Irresistible Impulse (33 page)

SIXTEEN

“I
sn’t
this
a pain in the neck!” said the district attorney.

“So to speak,” said Karp. The D.A. scowled and sent over a black look. It was a Sunday, far too early on a Sunday, and the two men were sitting in a spare bedroom fitted out as study in Jack Keegan’s apartment, Keegan behind an oaken desk in a black leather judge’s chair, Karp in a comfortably worn armchair opposite. This apartment was a large, high-ceilinged one on West End Avenue. The Keegans had been in it since the fifties, but Karp had never before visited there, which served as well as the unlikely date and hour to demonstrate just how remarkable a pain it was. Karp looked out the window. He could see the trees just beginning to leaf out, the palest fuzz of painfully delicate green. It was April 2; the previous night, appropriately, Jonathan Rohbling had tried to hang himself in his cell in Bellevue, and had very nearly succeeded.

“Waley’s going to sue the city, you know,” said Keegan, “and maybe me too.”

“What the hell for?”

“I don’t know. Failure to yield to the wealthy, maybe. He’ll think of something. You talk to everybody already?”

“Uh-huh. Cops, Bellevue administration, the orderly who found him, the ER doctor who treated him yesterday—I mean, this morning—and the current attending doc. Also Rohbling’s private guy.” “And how
is
the little piece of shit?” “Not that great,” said Karp. “He apparently found a burr of metal on his bunk and used it to tear his T-shirt into narrow strips, which he then braided into a thin, strong rope …”

“Wait a second, in a suicide-watch cell?” “Yeah, with the windows up high and no sheets. What he did was he tied a pencil to the end of his rope and flung it up so that it caught on the window grille. Then he jiggled it until it pressed through the steel grille and fell down again. So now he had a double thickness of rope. He made a noose, slipped it around his neck, grabbed the double rope and heaved himself up the wall like the commandos do in the movies. When he got to the grille, he hung on with one hand, made a clinch knot around the grille with the other, and just let go. He fell about three feet, not enough to break his neck, but he squashed the hell out of his larynx.”

“Marvelous. You know what this whole thing’ll look like if we have to go on with the trial?”

“It won’t help,” said Karp. “Most people think a sincere suicide attempt is a pretty good indication that the guy is deranged. On the other hand, Rohbling knows that. So does Waley.”

Keegan raised an eyebrow. “Meaning … ?”

Karp shrugged and sipped coffee. “Meaning that Rohbling dropped just before the orderly reached his cell. He could have heard the guy moving down the hall. We should not rule out the possibility of a scam. Yeah, he hurt himself, maybe he miscalculated the damage …”

Keegan was silent and looked Karp over as if he were a used car of doubtful provenance. The look went on for an uncomfortable while. Finally Karp said, “
What?
”

“Oh, just trying to figure out where you’re going with this, and how loose a cannon you really are. I get the feeling you don’t want to quietly arrange for a plea here, send our boy off to the funny farm for an indefinite stay?”

“Do you?” Karp tossed back, and without waiting for a reply, said, “There’s a principle here. We spend ninety-five percent of our time pleading out pathetic scumbags, generally of the black and Hispanic variety, and when we do go to trial, we’re up against mostly Legal Aid kids who’ve spent a day prepping the case, and of course we win almost all the time. Okay, that’s what we get paid for, putting asses in jail, but—we get to run this assembly line because there’s an assumption that the law functions the same for everyone. It may be real dim sometimes, and it’s real easy to be cynical about it—hell, I’m cynical about it—but we both know it’s still there, ticking over, and it’s the reason why the communities that produce the big crops of criminals put up with the system. We don’t have a Casbah in this city, not yet: we don’t have a place the cops stay out of, where anything goes. Because on the rare occasions when we get a bastard from the ruling classes in our sights, we put the screws to him the same way we do for the skinny black kids, and we go up against his high-priced lawyer and his high-priced shrinks, and we do our best to whip their ass. If we buckle on it, if we say, hey, white boy, uh, too bad about killing those old ladies, not a good choice for a hobby, there, Jonathan, but no hard feelings, here’s a pass to a country club for, say, five years, and when you’ve had a nice rest we’ll let you out to resume your rich boy life, and Jonathan? In the future, think stamps, think coins, think trout fishing …”

Keegan snorted and clapped, heavily, slowly, four times. “Very impressive. Did I teach you to do that?”

