Robert Tanenbaum: Reversible Error

"Mr. Karp?" Schick said.

"Yeah. You're Schick. Let's go in my office."

The big man gestured toward the open door, and as he followed Schick he said something in a low voice to the dark-haired woman perched on the desk. She responded with a hearty guffaw. Karp stopped and said something else. Out of the corner of his eye Schick thought he saw the woman make a casual grab for the rear end of his prospective employer-if true, yet another sign that he was not on Wall Street.

Schick entered the bureau chief's office and looked around. In the center of the room a long scarred oak table was surrounded by a dozen or so miscellaneous chairs. At one end was a massive walnut desk, with a battered brown leather chair behind it and two straight chairs before. The desk was cluttered with a drift of russet case folders, assorted papers and yellow pads. Schick noticed his own resume floating on top of the pile.

There was a coat stand in the corner, from which hung a navy-blue suit jacket, a set of sweat clothes, a N.Y. Yankees hat, and a first baseman's mitt. On the wall behind the desk hung some framed photographs: one of a softball team (Karp in the third row), one, cut from an old newspaper, of a much younger Karp shooting a basketball through the arms of an opposing player (caption: "Karp Scores 26 Against UCLA"), a photocopy of a news photograph showing some horsemen in white uniforms charging with lances, and what looked like a "wanted" poster printed in a foreign language. Schick was just leaning over the desk to inspect this last more closely when the door swung open and Karp came in.

Karp threw his long, narrow frame down on the chair behind his desk and motioned Schick to sit across from him. He glanced at the resume for a moment and then looked directly at Schick.

"So. How come you want to work for the D.A.?"

Schick smiled nervously, thought of an idealistic answer, looked at Karp, who was not smiling, rejected the idealistic answer, which was in any case not true, decided to blurt it out, and said, "I want to try cases. I can't afford to set up my own practice, and if I work for a big firm, I won't get to stand up in front of a jury for years. So…"

Karp's mouth twitched in what might have been the shadow of a grin. Schick noticed again that his eyes had little yellow flecks in them, and were set in his broad face at an almost angle. Not a companionable face. Schick could not help contrasting Karp with the senior lawyers with whom he had interviewed that morning. They had been smooth, confident men, strong, but with their strength buoyed by the power of a deeply established order, symbolized by polished wood and thick carpets. Karp's strength seemed to be an interior toughness, owing little to the tacky office or whatever status he happened to have at the moment.

Karp said, "OK, so you want to use the D.A.'s office for a little legal practice before you go out and get rich."

"I didn't say that!"

"Yeah, but it's not unusual. We don't get many career people here. In fact, it's a seller's market right now. A lot of the bureaus will take anybody who isn't actually drooling." He looked down again at Schick's resumed "Good grades. Law review at NYU. Very impressive. You're a friend of Tony Harris, right?"

"Yeah, we grew up together. He's a little older than me, more my brother's friend, but the same crowd and all."

"He recommends you. He says you can hit."

"Excuse me…?"

"Hit. As in baseball. You did play varsity ball at Pitt?"

Schick nodded, confused.

"So I got a hole at third base I could use you in. You look puzzled. Here's the deal. We have a team, the Bullets, in the city rec league. We play law firms, the sanitation guys, the cops; it's a big thing around here. When Mr. Garrahy was the D.A., he used to come to every game. We try to keep it alive, and we win a lot, which is more than you can say for what happens in court. What do you think of that?"

"You hire lawyers because they play ball?"

"Of course. If possible. This is jock country, Schick. If we had a guy in a wheelchair, I'd expect him to want to come out and cheer. I need people who are competitive and aggressive and can keep coming back and playing even if they get beat every day. Which is not unusual, by the way. You get the picture?"

"Yeah. Sounds OK by me."

"OK. Let me tell you something about the job. The Criminal Courts Bureau was set up to deal with minor crimes, and that's still most of the work, but a lot of the crimes we tend to deal with are technically felonies. When Criminal Courts was set up, in the old days, cops had time for a lot more of the petty shit. Now they don't, unless the individual is making a particular pain in the ass of himself. Selling blowjobs in a car at night is one thing; if you try it in the skating rink at Rockefeller Center in broad daylight, they'll bring you in.

"So most of what we do is workaday small crime: purse snatches, pross, pickpocket, larceny, assault, some sex crimes, drunk driving. All the Fun City stuff. Felony Bureau gets the heavy crime, the armed robbery, arson, safe and loft ripoffs, hijacking. About ninety-eight percent of our work is stoking the system. New York County racks up around 130,000 felony and misdemeanor charges every year. Only about one out of a hundred felony charges in New York actually makes it to trial, and it takes an average of fifteen court appearances of one kind or another to clear a single felony case. So what do we do?"

Schick realized that this was not a rhetorical question, that Karp expected a response. He cleared his throat. "I don't know-I guess the cases back up."

"Of course, but only to a point. Speedy trial rulings mean we got to run the cases through at a certain rate whatever, or else some people are going to walk, and you never can tell who. It's never the guy who kicked his landlord in the ass, it's some mutt who killed six people. Big scandal.

"No, what we do is plea-bargain. The defendant's lawyer cops him to a lesser plea. Burglary goes to trespass, attempted homicide goes to simple assault, and so on. The mutt's been sitting in jail a couple of months, he gets out with time served. Case closed. It sucks, but what can you do?"

Karp paused and fixed Schick with a fierce stare. "But there's a right way and a wrong way to run the game. The first rule is to keep respect. You got to have the trial slots, so that if the defense holds out for some outrageous deal, you can spit in their eye and go to trial. Which means you have to prep cases like you were going to try them, and then not be afraid of going to court if you have to. And the second rule is: nobody gets away with murder."

"Murder? But I thought you said, um…"

"Yeah, minor crimes. Well, it turns out we do a lot of work on murders too. And some rape when there's violence attached. Not the easy ones, either. The reason for that is me." Karp caught the inquiring look and held up his hand. "A long story," he continued, "which somebody will convey to you if you're interested. The main point here is that our current D.A., Mr. Bloom, and I don't particularly agree about how the office should be run. Not to get into details, but Mr. Bloom, he basically doesn't like trials. He's not a trial lawyer himself and he doesn't understand how trial lawyers operate. What he understands are committees and deals.

"He wants the machine to run smoothly-that's his main thing. So we drag these mutts into the building, wave some hands, run them through a courtroom, and cop them out. A murder trial is like sand in the gears. A lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of publicity, and-you could lose. Bad publicity, questions of competence are raised, people start to remember that the point of a prosecutor's office is to prosecute, so how come Bloom is fucking up? Impossible! Much better to avoid it all and plead the goddamn killer to second-degree manslaughter. A year in the slams and another case closed."