“Sugar, am I glad to see you! We’re short a typist and an ADA and I’ve got sixty people to get into booths. Most of ’em are holdovers from the afternoon, before we closed up for dinner. I mean …!”
“Who’s working?”
“Hunk’s in Booth Six, doing good. Ehrengard never showed.”
“It figures, that shithead! OK, we’ll clean the place out.”
He walked into the room and scanned the seats. A tall black woman wearing fuchsia hotpants, a red satin camisole and a blond wig was using the pay phone. An elderly woman, her head bandaged, and her face bruised was sitting in a chair looking dazed. Next to her a young cop read the sports page of the Daily News. Two other cops were bringing a wino out of the men’s room and setting him down with some gentleness on a chair. The person next to him, a middle-aged shopkeeper in a checked sportscoat, said “Sheeesh!” and immediately vacated his chair. Karp caught a whiff and sympathized. The wino must have witnessed some significant crime. The cops would dry him out, keep him dry through his testimony and then toss him back into the gutter, where the person whom he had testified against would probably cut his throat some night. Right now, though, he was the safest wino in New York. The rest of the crowd reflected the city’s population-all races, the two major sexes, several of the minor ones, and most social classes were represented, united for once in boredom and imitation.
Karp took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt-sleeves and climbed up on Debra Tiel’s desk. Pitching his voice to carry, he said, “Alright, may I have your attention please! Everyone, may I have your attention! Hey, you want to shut off the radio?” Martha and the Vandellas vanished and the crowd turned to face the source of the voice booming down from eleven feet up.
“OK, we’re going to speed things up here a little.” (A few claps and sarcastic cheers from the cops.) “Everybody with homicide, rape, or sex cases raise your hands.”
“Does that include Dickie Wavers?”
“Tonight it does-flashing to fondling. All of you, go to Booth Three and get in line. All prostitution charges and all violations, including public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and harassment go to Booth Four and line up. All robberies and assaults, go to Booth One on my right; all burglary, trespass, go to Booth Two; all larceny, theft, auto theft, go to Booth Five, also anyone with bad-check arrests; all narcotics or gambling charges …”
“Does that include bookie collars?” a detective called out.
“Sure does. Go to Booth Six. Now, anyone left?”
“Just me, man.” Karp looked down from his tower and saw a black detective in a cream-linen jacket.
“Could I talk to you? I gotta get out of here, like now.”
Karp had worked with Sonny Dunbar before and liked him. He stepped down from the wastebasket and walked over to the detective. “What’s the problem, you got tickets to the Yankees tonight?”
Dunbar grimaced and ran his hand across his face. “I only wish, man. No, I got this shitty little purse-snatch collar, I’ve been waiting three hours, and I got serious family troubles, no lie.” He looked at Karp expectantly.
“Sure, Sonny, no problem. Let’s go into Eight.”
They went into the booth and Dunbar shot the basic facts to the typist: his name, defendant’s name, victim’s name, witness’s name, time, and location of the crime. Then he described the events in front of the drug store. Karp chuckled. “You wish they were all that easy, right?”
“Yeah, sure. I thought I was through with that garbage when I transferred to homicide. Anyway, I vouchered the purse, the chick says she’ll testify. The perp has a long sheet already; he’ll probably cop to petty with no trouble. Have you got that?”
Karp had been jotting notes on a yellow legal pad. He looked up and said, “Sure, Sonny, take off.” Dunbar flashed a smile.
“Thanks, Butch. I owe you one.”
Dunbar ran out and Karp dictated the language of the formal complaint to the typist. As he did so, he walked out of the booth to check on his handiwork. The Disneyland Principle had worked again. People were always happier on short lines, even if the waiting time was nearly the same as it would have been on longer ones. Much of the chaos and irritation had drained from the atmosphere in the Complaint Room; it now resembled a first-class bus station. Within an hour, there were scarcely a dozen people left on line.
Karp moved among the booths, listening to cops and victims, organizing the histories of human suffering and viciousness into the colorless language of the law. As always, he was torn between the natural impulse to sympathize and the requirement to keep the gears rolling. The gears had to win, of course, and not for the first time he reflected on the damage that continuous exposure to these experiences worked on the spirits of the people who made up the criminal justice system. This old lady now, telling him about being beaten bloody and robbed in the elevator of her building. It was the worst thing that ever happened to her. There was no way he could ever make her whole again. Certainly, putting the miserable kid junkie who had done it behind bars for-what, six months? — would hardly put her world back into balance. But he had heard it a hundred times. The cop had seen it fifty times. He looked at the face of the cop who had made the arrest. Young, curly-haired, wispy mustache, with a cynical old-man’s eyes. Armor, like Karp’s armor. He shook himself. He was letting the old lady ramble.
“Just a minute, Missus McGregor, let’s go over what the man actually said to you. Can you recall his words?”
As Karp dictated the tale of the mugging he heard a commotion at the front of the Complaint Room, loud female voices, and above them Ray Guma’s unmistakable barrelhouse laugh. Karp finished his dictation, left the booth, and went into the waiting area. Guma was standing in the center of a group of attractive young women waving his cigar and snapping off Groucho Marx one-liners. The women and the cops who were with them were cracking up. “Alright, ladies, I’d like you to remove your outer garments and go into the various booths we got here according to speciality. Booth One, fellatio. Booth Two, lesbian orgies. Booth Three, rim jobs. Booth Four, eyyahh-hah-hah, UNSPEAKABLE PRACTICES! Booth Five …” He caught sight of Karp. “Hey, Butch, the party’s on! What’d I tell you, hey?”
“Goom, what the fuck is going on here?”
“It’s the girls from the Two-Three Precinct. The kidnap victims I told you about at dinner. They’re here to make their complaint. I’m directing traffic.” He rolled his eyes, waggled his cigar in his mouth, and grabbed handfuls of buttock from the two women on either side of him. They squealed girlishly, like chorus girls in a Marx Brothers’ movie, being trained to pick up quickly on sexual fantasies.
“Goddam, Guma, this isn’t a whorehouse.”
Guma put a puzzled expression on his face. “It’s not? Gosh, I’m sorry, I thought this was One hundred Centre Street.”
“Hey, what’s going on?” said a new voice. “Guma! My man! You finally brought your sisters around to meet me.” Roland Hrcany was the other ADA working the Complaint Room. He looked less like a New York lawyer than a refugee from Muscle Beach; he was in fact a serious weight lifter, with a weight lifter’s big shoulders, broad chest, and wasp waist. He had white-blond hair, no stranger to Clairol, swept back to fall below his collar, baby-blue eyes, and a ferocious cavalry mustache under a large nose.
Guma clapped Hrcany on his massive shoulder. “Girls, this is it! Allow me to introduce Hunk Hrcany, the Hungarian Hustler and Heartbreaker. He will be servicing your every need in Booth Six tonight, for those who desire the crude and violent approach. And …” with a leer, “he has agreed to waive his usual fee. How about that?” Giggles. A few claps.