“The sexist, macho shit that I get in the Department is nothing compared to what it’s like on the outside. Guys are usually pretty intimidated by me. And if they’re not, it’s only because they don’t take my job seriously – because they treat it like it was some kind of hobby. But it isn’t a hobby – I care about my work, Lieutenant. From the time I was a little kid, all I ever wanted was to be a cop.”
“Then maybe you’d better walk away from this Bobbie thing,” I tell her. “Because even if we win, you’re going to be dead in the water as far as the Department’s concerned.”
“If I walked away, I could still be a cop,” Williams says, “but I couldn’t be a good one.” She stands up. “I guess I’d better be going.”
I suddenly feel lonely, even though she is still there.
“I’ll walk you back to your apartment,” I say.
“That’s not necessary,” Williams replies, slipping back effortlessly into the role of the tough lady police officer.
“I know it isn’t necessary. I wasn’t offering you protection – just company.”
She grins, ruefully.
“Sorry, I guess I’m in the habit of being defensive. Honest, there’s no need to walk me home … unless you’d like to come up for a nightcap. I’ve got a bottle of Jack Daniels I could use some help with.”
I don’t want a drink – how about that, I don’t what a drink! – but it’s as good an excuse as any.
“Jack Daniels sounds fine,” I tell her.
22
Williams lives on Lewis Square, which is named after Meriwether Lewis, the famous Virginian explorer who did so much to open up the continental USA. The square is possibly the prettiest in Harrisburg. All its buildings are constructed of mellow red brick, and have a wrought-iron arcade in front of them, left over from the days when this was a farmers’ market. But there are no farmers anymore, and most of the space they used to occupy has been taken over by the kinds of stores that depend heavily on the tourist trade.
My sergeant’s apartment is over an antiques shop called The American Heritage Store. Williams opens the door and lets us in.
“Well, this is it,” she says awkwardly. “This is where I live. Home!”
I look around me. The lounge is painted in a delicate shade of blue and – like her blouse – it matches my sergeant’s eyes. The floor is polished wood, broken up here and there by a craft rug.
“I’ll go get the whisky,” Williams says, disappearing through a door which I assume leads to the kitchen.
I look around some more. A couple of soft, sensual abstract prints hang on the wall. There is a bookcase in one corner, a music center in the other – and both have floor-standing plants next to them.
I like the room, I decide – mainly because nothing is here for effect. Williams has it this way purely because this is the way she wants it.
There is something touching about it, too. It makes Williams seem so … vulnerable. It is her retreat from the cold, hard world, just as Bobbie’s room – full of fluffy toys – is his.
Williams returns from the kitchen, carrying a tray holding the whisky, two glasses and an ice bucket – and she catches me right in the middle of my inspection.
“Surprised?” she asks.
She is trying to sound neither aggressive nor defensive, but she comes over as a little of both.
“Maybe I’m a little surprised,” I admit.
“Why, what were you expecting,” she asks, the aggression cranked up a notch or two. “Boxing gloves? Antlers!? Wanted posters?’
“I’m not Duffy,” I tell her. “I don’t think that just because a woman won’t hop into the sack with me she has to be a lesbian – and I don’t think the sign of a good cop is that her apartment looks like the Squad Room.”
Williams puts down the tray on the coffee table.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just that I … I’ve never invited a member of the Department up here before, and it’s kinda scary.”
“I’m honored,” I say – and I mean it.
Williams picks up the bottle and pours two shots. As she hands mine to me, I can see that her hand is trembling slightly.
“Lieutenant … Mike …?” she says.
“Yes?”
“Do you think it would seriously screw up our working relationship if we went to bed together?”
“Maybe.”
She nods, like that’s the answer she’s been expecting.
“Want to risk it?” she asks.
“Definitely”
She looks me straight in the eye, and smiles.
“The bedroom’s this way,” she says.
*
We are lying in Caroline’s bed, holding each other in a loose, relaxed embrace. Neither of us has said much in the last half hour. Neither of us has asked if was good for the other – we both know it was.
“You want to see if we’d made the evening news today?” Caroline asks.
“Yes,” I reply.
Why not? Reality isn’t going to go away, just because I’ve oh-so-recently experienced the most exciting love-making in the history of Western eroticism.
Caroline gently breaks away and reaches onto the bedside table for the TV remote. She flicks the switch and the set opposite her bed comes to life.
A young man with a stockbroker haircut and a plaid necktie is standing with his back to the old Mustang factory.
“ … site chosen by Comptech for its new operation,” he is saying. “We spoke to Mayor Pine earlier in the day …”
Cut to the Mayor’s office. Porky is sitting at his desk, the rows of leather-bound books behind him, and smiling magisterially at the camera.
“The deal’s been in the pipeline for some time,” he says, “but clinching it wasn’t easy, because Comptech also had several other towns in mind.”
“It must have helped that Craddock Industries was already here,” says the off-screen reporter.
Porky scowls. “Sure, it helped,” he says grudgingly, “but it still took very careful handling to beat off the competition and persuade Comptech to come to Harrisburg.”
