Resolved (2 page)

“Yes, I would,” said Murrow, “but my Mummy said I mustn't.”

A booming man's laugh from Stupenagel, in which, after a pause, the men joined. Karp recalled Marlene once saying that Stupe was the most infuriating and also the most uninfuriating person she knew, someone who would both steal your shoes and give you the shirt off her back.

“In that case, you can pour me another drink,” she said. “Oh, now, this is cozy. A blizzard outside, great changes in the DA, and the death of the year. You know where I was when the story of the century broke a couple of blocks away? In Havana. They wanted me to check if Fidel was actually still alive.”

“Did you fuck him?” asked Karp.

“Puh-lease! He could barely get it up in eighty-five. I never worked so hard for a story in my life.”

“Yes, Murrow,” said Karp, “if you succumb to Stupenagel's charms, you'll be able to share STDs with some of the world's great leaders, past and present.”

“That was unkind,” she pouted. “See, that's what happens to nice men when they're not getting it regular, they become unkind. Fill him up again, Murrow. Anyway, when Nine Eleven hit I realized there was no point in coming to the city, because everyone was here, so I hopped a flight to London and then to Pakistan, because it was obvious the story was going to be there. I heard you had quite a summer, by the way. Escaped maniacs…?”

“Felix Tighe.”

She said, “Yeah, Tighe. I remember the original case. I was in Guat at the time, but I read what the wire services had on it. I recall thinking that it was hard getting all excited about a couple or three people getting killed in New York when we had them in windrows along every road in the country. That was the guy that snatched Marlene, or was that his brother?”

“The brother,” said Karp. “And the mom. She was running a Satanic pedophile ring out of a fancy day-care center. The brother was a feeb, and she'd trained him to pick up stray little girls off the streets, like a Labrador retriever. She was aiming to make Felix the next prince of darkness, or whatever, but he liked freelance evil instead. Go have children.”

“I thought that whole Satanic ritual in the day-care center was a load of horseshit. Like an urban legend.”

“It is,” said Karp. “But there's always the exception. One giant alligator really does live down in the sewers, and one poodle really did go into the microwave. This one was it for the Satanic day cares. We never tried the case. The old lady killed herself in custody and the brother died, too, and the only other witnesses were the kids, and I wasn't going anywhere near that.”

“Marlene plugged him, didn't she?” asked Stupenagel. “Now it's coming back. God, how the years fly! This was when you were still a rug rat, Murrow. I might have dandled you on my knee. I might still, if you're lucky. Yeah, now that I think about it, that was Marlene's first hit, wasn't it?”

Karp was silent.

“Yeah, it was. But not anywhere near the last. What's the count now, or don't you keep track? No comment? Oh, right, this is talking rope in the house of the hanged, isn't it?” She slapped her cheek. “Naughty, naughty Stupenagel—again! Murrow, this is why I so infrequently get invited back, except regrettably, by horny short men. There was something else about the mother, too, wasn't there? Didn't get a lot of play?”

“Felix was screwing her,” said Karp. “They used to meet in a hotel, I understand, her in disguise, him in some kind of trance. It came up in pretrial, the defense feeling out how we would sit with an insanity plea, but Felix put the kibosh on it. ‘It never happened,' says Felix, ‘my mom was a saint.' I think Ray Guma has to get credit for the best line: ‘And here I thought that “mean motherfucker” was just a figure of speech. '”

She laughed. “Dear old Guma. But that's interesting. I wonder if it happens a lot or rarely. Mother-on-son incest. The other kind we know all about, girls blabbing about what bad old Daddy did every time you switch on the fucking TV. But the boys don't blab. Does that mean there's nothing there? Silence arouses my journalistic instinct. What about it, boys? Anyone want to confess. Off the record, of course. I'm not on duty.”

“Rare, but not unknown,” said Murrow after a pause. “A lot of fantasy around it, which is suggestive. Just check out the Internet. As a matter of fact, about ten percent of child sex abuse vics are boys, but that includes dad as the perp, of course. Then there's art.
Luna
by Bertolucci,
Le Souffle au Coeur
by Louis Malle.”

“My God, he talks!” crowed Stupenagel. “It's a pity you're not up for adoption, Murrow. Or doesn't that hold any interest? I'd wear a housedress and you could be in diapers. No? Then you can refresh my drink.”

She drank, and said to Karp, “So, do you think it was Mom who warped him and sent him on a life of crime?”

“I try never to speculate on causation. It's irrelevant, although there's practically never a case where the defense doesn't try to bring up their boy's sad life. A mutt is a mutt.”

“Even when he's a cop?”

“Especially then.”

