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you?”
    “Yeah! Of course I do. Shit, Butch I got an indictment from the grand jury on this thing—”
    “Marlene, don’t bullshit me!” said Karp, his voice rising. “The grand jury would indict Mother Theresa if a D.A. told it to, as we both well know. I want to know what we got .”
    Marlene looked over her shoulder at the judge, who was glowering at them. “Miss Ciampi, far be it from me to interrupt what appears to be a fascinating conversation….”
    “Yes, Your Honor,” said Marlene. “Sorry, we were just going.”
    With that she gathered her brown envelopes under her arm and made for the door, Karp following.
    A few minutes later they were in Marlene’s office. She lit up and watched the smoke rise up the high, narrow shaft of her office. “All right,” she said after a while, “I fucked this up. We got garbage for a serious trial. I was figuring the percentages: a parent kills a kid, what they want is punishment. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’ll cop to anything you offer, just to avoid standing up in public while somebody tells all about how they used the knitting needles on little Mary.”
    “So what do we have?” said Karp unsympathetically. He was angry with Marlene, and angry with himself for not keeping closer tabs on her and the other attorneys. That doing so was plainly impossible, given the caseload of the Criminal Courts Bureau, did not diminish his anger one whit. A case like this would have been laughed out of the old homicide bureau in a New York minute.
    “The history of child abuse. Butch, honestly, that’s what threw me. This kid has been through Bellevue emergency over forty times—broken wrists, ribs, bruises, cuts, burns, the whole nine yards. It just seemed too obvious that the mom had gone a hair too far.
    “Then the clothes. The kid was naked when they found her in the dumpster, in the trash bag. The cops found her bloody clothes in another trash bag—the same kind of bag—in the air shaft right under Segura’s window. There was a package of the same kind of trash bags in her kitchen.
    “The sexual abuse part—the child was raped, repeatedly, but what else is new? The mother had men in, nobody steady, different ones, all the time. Maybe one of them wanted seconds after the mom passed out. Or maybe ten of them. Did the cops interview every one of her known companions? Hah-Hah. So that’s fucked up too.
    “But … the woman doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the killing. Says she was sleeping one off, alone. That’s it. Pretty thin, huh?”
    “Yeah. So where’s the finger?”
    “The what?”
    “The finger, Marlene, the little girl’s finger. I seem to remember you telling me it was cut off. Did you find it?”
    “No. I figure she got rid of it, down the can or something. I was thinking a crazy punishment that got out of hand, you know? ‘Be a good girl or Mama will cut off your finger.’ Then afterward, the kid wouldn’t stop crying, the mother got scared, tried to shut the kid up, and bingo! Lights out. It’s happened before.”
    That was just the problem, Karp thought. It’s all happened before: repetition, the boring banality of crime, of seeing what people did to one another. It deadened not only the intellect, as in this case, because Marlene Ciampi was arguably one of the most intelligent lawyers in the bureau, but also extinguished the moral imagination, so that the people of the Courthouse could no longer look at the accused and say, “Could this person have done thus and so? Could I have done thus and so, if I were that person?” There were so many, and so alike, that after a while the association between the particular crime and the particular defendant—the essence of justice—didn’t matter. And if that didn’t matter, nothing mattered: the creeping death of Centre Street.
    He wanted to shout at her, to shake her, but instead he sat and looked down at his hands, and said in a low voice, “That’s an interesting idea. What