Switch to Julio Meles, twenty-nine, courier service manager, refresh smile.
“Now, let me assure you that if some poor soul being treated for schizophrenia wandered out of Bellevue in his underwear and pushed Jane Hughes under a train, raving all the while, and waited for the police to arrest him the odds are very good that we would not be here in a courtroom today. The State of New York has no problem accepting a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity when the behavior of the accused clearly warrants it. We are not in the business of persecuting the sick and helpless.”
Karp turned his attention to Earlene Davis, forty-one, restaurant cashier.
“But we know that such is not the case with Mr. Rohbling. We know it in the teeth of all the wild theories of all the psychiatrists that Mr. Waley can find in the telephone book and hire for generous fees, because we know how Mr. Rohbling behaved. You’ll recall me asking Dr. Persteiner about how we knew that Jonathan Rohbling did not suffer from schizophrenia, and he answered with one word: competence. Everything we know about the defendant’s behavior in the days preceding and following the murder of Mrs. Hughes shows competence, and not only that. We also see decision, alacrity, and guile. But let me make it absolutely clear, ladies and gentlemen …”
Karp made it absolutely clear to Lillian Weintraub, fifty-nine, housewife.
“… I am not saying that Mr. Rohbling is a model of mental stability. Here I find myself in agreement with Mr. Waley. I have no doubt that Mr. Rohbling is a sick man. But that is not the point. The People are not obliged to show that Mr. Rohbling is a well-balanced, happy person, able to live a full and rewarding life. I am certain that Judge Peoples will instruct you as to that. But there are many types of mental illness. Drug addiction and alcoholism are mental illnesses too, listed as such in Dr. Lewis Rosenbaum’s big DSM III book, which we all saw earlier, but we do not for that reason excuse the junkie who mugs or the drunk who kills with his car.”
Karp focused on Theodore Spearman, the retired NYU chemistry professor promoted to the jury from alternate, a man who might be expected to know about proof.
“No, all we are obliged to prove, and what we have proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that Jonathan Rohbling planned to kill Jane Hughes, that he costumed himself carefully so as to inveigle himself into her confidence, that he sought her out at her church, that he preyed on her decency, posing convincingly as a young black student lately come to the big city, and so got himself invited to her apartment, that he kept that appointment with murder at her apartment, that he killed her, knowing that he was killing her, for Jane Hughes fought hard for her life, she did not go easily as he pressed his suitcase down on her face, smothering her to death. And we have further proven that he escaped stealthily from the murder scene, and that when he was confronted by Detective Featherstone, as you heard, he cleverly and guilefully denied ownership of the suitcase, knowing that it contained damning evidence connecting him with the crime. Ladies and gentlemen, is this the behavior of an out-of-control maniac who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Give me a break!”
Pause. Switch to Carmen Delgado, thirty-one, dry cleaner. Karp took a deep breath, summoning the beginning case into his head. He would now review all the significant evidence as it applied to the theme he had just laid out for the jury, boosting his triumphs, ignoring his slips, telling him a coherent, convincing tale that would stick, he hoped, to their minds more tenaciously than the one Waley had told in the morning.
Late in the second hour of this grueling work, he noted out of the corner of his eye a young black woman he recognized as a clerk-typist in the bureau office enter the courtroom, walk up to the barrier dividing the well of the court from the spectator seats, attract the attention of Terrell Collins at the prosecution table, and hand him a folded piece of paper. The jury noticed it too, and their attention wavered for an instant. Karp suppressed a flush of rage. By far the gravest sin that any employee of the district attorney’s office could commit was to interrupt in any way a closing argument. Death in the family was no excuse, nor was the outbreak of nuclear war. Karp raised his voice a hair, pumped out a little more charisma, brought the jury back to full attention, and plowed on. He would have someone’s ass for this. Afterward.
Karp in his office, drained, rubbing an icy can of Coke across his eyes.
Collins was there for his usual postmortem, this the very last one. He could tell by the twitching of his boss’s jaw that something was wrong (talk about bahavior!), but he didn’t have a clue as to what it was. He thought that the closing had gone splendidly. Karp had brilliantly defused the whole dueling-shrinks aspect of the case, finessing Waley’s strongest card. The press-they had been yelling something about another granny-killer victim, but they had rushed down the gantlet so quickly that he hadn’t been able to make out what it meant.
Karp chugged three-quarters of the soda and snarled, “Now, what the fuck was that business with passing papers in the middle of the goddamn closing?”
“Hell, Butch, I don’t know. Look for yourself. I wasn’t going to get into a damn discussion with the woman, so I just took what she gave me.”
Karp read, “Fulton says call Homicide 28th IMMEDIATELY.”
Karp punched in a familiar number. Fulton came on the line right away, as if he had been waiting by the phone.
“You heard yet?” the detective asked.
“Heard what? For fuck’s sake, Clay, did you tell my office to interrupt me in court?”
“I did. Get this. A woman named Margaret Evans did not show up for work this morning. When a coworker checked on her at one-fourteen this afternoon, she found her in her apartment, dead, with a blue cloth suitcase over her face. M.E. says it looks like smothering. Time of death, last night sometime. Woman is black, age 58, two kids, four grand kids.”
“Oh, shit!” said Karp. “And the press has it already? How the hell …?”
“Somebody tipped them, is what I heard. How we going to play this, Stretch?”
Karp did not reply for a moment. He was trying to figure out if there was any way of keeping this news from the jury, and decided that there was not. Had he known about it sooner, he might have been able to make a case for sequestration, but by now the jurors were at home, sitting in front of the tube or looking at the evening paper.
“I want you to handle it, Clay,” he said at last. “You need me to call zone command or the Chief of D., I will.”
“No problem. By the way, I checked. He was in Bellevue, in case you were wondering.”
“Oh, that’s a relief,” said Karp. “I guess we should thank God for small favors. What’s your thinking, off the bat?”
“Off the bat? A copycat. Rare, but it happens. A psycho, or someone who just wanted to whack his mother-in-law, but was stuck for inspiration until the trial. So we’ll do the usual canvass, check on the relatives, the love life, the neighbors. Who knows, it could be a grounder-”