True Justice

Book by Tanenbaum Robert K

Chapter One

A Salvadorean Chinese man wearing a red Hebrew National apron with a black-checked kefiya around his neck and a Yankees hat on his head -- in short, a typical New Yorker -- jaywalked across Tenth Avenue at Fifty-second Street, contemplating, like so many of his fellow citizens, a minor offense. He was a food vendor, the January dusk was closing in, and he wanted to dispose of the considerable trash that had collected on his cart after twelve hours of dispensing edible garbage. He was supposed to carry it back to the cart depot, but he was now about to deposit a fat plastic bag in one of the row of trash cans he knew was kept behind the pizza joint across the street. The commercial trash collectors of the city were still recovering from a week of snow and ice, though, and he discovered that the five cans in the alleyway off Fifty-second were full, with bulging black bags stacked around them. The man looked over his shoulder to see whether anyone was watching and lifted up one of the bags. His plan was to secrete his own modest contribution behind one of these stinking blimps. Instead, he froze, goggling, and stumbled backward, knocking over one of the trash cans. Someone else had obviously had the same idea, because a dead baby was lying on top of the trash bag he had uncovered. It was slaty-blue, faceup, the little face shriveled like an old vegetable. It was a boy, with the exaggerated genitals of the neonate, and its long, ropy umbilical cord dragged down into the shadows beneath the trash.

"What's happening?" said a voice in Spanish behind him. A kitchen worker in whites and a cheap black parka stood behind him. The vendor was speechless. The kitchen man said, "Hey, man, what're you doing, kicking over my...," and then he saw the baby, too.

"Oh, shit!" said the kitchen man.

"Oh, shit, is right," said the vendor. He spoke both Spanish and Cantonese and was thus able to converse with nearly every low-level food-service worker in the city.

The kitchen man looked at him narrowly. "You didn't put that baby there, did you?"

"What're you, crazy? I just come here to stash my garbage from the wagon. That baby's been here awhile. Look, it's all blue and stiff."

"Poor little bastard! It's a boy, too," said the kitchen man. "Hey, man, where're you going?"

The vendor had turned away and was starting back toward Fifty-second. He paused and said, "I got to get back to my wagon, man."

"Hey, but we got to call the cops."

"You got a green card, man?" asked the vendor.

"Yeah, I got a green card."

"Well, you call the cops, then," said the vendor, and walked off.

What followed had happened well over a thousand times in the previous year, and already twenty in the current one, the digestion of a dead human by the bureaucracy established for that purpose. The police arrived, two patrolmen, who secured the crime scene and took an initial report from the kitchen man. Then the crime scene unit arrived in its van and examined the dead baby and its surround for clues. The baby was lying on some paper toweling, and they bagged that. Then the patrol sergeant arrived, and an ambulance from Bellevue, and shortly after that two detectives from the unit assigned to Midtown South. These looked at the baby and the scene and asked questions and found the Chinese Salvadorean vendor and yelled at him a little. Then the ambo took the dead baby away to the morgue. The next morning, an assistant medical examiner autopsied Baby Boy Doe Number One and discovered that it had died of exposure. Since exposing a baby to January weather in New York falls under the section of the homicide statute having to do with death resulting from a depraved indifference to human life, the death was ruled a homicide. The District Attorney's Office for the County of New York -- that is, the isle of Manhattan -- was duly notified, and thus it came, but only modestly, into the cognizance of the district attorney's chief assistant by means of a pair of lines on a computer printout. This printout was generated by the complaint bureau, an organization that was to the district attorney's office as the little ovoid plastic tube on the top is to the Cuisinart. The lines for Baby Boy Doe Number One indicated that this was a fresh case, that no arrests had been made on it. The chief assistant's name was Roger Karp, called Butch by everyone except his aged aunt Sophie.

Karp's eye moved on to the seventeen other people who had been killed in Manhattan since the beginning of the year. In ten of these, an arrest had been made, and these were naturally of greater interest to him. Karp had been doing this work for over twenty years. He had been a famous homicide prosecutor, and then the chief of the homicide bureau, and now he was the chief assistant district attorney, the operational head of the entire organization. He had not, he hoped, become callous, but he had a lot to do. The murder rate had risen rocketlike in recent years in pace with the citywide crack epidemic, and one more dead baby did not appear just then as pressing a matter as the legions of teenagers then roaming New York with heavy semiautomatic weapons. But he did not forget it, not entirely. Not forgetting the slain of Manhattan was one of his major talents.

