Immoral Certainty Read online

  Immoral Certainty

  A Butch Carp and Marlene Ciampi Thriller

  Robert K. Tanenbaum

  As always, for those most special,

  Patti, Rachael, Roger, and Billy

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  Preview: Reversible Error

  A BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT K. TANENBAUM

  CHAPTER

  1

  On a damp spring night in New York City in 197-, Patrolman Russell Slayton and his partner Jim Finney of the 114th Precinct, Queens, observed a man carrying a large plastic trash bag climbing out of a second-story window. They believed that they had probable cause to stop and question the man they suspected was in process of committing a burglary.

  Slayton, the senior of the two men, told Finney to pull the patrol car over and stay put, get on the radio and tell the precinct what was going on. He then got out of the car, unbuttoning the retaining strap on his pistol and fixing it so that the butt protruded from the slit in his tunic. He left his nightstick in the car and took instead a six-cell flashlight. This was not the kind of flashlight you buy in the hardware store. It was the kind policemen buy in the special little shops that cater to the law enforcement trade. It was made out of the same quality aluminum alloy used in the skin of an airliner, with a double thickness at the head and an acrylic lens thicker than the bottom of a Coke bottle. Except that it lit up, Slayton’s flashlight would not have been out of place at the battle of Agincourt.

  Swinging this flashlight, Slayton walked toward the man, who had by this time descended the fire escape to the street. Ten years on the force and the butterflies were still flapping around in Slayton’s belly.

  The man looked around and spotted Slayton and the patrol car. Slayton tensed, but to his amazement, the guy waved cordially, shouldered his trash bag and started to walk away. He even smiled; Slayton could see the flash of his white teeth.

  “Hey, you!” Slayton shouted. The guy kept walking. Slayton clicked on his flash and caught the man in its sharp beam.

  “Stop right there, fella!” The man turned and pointed inquiringly at his chest, a look of surprise on his face. Slayton thought later that this was the time he should have pulled his gun out, but something about the man’s appearance made him hesitate. He was well-built, fairly tall, good looking, and expensively dressed in a short leather jacket and tailored slacks. His dark hair was carefully barbered, and he appeared relaxed and confident, almost jaunty. And he was white. Slayton, who was black, didn’t actually think of what would happen to him if he were to shoot some rich white dude involved in some suspicious-looking but actually innocent business in this quiet middle-class neighborhood, but he was aware of the consequences at some level of his consciousness.

  He therefore did not pull his gun, nor did he shout “Yeah you, asshole, you see anybody else on the damn street?,” which was what came first to his mind. Instead he said, “Ah, sir, if you could step over here, I need to ask you a couple of questions.” The guy shrugged and approached Slayton.

  “Sure, Officer, what’s the problem?”

  “Could I see some identification, please.”

  The guy put the trash bag down carefully, reached into his back pocket and brought out a wallet. He handed Slayton a Visa card and a Social Security card made out to James P. Otto.

  Slayton examined the cards and handed them back.

  “Mr. Otto, could you tell me what you were doing climbing out of that window just now?”

  The guy smiled. “Yeah, well, it’s a little embarrassing, Officer. That’s my girlfriend’s place. Ah, she’s married to a guy who’s on the road a lot. Actually, they’re in the middle of breaking up. Well, tonight we were together and he buzzes up from downstairs. He just decided to come home. A panic—unbelievable! She’s got to buzz him in, right? I mean, what else could she do? So, needless to say, I get dressed and go out the window.”

  “And what’s in the bag?”

  “Oh, that’s my stuff—some shaving stuff, cologne, some clothes. Like I couldn’t leave it there, you know?” He laughed. “Christ, I hope to hell I didn’t forget anything.”

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  “Sure, go right ahead.”

  Slayton knelt down, opened the bag and shined his light in. He saw several bulky objects wrapped in towels. He pulled on the material, which came away, revealing the dull sheen of an expensive stereo tuner. He reached further into the bag, felt something cold and hauled out a silver sugar bowl. He stood up quickly then, and as he did he saw the knife, glistening, impossibly huge, rushing towards his throat.

  Slayton screamed a curse and brought up his left hand to protect himself. He still held the big flashlight and this is what saved his life as the keen blade chopped through the middle joints of his first two fingers, gouged the steel case of the flashlight, and buried itself in the meat of his left shoulder. He went down on one knee bellowing for Finney. The pain from his hand was staggering; it made him sick and weak. He fought the sickness and jammed his injured hand into his armpit to staunch the gush of blood. Everything was slowing down. He heard a car door open and a shout and running feet. He felt a blow against his back and a flood of warmth on his skin there. He went down on his face as he struggled to pull his gun from its holster. Breathing hurt. His cheek touched the damp pavement and he fainted.