“Partly,” said Karp, feeling a trace of shame at letting himself go. “Some of it is my own work.”

Keegan chuckled and said, “Besides the noble sentiments, it might also have something to do with Waley, beating his
particular
ass.”

A slight acknowledging inclination of the head. “I’m a competitive fellow, what can I say?”

“Your case, your funeral,” said Keegan, rapping his knuckles gavel-like on his desk, as if formally closing off the issue. “When do you figure you’ll be back in business?”

“Hard to say. When the docs declare him fit to stand. Could be a week, maybe more.”

“So … we’re talking late April?”

“At least,” said Karp. “Assuming nothing else goes wrong.”

An overly sanguine assumption, as events proved.

The suicide attempt of the rich-boy granny killer was widely reported. Karp assigned Terrell Collins to field questions, and learned that the New York and national press are a lot less disinclined to beat up a well-spoken black person than a white one, which discovery did not make him particularly proud of himself, but neither did it make him throw his own body into the breach. Waley also held press conferences, and hinted broadly that the tragedy largely resulted form Karp’s personal intransigence in opposing bail when all evidence had pointed to his client’s suicidal state. The black press, such as it was, supported Karp. There were a few spontaneous street celebrations in Harlem when the news about Rohbling got out and a transient fad for draping nooses over lamp posts. The cops tensed, but a spell of damp, cold weather suppressed whatever tendencies may have existed toward anything more violent.

By May 1, Rohbling could croak speech, and it appeared that his brain was not damaged, or not any more damaged than it was originally. Bannock, the private psychiatrist, issued a report claiming that his patient was in deep depression and could not aid in his own defense. Karp sent Perlsteiner to examine him, and, to Karp’s surprise and disappointment, he concurred.

Thus was Karp reminded once again that although criminal justice is often dramatic, and is in fact the subject of an immense genre of fictional accounts, the actual thing more often than not violates the traditional dramatic unities, most especially that of time. What we like is to see the chilling crime, the sleuth in pursuit, the exciting chase, the final conflict, and justice done in the end, preferably without the boring legal details, all within a few hours, but that is not what we get. Karp too had allowed himself to be caught up in the drama of the case, like any spectator, and was now sadly deflated.

Running the Homicide Bureau, he found, now had less charm than in the past, was even more like public sanitation than it had been; the training of young lawyers seemed somehow less urgent. The essential nastiness of its major work (the locking up of society’s rejects for murdering other rejects), the fervid preparation against the always faint possibility that a harassed public defender would deflect by some legal brilliance the virtually certain conclusion, the constant and faintly sordid plea bargaining that greased the system, all these seemed increasingly unbearable. Going from
Rohbling
back to the stream of nearly identical
People
v.
Assholes
was like going from the sunny uplands of the law into its fetid outhouse. Roland Hrcany had taken over the bulk of the work of the bureau chief, and Karp made no serious effort to reclaim it. Roland
liked
the meat grinder. He enjoyed flogging the young A.D.A.’s so that they would flog the system’s vicious-but-pathetic captives the harder. Karp withdrew his spirit from the work, supervised vaguely, came late, left early, and waited for winter to pass and his trial to start again.

On May 8, Rohbling was examined again and certified as fit to stand trial. Lionel Waley objected to this finding but was overruled by Judge Peoples. The trial was scheduled to resume on May 11, a Monday. Two days before that, however, a man named Amos Harder, a retired New York Central warehouse manager, stood up at the dais during a fraternal association dinner in Harlem and made a brief speech. Harder was a sober man, generally, but he had had a few that evening. In his remarks he noted that it was just a little over a year since Jane Hughes had been put to rest, and observed that, despite his tricky lawyer, Jonathan Rohbling would burn in hell, but before he did, he would spend the rest of his life in prison for murder, if Amos Harder had anything to do with it. Which he did, being one of the jurors.

