Counterplay

competitive nature that made him a tough, even ferocious, prosecutor whether he was going after some crack addict who blasted a clerk in a liquor store robbery or a mob enforcer who slipped up and got caught. Occasionally, those who slipped up were members or associates of his own extended family, some of whom were “mobbed up.” But there was understanding in the “connected” members of the family that if they got caught in Manhattan, they were fair game for Ray Guma and it wasn’t unusual to get a letter from Rikers Island or Attica letting him know that there were no hard feelings.

Karp entered the reception area. “What’s up, Goom? Or as my kids say, ’Sup, Goom?”

“Huh? Oh, sorry. I’m just a little preoccupied with the Stavros case.”

Karp nodded and led Guma into his office. The case seemed to have affected his old friend and colleague more than most. A few days earlier, he’d visited Guma in his basement office and noticed an eight-by-ten photograph of Teresa Stavros tacked to the wall. She was a beautiful woman, indeed, but he was only teasing when he said, You should get it framed.

Guma had shrugged the comment off. It’s just a reminder when I get here in the morning and when I leave at night that someone is still waiting for the wheels of justice to turn for her, he said. Anything wrong with that?

No, nothing at all, Karp had replied. Just a bad joke.

Now, Guma was fretting like any rookie ADA. “You’ve done a thousand of these at least,” Karp said. “Relax.”

Guma nodded. “Thanks, but this one is pretty complicated, and I’m a little rusty since the…since my illness. I realize there’s no body, but I worry that if I let this go now, I won’t get back to it and neither will anyone else. Those wheels of justice will have ground to a halt for Teresa.”

Karp noted the reference to the victim by her first name. He knew that Guma had a heart of gold, but when it came to trials, Ray had always approached them more as a competition than something he took personally. He was tough, tenacious, and in court could be quite impassioned when addressing the jury. But he’d never seemed particularly sentimental about the victims he was championing.

Now Karp wondered if Guma was getting too close, but he wasn’t going to say it. He extended a hand to his friend. “Come on, you wuss. The worst that can happen is they’ll tear you to pieces and leave you a quivering blob of Italian gelato.”

“That all?” Guma replied, but at least he was smiling again.

When everyone was assembled at the conference table inside the office, Karp nodded to Murrow, his administrative maven, campaign manager, and numbers cruncher for the DAO, who smiled broadly and said, “Everybody, I’d like to formally introduce Susan Halama as the new chief of the sex crimes unit. Of course, most of you know she’s been the interim chief, but this makes it official.”

The room full of lawyers erupted in applause and cheers for the pretty brunette at the end of the table, who blushed and shoved the files in front of her around with a finger. Karp smiled and clapped along with the rest. He couldn’t help but think that the former head of the unit, Rachel Rachman, would have never received that sort of approval from her colleagues. Soft-spoken and hardworking, Halama was not the sort to put herself forward or treat the law like some sort of personal crusade. Yet she was every bit the prosecutor Rachman had been-he couldn’t remember her losing a felony case.

The meeting progressed with reports from the various chiefs about the major cases they or their assistants were trying or preparing for trial. Then Kipman, the appeals bureau chief, reviewed the various stages of appeals before the meeting turned to dissecting each other’s cases.

The practice of presenting cases so that colleagues could rip them apart had been a staple of the Garrahy years. Old Man Garrahy, the legendary district attorney and Karp’s mentor, believed that cases were won or lost long before they got to the jury. You win by being the best prepared lawyer in the courtroom, not the flashiest, he’d once told a young Karp, who’d taken it to heart.

Each attorney with a major case would be called on to present the evidence, and then it was open season for the others to ask probing questions and pick apart weaknesses. Many an assistant district attorney had crumbled under the onslaught, some so badly that they’d disappeared into misdemeanor court oblivion, rarely to be heard from again. Or worse, they became defense attorneys.

Although some of his predecessors had let the practice slip, Karp had revived it. Now, he looked forward to Guma’s presentation of the Stavros case.

Guma had asked to go last. I may have to run to the crapper to throw up and wouldn’t want to interrupt the flow of the meeting, he’d joked when he made the request. But Karp sensed that there was a grain of truth to it and now, as he watched Guma wince as he stood, he wondered if there was more than a grain.

Guma began by giving the basics of the case. Teresa Aiello Stavros, the child of a wealthy Italian jeweler, had married Emil Stavros twenty-five years earlier. She’d borne a son who by all accounts she’d doted on, even as her marriage fell apart, mostly due to a philandering husband.

“One night fourteen years ago, she suddenly disappeared,” he said. “One theory is she grew tired of her husband and, I guess, her five-year-old son, Zachary, and ran off to start a new life. The other theory is that she was murdered that night by her husband…. And I have one witness who is prepared to testify that he saw Emil strangle Teresa. The witness is Zachary, who has recently, through hypnosis, recalled a memory he has repressed all these years.”

Guma ignored the eye-rolling and shaking heads of some of the older ADAs and moved on to other aspects of his case. The original police investigation had turned up very little to suggest foul play before it was shelved. “A little abruptly, though, as we haven’t located the detective assigned to the case to ask why,” Guma noted. “He retired five years ago, and we understand moved up to Bar Harbor, Maine-so that remains on the list of things to do.

“However, according to police investigation reports, someone had continued to use Teresa’s credit cards after her disappearance and withdrew cash from her private accounts,” Guma said, looking at his notes, “for a period of about five years, according to bank records we’ve obtained, until the money was gone.

“A story about ‘missing persons’ that had appeared in the New York Times several years later touched on the Stavros case. Apparently, Emil hired a private investigator who turned up ‘evidence’ that Teresa was living abroad, leaving tracks in the form of hotel registrations and shopping sprees from Madrid to Buenos Aires. However, somehow the PI just never quite caught up to her, though he supposedly snapped this photograph”-Guma held up a fuzzy black-and-white photograph from the newspaper-“of a woman in a hat and dark glasses getting into a taxi in Paris, who he claims was Mrs. Stavros.”

When he finished, Guma sat down-a bit wearily, Karp thought. But when he picked his head up, it was again with the look of a prize-fighter eyeing his opponent at the weigh-in. “Come on, guys, take your best shot,” he challenged.

“So what do we know about the husband’s whereabouts when Mrs. Stavros disappeared?” Kipman asked.

“Emil Stavros was questioned a number of times, but he stuck with his alibi-that he’d attended a very public fund-raiser that night, apparently not concerned how the press would react to being accompanied by his mistress, a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette by the name of Amarie Bliss,” Guma replied.

“I take it they were seen by others then?” Susan Halama tossed out.

“Lots of people saw him at the fund-raiser. He and the little gold digger even got on the Times society page,” Guma said.

“So maybe he whacked her after the party,” Murrow suggested.

“Well, he spent the night in bliss with Ms. Bliss at her apartment. A doorman at her building saw them going in about 1 A.M. and Emil leaving about eight the next morning. Told the cops that he was on duty all night and would have noticed if Emil left.”

“Before the party, then?”

“Not according to a report from the chauffeur, a Mr. Dante Coletta, who said he saw Teresa when he returned from dropping Emil and Amarie off. She was apparently upset and talking to someone on the telephone.”

“Have you talked to the chauffeur?” Kipman asked.