“With that, Sheldon starts yelling and running around the autopsy room wrapped in the sheet. It took three guys to hold him down. He kept bawling, ‘I’m alive, I’m alive, don’t cut me!’ and meanwhile, Denny is waving the scalpel and yelling, ‘You fools! That’s a corpse. Look at its face! Is that the face of a living man?’ I hear he’s in deep shit with the M.E. But what the fuck, if you can’t have a little fun with your friends, what’s the goddam point? Right?”
“Right. With friends like that, I don’t need any enemies.”
“OK, be that way. But just for being an asshole about it, I’m not going to tell you my good news.”
“What good news?”
“Say ‘pretty please with a cherry on top.’ ”
“Guma, I’m going to walk over to Mulberry Street and give the first guinea I see a hundred bucks to blow you away. Now give!”
Guma giggled over the line. “Karp, you ever want to kill me, I’ll do the job for fifty. I mean, what are friends for? Anyway, I got the gun.”
“Great, Guma. Stick it in your ear. Look, I got to go …”
“Butch, you’re not listening. I got The Gun-the gun from your case. We found it, me and Sonny Dunbar and the skinhead, Fred Slocum, his partner. We must of hit every pawn shop in Spanish Harlem. You know what Luis said. ‘Mister Guma, you wan’ to trow away any more gun, joos give ’em to me. Don’ trow ’em inna sheet can, they get all steeky.’ ”
“All right! Way to go, Mad Dog, I take back forty percent of everything bad I ever said about you. This makes my month. Where is it?”
“In its little box in the evidence locker, where it’s been since you put it there, these many months. And I’m glad you’re happy, Butch, ’cause you’re gonna need it. See you at two.”
A dozen or so lawyers assembled in Garrahy’s office at two o’clock that afternoon. Garrahy did not ask them to sit down. He looked at them with bloody murder in his eyes for a long moment. They shuffled their feet and hung their heads. Then there was a shattering crash, and they all jumped in unison, like a herd of antelope startled by a gunshot. Garrahy had flung his heavy glass ashtray at the wall, something he was wont to do in moments of extreme anger. Legend had it that he once brained a defaulting assistant DA with such a missile.
“Dis-gusting!” he roared hoarsely, his face blotched red with anger. “Disgusting behavior! Using evidence for infantile pranks! Drunkenness! Showing pornographic films for your own amusement! You are officers of the court. You are supposed to be above reproach. Not only have you besmirched yourselves, but you have brought dishonor on this office, my office, and that I cannot, I will not tolerate.
“Let me tell you something, and I hope that none of you ever forgets it. You know what keeps the law alive? It’s not the jails, it’s not the police-it’s respect. Without respect, this office and all that it represents to this city in terms of order, probity, and justice, cannot survive. And how do we build respect? By hard work. By honesty. By dignity. By dignity, gentlemen, if I can still call you that.
“A certain standard of behavior is expected of us. Aristotle said, ‘The state should be a school of virtue,’ and that is what I expect this office to be.
“You are the teachers in that school. In every aspect of your behavior, both in the courtroom and in your private lives-perhaps especially in your private lives-you are obliged to conform to a higher standard than the ordinary citizen. You must be literally above reproach.
“Do you imagine that I am ignorant of what is happening in this city, in this nation? Do you imagine that I am unaware of the filth in which you spend your lives? But let me warn you. If you do not hold yourselves to a higher standard by force of will, by discipline, that filth will wash over you, and destroy you, and destroy this great office, and destroy this city too. It will be Babylon and wolves will walk in its streets.”
Garrahy had leaned forward at his desk as he spoke, his deep voice filling the room, his hands clenched, his blue eyes bright and challenging. No one met his gaze.
When he had done, a sepulchral silence lay over the room, as if his dire prediction had already come to pass. Someone in the rear of the crowd sighed out loud.
Karp thought, this is the Real, all right. It was one thing to respect the man through reputation; it was another to see with your own eyes the splendid power that made Francis P. Garrahy one of the most devastating prosecuting attorneys in the history of American jurisprudence and one of the great men of his generation. At that moment, Karp would gladly have traded twenty years of his life to have worked under Garrahy in his prime.
The moment passed. Garrahy slumped back in his big chair. He began to rub his chest in a circular motion. Then he fumbled in his desk drawer, extracted a pill, and swallowed it with some water from his desk carafe. When he looked up again, he seemed older-and surprised to see the room filled with people. He waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal, as if brushing away insects. The office was cleared in three seconds.
In the hall outside, the attorneys were hurrying back to their stations in courtroom or office, chatting nervously. It had not been so bad after all. Roland Hrcany fell in with Karp.
“Helluva speech,” said Hrcany. “Made me feel real small. We’ll have to be more discreet about our excesses in the future.”
“Assuming there is one,” said Karp. “I’ve got a feeling that was the last dab of whipped cream in the bowl.”
“Mr. Karp!” It was Ida, the secretary, calling from Garrahy’s doorway. She jerked her thumb back over her shoulder. “He wants to see you.”
Hrcany said, “He must want the other testicle.”
Karp went back into Garrahy’s office. The old man hadn’t moved. He motioned Karp to a chair.
“I’ll be blunt,” he said, his voice once again an old man’s gravel. “I’m moving you out of Homicide.”
Karp’s stomach hit the top of his shoes and rebounded. Oh, shit, he found out about the pistol.
“What! You mean because of the party?” he said weakly.
“God, no! What has that to do with it?”
“Then … ah … I don’t understand. You think I haven’t been doing the job?”
“Of course not. You’re an excellent prosecutor. But you’ve got enemies there now. I see you’re surprised.” He let out a dry chuckle. “People are. They think I sit here and talk to politicians all day. Or that I’m drooling.
“Jack Conlin will never forgive you. I’ve known him for twenty years, no, twenty-five. An unforgiving, a relentless man. That’s what you get for dabbling in politics, my boy. But I’m grateful to you. Not many would have done what you did. And it’s time for the rewards.”
“Mister Garrahy, please! I hope you don’t think …”
“What? That you helped me out of ambition? What of it? How do you think this city works, God help it? You helped me out and I’m returning the favor. How would you like to be an assistant bureau chief?”
“An assistant bureau chief?” said Karp idiotically.
“Yes. The Criminal Courts Bureau. Cheeseborough’s retiring next week. Frank Gelb’s moving in, but I expect he’ll be swamped with paperwork. He’ll need someone to work with the new attorneys, show them how we do things around here. It’ll give you a chance to shake the bottom of the system up a little bit. I’ve spoken with Gelb, and it’s OK with him. What about it?”
“Mister Garrahy, I don’t know what to say.”
“Say yes. Learn to take, Butch. God knows you give enough. All of you.”
Karp said yes and shook his chief’s hand. It was small, cold and dry.
He was hardly back in the office when the phone rang.
“Thirty-nine,” said Sonny Dunbar over the line. His voice was high and excited.
“What’s thirty-nine, Sonny?”