“I could never figure out what happened in that thing last summer,” she said. “I mean, even after all the shit that's been going down about bad shootings and police brutality, why a cop would even take the chance…what did you make of it?”

“Are you back on duty?”

“No. But as a victim of police brutality in four countries, including this one, I have an interest.”

“It wasn't a police brutality thing,” said Karp. “Not really. It was a police stupidity thing. A hell of a lot more common, to tell you the truth.”

“So there must have been a lot of pressure on that case,” said the reporter. “White cops, black victim. How come you took the case?”

Karp explained the situation and added, “Even so, I didn't think Jack would let me take it. They usually keep me away from cases with racial overtones, as you know.”

“But I don't know. I was out of the country at the time. I'm a foreign correspondent.”

“Then what are you doing here?” Karp said, not quite keeping the snarl from his voice. I'm getting drunk, he thought. Am I going to be a mean drunk?

She appeared not to notice. He imagined people snarled at her all the time, given her personality. She said, “Every place is foreign from the standpoint of someplace else. Pretend I'm reporting on the strange customs of American jurisprudence for a Canadian paper. No, really, all I know is the gossip. You punched out a black reporter is what I heard.”

“I didn't punch him out,” said Karp. “He got in my face in a hallway and I pushed past him and he tripped on some TV cables. Then a guy fell on him with a TV camera and his face got bruised. There was some tape with me scowling and this little guy with blood streaming down his face. The press made a big thing of it. And it was the case I was working on at the time, that had a lot to do with it.”

“Okay, now it's coming back. That was that wacko who was after black grannies. You lost that one, if memory serves. Another racial thing?”

“Not really. It was a good jury. I just got beat. The guy, Rohbling, was a weedy white boy with a lot of money. His family hired the best lawyer in the country and the rest is history. He's in Matteawan now, until the shrinks decide he's not a danger to the community. It happens. The African-American sector was not pleased.”

“Was that when they started calling you KKKarp?”

“Around then. They thought I was being insufficiently aggressive. They thought it was funny that a prosecutor who'd won over a hundred straight homicide convictions, mainly, if you want to know, where the defendants were what they call people of color, just couldn't hack it when it came to nailing a rich white guy.”

“Did they have a point?” she asked slyly.

T
HE INTERIOR OF
N
EW
Y
ORK
S
TATE
GETS SURPRISINGLY HOT
in the summer, and this was a hotter than usual week, even for the last of August. The guards at the Auburn Prison, located nearly in the center of this region, were more than usually interested in the weather reports, for hot weather does not play well in the cell blocks. Auburn is a maximum security joint, like Attica, its more famous sister. Most people have forgotten that in 1929, in a similar hot spell, the prisoners had rebelled and burned the whole place down. But the guards remember. Prison cell blocks are not air-conditioned. Air-conditioning would be coddling convicts and the legislature will not countenance it, although if it were up to the guards, they would chill the whole place down so low that frost would form on the bars.

The fight started on a Monday, which is the worst day in prison, because Sunday is visiting day. Those who have received visits from loved ones are pissed off because they can't actually make love with their wives or hug their kids, and the ones who haven't are pissed off because they haven't, and the air is stale and stinking that monkey-house stink, and in the shadeless yard the sun boils the brain. Twelve hundred men, not one of whom has particularly good impulse control, all with little to lose, most with grudges against the world, mingle on that barren plain in the wilting heat. There are gangs. Half the prisoners are black, a third Hispanic, the rest white, and the gangs track this assortment. Someone makes a remark, and if the ethnicity of the remarker and the remarkee differ, that's all it takes. The guard in his tower sees a rapid movement, a coalescence of men's bodies around a center, like dirty gray water sucking down a drain. He goes for his radio and picks up his shotgun. The guards rush out with clubs swinging. They disappear into the mass.

Felix Tighe woke up in the prison infirmary with an aching head and a dull pain in his side. It took him a little while to recall where he was and what had put him there. It was hot, he remembered that, and he was on the bench in the yard, doing bench presses, 380-pound presses, with some Aryan Nation cons around him, also working out, ignoring the niggers at their weights, as usual, and then one of the niggers had said something about the sweet little white-boy ass of Kopman's punk, Lulu, which was bad enough, but then—it was Marvelle, the Crimp, he now recalled—Marvelle had actually grabbed Lulu and started dry-humping him right there in front of everyone, and all the white guys had dropped their weights and gone after him.

