Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) (44 page)

As he lay in bed that same night with Marlene, Karp had finally let his guard down and mourned the lives that were lost. “I was too slow with the riddles,” he lamented.

Marlene kissed him gently and noted, “Even Superman can’t save everyone. Imagine what today would be like—how many thousands of lives might have been lost—if you didn’t do what you did.”

Ned and Lucy had left for New Mexico the next day, accompanied by Marlene.
“Lucy’s still not talking much about what happened to her, and I want to be there for her and Ned if it comes boiling out,”
she’d said.
“Besides, we have a wedding to plan.”

That evening, Karp was meeting with Jaxon for drinks at Bleecker Street Bar when the subject of Lucy came up. “I don’t suppose you no longer need her and Ned,” Karp said. “And they can go back to their little house on the prairie to live happily ever after.”

Jaxon had looked at him for a long moment before smiling slightly. “For a time, perhaps, while the rest of us try to dismantle the Sons of Man.” Then he frowned. “And if she wants to leave the agency, I won’t try to talk her out of it. She just went through hell, but she believes in what she’s doing. The world has changed, Butch, people of good conscience can’t sit on the sidelines anymore and let others take all the risks for their freedom and security. Whether it’s the heroics of people like Ivgeny and his men, or the New York firefighters and police officers who rushed into the World Trade Center buildings, or a district attorney seeking justice one evil man at a time, we’re all in this together.”

One evil man at a time,
Karp repeated to himself as he looked over at Maplethorpe, who’d just walked back into the courtroom. The spectators filed in quickly afterward, as did Katz, accompanied by Carmina Salinas, Tina Perez, and Alejandro Garcia, who took seats behind the prosecution table.

When Katz took his seat next to him, Karp picked up the apple. “Mind if I borrow this?” he asked.

“Hey, bring your own healthy snacks,” Kenny Katz replied. “Have you seen how expensive fruit is these days?”

“I promise to give it back to you in just a few minutes without a single bite out of it.”

“Okay, then, but I’ll be watching.” Katz laughed.

Rosenmayer entered the courtroom and quickly asked for the jury to be brought back in. He then turned to the prosecution table. “Are you ready to present your summation, Mr. Karp?”

“I am, Your Honor,” Karp replied, standing and walking until he faced the jurors so that they could all see his face clearly. He held up the apple, turning it this way and that as though inspecting it.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began, “I have before you a simple red apple. Nothing fancy, just an apple. Put it in a crate full of oranges and shake the bag around, maybe toss in a lime or a lemon, and it may be more difficult to see, but it is still just an apple. And none of us need a lot of people to tell us that it is an apple. We know what it is from personal experience. We held one in our hands. And I assume we’ve all tasted one at some point in our lives. We know beyond a reasonable doubt that if it looks like an apple, and tastes like an apple…it is an apple.”

Karp placed the fruit on the ledge in front of the jury. “The truth is a lot like that apple. You can put the truth in a bag full of lies and it’s still the truth. You can call as many psychologists as you want, or experts in injury biomechanics and the Italian language, but the truth is still just the truth. But what the defense hopes is that if they pile the lies high enough, and present unnecessary and meaningless expert testimony, the defense hopes that the bogus testimony will hide the truth. This is something I call the Big Lie.”

Karp strolled over toward the defense table, where Leonard sat with a smile plastered to his face, but Maplethorpe cowered down as though he thought he might get hit.

“What is the Big Lie?” Karp asked. “Well, it’s a lie built upon the foundation of so many other lies that reasonable people such as yourselves look at what you’re being told and it’s so outrageous, so outside the bounds of common sense, much less common decency, that we start to think that well, maybe there’s some truth to it. And
why? Well, we reason, why would Mr. Leonard go to such trouble and say such outlandish things if at least some of it wasn’t true?”

Karp turned back to the jury. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because he only has oranges. There’s not a single apple in all those words either he or his expert witnesses had to say pertaining to the death of Gail Perez.”

