Immoral Certainty (2 page)

“So who’d he call?” asked Finney.

“His momma,” Frie answered, and laughed.

Detective Frie’s and Patrolman Finney’s handiwork was delivered to the Complaint Room at Queens County courthouse, where an Assistant District Attorney transmuted the simple facts of the case into a criminal complaint, which was duly laid before a Criminal Court judge in the presence of the accused the next morning.

The arraignment of Felix Tighe lasted approximately as long as Felix’s attack on Patrolman Slayton. The jails were crowded in the City that year, and their precious spaces had become more exclusive than suites at the Carlton. Jail was reserved first for the most ferocious, the most untrustworthy and implacable enemies of society and second, for those too stupid to avoid it. Thus when the judge heard that Felix had a job, and roots in the community (was that not his own mother in the courtroom, dabbing at her flowing eyes?) and—most important—no prior record, he had no trouble in walking Felix on five thousand dollars bail. His mother wrote a check for five hundred dollars to a bondsman and took her son home.

Felix had not liked jail, not even one night of it. He was sure he would not like prison either. And he hadn’t liked the way the cops treated him, as if it were his fault that stupid nigger had attacked him. Well, as good as attacked him. You could see it in his eyes, he was going for his gun. A man has a right to defend himself. And then he was beaten almost to death by that other asshole, just as he was about to surrender peacefully.

Thoughts like these continued throughout the day, as Felix recuperated from his ordeal at his mother’s brownstone on 78th Street, near Riverside Park. By the end of the day, Felix had made up his mind and come to the decision: he was not going to stay in Queens, where the cops obviously had it in for him. He would move to Manhattan.

CHAPTER
2

T
he same morning that Felix Tighe walked out of the Queens County Courthouse, a very tall man and a woman of moderate size walked into the New York County Court House, at 100 Centre Street on the Island of Manhattan. They walked hand in hand until they reached the main doorway, at which point the woman pulled away. From this you could tell that they were not going into the courthouse to be married; if they had been, the woman would have held on tighter. In fact, both of them worked in the courthouse, as assistant district attorneys. Although they were not going to be married today, they were more or less in love, and had been for nearly four years.

The very tall man—he stood just over six-five—was obviously a familiar figure in these halls. A number of people called out greetings as the two of them moved through the lobby crowd. He acknowledged these with a nod or a grin or a wisecrack. The man had an aggressive walk, a City walk: head forward and casting from side to side like a rifleman on point, shoulders slightly hunched. You had to look closely to see that his left leg was a little lame. The hands were big in proportion, the wrists thick and strong.

He had an aggressive face too—a heavy, broad brow, a big bony jaw, a long nose that had been broken and then straightened out, leaving a bump just north of center. The lines and other accessories were what you might expect from thirty-four years of this life, lived mostly in the City.

Except for the eyes, it was an ordinary face, in New York at least, although it might have drawn a second glance in Marietta, Georgia. The eyes were long, narrow, slightly slanted, gray with yellow lights: wolf eyes, perhaps a souvenir of a Cossack raid on some eastern
shtetl.
It was not a peaceful face.

The man was Roger Karp, Butch to his friends, who were few, but good ones. He was at this time Chief of the Criminal Courts Bureau of the New York District Attorney’s office. The woman was Marlene Ciampi, an assistant district attorney, his employee and intermittent main squeeze.

It was Marlene’s fantasy that their affair was a private matter, and one that, if public, would expose her to disdain—the bimbo who screws the boss. The fact that the newest secretary was filled in on the details of her involvement with Karp soon after being shown where they kept the typewriter ribbons did not matter to Marlene. If she did not acknowledge it publicly, it did not really exist. Karp had been irritated by this obsession at first, but now regarded it with something like fond amusement, another of his sweetie’s infinite skein of eccentricities.

Over one side of the marble entranceway to this building were inscribed the words, “Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the People?” As they passed through the security checks and entered the swirl of the main lobby, they received, as every morning, the answer why not. This area of 100 Centre Street is to the City’s justice what the pit of the stock exchange is to its finance—a confused interzone full of worried, nervous people making deals—with the difference that the ethnic mix of the participants is spicier and the deals are about time, not money.

