Robert Tanenbaum: Reversible Error

"Unless what?"

"If your bureau chief went to data's bureau chief and did a deal."

"My bureau… you mean Karp? And Wharton? Not in a zillion years. God! If Wharton ever thought that Karp was connected with this…"

"Yeah, its priority might drop even further, like they'll do it right after they solve Fermat's Last Theorem. Which reminds me, maybe a university would be your best bet."

"How do you mean?"

"It's an intrinsically interesting project; it might make a good dissertation-an analytical method of discovering serial rapists. Get a criminology professor up at John Jay or NYU involved, and you're home-free. Universities got better computers than we do, and the people who can use them."

Marlene nodded without really listening. Tony said something about being sorry he couldn't be of more help, and she thanked him vaguely and left.

It was too much, another thing to think about, to set up, to marshal barely willing people into doing something that was so obviously important. Or maybe not… who, after all, gave a shit? Women got raped? Hey, baby, might as well relax and enjoy it, right? If somebody was going around town grabbing middle-class white guys and pulling their pants off and fucking them up the ass, then there'd be priority. The fucking cops would work on nothing else for a year! Thinking these and similar thoughts, Marlene stomped off to meet her lover, boss, and fiance, Butch Karp. Horace Jordan, the pimp, called Slo Mo by his many friends, was not hard to find. Pimps are public figures. They must see and be seen, show their flash on the street, monitor and discipline their whores, and recruit new ones. The King Cole Trio found him at just past eleven that night, on the Deuce, the strip of 42nd Street between Sixth and Eighth avenues that is New York's semiofficial sex, drug, and mugging emporium, standing under a sex-show marquee, talking with a black woman in tiny vinyl shorts and a pink bra.

The conversation must have been gripping, because Slo Mo did not notice Jeffers and Maus until they had grabbed him, each by an elbow, and were carry-dragging him out to the curb, with the tips of his white Guccis just bobbing along the concrete.

Without a word spoken, the two detectives threw him up against their unmarked Plymouth, patted him down, and emptied his pockets. "Hey," Slo Mo said mildly, "what the fuck's happening, man? I got no beef with you guys." Jeffers opened the rear door of the car and tossed Slo Mo in like a bag of laundry.

Art Dugman was sitting in the back seat of the car. Jeffers settled his huge form on the other side of Slo Mo and Maus drove off.

"Hey, wha' you doin', man? Wha' the fuck's goin' down? Hey…" said the pimp, to no response. After a while, he shut down, adjusted his gold chains and his lavender do rag, and waited philosophically for what might happen. Maus drove west on 42nd, south on Eleventh Avenue to West Street, where he pulled into an alley between two deserted warehouses.

Dugman flicked on the dome light. "What do we got?" he asked Maus. Maus said, "A switchblade knife, a vial of a suspicious-looking white powder, keys, a roll of ill-gotten gains, looks like eight, nine hundred. It's enough."

Slo Mo said, "What you talkin' about 'enough'? You ain't got shit on me! Hey, what you doin'?"

Jeffers had opened the door of the car and yanked the pimp out. He threw him against the alley wall. Maus followed them out. "Fuck this shit, man!" shouted Slo Mo. "Po-lice brutality. I wanna see my lawyer!"

Jeffers spread his legs and stood in front of the pimp and hooked his thumbs in his belt, revealing his service revolver where it rested in its holster on his left hip. Slo Mo saw the gun and seemed to register his situation for the first time. His thin tan face turned ashy gray and his knees sagged. "No, man, I ain't no dealer, man. Shit, I just got that stuff for the girls, man. I never… I never… oh, Jesus, fuckin' shit… not me, man."

Jeffers said, "You got a girl for Larue Clarry last night."

Slo Mo looked at him blankly, his teeth set in a grimace of terror. Jeffers could see several gold teeth, one set with a small diamond, glittering in the faint light from the car lamp. He repeated the question. This time Slo Mo seemed overjoyed to answer. "Clarry, yeah, yeah, Haze… he like Haze."

"You sent Haze up to him last night."

"Yeah."

"What does she look like?

Slo Mo had recovered some of his initial cool. He straightened himself and said, "What she look like? What you think, man? She look like a damn ho."

"Redhead?"

"Yeah, curly hair, short, little tits, nice ass. Wear that purple lipstick. Got real white skin."

"How old?"

"Fuck I know, man. Old enough to fuck."

"Sixteen? Fifteen?"

"Yo, aroun that. She fresh, whatever."

"Where is she now?"

"What you want with her? You homicides. She ain't killed no one. What, they bust you down to vice now?"

Jeffers reached out and grabbed a handful of the gold chains that looped around the pimp's neck and lifted him a half-inch clear of the ground. "Where she at, scumbag?" he asked softly.

The pimp made a strangled reply, the address of a hotel on Eighth Avenue. Jeffers let go; the pimp staggered and fell against the alley wall. Maus got out of the car, took the switchblade out of his pocket, snapped the blade off and threw it away, crushed the glass vial of cocaine under his heel, dropped the ring of keys, pulled the rubber band off the roll of bills and tossed them into a puddle of greasy water. The two detectives entered their car. Dugman flicked the dome off and they drove off, leaving Slo Mo scrabbling in the alley after his drifting loot.

"That was real cruel, Maus," said Dugman.

"That's our motto, Dr. D.," Maus replied. "Cruel, but fair. Shit, that little mutt was scared, wasn't he, Mack? What the fuck did you say to him?"

Jeffers shrugged. "Didn't say shit. He just started whining that he wasn't no dealer. But you're right, I thought he was gonna wet his drawers."

Maus laughed. "Must have a guilty conscience, I can't figure why. Where to, Mack?"

Jeffers gave them the address. But the wretched little room, when they arrived, was empty. Back in the car, Dugman said, "OK, let's knock off for tonight. We'll pick her up- she ain't gonna go off to college. Circulate the description and get the word out we want her."

They drove north, talking little, listening to the calls on the police radio. In the rear seat, Art Dugman sat thinking about why a tough little pimp like Slo Mo should have been so frightened of two police detectives, and why he should have been so desperate to convince them that he was not a drug dealer. Karp was not, to Marlene's no great surprise, in his office (his "palatial office," as she always referred to it). He never was, if he could avoid it. To Karp, the office meant paper, and irritating phone calls from upstairs, and the attentions of those few of his staff who still thought that hanging around Karp and flattering him was the way to get ahead in the D.A.'s office. In fact, the opposite was more nearly true.

When Marlene asked Connie Trask where Karp was, she shrugged helplessly and rolled her eyes. Marlene knew that Karp was not in court, because it was already late afternoon, past the time when tradition declared that the judges of the city should be in their sedans on the way to the suburbs.

Marlene did not feel up to chasing Karp through the warrens of the bureau's staff, one of his favorite haunts. Instead, she took the elevator down to the main floor of the Criminal Courts Building, where she knew he would eventually show up. And it was a place where she could probably catch up with some of her own business.

This zone was known to the inhabitants of the criminal justice system as the Streets of Calcutta. Even this late in the day, the corridor was crowded with the human material of justice: the accused, their defendants and prosecutors, the victims, the witnesses, friends and families of all of these, plus wandering cops and the various officers of court. Besides these the long hallway held a changing group of people for whom the courthouse represented a source of free entertainment and a refuge from the street: bag ladies, defectives, zanies, homeless families, retired lawyers, bureaucrats on the coop.