Karp paused. “The Big Lie is nothing new,” he said. “It’s been with us a long time and has been used in many ways. Historical revisionists are particularly good at it. For instance, there are those like the president of Iran who tell the world that the Holocaust never happened…that the extermination of six million Jews, and six million other people, was a hoax perpetrated on the world to garner sympathy. Even reasonable people, if they hear that sort of nonsense often enough, there’s a tendency to say, ‘Well, maybe there’s something to it. Maybe it was exaggerated. Or Israeli propaganda.’ In the meantime, the Big Lie allows people like the Iranian president to disguise the truth—that he heads a government that sponsors terrorism and keeps its own people under the boot of theocratic oppression. The Big Lie is used today by Islamic terrorists to justify the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children by claiming that such acts are retributive justice for a hundred years, no, thousands of years if you go back to the Crusades, of crimes committed against Muslims. And even reasonable people wonder if there’s some truth to it if they’re willing to go to such lengths. But the only truth is that these people who believe that they can achieve their ends through murder and intimidation, they laugh at how we buy their lies.”

Karp looked at the faces of the jurors. Good people. He had not cared if they were liberal or conservative. White, black, or Asian. Just good, thoughtful, practical taxpayers.

“The worst part about the Big Lie is that it doesn’t just hide the truth,” Karp continued. “It tries to portray perpetrators as victims, and victims as perpetrators and sometimes even scapegoats. It goes something like this: ‘The Jews deserved it. The West has forced Muslims to murder.’ But if we dump the crate over and kick away the oranges, we’ll find our apple among them.”

Karp knew that the jurors would be thinking of the recent events,
and he gave them time to make the connections. “By the same token, Mr. Leonard and his highly paid expert witnesses have conspired to try to hide the apple with all these little psychobabble, high-tech oranges in order to create the Big Lie and attempt to portray the perpetrator of this crime, Mr. Maplethorpe, as the victim, and the victim, Gail Perez, as the perpetrator. And the injustice of that alone should make you want to cry out that enough is enough.”

Karp walked over to the defense table again and stood looking at Maplethorpe. He shook his head. “A few minutes ago, this man sobbed, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ and his attorney tried to portray him as the victim of Miss Perez. They hope that such displays and accusations will generate sympathy. But before you shed any tears for the defendant, let’s not forget who deserves those tears and who does not.”

Pointing to where she sat in the courtroom, Karp identified Tina Perez as one of those people. “Let’s not forget who lost her sister and then had to listen to some defense attorney portray the deceased as a woman who prostituted herself to get a job. And let’s not forget the disingenuous revelation of Tina’s private medical records in order to paint her as a mentally unstable individual, and the attempt to make a linkage to her sister also being a mentally unstable individual, for which there is no evidence.”

Karp looked over at Carmina. “And if we shed any tears, let them be also for Carmina Salinas. She didn’t have to testify in this case. She was under no obligation, except a moral one, and no one paid her to render an opinion. She didn’t have to take the stand and allow that same defense attorney to paint her in the same reprehensible light as he’d done with Gail Perez.”

Karp turned back to the jury, moving up to the ledge that separated him from them. “We in this business call this the slut defense, which is a common factor in the defense’s Big Lie when there is a young woman involved who has been sexually assaulted. Every woman in this courtroom, or for that matter in this city, this state, this country, knows that if she is sexually assaulted by a man and takes the stand against him, the defense will make every attempt to demonstrate that it was her fault. It might not be as blatant as it once was…they’ve got to be careful about accusing a woman of
wearing her skirt too short or visiting the wrong bar and thus ‘de-serving what she gets.’ But they still imply it every chance they get. So, of course, Carmina sold her body to Mr. Cowsill to get a part in his play, and for some reason hung around another two years. And of course, the defense argues, a beautiful young woman like Carmina was willing to do the same thing with that man”—he pointed to Maplethorpe—“for a better role. She’s just a slut, a whore…she and Gail Perez deserved what happened to them.”

