“Christ on a crutch, give me a break. Are ya blind?” Guma exclaimed. “She must be a hundred years old-”
“I looked at her resume, she’s two years younger than you. A widow, too.”
“There’s chronological age and there’s psychological age,” Guma sniffed. “I date women who look closer to my psychological age.”
“Yeah, but teenagers under the age of sixteen are off limits in the state of New York,” Karp said, circling around to his seat on which he plopped down with a self-satisfied smirk. “Nevertheless, I’ll thank you kindly if you’d avoid boinking Mrs. Milquetost should you ever find her drunk at an office party and in a compromised position. Office romances are such a pain in the ass.”
“Screw you, Karp,” Guma said, smiling as he sat in the leather chair by the bookcase, across the room from his boss’s desk. He’d never been one who liked sitting in a chair across a desk from someone else; it made him feel subservient. He glanced at the small stand with a green-shaded reading lamp next to the chair and reached for a small black object. “Black bishop,” he said. “Yours?”
Karp shook his head. “Nah, you know I’m too impatient for chess. I saw it earlier on the floor and figured it was yours or V.T.’s, so I put it there.”
Guma and V. T. Newbury were two of Karp’s oldest friends. They’d all graduated law school and hooked up with the New York DAO within a few years of each other. In contrast to Guma, or Karp, Newbury possessed a dry wit and cool exterior, and had been a handsomely aristocratic Yale Law boy and the scion of a senior partner in one of the city’s most prestigious white-shoe law firms; but he’d turned his back on civil litigation and wealth for the low-pay but high-reward task of prosecuting criminals. Guma was the hot-blooded son of Italian immigrants. When just starting out at the DAO, he’d carried quite a chip on his broad, neckless shoulders, especially around better-heeled colleagues, but it had been offset by his sense of humor, abilities in the courtroom, and general joie de vivre.
Both Guma and Newbury possessed rapier-sharp legal minds. But Newbury preferred the complex, thinking-man’s cases, which was why Karp had him heading up the White Collar Fraud and Rackets Bureau. The bureau primarily focused on business fraud, organized crime, and public corruption. He and his team, known around the office as “the Newbury Gang,” had aggressively and successfully prosecuted high-level politicians, government officials, and other white-collar felons in and out of the justice system.
Meanwhile, Guma liked his cases down and dirty, the messier the better. He hated to plea bargain and was happiest in the courtroom in front of jurors-preferably women jurors-watching him dismantle the bad guy’s defense and send him off to prison.
One thing they did have in common was the game of chess. They’d been going at it ever since Karp had known them, both playing in styles that matched their personalities. Newbury preferred the classical attacks and defenses; he could name them and recall the point at which they’d been used in world tournaments. Guma had learned his game at the knee of old Italian men sitting in parks on sunny days. He simply attacked, making up for his lack of finesse with an innate sense for an opponent’s weaknesses.
“Not mine,” Guma said of the chess piece, which he put back on the table. “Maybe V.T.’s. It’s certainly his taste-expensive-but I’ve never seen that particular bishop. Check out the detail in the carving. It looks like a little statue.”
“I’ll check it out later,” Karp said, yawning. “Excuse me, guess I’m a little bushed. So what’s this case you’re all pumped up about? And don’t you want to bring it up at the regular meeting?”
Every Monday morning, Karp met with his bureau chiefs and a few other select assistant district attorneys to review cases, which meant grilling each other to ensure that the convicting evidence was trustworthy and looking to shore up weaknesses. The practice had started with the Old Man, Frank Garrahy, who believed that cases were won or lost in the preparation stages, long before they went to trial.
“I will next week,” Guma said, reaching into his coat pocket for a cigar, which he stuck in his mouth without lighting. “But I wanted to run it by you first, and for you to meet someone, before I take it to the rest of the law- school underachievers you employ.”
“Meet?” Karp said, looking at his watch. “When?”
“In about three minutes, if this kid is punctual, and I suspect he will be,” Guma said. “But there’s another reason why I wanted to talk about this before the meeting; you know how some people like talking to the media more than they should.”
Karp had a standing rule that no one in his office was supposed to discuss anything with the press without prior approval-especially to comment on ongoing cases. But it was only natural for young assistant district attorneys, some of whom got invited to the meeting to discuss big cases, to want to highlight their exalted position as “someone in the know” by leaking juicy tidbits to the media. Karp was also getting uneasy with the way Guma was obviously trying to break bad news to him “gently.”
“Spill it, Guma,” he growled. “You’re getting entirely too much pleasure out of watching me squirm.”
“Payback for the Milquetost innuendos.” Guma smiled at his friend over the tip of the cigar as he slouched further into the chair. “The ‘other reason’ is there may be political implications with pursuing this case at this time.”
“Great.”
“Let me give you a little background,” Guma said, taking his cigar out of his mouth and sitting forward. “As you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time going through old files in that cold, tiny cubicle you so graciously arranged for me in the basement-”
“You asked to be down there.”
“Yeah, but you might have installed some carpeting and a light or two more than the single bulb dangling from a wire in the ceiling-”
“Objection: exaggeration. Get on with it, Goom.”
“Sure, sure. Anyway, I’m shivering in the near-dark at my minuscule desk when I get a telephone call from some guy who says some other guy saw his dad choke his mother. The guy on the phone says they think the dad killed her because she disappeared suddenly without a word.”
“Seems pretty straightforward,” Karp said. “Why aren’t they going to the cops?”
“Because it’s a cold case. The cops aren’t interested.”
“You believe it?”
“Maybe,” Guma said. “I went and talked to the son who supposedly witnessed the murder. At first, he was surprised I knew about it, but then he loosened up and told me the story. Pretty believable as witnesses go, but there are a couple of reasons I wanted to get a second opinion from you before I go forward with this. For one thing, the woman disappeared fourteen years ago.”
Karp whistled. A lot of police departments across the country were creating “cold case” squads to revive old homicide cases. There was no statute of limitations on murder and forensic sciences had been making enormous strides in recent years. But not many DAOs that he knew of were conducting their own investigations.
Then again, Guma wasn’t on the regular payroll. If he and his former detective pal, Clarke Fairbrother, wanted to knock the dust off some old files and see if they could bring some killer to justice, more power to them. But fourteen years was a long time-witnesses die or disappear or “forget”; evidence gets lost…and what about this “political ramification,” he thought. That didn’t sound good. “You want to drop the other shoe now, please.”
Guma sucked on the cigar and looked down at it lovingly before turning his gaze back to Karp. “This kid’s father is Emil Stavros.”
Karp let out an involuntary groan. Emil Stavros. Wealthy banker, moved in the best social circles, and, of greater concern, a major mover and shaker in the opposition party. The party that had at one time backed Andrew Kane as the next mayor of the Big Apple. The thought of Kane…the dead children…Fulton crippled…he had to focus to hear Guma.
“Hey, I know,” Guma said, holding up a hand. “Bad timing with the election seven months away. We can always wait and go after this in December…if you win. If you don’t, well, I expect we’ll all be fired and that will be the last we hear of it.”
Karp caught the challenge in Guma’s comment. His old friend didn’t give a rat’s ass about politics, nor did he have much respect for those who let it influence their decisions. “Let’s presume for a moment that I win the election, what are the other hazards of waiting so that this doesn’t come off as dirty politics?”