Felix had picked up a weight bar and gone in, too. After that it got blurry. He remembers cracking some heads with it, before the screws came in and started whacking everyone they could reach. He touched his side, moved his left arm. It stung, but didn't feel that bad. Someone had shanked him. He'd have to find out who and get even. Felix always got even and everyone knew it. It was one of his two main things, which was why no one had fucked with him after the first week, and now it was going on nineteen years here in Auburn. He was nearly forty-two.

A face swam into his field of view. A thin, pale brown face, the color of a sandy dirt road, shaven-headed, beak-nosed over a cropped gray beard, with prison glasses glinting in front of wide-set intelligent eyes. The Arab.

“How do you feel?” the Arab asked. He had a soft voice, only slightly accented. The Arab had been the chief trustee attendant at the infirmary for at least ten years. The Arab wasn't in a gang, not even in the Muslim Brothers, although he was an actual Muslim. Everyone left him alone for two reasons: one, you never could tell when you might have to go into the infirmary and hence find yourself in his power, and two, he provided dope for the whole prison. The doc was a junkie, and nodded off half the time. The Arab ran the place. Actually, three reasons. There was something about him, a look. The toughest cons, the yard bulls, could read it, and they treated the Arab with respect, and so, accordingly, did everyone else, including Felix. The prison records gave his name as Feisal Abdel Ridwan, which was somewhat true, and the crimes for which he had been sentenced as felony murder and armed robbery were also somewhat true. His actual identity and his actual crimes were kept secret, even from the prison authorities. This was part of the deal his lawyers had negotiated, to keep him safe, and to keep the information in his head on tap, should any of a number of U.S. government agencies wish to tap it.

“Okay, I guess,” said Felix. “My head hurts. What the fuck happened?”

“You were knocked out, a concussion. Also you were stabbed, but the blade twisted against a rib and did not penetrate far. Would you like some pills for the pain?”

“Fuck yes.”

The pills were produced, two tabs of Percocet. After swallowing them, Felix asked, “So I'm okay? No permanent damage, huh?”

“Not to your body. Your legal situation is not so good, I am afraid.”

“My legal…?”

“Yes. The guard Daniels is dead. They are saying you killed him.”

“The fuck they are! That's bullshit! Who's saying I killed him, the niggers?”

“No, you were seen by several guards, apparently. Daniels was killed by a blow to the side of the neck, a blow from a naked hand. There are not many men who could deliver such a blow.”

Without thinking, Felix looked at his hands. A heavy rind of callous ran along the edge of each. The knuckles barely rose above the thick hornlike skin that encased them. Felix had been a karate black belt before coming to the prison, and he had been scrupulous about practicing during his time here. That was his other main thing—his body and its effectiveness as a weapon. Had he killed Daniels? He wasn't sure, although some details were returning now, as the drug relaxed him. The iron bar had been torn from his hands, and then he'd felt the jab of the knife. There were angry black faces all around him and he'd kicked and struck out at them. Someone had tried to grab him from behind and he'd whirled and chopped at a neck. Then nothing. That could have been Daniels. By then everything was a blur, the red haze of rage, sweat in his eyes. They couldn't hold him responsible for that. It was Marvelle who'd started the whole thing anyway.

“It was Marvelle started the fucking thing. Whyn't they fuck with
him
for a change?”

The Arab ignored this. “I think you are in a lot of trouble, Felix, you know? A great deal of big trouble. Killing a guard is murder in the first degree. They have the death penalty now. I think they intend to pin you for this murder.”

“Let them fucking try,” said Felix, “I didn't kill anyone. Not on purpose anyway.”

Later that same day, however, two state police detectives arrived at Felix's bedside, to interview him and to confront him with the evidence against him. The whole thing had been captured by the video cameras perpetually trained on the yard, they said, and it was perfectly clear who had killed the guard. They desired a confession, which Felix did not give them. It was an essential part of his psychology never to confess to anything, not for strategic reasons, but because, in his own mind, he was incapable of wrongdoing of any kind. That any act of his was justified, correct, blameless was, in a sense, the core of his being. Felix Tighe was a psychopath.

He asked for a lawyer then, which meant that they had to stop questioning him. It did not mean, however, that they had to stop talking to him, and one of the state detectives did that, describing in some detail what would happen to him after he was convicted of first-degree murder. New York had never executed anyone under the new statute, but it was the detective's belief that the state was merely waiting for someone just like Felix: white, a convicted murderer of a woman and a child, who had killed an officer in the line of duty. “A poster boy for capital punishment” was the phrase he used more than once.

