Justice Denied (17 page)

The sergeant goes back to the patrol car to call for backup, and Thornby and the other patrolman enter the basement.

Karp got the call eighteen minutes after Susan Weiner had been pronounced D.O.A. at St. Vincent's. Fifteen minutes thereafter, he was at the crime scene on Hudson, talking with the detective in charge, a short, saturnine man out of Zone One named Charlie Cimella.

Karp stared for a moment at the stain on the pavement.

“Who was she?”

Cimella said, “Woman named Susan Weiner. This is where she lived. The super ID'd her. She had a date with her hubby for lunch. Nice. Guy showed up just after it went down.”

“Witnesses?”

“Yeah, a couple of out-of-towners saw the whole thing. And a bunch of folks chased the guy around the corner. I got the word out to the portables to round them up.”

“Okay, when you get them, take them over to the Six. I'll interview them there. Any chance we'll pick up the perp?”

Cimella shrugged. “We could get lucky.” He looked at the bloodstain too. “Hell of a thing. Nice neighborhood, nice building. Pretty kid, young. The papers, TV'll go batshit.”

Karp nodded and went back to his car. Susan Weiner. The name stirred a memory, but he couldn't place it. A not uncommon name in the City. Maybe he had gone to school with a Susan Weiner. He told the driver to make for the Sixth.

In the lightless, sweltering boiler room of number 58 Barrow Street, Ray Thornby gets lucky. He checks the room with his flashlight beam and is about to leave when he spots the cardboard sticking out from under the boiler. He draws his pistol, kneels down, and tugs at the sneakered foot he finds resting on the cardboard. Slowly a man rolls out from under the boiler, blinking in the flashlight's glare. Thornby backs away and points his gun.

“Get up and put your hands against the wall!” he orders.

A high, whining voice comes from the man: “Hey, wha'? Hey, man, 'm just sackin' out, y'know? My daughter, she kicked me out—”

“Up!” says Thornby. The man staggers out and braces his hands against the wall, spreading his legs as he does so. An experienced mutt, thinks the policeman as he pats the man down and goes through the pockets of his grubby jeans.

No ID. Nothing but a crumpled wad of paper money, two singles and a five. And something else: a VISA counterfoil from Bloomingdale's with today's date made out to S. WEINER, crumpled up between the bills. Thornby puts the receipt in his own pocket and gives the money back to the man. At this time he does not know the name of the vic, but he knows it was a woman, and that Bloomingdale's is a high-end women's clothing store, and that the odds are long indeed that this man he has found under a boiler has just come from a spree in Better Dresses.

“What's your name?”

“Hosie Russell. Hey, what is this? I was just sleepin' off a drunk, man. C'mon, gi' me a break, man. I jus' got out of the joint. My daughter kicked my sorry ass out of the house.”

Thornby can smell the truth of at least part of that statement. He looks Russell over carefully. Close up, he is a lot older than the initial description, closer to fifty than thirty. And his shirt is red, bright red, not blue. Not a blue picture. He hesitates. Russell catches this and smiles, says ingratiatingly, “C'mon, blood, gi' me a break. I'll jus' move along uptown …”

Thornby frowns. The guy could be just a wino, but Thornby doesn't like that receipt; he hates the receipt. More than that, he doesn't like being called “blood” by a skell. He whips Russell around and snaps the cuffs on him.

The crowd rumbled as they emerged. Some people clapped. There were two more blue-and-whites parked in the street, their lights flashing. Thornby brought his prisoner across the courtyard to the young actor, waiting with the sergeant.

“Is this him?” Thornby asked.

“Yes, definitely. Only he was wearing a different shirt.”

Russell rolled his eyes and said,“Bull
-shit,
man! He don' know what the fuck he talkin' about. I never was in his fuckin' place. What he mean, all niggers look alike.”

As if to confirm this statement, an elderly white man in a rumpled tan suit, who was standing on the curb, shouted out, “That's not the guy. I saw the whole thing. The guy who stabbed the girl was a different man.”

Russell nodded his head vigorously. “See? He saw it! It wasn't me. Hey! What you doin', man? Hey! It wasn't me!”

As he continued to shout these and other protestations, he was muscled into a blue-and-white and driven off to the Sixth Precinct.

