was bent over with helpless laughter. It was the hiccupping kind of laughter, nearly soundless, the infectious kind, and Karp himself felt it tickling his own face.
'It's a good opportunity-,' he added.
The laughter increased in intensity, and the other man, who was a detective lieutenant in the New York Police Department, started to lose control of his limbs and slide off his seat.
Karp started to laugh too, as the thought of trying to convince a hysterically laughing man to take charge of the field investigation of the death of John F. Kennedy suddenly struck him as hilarious.
Several minutes passed in this way, and when the lieutenant, whose name was Clay Fulton, and who was Karp's oldest and best friend in the cops, had advanced to the stage of gasping 'Oh, God' and wiping his eyes with his lemon silk handkerchief, Karp took up his case again.
'Seriously, Clay…'
'Oh, God, don't start,' Fulton groaned. 'My heart can't take much of this anymore.'
'Seriously,' Karp persisted. 'I think it's a good deal. You were set to retire from the job anyway.'
'You are serious about this,' said Fulton, sitting up again.
'I keep saying.'
'You're going to go find out who aced JFK, and you want me to help you?'
'You got the picture. What's your problem?'
Fulton let out a whoosh of breath and scratched the side of his heavy jaw. He regarded Karp through narrowed eyes. 'Well, I got a couple. One, what makes you think we're gonna do any good on a thirteen-year-old investigation, that the guys who were there when the corpse was still warm couldn't've done?'
'Maybe they didn't want to. Maybe they were incompetent. Besides, it was Texas. You ever been in Texas?'
'Yeah, in the army. Why?'
'Well, so you know what it's like. Do they have food? Do they have shows? Do they have clothes? They're hicks, face it. So, get a couple of sharp New York kids like us in there, a little hustle-it'll be a whole different story.'
Fulton laughed again. 'So what you're saying is because you can't get a knish in Texas, we'll make it happen thirteen years later, where they drew a blank?'
'That's it. I rest my case.'
Fulton stared at him for a moment and said, smiling, 'You need professional help, not a cop.'
'Come on, Clay. You're a homicide investigator. Investigate the homicide of the century! What're you gonna do when you retire? Security for department stores? Teach at John Jay? You'll go batshit.'
'This is for me, right? You're doing me a favor? Just a minute, let me make sure my wallet's still here.' He patted at his suit coat pocket. 'Okay, wise guy, how long you figure this gig is going to take? Months? Years?'
'This I don't know,' admitted Karp. 'Say a year…'
'Okay, that means I'm gonna have to go to Martha and say, 'Guess what, baby? We're going south. Back to the land o' cotton…' '
'Oh, horseshit, Clay! Washington isn't the South!'
'Do tell,' said Fulton, giving Karp a hard look. 'And there's Texas, too. Those old boys're gonna love having a big-city nigger poking around in what they did or didn't do, the heaviest case they ever saw.'
Karp was taken aback, and felt himself flush with embarrassment. It had not occurred to Karp that Fulton and his wife would be at all discommoded by moving from their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a city that was still heavily segregated, in fact if not in law, or that poking into a Texas investigation might be a problem for a black man.
Karp said, 'Okay, forget it. I wasn't thinking…'
Fulton stood up, leaned over, and placed his hand on Karp's arm. 'No, I appreciate being asked… I guess.'
He perched on the edge of the desk and looked at Karp with the fatherly expression he sometimes assumed with the younger man. He was only twelve years older, but he had spent most of his adult life as a street cop uptown, which worked out to an effective seniority of about a thousand and four years.
'Goddamn,' said Fulton, shaking his head and grinning, showing his gold tooth, 'our little Butch's really gonna do it. A long time, the two of us.'
'Yeah, eleven years. Dr. Fulton's College of Criminal Knowledge for green-ass prosecutors. I would've sunk like a stone, you hadn't grabbed me by the shorts.'
'Mooney McPhail.'
Karp smiled. 'Yeah, Mooney McPhail. An easy grounder to short and I bobbled it.'
'You were second seating for Joe Lerner.'
'Right, another blast from the past. He's in on this too, by the way, the MLK side. I had a witness said she saw Mooney use the knife, and picked him out of the lineup. That was the case. Holy shit! What a fuckup!'
'Only she didn't. It was her sister saw it and she told-what the hell was her name? — Esther, Ethyl?'
'Methyl,' said Karp.
'Methyl, right. She got the whole story from the sister and she decided to be the witness, because the sister had the arth-a-ritis.'
'Yeah, it would've been a classic, if it'd come out on cross. Defense would've asked, 'Did you actually observe this with your own eyes,' and old Methyl would've said, 'Oh, no, my sister told me the whole story and she don't lie.' Case dismissed.'
Fulton laughed. 'Turned out the sister didn't see it either. Took me a month to find the girl who told the sister… Damn!'
'What?'
'It just flashed on me, where I was.'
'What, when you found the witness?'
'No, where I was when I found out about Kennedy. I was up on St. Nick, up around 'forty-third, making a collar. Some pimp cut a girl. I was a detective second out of the Two-eight. I had him in cuffs on the street and my partner, Mike Samuels, was just opening the car, and I looked up and there was a crowd of about fifty people around this appliance and stereo store, pressed up against the grilles. They had a bunch of TVs there, on all the time. We locked the mutt in the back and I went over to see what was going on. We'd been in the building maybe forty minutes with this asshole, and in that time Kennedy'd been shot and pronounced dead. The man never meant that much to me personally, but it was a hell of a jolt-the president and all that. But the people on the sidewalk, most of them were carrying on like it was Lincoln all over again, a couple of old church ladies hollering, 'Sweet Jesus God… ' '
Fulton paused for a deprecating chuckle. 'It affected a lot a folks up there. I guess it's… they've seen a lot of young men die for no reason, just from meanness and stupidity. It must've kind of crystallized the whole thing for them. My mom, now… still got a magazine cover of JFK framed, and Bobby too. Right next to Dr. King. And Jesus, of course. Hell of a thing!' He shook his head.
'Anyway, I ran back to the car and told Samuels what was up, and of course, he had to go over and check it out for himself. The mutt asks me what's up and I tell him and he says, 'Well, fuck him! When we gonna move?' Like he was late for a big date.'
Fulton stood up and said, 'Tell you one thing. I do this, and it works, I'd get my momma off my case. She's been pissed at me for joining the cops from day one. Can you believe, she still introduces me: 'This is my eldest, Clayton, first college graduate in the family and he threw it all away to be with the police.' '
Karp brightened. 'So you will think about it.'
'I'll think about it, boss. We're in the thinking stage here. Give me a couple of days. Meanwhile, I'll see you later on at the party.'
'You're not supposed to tell me about it,' said Karp glumly. 'It's supposed to be a surprise.'
Four hours later, Karp was in that state of woozy euphoria he obtained through drink, a state that for him lasted about twelve minutes before being replaced by faint nausea and a sick headache. Karp couldn't drink at all, this lapse being a source of keen amusement to his friends and his wife, all of whom could put it away pretty good.
The farewell party was well under way. The homicide bureau had kicked in for a catered spread-chopped
