by Otto Penzler
And while he makes these noises—if he really does—does Walter, this failed, lazy student of film and video school, videotape what he does with Carmen’s sister like he videotapes his Funtime with Dead Things?
Walter is looking at Carmen quizzically, the angles of the woman’s haughty face peering around his chubby jowls. “Officer?” Wordlessly Carmen hands him the woman’s briefbag, an expensive, softly tanned leather thing. As he lifts the outer flap the smell of good leather drifts from its interior, floating above the milder scents of hand lotion and face powder. Stuffed atop an illegal alligator wallet from which a thick wad of bills peeks is the pink silk teddy the woman had been fingering when Carmen cuffed her, its edging of creamy Irish lace smashed between the wallet and a red suede checkbook. Walter lifts it out with one finger, as though it has become something he doesn’t want to touch. The woman gasps once—twice—and begins to talk, her voice razored and fast and dripping with the first hint of panic.
“I didn’t take that, I swear to God I didn’t. She put it there, she did, and I demand to see my attorney right now, you—”
Carmen isn’t just smiling inside now, she is grinning, like a big, happy slice is curving inside her chest from lung to lung.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Carmen interrupts. “Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to have an attorney present—”
“You’re damned right I’m going to have an attorney present, you evil little bitch!” Snarling and incredulous, the woman’s cheeks are now a rich shade of magenta. “You planted that in my purse, and if you think a judge is going to take your word over mine, you’ve got another thing coming, you stupid, mindless—”
“Anything you say can and will be held against you,” Carmen continues patiently. She finishes the Miranda above the woman’s raving and Walter stays as she calls for a transport squad to take the woman to lock-up. Despite her shock, the woman is still self-righteous, hurling insult after insult at Carmen, who has been nothing but polite during the entire situation. Only once had a perpetrator been polite throughout the arrest process, never raised her voice or fabricated an insult. That woman’s security had been of a different kind, self-secure but not self-smug, and Carmen had let her go due to a . . . “mix-up” in the evidence room and the disappearance of the stolen merchandise; thus the alleged perpetrator had walked from the station a free, whole woman, a little wiser and able to pat herself on the back and say “Courtesy pays, by God.” But this one . . . ah.
Carmen so loves to discipline people, especially the rude ones. There is little else left. As a child, quiet and unremarkable; a mediocre teenager; a dull young woman, barely above the poverty line as she worked in a factory like a small, automated robot, doing what, when and where she was told—through all that she dreamed of reversing the roles, being able to tell others what to do, how to do it, to reprimand them when they were wrong or acting incorrectly, to control their very destiny.
Then had come The Change, and the world was filled with Dead Things and the cops and the National Guard and the Army had their hands full, then overflowing. As people died by the thousands then came back as Dead Things themselves, a panicked nation withdrew into itself, as did the rest of the world, and restructured its forces, replenishing them from every possible source. And suddenly Carmen had a chance to lift herself out of factory work and into law enforcement as it had been redefined, and it was so exciting, nearly orgasmic in its first, fiery intensity as she and her co-graduates burst from the Academy and joined to wipe out the hordes of Dead Things prowling the city. All that bloodshed and downed flesh, the permission to annihilate using the intense, vicious training she had so taken to at the Academy.
Finally the Dead Things were not so numerous, and though times were a little stricter and a little faster, it might as well have been before, with its legal doubletalk and loopholes and the frustration of watching the same slimes, white-and blue-collar, walk free, again and again. And so Carmen, with the help of That Fucking Pervert, had devised a system with which she could occasionally tip the scales in favor of justice, and if the perpetrator wasn’t an outright criminal, what difference did it make? Money still bred injustice, greed, envy, all those undesirable attributes, and there lay her justification. Society had become three-tiered: the rich, like the woman Carmen had just arrested; the blue-collars, like Carmen, her brother-in-law and all these clerks who slobbered over the rich like adoring puppies; and . . . Everyone Else. “Everyone Else” was a phrase that, like the cheap polyester shirts Walter wore off duty, covered the ugly but didn’t quite hide it all away. Everyone Else was the poor, the homeless, the sick, the old—all those wretches who had no place to go and no way to escape the Dead Things. And Everyone Else included the Dead Things themselves.
