Immoral Certainty Read online

  Karp found Kirsch at his desk, reading a tabloid. On the front page was a picture of a couple of cops standing next to a dumpster in an alley looking glumly at a small bundle at their feet. The headline read “GRAB MOM IN GARBAGE BAG KILLING.” Karp tapped his knuckles on the glass and the young lawyer looked up and grinned. He had hired Kirsch nearly a year ago on the recommendation of one of his law school professors. Kirsch was a Californian, a Berkeley graduate, smart and rich, hence a good prospect. Also he was tan, he had razor cut dark hair, he wore sharp, tailored dark suits, all of which endeared him to Karp, who was always having to lecture the scruffy polyestered St. John’s graduates who made up much of his staff on the importance of appearances in the legal game.

  “What’s going on, boss?” asked Kirsch genially, leaning back in his swivel chair and hooking his thumbs behind his canary yellow suspenders. Karp perched on the edge of the desk, which was suspiciously clean. “Not much, Freddie. I thought I’d drop by and check out the Stahlmann trial. How’s it look?”

  Kirsch kept his grin. “Looks like we won’t need a trial. He’s going to plead.”

  “What? To murder two?”

  “No, man one. I just talked to his lawyer this morning. We’ll go with it in Part 34 tomorrow.”

  “Wait a second, Freddie. How come we’re accepting manslaughter as a plea on this one? This is the trunk murder, right? The guy bashed in the girlfriend’s head with a tire iron and stashed her in the trunk of her car.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Stahlmann’s a religious nut with a thing about pure women. He thought he’d found the last virgin in New York until some guy in his church told him one of his buddies had porked her a couple of years back. He went batshit.”

  “So? What has that got to do with it? On a man one he could be walking in two years, out looking for more virgins.”

  Kirsch’s smooth brow furrowed. “Extreme emotional disturbance is what. They’re arguing he lost his marbles from disappointment. They got a psychiatric examination confirms it.” He shrugged. “It’s an affirmative defense under the law. I figured it cast enough reasonable doubt on the case so that trial wasn’t worth it. So I took the man one. I’ll try to push for years on the sentencing.”

  “Shit, Freddie!” Karp propelled himself violently off the desk and slammed his hand down on his thigh, making a sound like a gunshot. Kirsch jerked and sat up.

  “What’re you talking ‘reasonable doubt’?” asked Karp contemptuously. “It’s an affirmative defense. The burden’s on them to show extreme emotional. They’ve got to have a preponderance of evidence. Do they? They’ve got crap. The guy laid for the girl in her apartment, wasted her, and hid the body. That doesn’t sound like he was out of his mind to me.”

  “But they got a shrink—”

  “Fuck the shrink, Freddie! The trier of fact can reject testimony as to extreme emotional disturbance, even if the prosecution presents no testimony to rebut. People v. Shelton. Come on, Freddie. You know this stuff.”

  Kirsch looked so genuinely miserable that Karp’s ire receded. He perched again on the desk. “Look, Freddie, I’m sorry I have to be a hard-ass with you, but there’s no way around it. You want to be a trial lawyer, you got to worship perfection. That’s the goal. You can’t tell what a jury will do, maybe you’ll lose, but you have the obligation to walk in there with a perfect case, which includes knowing the relevant law.”

  Freddie bit his lip and stared at his desk. “Yeah, I guess I fucked it up royally.”

  “Come on, kid, you got a basically good case. Just call them up and tell them you reconsidered.”

  “I can do that?”

  “Shit, yes. It ain’t over ’til it’s over. Tell them you were suffering from extreme emotional disturbance.”

  Kirsch laughed and the flush left his face. “OK, will do, boss. Say, speaking of emotional disturbance, you seen this yet?” He tapped his finger on the front page of the tabloid, which splashed the news of a murdered child found in a trash bag.

  “Yeah, they picked up the mother. Who’s handling it?”

  “Ciampi.”

  “She is, huh? I better go over and talk to her about it. Let me know when you fix that Stahlmann thing.”

