No Lesser Plea (15 page)

“Yeah, it used to be a supply closet in the old days. When it gets damp, you can still smell the Lysol. By the way, what was all that commotion downstairs a little while ago?”

“Nothing much,” said Karp. “One of the DAs was fucking a witness on his desk and set off a bunch of fireworks.”

“Oh,” said Lerner. “The usual.”

Chapter 8

T
wo weeks later, Karp was still in the little office, answering
coram nobis
petitions. It used to be somebody got caught, and convicted, they went to prison and, mostly, stayed there for the time they were sentenced, or until paroled. “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” the cons said, and in a weird way, they were proud of it. But now, as Karp realized more and more, wading through the piles of petitions, that subtle agreement between the bad guys and the good guys had entirely vanished. Although very few of the thousands of felons in New York City were ever caught, and although few of those few were ever sentenced to long stretches in prison, and although it was absurdly easy to cop a plea to a lesser offense, the small number of people actually sentenced for killing somebody seemed to be spending their entire lives behind bars looking for legal technicalities that would free them.

In general, there was no question here that these people were killers. Here was a guy, for instance, who quarreled with his neighbor about a gambling debt, went home, brooded about it, got liquored up, took a steak knife from the kitchen, went next door, stabbed his neighbor four times through the heart, went back home, rinsed off the knife, and went to sleep. Next day, the cops come. Hey, there’s a trail of blood leading from the corpse to the house next door. The cops go in, brace the dude (“I din do nothin’ ”), they find the knife—he washed the blood off the blade, forgot about the handle, also forgot about his shirt and pants. The blood’s a ten-point match with the victim’s. Case closed, right? Wrong. On the advice of his cellmate, the guy does a
coram nobis
on the grounds that the evidence was illegally obtained, because the cops did not have probable cause to enter his castle.

There were a lot of them like that. Law was a game, sure, but there used to at least be agreement on the rules. Now it was as if, at a basketball game, one side would argue about whether the court or the ball was exactly the right size until the other team got pissed off and left, giving them the win on a forfeit.

Karp soldiered on through most of the morning, with the sunlight from the bright day moving slowly across the piles of forms on his desk, making jagged shadows like springtime in the Rockies. He was starting to think about breaking for lunch, when he heard a couple of taps on his door and Lerner came in.

“How’s it going, kiddo?”

“I’m dying. How about yourself, Joe?”

Lerner chuckled. “This too shall pass. Actually, I’m bringing you some relief. How would you like to do something for me?”

“I left the Johnnie-Mop home, so I can’t clean the toilets, but besides that I’m at your disposal.”

“That’s it, keep your sense of humor.” Lerner sat down in Karp’s visitors’ chair and stretched his long legs almost to the opposite wall. “No, this is an interview with a homicide suspect over at the Tombs—the Marchione killings.”

“They got the guy for those?”

“Not exactly. A guy turned himself in, says he was driving the car, he never pulled the trigger. Says there were two other guys involved, one of them did the job.”

“Shit, what else is he going to say?”

“Sure, but it’s not that simple. You know Sonny Dunbar, works out of Midtown South? OK, it turns out this guy’s his brother-in-law, name’s Donald Walker. Kid’s never been in much trouble, but apparently he started using junk, fell in with some bad guys, and they got him to drive for the Marchione job. Anyway, apparently the kid panicked and got in touch with Dunbar and spilled his guts.”

“Spontaneous statement?”

“Ah that’s the catch. Dunbar seems to have put the fear of God into the boy, like you would if somebody in your family was screwing up. That’s before he knew what Walker had done. So that whole part of it is tainted rotten. Then he told Walker to turn himself in and tell his story for the record. The problem is, by the time he got to the cops—Dunbar sent him to Fred Slocum—he was frozen up, looked to be half out of his skull with coming down off of the junk. I talked to Slocum. He thinks the kid made the other two guys up.”

Karp was scribbling rapidly on a yellow legal pad. “What do
you
think? Any other evidence linking this Walker to the crime?”

