Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) (2 page)

On the ride up, he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, rocking on his heels as he wondered what sort of emergency he was about to confront. Maybe the woman had passed out. Or maybe she’d rejected Maplethorpe’s advances and was threatening to beat him up.

Now, that I’d like to see,
Gianneschi thought with a smile as the elevator door hissed open.

The smile vanished as he found himself looking across the hallway at F. Lloyd Maplethorpe. The producer was waiting for him in the open doorway of his suite dressed in a black-and-white polka-
dotted smoking jacket, which fell open as he stretched his arms out to Gianneschi, revealing a thin, concave chest and an odd sort of leather pants that failed to cover his shrunken penis. He was holding a gun in his hand.

“Oh, Harry,” the man cried, his eyes bulging with what looked like genuine fear. “I’ve been bad.”

“Bad, Mr. Maplethorpe?”

“Yes, Harry, very bad.” Maplethorpe glanced over his shoulder and then back at Gianneschi. “Oh please, tell her I didn’t mean to do it.”

Gianneschi tried to peer into the apartment but couldn’t see much beyond the producer. “Do what, Mr. Maplethorpe?” Fear was starting to creep up his spine. Then he saw the small flecks of red on the producer’s right hand and sleeve of his gown. “What did you do?” He wanted to shout at the man, but fought to keep his voice calm.

F. Lloyd Maplethorpe blinked at him, tears melting his eyeliner, which ran in blue rivulets down his cheeks. His lower lip trembled like that of a child. “Do? Why, I…I think I killed her.”

“I think I killed her.” What more did a jury need?
Roger “Butch” Karp, the district attorney of New York County, shook his head as he walked in the door of the Third Avenue Synagogue, contemplating his own question.
Apparently, something we didn’t give them, or didn’t make clear enough.

Approximately eight months after F. Lloyd Maplethorpe made that statement to an Italian concierge at a Tribeca hotel, a jury had been unable to decide if the Broadway producer had murdered a sometime-actress-slash-waitress named Gail Perez. Just hours earlier that Friday afternoon, Judge Michael Rosenmayer had called the attorneys into his courtroom in the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street to inform them that the jury was hung and he was declaring a mistrial.

Now we have to do it all over again,
Karp thought gloomily as he entered a room where a dozen or so teenage boys and girls chatted and laughed. With the judge’s decision coming late in the day, there’d been no time to dissect or digest what had gone wrong in
the Maplethorpe trial. Karp had made the decision to send all the players from his office—the assistant district attorney who’d handled the case and Karp’s closest advisors—home for the weekend to ruminate over the case and get back to him on Monday.

Then he’d had to hurry to get uptown to the synagogue where as a “Jewish community role model” he regularly conducted a discussion class for teens, including his twin sons, studying for their bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah rites of passage.

He’d been asked to participate in the program by the youth rabbi, Greg Romberg, who had been tragically murdered that past July in a suicide bombing at the synagogue. The killer had been a young Harlem-raised black man who bought into the demagoguery of his so-called spiritual advisor at his 124th Street mosque that Jews were to blame for the world’s woes, including his own personal misfortunes, and that killing them was sanctioned by God.

Romberg’s death and that of a half dozen others who had gathered that day to worship had shocked a city whose wounds from 9-11 remained raw. However, the bombing had the unintended positive consequence of alerting Karp and other authorities to the presence of a radical Islamic terrorist cell, and thereby helping them thwart an attack on the New York Stock Exchange that could have had much more tragic consequences. The idea that the terrorists’ own lies had foiled their plotting reminded Karp of the old Yiddish saw “Man plans and God laughs.”

The noise level of the class rose as Karp walked to the front of the room, as if when they spotted his six-foot-five presence they felt compelled to get a last word in before the new sheriff came to town. As Karp sat on the edge of the desk, facing the students, he raised his index finger to his lips and the class moved rapidly from din to hushed to silence.

That is, except one young man who continued what appeared to be a quiet but intense conversation with a pretty redheaded girl seated behind him. Not surprisingly, the young man, a square-jawed, handsome fellow with wavy black hair and smoldering Mediterranean looks was his son Isaac, also known as Zak.

“Um, Mr. Karp, is there something, perhaps, you’d care to share with the rest of the class?” the senior Karp asked.

