No Lesser Plea Read Online Free PDF Page B

three shades of tan against black and white, an alcove behind the door housing an ornate cast-iron radiator where you could heat towels, high ceilings, sculpted cornices covered with three inches of yellowing paint, a huge cast-iron bathtub with ball-and-claw feet, with a chrome shower ring, and one of those old-fashioned flat shower heads.
    Karp turned on the cold water almost full and then goosed the hot faucet gingerly. The room was immediately filled with steam. Karp had retained his athlete’s taste for hot showers, but the old building, equipped with boilers on the scale of those that drove the Carinthia to win the Atlantic Blue Ribbon, often supplied too much of a good thing.
    After finishing in the bathroom, Karp dressed in a lawyer’s dark blue pinstriped suit, black shoes and socks. He made the bed, picked up his briefcase, and left the apartment.
    The Manhattan DA’s office was at Foley Square, about two miles away; when it didn’t rain, Karp walked the distance. He walked down Sixth, over to Broadway, and then straight south, moving fast, with long powerful strides. Every ten steps or so Dr. Rosenwasser’s magic knee would give a little soundless pop, just to let everybody know it was still on the job. Most people would have felt it as a jab of pain, but Karp had been playing hurt since he was twelve years old. “No pain, no gain,” had been drummed into him by a succession of beefy older men, until he had grown up into a perfect little masochist. Winning made the difference; it was the balm beyond compare, the incomparable analgesic. So that when, playing hurt, Karp had received the injury that ended his athletic career, and the beefy older men had no more time for him, it was natural to switch to criminal law, a field that presented many of the same conditions and offered many of the same rewards as topflight athletics.
    It had the same elements of intense preparation and concentration, of confrontation in a circumscribed arena, where passion and aggression were bound by elaborate rules, of the final decision, and the emotional charge that went with it: won, lost, guilty, not guilty. He had done well at law school—Berkeley—and had earned a place on what was generally agreed to be the Celtics or the Knicks of the prosecutorial league—the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, then in its last years under the direction of the legendary, the incorruptible, the incomparable Francis P. Garrahy.
    In fact, as he walked that morning past the lower fringes of Greenwich Village, past the faded commercial streets of lower Broadway, the chic squalor of Soho, the tacky circus of Canal Street, and into the gray ramparts that held the administrative heart of New York, he felt again that little turmoil in the belly that for years had signaled for him the start of competition. His shoulders flexed, his jaw tightened, his face, which when relaxed was fairly pleasant—broad forehead, slightly crumpled largish nose, full mouth, gray eyes—became grim, even predatory. He began to look like what they tell you to look like in New York—if you don’t want to get mugged.
    By the time Karp rolled into Foley Square, he had worked up a mild sweat and an appetite. He cut across Chambers Street and went into Sam’s to take on fuel. Sam’s was a luncheonette, one of the thousands of such establishments, all different and all the same, that had been dispensing fast and semi-fast food to New Yorkers for generations before the appearance of the first Golden Arch. Nobody remembered when Sam’s had come to Foley Square; probably Foley used to stop by for a prune Danish and a container of coffee before going out to collect graft. Sam’s had a street window that was opened for knishes and egg creams in mild weather, a counter, four booths, six tables, tile floors, a stamped tin ceiling and a pay phone.
    Karp was greeted by the current proprietor, Gus.
    “Two?”
    “Yeah,” said Karp. “One butter, one cream cheese.” As Gus