Irresistible Impulse (43 page)

Karp made a note. Not that great, Lionel, he thought, all those negative constructions are confusing. But he knew that in the course of his speech Waley would repeat that essential argument many times, with many illustrations. He would try to demonstrate that the testimony of his shrinks
constituted
reasonable doubt. If a trio of top psychiatrists testify the guy’s crazy, well, then …

The argument was standard and specious, and Waley was presenting it as well as Karp had ever heard it done. He wondered briefly if Waley really believed that Rohbling was insane under the law, and decided that he did. That was his art, his genius as a defense attorney: he could manipulate his beliefs to suit his case. He
was
stricken by the tragedy of J. Rohbling, madman, and if he could make the jury believe it along with him, he had won. Karp took notes, listened, waited. It would be some hours yet before his last licks.

“He must have tossed it in,” Marlene was saying, “from that window. He climbed up the ivy, your window was open, and he flipped it in. You’re on the west side of the house and the wind was from the east—it still is—”

“I thought the dog was supposed to stop anyone from getting in,” Edie Wooten protested. She had stopped crying, but her eyes were still moist and red. She was hunched in bed like a kid with the chicken pox, dabbing her face with tissues and then tearing them into shreds.

“Nobody got into the house, Edie, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. If he had tried to open the window enough to climb in, the dog would’ve heard him. As it was, I heard something in the night and so did Sweety. He must have tossed the rose and note and run off.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Same as before, only now I think we’ll put Sweety in your room at night.”

“You think he’ll come back?” She bit her lip, hands to face, classic terror.

“Of course. He was to. He’s obsessed. And we’ll get him.”

“So … what? I’m the
bait?
”

“Afraid so. Unless you want to spend your life running, this is it.”

Edie wailed and pulled the covers over her head.

Marlene left her then and walked around the house with Sweety. She checked the ground under Edie’s window, but found little disturbance. Robinson must have been particularly careful, or maybe he had sent Ginnie.

In the boathouse, she saw that
Bonito
, the big Chris-Craft, was in its berth, looking tatty, with lines tangled and bottles and articles of clothing strewn on its decks. There was a noise from below decks. Sweety gave his warning growl.

A young man Marlene did not recognize staggered out of the main cabin hatchway. He was wearing nothing but white tennis shorts and a gold razor blade on a chain around his neck. His face, tanned and handsome though it was, showed the signs of a bad hangover. He stared at Marlene and her dog blankly for a moment, then groaned and said, “Jesus shit! Where the hell is everybody?”

“Probably back at Ginnie’s house?” Marlene offered.

“Oh, Ginnie! She took off with Vince. Hell if I know where she is.” He blinked at her. “Do I know you?” “I don’t think so.”

“I didn’t fuck you last night, did I? No, it was somebody … you got anything on you? Uppers? No? Coke? Fuck! I am
flicked up!
Started in Danceteria, somebody said, Ginnie Woo’s on a fucking boat, now where am I? Some place on the Island. These aren’t my shorts.”

“Vince knows how to throw a party, hey?” said Marlene.

“Oh, fuck, lady! The guy is out of his mind. I say that,
I’m
fucking out of my mind and I’m my
father
compared to Vince. Last Thanksgiving? Twenty of us, private seven-two-seven, Marrakesh. Jesus shit! Four days. Fucking Arabs never saw anything like it.”

“On Thanksgiving I thought he would’ve taken you to Turkey, not Morocco.”

“Turkey? What the fuck’s in Turkey? Nah, forget it! Fuckin’ Turks’re real down on fun, man … Christ, you got any aspirin, Empirin, Darvon … shit! You don’t got shit.”

The man staggered back below. Marlene left the boathouse and went around to the dock. She wondered where Robinson and Ginnie had taken off to last night, and there was something else in what the jerk had said that disturbed her, but she couldn’t quite locate the itch. She went back to the house.

Waley’s closing statement took up the whole morning, and at the end of which only the most wideawake observer would have known who the victim was in the case. For Waley the “real” victim was clearly the defendant. Unloved. Abused. Insane. Jane Hughes might just as well have been hit by a runaway truck. Waley ended with an impassioned rendition of his original theme: don’t compound this tragedy by punishing a young man who needs medical help.

