Resolved (8 page)

At 4:30, Karp slid Murrow's memorandum into one of the green accountancy ledgers he used as notebooks, and went into the DA's office. Laura Rachman was there already, today in an insistent violet costume. She was talking animatedly at the DA, who was studying the never-smoked Bering claro he used as a prop. He seemed happy to see Karp, if only to terminate Rachman's spiel.

“I hear you're interfering with the course of justice again,” Keegan growled.

Karp sat down and nodded to Rachman. “Just a difference of opinion on
People versus Hirsch
. I don't think it's ready, Laura does.”

“He wants a corroborating witness,” said Rachman. “For crying out loud, it's a rape case.”

“Actually, I didn't say that. What I said was I wanted something else besides the completely unsupported testimony of a woman against a doctor where we don't have a breath of anything else against him.”

“Also untrue,” said Rachman. “We have enough other stuff. Jack, this is a critical issue for me, I mean if I don't have your confidence…” She left it hanging.

Keegan said, waving the cigar dismissively, “No, no, come on, Laura, you know that's not the issue. What
is
the issue, Butch?”

“Well, I always thought that if your whole case depended on uncorroborated testimony from the victim, with no forensics at all, with the victim not reporting until five days later, like we have here, then the quality of the witness was pretty important. So is this the case with Ms. Coleman? You'll judge for yourself. It appears that Ms. Coleman got herself evicted from her apartment late last year, for nonpayment. She eventually came up with the rent and they let her move back in. She subsequently sued her landlord, claiming the stress and whatever of the eviction had caused her severe digestive upset, so severe that she had to quit work. She's suing for two million.”

“What relevance does all this have—” began Rachman, but Keegan stopped her with a gesture.

Karp resumed. “A week after she mounted her lawsuit, she became a patient of Dr. Hirsch, who's a specialist in gastroenterology. She complained of severe stomach pains. Hirsch examined her and found no organic cause for her pain, but being a careful man, he arranged for this colonoscopy. Five days after said procedure Ms. Coleman reported the alleged assault to the police. Five days.”

“She couldn't find a precinct with an African-American police-woman,” said Rachman.

“So she says. Although she doesn't seem to have any trouble finding Albert B. Pearson, her lawyer in the civil suit she's been preparing against Hirsch. A litigious person, Ms. Coleman.”

“She has every right to sue,” said Rachman. Little spots of color had appeared on her cheeks.

“It's every citizen's right,” Karp agreed blandly. “And her case will be a lot better if Hirsch is convicted. Moving on, we have the curious incident of the post-traumatic visit. The colonoscopy occurred on a Monday, the fifth of March. On Wednesday, Ms. Coleman arrived at Dr. Hirsch's office, without an appointment, and insisted on seeing him. He agreed. In the office, Ms. Coleman asked the doctor to be a witness in her lawsuit against the landlord, to testify that her putative intestinal ailments were a direct result of the stress caused by her eviction the previous year. This Dr. Hirsch refused to do. He said he could find nothing organic wrong with her at present, and even if he had made such a finding, since she hadn't been his patient before the eviction happened, there was no way in good conscience that he could testify to any physical debility attendant upon that event. At that, Ms. Coleman became angry and, for the first time, accused him of the assault. He vigorously denied it, and continues to deny it. Two days later, she reported it to the police. Now, none of what I've just said was included in the sex crime bureau's presentation of the case. But it was easy enough to get.”

“Yeah, from Hirsch,” Rachman said. “Of course, he's going to deny it and tell stories.”

“Did you know all this, Laura?” Keegan asked.

“Of course we did. As I said before, it's irrelevant to the crime. The fact is, Ms. Coleman was abused. And we can prove it.”

“Can you?” asked Karp. “Really? I mean, you don't think all of this material rises to the level of reasonable doubt? The unlikeli-hood of the event given the medical situation, the exposed locale, the prior reputation of the accused, the lack of credible supporting witnesses, the failure to report, the return visit, during which no mention was made of the assault until after Hirsch refused to testify, the financial benefit of a conviction to the supposed victim…”

“I told you, it's irrelevant. And we'll make sure none of that is allowed at trial. With a halfway decent judge…”

Karp felt his jaw drop and his belly tighten. “Laura! For God's sake, what the fuck does it matter what you can get suppressed? It's fucking exculpatory evidence.”

