No Lesser Plea (18 page)

“Nationally? I don’t know. With Nixon in there the Republicans …”

“No, not the national bullshit. I mean here. The DA’s office.”

“The DA’s office?” Karp shrugged. “What’s to think? Mr. Garrahy will run and be elected by ninety-eight percent of the vote, as usual.”

Conlin regarded the younger man inquiringly through a cloud of cigar smoke. “He’s seventy-three. Have you looked at him lately?”

Karp remembered the day at the Bullets’ game and what he had seen, and what he had said to Guma and what Guma had answered.

“Yeah, but somehow it’s hard to think of the New York District Attorney’s Office without the … well, without the
DA.
Are you suggesting he might not run?”

Conlin leaned back in the judge’s chair and blew a stream of smoke at his high ceiling. “He’s been making noises in that direction. The question is, who replaces him if he decides to retire?”

Karp waited. This was obviously the other shoe. Conlin resumed.

“There’s what’s-his-name, Bill Vierick in the Mayor’s Office: lawyer, very big with the liberals; never argued a criminal case as far as I know, but ran the Mayor’s Task Force on Criminal Justice. I know he’d like to be DA. Like JFK said about Bobby when he made him attorney general, give him a little legal training before he goes into private practice.

“Then we have Bloom over in the Southern District. Good political connections on the state level, hard charger, ambitious as sin. Rich fucker, too. On the other hand, he comes on like a nun. Our party leaders don’t like that, so that could be trouble for Mister Sanford L. Bloom.”

“OK, who else … ?” Conlin mused, as if to no one in particular.

My cue, thought Karp. “There’s you,” he said. And it was true. Jack Conlin would make a fine DA, but Karp could not help resenting the manipulation.

Conlin pursed his lips and drew on his cigar, as if this notion had never occurred to him before. Then he laughed, a short bark. “I guess you do know something about politics, Butch. OK, let me cut out the blarney. I want to be the DA. But not at Phil Garrahy’s expense, and not at the expense of splitting the Party vote. I happen to know Vierick has already organized a committee and that the mayor will support him, whether Garrahy runs or not.”

“What! Garrahy will blow his doors off. Who gives a damn who the mayor endorses for DA? The only endorsement worth squat in an open DA race would be the one from Francis P. Garrahy himself.”

“Assuming he doesn’t run, in which case I can’t see him endorsing anyone but me.”

Karp did not like the way the conversation was going. He did not care to examine that closely what went on under the hood in the DA’s office. As long as it let him get on with putting bad guys in jail, he was content to let others get greasy hands. He was also a little confused about what Conlin wanted of him.

“Yeah, but he is going to run, isn’t he? I mean, nobody is telling him not to, right?”

“Of course not. I’ve been asking him to declare as a candidate at every bureau chief meeting for the past six months. No, he’s just being cagey. I think he’s feeling his age and wants everybody to tell him he’s still the man he used to be, and all.”

“Hell,
I’ll
tell him that.”

Conlin chuckled. “Well, you may get the opportunity some day. Meanwhile, if he doesn’t run, and it does come to a primary fight, I’d like to be able to count on your support.”

“Uh, sure. I mean, for what it’s worth …”

“No, don’t go undervaluing yourself. You happen to be among the most respected of the younger men in this office. People listen to you. They think you’ve got a good head on your shoulders.” Conlin let go a flashy smile. Karp smiled back. An inane song of the period rattled through his head—“I’m in with the In Crowd, I know what the In Crowd knows.” Conlin was looking through some papers on his desk. Karp sensed the meeting was over and got up to leave.

“Oh, couple more things, Butch,” Conlin said. He consulted a piece of paper on his desk. “This Marlene Ciampi. You ever work with her?”

“Yeah, some. She’s hard to miss.”

“The bureau has been getting some pressure about hiring a woman. Abondini’s leaving next month, so we’ve got a slot. What d’you think?”

“I think she’s a great lawyer. Works hard, knows her procedure, plenty of guts.”

Conlin grunted. “Yeah, well Phil is a little uneasy. You know how old-fashioned he is. Thinks maybe a woman might have, how did he put it? Sensibilities too delicate for the rough-and-tumble of the Homicide Bureau. What about that?”

Karp barely restrained a giggle. “Ah … I think Mr. Garrahy can put his mind at ease in the sensibilities department.”

