Immoral Certainty Read online

  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.

  Felix Tighe slept nearly eight straight hours at his mother’s house, in his old bed in the room he had occupied as a boy. His mom kept it just the way he had left it—the weight set, the Jim Morrison poster, even his high school books still lined up neatly on a shelf. He awoke around five in the afternoon, feeling peaceful and secure, and after limbering up, performed three r
epetitions of the Ten-no kata of the shotokan school of karate. Felix had recently been awarded a shodan, the first degree black belt in this school, one of the few projects he had ever completed, and an accomplishment of which he was inordinately proud.

  Sweating slightly now, he stripped, showered, and dressed in the clothes his mother had laid out: tan whipcord pants, a green plaid sportshirt, a gray cashmere sweater, gray socks, and shiny penny loafers. His mother always seemed to have a supply of clothes in Felix’s size; a good thing too, since he had thrown away the clothes he had been wearing the night of his arrest.

  His mother was in the kitchen cutting up potatoes on a butcher’s chopping block. She looked up and her face brightened when he came in. “My, don’t you look nice. Does that shirt fit?” She put her knife down, walked over to him and adjusted his collar. Felix hugged her and kissed her loudly on the cheek. “How’s my best girl?” he said. She giggled and kissed him back, and smoothed her hair when he released her. She was a small woman of about fifty, with the same dark handsomeness as Felix. Her hair was thick and dark, showing no gray, swept back in a large bun at the nape of her neck. She was wearing a cotton shirtwaist dress in some neutral color and a white apron around her waist.

  “You’re still the prettiest mom in the world,” said Felix, going over to the refrigerator. He poked around and pulled out a can of Schlitz and a bag of Fritos.

  His mother said, “You’ll ruin your appetite. I’m making fried chicken and french fries.”

  “Ma, I got to go back to Queens tonight. I thought I told you.”

  “Felix, it’s your favorite! And it’s all prepared—”

  “I’m sorry as hell, Ma, but it’s business. They’ve got me writing this big report, and it’s got to be at the front office day after tomorrow. I thought I could finish it last night, but those crazy cops locked me up. I can’t tell the boss I was in jail, can I? I mean they wouldn’t understand and all …”

  Her face softened. “Well then, if it’s business. Oh, but I do wish you’d take it easier. I want you to be a success, dear, but you should relax more.”

  “Yeah, well I’ll try, Ma. But you know how it is, the executive rat race.” He shrugged and showed a wry smile.

  “Yes, I do, and I don’t forget what it did to your poor father.”

  “And how’s your business, Ma?” said Felix quickly. He disliked talking about his father. “Doing good?”

  “Oh, fair. It’s a lot of work, and I do it all. You can’t get help today. Doesn’t matter what the pay is, they’d rather go on welfare. And your brother … if you’re not watching him every minute, he makes a mess of everything.” She came toward him and touched his cheek. “Now if I had you here, it’d be different.”

  “Yeah I know, Ma. We talked about that a million times. I appreciate it, but I got to follow my talent. My own star, like you used to tell me. I got lots of deals now, one of them has got to pay off. I’m real close, I know it.” He grinned sheepishly. “Speaking of which, I’m a little short this week. And they cleaned out my wallet in jail.”

  “They did? Did you report it?”

  “Sure, but don’t count on anything happening there. The cops are just as bad as the crooks. They probably take a cut.”

  “You poor thing! I’ll write you a check.”

  “Thanks a million, Ma,” said Felix warmly. “Hey, you know, I’ve been thinking about moving to Manhattan. It’s closer to work and, you know, I’d get to see you more.”

  “Felix, that’s wonderful! Have you found a place?”

  “Not yet. But rent is sky high in the good neighborhoods. And they want first and last month security, and sometimes you got to tip the super to get you in.”

  Felix’s mother went to a drawer in one of the kitchen cabinets and took out her checkbook. “I know,” she said. “Soon decent people won’t be able to afford the city at all. Will five hundred do it?”

  “That’ll be great, Ma. But, uh, if you could, I could use a couple hundred in cash.”

  She looked at him, and something odd seemed to come over her face, as if there was another person sitting behind her eyes. “That’s fine,” she said pleasantly. “I have some stuff I need to drop off in the safe deposit. You can take that along when you get your cash.”

  At about four-thirty that afternoon, Karp left his office and began the daily inspection of his empire. This was comprised of his own Bureau Chief’s office, a secretarial bullpen, two large partitioned bays where the rank and file worked, and a set of tiny colonies—little offices, alcoves, and closets that the Criminal Courts Bureau had accumulated in various deals and trade-offs over the years, every square inch of which was sacred soil to be defended to the last memo.