  “Yeah, Christ, these homicides take a lot of time don’t they? How come they don’t have a separate bunch of people that just does homicides? I mean, we spend most of our time just running people through the Criminal Courts on petty shit, and then one of these comes along and it throws everything off kilter. Breaks the rhythm.” Freddie moved his shoulders rhythmically, to illustrate this perception.

  Karp sighed and said, “Well, you got a point there, Fred, but as it happens there did used to be a homicide bureau.”

  “Yeah? What happened to it?”

  “Our D.A. shitcanned it the first year he was here.”

  “No kidding! How come?”

  “The homicide guys were all trial lawyers. Bloom doesn’t have much use for trial lawyers, and they didn’t have much use for him. Also, everything runs on clearances now—a murder’s just another case, nothing special about it, and so if you’re going to plea bargain away everything anyway, why bother having a bureau that specializes in prosecuting and trying murder cases? So he broke it up, and now most homicides come here, to Criminal Courts.”

  “Uh-huh, I always wonder about that, why they didn’t go over to felony bureau.”

  “Oh, that. That’s because of me.”

  “Yeah? What do you mean, because of you?”

  “Well, I guess I’m the closest thing the office has to a homicide expert now, so that’s one reason; and the other reason is, sometimes homicides get a lot of publicity and if I were to lose or otherwise screw up a big important case, then Bloom would have the excuse he needs to get rid of me. I think that’s the real reason.”

  “So how come you’re still here?”

  “Because I haven’t blown one yet.”

  “You won all your cases?”

  “Yeah. So far so good.”

  “Holy shit! How do you do that?”

  “By being perfect, Freddie,” said Karp with a tight smile.

  “And how do you achieve this perfection?” Kirsch asked. Karp shot him a look, suspecting Freddie’s usual light sarcasm, but for once Kirsch appeared to be in the throes of a genuine admiration. Winning, Karp thought, the unimpeachable argument.

  “Like I said, know the law. Know the witnesses. You have to have a mental picture of every one of your witnesses. You have to know what they’ll answer in your direct case, where they’re vulnerable on cross, and how you’re going to compensate for however they screwed up when you get them again on redirect.”

  Kirsch looked dismayed. “I got to do this on what—thirty to fifty cases?”

  “Yeah, you do, and not only that—you have to orchestrate the presentation of each witness so the whole show has the maximum impact on a jury. Like for instance, you have two eyewitnesses. One of them remembers a lot of detail—the day, the car, what the defendant was doing before, after—he’s a whole newsreel. The other guy just remembers the mutt had a red jacket and scar. Who you going to put on first?”

  Freddie looked blank. “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters! Everything matters! You put the guy with the details last. If you put him first the defense will question the lightweight on the very same details, and he won’t remember and that’ll leave the jury thinking maybe the first guy was making it up.

  “Then there’s the evidence. You have to keep straight what documentary or physical evidence you’re going to present along with each witness and work that into the orchestration. And the Q. and A.’s: They have to be perfect too. Hammer them with the evidence. Make sure they identify the knife or the gun in detail, the bloodstains, whatever….”

  “On every witness?”

  “Not on every witness, Freddie. You don’t take Q. and A. on your witnesses. The less the defense knows about what your witnesses saw and did the better. You do
it on witnesses friendly to the defense or on hostile witnesses. And on the ones you know are going to flip.”

  “Shit, Butch! How the hell do you know which ones are going to flip?” asked Kirsch plaintively, suddenly aware that he was not to be supplied with a secret substitute for work or a simple trick.

  “How do you know? It’s part of being perfect, Freddie,” said Karp casually, on his way out of the cubicle, “just like you’re going to be from now on.”

  As Karp made his way through the maze of tiny passages, he was reflecting simultaneously on two related subjects. The first was that in the old days, somebody like Freddy would not have lasted two weeks in the homicide bureau. He would not have even gotten in, but if he had he would have been shredded and flushed after a single confrontation with the rock-hard men who had, under Francis Garrahy’s direction, made the New York City Homicide Bureau one of the finest prosecutorial organizations in the world.

  The fact was, Freddie was bone lazy, but his intelligence made him worth a salvage effort. Also, he might stay a while. To such expedients had Karp been reduced. Ring in the Age of Brass!