  Finney was out of the car the instant he saw Slayton go down, without pausing to call for backup. The man was ten yards ahead of him when he passed Slayton’s prostrate form, but by the end of the block he had narrowed it to five. Finney held his own six-cell flashlight in his right hand as he ran, like the baton of a relay racer, which, a scant four years ago he had in fact been at Richmond Hill High School, and on a citywide championship squad at that. He was still in pretty good shape.

  The two of them crossed the deserted intersection about six feet apart. The fleeing man snapped a look over his shoulder. Finney saw his eyes widen in surprise. The man put on a burst of speed and cut sharply right, as if he were a running back shaking a tackler. This proved to be a serious error, as the cop cut inside, reached out, and clocked the man across the base of the skull with his flashlight.

  It was not a heavy blow, but Finney’s flashlight was the same model as Slayton’s and even a tap was enough to throw the man off balance. He caromed into a street sign, stumbled, and then Finney had a hunk of leather jacket in his left hand. The big flashlight came down on the man’s head once, twice. After that, Finney had no trouble handcuffing the man’s wrists together around a lamppost. Then he ran back to see about his partner.

  After Slayton was rushed off by ambulance, and after the seven police cars that had responded to the “officer down” call had dispersed, they took the burglar back to the precinct and found, unsurprisingly, that he was not James Otto. His name was Felix M. Tighe, of Jackson Heights, in Queens. A local boy. They checked his name for criminal history, and were mildly surprised to find that he had no record. They booked him for burglary, felonious assault, resisting arrest, and attempted murder. Then they patched his head and put him in a cell.

  Patrolman Finney stayed at Queens County Hospital until the surgeon came out and assured him that Slayton would see the dawn. Then he drove back to the 114th to make his report. He filled in his UF 8, the summary arres
t card, turned it in, and then looked up the detective who had caught the case.

  The detective, a slight, tired-looking man named Howie Frie, was filling out his own form, this one a DD5 situation report. He had already tagged the two major pieces of evidence—the big bloodstained knife and the bag of swag—and sent them to the lab for routine fingerprint and blood-type analysis.

  Finney introduced himself as the arresting officer. Frie scowled. “Oh, yeah. How’s your partner?”

  “He’ll live. His flash took some of the knife or the fucker would have sliced his head off. I never saw a blade like that before.”

  “Yeah, it’s a real, what they call a bowie knife. A reproduction—not cheap either. By the way, he looked like shit when they dragged him in. What’d you do, slap him around a little?”

  “Fuck, no! It’s just like it says in the report, man. I pursued the perp and subdued him using necessary force.”

  “You hit him a couple with the flash, huh?”

  “Nightstick,” answered Finney, unconvincingly.

  Frie smiled, “Yeah, stick to that, kid. You don’t want any of that police brutality screwing up the case. Not that it’ll ever get to a jury.”

  “It won’t? Why the hell won’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah, it could. But probably, his lawyer’ll try to cop, probably to B and E and the assault. Three years max. He’ll be out in a year and a half, he keeps his nose clean. I figure the D.A.’ll take it.”

  “What! Why the fuck should he? He practically killed a cop. I’m an eyewitness. We got shitloads of physical evidence. Why should the D.A. give anything away?”

  Frie shrugged and finished filling out his form. He scrawled a signature and tossed the report into a wire basket on top of a dozen others.

  “Why?” said Finney again. “Slayton could’ve bought it tonight.”

  Frie looked at the young patrolman and tried to recall what it felt like to get pissed off because the system stank on ice.

  “Yeah, but he didn’t, so your case, instead of being one of half a dozen cop killings, is one of ten thousand burglary and fifty thousand assaults. Ok, it’s a cop, it gets a little more juice, but not much. The main thing is, the mutt got no sheet on him.”

  “No?”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you, Finney. He’s a clean motherfucker. Now, that’s not saying he don’t have a juvie sheet twelve feet long, maybe he’s Charles Manson Junior, but age eighteen they wipe it, and he gets a clean start. So figure, all’s he got to do is stay out of trouble for—how old is he?—twenty-eight, there, figure ten years. Our clearance rate on burglaries is about right to catch a professional burglar about once every ten years. But I doubt he’s a real pro.”

  “No? How come?”

  “No tools. Pulling a boner like coming down a street ladder instead of going out through the building. Knifing a cop. All kid stunts, junkie bullshit, and he ain’t no junkie. No, I figure he’s a square, got a little behind on the car payments, maybe he’s into the books on some sports action, could use a couple hundred on the side. So he goes into the den, takes the bowie knife down from the collection on the wall, there. Shit, he figures every shine in town is getting rich, why shouldn’t a nice white boy? Something like that. Good thing he don’t collect Lugers. And you know what proves it?”

  “What?”

  “He gets in trouble, who does he use his one dime to call? A Queens Boulevard shyster who specializes in springing small-time mutts? Not him. He was a pro he’d have Terry Sullivan’s or Morrie Roth’s number fuckin’ memorized.”

  “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

  The 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 t
hey 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.