Justice Denied (9 page)

The lunch ended, not without (as Marlene had expected) an unbearable niggling over who owed what on the check, presided over by Geri, wielding a pencil. At the point when she was calculating the tip, to the nearest cent, Marlene whipped a twenty out of her wallet, snatched the check from Geri's fingers, slapped the check and the bill on the table, and clunked a sugar dispenser down on both.

“My treat,” she said. “Let's move, Susan.”

“God, yes,” said Weiner, glancing at her watch. “I already missed my Jazzercise.”

“Your Jazzercise—” said Geri. “Honestly, it's like a religion with you.”

“You should try it, Geri, seriously, I'm always trying to get her off her behind. Do something! Marlene, you work out, right? What, aerobics?”

“I box,” said Marlene. A snuffle of unbelieving mirth. “No, I don't mean I get in the ring. I have a body bag and a speed bag, and I jump rope and curl dumbbells. My dad taught me, and I've kept it up.”

“Really?” from both.

“Yeah, he was a welterweight contender at one time back in the forties, or thought he was before he spent six minutes in there with Kid Gavilan. He stuck to plumbing after that.”

Polite smiles, but Marlene caught the little look that passed. The sisters Stone did not know people whose fathers were ex-pugs or current plumbers. One of the nearly invisible injuries of class that aren't supposed to happen in America, but which make up much of the grit in the national gears. Sacred Heart and Smith and Yale Law had taken much of the sting out of it for Marlene; still, she could recall very much the same look on her own dear one's face when she had first told him about where she came from, under the fancy veneer. A brief thought, and a familiar one, brushed across her mind: that Karp might have been, not happier maybe, but more content with another perfect Jewish princess like Susan Weiner. She was glad now she had sprung for the lunch.

The day-care was on Lispenard off Church, a few blocks north. They walked up Church. Susan Weiner did most of the talking, much of it about herself and her nice life. Marlene let the talk wash over her, content to just swing along the street. It was a pleasant day in the City. That is, the sky was the color of a lizard's belly and the air stank of petroleum byproducts, but at least it wasn't raining ice.

And she had high expectations. A perfect being like this could not have found anything less than the perfect day-care.

And so it proved. The woman who took care of six children in her large, sunny loft was a matronly soul named Lillian Dillard, who affected an embroidered smock and a plait of gray-blond hair down to her butt. She made quilts and wrote poetry and would someday finish her dissertation on early childhood behavior. The children, ranging from eight months to three, obviously loved her. Susan's three-year-old boy barely acknowledged his mother's presence, which Marlene took as a good sign. There was no TV in the large front room, another good sign. Marlene turned on the charm, was accepted, and wrote out a check for the first month in advance.

Back at her desk, feeling pleased with herself, she flipped through her messages, returning calls.

“Morgue, we doze but never close, Maher.”

“Denny? Marlene.”

“Ah, the pearl of Centre Street. How nice to hear your voice.”

“Likewise. What's up?”

“Hmm. We've got a Jane Doe here. A splatter case. Went off a six-story building in Alphabet City. Some marks I don't like on the body, and the vaginal and esophageal smears are positive.”

“You think rape and he killed her?”

“I wouldn't go that far yet,” said Maher. “The girl was fairly torn up. On the other hand, I have some anomalous results on the secretion tests. We have more than one sperm donor here.”

“What do the cops think?”

“They think a pross. They think suicide.”

“They would. They made her for a pross? No, you said a Jane Doe.”

“Right. Her face is jam. But the kicker is, I have clear human tooth marks, three bites, same guy, and deep enough to draw blood. That always makes me steer away from either a trip to the moon on gossamer wings or a straight commercial transaction. Of course, I don't date much anymore …”

“Drugs?”

“No tracks. Tissues are negative for barbs, amphetamines, and opiates. No booze either.”

“Who caught the case?”

Marlene heard paper shuffle. “Camano. Ninth Precinct.”

She wrote down the name and the phone number Maher gave her, thanked the medical examiner, and hung up.

