Carella's life for my Frank's life. And that is justice. The concept of justice had never truly entered the thoughts of Virginia Dodge before. She had been born Virginia MacCauley, of an Irish mother and a Scotch father. The family had lived in Calm's Point at the foot of the famous bridge which joined that part of the city with Isola. Even now, she looked upon the bridge with fond remembrance. She had played in its shadow as a little girl, and the bridge to her had been a wondrous day, she had dreamt, she would cross that bridge and it would take her to lands brimming with spices and rubies. One day, she would cross that bridge into the sky, and there would be men in turbans, and camels in caravans, and temples glowing with gold leaf.
She had crossed the bridge into the arms of Frank Dodge.
Frank Dodge, to the police, was a punk.
He'd been arrested at the age of fourteen for mugging an old man in Grover Park.
He'd been considered a juvenile offender by the law, and got off with nothing more serious than a reprimand and a j.d. card.
Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, he'd been pulled in on a series of minor offenses-and always his age, his lawyer, and his innocent baby-blue-eyed looks had saved him from incarceration. At nineteen, he committed his first holdup.
This time he was beyond the maximum age limit for a juvenile offender. This time, his innocent baby-blue-eyed looks had lengthened into the severity of near manhood This time, they dumped him into the clink on Bailey's Island. Virginia met him shortly after his release.
To Virginia, Frank Dodge was not a punk.
He was the man with the turban astride the long-legged camel, he was the gateway to enchanted lands, rubies trickled from his fingertips, he was her man.
His B-card listed a series of offenses as long as Virginia's right arm-but Frank Dodge was her man, and you can't argue with love.
In September of 1953, Frank Dodge held up a gas station. The attendant yelled for help and it happened that a detective named Steve Carella, who was off-duty and driving toward his apartment in Riverhead, heard the calls and drove into the station but not before Dodge had shot the attendant and blinded him. Carella made the collar.
Frank Dodge went to prison-Castle-eview this time, where nobody played games with thieves. It was discovered during his first week of imprisonment that Frank Dodge was anything but an ideal prisoner. He caused trouble with keepers and fellow prisoners alike. He conStantly flouted the rules-as archaic as they were. His letters to his wife, read by prison authorities before they left the prison, grew more and more bitter.
In the second year of his term, it was discovered that Frank Dodge was suffering from tuberculosis. He was transferred to the prison hospital. It was in the prison hospital that he had died yesterday.
Today, Virginia Dodge sat with a pistol and a bottle, and she waited for the man who had killed him. In her mind, there was no doubt that Steve Carella was the man responsible for her husband's death. If she had not believed this with all her heart, she'd never have had the courage to come up here with such an audacious plan.
The amazing part of it was that the plan was working so far. They were all afraid of her, actually afraid of her. Their fear gave her great satisfaction. She could not have explained the satisfaction if she'd wanted to, could not have explained her retaliation against all society in the person of Steve Carella, her flouting of the law in such a flamboyant manner. Could she not, in all truth, in all fairness, simply have waited for Carella downstairs and put a bullet in his back when he arrived?
Yes.
In all fairness, she could have. There was no need for a melodramatic declaration of what she was about to do, no need to sit in judgment over the law enforcers as they had sat in judgment over her husband, no need to hold life or death in the palms of her hands, no need to play God to the men who had robbed her of everything she loved.
Or was there a very deep need?
She sat now with her private thoughts.
The gun in her hand was steady. The bottle on the table before her caught the slanting rays of the overhead light.
She smiled grimly.
They're wondering, she thought, whether the liquid in this bottle is really nitroglycerin.
"What do you think?" Bucky said.
"I think it's a bunch of crap," Jim said.
"Let's go get the Spanish girls."
"Now, wait a minute," Bucky said.
"Don't just brush this off. Now just wait a minute."
"Look," Jim said, "you want to play cops and robbers, fine. Go ahead. I don't. I want to go find the Spanish girls. I want to find Mason Avenue. I want to curl up on somebody's big fat bosom. For God's sake, I wanna get laid, for God's sake."
"All right, that can wait. Now suppose this is legit?"
"It isn't," Sammy said flatly.
"Damn right," Jim said.
"How do you know?" Bucky asked.
"In the first place," Sammy said, his eyes bright behind his spectacles, "anybody looking at the thing can see it's a phony right off.
