Robert Tanenbaum - Counterplay

“Shall I call security to escort him from the building?” Mrs. Milquetost inquired, starting to reach for the telephone again.

Karp shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that will be necessary. He really doesn’t like to stay indoors any longer than he has to.”

Mrs. Milquetost was still muttering about “lax security” when Gilbert Murrow walked in a minute later and wrinkled his nose. “What is that smell?” he asked. “The garbage union on strike again?”

“One of Mr. Karp’s friends came calling unannounced,” Mrs. Milquetost complained. The stench of Edward Treacher had a staying power that overwhelmed air fresheners and defied open windows.

Karp returned to his office and walked back to his desk, followed by Murrow. He looked down at the campaign finance papers and slumped into the seat, feeling the first storm clouds of a headache approaching. “Do I really need to know all this?” he complained. “Isn’t this why I pay you?”

“Yes and no,” Murrow replied, sitting down in the chair across from him and whipping out a PalmPilot day planner with the flourish of a matador drawing his sword from its scabbard. He began reading off the various upcoming speaking engagements, ribbon cuttings, fund-raising events, and black-tie parties Karp was expected to attend.

The reluctant candidate put his hands to his head, groaned, and said something disparaging about Murrow’s immediate ancestry. Sometimes Karp wondered if the brain damage of running for political office was worth getting elected. In fact, he often wondered why he wanted to be the district attorney of New York.

Fighting crime on the island of Manhattan was like building sand castles against an incoming tide, what with some 600 murders, 1,700 rapes, 27,000 robberies, and 34,000 aggravated assaults, plus a deluge of other felonies in any one year. But that wasn’t the bad part; he enjoyed putting criminals away and standing up for the victims.

No, the onerous part of being the district attorney was putting up with an exploitative and sensationalizing media and dealing with a myriad of special-interest groups, all of whom thought they were being ignored, or discriminated against, or deserved more, and all of whom knew that they could do his job better than he could. He was also tired of watching incompetent judges and ethically challenged lawyers make a mockery of the system.

More than any of that, though, he worried about the impact on his family. He’d made plenty of enemies over the years, some of whom had tried to get back at him by going after his wife and the kids. Not that Marlene hadn’t brought some of the violence on herself or them, but as long as he remained The Man, they would always be a potential target.

Maybe it’s time to let someone else carry the ball, he thought, leave the city and find some small town and practice law. Maybe Marlene would consider practicing again. Karp and Ciampi, LLC, has a nice ring to it.

Yeah, right, said the little voice that seemed to have camped out in his cerebellum of late. Butch Karp, the lion of New York County’s DAO, going to hang his shingle in some little place in the sticks and take on divorce and shoplifting cases. Your ego couldn’t handle it.

That’s not fair, he responded. This has nothing to do with my ego. I’m doing this to return the office to the integrity and respect it had under the Old Man. Somebody has to keep building sand castles or the tide will have nothing to slow it down.

Liar, said the voice. That may be part of it, but face it, you’re as competitive as ever. You want to WIN this election. You just don’t like the grunt work.

“I want to win this election because it’s important for the public,” Karp said before realizing he was now speaking aloud.

“I know, I know,” Murrow said, putting up his hands in mock surrender, like he did every time the boss started grousing. “The polls are looking good, too, but we’ve got to continue to counter Rachman’s ad campaign with personal appearances. That’s where you shine.”

Murrow furrowed his brow, a very studied move that he’d practiced thousands of times in front of a mirror back in law school. “I wonder where she’s getting all that money?” he mused. “Her own party seems barely lukewarm to her candidacy.”

Karp cringed at the mention of the former head of his sexual assault unit. “She should be in prison, not running for political office,” he growled. “But there’s plenty of people out there who would prefer her to me, and some of them have pretty deep pockets.”

“Yeah, criminals,” Murrow said. “I still can’t believe the AG’s decision.”

Rachel Rachman, who years earlier had taken Marlene’s place as the head of the sexual assault unit, had gone off the deep end in January and been caught trying to withhold exculpatory evidence from the defense in two rape cases, as well as preparing to put a witness on the stand who she knew had lied to the police. She’d always been something of a crusader-a virulently effective trial lawyer when it came to prosecuting rapists. But somewhere along the line, she’d decided that all men were rapists and all female complainants honest…justice and the rules be damned.

He’d had to recuse his office from prosecuting her but had turned over the evidence to the New York Attorney General and asked him to seek an indictment for obstruction of justice, false imprisonment, and withholding evidence in a criminal case. He’d been both surprised and disgusted when the AG declined to prosecute, saying that Rachman’s action could have been interpreted as carrying out the job she’d been hired to do, albeit unethically, but it didn’t rise to the level of criminal intent. The AG suggested that it was a matter for the state bar association, not the courts.

Seething, Karp had then tried to have Rachman disbarred. But again, he’d been stymied unexpectedly when the bar association would go no further than send his former employee a letter of reprimand. He sensed a rat.

The whole thing had been kept hush-hush from the public. Because the AG declined to file criminal charges, and the bar association letter was considered confidential, Karp’s office-in the form of Murrow, who would have loved to expound on Rachman’s short-comings-was not free to comment on the reasons for her leaving the DAO.

Murrow’s girlfriend, the ubiquitous journalist, Ariadne Stupenagel, had done her best to get to the bottom of the scandal in the DA’s office. Even to the extent of promising Murrow sexual experiences almost unheard of, and possibly illegal, in the civilized world. But he’d refused to crack, and she’d otherwise run into a stone wall as far as official comment.

However, she had written a story noting that Rachman had been dismissed shortly after two of her sexual assault cases had fallen apart for unknown reasons. One of the complainants in the case, a young woman named Sarah Ryder, who’d accused her professor of Russian literature at NYU of drugging and raping her, turned out to be a real nutcase. In fact, she’d stabbed Karp’s appellate chief, Harry Kipman, in the shoulder with a pair of scissors.

In both sexual assault cases that Rachman mishandled, the accused had been set free, the charges dismissed by Karp. And now corporation counsel, the city’s attorney, was holding his breath, waiting for the expected lawsuits.

However, Rachman had countered by taking advantage of Karp’s refusal to get into a war of words in the press. She’d announced her candidacy for the district attorney’s seat and then gone on the attack. Her dismissal, she told her friends in the press, was due to “dirty politics.” She claimed that she’d informed Karp that she intended to run for the office and her termination had been an act of revenge because her boss felt “betrayed.”