Robert Tanenbaum - Justice Denied

The judge was not used to jailing people in nice suits with, as the saying went, roots in the community. He pondered for a few seconds and, using his years of experience on the bench, pulled a number out of the air: “Bail is set in the amount of five million dollars.”

Sighs from the small group of people sitting behind the defense table. Karp thought it a reasonable out for the judge. Bondsmen would not touch a bail like that, which meant that Tomasian and his near and dear would have to raise the face amount, which meant in all probability that the guy was going back inside.

Karp waited at the head of the aisle. When Roland reached him, he said, “Nice work, Roland. The City sleeps safer tonight.”

Hrcany’s face twisted. “It should have been a no-bailer. These are diamond people, for chrissake! Who knows what they’ve got squirreled away?”

“Maybe. Meanwhile, I’m glad I caught you, Roland. I was just curious: what did you find in the vic’s safe-deposit box?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“The box. The vic had a box key on him when he went down. What’s in it?”

Roland’s eyes narrowed slightly and his body tensed.

“What is this, Butch? You checking up on me?”

“No, it just happened to cross my eye. I have to go and sit down with Bloom this afternoon and tell him that the case is a wrap, which is the only thing he wants to hear. So I needed to know if it is.”

A flush began to rise under Roland’s jaw. “Wait a minute! Since when did you give a shit about Bloom?”

Karp ignored this and pitched his voice to its maximally calming tone. “That’s not the point, Roland. The fact that a victim has a safe box suggests a repository of information that could bear on the case, and I need to know what was in it before I go talk to Bloom. So what was it?”

Roland, of course, had noted the box key first thing, but in the flush of success had neglected to follow up on it. He covered himself now by blustering. “How the fuck do I know? Cuff links? His birth certificate? What the hell does it matter?”

“You haven’t checked it,” said Karp.

“I don’t believe this! You still don’t get it. This is the guy. It doesn’t fucking matter what’s in the box. We don’t have to trace the victim’s movements or his fucking associates, or find out what he ate for his last meal. It ain’t no mystery, Butch.”

Karp shifted gears. “The alibi didn’t check out, huh? You talked to the girlfriend?”

“The girlfriend is gone,” replied Roland with an unpleasant smile. “Her office says she’s on leave. So I got a warrant to search her place, knowing, knowing, that you would bug me about her. They found a VISA counterfoil for a ticket to San Francisco. We checked with the airlines: she was on a flight that left late that Sunday. I wonder why.”

“You think she’s involved?”

“I know it. Her place was full of Armenian nationalist literature, some of it copies of the stuff we found in Tomasian’s office. They were in it together. In fact, it wouldn’t blow me away if we found out that she was the other gun.”

“So we’re looking for her.”

“Yeah, she’s out on the wire. But whether she turns up or not, it shoots the shit out of our boy’s alibi.”

Karp nodded agreement. “Yeah, it does, provided he needs one.”

“What?”

“Roland, what happens to your open-and-shut case if there’s five kilos of Turkish heroin in his box? Or a letter from a shark that says, ‘Pay up or else!’?”

“This is horseshit, Butch!” cried Roland, going red again.

“Just open the box, Roland,” said Karp, and walked away.

Detective Camano turned out to be one of those cops who had retired on the job. The Jane Doe from Avenue A was an easy clearance, one of hundreds of miscellaneous bodies and parts of bodies that turned up in the City every year.

“It ain’t homicide to get a bite on the ass,” he told Marlene confidently. “The M.E. says there was no sign of foul play.”

“Biting isn’t foul play?”

“I mean not a cause of death. Look, honey, there’s no knife wound, there’s no gunshot wound, she wasn’t strangled, or tied up-”

“You haven’t considered the possibility that she was raped and thrown out of a window?”

A long-suffering sigh on the line. “We checked the houses on both sides of the street. Nobody saw nothing, and there’s no woman missing from any of the apartments.”

“What about the street girls?”

A laugh. “They haven’t missed a trick, is what I hear. Look, we got forty, forty-five homicides on the chart here that we know are homicides. We don’t need to invent any, especially when the M.E. isn’t ready to call it.”

“What about the rape part?”

“We don’t know that either. I got nobody on the block saying they saw this chick dragged into the bushes. Nobody’s coming around saying where’s my Mary. So what am I gonna go on? Fingerprints? Sperm samples? You know how I figure it? This chick gets off a bus, tries the sporting life, a customer gets a little rough, and she decides to take a jump.”

It was a dead end with this guy. Marlene decided to waste no more time. She said, “I hope you’re right, Detective Camano. On the other hand, if we get three more women’s bodies turning up with bite marks in the same places, and one of them is the mayor’s niece, I’ll remember this conversation and bring it up whenever I can with whoever will listen.”

She slammed her phone down and reached for the next call message in the stack.

After fuming in his office for a half hour and being rude to everyone within easy reach, Roland called Frangi at Midtown South and told him to get over to the bank where Mehmet Ersoy had maintained a safety-deposit box, with key to same. Roland stood impatiently over a secretary while a warrant was typed out, whipped into a judge’s office, got it signed, and left immediately for the bank.

Frangi was already there. He had identified himself to the bank branch manager. Roland flashed his warrant, and they were allowed to follow a uniformed guard into the vault.

“What’s going on?” asked Frangi.

“Nothing. My boss got a hair up his ass about this case.”

It was one of the large kind, a smooth steel box nearly the size of a bus station locker. The guard used Ersoy’s key and the bank’s key to remove the box, and carried it with dignity to a little room, where he placed it on a table and departed.

Frangi flipped up the lid of the box. He let out a wordless exclamation. Hrcany looked inside and cursed and stamped his foot.

“How much you figure?” asked Frangi.

Both men had considerable experience in judging large volumes of cash. Roland rummaged in the box, flipping stacks of bills at random. They were hundreds, all of them, in fresh bank wrappers marked “$10,000.”

“A million,” said Roland, “at least. Maybe a little more.”

“Thrifty guy,” said Frangi glumly.

Karp sloshed his drink idly in his glass and looked around through the milling crowd for Marlene. As a rule, he disliked workplace parties. He had to pretend to like drinking, to find amusement in what drinking did to the brain and behavior (in order to avoid being thought a spoilsport, one of Karp’s big fears, and somewhat justified), and to socialize with people he would not have shared three words with had they not had a function in his professional life, and, since his profession was criminal justice, that included socializing with an unusual number of unpleasant people.

He would have avoided this party, as he had many others, had not the guest of honor been Tom Pagano, the outgoing director of the Legal Aid Society offices for the Manhattan criminal courts and a man for whom Karp had immense respect and affection. Pagano had been copping pleas when Karp was still in grade school, and now, in his early sixties and tired, had been rewarded with a judgeship, which in comparison to running Legal Aid was a paid vacation.