“Don't yell at me! Don't you dare yell at me!”

“Guys, guys, calm down,” said the DA, who despised histrionics in his office that he did not himself initiate. “Maybe we can avoid trial in the first place. What would Hirsch say to a deal? The charge is sexual abuse first—we drop it to third, it's a misdemeanor, he might not even lose his license.”

“We tried that,” said Rachman, “Terry tried that and Hirsch told us to get lost. He says it never happened.”

“Terry?”

“Teresa Palmisano, the ADA, very competent, very thorough.”

Karp could not suppress a sniff here, and got a furious glare from Rachman. They were silent for a moment, while the DA cogitated. Karp thought he could almost see the wheels whirring in the man's head. Another racial case, black vic, white defendant, how would it look to the black vote, Rachman with connections to the liberals, to the women, percentage of votes that represented, plus the black, weak there in the first place, Karp a liability because of the racial thing, the doctor ought to deal, he wouldn't so he gets it in the neck, go ahead with the trial, the low-risk solution…

“Well, I'm inclined,” said Keegan, “absent any other information, to let the case go forward. Let the jury sort it out. That's what juries are for. And next time, Laura, let's put everything, good and bad, in the pretrial package, so that Butch doesn't have to get bent out of shape off of this kind of crap.”

Karp couldn't meet his boss' eye. He nodded his head and made a note in his ledger. A little forced chitchat to show that they were all still good friends, and Karp was out in the corridor with Laura Rachman. She turned to him and said, “No hard feelings, Butch, huh?”

“No, of course not,” said Karp stiffly. “It's all part of the day's work. But, I admit it's still a little bit of a shock to see him do it.”

“Do what?”

“Pervert the law for political purposes. I don't have a sister, but I guess that if I did, and she turned into a whore and I had to drive past her stroll every day, after a while I'd get used to seeing her in her little hot pants with her tits hanging out. But I bet it'd take a while, and I guess I haven't gotten to that point with Jack Keegan.”

Her face wrinkled in distaste. “You know, Karp, you really are an offensive son of a bitch.”

“So I've often been told,” he said, turning away down the little dogleg corridor that led to his office.

“We're going to win this case,” she called after him.

Karp stopped, turned to face her. “Yes, you might. There are enough asshole judges in this building, and one of them might actually allow you to suppress all the material about that woman's history and actions. That's not the point. Winning isn't the fucking
point
. We're not playing girls' soccer here, Laura. The point is that you know and I know and even Terry what's-her-name probably knows how incredibly, extremely unlikely it is that Hirsch actually stuck his tongue into the alleged victim's shit-smeared vagina in the way the alleged victim described it. The woman is a fraud, and the case is a fraud, and nobody seems to give a shit.”

“Girls' soccer?” cried Rachman, her voice rising.

“And furthermore, whatever happens here, you're going to get creamed on appeal even if you get your suppression. Appeals Court judges tend to take a dim view of the state junking exculpatory evidence.”

“How
dare
you talk to me like that!” cried Rachman. Her face had gone pale and blotchy under her makeup, giving it an unfortunate clown-mask appearance. He turned again, and went into his office, slamming the door behind him.

Karp heard her shouting at him, heard himself called a misogynist as well as a racist, heard threats of formal complaint. Rachman had a famously aggressive tongue when aroused.

Terrell Collins was sitting in his office. Karp felt a flush of embarrassment rise to his face.

“You heard all that?”

Collins nodded. “Uh-huh. What's going on?”

Karp sat in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. “Don't ask. Yet another case flavored by racial overtones, into which I inserted myself with totally predictable results.”

“I hear you're a misogynist, too. That line about girls' soccer was probably not wise.”

“No, it wasn't. I lost my temper and Satan made the phrase swim into my mind.”

“Will that be your case when she brings you up on a sex harassment complaint?”

“It might be. It might even work. It's more plausible than the case against Dr. Kevin Hirsch.”

Karp took from his desk a baseball signed by Mickey Mantle and threw it hard against an opposite wall a number of times, catching it one-handed on the rebound, enjoying the sting in his palm.