That was the first dead baby. The second dead baby was found two days later, on January 12, by a track worker on the Broadway line, just south of the Ninety-sixth Street station. It was wrapped in newspapers and stuffed in a supermarket shopping bag. The complexion of the first dead baby suggested it was Hispanic, and this one was a girl and black. The track worker had called the cops immediately. A different team of detectives arrived, and another crime scene unit arrived, who collected and tagged the newspaper wrapping and the grocery bag. Service on the Broadway line was delayed for several hours, as a result of which the second dead baby created somewhat more of a media stir than the first one had. On autopsy, the second dead baby proved to have been smothered, and thus after the usual grinding, Baby Girl Doe Number One also appeared as a homicide line on Karp's daily computer printout, along with the four other people who had been killed (all drug-related shootings) since the last time he had looked. Baby Girl Doe Number One attracted rather more of his attention than her predecessor. Karp was not a political creature -- far from it. Still, Karp understood that the New York DA's office existed in a corrosive bath of media attention, and two murdered babies in a week was perhaps unusual even for the Big Apple. He paused and made a note to give his boss, DA Jack Keegan, a heads-up, so that he would be prepared for any questions should one of the city's many journalists choose to do a bleeding-heart piece.

That note proved, in the event, somewhat de trop, because on January 17, the third dead baby appeared. The third dead baby was different, and different for reasons peculiar to New York. On the late afternoon of that day, a young man named Raul Jimenez, a communications student at the Tisch School of New York University, was walking along 112th Street near Lexington Avenue. He was working on a school assignment, which was to make a three-minute video on "animals in the city." Jimenez had grown up in this neighborhood, had avoided, more or less, the drugs, gangs, and cops, and was now rising, but rising, he felt, with an edge. The other kids were going to do pigeons, puppies, and squirrels, he figured, while he was going to do bad dogs. It had lately become fashionable among the guapos on the street to keep large, nasty dogs, pit bulls or ridgebacks or rotties. Given the average life span of this class of person, and their average level of responsibility, many of their pets were abandoned, scavenging in garbage for food, menacing people, and usually ending up gassed in the pound or shot by the police. These feral dogs of Spanish Harlem were Jimenez's subject, and the location he now gingerly approached was a burnt-out building and an adjoining vacant rubble-field, where he knew the beasts congregated.

He heard a scrabbling sound and a growling from the rubble. Slipping through a gap in the ragged chain-link fence, he advanced cautiously, holding his Panasonic VHS camcorder up to his eye. Movement. Louder growling, a real dogfight, now. He came closer, correcting the focus. A white pit bull and an emaciated, mangy young Doberman were fighting over some garbage. The Dobe retreated, snarling. Perfect, thought Jimenez, good action, the contrast between the colors of the dogs, perfect. He used the zoom to close in on the pit bull, at what the dog was eating. Bile rose in his throat, but he kept the camera going. Suddenly the Doberman lunged and grabbed a piece. That was the beauty shot. The pit bull heaved harder and trotted away with its prize, leaving just a small piece for its rival, and vanished down into the weed-grown cellar of the former tenement. Jimenez sat down on the bricks and threw up his lunch. Later that day he brought the tape to his professor, who helped him negotiate the sale to NBC and the Post. The network used a doctored version of the tape that evening, with blur zones to water down the awfulness and also on advice from legal, but the Post gave it a full front page that evening: under the headline horror! a picture of two dogs, one black, one white, tearing apart a baby in the city of New York in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Karp was, as it happened, working late that day. His wife and daughter were out at his daughter's school for some event, and his seven-year-old twin boys were being taken out for pizzas by their nursemaid and her boyfriend. Karp was, in fact, a workaholic, but he thought he had it under control. Yes, he got to work at seven and worked weekends, but he dined with his family nearly every evening and saw his wife and children at least once each day. The job he had -- managing a system that ate three hundred thousand serious crimes each year including three murders a day, with over four hundred assistant district attorneys -- was frankly impossible to do; it would have consumed any three people. Nor was it one he particularly liked, although he had become fairly good at it. What Karp liked to do was try murder cases, and he was very good at that. With the recent increase in workload, Karp had acquired his own secretary, an Irish girl named Flynn, and a special assistant, a willing infant named Gilbert Murrow, and a nice many-windowed office in the DA's suite on the eighth floor of 100 Centre Street, the New York County courthouse.

