In general, there was no question here that these people were killers. Here was a guy, for instance, who quarreled with his neighbor about a gambling debt, went home, brooded about it, got liquored up, took a steak knife from the kitchen, went next door, stabbed his neighbor four times through the heart, went back home, rinsed off the knife, and went to sleep. Next day, the cops come. Hey, there’s a trail of blood leading from the corpse to the house next door. The cops go in, brace the dude (“I din do nothin’ ”), they find the knife-he washed the blood off the blade, forgot about the handle, also forgot about his shirt and pants. The blood’s a ten-point match with the victim’s. Case closed, right? Wrong. On the advice of his cellmate, the guy does a coram nobis on the grounds that the evidence was illegally obtained, because the cops did not have probable cause to enter his castle.
There were a lot of them like that. Law was a game, sure, but there used to at least be agreement on the rules. Now it was as if, at a basketball game, one side would argue about whether the court or the ball was exactly the right size until the other team got pissed off and left, giving them the win on a forfeit.
Karp soldiered on through most of the morning, with the sunlight from the bright day moving slowly across the piles of forms on his desk, making jagged shadows like springtime in the Rockies. He was starting to think about breaking for lunch, when he heard a couple of taps on his door and Lerner came in.
“How’s it going, kiddo?”
“I’m dying. How about yourself, Joe?”
Lerner chuckled. “This too shall pass. Actually, I’m bringing you some relief. How would you like to do something for me?”
“I left the Johnnie-Mop home, so I can’t clean the toilets, but besides that I’m at your disposal.”
“That’s it, keep your sense of humor.” Lerner sat down in Karp’s visitors’ chair and stretched his long legs almost to the opposite wall. “No, this is an interview with a homicide suspect over at the Tombs-the Marchione killings.”
“They got the guy for those?”
“Not exactly. A guy turned himself in, says he was driving the car, he never pulled the trigger. Says there were two other guys involved, one of them did the job.”
“Shit, what else is he going to say?”
“Sure, but it’s not that simple. You know Sonny Dunbar, works out of Midtown South? OK, it turns out this guy’s his brother-in-law, name’s Donald Walker. Kid’s never been in much trouble, but apparently he started using junk, fell in with some bad guys, and they got him to drive for the Marchione job. Anyway, apparently the kid panicked and got in touch with Dunbar and spilled his guts.”
“Spontaneous statement?”
“Ah that’s the catch. Dunbar seems to have put the fear of God into the boy, like you would if somebody in your family was screwing up. That’s before he knew what Walker had done. So that whole part of it is tainted rotten. Then he told Walker to turn himself in and tell his story for the record. The problem is, by the time he got to the cops-Dunbar sent him to Fred Slocum-he was frozen up, looked to be half out of his skull with coming down off of the junk. I talked to Slocum. He thinks the kid made the other two guys up.”
Karp was scribbling rapidly on a yellow legal pad. “What do you think? Any other evidence linking this Walker to the crime?”
“Some. We have an eyewitness, on the car, at least. Woman named Kolka was sitting in a car on Forty-eighth Street the night of the murders, waiting for her husband to come down from their apartment. He’s a retired cop. She sees a white car come around from Madison and park a couple of cars down and across the street. She sees a light-skinned Negro male leave the car from the passenger door, carrying some kind of briefcase. About ten minutes later she hears what she described as ‘firecracker noises’ coming from Madison. Couple of minutes after that, the same guy comes back, gets in the passenger door and drives off.”
“Did she do an ID on Walker?”
“Yeah, she says close but no cigars. She’s pretty sure this guy was clean shaven. Walker’s got a beard.”
“She spot anybody else in the car?”
“She thought she saw a head in the backseat, but she couldn’t swear to it. The angle was wrong to see the driver’s seat. But, when the car pulled out, she got a good look at the plates, and that nice old lady wrote down the tag number.”
“Which was Walker’s number?”
“Which was not Walker’s number. But from what we can figure, it was indeed Walker’s Nineteen-sixty-four Chevy Impala. The plates on it that night were reported stolen in East Harlem the week before.”
“Pretty clever.”
“Yeah, real pros we got here. But there’s something else. The morning after the murders, an anonymous caller rings up the cops and tells them that he saw the whole thing, describes the car, and gives the tag number.”
“Confirming Mrs. Kolka?”
“Not confirming Mrs. Kolka. This guy gives Walker’s real plate number, the plates that were on the car when the cops picked it up.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh is right. It looks like somebody is trying to stick Walker with the whole bag. That tends to confirm Walker’s story about other guys being involved. Oh, they also checked the hotel room where he went after the crime. In the trash can there, they found an empty J amp;B bottle with three good sets of prints: Walker’s, the room clerk’s, and Angelo Marchione’s, and nobody else’s. That tends to put Walker in the store, unless one, he was a regular patron of A amp;A Liquors, or two, he had been there earlier, maybe checking the place out, or three, somebody else, who was careful not to leave any prints, took the bottle and gave it to Walker. Which, of course, is Walker’s story. In any case, we booked him for the double murders. He’s been in the Tombs since last Friday.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Our basic problem is that Walker clammed up with Slocum. He hasn’t wanted to talk at all. I think Slocum came down too hard on him, and he thinks he’s being railroaded to take the whole rap for the murders. I figured to let him cook in the Tombs for a while. If he is telling the truth, I got to have that gunman. Yesterday evening, Walker called his brother-in-law and said he was ready to spill, if he could make a deal. Dunbar called me. He’s scared too, for his brother-in-law, and also because he doesn’t want to be blamed for fucking up a big case.”
“How big is it?”
“Biggish, for a retail store rip-off and killing. The old man was a pillar-of-the-community type, the kid was popular and good-looking. But mostly it’s the brother, Alfredo Marchione. He’s a macher on the West Side; big in the Knights, active in the Party. The kind of guy elected officials like to be nice to. He’s jerking chains all over town.”
“I think you’re going to tell me I’m not handling this case all by myself.”
Lerner smiled broadly. “Smart boy! No, you’re going to second-seat Jack on this. I’d love the case myself, but I’m starting a trial on Monday. Anyway, I told the cops somebody would meet them over at the Tombs at one o’clock.”