“Ah, fuck 'em all! Let them fire me. It'd be a mercy at this point.” Karp tossed the ball into his out-basket, shifted his chair, and stared out the window for a moment, thinking about what his life would be like if he didn't have this job. A descent into the bowels of the profession, chasing ambulances, wills, and closings? Or in a gilded penitentiary, doing civil litigation for Wall Street? He snapped out of the brief, unpleasant reverie and said briskly, “So. What's new with the Gerber and Nixon case? Any sense that they'll deal?”

“Not a whisper. Both Gerber and Nixon claim they did nothing wrong, it was a clean shooting. The victim was grabbing for the gun, et cetera. Unfortunately we don't have criminal stupidity as a charge, because it would be a slam dunk to nail this particular pair on it. They're consistent, I'll say that for them.”

“Yeah, like Hirsch,” said Karp. “Well, Terry, look at the bright side: Even if you lose, they won't accuse you of letting them off because you're a racist.”

“No, only an Uncle Tom.”

“We all have our cross to bear, son,” said Karp, in his faux paternal mode. “Meanwhile, I think I'll go home.”

 

Felix loved it when the bomb went off. Rashid had warned him not to hang around the area of the courthouse, but he'd wanted to see it go up. He had gone east of the courthouse, into Columbus Park, and there sat with a newspaper, pretending to read, and keeping an eye on the parking lot. It was a lot louder and more gaudy than he had expected, and he experienced an almost methlike wave of pleasure when the sound and the tail of shock wave reached him in a little line of blown dust and scattered trash. He loved, too, the expressions on the faces of the people in the park. For the first time he understood suicide bombers; to have that kind of effect on people was almost worth dying for. His pleasure was hardly diminished when he learned, a few hours later, that the victim had been a parking attendant and not the judge. It was actually better in a way, because if they still wanted him to clip the judge, they would have to give him another bomb. As the sirens began to wail, he started uptown to the Holy Redeemer soup kitchen to find Lucy.

K
ARP WENT HOME
. H
E LIVED IN A HIGHLY GENTRIFIED LOFT
at Crosby Street and Grand, a short walk from the courthouse. It had not been gentrified at all twenty years ago, when his wife had lived there, but over the years and through many adventures involving the earning and expenditure of large sums, they now owned it and it was now all that a tony SoHo loft should be. Karp had been offered truly nauseating sums of money for it, which his wife had always refused to consider. Karp would have considered even somewhat smaller sums. He liked being able to walk to work, but a loft had never figured in his dreams of what adult life ought to be. Left to himself, he would have chosen a large sprawling home in the nearer suburbs, set back under old trees, with a basketball hoop over the garage. That was a proper environment in which to raise children: good schools, fresh air, no dangerous people. He imagined himself coming home from a day at the office, driving an old car from the station to his broad driveway. Inside his wife would be waiting for him or, not to be a complete neanderthal, she would have just arrived from her decent, lucrative work in a suburban law firm….

Walking through the hot summer streets, he often thought along these lines, especially when, as now, he had to step around some passed-out derelict, or the garbage generated by the Chinese grocery that was his nearest neighbor, but this sort of thinking had become a mere tic, or something like an itch from an old amputation. Even though he was at present literally left to himself. When his interior tape got to this point, it always escaped from its little rollers and tangled. He switched to more immediate concerns. Lucy had not called him, so he didn't know whether she'd be having supper at home tonight. That was annoying.

He concentrated on the annoyance as he worked the key for the elevator. That was new, installed since the building had gone expensively condo. He used to have to walk up four flights, often carrying one or more children. That had been the peak point of his desire for a suburban homestead. In fact, he would have liked to have reproduced his father's establishment in leafy New Rochelle, with a happy family in residence. He had not been able to manage either the house or the happy family, it seemed. Was that Marlene's fault, or his? People whose professional lives are devoted to a fine assessment of blame often apply this art to their personal lives, with unhelpful result, and Karp was no exception. He thought bad thoughts about his wife as he walked into the loft.

As always, it was clean, smelling of floor wax and furniture polish. Lucy kept it so. A little pang of guilt here for Karp. His daughter had taken a leave of absence from Boston College so she could help out at home. Definitely Marlene's fault that, not the catastrophe per se, but the aftermath, her withdrawal, her refusal to face the toxic elements of her personality and…

He turned these thoughts off, a mental switch he used not less than fifty times a day. He went to the gigantic Sub-Zero refrigerator and pulled out a can of soda. Now he noticed that except for the purr of this machine, the loft was utterly silent, too silent to contain a pair of eleven-year-old twins. He checked. Gone.

