Robert Tanenbaum - Reversible Error

"Oh, yes I do! I'm gonna take this case down to the wire."

"You can't! You're out!"

"No, I'm not. I get to stay for continuing cases, and this guy is the same guy who's been doing the rapes I've been working on for months, so it's the same case."

Karp opened his mouth to speak, to scream in fact, but was suddenly affected by a feeling of inutility and despair. He sank back on the couch, shaking his head. "I can't believe it," he said. "You're crazy. Out of your fucking mind."

"I'm always 'crazy' when I don't do what you want."

"Right, Marlene," Karp said with a sigh. "Whatever you say."

"Now you're going to get all depressed for days," said Marlene. "I wish one time we could just have a good fight and clear the air." She shucked out of the jacket, stuffed her rags of shirt into the trash, and vanished behind the screen that divided the living area from the bathing tank.

Karp had averted his eyes from her nakedness. What Marlene wanted, he knew, was a slam-bang battle, including blows, a long blubbering cry, and a good fuck to top it off. Karp wondered why he couldn't do it. But he could not; some deep knot of resistance to such a release tied him into this angry passivity. He was right and she was wrong.

Karp's parents had never fought, that he remembered. Father knew best. He laid down the law. Mom smiled bravely under the cold and sarcastic logic with which he did so, right up to the doors of death. Maybe she cried secretly, her head jammed under two pillows. Did he remember that?

Karp got up, drank a glass of water at the kitchen sink, and slipped into his sneakers. Marlene was splashing and humming to herself in the bath. Humming! She was fine. He was left holding the bag, the anger, the sense of betrayal. Karp muttered a curse and walked out, slamming the door behind him.

He knew he would walk the streets until three-thirty in the morning, wondering whether the next thirty years were going to be like this, feeling angry at, and sorry for, himself at the same time. And he knew he would crawl back between the sheets with Marlene and hope for it all to have blown over by the morning, or the next day, or the next. In any case, in the morning he could at least go to work and take it all out on the felons. Roland Hrcany was not ordinarily sympathetic to the struggles of the younger ADA's. Like Karp, he had been bred in a hard school by the old guys of the former Homicide Bureau; unlike Karp, he saw no reason why he shouldn't give back what he had got, with interest. He was, in fact, the very last of the senior attorneys to whom a rookie would go for advice and counsel, so that the presence of Peter Schick in his office, wanting to talk, aroused his curiosity, if not his sympathy.

"So," he said, leaning back and cocking one foot up on his desk. "You're here. Spit it out. By the way, you look like shit."

Schick flushed and grimaced. "Yeah, well, I guess I'm not sleeping too good. Um, I don't know exactly how to put this, but, um, it's driving me up the wall. It's this drug-killings task force…"

"Yeah? What about it?"

"Well, there was a meeting this morning. Manning was talking about how they couldn't find this witness, Booth, and that he had information from a reliable informant that Clay Fulton was involved in the disappearance. You know they saw him leaving the scene of the attempted homicide?"

"Yeah, I heard. So what did Bloom say?"

"He got all excited," Schick said. "He wanted a full-scale investigation started on Fulton. And he kind of looked at Karp real hard, because he knows that Karp is, like, close to Fulton and he always defends him. But this time Karp just shrugged and said he'd set it up.

"Then, later, I went to him and asked him how we were going to proceed on the Fulton thing, and he said to forget it, he was just blowing smoke. Then I asked him about Booth and what he thought about the Fulton connection, and he said he didn't think there was anything in it."

"But you think there is?" asked Hrcany.

Schick looked away, embarrassed. "Yeah, I know there is. Um, that's why I had to talk to somebody about it. Before I went to Karp. I mean, I'm way over my head here."

"So, talk! Why do you know there's a connection?"

"Because I saw it. Last Friday, when we were all playing ball in the park-a couple of us were hitting fungoes, just farting around, you know, a little bombed. Somebody got off a good shot and the ball went into the woods along the left-field line. I went into the woods looking for the ball. So I came over this little rise, I'm down on my hands and knees looking, and I lift my head over the bushes and I can see the path and a bench in front of some rocks. About twenty yards away, Karp is sitting on the bench with a black guy, and I look again and I see it's Booth."

"How did you know it was him?"

"For cryin' out loud, Roland! I've been practically sleeping with the guy's jacket for the past month. It was him. I wasn't close enough to hear what they were saying, but after a while Karp gives Booth something, like a little envelope, and Booth gets up and walks away. Then Karp yells out something and Fulton comes out from behind some rocks. Fulton's got a tape recorder. They sit down and listen to the tape and talk for a little while, and then they shake hands and walk away."

Hrcany was staring directly at Schick as he related this, and after he fell silent the intensity of the pale-blue gaze did not diminish. Schick met it uncomfortably, swallowing hard. After some moments of this, Hrcany seemed satisfied. He considered himself an expert on lying and was convinced that the younger man was relating the truth. He nodded and pursed his thin lips. "So. What's your take on all this, Schick? What's Karp doing?"

"I don't know. I think he's protecting Fulton-that's the general plan. What he's doing with Booth…" He shrugged helplessly. "Like I said, it's way over my head."

Hrcany dropped his foot and sat upright. "Yeah, it is. OK, I'll take it from here. You know to keep quiet about this."

Schick nodded. Relieved of his burden, he felt like a new man. "Um, if I can help-" he began.

Hrcany made a dismissive gesture. "Yeah, I'll call you. Meanwhile, you keep in touch if you learn anything else in the same line."

After Schick had left, Hrcany sat awhile in thought, occupying himself by lifting the front of his desk off the floor, in a series of slow curls, stretching the fabric of his shirt across his coconut-hard biceps until it creaked. Hrcany considered himself Karp's friend, as friends were counted in his bleak view of human nature at the New York D.A.'s office: someone you could depend on most of the time and who would probably apologize if he screwed you unusually hard.

Hrcany, in fact, admired Karp, and the people that Hrcany admired comprised a very small club. Karp was the only criminal lawyer in the D.A.'s office that Hrcany considered his peer, and perhaps, if he were to be completely honest, something more than a peer-the best.

His admiration was, however, crusted with just the faintest patina of contempt; Karp was a great lawyer, sure, but after all, something of a Boy Scout, not enough of a street fighter. There was the problem. That Karp had not told him about what he was running with Booth and Fulton, that he had, as it now appeared, maneuvered, manipulated, Hrcany out of the drug task force so that he could put a raw know-nothing in there and thus become free to play whatever game he was playing, disturbed Hrcany more than he was willing to admit. It struck him at the heart of his own self-esteem-his status as resident master of dirty pool.

He did not, of course, wish to hurt Karp in any way. Karp was a buddy. But if someone flicked you with a wet towel in the locker room, you had to flick him back. Hrcany reached for the phone.

He dialed the number of the Twenty-eighth Precinct and talked briefly. Then he hung up and dialed the Thirty-second. He talked with two cops there. An interesting picture started to emerge. He made a few more calls. Hrcany knew cops. More to the point, he had stuff on a lot of cops, small stuff, most of it, but enough, in the atmosphere of paranoia that had affected the NYPD after the Knapp corruption scandals, to give Hrcany a way to get information that few men outside the department were able to acquire.