Robert Tanenbaum - No Lesser Plea

“OK, Sonny, why don’t you find me a wheelchair and we’ll roll down to Elvis’s room. I want to talk to him as soon as he comes around.” Dunbar went out and was gone for half hour. When he returned, it was without a wheelchair and in the company of the West Indian nurse and a stocky man with large teeth and a white brush haircut, dressed in surgical greens.

“Mister Karp, I’m Doctor Hudson. I just operated on your knee, and now Nurse Simms here tells me you want to screw up my work.”

“Butch, I tried, but she wouldn’t let me have it,” said Dunbar.

“It’s just for a few minutes, Doc. Just down the hall.”

The doctor reached down and picked up a bedpan. “You see this? The reason we give you this so you can perform your bodily functions in the comfort of your bed is because we don’t want you to leave the bed. For any reason.”

“But …”

“No buts. Look, young man, if you ever want to dance Swan Lake again, you’ll stay put, flat on your back for at least a week. Your knee is stuck together with spit. It’s a marvel you were able to run fast enough to fall down. Worst damn job I ever saw. Where did you have it done, Taiwan?”

“California.”

Hudson snorted. “Same damn difference! All right, I’ll be back tomorrow, and I want to see cobwebs on that cast. Simms, if he moves, sit on his face!” Hudson flashed a large grimace and strode out of the room. Simms took charge again. Turning to Dunbar, she said, “All right, you, visitin’ hours is ov-ah.”

“Simms, are you really going to sit on my face?” said Karp, after Dunbar had been hustled out of the room.

“None of that naughty talk, you. Here, take this pill! I don’t want you to be achin’ and yellin’ up the night nurse.”

“Kaplan! What’s going on?” said Karp on the phone. “You’re supposed to keep me in touch.” Karp had been cosseted and bullied alternately for a week by Simms and the other nurses, and by the ferocious Hudson. He had to admit that his knee felt better; the bandages were off his hands, feet and face. He was going crazy with boredom, and with worrying about Marlene suffering and about Louis somehow getting away.

“Sorry, Butch, I’ve been running off my feet. All this stuff with Louis and Elvis is extracurricular, you know. I still got to hold the fort out there.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. So what’s the story? You talk to Elvis?”

“Not exactly. His lawyer was there as soon as the docs would let him talk. But he didn’t talk. I mean stone wall.”

“His lawyer? A Legal Aid?”

“Bullshit, a Legal Aid. We’re talking Leonard Sussman.”

“Oh, shit! Did you talk to him? What’s the deal?”

“The deal is, one, Sussman’s fee is being paid by a benefactor who prefers to remain anonymous. Three guesses who. Two, the story is, Elvis came to you to tell you to lay off his dear girl friend, who was apparently threatened by one of your minions. You viciously attacked him with lye and boiling water, as a result of which he is blinded and disfigured. He drew his gun merely to defend himself against this unprovoked attack. Oh, yeah, he will plead to a concealed weapons charge. How about that shit?”

“This is a fucking joke. What about the goddamn bomb!”

“What bomb? Just because our man is, get this, ‘politically active,’ we are going to try to frame him for an act of terrorism. A scandal.”

“But, the girl friend, Higgs, she told Sonny that she … oh, crap!”

“Oh, crap is right. Vera is tight as a clam. Didn’t see nuffin’, didn’t write nuffin’, don’t know nuffin’. Except one thing. Preston Elvis was warm in the bosom of his little family on the night of March twenty-sixth, Nineteen-seventy. She remembers that, clear as a bell. Mandeville Louis? Never heard of him, either of them. We been struck out, Chief.”

“Uh-uh, baby, we’re just getting started.”

“What are you going to do, Butch?”

“Damned if I know, now. I’ll think of something.”

At ten o’clock that night, Karp cruised into the prison ward of Bellevue, showed his credentials to the guard, and rolled his wheelchair up to the bedside of Preston Elvis. Elvis’s head was swathed in bandages yellow with furacin and his right arm was in a cast. Karp sat silently, and after a while Elvis became aware that somebody was in the room.

“Who … who there?” he said nervously.

“Don’t worry, Pres, it’s not the hit man, yet. It’s just your latest victim.”

“Who, Karp? What the fuck you doin’ here? Get outa my room!”

“Come on, Pres, I’m just a fellow sufferer come to keep you company. Like a candy striper. Would you like something to read?”

“Fuck you, muthafucka! You finished, man. I’m gonna sue your ass, what you did to me. I’m gonna sue every fuckin’ thing you got.”

“Oh, yeah? Is Sussman going to do it for a contingency fee? Or is Mandeville Louis going to pay for that, too?”

“Fuck off! I ain’t talkin’ to you. I don have to talk to you. My lawyer say …”

“Shut up! I don’t give a rat’s ass what your lawyer says. I’m not here to ask you any questions because I already know what you did and how you did it. I don’t need anything from you, Pres. But you need something from me.”

“Fuck I do!”

“Yeah, you do, Pres. Lookie here. We got you on the weapons charge, and I think we could probably make simple assault stick. OK, needless to say, we go for the max, five years, and I’ll make sure you do straight time, if I have to use every chip and every bit of pull I got to my name. Think about it, Pres. Five in the joint, blind, no face, a fucked-up arm. But they won’t be looking at your face, Pres. They’ll be a lot more interested in the other end. They’ll be betting your tail in poker games, Pres. I raise you two smokes and you can fuck Elvis. After a couple years you’ll be able to park a VW up your asshole.”

“Shut up! Nurse! Get this bastard out of here!” Elvis yelled.

“OK, Pres, I was just going. But here’s another thing to think about. Your good buddy, Louis. You think he’s about to let somebody who could finger him on a murder rap live in prison for five years? I mean, you know him better than most, right? Few cartons of cigarettes is all it would take up there. What do you think?”

Elvis was cursing shrilly. Karp heard somebody coming in the hallway, and other people in the ward were yelling for quiet. He leaned closer to Elvis’s bed and spoke softly, with a terrible intensity.

“I don’t want you, Elvis. You’re just a little piece of shit to me. But you give me him, him, and you’ll walk, free and clear, I swear it. I swear it. Free. And. Clear. ”

Karp did not go back to his room after this episode. Instead, he went to see Marlene, and begged the night nurse to let him spend a few minutes in her room. She was nearly as bandaged as Elvis. Only her mouth and a small patch of clear skin on the left side of her face remained uncovered. Her left hand was immobilized and suspended in a complicated frame attached to the bed. She appeared to be asleep. The room was full of flowers, from friends and relatives, and from Karp, who had ordered flowers sent every day since the bombing.

He rolled into the room and watched her for some minutes. Then he began to speak, softly, and to weep, a long, snuffling monologue. He told her how miserable and ashamed he was, and how he would make it up to her if it took him his whole life. He enumerated all the things he could have done that might have prevented her from getting hurt. He said he wished it was him lying there, instead of her. Worst of all, he told her they had the man who planted the bomb and he would give that man his freedom if he would help put Mandeville Louis away, and that he, Karp, was the lowest worm in the universe and if Marlene never looked at him again it was only what he deserved. And more in the same line.