Immoral Certainty Page 6

  Karp felt his face grow warm. It was true. He needed trial slots to threaten the professional badmen and their lawyers. Otherwise, why would anybody, even the most patently guilty, take a stiff prison sentence on a plea bargain? After all, didn’t they have the right to a speedy trial? So spending a trial slot on what in his true heart he saw as a crummy domestic slaying irked him, and worse, filled him with shame that his situation had led him to regard the brutal murder of a little girl as a professional annoyance. Marlene was still staring at him. The court was hearing a plea of not guilty on a vehicular homicide. Something nagged at his mind.

  “Umm, OK, Marlene, you offered manslaughter one?”

  “Of course! And negligent homicide. Nothing doing. She says she never touched the kid.”

  “Are you sure she did?” asked Karp.

  Marlene opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment the clerk called out “Segura!” and Marlene had to walk down the aisle to the well of the court to help Albert the Asshole arraign Maria Segura for the intentional murder of her daughter Lucy.

  Two burly female guards brought in the accused, who proved to be a small, biscuit-colored woman, barely out of her teens, with a sharp nose, a downcast mouth and dark, soft-looking pads under her eyes. Karp watched as she pleaded not guilty in an accented and almost inaudible voice. Karp thought she looked about as dangerous as a dust mop.

  The judge remanded her for trial. The public defender made a perfunctory argument for a reduction in bail. The woman had two small children to look after. The judge said that this woman asking for a bail reduction so she could look after her children was like the man who killed both his parents asking for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. The judge got his titter from the onlookers. He beamed horribly. The guards shuffled Maria Segura out the narrow door. Next case.

  Marlene came up the aisle tight jawed and frowning. Karp said, “I like the way your eyebrows almost touch when you have that expression on your face. What’s wrong? I thought you did OK. The dread Mrs. Segura is not out menacing our citizens.”

  “Fuck you, Karp! What did you mean, ‘Are you sure she did it?’”

  “Well, it just struck me that one explanation of Segura’s intransigence on the plea is that she is in fact innocent. Also, if you’re going to try a homicide against a defendant with no priors who doesn’t look up to wasting a cockroach, you better have the case really nailed down. Do you?”

  “Yeah! Of course I do. Shit, Butch I got an indictment from the grand jury on this thing—”

  “Marlene, don’t bullshit me!” said Karp, his voice rising. “The grand jury would indict Mother Theresa if a D.A. told it to, as we both well know. I want to know what we got.”

  Marlene looked over her shoulder at the judge, who was glowering at them. “Miss Ciampi, far be it from me to interrupt what appears to be a fascinating conversation….”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” said Marlene. “Sorry, we were just going.”

  With that she gathered her brown envelopes under her arm and made for the door, Karp following.

  A few minutes later they were in Marlene’s office. She lit up and watched the smoke rise up the high, narrow shaft of her office. “All right,” she said after a while, “I fucked this up. We got garbage for a serious trial. I was figuring the percentages: a parent kills a kid, what they want is punishment. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’ll cop to anything you offer, just to avoid standing up in public while somebody tells all about how they used the knitting needles on little Mary.”

  “So what do we have?” said Karp unsympathetically. He was angry with Marlene, and angry with himself for not keeping closer tabs on her and the other attorneys. That doing so was plainly impossible, given the caseload of the Criminal Courts Bureau, did not diminish his anger one whit. A case like this would have been laughed out of the old homicide bureau in a New York minute.

  “The history of child abuse. Butch, honestly, that’s what threw me. This kid has been through Bellevue emergency over forty times—broken wrists, ribs, bruises, cuts, burns, the whole nine yards. It just seemed too obvious that the mom had gone a hair too far.

  “Then the clothes. The kid was naked when they found her in the dumpster, in the trash bag. The cops found her bloody clothes in another trash bag—the same kind of bag—in the air shaft right under Segura’s window. There was a package of the same kind of trash bags in her kitchen.

  “The sexual abuse part—the child was raped, repeatedly, but what else is new? The mother had men in, nobody steady, different ones, all the time. Maybe one of them wanted seconds after the mom passed out. Or maybe ten of them. Did the cops interview every one of her known companions? Hah-Hah. So that’s fucked up too.

