Amazing, he thought. They don’t give a damn about this. They don’t care about the subpoena either. What they want is my complicity in something stupid, arbitrary, and faintly nasty. They want to pull me away from my friends and my troops and everything that Phil Garrahy stood for. It was so simple; and what would they do once they had him? Make him dance around and gibber like an ape? Train him to flattery? He suddenly felt old.
“Yes, that was very interesting, Butch,” said Bloom, when Karp stopped talking. “Chip, check this out, would you? Good. Now, I must get to a meeting. Butch, do me a favor. I don’t want a messy hearing. There’ll be press, it’ll string out forever. Write a little note for Kaplan’s file. Drop the testimony. I mean it’s one case out of thousands. We got a big system to run here, right?”
Bloom shone his smile. Karp was impassive.
“No.”
“What? Karp, damn it, you’re being plain unreasonable. Didn’t you understand what I said?”
Karp struggled to his feet and set his crutches. “Yes, I did. And I think it sucks. And there’s going to be no secret screwing with Mike Kaplan, and no secret deals with Lennie or Irv. If anything like that goes down, I will jump the reservation in a New York minute. I will demand a judicial hearing. I will leak like a sieve. I will call Breslin. And I will call Alfredo Marchione and tell him the case against his brother’s murderers is being gutted by the DA because Mister Bloom doesn’t like a technical procedure that Phil Garrahy used every day for forty years. That ought to go down like peaches and cream at the Chelsea Democratic Club, of which Alfredo is past president and spiritual leader.”
Bloom gaped like a carp. “You. You’re threatening me. You’re threatening me?”
“No, I’m not,” said Karp, turning away and humping toward the door. “I have no reason to threaten you. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
That evening Karp took a cab over to Bellevue. Three days a week he had physical therapy from Hector Delgado, ate dinner in the hospital cafeteria, and then went up to see Marlene Ciampi. He went after normal visiting hours, because during them a tide of relatives filled the room. Hector knew the nurse, so Karp got fifteen minutes alone after she had shooed the Ciampis onto the elevator.
It was hard for Marlene to talk much, with her healing face. They were tapering her off the dope, but she still drifted in and out of sleep a lot. Tonight she was out cold. Karp sat in a wheelchair, held her hand and watched TV. This is what it will be like at Golden Age Ranch, when we’re old, he thought.
It was a World War II movie. A sailor ran up to the star and said, “Captain, the Jap carrier is reported dead in the water and burning.” Karp liked the phrase. “Marlene,” he said softly, “you know what I did today? Don’t ask, but I’m dead in the water and burning.” He kissed her cheek and left. He felt light and clean, better than he had in months, better than he had since Garrahy died.
And of course he didn’t get the bureau chief job. That went to a crony of Wharton’s named S. Mervin Spence. Which meant the scam in the Complaint Room was off, or at least scaled way down. Which meant that morale dropped a little lower among the best of Karp’s young lawyers. Who simply left. Kaplan, then Dellia, then half a dozen others. Which meant that the criminal justice system became a little more of a joke. Wharton’s administrative system was in high gear. He knew exactly what was happening in every part of the DA’s office. The problem was, nothing was happening. As V.T. said, “The criminal justice system is neither a system, nor just, but it is criminal.” When the conviction rate hit twenty-five percent Karp stopped charting it.
Karp traded in his crutches for a cane and by Christmas he was walking unaided. He began once again to walk to and from the office when the streets weren’t slick. Toward the end of the winter he grew restless. I’m waiting, he thought. Waiting for what? For spring. For the girl to get better. Waiting for him, for Louis, to make his move.
In March, nearly four years from the day he had murdered the Marchiones, Mandeville Louis reappeared in court. He had spent the fall and winter back in Matteawan, worrying and making plans. He kept telling himself time was on his side. Maybe the witness would die. Maybe Karp would die, or Elvis. He covered sheets of paper with carefully drawn plans, boxes and arrows, showing what would happen if this one did this and the other one did that. He stayed up late making one backup plan after another. Somehow they never seemed to make much sense in the morning and he would take his night’s work and tear it to shreds.
He couldn’t make contact with the perfect Louis anymore. That was what hurt the most. He had to pretend so much, to be cheerful, and not act out, not give vent to his almost continuous rage. Dr. Dope didn’t like acting out. Louis’s life had, of course, been one long pretense, but then he had been the master, that was the point.
He couldn’t get Karp out of his mind. Karp knew. That was the tumor eating his brain. He had tried to destroy Karp and failed. And Elvis was ratting him out. That hurt too, after all he had done for that little punk. And he couldn’t get to him. He took his yellow legal pad and wrote, “KARP KNOWS” and “ELVIS RATS” in big block letters. He drew lines connecting different letters together, trying to make sense out of it, trying for some combination that would bring back the old Louis.
Around three one morning, eyes burning, hand aching from gripping the pencil, he knew he had found it. He wrote furiously, page after page. From time to time he laughed out loud. The next day, early, he called Leonard Sussman and told him to set a hearing date.
When Karp saw Judge Yergin on the bench, he thought he had died and gone to heaven. He had been expecting Stein, and he didn’t think even Daniel Webster could have convinced the old Swerve-with his elaborate political connections to the psychiatric community- that one of its distinguished members was both a jerk and a crook. Yergin looked irritated and bored. He must have been dragged in to preside at the last minute. Karp felt he was on a roll.
The players were in their familiar places: Louis looking docile, dull-skinned, and tired, flabby from four years of hospital food; Sussman, unchanging, immaculate, sitting rather farther away from his client than was usual. But this time there were more supporting characters. Dr. Edmund Stone, for one, had been dragged from his research and pinned to the stand, like one of his preparations, by Karp’s questions.
“Doctor Stone,” Karp was saying, “I don’t understand. Are you able to tell this court today if Mandeville Louis is competent to stand trial?”
“Yes, I am,” Stone answered. In fact, he barely remembered Louis. He had just done whatever Werner told him to do, and had signed off on whatever Werner told him to sign. Werner left him alone and didn’t ask too many questions about what experimental drugs Stone gave to indigent patients. It was a fair deal.
“Good. I ask you again, Doctor. In your medical opinion, is the defendant, Mandeville Louis, competent and ready to stand trial?”
Stone essayed a superior smile. “That would depend.”
“Doctor, you just told me you could answer the question. Do so!”
“The issue in a Ganser syndrome case, you must understand, is not the definition of ‘competence’ but of ‘ready.’ ”
“Ready? That means right now, prepared, able to understand the charges made against him and aid in the preparation of his defense. So yes or no-which is it? Doctor.” Karp put as much heat and venom into this last thrust as he thought he could get away with- without being accused of harassing the witness.