Reversible Error (11 page)

"Goom, what is this shit?" Karp cut in. "This is a multiple homicide. It's your case. The kids can handle fucking Valdez."

"Um, and also there's the judge in Petrossi. Judge Kamas."

"Who? Oh, yeah, the new one they got to replace Birnbaum. What's wrong with her?"

"Nothing, but… ah, there's a conflict, with me. I mean, I know her."

"Yeah, she's a judge, of course you know… Oh, you mean outside. She's a friend of yours?"

"Ehhm… somewhat more."

Slowly Karp's eyes widened and he placed his hands carefully over his ears. "I don't want to hear this, Guma."

"Butch, it was fate. How the fuck was I supposed to know she was going to be moved into Supreme Court? She was a Family Court judge. We met in a restaurant, for Chrissakes."

"I can't believe this. You're schtupping the judge in Petrossi. But now she knows you're her ADA. What'd she say?"

"Well, to tell the truth, she doesn't know. That's the point. That's actually why I can't do the trial. Look, it's a long boring story…"

Karp casually wrapped a long finger around one of Guma's suspenders and said, "Bore me, Mad Dog, I think I need to hear it."

"Butchie, believe me, someday we'll laugh about this whole business. Anyway, the thing of it is, we met in this restaurant, we fell into this conversation about her kid's teeth-she's divorced, right?-a common interest there, and I was giving her all this advice because of what I went through with my kid's teeth. I mean, did you ever see her? Kamas? Forty years old, but a terrific body, you know?

"Anyhow, we were making good progress, a couple, three drinks, and then she says, gosh, you must be an orthodontist, and-so help me, Butch, I didn't think-I pulled out this card I happened to have on me and gave it to her. Yeah, I am an orthodontist, ha-ha, et cetera, et cetera. So she thinks I'm him."

"Who, Guma?" asked Karp, fearing he already knew the answer.

"Well, remember when Marlene was nice enough to refer me to her brother John…?"

"Oh, that's a relief!" said Karp, his hands clenching stiffly before him, his voice rising. "There's no problem, then. You're fucking the judge in what is probably the most famous and press-ridden murder case in the last six months, and you told her that you were my future brother-in-law. It's perfect. Guma, just tell me one thing: most guys only got one cock to worry about. How come I got to concern myself with yours?"

Guma said, "C'mon, Butch, that's not fair."

"No, you're right. My apologies. I'll calm down in about a fucking week!"

"So I'm off the case?"

"Yeah, Goom, go play with the burglars."

"Who you gonna give it to? Be a shame to blow it at this late date."

Karp gritted his teeth and took a long, slow breath. He patted Guma softly on the shoulder. "Goom," he said, "you're… a one of a kind. Don't worry, I'll think of something."

Two hours later, his mood in no way improved, Karp was sitting in front of a gigantic desk in a gigantic office on the fourteenth floor of police headquarters. Across the desk was a smallish man wearing a neat blue suit and hard blue eyes, who looked enough like Karl Malden to use his American Express card. The man's name was William Denton, and he was the chief of detectives of the New York City Police Department.

Karp got right to the point. Denton was not big on pleasantries in any case, and Karp had no stomach for them this afternoon.

"Clay Fulton," said Karp. "I'd like to know what he's doing."

"Why don't you ask him?"

Karp paused and swallowed. He had worked with Denton closely over the years, and trusted him-so far. On the other hand, Denton was a cop, and one of the half-dozen most powerful men in the city's criminal justice system. Karp was, in contrast, a bureau chief in what was but one of the five independent prosecutors' offices operating in New York. There was just the one police department, and although legally the police were supposedly there to serve the district attorney, the reality was more complex.

There was no way he could pressure Denton. He had used up all his chips just getting an immediate appointment with the C. of D. Karp determined now to lay out his problem as squarely as he could, and if Denton wanted to tell him to get lost, that was it.

"Well, Chief," Karp replied, "I have tried that. The problem is that my buddy Clay, who I have worked with on and off for nearly ten years, and who has always impressed me as the straightest shooter around, has apparently traded in his personality on a new model, something out of the KGB stockroom.

