Falsely Accused (10 page)

“So? What's her problem with that?”

“Nothing except she wants to talk to him direct, and Clancy, being a
Patrol Guide
reader, won't talk to the press without authorization. And she keeps bugging me to get her together with him. And …” Hrcany paused significantly.

“And now you're bugging me about it. What do you want me to do, Roland?”

“You're a famous big cheese—”

“Medium-size cheese. Ex-medium-size cheese.”

“Famous ex-medium-size cheese. You know the big shots up on the twelfth floor in the P.D. Make a call. Get Clancy to see her. Get the bitch off my case.”

Karp considered this request for a long moment. Ordinarily, he would not have minded doing a favor like this for Roland Hrcany. He liked Roland, especially when Roland was in this kind of faintly embarrassing bind. And he had the contacts. He had been very close for a long time to the chief of detectives, and as head of the Homicide Bureau he had been a major player in Manhattan's criminal justice bureaucracy. He had met most of the current superchiefs and their aides. Even if he was no longer a player, there were people who owed him favors. The only thing that made him hesitate was the suspicion that Ariadne Stupenagel had figured this out too, and was using Roland, all unconscious, as a means of manipulating Karp. On the other hand …

“Butch? You still there?”

“Yeah, Roland. Okay, no problem. I'll call Barry McGinnity at Public Affairs. It shouldn't be any big deal.”

FIVE

Pruitt looked good in court for his arraignment, so good that Marlene's heart sank when she spotted him moving with his lawyer through the thronged courtroom. He didn't have long, greasy hair, he was not dressed in filthy leather garments, he did not have a teardrop tattooed on his cheek, or LOVE and HATE inscribed on the knuckles of his hands. He was not wearing the oversize sneakers the cops called perp shoes. He lacked, in short, all the obvious stigmata that would tell a casual glance that he was
a
dangerous man, and in this court a casual glance was all he was going to get. Pruitt was dressed in his honest, somewhat ill-fitting, workingman's best suit, in dark blue, with a white shirt and a red striped tie He had heavy black lace-ups on his feet. His hair, cut in humble, honest, Italian-barbershop style, was combed flat with water.

A court officer yelled out a docket number and Pruitt's name and the charge. Pruitt and his lawyer stepped in front of the judge's presidium. Marlene's heart sank further when she saw who was representing the People of New York. She didn't know him, of course. The turnover in the lower reaches of the Criminal Courts Bureaus was too great to make this at all likely, but she had hoped at least that Luisa had been able to talk one of the more senior people into taking an interest. She pushed forward and touched the A.D.A.'s arm. He was a weedy kid with a mottled nose, a moderate Jewish afro, and thick glasses marked with fingerprints, who obviously wanted to be a lawyer when he grew up but was still struggling with the basics. “Excuse me? I'm Marlene Ciampi, I used to work here. You're on the Pruitt case? Did Luisa Beckett talk to you about this one?”

“Beckett? Oh, yeah, she called. I haven't been able to get back to her yet. Sorry, I'm real busy now.”

He turned to find out what was going on, at the same time wrestling the half dozen case folders he was carrying so as to float the instant case to the surface.

The judge was saying, “You're charged with burglary and assault, and criminal contempt in that you've violated the terms of a protective order. How do you plead?”

“Guilty, Your Honor,” said Pruitt, then added, “With an explanation.”

The judge shot him a sharp look. “This is not traffic court, sir. You stand accused of serious felonies.”

“I love her, Your Honor. I've loved her for years. I know I shouldn't have gone in there. I know it was wrong, but I couldn't help myself. I just wanted to see her.”

The judge resumed a stern look. “Well, she didn't want to see
you.
That's why there's a protective order. You still want to plead guilty? You understand what it means?” He looked at the defense lawyer. “Does he understand what a guilty plea means?”

The lawyer assured that the consequences of such a plea had been explained in detail to Mr. Pruitt.

“Okay, let's dispose of this right here. Do the People intend to prosecute these felonies?”

“Um …” said the People, shuffling his notes. The judge refocused his stern look on him. “Was the girl hurt? What was the nature of this assault?”

