Resolved Read Free Page A

gossip. You punched out a black reporter is what I heard.”
    â€œI didn’t punch him out,” said Karp. “He got in my face in a hallway and I pushed past him and he tripped on some TV cables. Then a guy fell on him with a TV camera and his face got bruised. There was some tape with me scowling and this little guy with blood streaming down his face. The press made a big thing of it. And it was the case I was working on at the time, that had a lot to do with it.”
    â€œOkay, now it’s coming back. That was that wacko who was after black grannies. You lost that one, if memory serves. Another racial thing?”
    â€œNot really. It was a good jury. I just got beat. The guy, Rohbling, was a weedy white boy with a lot of money. His family hired the best lawyer in the country and the rest is history. He’s in Matteawan now, until the shrinks decide he’s not a danger to the community. It happens. The African-American sector was not pleased.”
    â€œWas that when they started calling you KKKarp?”
    â€œAround then. They thought I was being insufficiently aggressive. They thought it was funny that a prosecutor who’d won over a hundred straight homicide convictions, mainly, if you want to know, where the defendants were what they call people of color, just couldn’t hack it when it came to nailing a rich white guy.”
    â€œDid they have a point?” she asked slyly.

Before

1
    T HE INTERIOR OF N EW Y ORK S TATE GETS SURPRISINGLY HOT in the summer, and this was a hotter than usual week, even for the last of August. The guards at the Auburn Prison, located nearly in the center of this region, were more than usually interested in the weather reports, for hot weather does not play well in the cell blocks. Auburn is a maximum security joint, like Attica, its more famous sister. Most people have forgotten that in 1929, in a similar hot spell, the prisoners had rebelled and burned the whole place down. But the guards remember. Prison cell blocks are not air-conditioned. Air-conditioning would be coddling convicts and the legislature will not countenance it, although if it were up to the guards, they would chill the whole place down so low that frost would form on the bars.
    The fight started on a Monday, which is the worst day in prison, because Sunday is visiting day. Those who have received visits from loved ones are pissed off because they can’t actually make love with their wives or hug their kids, and the ones who haven’t are pissed off because they haven’t, and the air is stale and stinking that monkey-house stink, and in the shadeless yard the sun boils the brain. Twelve hundred men, not one of whom has particularly good impulse control, all with little to lose, most with grudges against the world, mingle on that barren plain in the wilting heat. There are gangs. Half the prisoners are black, a third Hispanic, the rest white, and the gangs track this assortment. Someone makes a remark, and if the ethnicity of the remarker and the remarkee differ, that’s all it takes. The guard in his tower sees a rapid movement, a coalescence of men’s bodies around a center, like dirty gray water sucking down a drain. He goes for his radio and picks up his shotgun. The guards rush out with clubs swinging. They disappear into the mass.
    Felix Tighe woke up in the prison infirmary with an aching head and a dull pain in his side. It took him a little while to recall where he was and what had put him there. It was hot, he remembered that, and he was on the bench in the yard, doing bench presses, 380-pound presses, with some Aryan Nation cons around him, also working out, ignoring the niggers at their weights, as usual, and then one of the niggers had said something about the sweet little white-boy ass of Kopman’s punk, Lulu, which was bad enough, but then—it was Marvelle, the Crimp, he now recalled—Marvelle had actually grabbed Lulu and started