Immoral Certainty (35 page)

“I dunno, I was down there a couple of times.”

“This was the day the detectives came to your apartment and found the brown bag. You remember?”

“Oh, yeah, that time.”

“Yes, that time. Now do you remember a time when Mr. Kirsch showed you those black bloodstained pants and asked you to identify them as the pants removed from your apartment that very day?”

“That wasn’t the same pants, I told him.”

“I see. Now, there was a stenographer present, who took down the conversation between you and Mr. Kirsch. Let me read a portion of this conversation to you and ask you if you remember giving these answers.” Karp swooped over to the prosecution table and grabbed the transcript of the Q and A that Freddie Kirsch had done.

“Mr. Lutz, it says here on page eight that Mr. Kirsch asked you, ‘Did you observe Detective Balducci remove a white jacket and a pair of black pants from your apartment?’ And you answered, ‘Yes.’ And then you were asked, ‘Did you have any objection to the detective removing this white jacket and black pants?’ And you said ‘No.’ And then Mr. Kirsch showed you these black pants and asked you, ‘Are these the black pants that Detective Balducci removed from your apartment on July seventeenth of this year?’ And you answered, ‘Yeah, that’s them.’ Do you recall making those answers?”

“I don’t remember,” said Lutz, beginning once again to stare wildly around the courtroom.

“But you have such a good memory, Mr. Lutz. I show you the page of transcript. Isn’t that your signature on it?”

Lutz took the transcript gingerly. “Yeah, but I never said it was black pants,” he said lamely.

“Let’s try again, Mr. Lutz. Starting on page fourteen. Mr. Kirsch asks you, ‘And did you see what, if anything, Detective Balducci removed from the brown bag?’ And you answer, ‘Some papers, newspapers, and a big knife.’”

“Two knives!” said Lutz. “A bread knife and a little one.”

Judge Montana broke in, “That’s what you said. It’s written there.”

“I never saw that knife. It ain’t that knife!”

“Please continue, Mr. Karp,” said Montana, a crinkle of disgust beginning to show on his neat, brown face.

Karp nodded to the bench and resumed. “As I was saying, page fourteen. Mr. Kirsch said,
I
show you this knife. Written on the blade just under the hilt are the word,
Vindicator,
the letters capital
EM,
the numbers
2176,
and the word,
Korea.
Do you see that?’ Answer, ‘Yes.’ Question, ‘Were you present today when Detective Balducci removed this knife?’ Your answer, ‘Yeah. It was in Felix’s bag.’ Do you recall giving those answers to Mr. Kirsch?”

“Yeah, but we were talking about the other knives. I told you, I never seen that knife.”

Karp went over to the clerk’s table, picked up the bowie knife, and held it in front of Lutz’s face. Lutz seemed to cower away from it, like a goblin shying from an enchanted sword.

Karp said, “I ask you to read what is written, engraved, on the blade of that knife.”

“I never seen that knife,” said Lutz, like a broken record.

“He didn’t ask you that,” said the judge. “Read what he told you to!”

“I can’t read,” said Lutz, his voice rising.

“Did you sign the stenographic transcript of the question and answer session you had with Mr. Kirsch as being true?”

“Yeah, yeah, but they told me …”

“And here, on page sixteen, where you are asked, ‘Has everything you have said today been the truth to the best of your knowledge,’ did you answer yes?”

“Yeah, but … it was different, they pulled a switch.”

Karp walked to the presidium and handed the knife to the judge.

“Your Honor, would you please read the inscription?”

Montana read from the blade the same inscription Karp had just read from the Q and A. Now the disgust was patent on his face.

Karp returned to the questioning, going through the grand jury minutes and demonstrating that Lutz had on a separate occasion, and under oath, identified the black pants and the knife as being the items removed from his apartment. But it was anti-climax; from the moment the judge read the words written on the knife, Steven Lutz was utterly impeached as a witness. Karp settled back and thought nice thoughts about little Freddie Kirsch and his unexpected gift: a perfect Q & A.

The remainder of the trial consisted of the defendant’s testimony. This was anticlimax, too, at least to Karp. Had Felix Tighe lived an exemplary life, had he been a pillar of the community, it might have been remotely possible that against the net of circumstantial evidence that tied him to the murders a clever lawyer like Chopper Hank Klopper might have inserted a reasonable doubt wide enough to spread the meshes.