The call from the M.E. was supposed to be automatic, but some of the medical examiners thought it too much trouble to call the D.A.'s office directly. They figured the cops were in charge and that it was their call. Besides, they had a lot to do.

Marlene looked at the name she had written down and wondered if it was even worth making the call. The cops had a lot to do as well, and so did she. About three thousand rapes were reported to the police in Manhattan every year, out of which Marlene would be glad if she secured fifty convictions. Of course, the woman had been murdered too, which meant the cops had to give it more attention. Lucky her.

The problem was that there were good and bad rapes. The good rapes were when the age, race, or social class of the perp and the victim were widely disparate, or when there had been notable violence. Rapes of prostitutes were, however, the worst rapes of all. The casual murders that were part of the occupational hazard in the City's sex trade were only slightly better. If the cops had decided that Jane was a whore who had taken early retirement, then convincing them that she was a whore who had been raped and killed would not get all that much more action out of them. Sighing, she made the call.

The homicide bureau occupied a small suite of offices on the sixth floor of 100 Centre Street. Only Karp and a few senior people like Hrcany had actual offices. These gave on to a large common area jammed with secretaries' desks, the domain of Connie Trask. The rest of the A.D.A.'s were stuck in glass cubicles in a large bay a short distance down the main sixth-floor corridor.

It was Karp's habit after lunch, and before court started again in the afternoon, to prowl his turf, poking into papers and confronting malefactors. This habit obviated any number of formal meetings, which he abhorred. In this way, emerging from his office, faintly redolent of Italian sausage, Karp made the discovery that brought him back into
People
v.
Tomasian.

A clerk had just brought in a pile of Xeroxing, which she distributed among the wire baskets arranged for that purpose, one for each attorney, on a table in the corner of the secretaries' bullpen. Karp wandered over and thumbed through some of the still warm papers. One of the folders in Roland Hrcany's basket was labeled TOMASIAN. It contained copies of material produced by the arresting officers, mostly DD-5 forms, which cops used for describing in some detail what they had done to pursue the investigation and the results, if any. Karp skimmed the reports and the list of items seized under the search warrant. He dug deeper. The autopsy report. Deeper. A description of the items found on the victim. Here he stopped, puzzled, and leafed through the stack more carefully. Then he tossed the folder back into the basket and, frowning, strode off in search of Roland Hrcany.

Roland was not in his office when Karp looked for him there. He was in court, as it happened, for a bail hearing on the case in question. Karp sat in the back of the courtroom and watched Tomasian's defense counsel, a stocky, grave man who really did look a lot like Raymond Burr, move for the setting of bail. He pointed out Tomasian's clean record, the presence of a large and caring family, the defendant's gainful employment in a family business, his ownership of a condo. Roland rose to rebut and argued with equal vehemence that the defendant was accused of a particularly heinous crime; he had resources and contacts outside the country; he was part of an international terrorist network.

Karp sympathized with the judge. Justice was at least partially sighted in cases like this one, and able to read the papers and watch TV. Poor kids from the lower orders of the City who gunned down people on the streets were invariably remanded to jail without bail. On the other hand, the well-dressed and harmless-looking man sitting before him was supposedly innocent until proven guilty, and had a constitutional right to reasonable bail.

The judge was not used to jailing people in nice suits with, as the saying went, roots in the community. He pondered for a few seconds and, using his years of experience on the bench, pulled a number out of the air: “Bail is set in the amount of five million dollars.”

Sighs from the small group of people sitting behind the defense table. Karp thought it a reasonable out for the judge. Bondsmen would not touch a bail like that, which meant that Tomasian and his near and dear would have to raise the face amount, which meant in all probability that the guy was going back inside.

Karp waited at the head of the aisle. When Roland reached him, he said, “Nice work, Roland. The City sleeps safer tonight.”

Hrcany's face twisted. “It should have been a no-bailer. These are diamond people, for chrissake! Who knows what they've got squirreled away?”

