Robert Tanenbaum: Malice

Yet something wasn't right. He sniffed the air and would have sworn that the usual antiseptic bouquet of the hospital room now carried a faint earthy odor, like the windowless basement of his parents' home in Brooklyn when he was a boy. He held his breath to listen. But all he could hear was the death rattle of a fluorescent bulb in the hallway and the far-off voices of the late-night shift hovering around the nurse's station. He could make out a male voice engaged in banter with a bevy of female voices and supposed that the young police officer who'd been assigned guard duty outside his door was taking a break.

Flirting with the nurses, Karp thought. Good for him. I don't see the point of wasting the night, sitting in a chair to protect me. Never wanted it, but that damn mother hen Clay Fulton…

Detective Clay Fulton was the head of the DAO's criminal investigations unit, a squad of NYPD officers and detectives assigned to the DA's office to provide investigative and protective services. He and Karp had been friends for three decades, but the big detective-a former fullback for the Syracuse University football team-sometimes treated him more like a witless child than the top law enforcement official in Manhattan, or his boss.

Karp glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand across the room: 3:00 a.m. The witching hour…try to go back to sleep. He tired easily and had been sleeping a lot over the past couple of weeks since the shooting. I guess that stands to reason after being shot three times, he thought.

Karp's memory of the attack was a series of surreal vignettes-like watching one-act plays from just offstage. He remembered that he was leaving the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street, which housed, along with the courtrooms, the Manhattan House of Detention for Men, affectionately referred to as the Tombs, and the Office of the New York District Attorney. He and his longtime colleague, Ray Guma, had just won a murder conviction against political power broker Emil Stavros, who'd murdered his wife a dozen years earlier and buried her in his backyard. As he walked down the steps of the entrance, he'd glanced with satisfaction at the inscription carved into the marble on the wall: "Why Should There Not Be a Patient Confidence in the Ultimate Justice of the People." Why not indeed, he'd thought.

When he looked up, he saw his wife, Marlene Ciampi, waving to him from across Centre. They were going to go out to celebrate the victory with an expensive Italian dinner-on Marlene's dime-at Il Mulino on West Third Street, not too far from the West Village. He remembered smiling and distinctly recalled the warmth that coursed through his body whenever he saw her petite but well-proportioned frame-at least when they weren't fighting like bantam roosters-even after nearly twenty-five years of marriage. He'd had no clue that danger was approaching, not until he saw Marlene's attention suddenly shift to some point farther up the street.

Karp thought that he would have developed a better sixth sense for impending peril. After all, he'd grown up across the East River in a fairly rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighborhood, and then spent most of his career working at the DAO putting assorted murderers, rapists, sociopaths, thugs, and terrorists in prison. But it was Marlene, a former Catholic schoolgirl, who had discovered a latent talent for recognizing the pungent aroma of danger before anyone else caught a whiff.

Karp had followed Marlene's glance to a sedan with dark-tinted windows that was pulling away from the curb and rolling slowly toward him. He heard her shout something-a warning that he couldn't make out over the din of taxi horns and human voices-and then watched her dash into the street with a gun in her hand.

Drivers slammed on their brakes to avoid her and hit their horns. Marlene was pointing her gun at the sedan. He looked and saw that the window on the passenger side was down. But he never saw who shot him, just flashes from the gun.

The force of the bullets striking him in the chest, leg, and neck propelled him back across the sidewalk on which he'd landed with a bone-jarring thud, like the morning delivery of the Sunday New York Times. Pedestrians around him screamed and ran to get out of the way.

Then he was just lying there, looking up at the sky and remarking to himself how white the clouds looked against the blue background, while around him there were more shots and more screams. Marlene's face appeared above him. She was yelling something and crying. He wanted to tell her that it was all right: Don't cry. I love you. He tried to say the words but his mouth was full of warm liquid that he realized was his own blood.

Then something was pulling at him, lifting him from the sidewalk. He looked down and was surprised to see his body lying in a spreading pool of red as his wife and a man he didn't recognize pressed at his wounds. He noticed the sedan was partly up on the curb, stopped where it had run into Dirty Warren's newsstand.

Vaguely, he heard Marlene calling him back. Butch! Butch Karp! Listen to me. You're not leaving me, Karp! Please don't leave me, baby.

It was difficult to keep his eyes open. He was so tired; he just wanted to rest. His mind filled with a white light. So that part's true, he'd thought. I wonder what's next.

He felt at peace and was ready to go. But Marlene's pleas were irritating him when he just wanted to be left alone. Opening his eyes, he'd looked at her with annoyance. "What?" he complained. "Can't you see I'm sleeping?"

Somebody else was pressing on him, and it hurt. It was the man he hadn't recognized, who now looked at him and smiled. The stranger had a thick crew cut of pewter-gray hair that matched his eyes, which were kind and steady, as if nothing fazed him. Then Karp glanced down and saw the collar. A priest?

"I'm Jewish," Karp had croaked through the blood in his mouth, thinking the priest meant to administer last rites.

"That's okay, Mr. Karp," the priest answered. "I'm not trying to convert you. But do hang on, I believe you have some unfinished business here."

The next thing Karp was aware of was waking up at Beth Israel with Marlene's head on his chest and the voice of the priest in his head telling him that he had unfinished business. It ain't over till it's over, he'd thought, recalling one of the aphorisms of Yogi Berra, a New York Yankee and boyhood hero. He'd stroked the short, dark curls of Marlene's hair until she gradually woke up. First covering his face with kisses, she'd then run out of the room to announce his return to the world.

"What happened?" he'd asked after a half dozen doctors and nurses who'd flooded into the room to verify Marlene's happy prognosis had left again.

"Rachel Rachman shot you," she'd replied tersely.

Karp caught the hitch in her voice but was too stunned by the identity of his attacker to do much more than stare at his wife with his mouth hanging open. He could have understood if it had been some killer he'd put away in prison and was out on parole. Or maybe some terrorist belonging to a group whose plans he or his family had foiled. But Rachman? The same woman who'd once been Marlene's protege when his wife was running the Sex Crimes Bureau for the DAO?

It didn't make sense. Sure, she'd been abrasive and aggressive and wasn't well liked in the office. But she'd also been a good prosecutor, tenacious in her pursuit of convictions for sex offenders. Unfortunately, at some point her dedication became an obsession and justice had flown the coop. He'd had to fire her and even tried to bring charges of malfeasance against her for lying and hiding evidence in her zeal to prosecute an innocent man.

Party politics had saved Rachman from an indictment. The state attorney general had declined to prosecute under smarmy political pressure after Karp had recused his office to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. But then she'd announced herself as a late entry into the race for the district attorney seat. She'd immediately tried to make up ground by running a vicious, mudslinging campaign. In particular, she'd repeatedly accused Karp of being soft on sex offenders, part of the old-boys network that supposedly coddled rapists and blamed the victims for the crimes.