Robert Tanenbaum - Justice Denied

“Okay, let’s take a look at him,” Roland said at last.

“Terrific,” said V.T. “I’ll be the nice guy.”

The two men left the room. Frangi got up to go with them, but Karp gestured for him to remain. Marlene said, “I notice Roland didn’t mention his jailhouse snitch. What about that?”

“Yeah, what about that?” said Karp. He stared at Frangi, who was down at the other end of the table, looking ill at ease.

Frangi shrugged. “Hey, all I know is, I got a call from the jail captain said this cell mate Medford, wanted to talk about Tomasian for a deal. I told Roland and we talked to the A.D.A. on the guy’s check kiting and then we went and talked to Medford. That’s all I know.”

“Well, if we’re right about Nassif,” said Karp, “it looks like the guy’s lying.”

“Snitches lie,” said Frangi.

“Yeah, they do, but it’s hard to believe a mutt like Medford would’ve come up with a hoax like that on his own.” Frangi started to protest, but Karp held up his hand and continued, “I don’t mean it was you. Or Roland either.”

“Who, then?” asked Marlene.

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter at this point,” Karp said quickly, although he thought it did matter a lot. A suspicion was growing in his mind, but he couldn’t do anything about it at present. It would have to wait. He said, “Thanks, Joe,” and Frangi left, followed soon by Guma.

Karp said, “Djelal, guys. How do we get him?”

“Not a prayer,” said Marlene, “unless his cugine rats him out, or unless you want to totally shit on the D.A. and harass Djelal’s butt and start an international incident. Even then he’s clean. We don’t have anything on him we could put on a warrant. Renting a locker and buying a jeweler’s furnace? Having a sleazy cousin? On the other hand, I’m dying to know what he has in that locker.”

“Yeah, me too,” said Karp, “but we’re going to have to keep dying, because we got no way into it legally.”

Marlene and Bello exchanged a look, so brief that no one else saw it, but one that compressed megabytes of data, like a satellite transmission.

As they walked out of the office together after the meeting, Harry said, “I got a delivery truck I can borrow, with a lift on it.”

“Good,” said Marlene. “Don’t hurt your back.”

Roland stopped by Karp’s office at ten that night. Karp was on his cot, memorizing his summation notes for the next day.

“You look comfy,” said Roland. “Comfy but lonely. Want me to send somebody up?”

“I’ll survive. This is the last day. What did you get?”

“We got shit. Nassif wouldn’t talk. I don’t mean he wouldn’t confess. I mean he wouldn’t talk, literally. And he was scared too. I never saw anyone in that much terror. His teeth were actually chattering.”

“Well, he does have the right to remain silent,” said Karp. “I guess he took it seriously.”

“No, he was waiting for us to start the tortures. Isn’t that Turkey where they hang you upside down and beat your feet with sticks? Frangi and me were screaming at him and dancing up and down, and he must’ve thought we were the good cops.”

“So you think they did it? The cousins?”

Roland frowned. “I didn’t say that. I think they did something, but I got noreason to believe that Tomasian wasn’t part of it.”

Karp nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay? That’s it?”

“Yeah, Roland, that’s it. It’s your case, like I’ve always said. We’ll see how things develop. Meanwhile, we’ll book Nassif for the fraud and see how he likes jail, with his cousin running around free. Maybe he’ll come around.”

Karp shaved and took a whore’s bath in the hall john that night. He was too tired to walk over to the jail; more than that, he didn’t want to see Russell again, except in court.

The next morning, of course, he did. Russell did not look well: even older than his years and his cheap suit was loose around his neck. Perhaps Freeland was giving him lessons in appearing pathetic and harmless, or maybe the reality of his situation was finally coming home to him.

Freeland led off on summation, as tradition demanded. He spoke for twenty-two minutes, a shortish speech, but then he didn’t have a lot to say. His own evidence was fairly weak: Tyler’s it-wasn’t-him and Ashakian’s gymnastic feat and the Sister. He spent most of his time pointing out the various places where the authorities might have lied. If you believed in conspiracies, it was a good story.

Karp spoke for nearly three times as long, but then, he had a lot more material to cover. He started off with James Turnbull’s testimony, the dramatic scene in the police station-Russell sitting there without his blue shirt and Turnbull leaping at him, accusing him with no prompting at all, the man who was physically the closest witness to the actual murder. You swine! This was the guy.

Then the chain of police testimony-Thornby’s adventure in the stifling black basement, the hiding fugitive, the sales slip found. Then Jerry Shelton’s identification-this was the man who had fled from the pursuing crowd.

Then the discovery of the purse and the knife and the shirt, and the identification of the shirt in the jail by the defendant himself.

He disposed of Tyler: a ridiculous witness-a one-second, impossible full-face glance at thirty, or was it forty-five, feet, compared to people-the Digbys, Shelton, Turnbull-who had positively and independently identified the defendant.

Karp walked over to the evidence table and picked up the sales slip from Bloomingdale’s and walked back to stand in front of the jury box.

“Susan Weiner is dead, her life cut short on a summer’s day at twenty-eight years of age. But in a way she is here in this courtroom right now. Because when she bought a pair of stockings at Bloomingdale’s in one of the last acts of her young life, she did something that was very human. She might have been in a hurry to come home to have lunch with her husband, so when they gave her her charge slip at Bloomingdale’s, she grabbed it and shoved it down among three bills, two ones and a five, that were in her purse.

“Hosie Russell murdered her for that seven dollars, but when he tore the wages of his crime out of her purse, he didn’t notice the VISA receipt wrapped in the currency; he was in a hurry too. And Officer Thornby found it in his pocket.”

Karp fluttered the little piece of white paper in front of the jury.

“This is Susan’s last message to us all. It doesn’t just say ‘six-ninety-five plus tax.’ It says, ‘Hosie Russell murdered me on my doorstep for seven dollars.’ It says, ‘Give me justice!’

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the evidence in this case is overwhelming and conclusive. It demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt, to a moral certainty, that Hosie Russell stabbed Susan Weiner to death in the course of a robbery. And so, in the name of the People of New York, I ask you to find Hosie Russell guilty of felony murder and guilty of intentional murder: guilty as charged.”

Karp waited a few beats, looking at each face in turn, and then spun on his crutches, walked over to his seat, and sat down.

Martino charged the jury. It was a good, fair charge, but in the nature of things, as he went over the points of evidence, explaining how the law applied to each one, it was inevitable that he mentioned prosecution evidence more than that of the defense. Karp had no problem with the charge, but Freeland did. All of his motions were, however, denied, and the jury marched out to deliberate at 4:45.

“How did it go?” Marlene asked.

“The usual.” They were in his office.

“You were brilliant and the other guy was an asshole?”