Immoral Certainty (7 page)

“I guess. But it don’t start ’til four.”

“You still working that security job?”

“Yeah. Fuck, I get paid for rackin’ out, which I would do anyway, so….”

“Yeah, hey, so what do they keep there, that, what is it, a warehouse or somethin’?”

“Yeah, a warehouse. It’s all white goods, like fridges, and stoves, washers, like that.”

“Any TV or stereos?

“Yeah, sometimes. Hey, Felix, you thinkin’ maybe you wanna take the place off?”

“No, Stevie, I’m thinking of goin’ into the fuckin’ warehouse business, I wanna check out the competition. They know you been in the joint? At the job?”

“Fuck I know. They didn’t ask. Shit, fuckin’ half the dudes work there been in. If not, they’re some kinda gook or some kind of weird nigger, from Pakistan or some damn place. Who the fuck else is gonna work that kinda job?” The two men were silent for a moment, as if contemplating the economic reality behind that question.

Felix Tighe was lying on a narrow sofa bed in the living room of his friend’s apartment. His friend, Steve Lutz, was leaning in the doorframe that led to the apartment’s bedroom, dressed in maroon gym shorts and a cut-off Rolling Stones T-shirt, the first Schlitz of the bright morning in hand.

He was a lean, muscular man in his early twenties, with a narrow, lantern-jawed face and lank, dark, neck-length hair. His arms were tattooed with the usual assortment of hearts, knives, names and snakes. He kept his mouth open, even when not talking, showing uneven yellow teeth.

Lutz took a long swallow and asked, “You wanna work out?”

“Yeah, in a minute.”

Lutz disappeared into the bedroom, and shortly afterward Felix heard his grunts and the clank of weights. He rolled over and reached for his first cigarette. He tried to remember if he had exceeded his self-imposed ration of five daily cigarettes the previous evening, and decided he probably had. He had been with Anna, who smoked like a chimney. He’d have to get her to cut down.

He sat up and looked around the living room, wrinkling his nose in disgust. There were dirty clothes strewn in piles on the floor and the remains of a large pizza on the square bridge table in the center of the room. Beer cans, some crushed, some still holding stale dregs, littered the floor and overflowed the large rubber garbage pail in the corner. He could see into the tiny alcove kitchen through a torn curtain made of an Indian bedspread. Filthy dishes were piled in the sink and three squat brown bags of dripping garbage were lined up on its drainboard. The close air stank of old beer and orange peel.

Felix got out of bed, naked except for a pair of bikini underpants printed with a zebra-skin pattern, and picked his way carefully through the litter to the bathroom. He wondered how Lutz could stand to live this way. That junkie bitch he hung out with never lifted a finger around the house, at least she hadn’t in the four months Felix had been crashing here. He would have to get Anna to come over and clean the joint up, or better still, get her to let him move in with her. He would ask her tonight.

The shower was tepid and weak, the tub ringed with black grime. Felix thought of his mother’s spotless house. He could move back there in a minute. His skin crawled. No, he could hit her up for meals and cash, and stay an occasional night, but no way was he going to move back with Mom. It meant no women for one thing, and for another … he could not quite put his finger on it but there was a big reason why not. No, it would have to be Anna, even if he had to marry her, because he sure as hell was not going to spend any more time in this garbage dump, and the only other alternative, even more unattractive, was moving back in with his wife.

“Hey, little girl! Want some candy?”

Marlene Ciampi looked up from the papers on her lap as Karp sidled into the seat next to hers.

He dangled a Milky Way in front of her face. “What do I have to do, show you my undies?”

“For starters.” He dropped the candy bar into her hand. She stripped off the wrapper and a full third of it vanished into her mouth. They were sitting in the back of a courtroom, Part Thirty, a calendar Part of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, watching the Honorable Albert A. Albinoli dispense justice.

“Ummpph, God, don’t even joke about that stuff!” mumbled Marlene around the Milky Way. “I’m waiting on the Segura case here; we’re arraigning on the indictment.” She finished the candy bar and sighed contentedly as the chocolate was transformed into incandescent plasma by her remarkable metabolism. Marlene lost weight on six thousand calories a day. She radiated heat. Karp could feel it warming him on the next chair. He wanted more.