Carmen and Walter watch the transport pull away and Carmen glances at her watch; the woman will be put in holding and Carmen has plenty of time before she must report to the booking sergeant at the station—legally the woman can be held for twenty-four hours before charges are filed, although Officer Valensuela wants to get to the station as quickly as possible. Beside her Walter shoves a cigarette between dry lips—a habit Carmen despises—then touches a match to it. He sucks in, then exhales, and she closes her lungs against the smoke that circles her head. There is a restaurant in the American National Bank Building on LaSalle and Wacker, and the smell reminds her of the heavy, foul air it leaks into the building’s hallway after a full crowd. She thinks again of her petite sister and is granted a vision of this pig of a man grunting over her, with his thick, smoky breath and Dead Thing–dirtied cock; she resists the urge to spit, steeling herself because she knows he will take her by the elbow and turn her toward the store. He always does.
His hand is cold and damp, but she will not flinch. Seeing his nicotine-stained teeth bothers her more than his touch. Does he kiss the flesh of the Dead Things he plays with? Does he give them love bites? The thought makes her want to gag.
“Come on back to my office and we’ll check the videotape.” This is what he always says, in case someone else is within earshot or monitoring the arrest process. If Carmen did not need the tape for the arraignment and trial, she would not go with him; as such, she has no choice and this gives her brother-in-law, That Fucking Pervert, a measure of control over her, and it eats at her insidiously, like a splinter embedded under a fingernail. Behind her cool-blue exterior the grin inside her has abruptly turned upside down but she follows him anyway, watching him lumber through the aisles of china and crystal perfume bottles, slightly amazed that the air pushed in front of his massive body does not tremble the fragile containers, wishing it would tumble a few from the shelves. As they reach the door to SECURITY/HOLDING, Carmen’s secret frown twists briefly into a snarl, but she bites the tip of her tongue hard enough to bring blood and clear her mind, a technique she uses often when she must deal with Walter. For the two days following a trial she is usually unable to eat salted food.
But that’s okay. It’s all worth it.
He leaves the door open and she does not sit. He settles onto his chair with an appreciable wheeze and picks up a videotape lying by the VCR and security monitor, then shoves it into the machine with a practiced flick. One thick finger stabs the PLAY button and the autosweep of the jewelry and silver department’s camera is cracked apart by a lookalike shot of lingerie. Carmen watches critically, looking for jump-cuts or cracked celluloid, an arm that angles unnaturally, but there is nothing; the fade-ins are smooth and undetectable to the naked eye. The scene ends and Walter looks at her expectantly.
“Again,” she orders.
His snort is the only hint of rebellion, then the machine rewinds, stops and begins to play again. It is a well-practiced routine, and he knows to run it on slow motion the second time. At the scene’s end, he looks up at her, his florid face hopeful. If he expects her to compliment his work, he is a fool; she will not give him the satisfaction of praising the skills that support h
is perversity. “It’ll do,” she says shortly.
Her brother-in-law ejects the tape and hands it to her, his grip leaving a nasty slick print on the case; Carmen plucks it from his hand by the edge, loathing the thought of getting this man’s body oil on herself. She turns on her heel and walks out.
She makes her way to the station and the booking sergeant sets the trial for two o’clock tomorrow and instructs her to turn in her evidence no later than noon; she nods but does not hand over the videotape; he does not care enough to ask why. He is blue-collar like herself and while on the surface he is unconcerned about the Susan McDunnah Atgelds of the world, Carmen instinctively glimpses the resentment behind the bottle-thick lenses of his glasses. Mrs. Atgeld will spend the night in the upper holding cell, sharing quarters with two to four other criminals. Shoplifters, robbers, perhaps a rapist or murderer; it is a different world now and criminals have attained a startling, deadly equality among themselves. Ten years ago a white-collar shoplifter would have been out on bail within an hour and would never have seen the inside of a smelly cell where the toilet was in full view of other men and women. Today things move a lot quicker and the word “bail” no longer exists.
