Act of Revenge (22 page)

“This is a
hopeless
job,” he said vehemently. “Your work will not help make things better, because we don't understand what causes crime, and it's not entirely clear that punishment, which is what we mostly do here, helps the problem. It may even make it worse. This society, this city, is like a ship that's hit a rock. We don't get to steer it to safety and we don't get to plot the course to avoid more rocks and we don't get to evacuate the women and children. What we do get is a crummy little office in the bilge of the ship, where we work the pumps, keep the water level down, and prevent the ship from going under entirely. Right now the water's coming in a little faster than we're pumping it out, which sucks, so to speak, but on the other hand, if we stopped pumping, it'd be all over in a pretty short time. What I've just described is damned near the full extent of the job satisfaction: pump, pump, pump, and listen to that water slosh out. That's the
good
part. The downside . . .”—here he waited for the laughter to subside—“the downside is you may screw up and let someone out who should've been in the can, and he does something bad again, and it's on you, he kills someone, say, and it's on
you
.” He waited for that to sink in.

“Fortunately, there are ways around both these problems. It turns out there are some objective standards for doing this job, about how to prepare a case for prosecution, and you will find that preparing a case in this way is a source of real satisfaction. Once again, sports: it's great to win, but sometimes the other guys are just better, so you have to be content with just playing your best. Justice and success are not defined by the vagaries of jury deliberations. The only issue for you is whether each case is a legitimate case to prosecute. Are you convinced a thousand percent that the defendant is guilty and that you had legally admissible evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? It's a gem of a system, folks, but it can be corrupted by the people in it. Don't become one of those people! Now, we will ensure that you prepare cases in the proper manner, and that you play your best, by yelling at you when you don't. We have a large number of expert yellers on staff, and you'll meet all of them as time goes on. If you really push at it, and you can take the yelling, you will learn how to prepare cases in such a way that the likelihood of screwing up is reduced to near zero. One final thing: it's never personal. You're doing the law, you're not trying to
get
some guy. You start eating your liver on these cases, in a month you won't have enough liver to make a decent chopped-liver sandwich. Oh, yeah, one final, final thing. You think what I just said is cynical. It's not, it's just hard-boiled. This is a hard-boiled outfit here. It's also the best prosecutorial organization in the free world, because, by and large, it's
not
cynical. I'll tell you what cynical is. Cynical is saying, rules are made to be broken, and then breaking them. Cynical is drilling some poor bastard because you think it looks good in the press. Cynical is letting politics into your legal decisions. Cynical is rolling over for the cops because it's popular and it makes your job nicer if the cops like you. Cynical is not trying because the Supreme Court has tied your hands with all these crime-coddling decisions. Don't be cynical, guys. It's not part of the job, and it's not nice.”

Karp looked up as a short brown woman in a dark blue suit came through the door.

“Ah, here she is,” said Karp. “Folks, this is Rita Mehta, one of our fine assistant bureau chiefs. Rita helps run the Criminal Courts Bureau, where you'll start your work here at the D.A. Criminal Courts handles the misdemeanors we cop felonies down to when we're feeling cranky, and Rita here is going to teach you how to slap the wrists of hardened criminals.”

“Softened criminals, too, don't forget those, Butch,” said Ms. Mehta.

The usual relief of nervous laughter. He had noticed some of the kids really listening, not being embarrassed, or just taking notes, as in law school. He turned the group over to Ms. Mehta, got the (also usual) nice round of applause, some worshipful stares, most of them from the women, and left the courtroom.

She was curled up on a couch in his office, reading a small blue book, and when he saw her face, he cried out, “Good God!” and felt a clench around his heart. He knelt down beside her, his face close, examining the bruises. “Lucy, what happened to you?”

“Nothing, I, like, got mugged,” said the daughter blandly.

“Mugged? Where? Did you report it? Did the cops bring you here? What—”

“Dad, settle down. I'm not hurt. It looks a lot worse than it is. But I have to talk to you,
now
. I think I'm in trouble.”