Even at this early hour, the lobby was crowded with people: the law’s servants—bored cops expecting hours of tedium sitting on hard benches, scurrying clerks and messengers, technical experts with bulging briefcases, lawyers in sharp suits, smiling hard, public defenders gearing up for another day of saving ingrates—and its more numerous subjects—the criminals, their victims, witnesses, and their families and attendants.

Besides these, the lobby also included a population that had, since the repeal of the vagrancy laws and the closing of the mental hospitals, used the courthouse as its dayroom, having nowhere else to go. And why not? It was dry, warm in winter, cool in summer; it had water and bathrooms in reasonable repair; and it was safe. No one got mugged in the Courthouse, except after due process of law. If you were homeless, the courthouse was shelter; if you couldn’t afford the movies or TV, here was a never-ending source of entertainment.

The scene that greeted Karp and Marlene this, and every, working morning was like a throwback to an earlier period in the evolution of justice, when the king laid down the law in the course of a royal progress through his domains, surrounded by nobles, clergy, and retainers in a kind of moving fair, attended also by mountebanks, jugglers, clowns, humble petitioners, cutpurses, rogues, freaks and the kind of miscellaneous idlers attracted to any show.

In the marble halls, whole families clustered in corners, eating spicy food out of paper bags. Ragged children played on and under the worn wooden benches and lumbering men made of dank clothes, hair and grease shouted at each other or at no one, until the tired security forces tossed them out. But they came back. This area was known to every denizen of the courthouse as the Streets of Calcutta.

Marlene checked her wristwatch. “Court in ten. I got to go prep. So long,” she said, giving him the favor of a smile. She had a beautiful smile still, in a face that was not quite beautiful any longer. Stunning, rather. Arresting. Marlene Ciampi had started out with a face from a fashion magazine—flawless bisque skin, long, tilted black eyes, a wide, luscious mouth, million-dollar cheekbones, and the usual accessories—had lost it all when a bomb went off in her face four years ago, and then got a lot of it back through the most advanced and expensive surgery a hugely successful lawsuit could buy.

The disaster had burned out her left eye and everything extra from her face and body. She had become tough, wiry, and graceful with contained energy, like a flyweight boxer or a jaguar. She wore a glass eye at work and a pirate patch off duty. Either way Karp still thought she was a being marvelous and heartbreaking at the same time. She made him suffer, also—an added attraction.

“Aren’t you going to give me a big hug and a kiss good-bye?” asked Karp. “God knows when I’ll see you again.”

Her smile twisted into a wry grimace. “It could be tonight, if you play your cards right, and no, I’m not, not in the middle of the Streets of Calcutta as you know, so stop asking.”

Karp tugged gently at the sleeve of her raincoat. “I’ll never stop,” he said. She rolled her eyes to heaven and began to pull away again, when another hand landed on her sleeve.

This belonged to a small, bald, sweaty man wearing a three-piece dark suit, with dandruff, thick glasses, and a pervasive cologne. This was one of the fraternity of petty lawyers who derived their living from representing defendants prosperous enough to pay cash for their day in court.

“Ah, Miss Ciampi, am I glad to see you!” the man said breathlessly. Marlene stared at where he had grabbed her sleeve until his hand fluttered away. “Why is that, Mr. Velden?” she asked coolly.

“Oh, I just thought we could save some time, come to some workable agreement on De Carlo.”

“Save some time? You’ve decided to plead your client guilty to felony assault and robbery?”

Velden smiled and held up his hands in protest. “Please, lady, be serious. Larceny I’ll give on, but don’t bust my hump with the felony assault. It’s a ten-dollar purse snatch and the kid’s never been convicted.”

“Yeah, this’ll be a first. Also, counselor, my witness informs me she received a phone call the other night suggesting that she’d get worse than a bang on the head if she testified. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

A look of pained innocence appeared on Velden’s face. “What are you implying? Me? Arthur Velden? Threatening witnesses?”

“Have a chat with your client, Mr. Velden. Explain the rules. See you in court.”

She turned and elbowed her way into the crowd.

Velden chuckled as he watched her go. “What a little pisser, heh?” he remarked to Karp. “She’ll learn.”