Zak turned around in his chair, his dark eyes angry. “No, sir,” he replied curtly.

“Elisa dumped him for the Winter Dance in December. She’s going with Giancarlo instead,” volunteered Crissy Zubrinski, a plump girl with a tiny upturned nose, who prided herself on being the class gossip.

“I never asked her in the first place,” Zak retorted as the rest of the class tittered.

Karp felt for his elder (by a couple of minutes) son. Zak was definitely the more aggressive and self-confident of the twins—the better athlete and Joe Cool at school. But when it came to attracting the opposite sex, women of all ages melted at the sight of the other twin, Giancarlo, with his classic refined features, porcelain skin, and ringlets of dark hair that fell about his face like some painting of a Renaissance prince.

Zak was no slouch in the looks department and had plenty of female admirers, though they tended to like him more than he liked them; it was the girls like Elisa Robyn, a beauty with brains, who eluded him. It didn’t hurt Giancarlo that he was perceived as the sensitive, artistic sort—he could play a half dozen musical instruments and recite Blake, Byron, and Keats at the drop of a hat. Side by side, Zak and Giancarlo were Ghiberti’s sculpture
St. John the Baptist
and Michelangelo’s
David;
both beautiful works of art, but the former just a bit rougher, less sophisticated than the latter.

Zak liked to put on a tough exterior, but behind the bluster was a sensitive soul who took rejection hard. There was nothing to say now that wouldn’t cause Zak more embarrassment, and the best strategy was to move on quickly.

“Okay, gang, let’s focus here,” Karp said. “I wanted to talk today about a concept I call ‘the Big Lie,’ and how it pertains to some of the issues we’ve been discussing. Any ideas about what I mean by the Big Lie?”

“It’s when you act as if you like someone but really you’re just using them,” Zak suggested sullenly. “Or maybe it’s when your brother stabs you in the back.”

Karp winced. Obviously, this was going to take some mediation between Zak and his twin, but now wasn’t the time. “Well, I was
thinking more in terms of the Big Lie as it pertains to larger topics, such as in trials or historical events.” He looked around the room but there were no takers. “Okay, then let me get the ball rolling. When I’m talking about the Big Lie conceptually, I mean people who create and present a false or delusional belief as reality, generally for nefarious, or bad, purposes. People who create the Big Lie claim that it has significant importance, when in reality it’s just a mere illusion and doesn’t really exist.”

“Do you have an example?” asked Joey Simon, a severely nearsighted youth with a narrow, serious face. He was the only student in the class who felt compelled to take notes on the discussions even though there were no tests.

“Sure, I see it all the time in my line of work,” Karp responded. “It’s actually quite common for defense attorneys to blame the victim of a crime. A young woman gets raped because, according to the defense, she wore the wrong clothing, or was in the wrong place, or waited too long to say no. Or someone shoots and kills another person because the victim made them angry, or insulted them. In a more general sense, in which we think of society as the victim of criminal acts, then the Big Lie is used to blame society for the perpetrator’s actions—he blames racism, or an impoverished childhood, or the lack of a male role model.”

Karp thought of his friend the baker, Moishe Sobelman, a Holocaust survivor, and the faded purple tattooed numbers on his arm. “Or, we’ve talked about people who say that the Holocaust never happened—that six million Jews, and another six million others, weren’t murdered by the Nazis and that the Jews made it all up. And in one of our future discussions, I thought we might examine how the Big Lie is at the root of many horrors like pogroms and the Holocaust, and how the Big Lie came to exist that the Jews killed Jesus and therefore have deserved whatever evil has befallen them over the last two thousand years.”

“But if it’s a lie, why would anyone believe it?” Elisa asked.

“Because they’re good at lying,” Zak muttered.

“That’s right, Zak, they are good, indeed very good, at lying,” Karp replied. “And that’s a good question, Elisa. My theory is that the Big Lie is so outrageous, so ‘out there’ that people think, ‘Well,
they couldn’t have made
all
of that up. You’d have to be crazy to say something like that if it wasn’t at least partly true.’ So some begin to accept at least the basic premise of the lie, if not all the details. Now something that is all entirely false is perceived as partly true—maybe even enough to cast doubt on the real truth.”

