John Conlin was the Homicide Bureau chief, and a reputed ball-buster. That was OK. Karp wasn’t afraid of work and knew he was good. He looked forward to the interview.
McFarley called the next case and Karp slipped back into gear. Assault, no priors, steady job, released on own recognizance. Maybe the guy would show for the trial, maybe not. You had to play the odds if you were a judge. You had to keep the jail space free for the real bastards, which meant that the average lawbreaker was in small jeopardy of spending any time locked up. Each year tens of thousands of people were released on their own recognizance; thousands were never heard from again, unless they were arrested on another charge. It was every judge’s secret fear that he would walk some bozo who would later turn up on the front page of the Daily News as a gently smiling mass murderer. It happened, but there was nothing you could do about it. ROR was the Drano of the criminal justice system.
Thirty-two cases later it was noon, and Yergin recessed the court for two hours. Karp gathered his stack of papers and left the courtroom. It was lunch-time in the Streets of Calcutta. People were eating snack-bar specials out of greasy paper containers. An immense Puerto Rican woman was feeding her three children on Twinkies and Pepsi. Karp steered through the mob to a bank of pay phones and called a couple of witnesses who hadn’t shown that morning. One of them was the woman who had appeared five times and had been sent home five times when the defense had asked for an adjournment. Karp convinced her that this time she would get to testify, and arranged for a cop to pick her up at her office. The other one had left town; they didn’t know when he would be back. Scratch that case.
After dumping his papers in his cubicle, Karp took the elevator down to the ground floor and walked out of the courthouse into the real world. It was still spring. Foley Square was full of lunchtime strollers.
Karp walked across the square to a food vendor and joined the line of customers. He was something of a connoisseur of New York street food, since he bought most of his weekday meals off wheeled vehicles of one kind or another. He knew that all Sabrett carts were not equal. He sought out the ones that grilled the hot dogs before putting them in the steam box, so that the skin became crisp and chewy; the ones that had fresh, steam-soft buns, and crisp hot sauerkraut, and real deli mustard. He knew one guy who sold real potato knishes with paper-thin layers of pastry over peppery filling, not the usual hard square kind that looked and tasted like brake pads for a heavy truck.
Today he ordered three hot dogs, mustard and kraut, a salted pretzel, also with mustard, and a can of orange soda. He ate standing at the curb, his fellow citizens flowing past him like breakers around a jetty. Karp ate the hot dogs with four chomps each. Garbage, but good garbage. He drank his soda and walked back up to the courthouse chewing on the pretzel. Elapsed time for lunch: fifteen minutes.
He went back to his office to familiarize himself with the afternoon’s cases. The offices given to assistant district attorneys in the Criminal Courts Bureau were not elegant; strictly speaking, they were not offices either, just glassed-in cubicles, each containing a file cabinet, a gray metal desk, a swivel chair designed to produce hemorrhoids as quickly as possible, and a wooden chair for visitors. Karp had just begun reading when a knock on the frosted glass made him look up. It was Tom Pagano, the Legal Aid bureau chief for the Criminal Court and responsible for the hundred-odd public defenders who were Karp’s usual adversaries. Karp tried to think of what case on the day’s calendar would merit a personal visit from the captain of the opposing team.
“Hello, Tom. Hey, if this is about the Rankin mugging, I told your boy we’re going for trial on the armed charge. No copping to larceny anymore for this baby …”
Pagano waved his hands to shut Karp off. “Stop, stop, this has nothing to do with any defense case. Can I sit down for a sec?”
“Sure, what’s it about?”
Pagano sat down in the hard wooden chair. He was a stocky, well-groomed man of about forty, with short dark hair, swarthy skin, and high cheekbones. He stared at Karp for a moment with large, intelligent eyes, as if undecided about whether to proceed. Finally he said, “I’ve got a case for you.”
Karp grinned. “Sure. You have a hundred and fifty cases for me every day. So what else is new?”
Pagano didn’t return the smile. “No, this is serious, and frankly I’m coming to you personally, rather than going through the system, because you seem like somebody who cares about people getting fucked over, which is what we have here.”
“I’m listening,” said Karp.
The other man took a folded sheet-from a yellow legal pad-out of his breast pocket and consulted it.
“Four kids-Sheldon Goldstein, Victor Cruz, Willie Martinez, and Tony Ocha-were remanded to the Narcotics Addiction Control Commission Center in West Harlem in December of last year. Two weeks ago they tried to escape, unsuccessfully. They want to press charges against the guards who captured them.”
“Brutality? Against guards in the course of an escape attempt? Tom, give me a break.”
“Yeah, I know, but this is a real one. Look, do one thing for me. I’ve got them in a pen on the fourth floor. Come down and listen to their story.”
A few minutes later, Karp, feeling like a sucker, was sitting in a questioning room across a battered oak table from Sheldon Goldstein. Pagano was leaning against the wall near the door. In a corner sat Hal Dooley, a detective assigned to the DA’s office for investigations. Karp had worked with Dooley before; the two men respected one another, but Dooley was the kind of cop who trusted only cops, preferably those over forty-five. He thought the country was going to the dogs. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he thought Goldstein was one of the dogs.
Karp looked at the nineteen year old across from him. He was a weasely faced, skinny kid with acne and bad teeth. As a junkie, at nineteen, he had a life expectancy of approximately three years-and looked it. He wore a Grateful Dead black T-shirt and tattered jeans and kept picking nervously at a scab on his forearm. His face was covered with bruises, his lip had stitches in it and a white bandage covered his left eye.
After introducing himself and Dooley, Karp said, “Alright, Mr. Goldstein, please tell us what happened in the Drug Center on the night of, let’s see … Saturday, February Twenty-eighth, Nineteen-seventy. Take your time. I want to hear the whole story.”
Goldstein began in a reedy voice that grew louder as he warmed to his tale. “See, we was all watching this movie on TV in the Rec Room. Tony says, ‘Fuck this shit, let’s get outa here. Who’s comin’?’ So we all said OK. Tony had this plan, an’ all. Before the show, fuckin’ guy rips off a fire extinguisher from the hallway by the bedrooms and stashes it in the can by the Rec Room.
“So we all go to the can. One by one, see. Tony gives me the fire extinguisher. Him an’ Willie got these pennies rolled up tight in paper in their hands. Victor goes out to where these two screws are sitting, you know, watchin’ TV, an’ says the toilet’s stopped up, shit all over the place, an’ all. So one of the screws comes in to check and I blast him inna face with the foam. He’s blind. Willie clocks him a couple of times and he goes down. Tony grabs his billy club an’ we all run out into the hall.
“OK, so Victor runs down the hall and gets another fire extinguisher. The other screw comes toward him, gonna bat him with his stick, but Victor blasts him inna face an’ Tony cold-cocks him with the stick he took offa the other screw. So he goes down.