Carmen clocks out and goes to the women’s locker room, carefully holding the tape by the edges that Walter hasn’t touched. She changes into street clothes, slips her gun into the leather holster under her left breast, then dons a short jacket to conceal it. The walk to the fingerprint lab on the second floor gives her a chance to run a mental check and make sure she isn’t screwing up; by the time she pulls open the door, she is confident everything is covered.
“Afternoon, Stan,” she says serenely. She pushes the tape across the counter. “I need fingerprint photos on this, with a full blow-up. The tape’s due in evidence on a different case by noon tomorrow. Can you handle it?”
Bernick, the little man behind the counter, grunts noncommittally but bags the tape and pushes a form at her. “Fill it out,” he rasps. “And don’t forget the TIME DUE box. Use red.” Carmen completes the form obediently, marking the TIME DUE as eleven a.m.; she’s worked with Bernick before and knows she will have her tape and print photos back on time.
Outside the air is clean and crisp, with only the faintest scent of burning flesh drifting from the old stockyards southwest of the station where the Dead Things who are too far gone to be of any use are burned. She has smelled it too long and too often for it to affect her, and even the sight of them twisting beneath the flames does nothing anymore, not since she and her older brother (himself dead and burned eight months ago) had hauled their parents’ struggling corpses to the burnyards and pitched them in. In a way Carmen is a Dead Thing herself, with a dead place inside which no one on the force can see and do anything about. But that is okay, because she can do something about other people, people who have Dead Places inside that bleed outside and dirty others, either with their attitudes, as with those like Susan Atgeld, or with their mere physical presence. Like Walter, for instance. His loss will cost her the security connection at Lord & Taylor, but that’s played out anyway, growing into too much of a pattern to be safe. There are always other ways to break the parchment pedestals that people build for themselves and foolishly think elevate them above the common man. Walter has made it easier to knock down a few, but she has been studying his books and a few of her old surveillance texts from the Academy, and adjusting to his absence will not be that difficult. Besides, it is better for her sister in the long run.
Carmen’s studio apartment is stark and clean, a monk’s quarters but for the television and video equipment, the piles of film books and mini-towers of videotapes with neat, carefully coded labels that no one can decipher but her. So many old tapes, so many arrests, the stream-lining of procedures as mankind struggled to adapt and survive in the face of a predator surpassing him in numbers, if not intelligence. There is no time or desire for red tape now, carboned forms, juries and the archiving of bygone evidence. Now there is an arrest, an arraignment and trial within twenty-four hours, and immediate punishment if guilty—and that’s it. It’s amazing how crime has declined, with only the craziest white-collars doing it out of greed and the sick thrill of gambling with their lives—or the poor and homeless, so desperate that being caught and executed means losing little beyond the misery of their day-to-day existence.
By now Susan McDunnah Atgeld has called her attorney, who is preparing a case of planted evidence or mistaken assumption. What Ms. Atgeld does not consider is that unless her lawyer is a relative, when he loses the case he will raise an eyebrow, then go out to lunch on a crab salad croissant after depositing his check (“Payment in advance, please”). Carmen feels sure her evidence will hold up, and it will, of course, be a surprise to the defendant; appeals have gone the way of juries, red tape and lawsuits, and there will be no second chance. It is a hard world now, a world where children run in packs and not just for protection, where outsiders foolishly traveling alone are thrown into rings with Dead Things for sport by gangs of kids. And the games go on, unchecked, because one bite, one scratch from a Dead Thing is damnation within an hour, and where is the crime without a complaining witness?
