney, whore that she was.

“Jim, there's something I'm interested in—in the Nine.”

“Oh?” It was not an encouraging noise.

“Yeah, a Jane Doe, took a header off a building in Alphabet City. Camano's handling it as a suicide, a pross. I think it could be a murder, maybe a weirdo.”

Raney's manner changed instantly from genial to chill. “What does the M.E. say?”

“Undetermined pending further investigation. But the woman was raped. She had teeth marks all over her.”

Raney shrugged and relaxed slightly the intensity of his clutch. The music changed to “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” but he didn't feel like a chacha. He said, “It takes all kinds, Marlene. Why don't we just wait for the further investigation?”

“Ah, shit, Raney! You know there won't be further investigation. Not if they got it pegged as a suicide. Not if there isn't a family making waves. All I'm asking is, just give it a shot. Just look into it.” She smiled fetchingly and tweaked his tie. “Come on. For little me?”

Raney grinned at her. “Marlene, darling. You know I love you, but … let me say that if you were offering me a lot more than a cheap feel on the dance floor, a lot more, the absolute last thing I am gonna do is to stick my nose in another cop's investigation, especially in a precinct where I'm not even in there yet, and where I'm gonna have to move into a command slot. No way, baby.”

“Oh, crap, you're just like my husband,” she cried. “Okay, just forget it. I want another drink.”

When Marlene arrived home two hours later, she was at that stage of drunkenness when the jolly effects of inebriation have begun to thin out, and the brain and body are about to take their revenge for having been flooded with a deadly poison. At this point one can drink more until oblivion arrives, staving off the reckoning until the morrow, or stop drinking and tough it out. Marlene had chosen the latter course, not wanting to render herself comatose in the midst of a pack of drunken lawyers, or in proximity to (the quite sober) Detective Raney.

Raney got her home in his beat-up Ghia. His behavior was beyond reproach, limited to a peck on the cheek at parting and a comradely pat on the thigh.

She could hear the wails from the first floor. Little Lucy was having one of her evenings. Entering the loft, she found Karp stumping to and fro like Captain Ahab, looking gray, holding the red-faced, squalling infant and patting her back despairingly.

Marlene threw down her coat and snatched her daughter. “I fed her,” said Karp. “I changed her. I fed her again. She wouldn't calm down.”

Marlene sat in the bentwood rocker. “Did you sing and rock?”

“Of course,” said Karp indignantly. “It didn't work. She's been crying for hours. She's not sick, is she?”

“No. What did you sing?”

“I don't know—what does it matter? Rock-a-bye baby, nursery rhymes, the usual.”

“That's the problem,” said Marlene and began to rock and sing:

Chistu voli pani,

Chistu dici: 'Un cci nn'e,

Chistu dici: Va 'rrobba,

Chistu dici: 'Un sacciu la via,

Chistu dici: Vicchiazzu, vicchiazzu,

camina cu mia!

Ten minutes of this and the child was out cold. Marlene put her in her crib and returned to the kitchen, where she ate four aspirin and a glass of tomato juice. Then she collapsed on the red couch next to Karp.

“Thank God,” he said. “I was going nuts. How did you do that?”

“Oh, sometimes a girl needs her momma. And sometimes her Sicilian genes need a special treatment.”

“That song? What does it mean?”

“Um, something like: I'm hungry, I want bread. There isn't any. Then go and steal some. I don't know how. Come with me, old man, and I'll show you.”

“Very nice, Marlene. When she starts muscling the other kindergarten kids for milk money, we'll know why. I'm writing to Mr. Rogers about this.”

“Please, my head is coming apart. Speaking of crime future, I think I'm going to put Harry Bello on this Avenue A thing when he comes over.”

“The jumper? I thought the M.E. didn't rule on that.”

“Not on the homicide, no, but the rape part—I don't like it. It has all the marks of a particularly nasty sex crime—the bites, the sexual bruising. It looks like the kind of thing where if he's done it before, he'll do it again. And once, just once, I'd like to nail a serial weirdo before he gets going on the series. I'm telling you about it now because just in case we come up with evidence that it's a homicide, and we find a guy, I don't want it to get lost.”

Karp didn't mind. He was happy to do Marlene a favor: anything to distract her from the Armenians.

On the following morning when Karp held his weekly trial meeting, the Armenians were much on his mind. At the trial meeting the assistant district attorneys who were planning trials laid the cases they had prepared before their peers, and Karp, who attempted to shoot them down: a sort of legal scrimmage. Such discussion was possible because trials were much rarer than murders. Of the thousand or so homicides brought to attention of the law in Manhattan, fewer than one in ten would get before a jury, the remainder being otherwise disposed of, usually by plea bargaining. Or the guy would walk because somebody forgot to do something important.

