He had finally passed out, and they were dragging him into the bathroom where they had filled the tub with water. Not passed out entirely cold, but so sklonked he couldn't walk or even stand, didn't know what the hell was happening to him, just kept waving one arm in the air like a symphony conductor except that he was singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as they dragged him across the floor by the ankles. Something fell out of his pocket, the switchblade knife he'd threatened them with earlier tonight. Richard the First stooped to pick it up, jammed it in the pocket of his own jacket. He was sweating heavily. They were about to kill someone, but this had to be done. The girl had been an accident, but this was murder, but it had to be done.
They all knew that. The three Richards now as one.
They were Richard acting in concert, dragging yet another Richard into the bathroom where the tub full of water waited.
The water looked brownish, this city. Richard the Third was the strongest of them, he grabbed black Richard under the arms, while the two each grabbed a leg. "One… two.. three," they said, and they hoisted him off the floor and swung him into the tub.
"Hey!" he yelled.
Too late.
Jamal knew Richard as a dope dealer pulled down what, five, six bills a day, maybe a thou when business was good and the cotton was high. Used to be in trade together many a moon back, before Jamal tipped to the fact that dealing was a hazardous occupation whereas living off the sweat and toil of the female persuasion was less strenuous and nowhere near as dangerous.
What puzzled Jamal now was what Yolande had been doing with Richard and three white dudes at six this morning, directly after she'd phoned to say she was on the way home. Had Richard decided to do a little freelance pimping on his own? In which case he had to be taught about territorial imperative and not stepping on a fellow entrepreneur's toes. Or had Yolande and Richard decided to share an early morning breakfast with the three honkies? In which case, what had happened to the red patent-leather handbag containing-by Yolande's own admission on the phone." close to two thousand dollars?
Teaching Richard a lesson was no longer necessary now that Yolande was dead.
Recovering that handbag with the money in it was of prime importance, however, and it was the memory of that bag and anticipation of what was in that bag that propelled Jamal up the steps two at a time to Richard's third-floor apartment.
The time was three minutes to noon.
He started fighting the minute they threw him in the tub. He didn't know how to swim and the first thing that entered his mind was that he had somehow fallen into a swimming pool and was going to drown.
Only the second half of this supposition was true.
Jamal was thinking if Richard didn't hand that bag over the minute he asked for it, he was going to beat him senseless.
No cyanosis.
No bruises on the galea of the scalp.
No punctate hemorrhages in the conjunctivae.
And now no dark red fluid blood in the heart, or excess serous fluid in the lungs.
Ergo, no suffocation.
Considering the way she had bled, Blaney wondered if the girl had died from a botched abortion.
If the Pro-Lifers-a hypocritical designation if ever he'd heard one, and don't send me letters, he thought…. had scared her away from seeking help at any of the city's legal clinics, perhaps she'd found a back-alley butcher to do the job or, worse yet, maybe she'd tried to do it herself. Too many women attempted tearing the fetal membrane release the amniotic fluid, thereby causing contractions and expulsion of the fetus. Then whatever long thin object they could find, not just a coat hanger depicted in the Pro-Choice propaganda and don't you write to me, either, he thought but also umbrella ribs and knitting needles.
Blaney was a doctor.
He felt the best and only place to perform a gynecological procedure was in a hospital.
Period.
By a trained physician.
Period.
But here in the silence of the morgue, there were moral or religious judgments to be made, no agendas to be met.
There was only search and discovery. How had the girl died? Period.
Blaney found no fetus, nor any fetal parts, in the girl's genital tract or peritoneal cavity. Moreover, he had measured the thickness, length and width of the uterus, the density of the uterine wall, the length of the uterine cavity, the circumference of both the internal and external vaginal openings, and the length of the lower part of the uterus, he found no indication that the girl had been pregnant before her death.
Nor was there any indication that the vaginal vault had been accidentally punctured while she'd been seeking to abort herself, unsurprising in that there had been nothing to abort.
What he found instead was a massive assault on the uterus by a sharp instrument with a saw-toothed edge. The instrument had passed through the cervix, wreaking havoc in its relentless wake, and had ripped through the abdominal cavity where it caused hugely significant damage;