  People called out to him or waved good-naturedly as he threaded his way through the warren of neck-high glass and steel barricades that choked the work space. Karp liked this part of his day. Although he accepted that his temper and impatience made him an indifferent bureaucrat, he liked to think that he was a good manager. Managing was like coaching a team, he thought: You develop your players, you teach them how to work together, give them some tricks, and send them out to win.

  In fact, the Criminal Courts Bureau was and had always been a jocky sort of place. Most of the young attorneys who came to work as prosecutors had played some ball in school. The squad bays were busy with energetic young men, their hair cut unfashionably short, making loud wisecracks. Nobody ever just threw a piece of yellow legal paper into the can; it was always a graceful hook or jumper and an exhalation of “Yessss!” or “Two points!”

  In general, Karp was pleased with the quality of the kids who came to work for him; what was wrong was what became of them after a zillion cases and no trials. It was like training a team to a high pitch and never letting them play. It wore them out and made them dull and cynical before their time.

  He walked into the cubicle occupied by Tony Harris. Stacks of large-format computer paper, books, brown accordion folders, and sheaves of various sorts of paper covered the small metal desk and flowed down over the straight wooden visitor’s chair to the floor. More paper, some of it in dusty cartons, was stacked precariously against two walls. It looked less like an office than something geological, a cave or the results of a retreating glacier. Harris had made the mistake of admitting that he knew something about computers and had been tagged with piles of administrative work on top of his court schedule. Harris was a skinny young man with bright blue eyes and a bush of brown hair that sprouted like marsh grass from either side of his face and down his collar. A scraggly mustache floated over a wide mouth, which, when he saw Karp, expanded into a wide crooked-toothed grin.

  “What are you so happy about?” asked Karp.

  “I think we stole about ten more trial slots than we’re entitled to this week—all homicides, by the way. Our clearance rate is piss-poor, but, ah, I made some adjustments on the computer. Of course, if the chief administrative judge or the D.A. ever find out about it, I’ll probably get disbarred or something.”

  Karp chuckled. “Don’t worry, kid, they’ll never catch us. His Honor the chief administrative judge has other fish to fry, like running for the Court of Appeals, God help us. He’s not going to make any waves. As long as the numbers balance he’ll never notice we jacked up the intake figures. Same thing with Bloom. Wharton might catch on, but I can handle him. Worse comes to worst, they’ll charge us with falsifying records. We’ll plead insanity and walk. But the main thing is …”

  “Yeah, trials. More trials.”

  “That’s right. Keep the mutts honest. The only way. Incidentally, how many homicides do we have this year so far?”

  Harris shuffled through some papers and pulled out a chart.

  “Six-hundred twenty-one. Up seven from this time last year.”

  “Great. We must be doing something right,” Karp said. “I’ll tell that to Mr. District Attorney next time he wants to clean out the whores from Times Square or some other goddamn project. Hey,
have you see Freddie Kirsch around recently?”

  “Yeah, I think he’s in his cell. I heard suspenders snapping. Speaking of cells, there any chance of me getting a bigger place? You got me doing all this administrative and computer crap, and I got green stripers coming up around my ears. There’s no place to fucking sit down.”

  Harris gestured toward his cubicle, which was about the size and shape of an apartment bathroom or a walk-in closet.

  Karp spread his hands in helplessness. “Tony, I got nothing to offer. And I need you to handle the admin because nobody else I got knows how to fuck with the data.” He looked sad. “This was a great place to work in forty years ago when the crime rate was about ten per cent what it is now. You know, this bay we’re in now was a reception area, back when the D.A. had about thirty attorneys in all. Joe Lerner told me when I started here. Can you believe it? A reception area?”

  “A long time ago,” agreed Harris. “Still,” he added, taking in his office with a sour glance, “it’s a definite statement by the people of New York. You’re garbage. Every day in every way you’re getting worser and worser.”

  “Come on, Tony, what’s an office? You’re getting a great legal education. Couple of years, keep your nose clean, you’ll be defending pimps and making a fortune and this’ll all seem like a bad dream.”

  Harris laughed and Karp walked off toward the cubicle of Freddy Kirsch, his mood darkening. Harris was one of the best, a decent funny kid with terrific courtroom instincts, but Karp could read the signs of wear and tear that meant he was not going to last. In general, Karp had found, only three kinds of lawyers stuck with the D.A.’s office in these corrupt times—one, slobs: those who had no other option, who, however talented legally, were too sloppy for a white-shoe firm and too disorganized to set up a practice, like Ray Guma; two, hobbyists, who had private income, and got a kick out of being hard-asses, like Roland Hrcany; and, finally, fanatics. Karp himself was a fanatic. Freddy Kirsch was another hobbyist. Harris was neither.