  The other subject was Marlene, and the unwelcome news that she had picked up the trash-bag child murder. Karp headed toward her office, which lay at the extreme end of a sixth-floor hallway leading to a pair of fire stairs. The architects had left a tiny alcove in the hallway beyond the stair doors and this alcove had been walled off and given a cheap door. There was just enough room for a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, and Marlene.

  Karp knocked and, receiving no answer, entered. A bomb had once gone off in this office, but that was four years back, and the place looked to Karp as if it hadn’t been straightened since. He moved a stack of files off a chair and sat down to wait among the drifted papers. Sitting alone in Marlene’s office was an unnerving experience. Since the office was only seven feet wide and the hallway ceilings were almost fourteen feet high, it was like being at the bottom of a mailbox, an impression that the great rafts of paper scattered around did nothing to dispel.

  He studied the dusty cream ceiling moldings. After a while, heels clicked on the marble floor outside. The door opened and Marlene came in, looking smudged and rumpled. She flung her handbag and a brown accordion folder down on her desk and flopped into the other chair. Kicking off her shoes, she put her feet up on her desk and lit a Marlboro.

  “Rough day?” asked Karp.

  “Rough? I wouldn’t say that. The usual. I got a new case today, another murdered child needless to say.”

  “Oh, yeah, I heard. The trash-bag thing. Why ‘needless to say’?”

  “Oh, because for some reason, whenever anybody decides to take the clippers, or the red-hot coat hanger, or the baseball bat, or the lit cigarette or the boiling grease to some little kid, which in this city is about forty-three times a day, whenever some asshole decides to do anything like that, in the rare instance where the case attracts the attention of the fucking law, then for some strange reason I get the case. Even though, my dear boss, I have mentioned this to you from time to time, that I cannot stand any more to—”

  “Marlene, you know that’s not true. All the cases get assigned off a rotation schedule from the complaint room.”

  ”—stand any more to see little. Punctured. Bodies. Or talk to their mommies and daddies. And, as long as we’re being technical about it, do you know how many child homicide, child rape, and child felony assault cases I have had in the past year? You do not? Let me tell you. One hundred and fourteen. This is coincidence? The luck of the draw? Can you recall the last time Ray Guma, let’s say, had a case like that? Or Roland? Or any of the male attorneys? I’ll tell you, Cindy Pitowski has got ’em, and so does Ruth Kammer, and that’s all the ladies you got working for you right now.

  “So I put it to you, counselor, on the preponderance of the evidence, is somebody saying, ‘who wants to fuck with this messy doo-doo, there’s no challenge, it’s a piece of shit, open and shut, smoking gun, it’s not roughie-toughie armed robbery, assault with a deadly, drug-crazed shoot-out, so let’s give to the cunts!’”

  She stared at him so intensely that he dropped his gaze. At moments like these it appeared that she was flashing emotions from both of her black eyes, even though Karp knew that the left one was glass. Marlene lunged furiously toward her bag for another cigarette, and the motion caused a minor landslide of paperwork off her desk.

  “You ought to get some of this cleared up,” Karp ventured, knowing instantly that it had been exactly the wrong thing to say. He saw her face grow tight and her lovely soft mouth knot into a ridged pale line. “Oh,” she said carefully, “is this what I owe the honor of your visit to? The inspector general is making his rounds. I’m sorry my desk isn’t all neatsy, sir, but I’ve been over to Bellevue, to the morgue, to see the child, a little girl named Lucy Segura. What her loving mother did to her body wasn’t too bad. She just cut off one of her fingers and shoved something into her little twat, and then strangled her. It wasn’t as bad as the one where they baked the little girl in the oven. You remember that one? I do.

  “So I didn’t have time to clean up! I better do it now or the big man will be mad at me.” She sprang to her feet and began to sweep the piled papers off her desk with broad, violent movements of her hands and arms.

  “Marlene! Stop!” shouted Karp. He rose from his seat and grabbed her around the shoulders. This was the only thing that really frightened Karp. Like most naturally brave men, he had little imagination, which doth make cowards of us all, and physical pain held no terrors for him, but when the black screamers took charge of Marlene it turned his bones to jelly.

