Karp was shaking his head doggedly. “Say what you want,” he said, “if the case is presented right, the jury will do the right thing. Meanwhile, what about this guy Featherstone? You know him?”
“Uh-huh,” said Fulton, happy to change the subject. One of the reasons he liked Karp was that he had rarely met a person of either race so devoid of race prejudice. On the other hand, that may have made it hard for him to understand how deeply that particular poison was etched into the bone of the society. “Gordy Featherstone. He just got his gold tin when I was in the Two-Eight, in ’76 or so. Wasn’t on my squad, but I heard he was a pretty good cop. Smart. Didn’t take. Didn’t kick ass that much. The collar on Rohbling was a nice piece of work too.”
“Yeah, it was. I need to talk to him about it in the next couple days. But as far as you know, there’s nothing in there that might come up to his disadvantage?”
Fulton grinned again. “Well, he’s black. That’s usually enough.”
They finished their conversation, Fulton promising to look into the affairs of Dr. Vincent Robinson, and then the detective left, leaving Karp with the burden of Rohbling lying embodied in the thick files on his desk and on the wire cart nearby. He had already gone through it all once, enough to follow the case’s presentation to the grand jury. That was coming up in a few days, and Roland Hrcany would bear the brunt of that task. Karp had no doubt that an indictment would be secured on all five homicide counts; grand juries almost always did what the prosecutor asked of them. Then they would arraign on the indictments, a judge would be selected, and the trial date would be set. The trial before a petit jury was, of course, something else again.
He picked up the file on the murder of Jane Hughes and resumed reading. This was the crime for which Jonathan Rohbling had been arrested, and was for that reason the key to the prosecution. The other four women had not even been classed as homicides until Rohbling had confessed to killing them. Mrs. Hughes had been sixty-eight, the widow of a mechanic, the mother of five, the grandmother of seven. On Saturday, April 20 of current year, at around eleven in the evening, neighbors in her respectable St. Nicholas Avenue building had heard shouts and crashing sounds from her apartment. Shortly thereafter, witnesses had seen a young black man carrying a soft-sided dark suitcase leaving the building. He was unknown to these witnesses. The following day Mrs. Hughes’s son had arrived early to take his mother to church. There being no answer to his ring, he had the superintendent open the door, and found his mother dead on the kitchen floor, amid signs of a violent struggle. The medical examiner had declared smothering to be the cause of death. Karp read through the M.E.’s report. There had been no sexual assault. Gordon Featherstone had caught the homicide case.
Karp read through the sheaf of DD5’s generated by the detective’s investigation. With allowances for the stilted language required by the NYPD, these were good, clear reports, a separate form for every action carried out in pursuit of the unknown killer. What was missing was the contemplation, the thinking, the instinct, that had led Featherstone along his successful path. Karp had to piece this together from hints. Son reports nothing of value missing from the apartment. Son reports mother did not own a dark soft-sided suitcase. Coffee set out for two persons on coffee table in living room of victim’s apartment. No sign of forced entry. Now the interpretation: Mrs. Hughes had known her assailant, had been entertaining him, in fact. The assailant was not a thief, nor was he a rapist. That let out the local bad boys. The family and friends all had alibis; there was no sign of murderous rancor there either. Confirmed: Featherstone’s witnesses did not find the picture of the killer in the zone book at the Two-Eight. There were fingerprints (Karp read the forensics reports), but they did not match any stored in the files of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. A request was sent out, without much hope behind it, to the FBI. Of more immediate interest were the fibers found under Mrs. Hughes’s nails and, curiously, between her teeth and caught deep in her respiratory tract. They were navy blue cotton canvas fibers. A mystery.
Karp loved this part. He loved reading the DD5’s and the arrest reports, the crime-scene unit reports, the forensic and M.E. reports. He loved seeing how the little tendrils of information curled into cords, and then ropes, and then stout cables, winding around a particular person, tying him tightly, dragging him with Karp’s help, of course, to justice. Ultimately, he would have to re-create Featherstone’s process for the jury, to show them that the cable had coiled itself inevitably around the throat of one man and one man alone, the D., Jonathan Rohbling.
And as he thought this, he could not help thinking a more disconcerting thought. In general, despite the importance accorded motive in the fictive universe of films and books, Karp thought motive irrelevant. If the facts showed the guy did it, who cared why he did it? Naturally, since juries read books and saw movies, motive inevitably made an appearance. Still, you never wanted the prosecution to rest on purported mental states-did the defendant hate, or love, or fear, or desire-because it was a place for the defense to introduce doubt, and of course, there was inherently doubt in any objectification of an inner state. So Karp never based his presentation on motive; he wanted to convince the jury only that the defendant was at a certain place and did a certain thing to the victim, which caused the victim’s death.
Here, however, the nature of the crime cried out for some explanation. Why would a young white man from a wealthy Long Island suburb travel to Harlem, disguise himself as a black man, and murder elderly black women? The jury would want to know. Karp wanted to know. He read on, although he doubted he would find the answer among the DD5’s.
“Hey, Marlene,” said Marlon Dane at the door to her office, “this is the guy. Wolfe, this is Marlene Ciampi, the boss.”
“Glad to meet you,” said Wolfe, stepping forward and holding out his hand.
Marlene shook it and sized him up. A muscle guy, first of all. The hand was big, hard, and warm, and attached to a considerable arm and shoulder. Six-three, two-ten, Marlene’s experienced eye estimated, a jock, a bodybuilder. The face was pleasant enough in an all-American way, sandy hair, cropped closer than was fashionable, odd sandy eyebrows that stood out sharply against what must have been a tanning-parlor tan. He wore a tweed jacket over a white sweater over a shirt and tie, with dark wool pants and shined shoes. The eyes were tan too, the nose undistinguished, the expression-what was it? Not quite menschlike. An astronaut, but one of the ones who never got to go on a moon mission. Well, she thought as she gestured him to a seat, that’s what you generally got when you hired security. The best you could expect was just enough of the almost right stuff to get by.
They sat down. A little small talk. He’d spent time down South and in New England, wanted to try his luck in New York. He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a folded resume. Marlene read it. Clean, neatly typed, not too many misspellings. Jackson Wolfe, age thirty-one, unmarried. It was a usual sort of history. High school (letters in football, track), one year of college, military service with an M.P. unit in Korea, honorable discharge, black belt in tae kwan do. The job history was a scatter of security work in several big East Coast cities, no longer than two years in each place. Also not untypical. Security was America’s fastest-growing business and nearly the only one in which a strong, quick, presentable, unskilled man who didn’t much care for the classroom could freely move from job to job and earn a modest living. It was the modern equivalent of being a cowboy or a seaman a century before, a drifter’s job.