Carmen studies the older tapes, paying careful attention to Mrs. Atgeld’s clothes and hairstyle in each until she is satisfied; there is no discrepancy, the original tapes chart everything. After an hour she bundles the old tapes, nine in all, into a bag which she sets by the door. She will drop the tapes in her locker at the beginning of her shift until after the Atgeld trial; then she will combine the trial tape with the fingerprint photos from Bernick. This will be a double week.
She takes a shower, hot at first to wash away the dirt and Dead Thing stink, then cold, standing rigid as the icy water works away the fiery spaces inside her. She is shivering when she shuts off the water but at least she is exhausted and able to sleep, to elude the warmth of anticipation, the bolts of need that hum through her veins and tease her stomach. There is little to excite her anymore, but tomorrow and her plans for later this week have her teetering on the edge of a rarely satisfied lust.
In the morning Carmen is up early. The sun is a hot, spiky ball in the eastern sky; at six o’clock the bodyfires have been burning for almost an hour, the smoke tendrils curling around the sunbeams which slice through the dirty morning air and bake the fried flesh aroma more thoroughly into the low, desolate buildings surrounding the old stockyards. Her apartment is not air-conditioned, but she throws its single window wide so the day’s heat and stench can join her in this hellpit of a home, momentarily hooking her fingers through the steel mesh that keeps her in and the Dead Things out. After a minute she turns away and dresses in a clean uniform, then cooks herself a poached egg before leaving for the station ahead of schedule. No one comments at her arrival.
The morning drags but Carmen does not mind. No one from evidence or IA comes to question her on the Atgeld case and she knows, with a sudden gut-freeing rush, that no one will. The only surprise at the trial will be for the defendant. She thinks of what the woman is doing now, biding her time, fuming and flinching away from the filth with whom she must share the holding cell, inspecting her nails with disgust even as she slaps away the advances of one of her inmates and wishes she could urinate in private. Carmen grins to herself; the woman should count herself lucky that the precinct has the manpower to keep a guard posted to protect the inmates from one another; less than a year ago she would’ve been a tasty diversion for her cellmates.
Twenty to twelve. Carmen picks up the tape and fingerprint photos from Bernick, then takes the tape to the evidence desk without stopping at her locker and hands them to the clerk. The case is white with print powder but the evidence sergeant says nothing as he logs it in. Carmen drops the photos in her locker and goes back to her desk to wait; she has a one day on, one day off schedule and is forbidden to pound the pavement today.
Finally, ten to two. Time for the trial.
The courtroom is moderately full, friends and f
amily come to attend the trials—about one every ten minutes—and lend support, old women clutching their purses and muttering, a few white-collars with grim faces, pale expressions witness to this incredible intrusion on otherwise normal lives. Interspersed among the visitors are the attorneys, coolly shuffling papers and secure in their safety. Susan McDunnah Atgeld stands with her own counsel and her husband, a tall, lanky man dressed in an Armani suit designed to mock the starvation of the lower classes. Carmen can see he wishes to touch Susan but cannot because a prison guard separates them; instead he whispers something to the lawyer, then flashes Susan a smug smile that makes Carmen’s eyes narrow behind her mirrored sunglasses as she joins the other officers along the church-like seats.
Carmen’s arrest is eighth on the call and she sits for almost an hour and a half, anticipation heating her belly and dampening the soft skin beneath her arms. The judge is not in a good mood today, and that is to the Atgeld woman’s detriment; perhaps his wife rejected his advances this morning, or he stepped in dog shit on the way to his car. Whatever his reason the magistrate is more heavy-handed than usual, and tension mounts as case after case is found guilty and the defendants are unceremoniously hauled away as family members wail and stumble out of the courthouse. By the time she is called, excitement nearly makes Carmen hyperventilate and the cop next to her glances at her in amusement, then frowns and looks away from the unsettling twin lakes of her gaze.