“But if the Big Lie is so enormous that people believe at least some of it, how do you deal with it?” Giancarlo asked.

Karp stuck his hands in his pockets and cocked his head to the side.
“I think I killed her.”
“With the truth, the simple, unvarnished truth.”

A
HOWL OF FEMALE LAUGHTER REVERBERATED DOWN THE
hallway of the loft to where Butch Karp sat at the kitchen table trying to accomplish the gastronomical feat of eating breakfast and reading the Saturday
New York Times
without upsetting his stomach. He was losing the battle, too, as he labored through yet another editorial posing as a news story on the front page, under the headline:

JURY HANGS IN MAPLETHORPE MURDER TRIAL

More laughter interrupted his reading further. He looked up, his gold-flecked gray eyes narrowing as he wondered what it might be about. Zak and Giancarlo were already off to Central Park to play football with their friends, and his daughter, Lucy, was…
Hmmm, who knows where Lucy is these days…just “away” according to her voice mail.

So something else was tickling his wife’s fancy this morning. Another gale of mirth preceded Marlene Ciampi into the main area of the loft, which included a spacious living room, a kitchen, a library, and a foyer on an open floor plan. She followed close behind, holding up what appeared to be a letter.

“Look what I found going through those old papers,” she chortled.

“Nude photographs from our wedding night?” Karp asked with a wink.

“Now
that
would be funny.” Marlene smiled. “Especially because I was too drunk to remember it.”

“All you need to know is that you said I was the best ever.”

“Yeah, so you’ve told me. A regular Secretariat. But nah, this is real
and
it’s hilarious.” She laughed again and shook the letter at him.

Marlene had been fixing up the “den,” which is what they were calling Lucy’s former bedroom now that she’d more or less permanently relocated to New Mexico and parts unknown. His wife had decided that the space could be better used as a home office and that they didn’t need to keep renting a storage unit in Newark for old papers and forgotten memorabilia. So a dozen boxes at a time, she was bringing the flotsam and jetsam of their lives to the loft and going through it “to get rid of anything we don’t need.”

When she started, Karp had made the mistake of saying he thought it might be a good idea so that someday they could “downsize” now that Lucy was gone and the boys were close to entering high school followed, presumably, by their leaving for college. But that had only earned him an icy stare from his wife, who had apparently not been thinking in terms of becoming an empty-nester in a few years.
“We’ll always need a big enough place they can come home to,”
she’d replied, as if instructing a not-so-bright pupil.
“I’m even going to put a daybed in the ‘office’ so that Lucy will have a place to sleep. I’m not pushing our children out of their home, just cleaning house a bit and making some work space.”

Having been dressed down for practically kicking their children to the streets, he’d been careful about what he said after that regarding her task and was happy to see her smiling now.

“So what’s so funny about a piece of paper?” He stood up from his chair and walked over to his wife, who held it away from him. At six feet five, he towered over her so that she had to look up, her dark brown eyes twinkling and her cupid’s-bow lips twisted into a smirk that said “The joke’s on you, buddy boy.”

That was okay with him as long as it made Marlene happy. She
was looking good these days. Not that he ever thought she was unattractive. Since the day they met as young assistant district attorneys for New York County, he’d been drawn to her classic Italian features, the petite but curvy body, and the way her soft, molasses-colored curls framed her face. Not even when she lost an eye opening a letter bomb intended for him, way back when they were first dating, had he thought differently.

However, the past few years had been rough on her and the rest of the family. After leaving the DAO, Marlene tossed aside her lawyer’s shingle and gave the private sector a shot as a gumshoe for hire. Fate, karma, circumstances—whatever you wanted to call it—had taken her down a road in which she found herself dispensing vigilante justice on behalf of abused women, and then again when her family was attacked—a not uncommon experience. All of her behavior could be justified in an “eye for an eye” way, but she’d found herself caught up in a web of violence that she couldn’t seem to extricate herself from. And it had taken its toll on her physically and emotionally, and on their marriage. As the district attorney for the County of New York and a man who believed in “the system,” for all of its failings and imperfections, he opposed vigilante justice on principle. That his wife was in the middle of it had strained their relationship to the breaking point.

