Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

"Girls' soccer?" cried Rachman, her voice rising.

"And furthermore, whatever happens here, you're going to get creamed on appeal even if you get your suppression. Appeals Court judges tend to take a dim view of the state junking exculpatory evidence."

"How dare you talk to me like that!" cried Rachman. Her face had gone pale and blotchy under her makeup, giving it an unfortunate clown-mask appearance. He turned again, and went into his office, slamming the door behind him.

Karp heard her shouting at him, heard himself called a misogynist as well as a racist, heard threats of formal complaint. Rachman had a famously aggressive tongue when aroused.

Terrell Collins was sitting in his office. Karp felt a flush of embarrassment rise to his face.

"You heard all that?"

Collins nodded. "Uh-huh. What's going on?"

Karp sat in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. "Don't ask. Yet another case flavored by racial overtones, into which I inserted myself with totally predictable results."

"I hear you're a misogynist, too. That line about girls' soccer was probably not wise."

"No, it wasn't. I lost my temper and Satan made the phrase swim into my mind."

"Will that be your case when she brings you up on a sex harassment complaint?"

"It might be. It might even work. It's more plausible than the case against Dr. Kevin Hirsch."

Karp took from his desk a baseball signed by Mickey Mantle and threw it hard against an opposite wall a number of times, catching it one-handed on the rebound, enjoying the sting in his palm.

"Ah, fuck 'em all! Let them fire me. It'd be a mercy at this point." Karp tossed the ball into his out-basket, shifted his chair, and stared out the window for a moment, thinking about what his life would be like if he didn't have this job. A descent into the bowels of the profession, chasing ambulances, wills, and closings? Or in a gilded penitentiary, doing civil litigation for Wall Street? He snapped out of the brief, unpleasant reverie and said briskly, "So. What's new with the Gerber and Nixon case? Any sense that they'll deal?"

"Not a whisper. Both Gerber and Nixon claim they did nothing wrong, it was a clean shooting. The victim was grabbing for the gun, et cetera. Unfortunately we don't have criminal stupidity as a charge, because it would be a slam dunk to nail this particular pair on it. They're consistent, I'll say that for them."

"Yeah, like Hirsch," said Karp. "Well, Terry, look at the bright side: Even if you lose, they won't accuse you of letting them off because you're a racist."

"No, only an Uncle Tom."

"We all have our cross to bear, son," said Karp, in his faux paternal mode. "Meanwhile, I think I'll go home."

Felix loved it when the bomb went off. Rashid had warned him not to hang around the area of the courthouse, but he'd wanted to see it go up. He had gone east of the courthouse, into Columbus Park, and there sat with a newspaper, pretending to read, and keeping an eye on the parking lot. It was a lot louder and more gaudy than he had expected, and he experienced an almost methlike wave of pleasure when the sound and the tail of shock wave reached him in a little line of blown dust and scattered trash. He loved, too, the expressions on the faces of the people in the park. For the first time he understood suicide bombers; to have that kind of effect on people was almost worth dying for. His pleasure was hardly diminished when he learned, a few hours later, that the victim had been a parking attendant and not the judge. It was actually better in a way, because if they still wanted him to clip the judge, they would have to give him another bomb. As the sirens began to wail, he started uptown to the Holy Redeemer soup kitchen to find Lucy.

Karp went home. he lived in a highly gentrified loft at Crosby Street and Grand, a short walk from the courthouse. It had not been gentrified at all twenty years ago, when his wife had lived there, but over the years and through many adventures involving the earning and expenditure of large sums, they now owned it and it was now all that a tony SoHo loft should be. Karp had been offered truly nauseating sums of money for it, which his wife had always refused to consider. Karp would have considered even somewhat smaller sums. He liked being able to walk to work, but a loft had never figured in his dreams of what adult life ought to be. Left to himself, he would have chosen a large sprawling home in the nearer suburbs, set back under old trees, with a basketball hoop over the garage. That was a proper environment in which to raise children: good schools, fresh air, no dangerous people. He imagined himself coming home from a day at the office, driving an old car from the station to his broad driveway. Inside his wife would be waiting for him or, not to be a complete neanderthal, she would have just arrived from her decent, lucrative work in a suburban law firm…

Walking through the hot summer streets, he often thought along these lines, especially when, as now, he had to step around some passed-out derelict, or the garbage generated by the Chinese grocery that was his nearest neighbor, but this sort of thinking had become a mere tic, or something like an itch from an old amputation. Even though he was at present literally left to himself. When his interior tape got to this point, it always escaped from its little rollers and tangled. He switched to more immediate concerns. Lucy had not called him, so he didn't know whether she'd be having supper at home tonight. That was annoying.

He concentrated on the annoyance as he worked the key for the elevator. That was new, installed since the building had gone expensively condo. He used to have to walk up four flights, often carrying one or more children. That had been the peak point of his desire for a suburban homestead. In fact, he would have liked to have reproduced his father's establishment in leafy New Rochelle, with a happy family in residence. He had not been able to manage either the house or the happy family, it seemed. Was that Marlene's fault, or his? People whose professional lives are devoted to a fine assessment of blame often apply this art to their personal lives, with unhelpful result, and Karp was no exception. He thought bad thoughts about his wife as he walked into the loft.

As always, it was clean, smelling of floor wax and furniture polish. Lucy kept it so. A little pang of guilt here for Karp. His daughter had taken a leave of absence from Boston College so she could help out at home. Definitely Marlene's fault that, not the catastrophe per se, but the aftermath, her withdrawal, her refusal to face the toxic elements of her personality and…

He turned these thoughts off, a mental switch he used not less than fifty times a day. He went to the gigantic Sub-Zero refrigerator and pulled out a can of soda. Now he noticed that except for the purr of this machine, the loft was utterly silent, too silent to contain a pair of eleven-year-old twins. He checked. Gone.

Not unusual, actually. Lucy could have taken them out, or they could be down at the basketball courts, or at a friend's house. But they were supposed to leave notes on the refrigerator in the case of the former, or call in the case of the latter. More annoyance. He called Lucy's cell phone, found it turned off, and left a message. Karp changed clothes- a cutoff sweatshirt, chinos, and sneakers- grabbed his own cell phone, and went out, intending to do a quick check of the usual places before starting to call the friend list. He walked north on Centre Street. As he passed the cigar and magazine shop at Spring Street, he heard singing, a high pure voice backed up by a button accordion: "Rose of Tralee," with plenty of vibrato. People were coming in clumps out of the nearby subway station, and a small group had gathered around the singer. The boy singer was wearing black glasses, and he sat on a folding stool, in front of which his accordion box lay open with a sign affixed to it that read, BLIND BOY PLEASE HELP. Crouching against the wall behind him lay his guide dog, a large black lab. A drift of bills and silver lay in the case, and as the boy finished the song, more rained down from the listeners. Karp waited until the people moved on, went up to the boy, and asked, "What do you think you're doing?"