Robert Tanenbaum - No Lesser Plea

“OK, Sussman, you made your point,” snapped Karp. “I don’t give two shits if you believe me or not. But, you ever feel like calling me again, let me say this. If your man decides to plead guilty to the top count of the indictment, I’m all ears. Other than that, save your dime.” He slammed down the receiver.

Leonard Sussman stared for a moment at the dead phone. Then he dialed a familiar number.

Louis was at arts and crafts when they called him to the phone. He was painting. Robert Fallon was teaching him how. Fallon joked about starting an atelier in the loony bin, to carry on his traditions after he departed for friendlier places. Fallon talked incessantly about escaping, about what he would do when he was free in South America. It was starting to get on Louis’s nerves. First of all, he thought Fallon was bullshitting. All the fucker did was eat. He’d need a guy with a forklift to escape. Louis was putting on weight, too, on the starchy food, but he knew he would never become one of the doughy creatures he saw every day in the lounge. He wondered why there were weight rooms in prisons but not in looney bins.

Also, he didn’t like hearing Fallon talk about what he had done with those girls, and what he was planning to do. Louis did not dwell on the murders he had committed. He didn’t particularly get off on killing people, any more than a mailman gets a charge out of stuffing mailboxes. What Louis got off on was getting away with it.

So when he heard what Sussman had to say about what he had heard from Karp, Louis experienced a blow to the core of his being. Someone had found him out and would not let him off. Nothing like this had happened to him since the ice pick incident over twenty years ago. For an instant of blinding disorientation he was back in the yard of his family’s home, trying to burn a blood-stained jacket as the police car approached.

Sussman was saying, “Mister Louis, I tell you he’s clutching at straws. He hasn’t a case and he’s bluffing. Let me tell him you’ll go to trial-he’ll cave, I know it.”

Louis made no answer. He was shaking and struggling for control. Karp knew. Karp knew.

“Mister Louis. Mandeville. Are you listening?”

“Karp knows,” Louis said, in a creaky voice.

“Beg pardon? What was that?”

“No trial. Set up a hearing, just like before. Nothing’s changed.”

“Mister Louis, did you hear a word I said? This Karp is …”

“Let me worry about that, Sussman,” Louis interrupted. “I’ll worry about Karp.”

“Hey there, Pres, how’s my boy?”

Preston Elvis let out a long, desperate sigh when he heard the familiar voice on the phone. For months after he delivered the fatal heroin shot to Donald Walker he had stayed away from Louis’s apartment, foregoing the delights of DeVonne, the yellow Firebird, and the easy money he got from swiping bits of Louis’s pure heroin and selling it, heavily cut, to his friends. He had returned to the home of sorts he had before, he went to prison, living off the welfare check of a woman named Vera Higgs. Vera, a mild and willing creature of eighteen, had borne him one child while he was in prison and was heavily pregnant with another. He was astonished that Louis had known where to find him.

“What’s the matter, Pres? Cat got your tongue? Say hello to your old friend.”

“What you want, Man?”

“What I want? Well, couple a things. You got a pencil and some paper?”

“Paper? What for?”

“ ’Cause you got to write down your orders, just like in a restaurant. You the waiter. Get ’em!”

Elvis scrounged up a paper bag and the stub of a pencil.

“What the fuck this about, Man?”

“Now Pres, baby, be cool. The first thing is, you gonna be glad to hear I got you a job. Now you gonna be able to keep that fine lady you got there and your baby in style. Gonna make your parole officer sit up and smile too.”

“What the fuck you talkin’ about, a job? What doin’?”

“You gonna be a paper boy, Pres. Now write this down.”

Sonny Dunbar dropped by Karp’s office that Friday to talk about the progress he had made in the search for Louis’s accomplice. Or rather the progress he hadn’t made.

“Butch, look. I’m just one guy, right?” Dunbar was explaining. “If this was a real case, we’d have people watching Louis’s apartment twenty-four hours a day, hitting the people who knew him. We’d have ten, twenty guys out. But this is just me. I got Slocum covering stuff I should be doing, but he can’t do that forever. The loot is on my ass already. He thinks I’m cooping, can you believe it?”

“What are you saying, Sonny, you want to give up?”

“No, shit, I’ll keep plugging. But this guy, Louis-it’s weird. Nobody knows him. I mean the usual snitches. He’s got no rep on the street, no contacts. I checked out that bar in Queens, Torry’s, where Donnie met him. They ID’d Louis, all right, they knew him as Stack, but I drew a blank on ‘Willie Lee.’ ”

“How about the girl friend?”

“Yeah, DeVonne. She knows shit. She saw the guy once, doesn’t know nothing. One thing, she heard Louis call him ‘Pres,’ or ‘Press.’ ”

“That’s good! That’s a name at least. You check it out?”

“Check what out? Is it a first name, a last name, a street name, a private joke? You know how many bloods are called Pres? You ever hear of Lester Young?”

“No, is he in the case?”

“Not that I know of. He was a jazz musician, kicked off about twenty years ago. They called him Pres because he was the president of all the sax players-the best, follow? OK, now if I had the manpower, I could go through every yellow sheet in headquarters and see whether we had somebody who was, one, black, two, about twenty, about six-two, two-hundred pounds, three, had a little scar on one side of his nose, and four, had some name or alias that fit with ‘Pres.’ Now, you want to go downtown with the shit we got and ask for ten guys to do that, and ten guys to work the street?”

“OK, Sonny, you made your point. But I got the feeling we’re not being smart. Let’s say the Louis connection is a dead end. We got to know something more about this other guy.”

They thought for a while in silence. Dunbar glanced at his watch. He was due to meet Fred Slocum in twenty minutes on another case and spend four or five hours walking up and down stairs, knocking on doors, and talking to suspicious people who didn’t see anything ever. Karp thought about punks and hoods, how they revolved like the dumb horses on a carousel, in and out of prison, on and off parole. He studied the clumsy Identikit sketch he had taped to his desk lamp, as if it would somehow yield up a name, an address. He drew idly on a yellow legal pad: a stick figure with no face, then bars across the figure, then he wrote “1970” above the bars and drew a big circle around the whole thing.

“Butch, I got to go,” said Dunbar, getting out of his chair.

“Wait a minute, Sonny. Maybe I got something. You remember Donny said Louis said this guy was just out of the slams?”

“Yeah, so?”

“OK, so he’s about twenty, right? It’s probably his first adult offense. And it’s got to be something like armed robbery, or ag assault.”

“Why? Why not drugs, or rape?”

“Just a hunch. Louis is an armed robber. He’s already got a junkie for a patsy. He needs a strong-arm-somebody like him-don’t ask me why, but I figure it that way. OK, now the field is a little narrower. We’re looking for an armed robbery, first offense-he probably got a bullet-released from prison in late Nineteen-sixty-nine or early Nineteen-seventy, that matches the other stuff we got on him.”

“Butch, what if he’s from Detroit or Jersey? Donnie didn’t say what prison. I mean other states got prisons.”