Karp looked around the table, the seats at which were reserved for presenters. There were four of them this morning. The rest of the staff sat along the walls in chairs they had wheeled into the room, or they were perched on Karp's desk or on windowsills. He nodded to the man seated to his right and said, “Okay, Guma, let's get started.”

The man so addressed was short and squat and looked enough like Yogi Berra to turn heads on the street, the main differences being that he was not quite as handsome as Berra and could not hit a high inside curve ball, for which reason he had been denied a career in the majors. Besides that, he was a very good athlete, as were almost all the men (and the two women) crowding the room. Karp had found, or imagined he had found, that people who played high-level competitive sports made the best trial lawyers. They had thick skins and a certain casual brutality without which survival at Centre Street could be measured in weeks; they lived to win; they played hurt; they could work as part of a team. It was not a job for the legal intellectual: let them work on Wall Street or teach at Harvard, was Karp's thinking.

Ray Guma was a good example. It was not entirely clear that he could read. It was a fact that no one had ever seen him writing anything down. Yet he never forgot a face, or a name, or an incident from any case he had ever handled. Nobody in the D.A.'s office was more magisterial on the subject of the mob, its politics, its personalities, its plans. It had rubbed off; Guma was mildly corrupt in what he considered a good cause. He consorted with known criminals. He was an astonishing and indefatigable lecher. And though he shared no point of habit or moral standard with his boss, the Mad Dog of Centre Street, as he was known, was one of Karp's favorite people.

Guma began his presentation. “This is
People
v.
Cavetti.
Okay, Jimmy Cavetti was part of a gang that's been ripping things off from air freight out at Kennedy for years now. They did high-value stuff: wines, furs, art, antiques. Needless to say, the goombahs are in it heavy. It's under the Bollano family, a
capo regime
name of Guissepe Castelmaggiore.

“So, a cozy arrangement. They bought enough of the shipping clerks and expediters to get them the word on where the good stuff is. Joey Castles handles protection, plus fencing the stuff, plus divvying the cut for the families. The other two main guys in the gang were the Viacchenza brothers, Carl and Lou, solid Bollano guys. The vics in this case.

“To make a long story short, Joey finds out the Viacchenza boys are skimming the take, holding out. Joey has a short fuse. One night last November, the Viacchenzas are leaving the Domino Lounge on Ninth. They walk past an alley, and somebody takes them out with a twelve-gauge. There's snow in the alley, and we pick up a perfect heel print, which we match to Jimmy's shoe. That's the case. The shoe and the situation.”

There was a brief silence. “How did we get the shoe?” asked Karp.

“Search warrant based on reliable informant. The usual horseshit. This time the cops really got a reliable informant. One of the shipping clerks in on the theft deal. They nailed him on a dope thing and he gave them Jimmy C.—I mean that Jimmy fingered the Viacchenzas for the hit. He didn't name Joey Castles, needless to say—he wasn't that stupid. They'll move to suppress the shoe, but we shouldn't have any trouble.”

Roland Hrcany, who was at the table, spoke up. “Did he do it?”

Guma snorted. “You mean, was he the trigger on the hit? Fuck, no! Jimmy's no killer. He's a thief. Nah, Joey Castles probably got a contract out. Jimmy was just there to finger, maybe drive. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. We got an eyeball says Jimmy was cruising around the Domino earlier on the night of, asking about the brothers, were they there yet, anybody seen them—like that.”

“But he'll stand up on it?” asked Karp. “To murder deuce?”

“Yeah, maybe,” said Guma, shrugging. “Jimmy was always a stand-up guy. On the other hand, he's never looked at twenty-five to life. But what you're asking is, will he rat out Joey Castles and whoever was the shotgun artist? I'd say no. Which is why we got the tap and the bugs on Joey.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Hrcany. “He didn't do the hit, but we're trying him for it?”

Guma turned himself and leaned forward so that he could look directly at Hrcany, who was sitting on the same side of the long table. “What kind of remark is that, Roland? The fuckin' guy was there. He was holding the shotgun's hand, for chrissake. He'll go down for it too, unless he deals.”

Karp didn't like the way the conversation was drifting, and he knew very well why Roland had raised that silly point. Karp asked, “But
will
he deal when it comes down to it?”

Guma said, “No. He's saying, ‘Convict my ass.' He figures we got a weak case, or that's what his lawyer's telling him. One heel print against his alibi. He got some bitch to say he was with her. (Sorry, ladies.) We shouldn't have much trouble impeaching her. They'll try to impeach our shipping clerk and our bar-flies. They'll get shoe experts. You know the routine.”