Resolved (4 page)

Tottering a little, she climbs the stairs and falls into bed. Another day, barely distinguishable from the day before. Gog the mastiff licks her face and thumps his two hundred pounds down in the doorway, rattling the windows. She weeps briefly, clutching a photograph of her children, and falls asleep.

 

Karp left the courtroom and climbed down the stairs to his office, one at a time now, where once he had taken flights in three bounds. Karp always used the stairs, up and down, and never the elevator. He hated being trapped in conversation during the painfully slow rides. He had nightmares about being trapped on a slow elevator that, when its door opened, revealed that it was on the same floor from which it had departed so long ago. Too much like his life.

In the office, he disposed of some bureaucratic details swiftly and efficiently and then turned to the pile of case reports he had selected for review. Karp thought that this was the most important part of his job and the one he enjoyed the most. He could review only a small fraction of the cases that the various bureau chiefs thought worthy of trial, but the fact that Karp was looking over their shoulders kept them honest and kept standards from sliding too far. Or so Karp believed. He picked up the case file from the homicide bureau. Husband kills wife, a no-brainer. What was interesting was why the guy wouldn't deal, since he had clearly done it and would go down for it. Middle-class guy, a furrier. Everyone thinks they're O.J., they can walk with a good lawyer. Not today, not in New York County. He made some notes and moved on. Narcotics. Why did he bother? He didn't know the heroin was in his apartment, the cops planted it. Another race thing, the defendant's lawyer was one of the ones who figured if he stacked the jury with enough black faces, they'd walk his guy to piss off the Man. Maybe he would. Karp spotted a flaw in the chain of evidence record and made a note. Check it out.

Next, the rape bureau. More interesting: a doctor was the D, the victim a patient, the charge sexual abuse, first degree. Not completely unusual that, but unusual to try it. Usually, their main interest was in getting past it as quickly as possible, cop a plea to misdemeanor and try to smooth things over with the state medical board and the hospitals. A little public penitence, too: yes, a terrible problem, I'm in therapy, my wife supports me, ask for the forgiveness of God and the victims, etc. An actual trial would do the opposite, keeping the case in the public eye for a week at least, and revealing all the juicy details to the press. Kevin Hirsch, M.D., was the guy, a gastroenterologist. No priors. The alleged crime had taken place at the Aurora Community Health Center, located in a semidecrepit zone of upper Manhattan, where Dr. Hirsch volunteered. The alleged victim was one Leona Coleman, forty-four. According to her statement, on January 12 of the current year she had gone to the clinic to have a colonoscopy. She suffered from bowel problems and chronic diarrhea. The accused had sedated her and begun the procedure, in the midst of which she had suddenly become aware that the physician had his head between her legs and was tonguing her vagina.

Karp read through the file and then thumbed back through it again, thinking he had missed something, but he hadn't. The rape bureau was apparently going to try this fellow on the completely unsupported word of the alleged victim. According to the police report, the alleged assault had taken place on an examination table shielded from a busy ward only by curtains. Was this at all likely? And the act itself, a colonoscopy in progress, diarrhea, the smell…Karp was not at this stage capable of surprise at any of the acts that people chose to relieve the sexual itch, but this still seemed extreme.

There was a pattern of abuse alleged in support of the state's case. The rape bureau had put out an 800 number: call if Dr. Hirsch diddled you or worse. He paged through the testimony. Four women had responded. Two thought something had happened during deep anesthesia but weren't sure what. One felt she'd had her breast touched inappropriately. The last claimed that Dr. Hirsch had seduced her in his office and they'd had a wild affair for six months and that he'd promised he'd leave his wife for her and then didn't. No tonguing of vaginas during colonoscopies. A dozen years back, Karp's wife had been the founding chief of the sex crimes bureau and so Karp knew more than most about the particular difficulties of prosecuting such cases. If this guy had done it, why hadn't he copped to a lesser? Why did he want a trial? Why, come to that, did sex crimes want a trial? Little bells were going off. Karp put the file to the side and reached for his phone.

Laura Rachman, chief of the sex crimes bureau, was a big blonde who dressed in colors more flamboyant than were usually seen in the courthouse, the colors of national flags. Today she was wearing a crisp linen suit of an eye-challenging green with a white blouse. Her hair was arranged in sprayed waves around her wide oval face, which she had carefully painted in matte fleshtones to resemble human skin. Karp did not like Rachman particularly and was unfailingly polite to her as a result.

“You wanted to see me?” she asked.
Wonted
. Rachman's vowels were artificial, like her face. She had escaped Queens and did not wish to be mistaken for an outer-borough person.

“Yeah, have a seat.” He gestured, she sat, crossing her legs. The short skirt of the suit rode up over her nylon-covered thighs. Karp focused his eyes on her face. “It's this Hirsch thing. What's the story there?”

“What do you mean, story? It's pretty clear. He's a serial sexual abuser and we're going to hit him with the max. You have a problem with that?”

“Yeah, I do. What did you offer him?”

“Sex abuse two and six months. He spit in our eye. He says he didn't do it.”

“Uh-huh. Well the thing is, I don't see that you've got a trial here. That's my problem.”

Little patches of natural color appeared under the blusher. “You're questioning my judgment?”

“It's my job, Laura. I question everyone's judgment. Basically, the whole thing rests on Coleman's testimony, with no corroborating evidence or witnesses…”

“It's a sex case. There's never corroborating testimony in sex cases.”

“Not often, right, but here you've got a doc doing an unlikely act in a place where it'd be easy for him to get caught. You've got nothing solid that he's not a Boy Scout…”

“That's not true. We've got three other women.”

Karp waved a hand. “You've got two women who think something happened when they were under anesthesia. The third woman says she had an affair with him, he seduced her, but I don't see any background on her. Is she cool?”