Careful handling by your wonderful mayor is what he’s actually saying.
Vote for Pine!
“And do you think other companies will follow?” the reporter asks.
“Certain to. Now that Craddock Industries and Comptech are here, we’re on a roll. Why, in three or four years, this town will be the Silicon Valley of the east coast.”
The scene shifts back to Prosperity Park.
“The Silicon Valley of the east coast?” Plaid Necktie asks. “Who can say? But one thing is for sure – the deal with Comptech has greatly increased the chances of Mayor Pine being re-elected for an unprecedented fourth term. This is Calvin Turner, for XTC News, returning you to the studio.”
The anchorman – same haircut as the reporter’s, but with an emerald green necktie – is wearing the deep, grave expression which goes with the human interest stories that most viewers tune in to watch.
“To return to the main news of the day,” he says, “alleged child molester Bobbie Hopgood met the press this evening.”
Film footage of the Country Jail, taken at a different, bleaker time of year.
Thick stone walls, skeletal towers, heavy wooden doors.
A building to break the spirit.
A building to crush the soul.
Cut to a room inside. Bobbie is sitting at a heavy institutional table in front of five or six microphones. He looks confused – as he is often confused by life – but his face shows the determination of a boy who, after getting hell for messing up on the laundry, still tried to fix the porch door. Beside him, smooth and in control, is Maxwell Tait.
“What the fuck is Tait doing?” Caroline demands. “He should never have allowed this!”
“Are you now admitting that you are responsible for all the attacks on children which have occurred in the last few months?” an off-screen reporter asks.
Bobbie scra
tches his head, and looks blank.
“Pardon me?” he says.
The reporter switches to a different mental gear.
“Did you do those bad things to all those little boys and girls?”
Bobbie lowers his head. Tears begin to flow freely from his eyes.
“I didn’t want to hurt them,” he sobs. “I only wanted to play. My mom never let me play.”
“But you did hurt them,” the reporter persists. “Didn’t you?”
Bobbie looks helplessly at Tait.
“He told me …” he begins.
He is talking to Tait, not about him – and I wonder who the ‘he’ is, and what it was that he told Bobbie.
Tait places a gentle, fatherly hand on Bobbie’s shoulder, and the younger man falls silent.
“How can you expect someone of Bobbie’s mental age to know what hurts?” Tait demands, directly into the camera. “All children shout and scream when they’re playing. And don’t be fooled by his size – Bobbie Hopgood has a child’s mind.”
It is a brilliant performance.
Tait, the honest lawyer who persuades his guilty client to confess, rather than attempt a cover-up.
Tait, the concerned human being who understands and sympathizes – and wants others to understand and sympathize, along with him.
Tait – the cunning, motherfucking bastard!
“Maybe he’s going for diminished responsibility,” Caroline suggests. “Maybe he’s putting on a public display to show that even if Bobbie did it, he can’t really be held accountable.”
Oh yeah, that’s exactly what he’ll tell the Bar Association if they question his actions. But it isn’t true. If he was going for diminished responsibility, he’d have insisted that Dr Maddox be allowed to examine Bobbie.
And Tait knows his client isn’t guilty – because by the time he staged the press conference, he would already have learned from Craddock that it would have been impossible to commit the crimes without an automobile.
He would have learned something else, too – that tomorrow Craddock is bringing in a new lawyer to defend Bobbie.
One who isn’t in Pine’s pocket!
I am already climbing into my pants.
“Where are you going?” Caroline asks.
“The County Jail. And you’d better come with me.”
“Why?”
“Because what we’ve just seen is the sort of move I expected Pine to make after my phone call to Tait. But he’s made it quicker than I ever thought he would, and I know now that if we don’t get to the County Jail soon, something terrible will happen.”
It may have happened already.
23
The weather finally breaks just as we are leaving town, and as we drive along the old back road which runs between Harrisburg and Lexington, the rain pounds angrily down on the roof of my LeBaron.
The road is flat for the first few miles, but to reach the County Jail we will have to cross Barker’s Ridge, a spine of rock which is towering up ahead of us now.
“It looks like a monster, just waiting to spring on its prey,” Carrie says, staring at the ridge.
Poetry, already! But she has a point. In these conditions, there is something sinister about the ridge.
We start to climb. The rain lashes the car harder than ever. Mud-heavy streams of water rush down the hillside and form pools – three or four inches deep – on the winding track. At the sides of the road, the tall pines shake and shudder as a merciless wind whips through them. It is not a night – or a route – for making speed, but the clock is already ticking, and I have no choice.
“Take it easy, Mike,” Carrie says, as I brake for a bend, and then hit the gas again almost immediately.
“Easy!” I repeat. “You think they’ll be taking it easy over at the prison?”
“And just how much good do you think we’re going to be to Bobbie if we’re dead?” Carrie asks.
She is right. The road is as slippery as a skating rink. If we skid here, there’s no way we can avoid crashing straight into the trees. And the higher we climb, the worse it gets, because now we are passing a picnic pull-in, opposite which all the trees have been cut down to allow the picnickers a panoramic view. Lose control at this point, and there’s nothing to stop us sailing right over the edge.