Conlin made a few notes and then turned to Karp again.

“Oh, and on the Marchione case? You’ll be happy to learn that our defendant has hired Leonard Sussman.”

Karp whistled. If you were a society matron and you found your husband in the rack with the upstairs maid and shot him five times in the head with your pearl-handled .32, you might hire Leonard Sussman to get you off, or if you were a Mafia chieftain and a number of your business associates had died under circumstances so unusual that the police suspected foul play, then you would definitely want Sussman to be your man in court. But Sussman did not work for armed robbers who shot liquor store owners.

“Sussman is doing
pro bono?
Stop the presses!”

“Nope. The little shit is paying regular rates. Where’s it coming from, I wonder? What do we know about this Louis guy, anyway?”

“Next to zip. No record, for one thing—that’s unusual as hell. No family in the city. Apparently works as a proofreader when he’s not shooting. Just a guy who decided to be an armed robber, it looks like. Say, is Sussman going to be any trouble on this case?”

Conlin said with a laugh, “Oh, he’s always trouble, some way or another. But, really, we built a great case. It’s a lock. I mean, what can he do?”

Which was precisely what Leonard Sussman was wondering at this moment.

Seated across from Mandeville Louis in the small lawyers’ meeting room in the Tombs, Sussman radiated the solid confidence that was his great professional tool. What he felt was irrelevant and invisible. He was a silver man: curly silvery hair, pale eyes, silver-rimmed half glasses, silvery-gray pinstriped suit, and silk tie. His skin might have been pale and silvery too, had it not been bronzed by a recent week of skiing in Gstaad.

Sussman was about to become annoyed with his client, something he never did. He considered it bad for business. But, of course, Louis was not part of his usual clientele. He was black, for one thing, and he wasn’t frightened, for another. In fact, he was maddeningly confident. Sussman tried again.

“Mister Louis, I seem to be having a great deal of difficulty communicating to you the gravity of your present situation. You’re being charged with murder in the first degree. Walker places you at the scene with a loaded shotgun. Another witness also places you at the scene. Your pistol killed one of the victims. I am a very good criminal lawyer, as you know, but I doubt that even I will be able to fix in the mind of a jury the possibility that in the fifteen or so minutes you were gone from the car somebody else killed the Marchiones with your weapons. Yet in spite of the strength of this evidence, you refuse to countenance negotiating a plea to a lesser offence, nor have you been forthcoming in offering me any extenuation, any scrap of …”

Louis broke in, saying, “Mister Sussman, I am not going to prison. Not now. Not ever.”

Sussman regarded his client coldly. Louis was dressed in a yellow jail uniform too large for his thin frame. His hazel eyes, discomfortingly odd in a black man’s face, glittered back at the lawyer from behind round, gold-framed glasses. Sussman felt himself becoming unsettled under this gaze and glanced down at his papers. Rich and recently widowed women did not treat him this way.

“Yes, yes, of course, that’s what I’m here for. Now I can of course delay the date to some extent, and I have in fact taken the liberty of entering a number of motions to that effect, but at some time we will undoubtedly have to go to trial, and I can assure you that …”

“There will be no trial.”

“No trial?”

“That is correct.”

Sussman stared at Louis over his half glasses. “Mister Louis, are you, ah,
planning
something?”

“Yes,” said Louis.

“Don’t you think you should discuss it with your attorney?”

“No, I do not.”

“You’re being impossibly difficult, Mister Louis.”

“Yes. That’s why I hired you,” said Louis with a cold smile. He rose and knocked on the door for the guard. “Good day, Mister Sussman. See you in court.”

Some weeks later Karp was having breakfast at Sam’s with V.T. Newbury.

“Anyhow,” said Karp, “I love the work, you know, but I’m getting nervous. Conlin makes me nervous. I mean I’ve always had a lot of respect for the guy, and all, a great lawyer, but this political shit is making everything wacky. I mean, he leaks stuff to the press all the time, stuff about cases that shouldn’t get out. But if it makes him look good, there it is on the front page. And, there’s cases he won’t go to trial on, cases we have good chances to win, but no, he’s thinking about the track record. It’s got to be a sure thing or he lets them cop to a lesser. This is
homicide
I’m talking about now …”

“And Homicide should be above reproach—and immune to the sort of corruption the rest of us are sunk in?”