At a commandeered desk in the detective squad room of that precinct, Karp finished his preliminary interview with the Digbys. The couple were sensible, straightforward people, and they had seen the fleeing defendant at close range. They would have made superb witnesses had it not been for their Dukes of Hazzard accents, which for most New York juries indicated either slowness of wit or racial prejudice or both. Nevertheless, they had assured Karp that they could identify the man.

A detective walked over and said that Cimella was on the phone.

“We got him,” said Cimella. “He was in a basement on Barrow Street. One of the uniforms found him, and we got a positive ID from a tenant in the building—guy ran through his apartment a few minutes after the stabbing. Name's Hosie Russell. They're bringing him in now.”

“Great,” said Karp. “Okay, run him by a lineup with the Digbys and the other people who chased him. Then stick him in an interview room and make sure nobody talks to him before I do.”

Karp hung up and called his own office and asked Connie Trask to get someone to run a check on whether a black male named Hosie Russell had ever come to the attention of the law. Then he went over his interview notes until, ten minutes later, Cimella walked in with Hosie Russell and a black patrolman. They put Russell through a lineup, and the couple from Kentucky had no trouble picking him out. Neither did the young actor, Shelton.

Karp was introduced to Thornby, who filled him in on the details of the arrest.

“The funny thing was, the guy Shelton, he said Russell had a blue shirt on and was carrying something when he ran through the apartment, but he was wearing red when I found him. No shirt. No handbag. I thought for a minute he was just a piss bum on the coop. You think it really is the guy?”

“I don't know,” said Karp. “We don't have any physical evidence, and it's hard to build a homicide case on just eyewitnesses, especially white eyewitnesses on a black perp.”

Thornby looked startled. “Homicide? Holy shit, she's dead? I didn't know that. I thought it was an armed robbery and assault. But I do have some physical evidence.” He handed Karp the receipt. “Does that help?”

Karp looked at the little slip of paper and then, sharply, back at the patrolman. “Where did you get this?”

Thornby told him.

“You didn't find the handbag?”

“No, it wasn't in the boiler room. The sarge got people out checking trash barrels and sewers. We didn't find his blue shirt either. Or the knife.”

The phone rang, and it was Mel Channing, one of Karp's junior attorneys, with a copy of Hosie Russell's criminal record. Karp asked him to read it over the phone while he made notes. It took five minutes.

“What was that?” asked Cimella when Karp hung up.

“Our boy's yellow sheet. From here to Mars. Fifteen felony convictions—robbery, assault, larceny, burglary. Guy's fifty, can you believe it? He's spent a total of—let's see …” Karp made a rapid calculation on the pad he had used to take notes. “Twenty-two years in the slams, total.”

Cimella said, “Gosh, maybe our system of rehabilitation isn't working. In any case, it looks good he's the guy.”

“Oh, it's him, all right,” said Karp. “He grabbed the cash out of her purse and didn't notice that the receipt was crumpled up in it. But it's nice to know he's not a pillar of the church. Okay, let's take a look at this sweetheart.”

Karp and Cimella went into the interview room. Russell stared at them blankly. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the room was full of his sour odor. Karp introduced himself and explained the rights of the accused.

“
Do
you know why you're here, Mr. Russell?”

“Yeah, the cops fucked up. They got the wrong guy.”

“Uh-huh. Tell me, what were you running from when you ran through Mr. Shelton's apartment this afternoon?”

“Who?”

“You ran through an apartment at 58 Barrow Street. The tenant saw you clearly and identified you to the police. What were you running from?”

“I din' run nowhere. I was drunk all mornin'. My head feel like shit. Could I get some aspirin?”

“In a minute. Let me tell you what we know for sure. At about twelve-fifteen you stabbed and killed a young woman named Susan Weiner in the doorway of 484 Hudson Street and took her purse. Reliable witnesses have identified you. Do you have any statement to make at this time?”

“Yeah, I want some aspirin. And a lawyer.”

Karp shrugged and walked out of the room. A cop took Russell to the holding cells. Karp and Cimella went back to the squad room.

Karp said, “125.25; 160.15; 265.04, okay?”

