Robert Tanenbaum: Reversible Error

As Karp spoke on this subject, his face darkened with angry blood, his heavy brow bunched, and little sparks seemed to flicker around his strange eyes. Schick unconsciously hunched a little in his seat. His thought was that he never wanted to be on the receiving end of that kind of anger.

Karp seemed to catch himself then. He sat back and grinned and shook his head ruefully. "I'm on my toot again. I was talking about our work. Yeah, we do murder trials. There used to be a Homicide Bureau, but there isn't anymore. What I try to do here is to do what the old Homicide Bureau did really well, which is to train lawyers to try cases, eventually to try homicide cases.

"So if you want to learn that, this is the best place to be. The down side is, if you work for me, you will not have a happy time with the powers upstairs. You will have the shiftiest little office, you will have the slowest promotions, and if you ever need an administrative favor, you'll hang by your eyelids before you get it. Sound good?"

"Who could ask for anything more?"

"Good. Any questions about the job?"

"A million, but nothing urgent. Anything else you want to know about me?"

"Yeah," said Karp. His smile melted back into the rock of his face and his jaw set hard. "How come you were staring up my girlfriend's dress out there?"

Schick goggled and felt the red rise up his throat. "I… didn't… um…" he stammered.

"Schick," said Karp in a gentler tone, "if you get red when you lie, you'll never make a trial lawyer. Work on it! Meanwhile…"

There was a sharp series of raps on the office door. Karp looked annoyed at the interruption, but said, "Yeah? Who is it?"

The door opened and a stocky mustached black man in a sharp tan chalk-stripe suit came in. Karp's face lit up. "Clay Fulton! What's happening, baby!"

The man noticed Schick. "Am I interrupting something?"

"No," said Karp, "we're just finishing up. This is Peter Schick, our new third base. Peter, Detective Lieutenant Clay Fulton."

After mutual handshaking, Karp said, "OK, Schick, go out there and see the bureau secretary-Connie Trask, the good-looking black lady on the center desk-and tell her you're hired. Tell her I said she was a good-looking black lady too. She'll give you a pencil and a yellow pad and somewhere to sit. You might even get paid eventually. And go find Tony Harris. He'll give you some stuff to do." Thus dismissed, Schick mumbled good-byes and nice-meeting-yous and left the office. It was only later that he realized that Karp had never considered that the offered job would be refused. In an odd way, Schick took that as a compliment.

When Schick had left, Fulton gestured toward the closing door. "What is he, twelve?"

Karp laughed. "God, it looks that way. But that's a law-school graduate. We're getting old, friend."

"Older but still tough. Speaking of old, I got your invitation."

"You'll come…?"

"Yeah, me'n Martha'll be there. I can't believe it, you and Marlene, the end of an era. I saw her outside just now, still a fox… still a dirty mouth. You gonna make her stop cursing that way when you got her legal? Slap her upside the head?"

Karp whooped. "It would be my last act on earth. But let me say this, Clay: if she ever does kill me, I want you to catch the squeal. Might as well keep it in the family."

The two men talked easily for the next few minutes, the man-trivia of sports and politics. They were friends from Karp's earliest time with the D.A.'s office, when he had been the most junior member of the fabled Homicide Bureau, and Fulton, already the owner of a glowing reputation as a detective, had taken him under his wing, taught him police procedure, and provided the evidence and witnesses that enabled Karp to make his own reputation as a prosecutor.

"So," said Karp after a pause, "they still killing people in Harlem?"

Fulton's face grew serious. "Yeah, that's what I need to talk with you about. Somebody aced Larue Clarry last night."

Karp searched his mind for the name and came up empty. Fulton saw the blank look and explained, "The dope dealer. Ran coke for the flashy set. Somebody killed him in his own car and left it under the FDR at 120th. Left the gun he done it with too."

"Any reason why we should especially mourn Mr. Clarry's passing?"

"No, unless you his momma. But look here. The last three months we had five major dope wholesalers knocked off in Harlem. Clarry's number six. Listen to this." He consulted a notebook. "April 2, Jimmie Williams, shot in the back of the head with a large-caliber pistol in a vacant apartment, Harlem. Nobody saw nothing. April 28, Togo McAllister opened the door to his apartment, Morningside Heights, and walked into a shotgun blast. Nobody saw nothing.

"May 12, Sweets Martin, found in an alley, Lower East Side, hands tied, throat cut, puncture wounds all over him, ditto. May 16, Bowman 'Heat' Fletcher, shot in the heart with a large-caliber pistol, also in his apartment, Upper West Side, also ditto. June 3, Ollie Bender, found in a construction site, Eighth and 43rd, with his head bashed in: fucking ditto."

Fulton put his notebook away and looked at Karp. "Anything strike you as odd about that set?"

Karp thought for a moment, then shook his head. "I don't see any pattern, except that there isn't any pattern. It just looks like a bunch of guys in a tough business got taken out in a short period of time. Their number was up. I mean, what's the average life span of a dope dealer? Three, five years? Or do you see something I don't?"

Fulton grimaced, a comical wrinkling of his heavy brow and broad nose, as if he smelled rottenness, and began pacing to and fro in front of Karp's desk. "I don't know what I see yet. Like you say, it looks like a normal couple of months in the dope scene. Maybe that's what's bothering me: it's too normal, too-I don't know-miscellaneous. Like somebody was painting a picture for the cops that's saying, 'Ain't nobody doin nothin special down here, boss!'"

"Like in Sherlock Holmes," Karp put in, "the unusual incident was that the dog didn't bark in the night."

"Yeah, like that! And look here: six different M.O.'s, in four different detective zones, and not a single witness in any of them worth a damn. Like somebody was designing the set so that it wouldn't be seen as a set, somebody who knows how cops think."

"Who benefits?" asked Karp abruptly.

"How do you mean?"

"Well, you say 'somebody,' implying that there's a single agent responsible for all six crimes. Assuming you're right, and that you've got no good leads, why don't you start with whoever you think might want to have all six of these guys killed?"

Fulton shook his head. "Yeah, I thought of that. It could be any of a dozen, twenty people, guys who could move in on the business with the dead dealers out of the way. That's in the city. God knows about out-of-town gangs, Colombians, Cubans, Jamaicans… where to start?"

"So you're stumped?"

"Yeah, and I can't stand it. God damn, I hate a mystery! Some slick fucker going around getting off on spitting in my eye. I ain't whipped yet, but I need help. That's why I'm downtown. If I'm not crazy, the only chance we got is on this Clarry hit. It's fresh and the guy made his first mistake."

Karp made an inquiring sound, and Fulton went on. "He left his gun on the seat of the car. It's a cheap piece of shit, a twenty-two, but it's something."

"Prints?"

Fulton snorted. "Not that good, but we got a serial number. Something could turn up. I want to squeeze the street hard on this. I'm gonna put the King Cole Trio on it, full-time."

Karp grinned and raised his hands in mock horror. "Uh-oh. Are they gonna be good, or am I gonna have 'police brutality' all over my cases?"

"Come on, Butch, these are changed men. They've seen the light. They're gonna treat every skell in Harlem like their momma. The thing of it is, I need to run everything that anybody finds out on all the investigations of all these killings through me. If there's a pattern, that's the only way to find it."