But they managed, he thought. He’d watched her making focaccia the other night, kneading the dough, lost in her own thoughts. She’d looked up and caught him gazing at her, then smiled and went back to her bread.

Lately, she just seemed…
What’s the word I’m looking for…satisfied?…Yes, she seems satisfied.

And yet, it had only been a few weeks since she had almost single-handedly stopped a terrorist attack on the New York Stock Exchange. If the terrorists had succeeded, the nation’s economy could have collapsed, ruining lives and throwing the country into pandemonium. She’d killed several men to prevent it from happening, but it would have been hard to argue that every drop of blood wasn’t justified. Still, there was the added trauma of nearly dying with her daughter…and the old bugaboo about people she loved getting caught up in the violence that hovered around her.

Of course, Karp worried that some new incident would push her back down the stairs of mental health. She’d get a taste of some act of violence and like an alcoholic who’d been on the wagon for many years and then tries “just a sip,” she’d be hooked again. So he’d watched for some sign of distress—a warning that the old addiction was kicking in again. But after she’d taken a few days to hang out with their friend John Jojola in the New Mexican desert, she’d seemed to bounce back to her new normal as devoted wife and mother.

Maybe it’s been too easy
, he thought, but then chided himself for doubting that she was coming to peace with who she was and her role in the world. Her present mischievousness seemed genuine enough. He smiled and held out his hand for the letter. “Come on, give it up, gorgeous.”

“Hmph, well, if you’re going to say nice things like that, you will spoil all my fun,” she said, pretending to pout. “Anyway, I was going through a box with some of your old law school papers and found this…I guess you could call it a letter of recommendation, from Robert H. Cole.”

“My torts professor?” At the mention of his old Boalt Hall law professor at UC Berkeley, Karp smiled. He recalled many a fine classroom debate with Cole; he’d realized only after the fact that the professor was using those debates to push his headstrong and occasionally overly emotional pupil to perfect his use of reason and logic in order to win the argument.

“Good old Bob Cole…what a mentor that guy was for me,” Karp said. “He was a master at the art of logic and persuasion. I learned more about how to problem solve from him as anybody before or since, except maybe Garrahy.”

“Well, the man certainly had you pegged.” Marlene giggled. “The letter’s addressed to Francis Garrahy.”

Karp perked up. New York District Attorney Garrahy was already a legend by the time Karp arrived as a snot-nosed, wet-behind-the-ears assistant district attorney out to save the world by locking up all the bad guys. The old man had seen something in him, a raw, hardworking Jewish kid from Brooklyn who aspired to a career in the Homicide Bureau, and he’d taken him under his wing.

The DAO required applicants to have three letters of recommendation, so Karp had asked Cole for such a letter and was glad he’d kept a copy of it. “So if you’re not going to let me read it, what’s it say?”

“‘Mr. Karp is an able and intelligent man,” Marlene began lightly. “He is highly motivated toward law and public service, and well trained. He is competent and fully qualified for excellent service in any law office.’”

“That’s what had you laughing like a lunatic? Have you been hitting the cooking sherry again?”

Marlene stuck her tongue out at him. “I’m getting to it if you’ll allow me to continue. ‘He has had a remarkable career of extracurricular activities, which testify to his energy, well-roundedness and complexity of interests, a principled devotion to public service, and his ability to do a great deal of work successfully. In college he was a star varsity basketball player…’”

Karp winced. His promising basketball career had ended with a blown-out knee that had required major reconstructive surgery and finished any thoughts he’d entertained of playing pro ball.

“‘…and a major student leader on a campus of over 25,000 students.’”

“I still don’t see what’s so humorous. If you ask me, it’s a rather dry recitation of these extraordinary facts as they pertained to me.” Karp grinned with a raised eyebrow and an “I gotcha” wink.

Marlene rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Saint Butch. Anyway, what I was laughing about was what Cole wrote in the last paragraph. ‘He is a forthright, strong-willed, outspoken man, and his combination of aggressiveness and determination has no doubt made him controversial at times and has occasionally annoyed people.’”

Karp’s wife, his darling companion, his one and only, burst out laughing and had to wipe the tears from her eyes before she could speak again. “Boy, this guy Cole was a master at the understatement. ‘Has occasionally annoyed people.’ Oh, that’s rich!”

