Immoral Certainty Read Online Free PDF

car, what the defendant was doing before, after—he’s a whole newsreel. The other guy just remembers the mutt had a red jacket and scar. Who you going to put on first?”
    Freddie looked blank. “Does it matter?”
    “Of course it matters! Everything matters! You put the guy with the details last. If you put him first the defense will question the lightweight on the very same details, and he won’t remember and that’ll leave the jury thinking maybe the first guy was making it up.
    “Then there’s the evidence. You have to keep straight what documentary or physical evidence you’re going to present along with each witness and work that into the orchestration. And the Q. and A.’s: They have to be perfect too. Hammer them with the evidence. Make sure they identify the knife or the gun in detail, the bloodstains, whatever….”
    “On every witness?”
    “Not on every witness, Freddie. You don’t take Q. and A. on your witnesses. The less the defense knows about what your witnesses saw and did the better. You do it on witnesses friendly to the defense or on hostile witnesses. And on the ones you know are going to flip.”
    “Shit, Butch! How the hell do you know which ones are going to flip?” asked Kirsch plaintively, suddenly aware that he was not to be supplied with a secret substitute for work or a simple trick.
    “How do you know? It’s part of being perfect, Freddie,” said Karp casually, on his way out of the cubicle, “just like you’re going to be from now on.”
    As Karp made his way through the maze of tiny passages, he was reflecting simultaneously on two related subjects. The first was that in the old days, somebody like Freddy would not have lasted two weeks in the homicide bureau. He would not have even gotten in, but if he had he would have been shredded and flushed after a single confrontation with the rock-hard men who had, under Francis Garrahy’s direction, made the New York City Homicide Bureau one of the finest prosecutorial organizations in the world.
    The fact was, Freddie was bone lazy, but his intelligence made him worth a salvage effort. Also, he might stay a while. To such expedients had Karp been reduced. Ring in the Age of Brass!
    The other subject was Marlene, and the unwelcome news that she had picked up the trash-bag child murder. Karp headed toward her office, which lay at the extreme end of a sixth-floor hallway leading to a pair of fire stairs. The architects had left a tiny alcove in the hallway beyond the stair doors and this alcove had been walled off and given a cheap door. There was just enough room for a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, and Marlene.
    Karp knocked and, receiving no answer, entered. A bomb had once gone off in this office, but that was four years back, and the place looked to Karp as if it hadn’t been straightened since. He moved a stack of files off a chair and sat down to wait among the drifted papers. Sitting alone in Marlene’s office was an unnerving experience. Since the office was only seven feet wide and the hallway ceilings were almost fourteen feet high, it was like being at the bottom of a mailbox, an impression that the great rafts of paper scattered around did nothing to dispel.
    He studied the dusty cream ceiling moldings. After a while, heels clicked on the marble floor outside. The door opened and Marlene came in, looking smudged and rumpled. She flung her handbag and a brown accordion folder down on her desk and flopped into the other chair. Kicking off her shoes, she put her feet up on her desk and lit a Marlboro.
    “Rough day?” asked Karp.
    “Rough? I wouldn’t say that. The usual. I got a new case today, another murdered child needless to say.”
    “Oh, yeah, I heard. The trash-bag thing. Why ‘needless to say’?”
    “Oh, because for some reason, whenever anybody decides to take the clippers, or the red-hot coat hanger, or the baseball bat, or the lit cigarette or the boiling grease to some little kid, which in this