Karp had never imagined himself as the sort of person who had special assistants, but he had swiftly become used to the pleasures thereof. Murrow was quiet, efficient, good-humored, and relatively free of the mental diseases to which special assistants were susceptible, such as megalomania and paranoia. He was fresh out of law school but had not taken the bar and was wondering whether, in fact, lawyering was really his thing after all, so this job suited both him and his boss. Murrow lived in a tiny cubicle outside Karp's office, summonable by a bellow.

Karp bellowed now. No answer. He punched the intercom button: "Flynn, where's Murrow?" No answer. He looked at his watch: five past six. They wouldn't have simply gone home without telling him, hence a mystery. Karp rose, stretched; a remarkable sight, this, for he was over six feet five inches tall, still reasonably lanky in his mid-forties. He walked out of his office, observed without surprise that Flynn was not at her desk, and proceeded to the DA's outer office, where he found that Mary Margaret O'Malley, the DA's secretary, was not at her desk either, which was rather more surprising. He recalled that the DA himself was busy upstate at some political do. There were sounds emanating from behind the paneled doors of the DA's office proper. Karp went in.

Murrow, Flynn, O'Malley, and a few other late-staying eighth-floor workers were grouped around the DA's huge TV. Karp noted with astonishment that O'Malley, a hefty woman with jaw and hair of iron, was dabbing at her eyes, although the rumor had it that O'Malley had shed her last tear on the occasion of JFK's assassination. A couple of anchors were on the screen, looking grave. Somebody's been shot, was Karp's immediate thought: the president, the DA...

"What's going on, O'Malley?" Karp asked.

"It's horrible, Butch," she said. "Unbelievable, in this day and age. I beeped him already, he should be calling any minute now."

Karp was about to ask again what was going on when the screen changed and flashed the startling Post front page: horror! Then, a talking head began talking about the decline of morality among the young and conflating the recent years of teenaged gunplay with the murder of babies: now the girls were getting into it, too, was the conclusion. Somebody flicked the remote at the screen, the channel changed to NBC, and Karp got to see the Jimenez tape, slowed down to provide more news, the Doberman tearing away a white blur that was clearly a baby's arm. Then the news moved on to other things, and the group stood around the noble office, gasping and murmuring.

Murrow said, to no one in particular, "This is a going to be a firestorm. Unbelievable!" Karp felt the eyes of the room on him. He looked at Murrow and frowned unconsciously, both because of the remark and because of Murrow's dress, which was a hairy tweed sports jacket worn over a navy sleeveless sweater, a foulard bow tie, tan whipcord trousers, and shiny Weejuns loafers. This was not how Karp thought junior staff members should dress. (Murrow had shown up for work one day in a red brocade waistcoat with shiny buttons. Karp did not say anything to him about it, but had stared at him throughout that day as if observing a particularly gruesome traffic accident, and the item had not reappeared.) Karp himself was not interested in clothes and always wore the same outfit: a dark, pin-striped, single-breasted suit, of appropriate weight for the season, a white shirt, a tie with some infinitesimal dark pattern, and highly shined black shoes. Despite this civilized apparel, Karp often looked as though he should be unshaven and wearing crossed bandoliers. He had the roundheaded, flat-faced, high-cheekboned, quasi-oriental look of his maternal ancestors, a rapacious band of Odessa Jews, horse traders, petty criminals, and head-breakers. His eyes were gray, with peculiar yellow flecks, and were used to good effect in his famous laser stare. Around the office, Karp was considered cold, and something of a stiff, since he failed to find incompetence amusing. It made him grind his teeth and look fierce and stare unforgivingly. Among his few close friends and with his family, however, Karp was a different man, humorous, a dead-on mimic, boyish, occasionally goofy, a peaceable man actually, and quite even-tempered. It was not his fault that he looked like Ivan the Terrible's first cousin. (His wife, on the other hand, looked like a Bernini angel, but she had a short fuse and occasionally shot people with a pistol in disagreements. Yet another thing that was not fair.) Meanwhile, Murrow, who did not understand this, writhed under the stare.

"I mean," said he, gulping, "the press is going to be all over this. It's not going to go away."

"And, what? Do you think we should be extrahard on infanticidal mothers because a dead baby got chewed up by dogs on the TV?"

"No, but...," said Murrow, and he concluded weakly, stammering, "but, we have to do, or say, something. Don't we?"

"We do," said Karp. "In about two minutes, Mr. Keegan will be calling here, and he will ord...