  “But … the woman doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the killing. Says she was sleeping one off, alone. That’s it. Pretty thin, huh?”

  “Yeah. So where’s the finger?”

  “The what?”

  “The finger, Marlene, the little girl’s finger. I seem to remember you telling me it was cut off. Did you find it?”

  “No. I figure she got rid of it, down the can or something. I was thinking a crazy punishment that got out of hand, you know? ‘Be a good girl or Mama will cut off your finger.’ Then afterward, the kid wouldn’t stop crying, the mother got scared, tried to shut the kid up, and bingo! Lights out. It’s happened before.”

  That was just the problem, Karp thought. It’s all happened before: repetition, the boring banality of crime, of seeing what people did to one another. It deadened not only the intellect, as in this case, because Marlene Ciampi was arguably one of the most intelligent lawyers in the bureau, but also extinguished the moral imagination, so that the people of the Courthouse could no longer look at the accused and say, “Could this person have done thus and so? Could I have done thus and so, if I were that person?” There were so many, and so alike, that after a while the association between the particular crime and the particular defendant—the essence of justice—didn’t matter. And if that didn’t matter, nothing mattered: the creeping death of Centre Street.

  He wanted to shout at her, to shake her, but instead he sat and looked down at his hands, and said in a low voice, “That’s an interesting idea. What does the M.E.’s report say? Does it confirm?” He saw in her face that she didn’t know, that if she had read the Medical Examiner’s report (among a thousand such reports) its message had failed to penetrate the part of her consciousness that was frozen into horrified routine.

  Wordlessly Marlene shuffled through the case file and began to turn pages. Karp looked at the distant ceiling. In a few minutes he heard a gasp, a muffled “Oh, shit!”

  “What?”

  “It’s right here.” Marlene wailed, her cheekbones red with embarrassment. She read, “‘Fifth digit of right hand missing. Signs of recent amputation at point one centimeter proximal to the first carpal joint. Crushing of tissues on both lateral and medial surfaces of stump suggest removal instrument was a heavy shears. Lack of circumferential bruising and normal clotting suggest amputation occurred post-mortem.’ I’m dying!”

  She slapped the base of her hand hard against her forehead. “God! What an idiot! I can’t believe I missed that. OK, Marlene, superstar, do you believe that this ratty little woman, who wants a trial, strangled her daughter in a fit of rage, and then calmly cut off her finger with a scissors? Why? And then took her body down to the dumpster, forgetting the finger? And … oh, shit, why go on? It’s all garbage. We got to check the men … no that doesn’t make sense either. I can’t believe a casual … oh, shit!”

  She sprang to her feet and started gathering up her bag and raincoat. “What are you going to do now?” asked Karp, surprised by this instant action.

  “Do? I’m going to reopen this investigation. Jesus, Butch! If Segura didn’t do it, and I don’t think she did any more, we got some stranger running around who likes to kill little girls. And takes souvenirs.”

  After his shower, Felix Ti
ghe put on a black exercise suit and went into Steve Lutz’s bedroom to work out. They helped each other with bench presses, whooshing air out of their lungs and groaning at the peak of the effort. Then Lutz did sit-ups with a twenty-pound weight held behind his head while Felix did bicep curls with thirty-pound dumbbells in front of a full-length mirror. He was feeling good, lifting smoothly, in control, just getting into watching his definition ripple, when the phone rang. He dropped the dumbbells with a clang. “I’ll get it, man, it’s probably for me anyway. Anna’s supposed to call me.”

  He took the phone on its hook on the kitchen wall. It was for him, but it wasn’t Anna. The voice on the phone was rich and dark. Whenever he heard it he felt the same odd feeling, a mixture of desire mixed with something close to dread.

  “Hello, Denise,” he said, his mouth dry.

  “How’s my big boy today?”

  “Fine, Denise. What you up to?”