Karp went on in the afternoon. He fixed with his eye a juror in the first row, Mr. Domingo Corton, welding-machine operator, fifty-four, whom Karp had noticed nodding in agreement during Waley’s performance. He would speak like this directly to each juror in turn, giving each one that portion of his argument he thought would tell the most, based on his assessment of that juror’s personality and the extent to which he thought they favored either side.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this case is not about the sad life and personal troubles of Jonathan Rohbling. This case is about the brutal murder of Mrs. Jane Hughes, the beloved mother of five children, the grandmother of seven. You have heard a great deal of testimony from distinguished psychiatrists, which Mr. Waley has just ably recalled for you, as to the defendant’s mental state at various times in his life. This testimony may be interesting or not, but it is important that you realize that it is
not
the critical evidence in this case. Judge Peoples will instruct you that you must convict Mr. Rohbling of murder unless you find that owing to a mental disease or defect he was substantially incapable of comporting his conduct to the requirements of the law. That’s a fancy way of saying that you have to find that when he killed Jane Hughes, he did not know what he was doing or that it was wrong. How would he know this, what the defendant’s mind was like at the moment when he killed Mrs. Hughes? Well, with all due respect to the psychiatric profession, no test or method has ever been devised that will tell you what is in someone else’s head at a particular time. It is beyond the ability of science.”

Mr. Corton was now nodding well enough for Karp too. He shifted his gaze to Mrs. Bertha Finney, sixty-four, retired postal worker, the jury’s lone female black elder.

“So how
do
we tell? Members of the jury, this is no great mystery requiring years of graduate school, medical school. You know from your own lives that the major evidence indicating mental state is behavior—facial expression, speech, both tone and content, and action. We don’t need a psychiatrist to tell us if a loved one is upset or our boss is angry. Human society
depends
on our native ability to determine what is going on inside a person from the way they behave. Now, sure, there are frauds, there are cheats, there are con men in the world, but these people also depend on our ability to read mental states from behavior—they are skilled at
imitating
such behavior so as to give us the
wrong
idea of their sincerity.”

Switch to Julio Meles, twenty-nine, courier service manager, refresh smile.

“Now, let me assure you that if some poor soul being treated for schizophrenia wandered out of Bellevue in his underwear and pushed Jane Hughes under a train, raving all the while, and waited for the police to arrest him the odds are very good that we would not be here in a courtroom today. The State of New York has no problem accepting a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity when the behavior of the accused clearly warrants it. We are not in the business of persecuting the sick and helpless.”

Karp turned his attention to Earlene Davis, forty-one, restaurant cashier.

“But we know that such is not the case with Mr. Rohbling. We
know
it in the teeth of all the wild theories of all the psychiatrists that Mr. Waley can find in the telephone book and hire for generous fees, because we
know
how Mr. Rohbling
behaved
. You’ll recall me asking Dr. Persteiner about how we knew that Jonathan Rohbling did not suffer from schizophrenia, and he answered with one word: competence. Everything we know about the defendant’s behavior in the days preceding and following the murder of Mrs. Hughes shows competence, and not only that. We also see decision, alacrity, and guile. But let me make it absolutely clear, ladies and gentlemen …”

Karp made it absolutely clear to Lillian Weintraub, fifty-nine, housewife.

“… I am not saying that Mr. Rohbling is a model of mental stability. Here I find myself in agreement with Mr. Waley. I have no doubt that Mr. Rohbling is a sick man. But that is not the point. The People are not obliged to show that Mr. Rohbling is a well-balanced, happy person, able to live a full and rewarding life. I am certain that Judge Peoples will instruct you as to that. But there are many types of mental illness. Drug addiction and alcoholism are mental illnesses too, listed as such in Dr. Lewis Rosenbaum’s big
DSM III
book, which we all saw earlier, but we do not for that reason excuse the junkie who mugs or the drunk who kills with his car.”

Karp focused on Theodore Spearman, the retired NYU chemistry professor promoted to the jury from alternate, a man who might be expected to know about proof.