“Some. We have an eyewitness, on the car, at least. Woman named Kolka was sitting in a car on Forty-eighth Street the night of the murders, waiting for her husband to come down from their apartment. He’s a retired cop. She sees a white car come around from Madison and park a couple of cars down and across the street. She sees a light-skinned Negro male leave the car from the passenger door, carrying some kind of briefcase. About ten minutes later she hears what she described as ‘firecracker noises’ coming from Madison. Couple of minutes after that, the same guy comes back, gets in the passenger door and drives off.”

“Did she do an ID on Walker?”

“Yeah, she says close but no cigars. She’s pretty sure this guy was clean shaven. Walker’s got a beard.”

“She spot anybody else in the car?”

“She thought she saw a head in the backseat, but she couldn’t swear to it. The angle was wrong to see the driver’s seat.
But,
when the car pulled out, she got a good look at the plates, and that nice old lady wrote down the tag number.”

“Which was Walker’s number?”

“Which was
not
Walker’s number. But from what we can figure, it
was
indeed Walker’s Nineteen-sixty-four Chevy Impala. The plates on it that night were reported stolen in East Harlem the week before.”

“Pretty clever.”

“Yeah, real pros we got here. But there’s something else. The morning after the murders, an anonymous caller rings up the cops and tells them that he saw the whole thing, describes the car, and gives the tag number.”

“Confirming Mrs. Kolka?”

“Not confirming Mrs. Kolka. This guy gives Walker’s real plate number, the plates that were on the car when the cops picked it up.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh is right. It looks like somebody is trying to stick Walker with the whole bag. That tends to confirm Walker’s story about other guys being involved. Oh, they also checked the hotel room where he went after the crime. In the trash can there, they found an empty J&B bottle with three good sets of prints: Walker’s, the room clerk’s, and Angelo Marchione’s, and nobody else’s. That tends to put Walker in the store, unless one, he was a regular patron of A&A Liquors, or two, he had been there earlier, maybe checking the place out, or three, somebody else, who was careful not to leave any prints, took the bottle and gave it to Walker. Which, of course, is Walker’s story. In any case, we booked him for the double murders. He’s been in the Tombs since last Friday.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Our basic problem is that Walker clammed up with Slocum. He hasn’t wanted to talk at all. I think Slocum came down too hard on him, and he thinks he’s being railroaded to take the whole rap for the murders. I figured to let him cook in the Tombs for a while. If he is telling the truth, I got to have that gunman. Yesterday evening, Walker called his brother-in-law and said he was ready to spill, if he could make a deal. Dunbar called me. He’s scared too, for his brother-in-law, and also because he doesn’t want to be blamed for fucking up a big case.”

“How big is it?”

“Biggish, for a retail store rip-off and killing. The old man was a pillar-of-the-community type, the kid was popular and good-looking. But mostly it’s the brother, Alfredo Marchione. He’s a
macher
on the West Side; big in the Knights, active in the Party. The kind of guy elected officials like to be nice to. He’s jerking chains all over town.”

“I think you’re going to tell me I’m not handling this case all by myself.”

Lerner smiled broadly. “Smart boy! No, you’re going to second-seat Jack on this. I’d love the case myself, but I’m starting a trial on Monday. Anyway, I told the cops somebody would meet them over at the Tombs at one o’clock.”

It was 12:40. Karp got up and said, “I’ll be there. It still sounds great.”

Lerner said, “Enthusiasm, that’s what we like. Oh, to be fifty again! Good luck.” He patted Karp on the shoulder and left.

Karp took his yellow pad and his suit jacket, left his office, and picked up the case folder from the smiling secretary. He went down the hall and, on his way out, told Walter Leonard to meet him at the Tombs at one. Leonard was in his late fifties, a gray, quiet civil servant, who as a stenographer for the Homicide Bureau during the last twenty-five years had recorded more tales of illicit slaughter than Agatha Christie.

The Tombs was in the building next door. Karp picked up a couple of hot dogs and a root beer from a Sabrett cart and sat down on a bench across the street to read the case folder. It was thin and told him little he did not already know from Joe Lerner’s briefing.

After lunch he went into the Tombs, a noble institution serving New Yorkers badly since 1838, met Leonard, went through a series of clanging doors, smelt the smell, heard the noise, felt the feelings that most visitors feel in jail (how horrible to cage men like beasts, how marvelous that they’re in here and not out on the street), and arrived at the interview room at just one o’clock.

