Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"Yeah." Swiveling in his chair, Karp turned his attention to the window, where a greasy rain was falling. Something was nagging at his mind, a connection he ought to be making, something about street people and thieves, but he wasn't making it. And there was something else, too, a name. He thought hard, but couldn't come up with it. It was like that a lot lately, as if part of his mind was locked up with some complex problem, leaving free about as much processing power as a pocket calculator deployed. He was making mistakes, not seeing stuff, screwing up with people. And he knew very well what the drain was. He felt Murrow's eyes on him, the pressure of his waiting. He swiveled back. "When was the watch logged in as evidence?"

Murrow consulted his papers. "The twenty-eighth at six-eighteen P.M. Why?"

"Oh, no reason, really. It showed the wrong time though. Look, Murrow, I got to give this some more thought. You're right, that's a good idea, maybe he was a mule. Okay, let's let Marshak hang for a while. Go and find this Maguire again, ask him to give you a list of Firmo's known associates. Maybe that'll jog something."

Murrow nodded and wrote a note, looking doubtful. The intercom buzzed. Murrow left and Collins came in.

"I want to thank you," said Karp when the young man had seated himself. "I had an interesting conversation with McBright on Sunday."

"He's a smart guy."

"He is, and remarkably well-informed about what's going on in this office. Remarkably."

Karp paused to let that sink in. He was not going to confront Collins about the leakage just yet, but he wanted him to be in no doubt that Karp knew what was going on. And a leak could be convenient, to disseminate both truth and things not necessarily true but which it might be convenient to have known. "In any case, we had a frank exchange of views about some racially tinged cases. Of which Benson is one. I take it you've seen the alibi witnesses, so-called?"

Collins opened a notebook. "Yes, I did. Yolanda Benson, forty-one, and Darcy Benson, nineteen, mother and sister. These are decent people, by the way. The mom's a teacher's aide, the sister's a student at Fashion. The father's an electrician, divorced a long time, but he comes by and helps out. I took the original Q amp;A and went through the questions again. This was in their home on West One Hundred Thirty-third Street. According to them, on the evening of, Jorell came in just after five because he wanted to watch the Holy Cross-Syracuse game on TV. Jorell is apparently a big college-ball fan, and he had a bet down. He had Syracuse and five points."

"They remembered this?"

"Yes, adamantly. They said it was a close game, and Jorell was jumping off the couch and yelling at the TV. They were eating dinner in front of the TV, and Jorell was so excited he hardly ate anything, and they were having barbecue pork chops, apparently a favorite of his. Anyway, Syracuse won by seven, and Jorell was pumped. He said he was going out to collect his bet and left around seven, returning after midnight. The murder went down at a little past six, so that's a stone alibi, if you believe them."

"And do you?"

"Wait, there's more. I reinterviewed Alicia Wallis, the girlfriend. Sixteen, but going on thirty. She says that on the afternoon prior to the killing Jorell told her he was going to hit a, quote, Jew diamond guy, unquote, that evening on the subway, that he had the knife and everything. Afterwards, he came to her mother's apartment, around seven, all excited and showed her the diamonds and asked her to keep them for him. Which she did. Two days later, Jorell came back, picked up some of the stones, and tried to sell them in the district and got caught. The cops visited her, and she first lied for him, and then she says she got scared because the guy had been killed, and she wasn't about to mess with no murder charge, and she told all. Now, back to the sister. The sister says that Alicia Wallis is a lying little street tramp, and she, Darcy, has been trying to get her brother to dump her for months. Darcy says that Alicia's been balling Oscar Simms since forever, and everyone in the 'hood knows it except for her dumb-ass brother, and if you want to know who stabbed that guy, you could do worse than look at old Oscar."

"And did you look?"

"Oh, yeah. It turns out that the police had looked, too. Oscar's an alumnus of Greenhaven, three years for armed robbery and two other arrests for robbery, dropped to larceny and time served in jail. Oscar has an alibi, too, supplied by a couple of homies, Duane Morgan and Tyrone Apger, also with sheets on them. A pretty tough crew, by the way, with a history of going after the black hats."

Karp voiced a couple of dramatic chords.

"You got it. They were watching a kung fu movie at the Academy, which is downtown, not too far from the murder scene."

"What kung fu movie?" asked Karp.

"Funny you should ask, because Oscar doesn't recall. 'All those movies be the same, man.' No knife on Oscar either, or any physical evidence, but my sense, after talking to Thornberry, the detective who closed, is that the cops didn't look all that hard after they had Benson. Benson looked good to go. The stones, Deng's eyewitness, and Alicia's story-three strikes and he's out."

"We got Deng to look at Oscar?"

"In a six-pack photo, against Benson and four dummies. He picked Benson."

"Wait a second- after he had already ID'd Benson live?"

"How did you guess?" said Collins. "Naturally, he focused on the guy he'd already identified. So, basically, if we look at it from the defense's point of view, which you're always lecturing us we should do, the case sits on the possession of part of the loot, a totally fucked ID process, and the testimony of a teenaged accessory after the fact who's screwing the guy who probably did it."

"How does Benson explain the loot?"

"Oh, you'll love this. He says he did it as a favor to Alicia. She told him she found them in a trash can, and she didn't think they were worth much, but could he maybe find out for her. Jorell is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier."

"Can we refocus on Oscar?"

"Maybe over Pat Thornberry's dead body. I'm telling you, the cops are not going to be helpful on this without a big circle jerk involving the eighth floor here and the twelfth floor over at One PP. Also, assuming we have the cops lined up, what do we have on him? No physical evidence, his homies are standing up right now, Alicia is solid for the time being."

"The time being…" mused Karp.

Collins nodded. "Yeah, my thoughts exactly. If he's really the guy on this, then Oscar needs to keep Alicia and his pals real happy indefinitely, and Oscar did not strike me as a fellow with the kind of self-control and long-term view that would make that work."

"You're probably right. Sooner or later one of these people is going to want a favor from us, and if someone asks the right questions, the whole thing will come unglued."

"So what do we do?"

"Interesting question, especially now. I think I'll ask the district attorney. He likes to keep decisions like this in his own hands. Meanwhile, good work. I'll probably be working for you if McBright gets in there."

"A racist remark, I believe," said Collins.

"See? My horrible reputation is well deserved."

Collins laughed and made his exit.

Karp got a chance to present these findings to the DA earlier than he had anticipated, for shortly after Collins left he got a peremptory call from Keegan, personally, telling him to get in there right away. He walked up the two flights.

Keegan was there with Fuller, which stifled the tiny hope that Karp always kept alive that Jack would return to his real, or noncandidate, persona and that they could then discuss the legal affairs of the office like menches, as they used to. Karp nodded to both of them and sat down.