  “Oooh, just lounging. Lounging in my tub, in perfumed water with lots of suds. I’m making my skin silky and clean. And you know why, don’t you. Yes you do. I’d like to have your hairy body in this tub right now. I’d like to bathe you and lick you dry, like a momma cat. Lick you everyplace. Would you like that? Yes, you would, you dirty child. But not today. It’s not our day yet, is it?”

  “No, Denise.”

  “No, it’s next week. Next Friday. I’ll just have to wait. I’ll just have to wait, and keep myself stimulated until then. Would you like to listen to that, to me stimulating myself?” She giggled. He heard faint splashing, and then other sounds.

  He listened. His skin burned and felt thick, as if he were on some drug. He had to listen to the sounds. She called out his name, her voice rising, cracking. There was silence on the line, except for her breathing and the movement of the water.

  Felix said, “Good-bye, Denise,” and hung up the phone. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor and put his head between his knees, and waited for the strange pleasure sickness to go away.

  He tried once again to figure out how he had gotten in with Denise, when it had started. He couldn’t remember, which was odd in itself, because Felix kept a meticulous record of all his appointments and accomplishments in a series of small, black notebooks, going back to high school. She had just appeared one week and after that, she was always there once or twice a month, forever.

  He stood up, shakily, and at once the telephone rang again. It was his lawyer from Queens, a morose little man named Dudnick.

  “Mr. Tighe,” said the lawyer in his precise, dry voice, “I’ve been trying to reach you all week.”

  “Yeah? Well, I been busy. What do you want?”

  “I wanted to remind you that your trial begins in four days. There are a number of things we need to discuss beforehand.”

  “What things? I’m getting off, right?”

  Dudnick cleared his throat. Criminal law at this level was not really his specialty. The white-shoe law firm that Mrs. Tighe used for her business and trust dealings retained him as a convenience for its distinguished clientele. The bulk of his practice consisted of arguing for leniency in cases where wealthy people had gotten drunk behind the wheel or bought marijuana from the wrong person. He had racked up thousands of hours of community service sentences. This was different.

  “Well, in fact, Mr. Tighe, I have been in contact with the Queens District Attorney and he appears willing to accept a plea of guilty to breaking and entering and felony assault, which is quite an advance for us. The indictment is for attempted first-degree murder and burglary.”

  “Does that get me off?”

  “Not exactly, Mr. Tighe. We would expect a sentence of from three to five years in—”

  “Three to five! You’re outta your mind, three to five!”

  “Of course, in all probability you would only have to serve eighteen months.”

  “Fuck me, eighteen months! Listen, asshole—I’m not serving eighteen minutes. I want off, understand! I’m not going to goddamn prison on the say-so of some dumb nigger cop. They got nothing on me.”

  “Well, actually, Mr. Tighe, as I’ve tried to explain to your mother, they have quite a bit on you. You actually were caught red-handed, so to speak, in that they were able to remove samples of that policeman’s blood from your hands and clothing.”

  “That don’t mean shit. They could of made it all up just to frame me.”

  “Yes, but that’s something we can discuss at our meeting. Now when would you like to come by? Mr. Tighe? Hello, Mr. Tighe?”

  Felix slammed down the receiver, shaking the phone and making it ring faintly. He went back into the bedroom, fuming. Felix had never been a clever burglar, just a lucky one. And considering the priority given in recent years to low-grade burglaries by the police in New York, he did not even have to be that lucky. He’d been picked up a couple of times as a kid, but his Ma had got him off. Since he’d turned eighteen he’d been pulling a couple of jobs a month and never a breath of trouble. Felix was not into self-criticism, but he had to admit to himself that he’d gotten cocky, coming down the ladder like that, with a cop car right under. He’d have to lie low on the burglary business for a while, maybe figure out another scam.

  “So, who was it? You look pissed off,” observed Lutz, who was setting up the weights to do his jerk and press sequence.

  “My fuckin’ lawyer, the dickhead. He says I’m going to have to go up for this piece of shit thing in Queens.”

  “Hey, man, that’s a son-of-a-bitch, ain’t it. So what’re you gonna do? I mean split or what?”