It takes us another five minutes to reach the top of the ridge and pass another picnic spot. I feel an unexpected stab of pain as we pass this – and then I remember that I used to go there with Joanna and imagine how it would feel when we took our kids out on picnics.
Behind us are the lights of Harrisburg; ahead of us the squat, ugly County Jail, bathed, periodically, in the eerie glow of the lightning.
“It’s going to be all right,” Carrie says.
But neither of us believe her.
*
At the bottom of the ridge, the road levels out. I can make better time now, but it is still another five long minutes before I pull up outside the big wooden gates of the prison and honk my horn.
A searchlight on the corner tower sweeps down on us, and suddenly everything in the vehicle is brilliantly, dazzlingly lit up.
“Stay right where you are until the guard has checked you out!” shouts a metallic, amplified voice, as loud and inhuman as the thunder. “No sudden moves, no reachin’ for nothin’.”
I shade my eyes and look at the gate. A small door opens, and a man wrapped in a yellow-hooded oilskin appears in the gap. He walks – with maddening slowness – over to the car. I wind down my window and rain spatters against my face.
“Yeah?” the guard says.
He has one hand on the roof of the car. The other is under the oilskin, holding onto the butt of his gun.
“I’m a cop,” I tell him. “Lieutenant Kaleta, HPD.”
“Got a shield?”
“Yeah.”
“Take it out – real slow – and show it to me.”
I reach into coat pocket and pull out my shield. He looks at it and nods.
“Who’s the woman?”
“My sergeant.”
“She got any ID?”
“Sure.”
“Take it out,” the guard tells her. “Do it same way the lieutenant did.”
Caroline opens her purse and produces her badge.
“Seems okay,” the guard admits reluctantly. “Wanna come in?”
Hell, no! We’re only here because it seemed such a nice night for a drive.
“We’d appreciate it,” I say.
The guard turns, and retreats through the small door again. After maybe a minute, the gates begin to open. The engine which is pulling them apart is old and tired. On previous visits I could hear its constant mechanical groan of complaint, but tonight everything is smothered by the angry crash of the storm. As we wait, I drum my fingers on the steering wheel, as though – in some magical way – this will make the engine work faster.
The gates are finally open wide enough for me to pass through. The prison is built like an inverted, squared-off U, and the car park, which is located just beyond the gates, runs along the top of it. As I slide my LeBaron into a free spot, the guard who initially checked us in appears again.
“So who do you want to see?” he asks.
“The man in charge.”
The guard shakes his head, like I’ve just said something stupid.
“In charge. Yeah!” he says. “Guess that’d be Wavering Willie. Okay, you better follow me.”
We get out of the car. The wind whips around my pant legs. Caroline shivers and turns up the collar of her jacket. The prison’s administrative wing is located at the left-hand corner of the U, but even in the short time it takes us to walk there, the rain seeps into our clothes.
Once inside the building, the guard points to the first door to the right.
“You’ll find him in there,” he says. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta get back to my post.”
He turns and disappears back into the night.
The sign on the d
oor says ‘Chief Officer – Night Shift’.
I knock, and a voice says: “Come in.”
I open the door. The guy sitting behind the desk – sandy hair, weak chin, pale green eyes – doesn’t look like a chief anything to me.
“Lieutenant Kaleta, HPD,” I say, flashing my shield.
The guy stands up and holds out his hand.
“Bill Taylor. Assistant Chief Officer,” he says.
We shake hands. It feels like I’m gripping a jellyfish.
“Where’s your boss?” I ask.
“Called in sick.”
Sure he has. Anybody in the know – anybody who is part of the conspiracy – will want to be as far from this prison as possible tonight. And the Chief Officer must be a part of it – it simply could not happen without him.
“So you’re in charge?” I ask Taylor.
“ … Uh … yeah. I guess so,” he says, like he’s only just realized it.
“Where’s Bobbie Hopgood?”
“The rapist?”
“The alleged rapist!”
Taylor consults a large, old-fashioned ledger which is lying on his desk.
“B Block,” he says, raising an eyebrow.
“You sound surprised.”
“I am. We don’t normally keep prisoners in there anymore.”
“Why not?”
“It’s the old Death Row.”
“And is Bobbie the only prisoner in there right now?”
“Yeah. Seems to be.”
So Bobbie is nicely out of the way. Alone, isolated, helpless – like he’s been all his life.
“Visitors?” I demand.
“What?”
“Has he had any visitors?”
Taylor runs his finger down one of the columns.
“Well, his lawyer’s been here. Man called Maxwell—”
“Tait!” I snap. “I know. Anyone else?”
“Yeah. Seems he had a visit from a Chief Ringman. Is he one of your guys?”
“What time did Ringman come?”
“Just after the television boys and the lawyer had left. That would make it round about eight.”
Round about eight!
When I was with Caroline in Visconti’s – eating spaghetti.
When I should have already been here – looking out for Bobbie’s interests.
Violation Page 14