Not unusual, actually. Lucy could have taken them out, or they could be down at the basketball courts, or at a friend's house. But they were supposed to leave notes on the refrigerator in the case of the former, or call in the case of the latter. More annoyance. He called Lucy's cell phone, found it turned off, and left a message. Karp changed clothes—a cutoff sweatshirt, chinos, and sneakers—grabbed his own cell phone, and went out, intending to do a quick check of the usual places before starting to call the friend list. He walked north on Centre Street. As he passed the cigar and magazine shop at Spring Street, he heard singing, a high pure voice backed up by a button accordion: “Rose of Tralee,” with plenty of vibrato. People were coming in clumps out of the nearby subway station, and a small group had gathered around the singer. The boy singer was wearing black glasses, and he sat on a folding stool, in front of which his accordion box lay open with a sign affixed to it that read,
BLIND BOY PLEASE HELP
. Crouching against the wall behind him lay his guide dog, a large black lab. A drift of bills and silver lay in the case, and as the boy finished the song, more rained down from the listeners. Karp waited until the people moved on, went up to the boy, and asked, “What do you think you're doing?”

“Oh, hi, Dad,” said the boy. “Pretty neat, huh? We made almost forty dollars since rush hour started.”

“Giancarlo, why are you begging in the street?”

“I'm not begging. I'm providing music for weary travelers. It's part of the service economy.”

“Uh-huh. What about the sign?”

“Oh, that was Zak's idea. He thought it was more authentic.”

“It would be more authentic if it was scrawled in crayon on a piece of dirty cardboard and not printed on glossy paper using a two thousand-dollar computer.”

“You think so? Maybe we should change it.”

“Maybe you should lose the sign and the soliciting money on the streets routine. Unfortunately, some people have to earn their living this way and you don't. It doesn't strike me as fair for you to scarf up charitable contributions that should go to them.”

The boy took off his dark glasses. His eyes were perfect, huge and glossy brown, and rimmed with lashes thick as mink. He could see out of them only intermittently and imperfectly, owing to a shotgun pellet lodged in his visual cortex. The rest of his face was in the style that fifteenth-century Florentines liked to cast in bronze or paint to suggest heavenly beings. Karp was always a little stunned to find he had fathered a child (two of them actually) who looked like that, especially after the girl had turned out so plain. When Giancarlo and his brother walked down the street, they stopped traffic. Just now the divine features were cramped into an expression of shock.

“Da-ad! We don't
keep
the money,” the boy exclaimed. “We give it to Lucy and she gives it to the poor. I mean,
duuuh!”

“I beg your pardon, then,” said Karp. “This was Lucy's idea?”

“It was all of us's actually. We never have any money and she said we could do good and do well at the same time and I like singing and playing and it's kind of a goof. In Muslim countries, all the people have to give alms so they think people who beg are really doing poor people a favor, because they can, like, give a penny and then they're cool.”

“Well, we're not a Muslim country
yet,
are we?” said Karp a little testily. He felt he had been caught wrong by his kid, never a pleasant experience of fatherhood, and he was also aware that it was his embarrassment and not the boy's that was now driving his bad mood. “And what's this about no money? You both get an allowance.”

“When you remember. And it's tacky for us to have to nag for it. And it's not the same as when you earn it.”

“I thought it was for the poor.”

“We take a small administrative fee,” said Giancarlo blandly.

“Oh ho.”

“No, Dad, real charities do it, too. Lucy says. Even Mom's charity does.”

“I'm sure. By the way, where
are
Lucy and Zak?”

“They went up Broadway to get some new sneakers.”

“How about you? Don't you need new ones, too?”

“Da-ad.” The long-suffering diphthong. “Obviously, if they fit Zak they'll fit me.”

“Oh, you mean…you're twins?” said Karp, and Giancarlo laughed, a glory in itself. Which did not much improve Karp's unease. Lucy had slotted into the space Marlene had occupied so smoothly that it was only in moments like this that Karp understood how little he knew about the domestic arrangements necessary to raise two boys. Marlene had done it all—shopping, school, church, feeding, doctor, dentist. Like most men of a certain stamp, Karp had restricted his parenting largely to the fun stuff: sports, excursions, roughhousing, giving valuable advice. He realized that dads were supposed to be different nowadays, to be more domestic, but…he would think about that later, maybe have a talk with Lucy. Other charges accumulated on the rap sheet he kept in his head for Marlene.

