Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"What are we going to do with Jingles?"

"Oh, I'll get him over to the VA. They'll keep him for a week until he dries out and then toss him back. And in a couple of weeks, if he doesn't get hit by a car or fall asleep on the tracks, I'll have to do it again. The poor ye have always with you. And the stupid, and the miserable, and the hopelessly damaged."

"Why do you do it then?"

"Why? It's my calling. And I don't have many other skills." He shut off the water, pocketed the handle. "Not like you, for example. Why do you do it? And why aren't you in school?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. It just seems like the right thing to do, helping people. The middle-class life, you know, school and having stuff, and buying stuff… it gives me the willies sometimes. I want all of that"-she gestured widely, taking in the armies of the destitute of New York-"to go away. I want things to be different. So people like Jingles and Benz and Ali can have real lives. How much would it cost? And this city has so much money, it makes me sick, and it's the poor old Church that has to take up the slack, people like you…" She stopped, embarrassed again. "I mean, it can't go on, can it?"

"Oh, yeah. You'd be surprised what people can take and how long horrible things can go on. Meanwhile"-he jabbed a thumb in the direction they had come from-"this is paradise. Jingles's life would be pure heaven to two-thirds of the people on the planet. We have to believe in ultimate mercy, you know."

"Ultimate mercy? You mean grace?"

"I mean death." He had for just a second that look on his face, the stranger she sometimes saw there, and then the lovely smile was back, and he said, "I tell you what-lend me your fancy cell phone, and I'll get old Mr. J. picked up, and then I'll run you across on my bike and we'll distribute charity for a while, and then we'll have lunch. I can tell you need cheering up, my little saintlet. Let's see if we can't generate a few moments of joy."

Thinking of something, Karp called for Murrow and told him what to do. Murrow wrote it down with his small golden pencil in the little leather-bound notebook he always carried.

"Is that legal?" he asked.

"Barely. It's also one of the large number of barely legal things you would not like known that you've done."

"Check. Are you going to the big press conference?"

"I might drop by. I might stand in the back and sob because my words aren't being taken down by newsies to decorate the Bloomingdale's ads."

"Yes, it's sad. I assume this conference is to respond to McBright's speech. What did you think of it?"

Karp picked a thin sheaf of paper from his cluttered desk and flipped through it casually. "An impassioned cry for justice. Unfortunate for Marshak that Desmondo Ramsey had a photogenic, middle-class, grieving family. Basically a decent kid with a few problems, not unlike yourself, Murrow. My daughter knew him slightly, as a matter of fact. Did you catch the reference in the Times to his juvie record?"

"Yeah. Character assassination of the victim. He was in on a stickup as a kid, so, therefore, okay to blast him. But what you asked me to do… that's on another case."

"Yes, it is, but you notice McBright mentions Lomax, too, and also our old pal Jorell Benson, accused killer of a politically significant group member. The picture he's painting is of a DA's office that skews justice according to skin color and politics. A black guy gets shot, they give the white fellow that shot him a pass, just like they're getting ready to give Sybil a pass. A black guy is accused of killing a white, they put him up for the death penalty." Karp thumbed through the transcript pages. "Here's a good part: 'That beautiful lady Justice has a blindfold on. And the job of district attorney demands that her blindfold be tight across her eyes, so that skin color and class and how much money or political influence you have and whether you're homeless or not doesn't matter. But Jack Keegan has tugged that blindfold down so far you can't call it Justice anymore. Another one of those little tugs, Jack, and we might as well call her Ms. Lynch.' Pretty powerful stuff."

"But untrue," said Murrow in a tone tinged with hope.

Karp gave him a hard look, then smiled and tossed the transcript down. "Of course, untrue. And also somewhat true. In fact, Justice is unequal. It's the case that almost everyone on death row in this country got there by killing white people. It's the case that most black defendants are poor and are defended by public defenders with no resources and less than adequate time to prepare cases. It's the case that the cops and us tend to pay more attention when a lowlife kills a citizen, black or white, than when a lowlife kills another lowlife, and it's a fact that a really high proportion of mutts in this town are black or Hispanic. It's the case that the system depends on those inequities, because if every accused felon we got in here could afford to mount a case like Sybil Marshak is going to mount, we would have to expand the courts and prosecutorial systems a hundredfold. But I also think that the inequities are the result of class and poverty. It used to be Irish, Jews, and Italians-now it's blacks and Hispanics. There's no specific racism involved here like there was in the Jim Crow South. Out on the street, with cops, it might be different, but not here. Okay, I'll give you that if Benson had killed his cousin the crack dealer, we would not even be thinking about seeking death. On the other hand, given the vic, I think Roland would come down just as hard on Benson if Benson was a nice Jewish boy." Karp grimaced. "Hell, harder probably, and his instinct is to cream Marshak, too. So, in that sense, McBright is demagoguing. There's no…" Karp moved his hands, searched for a phrase.

"Element of intent?"

"Exactly, Murrow," Karp agreed, after a brief pause to determine whether the kid was cracking wise again. "The element of intent. We're corrupt, but not vile. I don't know about you, but it keeps me going. Now, scram and do that stuff. Let me know how it goes."

Murrow went off, and Karp had to restrain his impulse to call him back, to forget the whole thing. He screwed around with minor stuff all morning, wrote a set of blistering memos to ADAs whose case preparation was not up to his standards, had a couple of brief meetings, spent a good deal of time resisting the temptation to make himself feel more useful by creating work for others. In fact, much of what he used to do had been taken over by Fuller. It was all the administrative stuff he disliked doing, but had recently found that it was just this stuff that had allowed him to get anything important done. It turned out that a threat to delay a load of new furniture was a greater goad to right action than a lawsuit that might cost the state millions or throw some poor sucker unjustly into prison. Fuller had those threats in his pocket now, and Karp, as a result, found himself a lot less potent bureaucrat. The good side of this was that it gave him much more time to poke around the office, visiting courtrooms and making a nuisance of himself to the sloppy and unprepared. He also had time to drop by press conferences.

This was a big one: the area outside the elevator bank on the eighth floor was jammed with TV crews and print reporters and lit with the glare of many lamps. Karp went to the back of the room. A little group of ADAs was back there already. Karp knew a few of them, all ridiculously young-looking. He traded a few wisecracks with Dave Pincus, a homicide guy, and chatted briefly with a few others whose faces he did not immediately know, a thin dark woman in her first few months at homicide, named Meghan Lacy, and a slim, bespectacled blond guy in a good blue suit, Peter something, whose job Karp could not immediately place. He recalled that he used to pride himself on knowing all the more senior ADAs, those who had been there more than a year or so, but it seemed that faces had lost their bite on his consciousness, or maybe it was just that these young, unformed faces had too little bite, like the interchangeable ones who populate TV sitcoms. Or maybe it was the mental decrepitude of age.