jazz lounge.
It was hard to imagine such a brutal crime had been committed there, and Karp wanted the guy who did it. The right guy, he thought before saying aloud, “Thanks, Clay. I just wanted to see this place for myself. Let’s head over to the university. Darla Milquetost called and Mr. Yancy is in class, but he’ll be done in thirty minutes and I want to catch him before he leaves.”
Karp was quiet for a moment then addressed Fulton. “Clay, do you remember when we first met?” Karp asked.
“The LeRoi Rodriguez case, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Karp reminisced, “I was brand-new to the DAO and working in the criminal courts under the inimitable Mel Glass. Man, he was special. But in my class of seventeen ADAs out of eight hundred applicants, I always figured that I was number seventeen. Everybody else seemed to have come from some big-name law school, including Fordham and St. John’s. And all of them had more practical experience working in courtrooms than a grad of the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC-Berkeley whose professors were long on theory and short on practicality. Anyway, I knew I had some catching up to do, so when Mel would ask who wanted to volunteer to handle the competency hearings over at Bellevue Hospital, I raised my hand.”
The hearings were held weekly in the psychiatric ward dayroom. They weren’t to determine a defendant’s sanity at the time of the alleged crimes-that might come up later at trial-but rather whether the accused was mentally competent to stand trial. As such there were two due-process issues: did the defendant understand the nature of the charges against him, and was he able to assist his defense lawyer in the proceedings?
Any given week there’d be fifty or so cases called one at a time into the dayroom, where a judge would read the recommendations of two staff psychiatrists on the competency of the defendant and make his ruling. The defense attorney, usually a Legal Aid lawyer, and the prosecutor were always present but only rarely objected to the findings or tried to introduce evidence or witnesses. In fact, it was all very informal; the judges didn’t even bother to wear robes, and it was well known that they expected to be done by eleven thirty and at the golf course or racetrack by one. They did not like it when competency hearings did not run smoothly and quickly, so everyone- the judge, the lawyers, the court staff, and the staff at the hospital-made sure they went along to get along.
“Then the nightmare snafu scenario unfolded: the judge called the calendar and the psychiatric ward staff failed to produce a defendant, one LeRoi Rodriguez, a forty-one-year-old guy from Harlem who enjoyed cutting up the local prostitutes with a straight razor. He’d been arrested several days earlier with his bloody weapon still in his pocket only two blocks from a young woman whose face he’d mutilated.
“The cops thought Rodriguez was good for a dozen or more similar attacks. As you know, the psychiatric ward at Bellevue is a locked facility-no one just wanders in and out-so I was a little alarmed when Rodriguez was not produced during the calendar call. Even worse, the judge just shrugged and put the case over to a date in the following month. He then instructed the court clerk to call the next case. I was a little bewildered and said, ‘Your honor, shouldn’t we put out a second call and find out where the defendant is? I mean, this is a locked facility, where is he?’ The judge shot me a dirty look and exclaimed, ‘So are you some kind of wise guy or something?’
“‘No, Your Honor,’ I said calmly and respectfully, ‘if the defendant is not produced on first call, it seems to me that before the case is adjourned we should make best efforts to locate him.’ And, of course, as you guys know, everything I was saying was on the record. So the judge is hip with this too and gave me the ‘don’t fuck with me, troublemaker’ look but then turned to the psychiatric ward guard who escorted the prisoners to the hearings. ‘Mike, would you kindly go see if you can locate Mr. Rodriguez? Our young wiseass Mr. Karp does have a point that the defendant is here somewhere. So let’s find him and get this over with.’”
Karp continued. “Mike sort of rolled his eyes, but it wasn’t over. Turns out that there were two L. Rodriguezes: a Lorenzo Rodriguez, a young man who had been charged with jumping a subway turnstile at the Bowling Green Station and had his case disposed of at arraignment and was ordered released by the presiding judge. Unfortunately, a bureaucratic snafu occurred and the wrong Rodriguez was released, leaving the turnstile jumper in the Tombs while the brutal LeRoi Rodriguez was put back on the street, and it was discovered only when ‘Mike’ couldn’t find him. Fortunately, when word went out, my friend here picked up LeRoi.”
“He was on Lenox Avenue and had just pulled his razor on a girl standing on the corner waiting for the light to turn green,” Fulton said. “Had him in my sights, ordered him to put the razor down, and was ready to pop him if he didn’t.”
Karp laughed. “Mel Glass kept me on that Rodriguez case and that’s when we met.”
Now it was Clay’s turn to laugh. Guma grinned, too. “Whatever brought on that little jog down memory lane?”
Karp looked out the window of the car as they drove onto the university grounds. “Just that this justice business is not rocket science. It’s common sense, thoroughness, preparation, and follow-through. There are enormous consequences at times when we fail to do what’s necessary and professional in these cases.”
Guma chimed in. “So now Big Daddy and the A-Team have to complete the follow-through.”
When they arrived at Columbia’s main campus, Karp watched Guma struggle for a moment to get out of the car. “You okay, Goom?” he asked.
Guma straightened his shoulders and nodded toward a pair of pretty coeds walking across the campus. “I was just remembering the good old days,” he said with his patented Guma wink and grin.
“Yeah, sure,” Karp replied. He’d seen the weariness and while he worried about his friend, he wasn’t going to embarrass him by saying anything about it. “When was that? The Pleistocene Era?”
“Very funny,” Guma replied as Fulton laughed. “Maybe when you’re done catching bad guys, you can start a new career as a stand-up comic.”
A passing student pointed them in the direction of Philosophy Hall and English lit professor Dale Yancy. They found him on the stage of an auditorium gazing at some one hundred students as he spoke:
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
Othello, Karp thought. The conniving Iago is speaking. He thought of Felix Acevedo and wondered if his office had “filched” that young man’s good name, as well as the underlying credibility of the justice system. What was that other quote, the one from the honorable lieutenant Cassio after he was involved in that drunken brawl because of Iago and then dismissed by Othello? Oh yeah, “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.” A good choice given the reason we’re here.
When class was over, Karp, Guma, and Fulton walked to the front and waited as Yancy spoke to several of his students and then turned and noticed them. He smiled tentatively. “May I help you?”
“Are you Dale Yancy?” Karp asked.
The smile disappeared. “I am. Why?”
Karp stepped forward and held out his hand, followed by Guma and Fulton. “My name is Roger Karp,” he said. “I’m the district attorney for New York County. This is Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma and Detective Chief Clay Fulton, who directs the detectives who work for my office.”
The professor relaxed and smiled broadly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have recognized you from the papers. I knew the face but for a moment thought maybe you were that bastard’s attorneys. I haven’t had much contact from the police or, to be honest, anyone from your office. I thought now that they’ve caught the guy, I would have heard more.”
Karp grimaced as he pulled out his wallet and selected a business card. “Well, first, I’d like to apologize for that; it wasn’t right and there’s no excuse. However, from here on out,” he said, handing over the card, “if you have any questions, day or night, please call me-my home number is on the bottom of that card along with the office number. And Ray Guma here will be handling your wife’s case personally; he and Clay are also available to take your calls.”
Accepting the card and another from Guma, Yancy gave Karp a puzzled look. “Thank you. I really appreciate that… I’ve felt a little lost in the system. But I’m sure you didn’t come all the way up here just to introduce