Newbury finished his soft-boiled egg and dabbed his lips with a napkin. “I think you’re learning that the bureau is not King Arthur’s Round Table, is that it?”

Karp bridled. “I never expected that.”

“Yes you did. But the bureau is made up of human beings. Human beings are fallible, frightened and prone to corruption. ‘In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.’ Conlin wants Garrahy’s job; why shouldn’t he jerk chains to get it?”

“It isn’t right.”

“Yes, that’s the correct Old Testament position. But look, how long did you expect Homicide to survive as an elite unit when the rest of the system is crumbling like cheese? The cops are rotten, the jails are rotten, the lower courts are rotten: it’s got to touch everything—Conlin, Garrahy …”

“Never. Not Garrahy.”

“No? There are different kinds of corruption, you know. There are sins of omission.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look around you, damn it! The criminal justice system of this city is operated like a third-class whorehouse. It would be a scandal in Venezuela. Not enough prosecutors, not enough office or courtroom space, not enough judges, not enough jails. Police corruption? I see cops wearing clothes and driving cars I can’t afford and I’m pig rich. And when was the last time you saw Garrahy making a stink about any of that on television or the front page?”

“Hell, V.T., you can’t blame the whole bad business on one man.”

“No? Who else is there? He doesn’t have the clout? The man’s got more political power than God Almighty, and as far as I can see he does fuck-all with it.”

“Jesus, Newbury, calm down! Would you prefer Jack Conlin in there? Or Bloom?”

Newbury drew a couple of deep breaths and then grinned sheepishly. “God help us! No, I guess it’s eight generations of outraged civic virtue. Good government DNA is in my genes. Look, Butch, it’s not that I don’t respect him, I mean as a person. Sure, who wouldn’t, he walks on water. But, I mean, look at the institution. Why hasn’t he groomed somebody to take over? Why does he tolerate that total shit, Wharton?”

“How should I know, V.T.? Maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on …”

“Oh, yeah. If only the czar knew how his people suffered, surely he would do something! Did I ever tell you about my Uncle Parker? A crucial event in my young life. Actually he was my great-uncle. Had a big place out in Sag Harbor where I used to spend the summers. I was crazy about that man. He had a room full of toys for all the cousins, and he would actually spend hours, playing with us down on the carpet. He was, I don’t know, everything you want your parents to be, but they never are: wise, kind, patient, unbelievably funny. A marvelous man. I was his absolute dog.

“He died when I was fourteen. I cried for a week. They thought I was bonkers—nobody cries in my family. OK, the scene switches to Newbury in college. I’m in American studies. I’m doing my senior thesis on labor organization in West Virginia in the twenties. You ever hear of the Highland Coal War? No? Not many people have. It was a little bit of Vietnam in our own dear land. For three years the Highland Coal Company carried on what amounted to a war of extermination against striking miners, their union, and their families.

“The miners fought back—dynamite, ambushes, sabotage—but Highland Coal had the county and state governments in their pocket and they had a private army of goons who used to whip through the hollows up there on fucking search-and-destroy missions. Finally, they imported blacks as scabs and kept them in locked stockades under unbelievable conditions—practically slavery. That broke the strike, but the hatred those people had—there are even songs about it—‘P.C. Highland, you got blood on both your hands. You done starve my children, you done shot down my good man.’ And so on. OK, here’s the kicker. You know who P. C. Highland was?”

“No, who?”

“My Uncle Parker, that’s who! It almost killed me when I found out.”

Karp was confused. “So he was a hypocrite; how could you know, you were just a …”

“No! He
wasn’t
a hypocrite. He hadn’t the faintest notion of where his money came from. That’s just the point. It was his
responsibility
to know, to know what was being done there in his name.”

“And you’re saying that Garrahy is like your uncle? That’s bullshit, V.T.”

Newbury sighed. “OK Butch, whatever you say. Maybe the job is getting to me. Maybe I should take my father’s advice and go work for Mitchell in Washington.” He glanced at his watch. “Hey, I love to linger, but it’s getting late.”

Both men slid out of the booth and went to the door. It was raining, a fine, warm April rain.

Karp said, “You ever think about a Washington career? God knows, you have the connections.”