“I doubt that, Arthur,” said Karp, walking away. “She’s a slow learner. And I wouldn’t play games with her, if I were you. She’s not one of the boys.”

Karp rode up on the elevator to his office on the ninth floor, and walked into the Bureau offices, a large room about the size of a squash court and about as elegant. Karp was not in favor with the administrative powers of the district attorney’s office, a fact reflected in his office furniture, much of which ran to green and gray steel and sprung vinyl in reptilian colors.

The Bureau secretary, a middle-aged, tough-minded black woman named Connie Trask, greeted him as he entered.

“I’m glad you’re here,” said Trask. “His Excellency has been on the phone twice.”

“Don’t tell me—his mother’s coming over and he wants to borrow my law-school diploma.”

She giggled. “You’re late on the budget.”

“Yeah. That’s what he wants to talk about, right?”

“I guess. He don’t talk to
me,
sugar. Should I put it through?”

Karp nodded glumly and Connie dialed the D.A.’s number. He went into his private office and sat down in a squeaky wooden chair purchased new during the senior Roosevelt administration. He picked up his phone. After the obligatory two-minute wait on hold, the District Attorney came on the line. There followed a minute or two of the inane and insincere small talk without which politicians cannot conduct the most trivial business, delivered in Sanford Bloom’s marvelously deep and mellow voice, beloved of the networks, but fingernails on the blackboard to Karp.

“Ah, Butch, it’s the fifteenth. I don’t have your draft budget submittal.”

“I’m working on it. I just got off a trial yesterday.”

This reference to trials was calculated to annoy. Bloom was not, and never had been a trial lawyer, unlike Bloom’s predecessor, the illustrious, almost legendary, Francis P. Garrahy, deceased. After a brief, pointed silence, Bloom ignored the remark and went on. “Yes. Remember I want you to include resources for community relations and affirmative action.”

That meant, Karp thought, lawyers sitting in meetings and writing plans instead of trying cases, so that Bloom could flash a few meaningless sheets of paper at other meetings. He uttered a few noncommittal phrases in the flat voice he always used with Bloom and the conversation trickled to an end. As usual, after any conversation with his boss, Karp felt hollow and vaguely ill. The previous year Karp had caught Bloom in a piece of nasty malfeasance, since which time Bloom had stayed out of Karp’s way on big issues, allowing him to run his bureau as an independent fief.

On the surface. Beneath lay a rich vein of deathless hatred, hatching pitfalls, traps, petty harassments. Karp looked at the budget sheets on his desk with distaste. He was at least ten lawyers short of where he should be, but he was extremely reluctant to ask for new people. Any transfers into Karp’s bureau were liable to be either spies, or more probably, turkeys that Bloom had hired to do a favor for someone and who were too dreadful even for Bloom’s cronies in the other bureaus to stomach. It would be a double score for Bloom if he could stick a couple of losers in Karp’s shop.

Karp never asked directly for new troops. Instead, he overworked the small team of decent lawyers he had gathered around him over the years, and himself worst of all, and occasionally allowed disgruntled people from other parts of the D.A.’s office to get some serious trial experience under his direction.

There were few other places for them to get it under the Bloom regime. Garrahy had been a trial lawyer, and Karp was a trial lawyer in the old man’s image, he hoped. Bloom was not a trial lawyer. He was a bureaucrat and a politician, and good at it, too. He could weasel and delay and obfuscate like a sonofabitch, and trade favors and get elected.

But not try cases. If you went to trial a lot, unless you were prepared, and understood the law, and made sure that the cops didn’t screw around with the evidence, you might lose, and let some bad guy get loose, and what was worse, get loose
publicly.
It was much safer to bargain, and do the people’s business in whispers beneath the bench, and if some monster got out on the street in eighteen months, well, that surely was the business of the courts, or the prisons, or the parole board, and couldn’t be blamed on the D.A.

Karp didn’t think about this stuff anymore. He did as many trials as he could and he made sure his people understood that the trial was the foundation of the whole system. That this was peculiar, even bizarre, that this was like the Air Force having to belabor to its pilots the importance of airplanes, was a fact that no longer occupied the center of Karp’s thoughts. It just made him tired. With a sigh, he switched off Bloom and turned to the endless and unsympathetic columns of figures.