But Felix was a mutt. He lied with every breath, and about things that could be easily verified, too, and that was what destroyed, at every turn, Klopper’s efforts to insert that doubt.

The pants weren’t his because, he went on, they weren’t his style, because he had to dress well,
because he was a sales manager.
The knife wasn’t his, and
he had never owned a knife like that.
He couldn’t have done the murders because he had an alibi for the night: He had gone to Larry’s Bar,
and he had been served by a waitress named Marge, whom he proceeded to describe in detail.

Karp could see it in Klopper’s face and in his manner. He knew he was being lied to, and on the stand. There is nothing more obvious, or pathetic, than a defense attorney with a defendant witness who is out of control. Klopper began subtly to withdraw from his client. Once or twice, he even snapped at him, “Just answer the question, please.” But Felix loved to talk, especially about himself, and with all these people watching, hanging on his words, he gladly hung himself.

Karp was practically salivating when his turn came to cross-examine. Not only had Felix owned a big bowie knife before, but he had used it to stab a policeman during the course of a burglary, wasn’t that so? It wasn’t like that. Didn’t you stab him? I can explain that.
Didn’t you stab him and weren’t you convicted of stabbing him?
Yes, but…. Next question.

Karp went over the initial Q and A that Felix had recorded with Freddie Kirsch. Here he had lied about everything. He didn’t know Stephanie Mullen. He didn’t know Anna Rivas. He had never been in the apartment on Avenue A.

He was confronted with his address book, with sworn statements from witnesses. Oh,
that
Anna Rivas. Yeah, I know her, but I never beat her up. Well, maybe we had a little argument. Oh,
that
Stephanie Mullen. Yeah, I knew her, but I never killed her. I was in a bar with a girl. Oh, not
that
girl, I remember now,
another
girl.

Karp brought all this out, letting Felix tangle himself. Finally, under Karp’s relentless pressure, Felix admitted he had lied, because he was afraid Kirsch was trying to frame him. He hadn’t trusted Kirsch.

“And did there come a time when you trusted Mr. Kirsch and at last told him the truth?” asked Karp.

“Yes. I thought we had, you know, a rapport. I finally told him, you know, I knew Anna, and we had some words, and that woman called the cops. That happened. I told him.”

“You mean, you lied until you were caught at it?”

“That’s not what I would say. I would say, I didn’t trust Fred Kirsch, because I didn’t think he was, that he had my interests in mind at the time. I would say …”

Here the judge interrupted. “Just answer the question, don’t make a speech.”

“Well a lie, that’s not what I would call it.”

But Karp could see, from a quick inspection of the jury, that the jurymen knew what a lie was. Frowns. Rolling eyes. Terrific.

A good close, too, on the cross, Karp thought. Always leave them laughing: “Mr. Tighe, did you ever meet the murdered boy, Jordan Mullen?”

“Yes, he was around. I think I met him once.”

“You were introduced to him?”

“Not actually introduced, no …”

“But he knew you, he would have recognized you?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Is that why you stabbed him to death after you had killed his mother?” asked Karp blandly.

“No.”

“No further questions,” said Karp.

On redirect, Klopper could do little to repair the damage. He tried to show Felix as a man who gave facetious answers under pressure, the kind of spunky guy who might appear to lie when pushed around by the bullies of the law. It was weak and brief. That ended the defense case.

On his rebuttal, Karp focused on the alibi. Karp had elicited from Felix a detailed description of the cocktail waitress. He even had him point her out where she sat in the courtroom. Then he called her to the stand, where she testified that on the night of the murder, she had been off duty. Murmurs in the courtroom.

On cross, Klopper could hardly attack the woman’s memory. She had never said that she recognized Felix—he had said he recognized her. He walked back to the defense table and broke a pencil.

The rest of the rebuttal witnesses were Felix’s supervisors, from his current job and previous ones. He was not a sales manager, nor had he hope of becoming one. There had been complaints from clients. He had been fired repeatedly for skimming, for abusive behavior. The People rested. The defense rested. Final arguments were scheduled for the following day.

As Karp left the courtroom, he saw Felix speaking urgently in Klopper’s ear. Klopper didn’t seem to be listening.

