Robert Tanenbaum: Irresistible Impulse

Karp still had a couple of people on his staff who remembered the golden age. Ray Guma, sitting just to his left, was one of them; Roland Hrcany, Karp’s deputy bureau chief, sitting halfway down the table, was another. Most of the other A.D.A.’s were young, eager, bright, and, in Karp’s opinion, almost completely unprepared to try homicide cases. Training had not been a big priority of the previous management; for that matter, neither had homicide trials. This was changing, but slowly, painfully, and in the nature of things, it was these people who were going to bear most of the pain. Fortunately, Karp had a willing sadist in Roland, whose current twitchings, subvocalized profanities, and nostril flarings informed Karp that the bomb was about to go off.

Roland Hrcany brought his massive knuckles down on the table twice, like the crack of doom. Hrcany had the physique and mien of a television wrestler, with white-blond hair worn long to the collar and a face like a slab of raw steak. Nolan froze in mid-sentence.

“Ah, Gerry,” said Roland, “this Mrs. Rodriguez, the neighbor, seems to be your chief witness. In fact, she’s your only decent witness, am I right?”

“There’s Fuentes,” offered Nolan.

“ Oh, fuck Fuentes!” snarled Roland. “Fuentes is the vic’s sister. Morella used to beat the shit out of the wife before he went upstate. Fuentes’d say he was Hitler. No witness. So, you going to trial with Rodriguez, Gerry? Is that what you’re telling us? With no gun? Where’s the fucking gun, Jerry?”

“He had a gun,” said Nolan. “We had a witness who saw him with it …” He started leafing frantically through his papers, seeking the name of the witness who had seen the D. with a gun.

“Hey, he had a gun? Nolan, I had a gun once too. Maybe I killed Carmen Morella and what’s-his-face, the boyfriend, Claudio Bona,” said Roland. “Anyway, what’s Ms. Rodriguez’s story? Did she get along with Carmen okay? Did she ever fuck Claudio? Did she ever fuck Morella? What about her kids? They selling any dope up there on East 119th Street?”

Guma said, “Yo, and I hear old Claudio was pretty tight with the Colombians.” Everyone looked at him. Guma had a reputation as a man from whom organized crime in the City held no secrets. Nolan’s face was blotched red where it was not cheeselike.

“I … um, there was no evidence of drug, um, involvement,” he stammered.

“No evidence?” said Roland. “Did you check? Did you check with Narco? With Organized Crime? No, you didn’t. You don’t know shit about Mrs. Rodriguez either, just her statement. You know what you got? You’re on your knees saying, ‘Believe the Rodriguez woman and not the D.’s witness, the cousin, Morella’s cousin, who says he wasn’t anywhere near the place when the shooting went down.’”

“There’s the forensics. He was there.”

Roland hooted. “The forensics! My sweet white ass, the forensics! Schmuck! It was his apartment before he went upstate. The vic was his wife! Of course there’re fucking prints and fibers. There’s going to be his prints and fiber on her snatch! No, look: let me tell you what you did, sonny. You didn’t build a case with your own hands. You just bought what the cops dragged in, and what the cops did was they caught this case, a couple uptown spics get whacked, no biggie, they check out the husband did time, got a violent sheet on him, and case closed. Well, fuck them, that’s their job. Your job, which you didn’t do, was to construct a case that would stand the test of no reasonable doubt. What we got instead is something any little pisher in Legal Aid with two weeks’ experience could drive a tank through.”

And more of the same, with Guma joining in, and a couple of the more confident of the group picking like vultures on the bones of the case. Nolan grew paler and quieter; he stopped making objections, and scribbled notes, nodding like a mechanical toy. Karp ended his misery by suggesting that he needed some more time to prepare, and after that the meeting dissolved. Everyone filed out with unusual rapidity, as if fleeing one afflicted with a purulent disease. Nolan was silently gathering up his papers when Karp said, “Gerry, the reason why we do this is that we figure it’s better you get it here than in court, in front of a judge.”

Nolan looked up, his lips tight, his chest heaving with suppressed rage. “I got twenty-eight convictions,” he said “I don’t like being treated like a kid out of law school.”

Karp had heard this before. “It doesn’t matter what you did in Felony, Gerry. This is the Show, the majors. It doesn’t matter you could hit the Triple-A fast-balls. Homicide is different, which is the point of all this.”

“Morella did it.”

“I’m sure,” said Karp. “But like I’ve said, more than once, it’s irrelevant that he did it. The only question is, Do you have a case of the quality necessary to convict? And you don’t. So get one and come back with it.”

Nolan gave him a bleak look, stuck his file folders under his arm, and walked out.

Karp was sure that Nolan would be back, and with a better case too, because Karp had picked him as being the kind of skinny Irishman who never gives up. Nolan was an athlete. He had been a J.V. quarterback at Fordham, although someone as small as Nolan should never have gone anywhere near a football field. In fact, all the people Karp hired were athletes of one kind or another. It was a tradition. Roland was a wrestler and running back. Guma was a shortstop who, before he got fat, had been offered a tryout with the Yankees. Karp himself was a high-school All-American and a PAC-10 star before an injury to his knee ended his career. The other twenty-two attorneys on Karp’s staff included enough football and basketball and baseball players to field complete teams, and good teams, in each of those sports. The three women on the staff included a UConn power forward, a sprinter, and an AAU champion diver. The one wheelchair guy played basketball. A jock sort of place, the Homicide Bureau; Karp believed, on some evidence, that no one who did not have the murderously competitive instincts of a serious athlete could handle the rigors of homicide prosecution, or the sort of coaching delivered by people like Roland Hrcany. The sports credential impressed the cops too, which didn’t hurt.

The phone rang. Karp picked up, listened for a moment, said, “I’ll be by in a minute,” and hung up. He stood, and from long habit tested his left knee before he allowed it to take weight. It would undoubtedly hold, being made of stainless steel and other stuff he did not particularly want to think about. Karp was six feet five, with long legs and very long arms, and the ends of which were wide, spider-fingered hands. His face was wide too, and bony, with high cheekbones and a nose lumpy from more than one break. He still had his hair at thirty-seven, and he kept it shorter than was fashionable then, at the start of the eighties. The two surprising features were the mouth, which was mobile and sensual, and the eyes, which had a nearly oriental cast and which were gray with gold flecks: hard eyes to meet in a stare, hard eyes to lie into. Karp walked out of his office, told his secretary where he was going, and (a daily masochism) took the stairs two flights up to the eighth floor, where the D.A. had his office.

The man behind the D.A.’s desk was an older version of the sort of man Karp was, although of the Irish rather than the Jewish model. Jack Keegan’s skin was bright pink rather than sallow like Karp’s, and his hair was thinner and silver. The eyes were blue, but they had the same expression: bullshit me, laddie, at your extreme peril.

Without preamble, when Karp walked into his office, Jack Keegan roared, “Rohbling, Rohbling, Rohbling, bless his tiny evil heart!”