“No, all we are obliged to prove, and what we
have
proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that Jonathan Rohbling planned to kill Jane Hughes, that he costumed himself carefully so as to inveigle himself into her confidence, that he sought her out at her church, that he preyed on her decency, posing convincingly as a young black student lately come to the big city, and so got himself invited to her apartment, that he kept that appointment with murder at her apartment, that he killed her, knowing that he was killing her, for Jane Hughes fought hard for her life, she did not go easily as he pressed his suitcase down on her face, smothering her to death. And we have further proven that he escaped stealthily from the murder scene, and that when he was confronted by Detective Featherstone, as you heard, he cleverly and guilefully denied ownership of the suitcase, knowing that it contained damning evidence connecting him with the crime. Ladies and gentlemen, is this the
behavior
of an out-of-control maniac who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong?
Give me a break!
”

Pause. Switch to Carmen Delgado, thirty-one, dry cleaner. Karp took a deep breath, summoning the beginning case into his head. He would now review all the significant evidence as it applied to the theme he had just laid out for the jury, boosting his triumphs, ignoring his slips, telling him a coherent, convincing tale that would stick, he hoped, to their minds more tenaciously than the one Waley had told in the morning.

Late in the second hour of this grueling work, he noted out of the corner of his eye a young black woman he recognized as a clerk-typist in the bureau office enter the courtroom, walk up to the barrier dividing the well of the court from the spectator seats, attract the attention of Terrell Collins at the prosecution table, and hand him a folded piece of paper. The jury noticed it too, and their attention wavered for an instant. Karp suppressed a flush of rage. By far the gravest sin that any employee of the district attorney’s office could commit was to interrupt in any way a closing argument. Death in the family was no excuse, nor was the outbreak of nuclear war. Karp raised his voice a hair, pumped out a little more charisma, brought the jury back to full attention, and plowed on. He would have someone’s ass for this. Afterward.

Karp in his office, drained, rubbing an icy can of Coke across his eyes.

Collins was there for his usual postmortem, this the very last one. He could tell by the twitching of his boss’s jaw that something was wrong (talk about
bahavior!
), but he didn’t have a clue as to what it was. He thought that the closing had gone splendidly. Karp had brilliantly defused the whole dueling-shrinks aspect of the case, finessing Waley’s strongest card. The press—they had been yelling something about another granny-killer victim, but they had rushed down the gantlet so quickly that he hadn’t been able to make out what it meant.

Karp chugged three-quarters of the soda and snarled, “Now, what the
fuck
was that business with passing papers in the middle of the goddamn closing?”

“Hell, Butch, I don’t know. Look for yourself. I wasn’t going to get into a damn discussion with the woman, so I just took what she gave me.”

Karp read, “Fulton says call Homicide 28th IMMEDIATELY.”

Karp punched in a familiar number. Fulton came on the line right away, as if he had been waiting by the phone.

“You heard yet?” the detective asked.

“Heard what? For fuck’s sake, Clay, did you tell my office to interrupt me in
court?
”

“I did. Get this. A woman named Margaret Evans did not show up for work this morning. When a coworker checked on her at one-fourteen this afternoon, she found her in her apartment, dead, with a blue cloth suitcase over her face. M.E. says it looks like smothering. Time of death, last night sometime. Woman is black, age 58, two kids, four grand kids.”

“Oh, shit!” said Karp. “And the press has it already? How the hell … ?”

“Somebody tipped them, is what I heard. How we going to play this, Stretch?”

Karp did not reply for a moment. He was trying to figure out if there was any way of keeping this news from the jury, and decided that there was not. Had he known about it sooner, he might have been able to make a case for sequestration, but by now the jurors were at home, sitting in front of the tube or looking at the evening paper.

“I want you to handle it, Clay,” he said at last. “You need me to call zone command or the Chief of D., I will.”

“No problem. By the way, I checked. He was in Bellevue, in case you were wondering.”

“Oh,
that’s
a relief,” said Karp. “I guess we should thank God for small favors. What’s your thinking, off the bat?”