at the Hispanic girl. It was obvious: there was no Cherise, pregnant or otherwise.
But Felix didn’t know that. He was beginning to look desperate. “No! It wasn’t me!”
“You sure?” Raymond growled. He looked over his shoulder to make sure the others were watching and grinned. “Now, tell me the truth, is you the one who diddled Cherise?” he asked belligerently, turning back to Felix, his face set as if he was about to fly into a rage.
Suddenly, Felix nodded so vigorously he had to push his glasses back up his nose. “Yeah, sure… okay. I… I… I diddled Cherise. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-”
“You didn’t mean to?” the big youth roared. “What did you think you was doing with that little pecker?”
As the other youths laughed at the joke, Felix looked behind him as if he’d heard somebody call his name from a distance. “I… I… I got to go,” he stuttered.
“You… you… you better,” Raymond said, mimicking Felix. “Cherise is trying to figure out which one of you peckerwoods forgot to use pro-tec-shun. Now that I know, she’ll be comin’ after your ass.”
Felix looked like he might cry, then he turned on his heel and began to walk quickly away.
The purse snatcher, who’d been laughing along with the others, saw his opportunity leaving and hurried after him. “Yo, Felix, wait up,” he said. “That was just plain wrong back there. You didn’t really get Cherise pregnant, did you?”
Felix shook his head again as he continued to walk at a fast clip. “No. I don’t even know her.”
“Then why’d you say you did?”
Felix shrugged his shoulders and slowed down. “That’s what they wanted me to say.”
“Well, it was wrong of them, dude,” the thief said sympathetically. “So, tell ya what I’m going to do. I know you got a girlfriend stashed away from those jokers, and she ain’t no whore like Cherise. Fine-looking young man like you-and by the way, I like the mustache you’re trying to grow there, brother, makes you look older, classy. Tell you what, I’ll sell you that ring for fifty bucks… and that’s a steal, bro.”
Felix stopped walking. His face twisted with doubt. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled bills and coins. He counted what he had and shook his head. “I only got twenty-three dollars and sixteen cents.”
“Oh man, you trying to rob me?” the thief said, rolling his eyes. He paused before adding, as though reluctant, “Well, ’cause I don’t like what those pendejos was doing to you, I’ll take it.” He held out his hand and accepted the cash, and then handed over the ring. “You gonna make some bitch happy, she gonna take care of you reeeaaaal good.”
Felix smiled shyly as he inspected the ring, then frowned. “It says, ‘Always, Al.’ Who’s Al?”
The thief thought fast. “Why, I am. Al Guerrero. My bitch decided to dump me and I got the ring back. That’s how come I knew it was a five-hundred-dollar ring.”
“You said it was worth four hundred.”
“Whatever, now it’s yours,” the thief replied. “All you got to do is get a little file and take off my name and you’re set with your lady friend. Now I got to go.”
Felix felt a pang of guilt as he watched the man trot quickly in the opposite direction. He knew that his parents wouldn’t approve of what he’d just done. Especially his dad, who never approved of anything he did.
His mother was always worried that others would take advantage of him and get him into trouble. It was true that they sometimes liked to play jokes on him-like committing some minor offense and then saying he did it, knowing he’d confess under pressure. Like the time at school when Raymond flushed firecrackers down the toilet, wrecking the pipes. Or when the police were called in to investigate when some other kids broke the front window of the Korean market on Anderson Avenue. Confronted, Felix had admitted he was the culprit in both instances even though he’d been nowhere near either scene.
Felix didn’t know why he confessed to things he didn’t do. He was, his mom always said, “a people pleaser,” but more than that, he didn’t like it when people were angry with him, especially the people in charge, like his dad, teachers, and the police. He’d discovered at an early age that it was easier if he just went along and did and said what other people wanted him to. In the case of his dad, if Felix denied some transgression and waited for the old man to really get worked up, the beating was much more severe than if he confessed quickly and just got slapped around a little bit.
Plus, as in the cases of the school prank and the Korean grocer, the authorities had quickly determined that he wasn’t involved. So other than a mild strapping with a belt from his dad “for lying,” which wasn’t out of the ordinary, nothing had ever come of his confessions.
Felix reasoned now that he’d paid the owner for the ring and got a good deal, and that there was nothing wrong with that. Still, his parents would never believe that it was an honest transaction, so he was just going to have to keep it a secret.
He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with the ring, but he was tired of everyone making fun of him because he’d never had a girlfriend. There was this one girl he liked. She worked as a waitress at the Hip-Hop Nightclub on West Thirty-eighth Street in Manhattan. Maria Elena. He was going there next week to perform for open mic night at the invitation of his friend Alejandro Garcia, who was a big-time rap artist.
Maybe she’ll notice me, he thought happily as he stuffed the ring in his pants pocket and headed for his family’s apartment on Anderson Avenue.
3
“Mr. Karp, that newspaper reporter Ariadne Stupenagel is here to see you. She says she has an appointment,” Karp’s receptionist, Darla Milquetost, said over the office intercom.
“Tell her I’m not in,” Karp replied, loud enough that Stupenagel could hear him not only through the intercom but also through his open office door. He winked at his wife, Marlene Ciampi, who was visiting and waiting for her old friend Ariadne.
Karp was kicked back in the leather office chair with his size-fourteen feet up on the ancient battle-scarred mahogany desk that had occupied the inner sanctum of the New York district attorney’s office since the days of his mentor, the legendary district attorney Francis X. Garrahy.
He stood and stretched his still-trim, six-foot-five frame. It had been a week since the jury had come back with a guilty verdict in the murder trial of the Harlem imam Sharif Jabbar, and he was still enjoying the release of all the tension that came with such an undertaking.
There was no gloating over the verdict. The way he saw it, the advantage was with the prosecution. As the chief prosecutor, he knew he would prevail if he did his preparation and was certain of the defendant’s factual guilt going into the trial, and if he had legally admissible evidence to convict beyond any and all doubt. Otherwise, the defendant never should have been charged in the first place, he thought.
However, with Jabbar convicted, it was as if Karp had passed through the perfect storm. Now the sky was blue, the ocean a lake, and he was relaxed and starting to catch up on some of his administrative duties, as well as what was going on at the DAO while his focus had been fully occupied by the terror trial.
The only thing rocking his boat at the moment was the impending court battle to make sure that Jabbar served his sentence of life without parole in New York and wasn’t whisked off by the feds into a witness protection program in exchange for information, thus escaping punishment. Even if he could keep Jabbar in a New York state prison for the rest of Jabbar’s life, Karp was still torn over whether the punishment fit the crime. He thought back to some of the discussions he’d had with several of the senior members of his staff over whether to pursue the death penalty for Jabbar.
There was no doubt in Karp’s mind that Jabbar had deserved the death penalty-the victim had been cruelly tortured for hours before her execution, which had itself been painful, horrific, and slow. However, there’d been other considerations. One was that there was no evidence to prove that Jabbar knew about, or participated in, the victim’s torture-one of the aggravating factors necessary to warrant the death penalty. And two, witness testimony and the evidence clearly showed that the terrorist Nadya Malovo actually wielded the murder weapon; Jabbar had been more planner, facilitator, and cheerleader than executioner.
This had not stopped Karp from prosecuting the anti-U.S. firebrand imam. For his role, Jabbar was just as guilty in the eyes of the law as Malovo. But when deciding whether to seek the death penalty, Karp had to weigh
