“No, who?”
“My Uncle Parker, that’s who! It almost killed me when I found out.”
Karp was confused. “So he was a hypocrite; how could you know, you were just a …”
“No! He wasn’t a hypocrite. He hadn’t the faintest notion of where his money came from. That’s just the point. It was his responsibility to know, to know what was being done there in his name.”
“And you’re saying that Garrahy is like your uncle? That’s bullshit, V.T.”
Newbury sighed. “OK Butch, whatever you say. Maybe the job is getting to me. Maybe I should take my father’s advice and go work for Mitchell in Washington.” He glanced at his watch. “Hey, I love to linger, but it’s getting late.”
Both men slid out of the booth and went to the door. It was raining, a fine, warm April rain.
Karp said, “You ever think about a Washington career? God knows, you have the connections.”
Newbury looked surprised. “Washington? Oh, it’d be fun for a couple of years, but, I mean New York is … where we live.” He waved his hand in a global gesture to encompass Sam’s, Foley Square, Manhattan, the entire great, wet, smelly metropolis. “I mean, we’ve been here over three hundred years. I’m related to half the people the streets around here are named after.”
“Yeah? Like Izzy Chambers and Morris Broadway?”
Newbury laughed. “Up yours, Karp. No, really,” he said, gesturing again, “this is our … I don’t know, our … fief.”
This conversation disturbed Karp more than he understood at the time. Newbury’s attack on Garrahy had irritated him for reasons he could not quite fathom. It was all stuff he knew. Why did he so resist acknowledging it? Then there was Newbury’s confidence and security. His fief! Karp’s fief was an eight by eight office and a pile of papers, a job, and his brains. Family? His wife had flown off in her own orbit and who knew if she would ever come around again? His mother had died when Karp was a child, his father made corrugated boxes, and was not interested in a son who was not interested in sweating Puerto Ricans to make even more corrugated boxes. His two brothers consisted of annual phone calls.
Karp compared himself to his friends. They all seemed to have a center-aside from work-around which their lives revolved. Guma chased women. Hrcany immersed himself in the social life of his vast Hungarian family. V.T. had noblesse oblige and was engaged to a young lady of suitable background. He looked out of his window at the gray slanting rain over Chinatown. He felt the walls closing in. He shook himself and crumpled up the sheet of yellow legal paper he was writing on and threw it across the room to join half a dozen other sheets in the wastebasket. Two points. He thought, there’s someone in my head, but it’s not me. He got up and took his jacket off the hook and went out of the office.
There was a greasy snack bar on the ground floor of 10 °Centre Street. Guma called it the Cancer Ward. Karp went in and had a cup of coffee and a cheese Danish. Then he stood in the lobby and looked out at the rain. The crowds in the Streets of Calcutta were damp and ill-tempered. The noise level was higher than usual. The fresh smell rain gave to New York’s streets did not penetrate here; it stank of damp dishrags.
Without thinking about it, he found himself at the door to his old office bay in the Criminal Courts Bureau. “Hey, look who’s slumming,” said a voice behind him. He turned and looked into the black eyes of Marlene Ciampi.
“Hi, Champ. No, just wandering.” She smiled and made to go past him into the office, but he stopped her by saying, “Say, has Conlin or anybody from Homicide called you yet?”
She frowned. “No-is there any reason why they should?”
“Oh, it’s just that I was talking to Jack Conlin the other day and he asked my opinion about you. I think they’re thinking about you for Abondini’s slot.”
Her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped in astonishment.
“What! What did you tell him?”
“What could I tell him? I said you had a great ass and liked to talk dirty.”
Marlene jabbed him in the belly with a rigid forefinger. “Goddamit, Karp, are you pulling my pork about this?”
“So to speak. No, really, he asked me and I told him you were a sharp little lawyer …”
“Little!” Poke.
“Ouch, Marlene! No, I told him the truth: I said you worked hard, knew what was what, and had plenty of guts. Then he said Garrahy was worried that your sensibilities might be offended by the rough-and-tumble of the Homicide Bureau, and I said he didn’t have to worry about that. That’s it.”
Marlene let out a shriek of delight. “I can’t believe it. I’m throwing up. Butch, this is great! Oh, God, what time is it? I’m late for court.” She ran two steps down the corridor, then stopped, turned, ran back to Karp, gave him a solid hug and planted a firm kiss on the side of his neck. “Thanks, Butch, I owe you,” she said, and then broke loose and ran off, weaving through the crowd like a racehorse breaking for daylight.
Karp stood still and waited for his groin to rejoin the rest of him. He thought, for the first time in many months, no wonder my head’s fucked up. I’m horny.
Chapter 10
Conlin said, “Look at that Sussman. That’s what you get if you call Central Casting and order somebody to play a lawyer. Looks like he could blow Perry Mason out of the box. It’s a long way from Bensonhurst for Lennie Sussman.”
Conlin said this softly to Karp as the two men waited at the prosecution table for the trial of Mandeville Louis to begin. The courtroom was crowded. It was an important case, and the press was there in some strength. It was in fact why Conlin was there. Nothing like a nice homicide conviction at primary time.
Nearly six months had passed from the time Louis had been captured to the day the case had been called. It had taken another week to select the jury, with each side questioning, challenging, selecting the veniremen, throwing out those who might lean the wrong way, according to an arcane set of rules, which had as little to do with the desire to see justice triumph as the choosing of a team lineup had with the desire of a coach to see a good game. Winning counted, nothing else.
So there they sat, twelve citizens of Fun City, nine men, three women, a little whiter than a stratified random sample of New Yorkers, but reasonably representative. Some were pissed off at missing work, but most were mildly excited to be doing in reality-so they naively supposed-what they had read about in high-school civics texts, and seen represented on television shows. None of them were lawyers; none of them had ever been on a jury before.
Karp did look at Sussman. The defense attorney was arranging papers from his briefcase precisely, like a fortune-teller setting out the Tarot deck. A clean yellow legal pad and sharpened pencils were on the long table in front of him. He observed Karp staring at him and nodded pleasantly. Karp nodded back. They were gentlemen about their serious work. Conlin was right; it was a long way from Bensonhurst for Lennie, a long way from Calcutta for Karp.
At 9:05, Judge Frederick Braker entered the courtroom. He was sixty-eight, frail and bent with scoliosis under the shelter of his black robes. His eyes were bright blue, his nose long and sharp, his forehead domed and running back into close-cropped silvery hair. He still had-as he would say himself, if you asked him-all his marbles.
All rose. All sat. Braker discussed some details of the court calendar with the lawyers, and then two guards escorted Mandeville Louis into the courtroom and delivered him to the chair next to Sussman’s. Karp was startled by the change in Louis’s demeanor. He was clearly distraught. He kept removing and replacing his glasses and plucking at his yellow jumpsuit. He swept his head from side to side rapidly, as if searching the room for an enemy. His eyes were bulging, and every few seconds his tongue would protrude for a long, unnatural swipe at his lips.