Karp drew up a straight chair and sat down on it, his heart pounding. There was an instant of ice-cold, ignoble rage against his wife (why isn't she
watching
this child?), which he suppressed, and a cacophony of head voices suggesting modes of trouble—drugs, thefts, sex, diseases—which he could not. He swallowed hard and asked, “Felony or misdemeanor trouble?”

“Um, well,
I
didn't do anything bad, but there's like a big felony
involved
.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

She looked away from him. “I can't, Daddy, that's the problem. I swore an oath I wouldn't and there are other people involved, and they'd get in giant trouble if I told and they didn't do anything wrong either.”

Karp resisted the impulse to switch from Daddy mode into interrogator mode. This was hard on him because he had no doubts about his skills in the latter and considerable doubts about his skills in the former. He made himself say, gently, “That's quite a problem, Luce. How are you going to handle it?”

“I don't kno-o-o-w,” she wailed, and started to cry. Karp moved next to her on the couch and swept her into his arms. Lucy was startled by the difference between being hugged by her father and being hugged by Tran, so much so that she stopped crying. She totted up the differences, fascinated. The smell. Daddy was regular American, like the air, a little soap, a little aftershave, clean cotton and wool, Home. Tran was fish sauce, lilac hair oil, motorcycle oil, leather, foreign, Other. The feel. Daddy was large, comforting, deep, summoning thoughts of babyhood, absolute security, the moments before sleep. Tran was hard, protective, too, but like an iron shield, something you had to use, not just sink into, and a wild heat came off him, in her imagination like hugging a leopard. It then occurred to her that once Tran had hugged his own daughter, and that he had not been like that to her, no, he must have been to that girl the same as her father was to her. She tried to imagine Tran different, softer, and then the Asian thing struck her again, the suffering. She was sobbed out by now; still, thick tears trickled down her cheeks. And a last thought, more of a wordless feeling: this sinking safety, delightful as it was, belonged to her past, she was going away from it even now, but Tran, or something Tran-like, was her future. She recalled how she had acted the spoiled baby and threatened him and felt deep, blushing shame.

Karp held his daughter away from him, at arm's length, saw the agony in her face, said as gently as he could, “Lucy, listen to me. You are a kid. This is over your head. You can't handle this yourself. You have to tell me about this, now, the whole story.”

“I can't, Daddy.”

“Well, then let me tell you what I think I know already,” he said, his voice growing sterner. “You witnessed a crime. What crime? A good guess would be the double murder at the Asia Mall. Why? It went down in a place you hang out in all the time. I know you and your pals like to play hide in that storeroom; maybe you were there when it happened and saw who did it. I know you got beat up today, and I doubt it was a random mugging. Somebody was sending you a message. They were telling you to keep your mouth shut. And you're doing just what they want, just what the bad guys want.”

“That's not why I'm not telling. I told you, I swore I wouldn't.”

“Lucy! Listen to me! This isn't a kid thing anymore. You
have
to tell me.”

As soon as this was out, he knew it was the wrong thing to say. She stiffened, and on her face appeared the very tintype of her mother's mulish expression. He changed tack.

“All right, Lucy. You came to me for help. What do you expect me to do? Huh? Hey, great, you're concealing evidence of a felony, here's a dollar for ice cream, run along and play? You know, I swore an oath, too, to uphold the law. I'm not allowed to ignore stuff like this. If you weren't my daughter, I could get a judge to hold you as a material witness, and then you'd be put under guard, and when it came to a trial you would
have
to tell what you knew and if you didn't you could be jailed for contempt and kept in jail until you talked. That's the law.”

“Okay, arrest me, then! Go ahead! I don't care.”

Karp sighed. “Oh, sh . . . I'm not going to arrest you, okay? I'm in the same fix you're in, kid. I'm your father, you come first, no question. But as of now, I'm breaking the law. So we're both in a pickle.”

“Could you, like, lose your job?” she asked. This aspect of the situation had not occurred to her before. Indeed, she
was
over her head.

