"Then I have a couple more kids who aren't as personable as Ottawa and're facing different charges, but basically got nabbed at later stages of doing the same thing: Being someplace where they shouldn't be, using stolen money to buy illegal stuff, and not being able to give the cops who happened by and caught them a satisfying explanation of why they were there and what their plans'd been. And so they got arrested.
"One of them said he actually has a steady job at United Parcel in Wilbraham. He said he was afraid being busted for buyin' crack might make him lose it. He looked very worried, so he might actually've been telling me the truth.
"One of the other two was on Essesseye. He has a physical problem:
"Bad back. Chronic," he said to me. Put his right hand back on it right above his belt, so I'd know where it hurts. I didn't believe him, but I do believe his claim that a doctor and a caseworker believed him in the past doctors and caseworkers believe many things the average person would strongly doubt and the average cop would laugh at.
"The third one was kind of vague. He said he's on workman's comp. He had a bandage on his left hand. Said he sliced it twenty-stitches' worth cutting pipe on a construction job. Could be, but he looked shifty. He had almost four hundred bucks on him, though, so it's possible he was telling the truth. Also possible he isn't, and that he got the cash from selling something that he stole, or else from selling dope. Leave that one for Probation to sort out Monday.
"Then comes my next customer. She's a young-lady barkeep at Cannonball's on the road up by the pond. She sold she's alleged to have sold, excuse me a gram of coke to a State cop. He was in civvies and he looks like a Cub Scout. She's maybe about twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. Five-five, zaftig, very blonde, long pony-tail. Unusual for a defendant in that she is Jewish.
Rosenbaum. Leah Suzanne Rosenbaum. I suppose this's going to qualify me as an anti-Semite, go along with my well-documented racist tendencies, but the fact is we don't get much weekend trade from the Chosen People in my line of work."
"They're not doing their part?" Diane said.
"Not even close to it," Merrion said. "Oh, now and then we'll get a stray, some Jewish college kid who went out partyin' with the hard-drinkin' goyim, or a middle-aged businessman who knew but forgot that Jews aren't supposed to be big drinkers and there's a good reason for that. The kid gets bagged in an underaged-drinking round-up, he's out drinkin' with his pals, not as drunk but just as under-twenty-one as they are, and therefore just as illegal, so he gets busted with them. His older landsmen: it's so unusual for him to have more than a drink or two that he doesn't realize when he's had too much, not being that familiar with the symptoms, so he tries to drive himself home. If you or I're in that same condition, wed probably make it. We really shouldn't, we know, but because we've had some practice wed probably make it all right. The Jewish guy's all over the road and promptly gets busted."
"You can leave me out of that speculation, if you wouldn't mind," she said.
"Sorry," Merrion said. "You idealistic grass-and-magic-mushroom people don't know about intoxication like we evil drinkers do. Forgive me for suggesting it. I'd make it home all right. You should stay where you are and sleep it off.
"This young lady's got a lot bigger problem," he said.
"Selling a gram of coke?" Diane said. "How big a problem is that?"
"Not big at all," Merrion said, 'if that was the full extent of it.
First offense, as this is, suspended for sure, with stern lecture.
Cavanaugh yells at her for five or six minutes, "serious offense; mighty big risk you're taking, young lady; ruin your life," so on and so forth, "go forth and sin no more. Don't let me see you in here again." Her problem's not just what she sold to the cop after her boyfriend gave him the sales pitch that got him to the bar; it's what the cops found, under the bar, where she got the toot that she'd sold: thirty-four more grams, give or take."
"I can never remember…" Diane said.
"A little over an ounce," Merrion said. "Twenty-eight grams to the ounce. That tips you off something's wrong here. It's unusual to find someone in her position with that much stuff within her reach. That's the second tier of the statute. Anything between twenty-eight and a hundred grams wins you a full five years as a guest of the Commonwealth. Mandatory minimum: they prove you had that much, you go.
If she's the retailer, and the boyfriend's her floor-walker, then the dealer that they're working for's been kind of careless, exposin' his loyal employees like that. Leavin' the help to twist in the wind.
