Robert Tanenbaum - Outrage

The night before, Guma had admitted that he felt old, which was unusual for him. The cancer had beat him “like a rented mule,” he’d said, and he’d never regained the energy levels he had before chemotherapy. “But it’s not that so much. It’s this shit,” he said, holding up the case file. “I’m tired of crime scenes and the tears of moms and dads, fathers, husbands, wives, and especially the children. Tired of all the wasted lives. Tired of the excuses and the senseless brutality. It’s just wearing on my heart and soul.”

Concerned, Karp said, “You don’t have to do this anymore, Goom. You fought the good fight. You could retire.”

“Yeah?” Guma asked. “Lay down the sword and fade away, forget about fighting the bad guys? Forget about justice? Could you?”

Karp smiled and shook his head. “No. Guess we’re in this until they kick us out.”

“Or we die with our boots on, whichever comes first,” Guma said, laughing.

Tired or not, Guma’s dark brown eyes were still bright with intelligence when he opened them again in Karp’s office and said, “But there’s a bigger problem than leading questions and threatening a suspect with the death penalty.”

“The ring,” Karp said grimly.

“Yeah, the ring,” Guma said in agreement. “I figured you’d seen it and that was why you wanted me to speed-read the file.”

“Yep,” Karp replied. “There’s nothing in the DD-5s to corroborate that the ring found on Acevedo is the same ring taken from Olivia Yancy. No report that says the ring was ever shown to her husband to confirm or deny. The single most important piece of evidence in the entire case against Acevedo and we have no idea if it’s even true. It’s a house of cards.”

Guma raised a bushy eyebrow. “The press is going to town on this one, and someone is feeding them juicy tidbits, probably the ‘hero’ detective. They’ve got the public convinced that we’ve got the Columbia U Slasher off the streets. If this makes the media look like fools-more than the usual amount-they’re going to be pissed. And it’s not going to be fun if this falls apart.”

Karp scowled and stood up. “I could give a rat’s ass about the press. We’ve got a young guy locked up and charged with murder, and he could be innocent as far as we know because there’s nothing in here”-he slammed a hand on the file folder-“that corroborates his guilt. I need some answers, and fast.” Karp turned to look out the window onto the teeming sidewalks and streets below.

He turned back to Guma. “How many times have I said whenever we have a confession from a defendant or an admission of culpability that we need other evidence connecting the defendant to the crime?” he said. “That’s the very basic rudiment of corroboration. And in a case like this-a high-profile case that serves as a window for the public to see into the justice system-we didn’t even begin to check the provenance of the ring.”

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Guma asked, already starting to stand up from his chair.

Karp turned and nodded. “Go get the ring out of the evidence safe,” he said.

“I’m on it,” Guma answered, heading out of the office as Karp picked up the desk phone and punched in a number.

When a familiar voice picked up on the other end, he said, “Clay, do me favor, get a car and meet me and Goom out front in a half hour; we’re going to take a drive up to Columbia University to see Professor Dale Yancy. Thanks.”

Twenty-five minutes later, Karp and Guma walked out of the Criminal Courts Building and up to the curb, where a black sedan with tinted windows waited. They climbed in, Guma in front and Karp in back. Sitting in the driver’s seat, Clay Fulton, the head of the NYPD detective squad assigned to the DAO, turned around. “Any stops along the way?” he asked.

Karp thought about it for a moment and nodded. “Take us to the crime scene first.” Fulton stepped on the gas and not long after that Karp sat gazing up at the dingy ten-story apartment building where less than a year earlier Olivia Yancy and Beth Jenkins had been butchered. He imagined their terror and their helplessness, knowing they were going to die, anticipating the painful cuts and vicious blows. The killer raping Olivia even as she bled out.

With an effort, he pulled his mind away from the crime scene photographs indelibly fixed in his mind’s eye, unclenched his fists, and looked around. The savagery was so incongruous with the scene surrounding him on a warm afternoon in May.

In many ways, the Morningside Heights neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan resembled a small town more than the urban jungle usually associated with Gotham. Gentrified over the past four decades, the streets were lined with apartment buildings and row houses, but there were no skyscrapers in sight. And the street-level spaces were filled by small cafes, fresh produce grocers, florists, and boutique coffee shops.

In some ways, Morningside had a similar feel to the Lower East Side’s Alphabet City with its more laid-back atmosphere and ranks of casually dressed pedestrians. Quite a difference from the hectic pace of the business-suited men and women in the Financial District and Midtown’s Madison Avenue. Absent the glitz of the opposite end of the island, Morningside attracted a smaller percentage of tourists who were more likely to be students and faculty of one of a half dozen higher education institutions in the neighborhood.

In fact, Morningside Heights was sometimes referred to as “the Academic Acropolis” due to the number of educational institutions packed into the section of New York that ran north to south from 125th Street to 106th and was framed by Riverside Drive on the west and Morningside Drive on the east. Within those boundaries were Barnard College, Union Theological Seminary, New York Theological Seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the Manhattan School of Music, Teachers College, Bank Street College of Education, and, of course, the neighborhood’s biggest landowner and star resident, Columbia University.

Morningside was the sort of neighborhood where professors led informal discussions on the scientific questions of the day at the PicNic Market and Cafe or debated books and philosophy at the Greek restaurant aptly named Symposium. And jazz fans could find top-notch students and professors taking to the stage at the Smoke jazz lounge.

It was hard to imagine such a brutal crime had been committed there, and Karp wanted the guy who did it. The right guy, he thought before saying aloud, “Thanks, Clay. I just wanted to see this place for myself. Let’s head over to the university. Darla Milquetost called and Mr. Yancy is in class, but he’ll be done in thirty minutes and I want to catch him before he leaves.”

Karp was quiet for a moment then addressed Fulton. “Clay, do you remember when we first met?” Karp asked.

“The LeRoi Rodriguez case, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Karp reminisced, “I was brand-new to the DAO and working in the criminal courts under the inimitable Mel Glass. Man, he was special. But in my class of seventeen ADAs out of eight hundred applicants, I always figured that I was number seventeen. Everybody else seemed to have come from some big-name law school, including Fordham and St. John’s. And all of them had more practical experience working in courtrooms than a grad of the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC-Berkeley whose professors were long on theory and short on practicality. Anyway, I knew I had some catching up to do, so when Mel would ask who wanted to volunteer to handle the competency hearings over at Bellevue Hospital, I raised my hand.”

The hearings were held weekly in the psychiatric ward dayroom. They weren’t to determine a defendant’s sanity at the time of the alleged crimes-that might come up later at trial-but rather whether the accused was mentally competent to stand trial. As such there were two due-process issues: did the defendant understand the nature of the charges against him, and was he able to assist his defense lawyer in the proceedings?