“The little girl homicide,” said Karp. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Look,” said Marlene, “Albert’s going to do a far-be-it-from-me.”

Judge Albinoli was berating a young public defender who had had the temerity to argue a motion to suppress evidence, thus taking up time that could be spent in getting through the calendar. Albinoli resembled the late Thomas E. Dewey, but run to fat and with an excruciatingly silly toupee. The calendar was his god.

He sprayed when he spoke. “Young man, far be it from me to make a commentary on the jurisprudence which you have averted to, far be it from me, but I too have passed the bar examination, and I have to tell you that I wouldn’t throw out this evidence if you paid me.” A mild titter drifted through the courtroom. Albinoli smiled, as if he had delivered a witticism. Although there were many in the purlieus of Centre Street to whom the term might apply, when people around the courts said “The Asshole” the reference was almost always to this particular one.

Marlene rolled her eyes and looked over at Karp, but he seemed lost in thought. After a minute he said, “Speaking of that case, Marlene, do you recall that little spat we had, couple of months ago, about you and the other female person attorneys picking up more than your share of these juvenile rape and murder? You still feel you got a problem?”

“As a matter of fact, now that you mention it, I do sense a slacking off in that department. I also see by the smug expression on your face that you think you had something to do with the fix.”

“You could say that. I had a few words with the clerical staff in the complaint room.”

“So it
wasn’t
a random thing at all. Somebody
was
putting it to the ladies.”

“Somebody was, and they ain’t any more, so far as I can tell. Anyhow, the boys are pulling their load in the child abuse area, and not too happy about it either.”

“My heart bleeds, the scumbags!”

“Yeah, for some reason it’s hard to get them to take those cases seriously, except when they’re actual homicides. They call them ‘spankers’.”

“Spankers?” Marlene shook her head. “Oh shit, that’s nauseating.”

“Yeah, well, they’re a hard bunch …” His voice trailed off. Marlene’s attention had turned to the business of the court. Karp stood up to go. “Gosh, thanks, Butch,” said Karp. “You’re welcome, Marlene.”

She looked up at him sternly. “Thanks. For the candy. I’m not going to thank you for doing your job. Which you should have started doing a year ago.” A look of pain and guilt spread like a stain across Karp’s face. She saw it and felt an instant and stunning remorse, but kept her face hard. Somebody had to pay for all her misery, and Karp was her favorite target, both handy and vulnerable.

“Fine, Marlene,” answered Karp tightly, “as long as we’re being so professional, what about this Segura case? She going to plead?”

“As a matter of fact, no. She insists that she’s innocent. I offered her a good deal, but she turned me down. Wouldn’t even consider it.”

“Shit, Marlene, you mean we’re going to
try
this thing?”

“Yeah, we’re going to try it. Unless you want to say, ‘Hey, Mrs. Segura, sorry about the inconvenience, but try to watch it with the other kids, OK?’ What the fuck, Butch! I thought you were Mr. Trial.”

Karp felt his face grow warm. It was true. He needed trial slots to threaten the professional badmen and their lawyers. Otherwise, why would anybody, even the most patently guilty, take a stiff prison sentence on a plea bargain? After all, didn’t they have the right to a speedy trial? So spending a trial slot on what in his true heart he saw as a crummy domestic slaying irked him, and worse, filled him with shame that his situation had led him to regard the brutal murder of a little girl as a professional annoyance. Marlene was still staring at him. The court was hearing a plea of not guilty on a vehicular homicide. Something nagged at his mind.

“Umm, OK, Marlene, you offered manslaughter one?”

“Of course! And negligent homicide. Nothing doing. She says she never touched the kid.”

“Are you sure she did?” asked Karp.

Marlene opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment the clerk called out “Segura!” and Marlene had to walk down the aisle to the well of the court to help Albert the Asshole arraign Maria Segura for the intentional murder of her daughter Lucy.

Two burly female guards brought in the accused, who proved to be a small, biscuit-colored woman, barely out of her teens, with a sharp nose, a downcast mouth and dark, soft-looking pads under her eyes. Karp watched as she pleaded not guilty in an accented and almost inaudible voice. Karp thought she looked about as dangerous as a dust mop.