"These dope-pusher homicides. He comes in, tells me you're going to let him coordinate them as one big case. Fine. I don't hear from him for a couple of weeks. I call him, I don't get called back. Fine, too. He's busy, it's going slow-I can understand that.

"Then I hear, like by accident, he's arrested somebody in connection with the Garry thing. The guy is squirreled away in some pen, no contact with me, no charge even. Not fine, Chief. I go to a meeting this morning with some heavy hitters, the D.A. wants a task force to coordinate the operations on these hits with the cops and the community. There's two cops there, playing hard ball for no reason I can see, and when I ask why Clay isn't there, everybody looks at me like I just farted. Then everybody starts acting like Clay Fulton is in the tank on this, and I'm the only one in town who hasn't got the message. Also not fine.

"So I put it to you, out front, what the hell is going on?"

Denton did not answer immediately. He looked at Karp for a long moment, and then picked up a yellow pencil from his desk and stared at it, held between his two hands, as if it were an oracle, as he rocked gently back and forth in his chair.

At last he spoke. "What if I said you're going to have to trust me on this one?"

"I'd trust you. If I ever thought I couldn't trust you, I'd move to Ramapo, New Jersey, and do divorces and real-estate closings. But that's not the point. Something's moving, out of Bloom's office. Maybe it's just typical smoke and mirrors, but I doubt it. The guys in that room-Reedy, Fane's guy-don't show up for a private meeting unless they have a serious interest in an issue. They might be on a platform or cut a ribbon for any kind of bullshit, but when they show up personally in a little room, something is going down.

"If you tell me you're in control on that end-OK. But somehow I doubt it. I'm involved, like it or not, and if I'm not helping you, there's at least a chance that I'll miss something important or actually screw something up.

"Also, there's Clay himself. Now, we both know that the only way to survive in this business, where everybody's fucking one another as hard as they can, is to put together a bunch of people you trust. At least that's what keeps me alive. Clay is one of my people that way, and I'm one of his, or at least I thought so. If he's in trouble, I want to know about it. I'm not talking officially here, I'm talking personally."

Karp stopped talking and shrugged helplessly. That's it, he thought, it's my only card, and I played it. He hadn't mentioned that if he was the only one who didn't know what was going on, he couldn't protect himself. Bloom could sucker him into something nasty and destroy him. He knew Denton liked him, but he doubted that such a consideration would be particularly telling to the chief of detectives.

Denton considered Karp's statement for a moment and then seemed to make a decision. He placed the pencil on his desk with a snap and rolled his chair forward, as if ready to issue orders.

"Clay's not in any trouble with the department. Far from it." He paused and gave Karp one of his intense stares. "Let me ask you something. What's the thing the department fears more than anything else?"

"You mean corruption?"

Denton grimaced in distaste and shook his head.

"Corruption! Hell, no! Corruption has been part of police work since the beginning of time. We root it out when we can, but we basically accept it, like flat feet or hemorrhoids. Every so often we drop the ball and something like the Knapp Commission goes into action.

"Look, I've been a cop for thirty-four years this October. There's less corruption in the department now than there ever has been, but people are more worried about it than ever before. If it goes on like this much longer, it's going to wreck the department, and then where will they be!

"But it's not corruption I'm talking about. That's not what scares the bejesus out of me. Look, we've got over twenty-eight thousand men out there, almost all of them with little more than a high-school education, all of them armed to the teeth. A lot of them spend eight hours a day in hell. They see what crime does. They see what junk does. They see the mutts laugh in their faces day after day. They arrest some scumbag and he's out on the street before they are." Denton paused again, and seemed to sigh. He lowered his voice.

"Did you ever think that one or two of them might crack, might decide to, say, abbreviate the judicial process? I'm talking Guatemala. Argentina. El Salvador."

As he grasped what Denton was saying, Karp felt a violent chill run through him, and he gritted his teeth to control it.

"You… think it's a rogue cop? Killing these pushers?"

"Yeah. We're pretty sure. Clay's accumulated a lot of evidence. The victims all went with their killers willingly, or let them in without a hassle. We don't have any witnesses who were close enough to make a definite ID, but we do have one person who saw one of the victims get into a car with two men, and his hands were cuffed behind him. At least one of the killers is a black man. That's all we know."