CHAPTER
16

T
his must be what sensory deprivation is like,
thought Marlene. Since she had conspired with Alonso to bring her undrugged food she had been left in the dark and unmolested, except for mealtimes. There had been three of these, or four, she was not sure. Kid food, and she was glad to get it: pizza, hot dogs, burgers, candy bars, milkshakes. In between she was left tied up on her cot, in total darkness. Ten days, Mrs. Dean had said, until the full moon. Marlene wondered how many of them were left.

As the unmarked hours passed, deprived of vision, hearing little but her own breathing and the creak of her cot, her sense of smell had become preternaturally sharp. She had become aware of a universe of subtle odors: the damp smell of old stone, the sharp odor of the canvas, the oily smell of the wool blanket, a musty rotting odor she couldn’t quite identify—perhaps some food that had been forgotten and had gone bad. Pervading all these was the stink of her own unwashed body, and the spicy-sulfur smell she remembered from childhood, before her house was converted to oil heat. She was in a coal cellar.

This discovery gave her some pleasure, as indicating that her brain was still working and that she was not entirely helpless. She thought about coal cellars for a while, about the excitement when, as children, she and her older sisters would hang around the coal truck on delivery day to see and hear the black lumps rattle and roar down the tin chute.

More excitement—coal cellars had chutes! That meant there was a way out of this place, or had been. Maybe it was still open and she could slip through. From this moment Marlene began to think actively about escape. All she had to do now was to free herself from her bonds and overpower or evade a monster the size of a Mack truck.

Pending that, she occupied herself with thought. What else could she do? And some action, even mental action, was better than dissolution into sobbing terror. Marlene had no difficulty admitting her fear, but she had long practice in suppressing it through an act of will, which is the only way a person with a vivid imagination can achieve courage.

She thought a lot about Karp. Karp would not be afraid, she thought, and thought half-enviously that his bravery had nothing to do with controlling imagination. Karp had, she knew, no more imagination than a manhole cover. Despite all the proof to the contrary, despite all the destruction that fate had visited on his body, he retained a belief in his own indestructibility.

Yes, Karp was brave. He was also ferociously honest, about deeds, if not feelings, trustworthy, intelligent, a great piece of ass, good-looking, neat. He washed dishes; he picked up dirty clothes: in short, he was a storehouse of all the manly virtues, beneath which noble edifice Marlene had detected an impacted zone of tender sensitivity, to whose excavation she intended to devote a good portion of her energies after marriage. If she didn’t die here in this hole.

She also thought about escape. She had given up on rescue. Judge Rice knew that she was going to visit St. Michael’s, but that was no help, because Mrs. Dean had only to say, “Yes I was expecting her, but the dear girl never showed up.” Why shouldn’t the cops believe her? Even
Karp
would believe her.

The key to escape was also the greatest barrier: the Bogeyman, Alonso. She had already won a concession from him, in the form of undrugged food, and where one concession had been given, others might follow. In an odd way, he seemed anxious to please her, almost as much as she (exhibiting, as she realized, florescent Stockholm Syndrome) was anxious to please him.

He seemed to enjoy feeding her and tucking her in and tending to her physical needs. After he fed her, he would sit at what looked like a child’s desk near the doorway, a desk that came barely to his knees, and play with little toys, which he would set out on the surface of the desk and converse with. Marlene could not see them clearly enough to make them out, but they appeared to be tiny Kewpie dolls, dressed in bright colors.

But Alonso was not mentally retarded. Somebody (and Marlene thought she knew who) had through some hideous warping of the processes of nurturance frozen him emotionally at about the age of five. His two governing emotions seemed to be a terror of his mother and a bottomless loneliness. Marlene sensed that he was making her into a little friend. Marlene understood that she had to extract from this friendship enough concessions to enable her to break free before he did to her what she suspected he had done to his other little friends.

She began to sing, to keep her spirits up and to pass the time; and to sass anyone who might be listening she sang prison songs. She sang “Parchman Farm,” “Morton Bay,” “No More Cane on This Brazos,” “The Peat Bog Soldiers,” in English and again in German, and Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” In between prison songs she sang “My Bonny Light Horseman,” and thought about Karp and about Raney, or rather about some unlikely blend of their best features.