Robert Tanenbaum - Falsely Accused

Marlene looked at her friend, at the sharpened pencil poised quivering over the pad, at the bright and merciless gleam in her eye. The thought entered Marlene’s mind that it was like having a pal who became a gynecologist: whatever the prior relationship, it inevitably became different when you were up on the table with your legs spread, watching her approach with the shiny instruments of the profession.

“What’s funny?” Stupenagel asked, seeing the expression that now crossed Marlene’s face.

“Oh, nothing,” said Marlene, putting her mug into neutral. Then she began the tale of Carrie and Rob, the official version, of course, and hoped that Stupenagel was not as perceptive as Karp.

Someone had once told Karp that clients were to the law what the serpent was to the Garden of Eden. Heretofore the truth of this had not been pressed upon him, as he had spent virtually all of his professional career as a prosecutor, for whom the client is the People, a pleasant abstraction having no propensity to deviousness or complaint. It was different now that he had a real client breathing, complaining, and being devious in his office. He did not much like it.

“Murray,” said Karp in a soothing voice, “it won’t matter. We’ll get by.”

“Yeah, you say that,” replied Selig. “How’re you going to do all the things you need to do for this trial without support from your firm? It’d be like trying to do a solo on a coronary bypass.”

“Right, and if I needed a coronary bypass, I’d take your advice. You need this trial, so take mine!”

A moment of glaring, and then Selig shook his chunky frame and grinned sheepishly. “Oh, crap, Butch-look, I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. I just hate this.”

Karp smiled back. “That’s because you’re a decent human being involved in a lawsuit. You’re supposed to hate it. If you liked it, I wouldn’t have anything to do with you. Anyway, as I was about to point out, we can hire support on the outside. I have a freelance paralegal lined up, and a steno who’s going to come in a little while and take the Mayor’s deposition. That’s part of what’s happening now, at this stage of the proceedings. I’ll be deposing the defendants-”

“Just the Mayor?”

“No. Fuerza too. And the D.A.”

“What’s the point of him? I didn’t work for the D.A.”

“No,” said Karp smoothly, “but his defamation helped form the basis of the firing, and added to the stigma you’re suffering now.” This partial truth was accepted without demur, and Karp continued. “We’ll also depose all the people who supplied information in the two letters that formed the basis of the decision to fire you.”

“The lies.”

“As we will prove,” said Karp. “Also, the defendants will get a crack at you and all of our witnesses, and they’re obviously going to concentrate especially on you.”

“That’s okay,” said Selig lightly. “I have nothing to hide.”

Karp shot a stern look across his desk. “Wrong thinking, Murray. Everybody has something to hide-Mother Teresa, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, I don’t care- everybody . The issue here is, you want to win this case, you don’t hide it from me.”

Selig nodded soberly. “I understand.”

“Okay, let me make sure that you do. This case is about reputation. They said you’re a sleazeball, you say you’re not. It is to their very great advantage to blacken you even more than they have already. Now, they’ve restricted the calumny to your professional behavior as C.M.E., but at this point any sleaze will do, because they’re trying to paint a picture for the jury and they want to make it the portrait of Dorian Gray. Look, let’s say for the sake of argument that you enjoy fucking chickadees in the privacy of your own home …”

Selig guffawed.

“… okay, you’re a little embarrassed, you don’t tell me. So at deposition, they got this, oh, say, some secretary up there on what looks like some minor paper trail matter and they ask her, did you bring those papers to Dr. Selig? Yes. And what was he doing when you got there? Oh, he was fucking this chickadee out by the birdhouse. Now, at that point I object, of course, but it’s now part of the public record, and unless I can get it thrown out by the judge via a motion in limine, the jury will hear about it, and that’s what they’re going to see when they look at you, a guy with a vice he’s ashamed to admit, and they’re going to inevitably think, if he’s covered this up, what else is there, and even if we destroy all their charges one by one, they’re still going to think, hey, where there’s smoke … You follow the logic?”

“Uh-huh. Okay, but I have this secret, what does it matter if I tell you first? What can you do? It’ll still come out.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Karp. “The point is, if I’m not surprised, then we’re in control, not them. We can do a deal. Let’s say we find out the Mayor likes to get sucked off by a python, he keeps it in a bathtub down at City Hall …”

“I love your imagination. Snakes can’t suck anything, though-they have no lips.”

Karp rolled his eyes. “Let me write that down, I never want to forget it. It’s just an example, Murray, for chrissake. Okay, we tell the D.: forget the chickadees, we won’t touch on the snake. Alternatively, we bring up the chickadees ourselves.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“Anything you bring up voluntarily has less sting than it does if the other side brings it up. In the hypothetical we’re discussing, we’d go in with a shrink: Dr. Selig has this chickadee problem, he’s fighting it, he’s in recovery. In your professional opinion, did it affect his work one iota? No. No further questions. Now the jury sees a courageous guy who’s trying to conquer an embarrassing fault, and isn’t afraid to admit it. Shit, if he’ll come out about the chickadees, he’s sure as hell not hiding anything else. Get the point?”

“Point got,” said Selig. “But I’m sorry-right now no secret vices spring to mind. I’ll talk to Naomi, though. She knows my faults better than I do.”

Karp gave his client a hard and unamused stare, but his client’s eyes slid away. Karp was about to say something when the buzzer on his desk bleated, and the receptionist announced the arrival of the Mayor of the City of New York.

Stupenagel stuck her pencil behind her ear and flipped through the pages of her steno pad. The story she had just heard was consistent and logical, but still it stirred some reportorial instinct of suspicion. “It was lucky that this cop Bello was there when this guy started to beat on you,” she said, trolling.

“There was no luck to it, Stupe. I told you, he was shadowing her. We figured Pruitt would make a move sooner or later.”

“Sounds almost like you baited a trap.”

“Carrie Lanin is not a criminal,” Marlene said with some heat. “She has the right to go anywhere and see anyone anytime. She doesn’t have to live like a hermit because some asshole is harassing her. Besides”-here she pointed at the livid bruises that covered most of her face-“do you think I planned for this to happen?”

Stupenagel did not. She had a good imagination and considerable experience with violence, but this experience did not support the notion that someone who looked like Marlene Ciampi would risk her face to put some jerk in prison. She nodded slightly and changed her tack.

“How long do you think he’ll get?”

“Oh, maybe five years, maybe three.”

“Is that worth it?”

Marlene took a deep breath and searched for an answer. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe somebody will shank him in prison. Maybe he’ll discover he likes fucking punks up the ass.”