“Maybe. Meanwhile, I'm glad I caught you, Roland. I was just curious: what did you find in the vic's safe-deposit box?”

“What're you talking about?”

“The box. The vic had a box key on him when he went down. What's in it?”

Roland's eyes narrowed slightly and his body tensed.

“What is this, Butch? You checking up on me?”

“No, it just happened to cross my eye. I have to go and sit down with Bloom this afternoon and tell him that the case is a wrap, which is the only thing he wants to hear. So I needed to know if it is.”

A flush began to rise under Roland's jaw. “Wait a minute! Since when did you give a shit about Bloom?”

Karp ignored this and pitched his voice to its maximally calming tone. “That's not the point, Roland. The fact that a victim has a safe box suggests a repository of information that could bear on the case, and I need to know what was in it before I go talk to Bloom. So what was it?”

Roland, of course, had noted the box key first thing, but in the flush of success had neglected to follow up on it. He covered himself now by blustering. “How the fuck do I know? Cuff links? His birth certificate? What the hell does it matter?”

“You haven't checked it,” said Karp.

“I don't believe this! You still don't get it.
This is the guy.
It doesn't fucking matter what's in the box. We don't have to trace the victim's movements or his fucking associates, or find out what he ate for his last meal. It ain't no mystery, Butch.”

Karp shifted gears. “The alibi didn't check out, huh? You talked to the girlfriend?”

“The girlfriend is gone,” replied Roland with an unpleasant smile. “Her office says she's on leave. So I got a warrant to search her place, knowing,
knowing,
that you would bug me about her. They found a VISA counterfoil for a ticket to San Francisco. We checked with the airlines: she was on a flight that left late that Sunday. I wonder why.”

“You think she's involved?”

“I know it. Her place was full of Armenian nationalist literature, some of it copies of the stuff we found in Tomasian's office. They were in it together. In fact, it wouldn't blow me away if we found out that she was the other gun.”

“So we're looking for her.”

“Yeah, she's out on the wire. But whether she turns up or not, it shoots the shit out of our boy's alibi.”

Karp nodded agreement. “Yeah, it does, provided he needs one.”

“What?”

“Roland, what happens to your open-and-shut case if there's five kilos of Turkish heroin in his box? Or a letter from a shark that says, ‘Pay up or else!'?”

“This is horseshit, Butch!” cried Roland, going red again.

“Just open the box, Roland,” said Karp, and walked away.

Detective Camano turned out to be one of those cops who had retired on the job. The Jane Doe from Avenue A was an easy clearance, one of hundreds of miscellaneous bodies and parts of bodies that turned up in the City every year.

“It ain't homicide to get a bite on the ass,” he told Marlene confidently. “The M.E. says there was no sign of foul play.”

“Biting isn't foul play?”

“I mean not a cause of death. Look, honey, there's no knife wound, there's no gunshot wound, she wasn't strangled, or tied up—”

“You haven't considered the possibility that she was raped and thrown out of a window?”

A long-suffering sigh on the line. “We checked the houses on both sides of the street. Nobody saw nothing, and there's no woman missing from any of the apartments.”

“What about the street girls?”

A laugh. “They haven't missed a trick, is what I hear. Look, we got forty, forty-five homicides on the chart here that we know are homicides. We don't need to invent any, especially when the M.E. isn't ready to call it.”

“What about the rape part?”

“We don't know that either. I got nobody on the block saying they saw this chick dragged into the bushes. Nobody's coming around saying where's my Mary. So what am I gonna go on? Fingerprints? Sperm samples? You know how I figure it? This chick gets off a bus, tries the sporting life, a customer gets a little rough, and she decides to take a jump.”

It was a dead end with this guy. Marlene decided to waste no more time. She said, “I hope you're right, Detective Camano. On the other hand, if we get three more women's bodies turning up with bite marks in the same places, and one of them is the mayor's niece, I'll remember this conversation and bring it up whenever I can with whoever will listen.”

She slammed her phone down and reached for the next call message in the stack.