“Yeah, well speaking of annoying…is that it?”

“No, he goes on, ‘Moreover, his manner is not entirely suave….’ He sure got you right, baby boy,” Marlene chortled.

“Give me that,” Karp growled, snatching the document from
her hands. He read silently for a moment before smiling and reading aloud: “‘Yet, I would consider these attributes as more desirable than not. They suggest a kind of earthy ability to understand ordinary people and a willingness to see even the unpopular jobs through to the end. I recommend him to you without hesitation.’ I suppose you were going to leave that out?”

“I was getting to it,” Marlene replied, grabbing the letter back. “Give me that…I’m going to have it framed.”

“Simple minds, simple pleasures,” he suggested.

“Uh, I wouldn’t talk, big boy. If I remember correctly, simple pleasures were about all you had on that extraordinary mind of yours last night.”

“I beg your pardon? I am a very emotionally complex man with a great variety of needs and am quite capable of multitasking.”

“Don’t I know it, Romeo.”

Karp grabbed for his Juliet, who deftly avoided his grasp. “What’s next week look like for you?” she asked. “The usual Monday morning meeting, I assume.”

“Yeah, but I have two others before that,” he said.

“Your mistress and who else?”

“She couldn’t fit me in…so to speak,” he replied, which caused his wife to make a gagging sound. “So instead, I’m going by Moishe’s shop. The old geezers in the Breakfast Club are looking for a new place to meet now that the Kitchenette moved, so I was going to introduce them to Moishe and Il Buon Pane.”

“I should have known. You’ve been mumbling about cherry cheese coffeecake in your sleep…. So what’s the other meeting?”

Karp held up a hand. “Guilty as charged on the coffee cake.” Then he frowned and tapped the front page of the
Times
. “After that I’m sitting down with Tommy Mac to talk about where to go now with the Maplethorpe case.”

Marlene nodded. Tommy “Mac” McKean was a longtime friend at the DAO who’d recently been made chief of the Homicide Bureau by her husband. “I still can’t believe the jury hung and that scumbag’s walking around town like he’s been vindicated. I read that ‘news story.’ It said he’s even going ahead with his new show,
Putin:
The Musical
, if you can believe that. And how poor Maplethorpe has been persecuted because he was trying to help out some nutcase who offed herself in his living room…. You’re going to retry him, aren’t you?”

“Without a doubt, kiddo,” Karp replied. “We’ll be asking Judge Rosenmayer to put us on the calendar for a new trial forthwith. But we’d better figure out where we went wrong, or the next time the jury just might acquit.”

“How’s Stewbie taking it?”

Karp thought about the question. Stewart “Stewbie” Reed was the assistant district attorney who had tried F. Lloyd Maplethorpe for the murder of Gail Perez. Stewbie was one of the most experienced and professional prosecutors in the Homicide Bureau. He’d won and lost cases before, but this one had been different—with all the publicity and scandal surrounding a famous Broadway producer, and up against a legendary defense attorney. There were a lot of pitfalls in such a case, and one of them was to get caught up in the hype and allow one’s ego to get involved. A hung jury could mean a loss in Reed’s confidence and the objectivity necessary to retry the case.

“That’s one of the things I want to talk to Tommy Mac about,” he replied. “I haven’t said anything about it to Stewbie, except that no one was blaming him. But he’s probably taking it pretty hard. It’s been what…seven, eight months since Maplethorpe’s arrest? He put a lot of time and energy into the case.”

“And if I know Stewbie, a lot of his soul, too,” Marlene added. She had once been the chief of the DAO Sex Crimes Bureau and had known Stewart Reed for many years, even working with him on several homicide cases that also involved sexual assaults. “He’s a good man, Butch.”

Karp nodded. “Yeah, I know, and a great prosecutor. He probably just needs a pep talk, and an extra set of eyes to help him plug any holes. Then he’ll be good to go again.”

“That’s my guy,” Marlene replied, and blew him a kiss as she turned to go back to the office. “So where are you off to now?”

“Thought I’d catch the train to Central Park and watch the boys.
Maybe treat them to a hot pastrami and corned beef at the Carnegie Deli on the way back.”

“Sounds nice. Do try to avoid annoying anyone if you can help it.”