  Felix didn’t bother to answer. He had all he could do to ride out the waves of fury that were rolling through him, blackening his vision and churning his guts. He was furious at the lawyer, of course, and at his mother for hiring the asshole, and at Anna for not having been on the phone instead of Dudnick. He slammed his knotty fist into his thigh. None of those people was immediately to hand. There was only one person in the apartment besides himself.

  “Hey, Stevie,” he said, “get out the mats. We’ll do a little karate.”

  Lutz dropped his barbell and looked up, an expression of nervous concern wrinkling his low brow. “What, you mean gohon?”

  “Nah, fuck that shit. I feel like some freestyle.”

  Lutz whined, “Ah, crap, Felix, you’re gonna whip my ass again.”

  Felix grinned unpleasantly. “I don’t know, Stevie. You might get lucky. Meanwhile it’s good training. You don’t spar, you’ll never make black belt, hey? So stop being a pussy and get the mats out.”

  Marlene was in the bullpen of the Criminal Courts Bureau, perched on the corner of a clerk’s battered desk, making the calls necessary to get the Segura case started up again. It was a place of business she often preferred to her own isolated office. She was trying to get a homicide lieutenant in Manhattan South to assign people to a case he thought he had wrapped up weeks ago. Since he had about sixty working homicides that were nowhere near wrapped up, he was less than excited at the prospect.

  “Let me get this straight, Ms. Ciampi,” said Lieutenant Shaughnessy, his voice on the phone suspiciously calm. “You’re throwing out this case because you just found out the kid’s finger got cut off after she was dead and not before.”

  “Yeah. You understand what that means, don’t you?”

  “Um …”

  “Lieutenant, the mother beats up the kid. We know that. She’s an abuser. So the theory was that she went too far, killed the kid in a rage, and then tried to get rid of the body. But the fact that the finger was amputated after death doesn’t jibe with a typical domestic child murder.”

  “It don’t, huh? What does it jibe with, then?”

  “A maniac.”

  “What are you talking about, lady?”

  “A maniac, Lieutenant. Who else kills kids and cuts off their fingers? Jaywalkers? And he did it once, he could do it again.”

  “Maybe the mother did it and cut off the finger to make us think it was a maniac,” s
aid the lieutenant, grasping.

  “Right. Good idea. You want to take the chance that there won’t ever be a repeat?”

  There was silence on the line for a long moment. Of all the things that could derail Lieutenant Shaughnessy’s stately progress toward thirty-and-out with a captain’s pension, a serial child murderer was close to the top of the list. There would be reporters. There would be outraged editorials. There would be parents with placards.

  The brass would be watching his every move and they would set up a special task force that would take half his men, and naturally, he wouldn’t get any relief from his normal clearance quota in the meantime. Of course, if he told this crazy bitch to get stuffed, which was his first impulse, and it turned out there really was a loony cutting up kids, he would spend the rest of his career running a motor pool in the South Bronx. An idea flickered across his mind.

  “Uh, well, you sound like you could have a real problem there, Miss Ciampo. Tell you what I’ll do. How would it be if I transferred a couple of good detectives over to the D.A. squad?”

  “That would be great,” replied Marlene cautiously. “But what’s the catch, Lieutenant? They stop killing people in your end of the city?”

  “Yeah, we stopped crime around here. The thing of it is, Miss Ciampo …”

  “Ciampi, Lieutenant. Ms.”

  “Yeah, right, the thing of it is, we’d naturally expect them to carry over their cases for the duration of the detail.”

  “Naturally,” Marlene agreed. She vaguely suspected she was being shafted in some subtle bureaucratic way, but didn’t have time to figure it out. And the offer was too good to turn down.

  “So, if that’s OK with you … ah, Ms.?”

  “Yeah, deal. What do I have to do?”

  “Not a thing. I’ll call Fred Spicer and put together the detail papers,” said Shaughnessy smoothly, and broke the connection before she could change her mind.

  An hour later, having made several dozen telephone calls from the same perch, setting up witnesses, talking to public defenders, and making appointments, Marlene became aware that she was sitting in the workspace of another person, who had for some time been carrying out her tasks minus the advantages of either a phone or a Marlene-bottom-sized section of her desk.