The judge remanded her for trial. The public defender made a perfunctory argument for a reduction in bail. The woman had two small children to look after. The judge said that this woman asking for a bail reduction so she could look after her children was like the man who killed both his parents asking for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. The judge got his titter from the onlookers. He beamed horribly. The guards shuffled Maria Segura out the narrow door. Next case.

Marlene came up the aisle tight jawed and frowning. Karp said, “I like the way your eyebrows almost touch when you have that expression on your face. What’s wrong? I thought you did OK. The dread Mrs. Segura is not out menacing our citizens.”

“Fuck you, Karp! What did you mean, ‘Are you sure she did it?’”

“Well, it just struck me that one explanation of Segura’s intransigence on the plea is that she is in fact innocent. Also, if you’re going to try a homicide against a defendant with no priors who doesn’t look up to wasting a cockroach, you better have the case really nailed down. Do you?”

“Yeah! Of course I do. Shit, Butch I got an indictment from the grand jury on this thing—”

“Marlene, don’t bullshit me!” said Karp, his voice rising. “The grand jury would indict Mother Theresa if a D.A. told it to, as we both well know. I want to know what we
got
.”

Marlene looked over her shoulder at the judge, who was glowering at them. “Miss Ciampi, far be it from me to interrupt what appears to be a fascinating conversation….”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Marlene. “Sorry, we were just going.”

With that she gathered her brown envelopes under her arm and made for the door, Karp following.

A few minutes later they were in Marlene’s office. She lit up and watched the smoke rise up the high, narrow shaft of her office. “All right,” she said after a while, “I fucked this up. We got garbage for a serious trial. I was figuring the percentages: a parent kills a kid, what they
want
is punishment. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’ll cop to anything you offer, just to avoid standing up in public while somebody tells all about how they used the knitting needles on little Mary.”

“So what
do
we have?” said Karp unsympathetically. He was angry with Marlene, and angry with himself for not keeping closer tabs on her and the other attorneys. That doing so was plainly impossible, given the caseload of the Criminal Courts Bureau, did not diminish his anger one whit. A case like this would have been laughed out of the old homicide bureau in a New York minute.

“The history of child abuse. Butch, honestly, that’s what threw me. This kid has been through Bellevue emergency over forty times—broken wrists, ribs, bruises, cuts, burns, the whole nine yards. It just seemed too
obvious
that the mom had gone a hair too far.

“Then the clothes. The kid was naked when they found her in the dumpster, in the trash bag. The cops found her bloody clothes in another trash bag—the same kind of bag—in the air shaft right under Segura’s window. There was a package of the same kind of trash bags in her kitchen.

“The sexual abuse part—the child was raped, repeatedly, but what else is new? The mother had men in, nobody steady, different ones, all the time. Maybe one of them wanted seconds after the mom passed out. Or maybe ten of them. Did the cops interview every one of her known companions? Hah-Hah. So that’s fucked up too.

“But … the woman doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the killing. Says she was sleeping one off, alone. That’s it. Pretty thin, huh?”

“Yeah. So where’s the finger?”

“The what?”

“The finger, Marlene, the little girl’s finger. I seem to remember you telling me it was cut off. Did you find it?”

“No. I figure she got rid of it, down the can or something. I was thinking a crazy punishment that got out of hand, you know? ‘Be a good girl or Mama will cut off your finger.’ Then afterward, the kid wouldn’t stop crying, the mother got scared, tried to shut the kid up, and bingo! Lights out. It’s happened before.”

That was just the problem, Karp thought. It’s all happened before: repetition, the boring banality of crime, of seeing what people did to one another. It deadened not only the intellect, as in this case, because Marlene Ciampi was arguably one of the most intelligent lawyers in the bureau, but also extinguished the moral imagination, so that the people of the Courthouse could no longer look at the accused and say, “Could this person have done thus and so? Could
I
have done thus and so, if I were that person?” There were so many, and so alike, that after a while the association between the particular crime and the particular defendant—the essence of justice—didn’t matter. And if that didn’t matter, nothing mattered: the creeping death of Centre Street.

He wanted to shout at her, to shake her, but instead he sat and looked down at his hands, and said in a low voice, “That’s an interesting idea. What does the M.E.’s report say? Does it confirm?” He saw in her face that she didn’t know, that if she had read the Medical Examiner’s report (among a thousand such reports) its message had failed to penetrate the part of her consciousness that was frozen into horrified routine.