“He’s seventy-four, he’s convincing, he’s extremely impressive, in my opinion, and I trust him.”
“The Jews stick together, right? Speaking of ethnic matters, who do you have second seating on this?”
“Well, Roland can’t do it, obviously, because he has to watch the bureau,” Karp replied, and then, suddenly suspicious, asked, “Why, do you have a suggestion?”
“Yeah. What about Terrell Collins?”
Karp answered in a controlled voice, “Collins is a good lawyer. He’s one of several that might be right for it.”
“Come on, Butch,” said Keegan, “a black face on the prosecution bench is not going to do you any harm. Not in this case. It also wouldn’t hurt to let him examine some witnesses.”
“Excuse me, there must be something wrong with the connection. I thought I was talking to Jack Keegan, the guy who taught me that one prosecutor has to work the whole case because otherwise the jury’s going to get the idea that the case is too hard for one guy to understand, and therefore too hard for them to understand.”
“Be nice, Butch,” said Keegan.
“Nice is my middle name, Jack,” said Karp. “And I want to stay nice, which is why I am going to forget that you just told me to put a guy in second seat because he is brown in color.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Butch! You just said he was a good attorney.”
“He is. And I intend to give his skills due consideration when I make my selection.”
A pause on the line. Karp could imagine the red creeping up Keegan’s neck. “You do that,” said Keegan tightly, and broke the connection.
Karp took a few deep breaths, put the conversation out of his mind, and called the chief medical examiner. He got a secretary, who put him on hold. He placed the phone on his desk and began going through the stack of paperwork that Connie Trask had marked with stapled-on notes, heavily underlined in red, as requiring his immediate and personal attention. About fifteen minutes passed in this way.
At last dim noises from the phone’s earpiece informed him that the C.M.E. was on the line.
“You know, Murray,” he remarked, “there are probably high public officials in this city who would resent being put on hold for a quarter of an hour.”
“I was cutting,” said Selig. “So, what can I do for you?”
“I’m returning your call, Murray. The Longren death?”
“Oh, yeah! Interesting case. Let me get a hold of it, just a sec.”
Clunk of phone hitting desk, squeak of swivel chair, rustling papers. Minutes passed.
“Okay. She wasn’t choked or strangled. Drug analysis shows phenobarbital, flurazepam, and ciretidine.”
“Which are what? I know what phenobarb is.”
“Well, flurazepam is a common tranquilizer; it’s Dalmane, the sleeping pill. Ciretidine is an antiulcer drug.”
“She had ulcers?”
“Uh-huh. But she shouldn’t have been taking sedatives in those dosages if she was taking ciretidine, since ciretidine potentiates the effect of sedatives.”
“So cause of death was …?”
“She had the flu, she doped herself up, or was doped up, there was some fluid in the lungs, as there usually is with flu, but her breathing reflexes were so suppressed that she couldn’t clear it. Essentially she just stopped breathing.”
“You’re ruling natural causes?” said Karp, his voice rising.
“Well, Butch, what the hell else is it? She might have recovered without the dope, sure, but the dope didn’t actually kill her. I’m not saying there couldn’t be a winnable civil suit against the doctor who treated her, a malpractice thing, but homicide? I don’t think so.”
“But, damn it, Murray! Why the hell did Robinson go through that charade with Davidoff if there wasn’t something fishy going on?”
“Oh, fishy I’ll grant you. Robinson screwed up, and he wanted the signature of the well-respected internist Dr. Davidoff on the death cert: cause of death viral pneumonia. It’ll be useful in case of an inquiry, and Davidoff’s insurance will participate in any defense and settlement. Fishy, yes. Slimy and unprincipled, yes. Murder? Can’t show it.”
“Oh, hell, Murray, first we have four homicides that you guys list as natural causes, and now you cry homicide and get me all worked up and it really is natural causes. I mean, what the fuck, Murray!”
“Hey, what do you want from my life? We messed up on Rohbling’s victims, I admit it. Now we’re being extra careful with anomalous cases, like this one. You don’t want that?”
Karp let out a quantity of air. “Oh, shit, Murray, I’m just pissed off in general. Look, thanks for the quick turnaround on this. It’s one thing off my plate at least.”
Back in the law library, Karp found it hard to plunge back into the details of Rohbling. He was uncharacteristically confused as to what to do about filling the second seat in the coming trial. In fact, he had actually been thinking about picking Collins, a calm, serious man who had won a couple of nice convictions in small-time gang shootings, but had never worked on a major, high-profile case. He was certainly ambitious enough, and he was at the point in his career that he was ready to join the dozen or so senior people in the bureau, like Hrcany and Guma, who could be trusted to handle their cases with minimum supervision from Karp. Collins’s race had pressed itself on Karp’s consciousness to the same degree that Hrcany’s Hungarianess or Guma’s Italianess had; that it might be a factor in the man’s employment had simply never occurred to him. Karp felt a bit of a schmuck about this, as he occasionally did when an office adultery was revealed, which every single person in the office except him had known about, including the janitors. Now, of course, he couldn’t use Collins, because it would look to Keegan that he was acceding to a cynical manipulation. On the other hand, cutting Collins out of a chance he deserved because of that was … what? Double-English reverse nondiscrimination prejudice? With a curse he got up and stomped off down the hallway to Collins’s cubicle, where he found the man, as expected, working late.
Collins looked up from his work and smiled. He was a chocolate-colored, broad-shouldered man who retained the lithe grace he had exhibited playing football for Lafayette.
Karp said, “Look, Terry … ah, shit, this sucks!”
“What did I do?” said Collins, alarmed.
“Nothing. I want you to second-seat me on Rohbling.”
“Jesus! That’s what sucks?”
“No.” Karp felt the sweat of embarrassment on his forehead. “But. Okay, here it is: the D.A. just told me I should use you because of the politics of this particular trial.”
“Because I’m black? That does suck, if you want to know. So this would be like, a … decorative assignment?”
“Oh, fuck, no! I’ll work your ass off. As a matter of fact, I told him to get stuffed, but I was thinking of using you anyway, so you can if you want to, I mean, I do want you, but not because of that.”
Collins thought for a moment and played with his thin mustache. In the tangled racial politics of the time and place, it was a situation with which he was familiar enough, and he was mildly amused by his boss’s discomfort. He grinned and said, “Okay, boss. In that case you got yourself a boy. So to speak.”
EIGHT
“Harry, can you pick up Luce at school?” Marlene asked as the afternoon grew hectic. Wolfe had arrived and waited patiently, like a well-trained dog (he had donned a cheap sports jacket and polyester slacks and obtained a new, and even more unfortunate, haircut) for Marlene to take him to Edie Wooten’s place, an appointment for which they were surely going to be late, because Marlene had taken longer than she had planned to instruct Sym in the intricacies of filling out quarterly withholding forms (Harry could have done that, but he didn’t have time, since he had to deal with the agent of the German tennis star; the Germans liked to have endless meetings about Fraulein Speyr’s tour, parodically thorough, them, and as far as Harry doing the teaching, Harry could not teach a cat to lap cream); and Marlene had to spend a half hour on the phone with the landlord negotiating the new office lease, and Posie had called saying Zak had swallowed a pin, but she wasn’t sure, and could they have hot dogs for lunch, and there was another panicked call from Carrie Lanin (one more love offering/threat from Pruitt), and Marlene had to spend another half hour calling in favors from cops she knew from the old days to put the word out that the warrant on Pruitt was serious and not just some domestic horseshit.