Robert Tanenbaum - No Lesser Plea

“What?” DeVonne was frightened. She saw the best scene she ever had going up in smoke, or worse. She didn’t want to think about how she was going to cover ten grand. DeVonne was not used to thinking on her feet.

“On the other hand,” said Hrcany, waving the receipt, “we could have a little party. Maybe I could forget this, huh?”

DeVonne sighed with both relief and resignation. She was once again on familiar ground. She stood up and walked slowly over to Hrcany, smiling and exaggerating the roll of her wide hips.

“Make sure you do, honey,” she said, toying with the belt of her robe. As she waggled toward the bedroom she flashed a standard sultry look over her shoulder. They saw the robe drop as she passed from view.

“It worked,” said Hrcany in a low voice. “Let’s get busy.”

“Christ, Roland, what are we supposed to do now?”

“Oh, well, I’ll toss this room and the kitchen, and you go in there and amuse DeVonne.”

“Me? Why me? I don’t get this whole scene, the song-and-dance about the money … why didn’t we just identify ourselves and ask if we could look around?”

“Good idea, Kaplan. You think DeVonne is going to let a couple of ADAs nose around? She’s dumb, but not that dumb. Also, we’re not looking for evidence. We’re looking for stuff we can use to beat Elvis over the head. We definitely don’t want anybody to know we searched up here. It would screw up the case something fierce. Catch my drift?”

“Shit. But what should I do in …?” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the bedroom.

“Oh God! Kaplan, use your glands. Go! I got to get started. Oh, yeah, sooner or later she’s going to use the can. See what you can find in the bedroom. Otherwise we’ll have to figure out some way of waltzing her out here.”

“You could tell her you can fuck only on a kitchen table,” said Kaplan sourly.

“Hey, now you’re thinking!” said Hrcany, and began pulling books from the shelves.

Dunbar was sitting on the crummy green couch in Vera Higgs’s apartment, watching “Gilligan’s Island.” Her child was in his accustomed place in front of the TV. Vera Higgs was pretending Dunbar didn’t exist. The last thing she had said to him, nearly two hours ago, was: “Pres say, the lawyer tol’ him, if you keep botherin’ me, he gonna get a coat order. He say it harassment. So you can sit there all night Mister PO-lice, I ain’ saying nothin’ I ain’ tol’ you a hunnerd times already.”

And she was as good as her word. Dunbar would have left a long time ago, but he had agreed to meet Kaplan and Hrcany in the Bronx, on the slim chance they would turn up something important.

There was a knock on the door, and Dunbar got up and opened it. Hrcany and Kaplan stood in the doorway. Hrcany beaming, Kaplan looking glum and a little sick.

“You got something?” asked the detective.

“Yeah, we do. A Grand Jury subpoena and some other stuff. Where is she?”

Dunbar motioned to the woman on the couch. Hrcany went over to her. She glanced at him without interest and then turned back to the TV. Hrcany held the subpoena between her eyes and the glowing screen.

“This is a subpoena, Miss Higgs. It says you got to come downtown and talk to us some more.”

“Do I got to? Pres, he say …”

“Yeah,” said Hrcany, “you got to.”

The four of them and the child rode down to Centre Street in Dunbar’s car. The child pointed and chattered. Everyone else was stonily silent.

In his office, Hrcany seated Vera Higgs in a wooden armchair. He sat in a leather chair behind his desk. Dunbar and Kaplan stood in opposite corners of the room. The little boy sat on the floor near his mother, tearing up yellow legal paper and scribbling with an assortment of markers.

Hrcany began, speaking slowly and gravely. “Miss Higgs, I want to talk frankly to you about your situation. My name is Roland Hrcany, and I’m with the District Attorney’s office. I am concerned about you, Miss Higgs. I fear that you may be the victim of a cruel hoax, one that is going to land you in a lot of trouble.”

She looked at him blankly. “What you talkin’ about?”

“Well, Miss Higgs, to put it bluntly, Preston Elvis seems to have convinced you to lie for him-”

“I ain’ tellin’ no lie! I tol’ you …”

“Please, let me finish! — convinced you to lie for him concerning his whereabouts on a certain night in March, Nineteen-seventy, when we believe he was involved in a brutal murder. You are also helping to cover up his involvement in a bombing at the New York District Attorney’s Office, in which a woman was badly maimed. These are felonies, Miss Higgs, and by refusing to help us, you have involved yourself as an accomplice. You could go to prison yourself.”

Vera Higgs said scornfully, “He tol’ me y’all would say that. Pres say, you cain’ do nothin’ to me.”

“Yes, he would say that. But it isn’t true. He’s using you, Miss Higgs. He intends to dump you as soon as he’s safe and go off with a woman named DeVonne Carter-whom he has been seeing intimately for many months.”

“You lie! They ain’ no woman. I his woman! I want to go home!”

Hrcany silently reached into his pocket and tossed a pack of color Polaroid photographs across his desk. She looked through them slowly, one by one. Slowly, tears formed in her large eyes and dropped onto her hands and onto the photographs. Finally, she began to sob, crumpled the pictures into a ball and flung them across the office. Her little boy picked one up, examined it solemnly and put it in his mouth. Dunbar picked one up, too. It showed two people screwing. You couldn’t see the woman’s face very well, but Preston Elvis as clear as day on top of her, grinning into the camera.

“Well, Miss Higgs. Do you still feel Preston Elvis is going to take care of you? Or would you like to tell me what really happened?”

Vera Higgs wiped her nose with a scrap of tissue. “I guess,” she said. “Goddamn him. An’ goddamn you, too. Goddamn you all to hell!”

Two hours later, Hrcany was smoking a thin celebratory cigar, with his feet up on his desk. Kaplan was slouched in a side chair. Vera Higgs had been formally deposed of her revised testimony about Preston Elvis, and driven back home. Kaplan had called Karp and told him the news. Karp had been ecstatic which hadn’t made Kaplan feel any better. Hrcany looked over at the younger man.

“What’s the matter, kid, you look like shit.”

“I feel like shit. I feel like there’s a thin crust of old turd over my whole body.”

Hrcany laughed, not nicely. “A thin crust? Don’t worry, it’ll thicken up. A couple of years it’ll go right down to the bone, like me.”

“Yeah, I can tell. God, that woman! Did you get how she asked what would happen to Elvis? She still cares about that rat.”

“Right, it’s that Frankie and Johnnie bullshit. So what else is new? Hey, as soon as I saw that Polaroid on the tripod in the bedroom, I knew we had pay dirt. I wish I had kept some of them. By the way, how was old DeVonne, stud? Hot stuff?”

“Marvelous. I worked a chess problem in my head the whole time.”

“No shit? Did you win?”

“I lost. But, really, what will happen to Elvis? Will he cop one if he gives us Louis?”

“Damned if I know,” said Hrcany, grinding his cigar out in a glass ashtray. “It’s Karp’s case.”

Dr. Werner was ecstatic. Another perfect example of Ganser syndrome. He regarded Lennie Trevio-the squat figure across the desk from him-with something like affection. He envisioned an international symposium on Ganser syndrome, an event that would make forensic psychiatric history, with himself at the center of it all.

He continued the interview. “So tell me, ahh, Lennie, have you ever had hallucinations or seizures-like the one you had in court today-outside of court?”