“Thank God,” he said. “I was going nuts. How did you do that?”
“Oh, sometimes a girl needs her momma. And sometimes her Sicilian genes need a special treatment.”
“That song? What does it mean?”
“Um, something like: I’m hungry, I want bread. There isn’t any. Then go and steal some. I don’t know how. Come with me, old man, and I’ll show you.”
“Very nice, Marlene. When she starts muscling the other kindergarten kids for milk money, we’ll know why. I’m writing to Mr. Rogers about this.”
“Please, my head is coming apart. Speaking of crime future, I think I’m going to put Harry Bello on this Avenue A thing when he comes over.”
“The jumper? I thought the M.E. didn’t rule on that.”
“Not on the homicide, no, but the rape part-I don’t like it. It has all the marks of a particularly nasty sex crime-the bites, the sexual bruising. It looks like the kind of thing where if he’s done it before, he’ll do it again. And once, just once, I’d like to nail a serial weirdo before he gets going on the series. I’m telling you about it now because just in case we come up with evidence that it’s a homicide, and we find a guy, I don’t want it to get lost.”
Karp didn’t mind. He was happy to do Marlene a favor: anything to distract her from the Armenians.
On the following morning when Karp held his weekly trial meeting, the Armenians were much on his mind. At the trial meeting the assistant district attorneys who were planning trials laid the cases they had prepared before their peers, and Karp, who attempted to shoot them down: a sort of legal scrimmage. Such discussion was possible because trials were much rarer than murders. Of the thousand or so homicides brought to attention of the law in Manhattan, fewer than one in ten would get before a jury, the remainder being otherwise disposed of, usually by plea bargaining. Or the guy would walk because somebody forgot to do something important.
Karp looked around the table, the seats at which were reserved for presenters. There were four of them this morning. The rest of the staff sat along the walls in chairs they had wheeled into the room, or they were perched on Karp’s desk or on windowsills. He nodded to the man seated to his right and said, “Okay, Guma, let’s get started.”
The man so addressed was short and squat and looked enough like Yogi Berra to turn heads on the street, the main differences being that he was not quite as handsome as Berra and could not hit a high inside curve ball, for which reason he had been denied a career in the majors. Besides that, he was a very good athlete, as were almost all the men (and the two women) crowding the room. Karp had found, or imagined he had found, that people who played high-level competitive sports made the best trial lawyers. They had thick skins and a certain casual brutality without which survival at Centre Street could be measured in weeks; they lived to win; they played hurt; they could work as part of a team. It was not a job for the legal intellectuaclass="underline" let them work on Wall Street or teach at Harvard, was Karp’s thinking.
Ray Guma was a good example. It was not entirely clear that he could read. It was a fact that no one had ever seen him writing anything down. Yet he never forgot a face, or a name, or an incident from any case he had ever handled. Nobody in the D.A.’s office was more magisterial on the subject of the mob, its politics, its personalities, its plans. It had rubbed off; Guma was mildly corrupt in what he considered a good cause. He consorted with known criminals. He was an astonishing and indefatigable lecher. And though he shared no point of habit or moral standard with his boss, the Mad Dog of Centre Street, as he was known, was one of Karp’s favorite people.
Guma began his presentation. “This is People v. Cavetti. Okay, Jimmy Cavetti was part of a gang that’s been ripping things off from air freight out at Kennedy for years now. They did high-value stuff: wines, furs, art, antiques. Needless to say, the goombahs are in it heavy. It’s under the Bollano family, a capo regime name of Guissepe Castelmaggiore.
“So, a cozy arrangement. They bought enough of the shipping clerks and expediters to get them the word on where the good stuff is. Joey Castles handles protection, plus fencing the stuff, plus divvying the cut for the families. The other two main guys in the gang were the Viacchenza brothers, Carl and Lou, solid Bollano guys. The vics in this case.
“To make a long story short, Joey finds out the Viacchenza boys are skimming the take, holding out. Joey has a short fuse. One night last November, the Viacchenzas are leaving the Domino Lounge on Ninth. They walk past an alley, and somebody takes them out with a twelve-gauge. There’s snow in the alley, and we pick up a perfect heel print, which we match to Jimmy’s shoe. That’s the case. The shoe and the situation.”
There was a brief silence. “How did we get the shoe?” asked Karp.
“Search warrant based on reliable informant. The usual horseshit. This time the cops really got a reliable informant. One of the shipping clerks in on the theft deal. They nailed him on a dope thing and he gave them Jimmy C.-I mean that Jimmy fingered the Viacchenzas for the hit. He didn’t name Joey Castles, needless to say-he wasn’t that stupid. They’ll move to suppress the shoe, but we shouldn’t have any trouble.”
Roland Hrcany, who was at the table, spoke up. “Did he do it?”
Guma snorted. “You mean, was he the trigger on the hit? Fuck, no! Jimmy’s no killer. He’s a thief. Nah, Joey Castles probably got a contract out. Jimmy was just there to finger, maybe drive. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. We got an eyeball says Jimmy was cruising around the Domino earlier on the night of, asking about the brothers, were they there yet, anybody seen them-like that.”
“But he’ll stand up on it?” asked Karp. “To murder deuce?”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Guma, shrugging. “Jimmy was always a stand-up guy. On the other hand, he’s never looked at twenty-five to life. But what you’re asking is, will he rat out Joey Castles and whoever was the shotgun artist? I’d say no. Which is why we got the tap and the bugs on Joey.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Hrcany. “He didn’t do the hit, but we’re trying him for it?”
Guma turned himself and leaned forward so that he could look directly at Hrcany, who was sitting on the same side of the long table. “What kind of remark is that, Roland? The fuckin’ guy was there. He was holding the shotgun’s hand, for chrissake. He’ll go down for it too, unless he deals.”
Karp didn’t like the way the conversation was drifting, and he knew very well why Roland had raised that silly point. Karp asked, “But will he deal when it comes down to it?”
Guma said, “No. He’s saying, ‘Convict my ass.’ He figures we got a weak case, or that’s what his lawyer’s telling him. One heel print against his alibi. He got some bitch to say he was with her. (Sorry, ladies.) We shouldn’t have much trouble impeaching her. They’ll try to impeach our shipping clerk and our bar-flies. They’ll get shoe experts. You know the routine.”
Karp did indeed. He said, “Okay, good job, Goom. Tony?”
Tony Harris, a bright young left-handed pitcher from Syracuse whom Karp had raised from a pup into a competent and aggressive prosecutor, told his story: People v. Devers-a man, a woman, drugs, a gun. The D. had a record of atrocious violence, and had shot down the woman in front of three shrieking children. It was therefore one of the cases on which Karp had decided to hang tough. The defendant had done likewise, making the state work for it.
As usual, Karp questioned Harris closely about the details, and, following his example, so did the other lawyers. The M.E. evidence, the testimony of witnesses, the fact that all potential witnesses were sought out and interviewed, the defendant’s alibi, the lab work, what the cops found.
After the questions were exhausted, Karp summed up the case. “The problem here is that the direct witnesses to the crime are minor children aged three to seven. Not convincing to most juries, easily confused on cross. So we build the case on indirect evidence, which is convincing. We have a neighbor who came out in the hall after hearing shots and made an ID. We have two young women outside the apartment, saw the defendant enter, heard the shots, saw the defendant exit. We have physical evidence in the form of nynhydrin tests that show the defendant had fired a gun recently. We have the murder weapon found in a sewer located on the direct route between the victim’s apartment and the defendant’s apartment three blocks away. It’s a story. Anything wrong with it that we haven’t brought up?” He looked around the room. Silence. “No? Okay, good job, Tony. Next.”