No Lesser Plea Read Online Free PDF

Something niggled at the back of his mind. Walker was wrong, for one thing. He didn’t like a junkie with a family—people could ask questions if something happened to him, and Louis’s career was founded on only the most shallow level of questions ever being asked about his criminal activities. Even Elvis, sitting happily next to him in his simple and murderous innocence, was a little wrong. Louis had never had a real accomplice—patsies, yes, but nobody who was really in with him. This need for some human contact shamed him; it was a blemish on the polished and icy globe of his perfection. Perhaps he would have to get rid of the kid, too.
    But deeper than these disturbing thoughts, something else was starting to stir through the mind of Mandeville Louis, almost imperceptibly, like the flutterings of a small moth. Though he could not know it, it was in fact an intimation of the moral order of the universe, which dwells somewhere in all conscious beings, even those far gone in evil, even—the theologians tell us—within the demons in the lowest hell. It is told often proverbially: “God is not mocked,” we say, or “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”
    A shiver ran through Louis’s body. “Somebody walked on my grave,” he thought. But it was not that. It was the first shadow of something that would have been recognized instantly in the ancient world, which understood these matters rather better than we do today. They called it nemesis.

Chapter 3
    N emesis was six-five and a bit, well-muscled, with a bad left knee. At seven o’clock on the morning after the Marchione killings, Roger Karp, called “Butch,” an assistant district attorney for New York County, was slowly rising from what was literally the sleep of the just. As he awakened he experienced, as usual, a moment of disorientation. He was not in the bedroom of the comfortable apartment he had shared with Susan. Susan was in California, with the furniture. He was in a renovated two-room apartment on West 10th Street off Sixth Avenue, with no furniture. Actually, he had a Door Store platform bed and a rowing machine; everything else he owned was in storage or at the office. The place had a kitchen, which he never used. The range and refrigerator were new and still had their packing slips and little instructional booklets tucked inside. Not a domestic guy, Karp. The bed and the rowing machine didn’t fit in the office, or he would not have needed an apartment at all.
    Karp stretched, swung his legs out of bed and stood up. By habit, he bounced a little on his left leg. The knee neither locked nor collapsed. Dr. Marvin Rosenwasser, orthoped of Palo Alto, was not God (except in the opinion of his mother) but his patellar re-creation seemed to be functioning approximately as well as the original—on a light-duty basis, of course. It would not stand a pounding dash down the length of a basketball court or a leap for a rebound, which is why Karp was an attorney, rather than a professional basketball player, in New York.
    In his faded Berkeley sweatpants, of which he had retained a prodigious supply, Karp walked over to his rowing machine, sat in its seat, put his feet in the stirrups, and pulled boldly into the current. The room was cool. The windows were open and the morning air was touched with the smell of rain. Still, after ten minutes Karp was running a sweat and after twenty he was dripping. He had the tension on the rowing machine set to its highest level. Karp didn’t believe in taking it easy. At thirty-two he had managed to retain a body that, legs aside, could still have started in the NBA: big shoulders, a hard slab of torso, sinewy arms, thick wrists.
    He rose from the machine, stripped, and went into the bathroom. It was the best thing about the tiny apartment, being one of the original bathrooms from the days when each story of the apartment house had only four flats instead of ten. It had a patterned tile floor in