There was a reporter for the
New Amsterdam News
in the room that evening, who wrote a story that included these comments, and the Post picked up the story and played it large (“burn in hell!” rohbling juror says). The next day Waley was in Judge Peoples’ chambers with a motion for a mistrial and a repetition for a change of venue. Peoples assembled the jury and interviewed each member alone, after which he dismissed Harder, replacing him with an alternate, the retired professor, and, rather to Karp’s surprise, denied both the mistrial motion and the change of venue. It appeared that the judge wanted this case nearly as much as Karp did. The trial would therefore take place in the county of New York, commencing on the fifth of June.

During this medico-legal katzenjammer the rest of the world moved along its merry way. In the Karp household, the twins became toddlers, establishing the usual reign of terror but doubled. Posie proved less able to cope with the highly mobile and destructive beings than with cuddly lumps. The twins got into Lucy’s room. After she calmed down, Lucy bought, with her own money, a lock for her door and installed it herself. It opened with a shiny key that she wore around her neck. Marlene realized that her nanny was over her head and, not wishing to risk fratricide, cut back the time she spent at the security firm to three days a week and no weekends. She took on more night work to make up for it. Increasingly, she handled the pro bono rather than the big-shot side of the business, which was what she liked anyway.

Lucy, now nine, began to attend Chinese school in the afternoons with her friends, occasioning a certain amount of expostulation from the organization that ran it, which Marlene quashed with veiled threats of legal action. Lucy took up brush and ink stone and attacked the 214 radicals, and learned some Mandarin. Third grade continued in good form, Lucy having conquered not only long division but fractions under the tutelage of Mr. Tranh.

Beyond even this Tranh made himself indispensable around Bello & Ciampi. He cooked, he cleaned, he guarded, he took over the accounts and payroll and got Sym through her GED. He learned enough English to man the phone; surprisingly, he spoke it with a French rather than a Vietnamese accent. On three occasions during this period, Marlene asked him to cover a case where deadly violence had been credibly threatened by a sweetheart, and in all three cases the woman was never bothered again. Marlene did not ask how Tranh had accomplished this, nor did he volunteer the information. In any case, no bodies showed up, so Marlene told herself that he had used moral persuasion.

Harry was the only person in the firm who did not consider the Vietnamese an asset. Harry Bello was changing. He had successfully switched his addiction from alcohol to work. He met with the rich and celebrities. They treated him like a real person, and he found he liked that. He bought several expensive suits and good shoes. Dead Harry with a spit shine. New York is full of famous people who do not want to be the next John Lennon. The firm grew. Harry began making noises about getting a real office. It is often, sadly, the case that when we are rescued, no matter how much gratitude we feel toward our savior, the presence of that person necessarily reminds us of our former fallen state. So it was with Harry Bello. Marlene observed this happening and was both happy and sad.

Marlon Dane came back to work. He did not talk about machine guns anymore. The Heckler & Koch MP5 itself stayed in a plastic bag in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in Harry’s office.

Wolfe continued as Edie Wooten’s bodyguard.

Paul Menotti advanced his case against the St. Nicholas Medical Centers, Inc., by obtaining indictments on 167 counts of Medicare fraud from a federal grand jury. Dr. Vincent Robinson was also charged, but a federal judge dismissed these charges for lack of evidence. V.T. Newbury was unable to find any direct connection between Robinson and the sale of prescription drugs.

Clay Fulton observed Robinson for some weeks, off and on. He reported back to Karp that the man was a crazed rich sadist, whose medical practice consisted largely of shooting cocktails of dope and vitamins into the nicely toned buttocks of young society. This Karp already knew. Robinson seemed quite indifferent to being watched.

The Music Lover waited. He knew she was booked for a series of summer concerts at Tanglewood, Wolf Trap, and Westhampton. He assiduously clipped reviews and notices of her tour concerts and pasted them into his scrapbooks. He did not interfere in any way with the plans for her wedding. There would, of course, be no wedding. He had his own plans for Ms. Wooten’s future.

June arrived. Karp oiled his sword and shield and began to review the proceedings in
Rohbling
, feeling tense and a little anxious, like a soldier long away who is about to meet once more the girl he left behind him.