"But couldn't it be an impostor-somebody with fake ID?"

"Very doubtful. The kind of victims we have are wise to that scam. If it was a thug doing it, the word would have spread around. No, it was somebody they knew by sight was a real cop. He came, he arrested them, they went quietly, and he killed them. Or he killed them when they opened the door.

"The other thing that's convincing is the pattern. These guys, the killers, are smart in ways that only a cop is smart. The hits are absolutely clean. They're designed to have no apparent connection with one another, so that we'll think they're the result of a drug war."

Karp marshaled his thoughts against the horrifying scenario that Denton was calmly building for him. "What about this arrest in the Clarry killing? This Booth guy? How do you figure that?"

"I think they've changed their pattern. Makes sense. We're catching on, after all. This was an assassination in the back seat of a car, using a driver that the victim trusted. A Mafia-style hit. Once again, clouding the waters. It was only luck that we nailed Booth. And we got the gun too. Know where it was last seen? A police evidence locker. That was the clincher."

Something still didn't jibe for Karp. "Chief, assuming you're right, why haven't you got five hundred guys on this thing? What is this business about not charging Booth?"

"Think it through for yourself," Denton replied. "You know what kind of hell we go through when a cop kills somebody in self-defense. Can you imagine what would happen if it came out that a bunch of cops were setting themselves up to be judge, jury, and executioner? Butch, the Knapp business left this department lying on it side, gasping for air. If this came out, it would kill it dead. They'll take our guns away. They'll break up the force. It'll be chaos.

"When Fulton came to me with this, it struck me that in one way we were lucky that it was him that discovered it. He's probably the best man on the force for the job. He's a brilliant detective. He's emotionally mature. He's black and he knows Harlem. And one of our main suspects is in his unit."

"Who?"

"You're familiar with the King Cole Trio? Rough boys. That Dugman is from another age-a head breaker. It could be that they got too rough one day. Maybe they got to like it. Maybe just one of them is involved. We decided on a strategy. You heard the rumors that Fulton is dirty already? That's by design. I want him close to the scumbags up there, in a way that you can't get close unless you're bent. I guarantee you somebody up there knows who's doing these guys, and sooner or later one of them is going to cross paths with Fulton and let it drop.

"The main thing, though, is that it meant that we didn't have to tell anyone else. Fulton's working alone."

"Completely alone?" Karp said in astonishment.

"Completely. He came to me with his suspicions and I decided that full knowledge had to be limited to him and me. And now you."

Karp wrestled with the enormity of this statement. Then he said, "But, Chief, that means he's got no backup. If some wacko asks him for a meet at three in the morning in a vacant lot, what's he gonna do? Beg off?"

"If he thinks it's worth it, he'll go," said Denton. "There's a hundred undercover cops on the force that take risks just as bad every day."

Karp had ready in his mind the argument that those cops had radios and people watching out for them and people they could at least talk to, but his reading of Denton's expression convinced him that the chief of detectives had already written off Fulton's safety as a necessary sacrifice to his plan.

Karp changed tacks. He said, "But it's all going to come out anyway, when it goes to court."

Denton looked at Karp silently, his face a mixture of sadness, anger, and massive determination. Then slowly he shook his head.

Karp felt another chill, and this time his scalp prickled and sweat broke out on his palms and on his forehead. Karp ran a hand across his face and took a deep breath.

"Chief, if you're going to tell me that when Clay finds this guy he's going to kill him, with your… blessing, then I don't want to hear it. I can't know it. Maybe I better go now."

"Stay where you are. I'm not at the point where I'm hiring assassins myself. Maybe I should, but I can't. There's a little mental hospital upstate that specializes in caring for the violent offspring of the very rich. Whoever this cop is, he's a sick man, and he has to be taken care of. He'll go there. Quietly, discreetly, and for a very long time. I've already made the arrangements. I've moved police funds into an account that will pay for it when the time comes. Illegally, of course. If this comes out, my own career will be ruined as well, not that it matters much in the scale of things."