“I would never hurt Carrie!” cried Pruitt.

“Quiet, you!” said the judge. To the People, “Well?”

“No, Your Honor, the complaint says he stroked her hair. And her arm.”

The judge snorted and looked down at Pruitt. “Stroking, huh? Mister, don't you know stroking is bad for your health?”

Polite titters. The judge grinned and addressed the People. “Okay, let's say, criminal trespass, assault in the third degree, and the contempt, I'd say that was good for about a year, wouldn't you?”

“Um, yeah, I mean, yes, sir, Your Honor,” said the People. Marlene could only with difficulty stifle her shout of protest. They were dropping all the charges to misdemeanors, a common method of disposing of cases in the Criminal Courts. She knew what was coming next.

“And I'm going to suspend that sentence and give you three years' probation,” the judge continued. “I assume that's agreeable?”

The defense lawyer's head had started nodding as soon as the word “suspend” had first danced upon the air, and it kept on bobbing.

“Okay, Mr. Pruitt,” said the judge, “I want you to stay away from this girl. If I see you coming through here again, you're going to be in serious trouble.”

Marlene was out of there almost before the sound of the gavel had ceased reverberating. She did not want to see Pruitt, nor, for that matter, to see Carrie Lanin. Who she wanted to see was Harry Bello.

Karp was not surprised when, several days after his meeting with Phil DeLino, he received an urgent summons to the office of his firm's senior partner, Jack Weller. He had been naughty and was about to get his desserts.

Weller was a hefty man in his early seventies, and looked, if you didn't look too closely, ten or twelve years younger. His thick gray hair was expertly stitched to his scalp, and the perpetually tanned skin of his face had the slick surface signifying expensive little surgeries and peels. He had, naturally, the perfect pearly teeth and shiny fingernails of the well-cared-for wealthy. A shiny man, was what Karp always thought when he saw him, and he thought it this morning in Weller's huge corner office. His teeth shone, as did his nails, the surface of his Sheraton desk, the brass fittings on his yellow suspenders, and his diamond and gold cuff links. His face, however, did not shine; it was dark with displeasure.

Karp was motioned with a curt wrist flick to a tan leather side chair. He was made to wait while Weller finished flipping through a document. Karp watched the cuff links twinkle as the pages snapped. He thought he knew what the document was. While he waited, he studied Weller's tan. The man was just back from St. Barts. Weller took a lot of vacations, and the year at B.L. was divided, like the medieval liturgical year, into before-and-after St. Barts, Aspen, East Hampton, and the Foreign Trip, Europe or Asia in turn.

Karp didn't dislike Weller, although he might have if the man had spent more time around the office. They were polar opposites as lawyers, of course, but Karp was by now used to being a quarter-turn different from most of his colleagues, and he was prepared to render Weller the sort of bland deference we reserve for someone who has made it possible for us to earn vast shitloads of money.

Weller finished reading and looked up at Karp. He sighed. “This won't do, Butch.”

“I'm sorry? What won't do?” asked Karp.

“Suing the Mayor. Didn't you realize that I was vice-chairman of his re-election committee?”

“No, I didn't realize that. But I don't see what it has to do with Murray Selig getting his day in court.”

“You didn't get clearance from the executive committee either.”

“No, I didn't realize I had to. I've never brought in any business before. It never came up.” This was a lie, of course, but a plausible one. It made Karp look like something of a jerk, but this had never bothered him much, especially when the lookers were people like Jack Weller.

Weller's face darkened beneath the tan, and he looked like he was about to say something nasty, but reconsidered. He had not spent much time with Karp, but something vestigial in him signaled a warning that Karp was not somebody who was prepared to take a lot of verbal abuse without returning it, and possibly some actual physical abuse as well.

“Who's the judge?” Weller asked instead.

“We have selection today,” answered Karp. “Craig, Roseman and Hollander are on the wheel.”

“Well, I know Joe Hollander and Larry Roseman pretty well, and I know people who're close to Craig. He's brand-new. It shouldn't be hard to get you out of there without prejudice to us, or causing a problem for the client.”