Karp rapped the knuckles of his right hand on the jury ledge. “It’s all part of the Big Lie, folks. But let’s examine this using our common sense and see if we can’t cut through the smoke. We have Carmina Salinas, a young woman just starting her career in the theater. She has the best role of her life thus far in Mr. Maplethorpe’s current production. Yet, if she testifies against him and he gets convicted, it’s likely this play will fold and she’ll be out of work. And what’s more, she’ll be the woman who kissed and told and didn’t get what she wanted, so she got even. And her chances of landing another job go right down the drain with Mr. Maplethorpe…. I want you to think about the tears that have been shed in this courtroom during this trial. Which do you believe were real? The theatrical sobbing of the defendant, or the tears Carmina Salinas wept when she talked about how this was the end of her dreams? She had nothing to gain and everything to lose by testifying here. Yet, the defense would have you believe that she’s the one who’s lying.”

Karp pointed over to the defense table. “And they’d have you believe that Hilario Gianneschi is some pathological liar, too. But let’s apply our common sense here as well. If Gianneschi wanted to avoid being detected as an illegal alien, he could have told the police that Mr. Maplethorpe didn’t say anything to him. Or when asked to report to the First Precinct for more questions, he could have run and set up again in some other city. And let me leave you with this. On the morning he was to testify, Mr. Gianneschi was mysteriously reported to the INS and apprehended. But instead of calling an immigration lawyer, he called my office to let us know what had happened. He has no deal with us; he’s going to have to go before a judge for a deportation hearing, and his dream of living in America may also be over. But he sat on that stand and let the
defense attorney call him a criminal and a liar because as he said, it was the right thing to do.”

Karp walked over to the prosecution table, picked up the photograph of Gail Perez performing in
Annie Get Your Gun
, and displayed it to the entire jury. “And last but not least, let us not forget to shed our tears for the deceased. We know she agreed to go to dinner with Mr. Maplethorpe, presumably to discuss a role in his play. That’s what she told her sister. I don’t know if she thought he might want to have sex with her, but there’s no evidence that she allowed that to happen. I’d remind you of the autopsy findings discussed by Detective Cardamone that showed she had not had vaginal sex or oral sex in the hours before she died. So if she didn’t sell her body for a role in a play, where does the defense find the nerve to label her a whore, and a vindictive whore to boot? Well, because part of the Big Lie requires them to make her the perpetrator, with poor Mr. Maplethorpe her victim.”

Karp took a deep breath and let it out. “Let’s compare what you heard from Hilario Gianneschi, Tina Perez, and Carmina Salinas to the expert testimony. What did you hear from the experts? A bunch of theories and opinions. You had computer-generated cartoons that change depending on what the computer is fed. But every single defense witness who appeared on that stand admitted that they did not have a single shred of evidence, not an apple in the bunch, to support the Big Lie that Gail Perez was a troubled young woman who sold her body for a job and then killed herself when it didn’t work out. Instead, they made it all up, or spoke in generalities about theories and books that had nothing to do with the facts of this case. Together they created, ladies and gentlemen, a Big Lie.”

Karp strolled from one end of the jury box to the other. “I can’t tell you all the details of what happened in Mr. Maplethorpe’s apartment that night. There’s only one person in this courtroom who knows, and he’s sitting over there at the defense table. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know who killed Miss Perez.”

Pointing to the apple, Karp said, “Let’s examine the evidence, the actual facts that we do have. We know that Mr. Maplethorpe called Hilario Gianneschi and asked him to come to his apartment. We know that when Mr. Gianneschi asked if he should summon an
ambulance, the defendant shrieked ‘No!’…Again, what does our common sense tell us? If someone found a gun in your house and shot themselves, wouldn’t you call an ambulance or the police? Or if a witness asked if you wanted them to call, would you have shrieked ‘No, don’t do it!’ When you begin to deliberate, ask yourselves, why would someone do that?”

Waiting a moment to let it sink in, Karp continued. “Ladies and gentlemen, you don’t need me to tell you who killed Gail Perez. You don’t need expert witnesses to throw a bunch of oranges at you and tell you that they’re apples. The person who told you who killed Gail Perez is sitting right there at the defense table. And what did he say?”

Karp held up one finger. “‘I’ve been bad.’” He held up another finger. “‘Please, tell her I didn’t mean to do it.’” And a third. “‘I think I killed her.’” He dropped his hand. “There was no misinterpretation, no telling authorities what they wanted to hear by Mr. Gianneschi. It was a confession by the defendant, Maplethorpe.”