“She's fine. She'll stand up.”

“Great, but I want to see it in writing that someone checked that she's not a fruitcake who also had passionate affairs with the mayor, the pope, and Warren Beatty. Also, your defendant, the guy's done nine thousand colonoscopies, according to his statement. And he's never indulged his taste for fecally flavored cunnilingus until now? Until your victim came along? What's she like, the victim?”

“Wait a minute, we're blaming the victim now? I'm sorry, when did the middle ages come back?”

Karp suppressed a sigh. “Laura, the defense is going to attack the character of the complainant because that's your entire case. The woman has to be squeaky, and I don't see from this file that you've made a significant effort to determine that. Does she have a grudge against the doc? Is she trying to muscle him on something? Is she a flake? Does she have any pattern of complaints against docs for this kind of thing?”

But Rachman was not listening. “I can't
believe
I'm hearing this crap. I'll tell you what the problem is. The problem is the D is a nice Jewish doctor and the victim is black.”

“No. The problem is that the case is not prepped for trial, and I'm not going to sign off on a trial slot until it is.”

She stood up and yanked her skirt down. “Fine. I'm going to Jack on this.”

“Go ahead,” said Karp, “and I'll tell him the same thing I told you: The case isn't ready.”

After she was gone, Karp spent a few moments predicting what would happen if Rachman took the wretched thing to Keegan. She would get on his calendar, Keegan would call him and ask what it was about, Karp would tell him, and Keegan would yell at Karp for not handling it at his level, meaning that Keegan wanted to be protected from having to make decisions on cases that would rile either the blacks or the liberal bleeders, the two squishiest elements of his political support. And Karp would therefore need something else, something that wasn't in the case file, to give the DA.

“Murrow!”

In a moment the man appeared. Karp understood that Murrow was out and about much of the day on his master's business, but it seemed that whenever Karp called him, he materialized, like a djinn. Karp thrust the Hirsch file at him.

“Look this over,” said Karp and explained his problems with the case. “There could be something fishy about the vic here. Ask around.”

 

Felix opened his eyes upon blackness. He was stiff and crampy and didn't know where he was. It took a few seconds for him to recall even
who
he was. He tried to sit up and bumped his head. His exploring hands told him he was in a box, his ears said he was in a vehicle of some kind. He pushed upward against a slightly yielding stiffness slick against his palms. Waxed cardboard?

Memories arose now, like the ghost images on photo paper rising to sharpness in the developer bath. The Arab. Injections. He touched his chest and felt the hardness of staples in the
Y
-shaped pattern made by an autopsy. But his own organs were intact. He was alive; it had worked; he was out.

The vehicle slowed, turned, and came to a halt. Felix felt himself lifted, carried, heard the grunts of men and short bursts of a foreign tongue. There were clicking sounds. The cover of the cardboard coffin rose up. He blinked in the sudden light. A face came into view, tan, with a short beard and thick hornrims over dark eyes.

“Are you all right?” The voice was soft and slightly accented.

Felix sat up, wincing a little at the pull of the staples. There were two other men in the room. The smell of gas, gray concrete walls—it was some kind of garage. The other two men were darker than the first one, with close-cropped heads and hard features, one meaty, the other a whippet. The muscle, Felix thought, and wondered briefly if he could take them. One at a time, maybe. The two hard men grabbed his arms and helped him out of the coffin. The third man brought a striped cotton robe for him to wear. Felix felt rubbery and weak. “I got to piss,” he said. His voice sounded strange to him, shaky and hollow. They had to almost carry him to the bathroom.

It took Felix three days to get back on his feet. It was the drugs, Rashid said. Rashid was the one with the beard and the glasses. The others were Carlos (big) and Felípe (thin). Felix didn't figure that an Arab would hang with a pair of greasers, and they were definitely that, because he heard them jabbering away in Spanish. Felix knew enough jailhouse Spanish to deliver an insult or make a demand, and so he knew they were for real. They were out of the house all day working, Rashid said. Rashid had a little home business, something to do with computers. He had a couple of machines in a room on the top floor of the house, at which he sat and tapped when he wasn't hanging around Felix, making sure he was all right and bringing him food and smokes. Felix figured him for some kind of faggot butler, not a real player.

On the fourth day, Rashid let him out in the yard, a patch of ragged grass surrounded by a chain-link fence and equipped with a picnic table and a couple of aluminum lawn chairs. The house was a three-story structure sheathed in gray asphalt shingles, one of a row of identical houses, with alleys leading back to small yards and detached garages. He could see the backs of another, similar row through the trees and foliage of the adjacent backyard. It was, he learned, in Astoria, Queens.

Felix sat in one of the chairs, and basked in the afternoon sun. They had supplied him with jeans and T-shirts, in the right sizes, and socks and sneakers, as well. Rashid sat on the edge of the other chair and handed him a beer.

“I thought Arabs didn't drink,” Felix said. “I thought that was a big Muslim no-no.”

“It is as you say. But here we are obliged to fit in and act like Americans. We drink, we eat swine, we look at women's bodies.”

“I'd like to look at some of that. What about throwing a little party?”

“Perhaps later. When our work is done.”

“What kind of work is that?”

“We are going to blow some things up. Our friend believes you would not object to this kind of work.”

“Our friend? You mean the Arab?”

“Ibn-Salemeh, yes. Was he correct in this?”

“Hey, if there's any money in it I don't have a problem. What're you going to blow?”

“We'll tell you when the time comes. We have a number of targets. Some will be of interest to you personally.”

“Meaning Karp.”

“Yes, him,” said Rashid. “But first his family, one by one.”

“Uh-huh,” said Felix. “And what's the story with you? You're what, the butler?”