“Good, I’ll get you a phone. And if it’ll make you feel more comfortable, I won’t take your prints till he gets here. What I’d like to do, you see…”
“You already told me. You’d like to charge me with first-degree rape.”
Yes, you rapist bastard, Annie thought.
“That’s the plan,” she said. “But first I want to compare your prints against whatever we get from a pair of beer bottles in Lorraine Riddock’s kitchen.”
Burton’s face went pale.
“Forget something?” she asked.
Junius Craig was one of a staff of five black attorneys employed by Truth and Justice. Alone with Burton, he informed him that “engaging in sexual intercourse with a female incapable of consent by reason of being physically helpless” constituted violation of Section 130.35 of the Penal Law, defined as Rape in the First Degree, a Class-B felony punishable by a minimum of three to six and a max of six to twenty-five. He suggested that if Burton for a moment believed his fingerprints might match the latents on the beer bottles in the victim’s kitchen, or if he thought for a further moment that samples of his pubic hair might match anything they’d recovered from the girl’s pubic area, or if-as yet another possibility- he felt DNA testing might come up with a positive match between his semen and anything they’d swabbed from the girl’s vagina…
“And make no mistake,” he warned, “they are going to get those samples from you. My guess is they’ll seek a court order…”
“Make them get a court order for my fingerprints, too,” Burton said.
“They won’t need one. In fact, under Miranda they won’t need one for the samples, either. But they’ll play it safe because they snatched you from a line of civil rights marchers. So what do you say?”
“About what?”
“About any of these possibilities.”
Burton did not answer.
“Because if you think any of them are possibilities, I suggest we start shopping a deal right now. Twenty-five in a state pen is a long time.”
“She wanted it as much as I did,” Burton said.
“You’re lucky you’re white,” Craig said.
“Anyway, Walter Hopwell gave me the rope,” Burton said.
They had him so doped up he couldn’t even remember his own name, but oh how sweet was the release. One swift kick of the needle and all the throbbing pain in his thigh disappeared, and all at once he was floating far far away on clouds of sweet contentment, floating. He tried to remember how long he’d been a cop, but he couldn’t even remember how he’d got shot tonight. Last night?
Two nights ago? What case had they been working? He tried to remember how many cases the Eight-Seven had worked over the years, but he couldn’t even remember where the precinct was. He lay in his hospital bed smiling, trying to remember, conjuring victims and villains alike, cataloguing the cases by their key characteristics, then arranging them alphabetically to achieve some semblance of order, smiling as he worked it through, pleased with what a smart detective he was, even though he’d got himself shot-until he lost his place and had to start all over again. Well, okay, how many had there been? Ten, twenty? Who knows, he thought, easy come, easy go. Forty maybe? Who’s counting? Who remembers, who even cares, I got shot! I deserve a medal or something just for being here. Two medals if I die.
I remember Marilyn Hollis.
I remember loving Marilyn Hollis. I remember poison, I remember those sons of bitches shooting the love of my life, killing Marilyn Hollis. If I should die here in this place in this minute in this bed…
There must be fifty at least, don’t you think?
At least.
Let’s dance, Marilyn.
Marilyn?
Would you care to dance?
May I have this last dance with you?
Bryan Shanahan, the detective who’d caught the Martha Coleridge murder downtown, could find no indication that anything had been stolen from the old lady’s apartment. So he had to assume someone had broken in there looking for something to steal and-when he hadn’t found anything-had turned on the old lady in rage. That sometimes happened. Not all your burglars were gents. Matter of fact, in Shanahan’s experience, not any burglars were gents.
He went back to the apartment that Wednesday afternoon without his partner, first of all because he didn’t want the burden of answering a rookie detective’s interminable questions, and second because he thought better when he was alone. This wasn’t what he would categorize as a difficult case, some junkie burglar breaking in and messing up. At the same time, it wasn’t a simple one because the killer-whoever he was-hadn’t left anything for them to go with. No latents, no stray fibers or hairs- which in any case wouldn’t have done them any good unless they caught somebody to run comparisons on.