Cimella said, “Sounds good,” and so they booked Russell for murder in the second degree (two counts, one for murder in association with a felony and one for intentional murder), first-degree robbery, and first-degree criminal possession of a weapon.

“What's wrong?” asked Cimella, observing the tight expression on Karp's face. “You expected him to confess?”

“Hell, no. I'd just like to have the shirt and the bag and the knife.”

“Why? We got the slip Thornby found on him.”

“Yeah, but that'll be challenged on probable cause. Why did the cops pick on a poor innocent derelict? We'll probably win that, but we could lose it too … what's all that?”

There was a commotion, sounds of shouting and crashing furniture from the lower floor of the precinct house.

Cimella trotted down the stairs, and Karp limped after him. There they found police officers holding back a large, conservatively dressed black man who had apparently been trying to attack a prisoner. Approaching, they saw that the prisoner was Hosie Russell.

“What the hell's going on here, Maury?” Cimella demanded of the uniformed sergeant.

“Damned if I know, Charlie. This guy”—indicating the large black man—“came in and asked the desk who was on that Hudson Street thing, so I gave him your name and he headed upstairs. Then Ryan and Hardy came through with this mutt on the way to the cells, and the guy sees the mutt and yells, ‘You swine!' and goes for his throat.”

The man now seemed calmer and, in fact, embarrassed at his outburst. The officers restraining him released him, and Russell was removed to the cells without further incident. Karp introduced himself to the man, who turned out to be James Turnbull, the proprietor of the leather shop on the ground floor of Susan Weiner's building.

“Mr. Turnbull,” asked Karp after steering the man to a quiet corner of the station-house corridor, “what was that all about?”

Turnbull shook his head, as if amazed, and spoke in a soft West Indian accent. “I just lost it, I guess. You see a woman, a neighbor, slaughtered before your eyes. When I saw him, I just wanted to smash his damned face in.”

“Him? You mean the man in custody?”

“Yeah. He killed Susan.”

“You're sure? You'd make a statement to that effect?”

“Of course. That's what I came down here for. I was too shaken up earlier.”

They walked off to find a stenographer, found one, and Turnbull dictated a statement and signed it. As Karp was about to find the officers who had witnessed the altercation and obtain statements from them, Cimella hailed him.

“Look what I got,” the detective said. He held up three sealed evidence bags, two large, one smaller. The two large bags held a dark blue shirt and a woman's leather purse. The small one held a short kitchen knife.

“Where did you get those?” asked Karp.

“Our friend Shelton. It turns out he was visiting a friend on the second floor of his building and found these under the stairwell. He called the house, they sent a car out, and they found the stuff. Cop just gave them to me.”

“That's Susan's bag,” said Turnbull. “I made it.” He looked close to tears. Cimella said to Karp, “So, we got it all. Are you always this lucky?”

“It's clean living, Charlie,” said Karp, grinning. “Luck has nothing to do with it.”

“Yeah, well, in that case, you can go talk to the jackals. There's fifty of them outside the house. I told you they'd eat this one up.”

Karp's shift on call lasted until eight. There were no more murders in Manhattan during its span, for which he was profoundly grateful. He had the police driver take him home and limped up the stairs.

The sound of heavy thumps and energetic grunting issued from the far end of the loft. Karp shouted a greeting, which was returned with a breathy “Hi.” He then sat down on the couch, removed his clothes, put on a bathrobe; and applied a chemical cold pack to his knee.

He had just bought a carton of these, and kept them near the old red couch, which he had taken over as a dressing room and bed. He could no longer bear to climb the ladder to the sleeping loft. After a half hour, with the knee partially anesthetized by the cold pack, he clumped down to the gym, an ill-defined area beyond the wall of the dining room. It held, among other things, Karp's rowing machine and Marlene's speed bag and body bag.

She was pounding away at the latter, dressed in baggy red shorts, a cut down T-shirt, and sneakers. Karp watched her in silent admiration as her muscles bunched and played and shining sweat bounced off her face. The baby was in her recently purchased playpen, bouncing, cooing, and rattling her bars. Karp took a towel and played peek-a-boo with his daughter until Marlene finished her workout and began to strip off her speed gloves. When she turned at last to face him, he saw that her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.