  She struggled and turned a stranger’s face up to him. “I can’t stand it,” she said, her jaw rigid. “I can’t can’t can’t can’t can’t! It’s too much. All the little children….”

  Wisely, Karp kept his mouth shut for once, didn’t give a pep talk or useful advice, just held Marlene, who began to cry. After a while her sobs subsided into loud snuffles and her body relaxed against his.

  “Whew, God! Sorry. Where’s the Kleenex?”

  “Use my tie.”

  She giggled. “No, I got them here.” She broke away and rummaged through her huge bag until she extracted a wad of tissue the size of a cabbage. She blew lustily into it. Then she sat on the edge of her desk and lit a cigarette.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “Things are getting hairy again. I used to wait for the dullness to set in, to where I get tough and cynical down deep inside. I don’t mean the pose. I got a pose as good as anybody’s. I mean deep, so you’re really dead. And I guess I can’t do that, I don’t want that to happen. I’m fighting it.”

  “Not everybody’s dead,” said Karp defensively. “I’m not.”

  She looked at him narrow-eyed through her smoke. “No you’re not, that’s true,” she said at length. “But you are also a lunatic, in your own sweet way.” She shook herself and started rooting around in the drift of papers. “Well, the performance is over for this afternoon, folks,” she said with a tight smile. “The divine Ms. Ciampi will be signing autographs at the stage door.”

  Karp felt a familiar flood of relaxation, tinged with exhaustion and not a little resentment. The storm was over and once more his sweetheart had returned from the precipice to the world of the passably sane. He watched her thin body move as she hauled papers up onto the desk. It was clumsy work, but she made it a dance; in everything she was as graceful as a snake.

  “What are you digging for, Marlene?”

  “The fucking Segura file. Ah, here it is.”

  “Marlene, are you really all right?”

  The concern in his voice made her look up. “Yeah, I’m fine, now. I’ve been feeling real weird recently, weepy and, I don’t know … vaporous.

  Thanks for putting up with me.” A real smile, this time. Karp felt his pupils expand.

  “Um, hey, no problem. It’s a rough job, but somebody’s got to do it. Want to get some deli, later?”r />
  “Yeah, sure. I need to call this social worker and start documenting the history of abuse. Great stuff. If I’m lucky, I can put her away until she’s too old to have any more kids. She’s twenty, by the way. Had the dead kid at fourteen.”

  “I guess there’s no question she did it? I mean, for a mother to do something like that….”

  “A mother? My dear, you would be amazed what mothers do. Mostly they let daddy do it, but sometimes they step right in and wale away. Like last month, we had one, a junkie, she held her daughter’s legs apart with her own hands while guys came in off the street and fucked the kid for two, three bucks a shot. Two years old, the kid was. Dislocated both hips as a matter of fact. Kid checked out in the hospital from shock and infection.”

  “But what does what’s-her-name, Segura, the mother, what does she say? Does she admit it?”

  “No, she doesn’t. She says she was sleeping off a drunk. She’s a wino. She says when she woke up the kid was gone. That’s all she knows, she says, until the cops came knocking. But there’s a history of serious child abuse there. The kid was in Bellevue last year with a busted arm. Fell down the stairs, hah-hah.”

  Marlene let out a long, sad breath. “No, she probably did it, or there’s a boyfriend. Who we’ll probably have to dig up. Ask me why I do this work.”

  “Why do you do this work?”

  She fluttered her eyelids and put on a Miss America false smile. “Because I guess I just love people,” she said.

  Karp leaned over and kissed her, something she normally objected to during office hours, but this time it seemed to be alright. More than alright.

  When they surfaced, Karp murmured, “Here’s a sweet nothing for you—Tony just told me there were six hundred twenty-one homicides this year so far in New York. If you’d like to accompany me to the fast food restaurant of your choice this evening, we might get lucky and see one.”

  “Or be one. Gosh, Butch, my eyes are shining. How romantic you are! But if we see a murder, we won’t have to get involved, will we?”