The next day, a lawyer appeared, a court-appointed local, bored and irritably earning his twenty-five dollars per, who explained to Felix the legal doctrine of intent. It did not matter, he said, that Felix had not arisen that Monday morning planning to murder Officer Phillip K. Daniels. He had directed a blow against the victim's neck, knowing his own power and skill, knowing that it was potentially deadly. It was precisely the same as shooting a cop in the commission of a crime. “I didn't mean it” was not exculpatory under law. The lawyer advised Felix to take the plea, and he'd try to work out something that did not involve lethal injection. Felix refused. The lawyer explained what a refusal meant: that he would be tried locally, in Cuyahoga County, before a jury composed of people having zero sympathy for New York City bad boys, who all knew someone who knew someone who worked as a corrections officer at the prison. Felix then cursed out the lawyer so violently that the man got up and left.

After that Felix napped, untroubled by the future. Like many of his fellow psychopaths, he had the imagination and foresight of a newt. It was the Arab who brought him to his senses. He was sympathetic, to start with, and Felix was a great consumer of sympathy. In the long quiet night hours of the infirmary, the Arab sat in a chair by Felix's bedside, listening to the sad story of how Felix had been shafted, screwed, betrayed by everyone with whom he had come in contact (especially women), how all his plans had been undone by bad luck, how his reasonable efforts to seek justice had been misconstrued, how he had been so many times unjustly accused of crimes, as now. To all this, the Arab listened calmly, silent except for little clucks of concern. This made Felix happy, not because he thought he was becoming friends with the man—friendship was a category void of meaning for Felix—but because the jerk seemed to be swallowing the story whole, which meant he could be manipulated to Felix's advantage. Which he already was: he was a willing source of drugs, and a faker of medical reports, so that Felix got to hang out in bed all day instead of having to hump laundry baskets or slave away in the roasting stamping shop, making license plates. The infirmary was air-conditioned.

On one of these pleasant nights, Felix was expatiating on one of his favorite themes, how the niggers got all the breaks, because the hebes wanted it that way, so that real Americans got kept down. Felix did not actually believe all this. Sympathizing with the downtrodden, even the class of which he was a member, was quite alien to him. All of it was in service of manipulation—he figured the Arab would have a thing about Jews. And indeed, the man spoke for the first time after Felix said this, but not about the Jews.

“They are going to execute you, you know,” said the Arab. “It is inevitable. And that will be the end of your sad story. A pity, really. You are clearly a man capable of larger things.”

Felix stared at him.

The Arab's eyes were sad as he resumed. “Yes, you see I have many contacts in the administration. And outside. It is amazing how much information one can buy if one has an endless supply of painkillers and soporifics and diet pills. Everyone is looking for the drugs smuggled into the prison; it never occurs to anyone that drugs can be smuggled out, as well. In any case, my informants tell me that the indictment is already prepared. It will be for first-degree murder, and the state has absolutely no incentive to ask for anything other than death.”

The word brought Felix back from a reverie in which he blackmailed the Arab into letting him into the drug supply business in the prison, running it, in fact. He'd be the fucking king of the yard if he could get his hands on…

“Death?”

“Yes. Inevitable. The trial will be a slam dunk. That is correct, yes, a slam dunk? As I say, a pity. Unless you were able to escape.”

“What're you talking about?”

“It could be arranged. I could arrange it, in fact.”

“How?”

An elegant shrug. “You could go into a decline. Dr. McMartin is not punctilious and we have an unusual number of patients because of the riot. Your wound becomes infected. I start an IV, for antibiotics. Unfortunately it is of no use. You slip into a coma. You die. You have no close relations, do you?”

“No,” said Felix, and had the strange, if fleeting, notion that the Arab already knew this fact. “What do you mean, I die?”

“Just that. I will give you a substantial dose of morphine, enough to make it appear to a casual observer that you are deceased. In the early morning hours, I will move you into the morgue cooler. There are drugs I have that can slow your breathing so that it is almost imperceptible, and also your heart rate. Dr. McMartin is not a skillful physician. He will examine you briefly, with a stethoscope that I will have altered so that it would not detect a jet engine. Your skin will be quite cold. The picture will be a sick man who has passed away in the night. He will sign the death certificate with no qualms. Then I will autopsy you.”

“You'll what?”

“It is required. I do it all the time, although it is not authorized for me to do it alone. However, the doctor does not care for autopsies and he is glad of my skill.”

“You're not a doctor, how the fuck can you fake—”

“I am, in fact, a physician, in all but the details of licensure. I had four years of medical training in Cairo before I was arrested by the regime. I will make shallow cuts in a
Y
shape on your chest and sew them up again, as if I have removed your organs. I have put aside organs from a real autopsy, which I will present as yours, if anyone asks. Which I doubt that they will. Everyone, in fact, will be delighted that you are dead. Then your body will be shipped to your cousin in New York City.”