Weller then launched into a long, detailed statement about what he was going to do and what he wanted Karp and some other people to do in order to cancel the firm's role in Selig's case. It was an admirable plan and Karp might even had admired it, had he been listening at all. But he was not. Instead, as Weller spoke, Karp was adding up columns of figures in his head. His available cash, plus what he could raise from a loan on the loft against monthly living expenses between his last check from B.L. and the time when he could expect to see some money from the Selig case. It worked out pretty close, but it was still feasible, always assuming he'd win Selig. Which he did not doubt.

“So, you understand what has to be done, go do it!” Weller said, and added, “And for God's sake, Butch, in future—”

“Actually,” said Karp mildly, “I don't intend to drop the case.”

Weller gasped. “You don't?
You
don't! Who the fu—sonny, read the goddamn letterhead! Read the goddamn brass fucking sign on the front door! It's my goddamn law firm, and I say who we sue and who we do not sue! Is that clear?”

“Perfectly,” said Karp. “I'll resign, effective immediately.” He stood up, and Weller had to lean his judge's chair back a little to see Karp's face. “I'll turn all my Goldsboro stuff over to whoever you think will try the case. Because Steve and Toby think it's pretty sure to go to trial early next year.” Karp paused significantly. “Who would that be? Trying it, I mean. Yourself?”

Weller ignored the absurd question. He had not been in front of a jury for years and did not intend to derail his extremely pleasant life to start now. Neither was the possibility of losing Karp seriously to be entertained. There were attorneys at B.L. who knew more about Goldsboro than Karp, but the firm did not have anyone who was his equal in the art of standing in the well of a court and convincing twelve ordinary people that although someone had done a bunch of awful things to the plaintiffs, that someone was not the Goldsboro Pharmaceutical Company, their client.

After a brief pause Weller said, “That's absurd. You're the only trial lawyer we have who's prepped on Goldsboro. You can't just drop it.” Then he had a happy thought. “And in any case, you couldn't run both Goldsboro and this Selig thing. You'd have to drop him eventually.”

“Not necessarily,” said Karp. “I expect
Selig
to go quite rapidly. We can fast-track the whole thing. The case is straightforward, and there's little room for maneuver on either side. It's September now. With the holiday slow-down, preliminary motions and discovery should bring us into next February. Federal jury selection is fast, a couple of days, and we should be in trial by early May, maybe earlier if we draw Craig, who's new, as you say, and who'll have a light calendar. Twelve weeks for trial, max. I can't imagine Goldsboro getting started much before late summer.”

“I don't like it,” said Weller, a trace of helpless petulance creeping into his tone. “Quite aside from the personal embarrassment and lack of consideration involved in pursuing this, by the distraction of your energies you're potentially jeopardizing the firm's most important case. And I don't understand it at all. Haven't we been good to you?”

“Yes, very good,” admitted Karp. “This is a nice place to work.”

“Then why? Is this Dr. Selig a friend of yours?”

“Not particularly. But something very nasty was done to him for no reason and I said I would fix it, and I intend to.”

“Butch, Butch,” said Weller placatingly, “you're not with the D.A. or some congressional committee now. You can't go running around town righting wrongs whenever you feel like it.”

“Gee, that's an odd thing to say. I thought that was the damn
point.
Of the law, of judges, courts, juries—”

“Oh, don't pretend to misunderstand me,” Weller snarled. “And I don't need any sanctimony from you. You know very well what I mean.”

“Yes, I do,” said Karp. “And I'm still not dropping Selig. So, was that all?”

It was.

Marlene went directly from court back to the loft and there sat by the answering machine, screening her calls. There was one message already from Carrie Lanin, and while she waited, Marlene's mother, a charity, and the insurance man called and Marlene let them all leave messages. The phone also rang four additional times, but the party calling hung up when the message tape came on. Marlene guessed that it was Lanin, and she was praying that Bello would call back before she had to pick up the kids and see Carrie and tell her that her sweetheart had picked up a walk from the criminal justice system.

Ring, ring, pause, clickety-click, beep. “It's me,” said Harry Bello, confident that Marlene would be poised at the phone. She picked it up immediately.