“Well, I'm hungry,” said Karp. “Why don't we see about gathering the clan and getting something to eat?”

“Could we go to Mercerama?”

This was perhaps Karp's least favorite place to consume calories: a large echoing chamber on Mercer Street full of video games, pinball machines, boys between eight and fourteen, guilty parents, and electronic cacophony. It served greasy pizzas and burgers. The guilty parent said, “Sure. That'll be fun.”

 

“You really know how to show a girl a good time, Dad,” said Lucy, rolling her eyes. “Why did you agree to eat here? You hate this place.”

Karp was looking through the mob of juvenile males, trying to spot his sons. Zak was at a video game, killing pixels. A couple of younger kids were sneaking looks at his scores, which were, as usual, spectacular. And an even more interested group was observing Giancarlo, who was playing Skee-Ball.

“How the hell does he do that?” Karp asked, rather than answer her question. “He can't see.”

“It's called blind sight,” she said. “There's nothing wrong with his eyes; he just has a problem processing the image. But he can make an association between what his eyes take in and the sound of the ball, so he gets better at hitting the holes. I asked at the lab and it was explained to me in tedious detail.”

“What do they say about the prognosis?”

“Guarded hopeful. It could get better, but it could get worse, too. Neurons tend to deteriorate if they're not used.” With a sigh she added, “There's no treatment and no point in talking about it. Wait and pray is all we can do. He seems pretty happy, though, considering. How was your day? Bad, right?”

“Oh, you know. The usual crapola. I had a run-in with Laura Rachman in which Jack decided to hang some poor schmuck to make a point. How could you tell I had a bad day?”

“Your eyes get all pouchy and you snap at the boys more than usual. As you used to continually tell me, don't take the blame for every damn thing that goes wrong in the world.”

Karp let out a short rueful laugh. “And aren't I sorry now! How about you? How were the poor today?”

“Always with us. But I've picked up an admirer.”

Karp felt a small chill. “Oh?”

“Yes. Larry. Yesterday he was Joe Fellini, but today he's Larry Larsen. He even showed me a driver's license. He said he was embarrassed about giving out his real name because of having to eat at a soup kitchen. But now he trusts me. We're pals, now.”

“This is, um, not a guy like the last guy, I hope.”

“Meaning David Grale?”

“Yeah, him.”

“No. But also the dangerous type. Or likes to think he is. He's an ex-con. Very handsome in a movie star way, square jaw, thick dark hair, lying blue eyes. He's got that terrific body-builder shape they all come out of the can with. A lot of magnetism.”

“Oy vey. When's the wedding?”

“Yeah, right. No, Dad, this is an old guy, over forty probably.”

“Oh, that's a relief. Because most guys give up thinking about sex when they're thirty-nine or so.”

“I meant, it's not that kind of thing, not a kid-crush thing like I had with Grale…what's wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, there is. You just sucked all the air out of this booth.”

What was wrong. Karp had just processed the observation that well over three quarters of the adults in the place were middle-aged professional men like himself, casually dressed, with stunned expressions and false smiles. Were they all like him, currying favor with their kids by taking them to this hideous place, feeding them empty calories, supplying game tokens? Was he in divorced dad hell?

He became aware of his daughter looking at him peculiarly, waiting for him to speak. He dismissed the idea of sliding by with a polite fiction about just being tired. The girl had a bullshit detector equal to his own. He thought to himself: But I'm
not
divorced. I'm at home and my kids are home, too. What was it, then?

“I don't know, hon,” he said. “This place gets on my nerves. It symbolizes…I don't know, barbarism: noise, hypnotic lights, children practicing reckless driving and killing. And it just made me think, when you mentioned Grale, like, Oh God, my daughter has a close relationship with a serial killer, and her nanny was a Vietcong assassin, and my wife arranged to have a couple of dozen people killed and got away with it, and she's hiding from me and her family, and one of my sons is blind and the other one is deep into violence and hardly ever talks…it's a little too much, you know? I didn't want this. And somehow, despite what you say, I feel it's my fault.”

“Because you're the dad.”

“Right. I'm the dad.”

“Mom says the same thing. It's all her fault, too. Honestly, I get so tired of the two of you.”