"This I don't know," admitted Karp. "Say a year…"
"Okay, that means I'm gonna have to go to Martha and say, 'Guess what, baby? We're going south. Back to the land o' cotton…' "
"Oh, horseshit, Clay! Washington isn't the South!"
"Do tell," said Fulton, giving Karp a hard look. "And there's Texas, too. Those old boys're gonna love having a big-city nigger poking around in what they did or didn't do, the heaviest case they ever saw."
Karp was taken aback, and felt himself flush with embarrassment. It had not occurred to Karp that Fulton and his wife would be at all discommoded by moving from their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a city that was still heavily segregated, in fact if not in law, or that poking into a Texas investigation might be a problem for a black man.
Karp said, "Okay, forget it. I wasn't thinking…"
Fulton stood up, leaned over, and placed his hand on Karp's arm. "No, I appreciate being asked… I guess."
He perched on the edge of the desk and looked at Karp with the fatherly expression he sometimes assumed with the younger man. He was only twelve years older, but he had spent most of his adult life as a street cop uptown, which worked out to an effective seniority of about a thousand and four years.
"Goddamn," said Fulton, shaking his head and grinning, showing his gold tooth, "our little Butch's really gonna do it. A long time, the two of us."
"Yeah, eleven years. Dr. Fulton's College of Criminal Knowledge for green-ass prosecutors. I would've sunk like a stone, you hadn't grabbed me by the shorts."
"Mooney McPhail."
Karp smiled. "Yeah, Mooney McPhail. An easy grounder to short and I bobbled it."
"You were second seating for Joe Lerner."
"Right, another blast from the past. He's in on this too, by the way, the MLK side. I had a witness said she saw Mooney use the knife, and picked him out of the lineup. That was the case. Holy shit! What a fuckup!"
"Only she didn't. It was her sister saw it and she told-what the hell was her name? — Esther, Ethyl?"
"Methyl," said Karp.
"Methyl, right. She got the whole story from the sister and she decided to be the witness, because the sister had the arth-a-ritis."
"Yeah, it would've been a classic, if it'd come out on cross. Defense would've asked, 'Did you actually observe this with your own eyes,' and old Methyl would've said, 'Oh, no, my sister told me the whole story and she don't lie.' Case dismissed."
Fulton laughed. "Turned out the sister didn't see it either. Took me a month to find the girl who told the sister… Damn!"
"What?"
"It just flashed on me, where I was."
"What, when you found the witness?"
"No, where I was when I found out about Kennedy. I was up on St. Nick, up around 'forty-third, making a collar. Some pimp cut a girl. I was a detective second out of the Two-eight. I had him in cuffs on the street and my partner, Mike Samuels, was just opening the car, and I looked up and there was a crowd of about fifty people around this appliance and stereo store, pressed up against the grilles. They had a bunch of TVs there, on all the time. We locked the mutt in the back and I went over to see what was going on. We'd been in the building maybe forty minutes with this asshole, and in that time Kennedy'd been shot and pronounced dead. The man never meant that much to me personally, but it was a hell of a jolt-the president and all that. But the people on the sidewalk, most of them were carrying on like it was Lincoln all over again, a couple of old church ladies hollering, 'Sweet Jesus God… ' "
Fulton paused for a deprecating chuckle. "It affected a lot a folks up there. I guess it's… they've seen a lot of young men die for no reason, just from meanness and stupidity. It must've kind of crystallized the whole thing for them. My mom, now… still got a magazine cover of JFK framed, and Bobby too. Right next to Dr. King. And Jesus, of course. Hell of a thing!" He shook his head.
"Anyway, I ran back to the car and told Samuels what was up, and of course, he had to go over and check it out for himself. The mutt asks me what's up and I tell him and he says, 'Well, fuck him! When we gonna move?' Like he was late for a big date."
Fulton stood up and said, "Tell you one thing. I do this, and it works, I'd get my momma off my case. She's been pissed at me for joining the cops from day one. Can you believe, she still introduces me: 'This is my eldest, Clayton, first college graduate in the family and he threw it all away to be with the police.' "
Karp brightened. "So you will think about it."
"I'll think about it, boss. We're in the thinking stage here. Give me a couple of days. Meanwhile, I'll see you later on at the party."
"You're not supposed to tell me about it," said Karp glumly. "It's supposed to be a surprise."
Four hours later, Karp was in that state of woozy euphoria he obtained through drink, a state that for him lasted about twelve minutes before being replaced by faint nausea and a sick headache. Karp couldn't drink at all, this lapse being a source of keen amusement to his friends and his wife, all of whom could put it away pretty good.
The farewell party was well under way. The homicide bureau had kicked in for a catered spread-chopped liver, little shrimpy hors d'oeuvres, fried wontons, tiny pizzas-and some decent liquor and beer. There were about fifty people in the bureau's outer office, where the desks had all been pushed to the walls. The secretaries had set up a big boom box, which was now blasting out the Village People's "YMCA" for the fifth time and people were getting funky in the center of the floor, doing the peculiar spastic dancing that made the 1970s such a world of fun.
"No more," said Karp to the man attempting to refill his glass with champagne. "I'll get blotto."
"That's the point," said the man, continuing to pour. "If the guest of honor can walk out steadily, it's an insult to his friends. We'll carry you on a door."
The man's name was Vernon Talcott Newbury. He was a lawyer in the fraud bureau and Karp's closest friend among the people he had started with in the old DA's office. A rare bird, Newbury, in the gritty environs of 10 °Centre Street: rich, for one thing, very rich, a sprig of a family of New York bankers who regarded the Rockefellers as pushy newcomers. Yale College and Harvard Law for another, unlike most of the people working at the DA, who were more likely to have come from places like Fordham and St. Johns. A lean, small man with longish, ash blond hair, he had the remarkable good looks, "chiseled" as the expression has it, of one of the gentlemen in white tie that Charles Dana Gibson used to draw in company with his famous girls.
Karp had never figured out what had brought V.T., as he was universally known, into the DA, or what kept him there. V.T. would not give a straight answer. "One slums," he might say, or, "My family are practitioners of fraud; I prefer to study it." It did have something to do with his family, Karp had concluded early on: that great intermarried, extended family of WASPs, with names off the street signs of lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, as exotic as Nepalese to Karp, and as fascinating. Such clans tend to produce at least one maverick in each generation, and V.T. was the one in his. He might as easily, and with about the same level of family disapproval, have chosen to have become a lion tamer at Ringling's or opened a delicatessen in Passaic.
Karp himself had a contracted family, and had he been a reflective type he might have considered that a vicarious association was one of the things that attracted him to V.T., as well as to his wife, whose clan was also vast.
There she was now, dancing with a young black paralegal. She was wearing a full plum maxiskirt with the bottom three buttons undone, so that as she danced it whirled upward, showing her thin and splendid legs. Her black curls were shoulder length and cut so that they fell over the left side of her face. In that way, if Marlene held her head cocked, as she always did, it would be more difficult for someone to tell that her right eye was glass.