The room was about ten by twelve, city green, furnished with a battered long table and hard chairs, like the boardroom of a long-bankrupt corporation. Slocum and Dunbar were already there. Fred Slocum was a beefy, florid man in a plaid blazer and sky-blue polyester pants. He had one of the last crew cuts in New York, a reddish fuzz like an unusually hairy peach. He was smoking a Tampa Nugget.

Karp shook hands all around and in a few moments a guard brought Donald Walker into the room. Walker looked shrunken in his yellow prisoners’ jumpsuit; he’d lost the touch of baby fat in his face and his tan complexion was grayish. He nodded at Dunbar and sat down. When everyone was seated, Karp began.

“Mister Walker, my name is Roger Karp, and I’m an assistant district attorney here in New York County. I am about to ask you some questions about the shooting deaths of Angelo Marchione and Randolph Marchione, which occurred between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock on the night of March Twenty-sixth, Nineteen-seventy, at A&A Liquors, located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street.” Karp then introduced everyone in the room—for the record—and told Walker that Leonard would be taking down on the stenotype machine everything that was said.

Then he advised Walker of his right to remain silent, of his right to have a lawyer present. Walker had had these rights read to him at the precinct, but Karp was establishing for the record that Walker was confessing voluntarily, in full knowledge of these rights, and without coercion. It was not enough to find out the truth. If Walker had killed fifty people on a live broadcast of the “Johnny Carson Show” it would still be necessary to go through this ritual before he could be brought to justice.

Karp went on. “Now, Mister Walker, having been advised of your rights, are you willing to tell us what you know about the shooting deaths of Angelo and Randolph Marchione, without a lawyer being present?”

Walker raised his head and tugged at his sparse beard. “I din see no shooting.”

At this Slocum gave a disbelieving snort. Karp shot him a sharp look. The detective rolled his eyes and looked away.

“Could we have your full name and address, please,” asked Karp. Walker gave it. Speaking his address made him think about the missed mortgage payments, about his family losing their home, about his failure. He started to weep. “Take it easy, Donny …” Dunbar began, but Karp cut him off with a gesture of his hand, and said, “Mister Walker, just tell us what you
do
know; that’s all we want.”

Then the story emerged, Walker speaking in a monotone, broken by sniffling and long silences. Karp let him tell his tale at his own pace, scrupulously avoiding any leading questions. After a while, Walker began to enjoy the confession; here, after all, were four serious, grown men listening attentively to what he had to say. It was a unique experience in his life.

Walker finished his confession by describing how he had dropped the two other men off at the 50th Street subway station. The sound of the stenotype machine echoed his last words, and after a brief silence, Karp said, “Mister Walker, I want you to know that I appreciate you coming forward like this and giving us this information. I also want you to know that while I can’t promise that it will have any effect on your own case, I would very much like your help in finding the two men you say were with you on the night of the crime. Are you willing to help us do that?”

“Yeah, sure, but I done already tol you everythin’ I know.”

“OK, but let’s go over some of the details once more. This man you call Stack—you met him at a pool hall near where you live?”

“Yeah, Torry’s, on Queens Boulevard.”

“More than once, right?”

“Yeah, a couple times.”

“And he supplied you with heroin?”

“Yeah, just one hit.”

“And he gave you the phony plates for your car?”

“Yeah, the last time I saw him, it was a couple days before the, you know, the robbery.”

“And where did he give you these plates?”

“In the parkin’ lot outside of Torry’s. I open my trunk an he toss ’em in.”

“So he had the opportunity to see your real plate numbers?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Mister Walker, are you aware that on the morning after the robbery, an unidentified man called the police and said that he had witnessed the crime at A&A Liquors, described your car in some detail, and gave your plate numbers?”

“No, I din. But so what? I already tol you I was there in my car.”

Karp paused for effect. “Not the phony plate numbers. The real ones.”

It took Walker a long minute to catch on. He jumped to his feet, and for the first time an animated emotion appeared on his face. “That muthafucka! He never … he never was gonna … that fuckin’ lyin’ bastard!”