“I could, if anyone found out about this conversation,” answered Karp, feeling horribly guilty at putting this kind of pressure on the girl, but what else could he do?

Lucy wrapped her arms around her head to shut out the tormented choices and buried her face in the cool, smelly leather of the couch. Karp waited. She said something he didn't catch.

“What was that, honey?”

“Kenny Vo,” she whimpered.

“Who's Kenny Vo?”

“The guy who beat me up. He's a Vietnamese gangster.” She described what had happened to her, and he took notes. His throat and nose ached with stalled weeping. When she ran down, and had another cry, he asked, “Did he do the murders, too?”

She blinked away the silvery tears, and her pale brown eyes stared levelly into his. “I don't know anything about any murders,” she said.

“Okay,” said Karp, knowing when he was beaten. “Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to get Ed Morris to take you back home, and I'm going to arrange for a policeman to watch the loft. I don't want you going out by yourself until we get this thing cleared up. Do you understand that? Not even down to the store, or to Mott Street, or Janice's. If you can't promise me that, then you really will have to go into protective custody.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she said meekly, carefully not promising, and to her immense relief, he turned to the phone and did not press her on it.

When Morris, Karp's driver and also a D.A. squad detective specially trained not to ask questions, had taken Lucy away, Karp went to the men's room, splashed cold water on his face, dried it with a towel, and looked deep into the mirror to see if the monster he had become showed much yet. No, not much, which said something for clean living and an absence of cynicism. Karp had been perfectly sincere in his lecture. He was not cynical about the law, was in truth as deeply in love with it as he had been when as a young, dewy bride he had first stepped across the threshold of 100 Centre Street long ago, and was continually amazed at how a system so inherently stupid and run, by and large, by moral imbeciles, kept cranking along, doing as well as it in fact did. What had not come up in the lecture was what to do when dedication to the law ran up against love of family. Marlene's shenanigans were bad enough, but Marlene was at least an adult, and Karp truly believed that if he caught his wife in a conscious felony, he would turn her in. It was different, he discovered, when his child was involved, a child who was turning out more like her mother than Daddy felt comfortable about.

Yes, the mother. Karp went back to his office and placed a furious call to the mother, and, fortunately for his marriage, did not get through. He was too old-fashioned a man to allow himself to express anger to an anwering machine, so he left a mere urgent message. He did the same at her office, and then tried the car phone (nothing) and then left another message at her paging service. He then put his notes into shape for a warrant and called Mimi Vasquez, who was in, and available at that very moment.

Nor was that the only favorable contrast with his wife. Mimi Vasquez was in her fifth year with the D.A. and her second in Homicide, and clearly a rising star, quite apart from her status as a Hispanic woman and thus an affirmative action two-fer. Karp had spotted her as a comer early on, and nudged her career helpfully when needed. Vasquez had the broad shoulders, solid build, and narrow hips of a distance swimmer, which she was, a neat round head, and short thick straight hair, cut close. With her round face, huge dark eyes, flat nose, and tawny skin, she presented the appearance of a not entirely terrestrial creature, a seal perhaps, recruited into the legal profession in exchange for those shiploads of lawyers the jokes are always drowning. She and Karp agreed perfectly on what was important; she was one of those who had instinctively understood his corny lecture and gone on to put principle to the test of action. Not in the least frightened of trials, she'd won a couple of nice ones recently, without becoming obnoxious about it as so many of her male peers did after similar victories. She reminded Karp strongly (and sadly) of his wife, when his wife had been a respectable colleague rather than a loose cannon with a short fuse.

For her part, Vasquez was always delighted when Karp took an interest in her work. Not only did he know a lot, but he was not, like Roland Hrcany, her immediate boss, trying tediously to get into her pants. As to that aspect, should anything unfortunate and permanent befall Mrs. Karp, Mimi Vasquez was perfectly willing to dispense entirely with pants
in re:
Butch Karp, a willingness she shared with any number of women at 100 Centre Street, and of which the object was entirely oblivious.