Robert Tanenbaum: Justice Denied

“So what do you think? He’ll keep sticking to it?” asked Roland.

Wayne said, “Yeah. This boy’s no scuzzball off the block; you’re gonna have to take it the distance, Roland, unless we turn up the partner.”

“Any leads on that?”

“Nothing so far, but we haven’t been through his papers completely yet. We’ll find him.”

Roland nodded and picked up a piece of paper on which Wayne had written an inventory of the items seized from Tomasian’s home and business.

“Okay, what about these guns?”

Wayne said, “He had a damn armory in that footlocker. The pistols are new, some of them still in boxes, but a couple could have been fired. Walther P5’s, 9mm. Then we got two H amp;K 54 submachine guns, also 9mm, also new, with the packing grease still on them, plus about three thousand rounds of 9mm. Parabellum.”

“That’s what the vic was shot with, right?”

“Right. And illegal as hell, the bunch of it.”

“What’s his story? You ask him?”

“A shooting club. Self-protection for Armenian businessmen. He picked the stuff up in Germany, he says. Goes over a couple times a year to buy gems. He doesn’t deny he smuggled the weapons in. Says he got a good deal, he didn’t think it was any big thing.”

“How wrong he was,” said Roland. “Meanwhile, we’ll do the ballistics on all the weapons, just to make sure he didn’t use them and then clean them up and rebox them. Now what about this assassination gun?”

Frangi smiled. “Uh-huh. You don’t see many like that. In fact, there weren’t that many to begin with. It’s an old World War II, what they call a grease gun, an M3 submachine gun chambered for the 9mm. Parabellum, but this one’s modified with a built-in silencer in the barrel. They made about a thousand of them for the OSS during the war. Shoot thirty rounds out of that thing, it’d make no more noise than a wet fart in an elevator.”

Hrcany seemed about to say something but didn’t. Instead he let out a hard laugh. “Also for protection and sport, no doubt?”

“I don’t know; that one he wouldn’t talk about,” said Frangi.

Hrcany picked a heavy spring-type hand exerciser from his desk and began to squeeze the handles without apparent effort. The muscles in his forearms flexed dramatically. He thought for a minute in silence as he pumped.

“Okay, like you said, do the papers. Find the other guy. Do the ballistics. Get the witnesses in to look at the car and Tomasian-I know he was masked, but let’s go through the drill.”

“They got a rubber print off the car at the scene,” offered Wayne.

“Yeah, that too,” said Roland. “Every little bit helps.” He looked at his watch. “Okay, let’s see this bozo now. I got a full day.”

The initial Q. amp; A. with Aram Tomasian did not in any way diminish Hrcany’s belief that he had in custody the murderer of Mehmet Ersoy. Tomasian had a lawyer present, so Roland could not get away with his famous screaming wildman act, but he was able to confront the suspect with: his hatred of Turks; his possession of the requisite hardware and the right car; his inability to account for his whereabouts at the time of the crime and for hours on either side of it.

Tomasian’s response to all this was weak. The alibi was a joke. Even if the girlfriend showed up, her testimony was hardly gilt-edged. Tomasian admitted the letters but denied the license plate. His plate had been stolen ten days before the crime. He had reported it to the police. He had not used his car in the interim, while he waited for a replacement plate to be issued. Or so he said.

Not a bad Q. amp; A., Roland thought. He had enough to charge, enough to indict. When the lab stuff proved out, he’d have enough to convict. A nice package.

Delivering this package to Karp was a moment Roland had keenly anticipated, one that in his imaginings would be second only to the one when the jury returned a guilty verdict in People v. Tomasian. Roland and Karp went back a long way. They had entered Garrahy’s old operation on the same day. In a system that put a premium on toughness, on hard work for little reward, on success in the arena of the court, both had flourished. Karp had perhaps flourished a little more, but that was because, Roland had told himself in his secret heart, Karp had sucked up to old Garrahy in politics and gotten hold of a bureau chief’s job in the Criminal Courts Bureau.

Still, Roland considered himself Karp’s equal in the courtroom, and more than his equal in the battle of life. Roland had done well in the market; Karp lived on his ungenerous salary. He had a parade of young lovelies in his bed; Karp was married to a one-eyed woman who, by all Roland’s experience of her, was a massive pain in the ass. He lived in a five-room apartment in the Village; Karp lived in a converted SoHo factory. He had a perfect body: Karp was a semi-cripple.

On the other hand … what was it on the other hand? Roland had trouble pinning it down. Something about Karp irked him mightily. Perhaps it was his refusal to be patronized by Roland, his refusal to recognize that there was a contest going on. Karp was playing, and playing well, but he wasn’t watching the score.

When Hrcany entered the office, Karp had his leg up on his desk and was engaged in wrapping an Ace bandage tightly around his left knee. Roland grinned and said, “You got another call from the pros? They can’t live without your two-inch jumper?”

Karp returned a bleak look. “Screw the pros. I’m hoping I can make it to the can and back.” With a movement of his head he indicated the case file Roland was carrying. “That the U.N. thing?”

Roland slapped the folder on Karp’s desk and sat down. “Yeah, it’s wrapped up. How do you like that?”

Karp’s eyebrows rose a notch. “No kidding? The warrant paid off, huh?”

“Jackpot. The guy had an armory in his safe. We got threatening letters to the Turks. We got the parka he wore. It’s all over but the details.” He quickly filled Karp in on what the police had found.

Roland spoke confidently-in truth, with more confidence than he felt, for he was a careful and rigorous lawyer. Karp tended to bring out the boastful in him, and Karp understood this, if Roland himself did not.

Karp finished wrapping his knee and pulled his pants leg down. He smiled wanly across the desk. “Sounds great, Roland,” he said. “It could be a record for tying up a major case. What’s the guy like?”

“A little twerp. Got tired of making earrings, figured being a terrorist might be more fun. I mean, everybody else is doing it, right? Fucks it up, gets pinched the next day, now he wants out. He’s hamburger.”

“If you say so, Roland. It sure comes at a good time. Bloom’s been on the horn three, four times, what’s going down with the U.N. thing? You sure don’t want to kill anybody with political clout on his watch. I presume you’ll want to bring the good news personally to Mr. District Attorney.”

Roland did indeed want to bring the news to Bloom, and stand next to him at the press conference that Bloom would instantly arrange, but he would die before admitting it to Karp. If Roland shared Karp’s contempt for the D.A. as a legal mind, he was more attracted than Karp to power-not an unusual thing in bright and ambitious men, especially lawyers. Roland knew that, given a chance, he could manipulate the D.A.-in the interests of good, of course. The present case seemed an ideal opportunity to do so. Roland shrugged and said, “Hey, whatever.”

Karp smiled again. “Go do it, Roland. Give him a kiss for me.”

Roland laughed, a deep, loud rumble. “On the lips, Butch.”

As soon as Roland left, Karp put the murder of the Turkish diplomat entirely out of his mind and turned to the contemplation of a kind of murder less distinguished but far more numerous. From the center drawer of his desk he extracted a large sheet of yellow paper. It was actually four sheets of the large-ruled stock that accountants call spreadsheets taped together. On it were written the names of his attorneys, the cases they were responsible for, and the schedule proposed for each case.