Marlene puts it in a greasy pan and pours her sauce on it, and the mushrooms, escarole, and sausage. She bakes it. They eat, baby Lucy chewing on a crust.
By the time they have finished, Marlene is calm again, but changed, in the way this life has been changing her for some years. Ever less Smith, ever more Sicily.
17
Dropping five stories on a wire was not Karp’s idea of how to start a day when he was on a trial. It did not make him feel like Peter Pan, especially since the belt slipped during the descent and he had to dangle in mid-shaft for a half hour while two employees of the wire factory on the third floor labored, amid loud Spanish controversy, to repair the fault.
When he emerged from the shaft gate, his brow was dark, and his police driver decided not to express any of the several cute remarks he had thought of while observing these events.
Marlene remained in the loft. She had called in sick, although there was nothing physically wrong with her. But if she could not take a mental health day after a weekend during which her child had been assaulted by a gigantic felon, when could she? She spent the morning lounging comfortably in bed, drinking coffee and sharing TV cartoons and cookies with the baby.
Karp passed his morning less pleasantly, finishing up the official witnesses in People v. Russelclass="underline" Thornby, the arresting officer; Marrano, the cop who had taken the famous blue shirt, the victim’s handbag, and the knife to the station house; Cimella, the detective who had received all this, plus the sales slip found on Russell; and two men from the medical examiner’s office, who established that Susan Weiner had died of stab wounds and that the wounds were consistent with the knife found on the stairway of 58 Barrow, and that the stains on the knife blade were human blood.
The cross went as Karp expected. Freeland pounded away at the time issue. The implication he was trying to plant in the jury’s collective mind was that the cops had found the handbag where the real killer (not Russell) had dumped it, found the sales slip within, and lied that they had found it on the defendant four hours or so before the bag had been located.
At least the trial was moving. Freeland had at last exceeded Judge Martino’s level of tolerance, and Martino had responded in a way that did the defense no good. After a particularly fruitless and time-wasting series of questions about an alternate blood-testing system addressed to the medical examiner’s blood pathologist, a man of magisterial expertise, Martino had called counsel to the bench.
“Mr. Freeland, what is the purpose of this line of questioning?” asked the judge.
“Your Honor, my purpose here is to draw out for the jury the failure of the medical examiner to test for blood type from the stains on the knife purportedly found.”
“The witness states that the amount of blood was too little for those tests.”
“Yes, but I’ve located articles in the Journal of Forensic Medicine-”
“Mr. Freeland, the witness has stated that those tests are not accepted by his profession.”
“Yes, Your Honor, but-”
“Mr. Freeland, do you know what an expert witness is?”
Freeland flushed, coughed, and said, “Of course, Judge.”
“I don’t think you do. An expert witness is assumed credible when speaking within the confines of his expertise. You have spent half an hour questioning him about the validity of tests that he says are garbage, despite repeated objections by the People, which I have sustained. If you wish to challenge the expertise of the People’s witness, the appropriate measure is to call an expert of your own. Do you plan to do so?”
“Uh, no, Your Honor, not at this time. But, Your Honor-”
“Be quiet, sir! Let me ask you, have you ever tried a homicide case before?”
Freeland’s face was brick now. “Uh, no, sir, this is my first.”
“It’ll be your last in my court if you don’t stop wasting my time. Unreasonable delay and contentiousness for its own sake are not acceptable strategies in this court.” Martino paused for a beat. “And I want to say that if you can’t cut it, I will have you replaced as counsel by reason of incompetence.”
Points for the judge, thought Karp, moving back to his seat. The threat of removal for incompetence would be particularly telling when counsel was the new head of the local Legal Aid Society office. He looked over at the defense table. Freeland was thumbing through notes and making marks. His color was back to normal, and he seemed relaxed for someone who had just had his shorts fried by a judge.
Marlene let the phone ring. It was lunchtime, and she was feeding the baby mashed bananas. But when the message machine clicked on and she heard the voice, she abandoned Lucy in her high chair and raced to the phone.
“Ms. Ciampi? I’m so sorry to disturb you at home, but I thought it was important.”
“No problem,” said Marlene. “What’s up, Mr. Sokoloff?”
“A gentleman called on me today. He presented himself as an associate of Mr. Ersoy’s, with similar contacts. He said his name was Nassif.”
“What did he want?”
“He had some things to sell. A very nice figured reliquary in silver-Armenian, fourteenth century. And some Byzantine coins ranging from the ninth to the fourteenth century. The reliquary is real, I believe, but the coins are not.”
“What did you do?”
“I, ah, said I had to consult with some potential customers. I invited him to call on me tomorrow.”
“Very good, Mr. Sokoloff, that’s very helpful. Look, I need to talk to some people and then Ill get back to you.”
Clever man, thought Marlene after he had bid her good-bye. Just the right move to dispatch any lingering doubts about the complicity of Sokoloff Galleries in a set of art frauds that may or may not have led to a murder.
Marlene got on the phone then and spoke with V.T. and then with Rodriguez, the art fraud cop, setting up a sting. Then she called Sokoloff back and told him what he had to do.
Lucy during this period had managed to cover herself and every object within range of her flinging power with a thin slime of sticky banana. Marlene laughed, hugged the child to her, stripped both Lucy and herself, and plunged the two of them into the bathtub.
In the afternoon, Karp presented his last official witness, Tony Chelham, the jail officer for whom Russell had identified his blue shirt. This was critical because all the witnesses who had seen Hosie Russell fleeing the murder scene and entering 58 Barrow Street had seen a man in such a shirt: the Digbys from Lexington, the actor Jerry Shelton, and James Turnbull, the leather shop owner. Karp brought those forward during the remainder of the afternoon. They all did well, both on direct and on cross. Freeland’s only option, since they had all obviously seen someone, was to suggest that whomever they had seen, it was not the defendant.
He implied that, to the Digbys, all black people looked alike. He implied that Shelton, a homosexual actor living in Greenwich Village, was probably besotted with drugs as a matter of course-he actually asked whether Shelton had been smoking marijuana on the afternoon in question. He implied that Turnbull, who had spontaneously identified Russell in the police station and had attacked him as the murderer, had been put up to it by the police, which implication Turnbull, a man of immense dignity and presence, passionately rejected.
It was not a particularly good cross, thought Karp. Freeland appeared to be drifting; a lot of his questions didn’t lead anywhere in particular, as if he was just going through the motions. It didn’t help him that the witnesses were all solid citizens. Attacking such witnesses tended to piss off the jury, composed of the similarly solid.