“Is he saying he has proof you were involved with Guy,” Raymond said, “or does he have something?”
She turned, leaning against the headboard, to look at him, holding her glass in two hands. “Are you asking was I actually involved, and could there be some valid bit of evidence?”
“I’m asking what he’s holding over you.”
Carolyn paused. “Well… if, for example, you found my name in Guy’s address book… name, phone number and figures that could be interpreted to represent amounts of money, perhaps, by some stretch of the imagination, a list of payments made to him, Guy-and you were looking for a suspect, someone who might have contracted for Guy’s murder-would you consider that evidence?”
Raymond shook his head. “Not by itself… Did you see the address book?”
“What address book?”
“The one Clement, I assume, lifted off the judge.”
Carolyn was still looking at him, at ease against the headboard. “I said what if you found my name in his book. I didn’t say Clement took it, did I?”
“We’ve come a long way,” Raymond said, “but I get the feeling we’re back where we started. You were scared to death of him a little while ago-”
“I’m still reasonably afraid,” Carolyn said, “enough to know that I have to be very careful with Clement. But that doesn’t mean I can’t handle him.”
“You don’t have to handle him. All you have to do is make a statement, Clement admitted to you he shot the judge.”
“Because he’s trying to capitalize on it,” Carolyn said. “I told you before, that doesn’t mean he actually did it.”
“But he did!” Raymond spilled some of the aquavit, pushing himself up on the pillow to get to Carolyn’s level. She watched him brush at the wet spot on the sheet.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said quietly, “the bed’s going to be changed.” She lounged against the dark wood of the headboard while Raymond sat erect, stiffly, bare above the sheet around his waist. She said, “Look, we’ve confided in each other because sometimes we feel the need. You said before, everybody has to have somebody to tell secrets to. I’ve told you things I wouldn’t tell my partners and you’ve told me things, you’ve indicated, you aren’t going to tell your people. You have your game with Clement and I have mine. We both will admit he’s an unusual study, a pretty fascinating character, or neither of us would be quite so uniquely involved. Isn’t that true?”
“You told him to find another lawyer,” Raymond said.
“Yes, but he won’t. He not only needs me, he likes me…”
Raymond listened to the lawyer and the woman talking at the same time.
“… But he is going to have to realize, once he gets this extortion-blackmail bullshit out of his head, that I charge a fee, and if he’s not willing to pay it he will, indeed, have to go somewhere else.” She seemed to smile, though it was a bland expression. “We can play our games, but it still has to be within the context of the jobs we’re paid to do. You can’t expect me to give you information about my client, just as I don’t expect you to shoot him down without provocation… Agreed?”
“I guess we are back where we started,” Raymond said.
“Why? Where did you expect to be?”
He paused and said, “I don’t know,” as he got out of bed and then stood naked looking down at her. “But aside from all that, how was the fuck?”
“Let me put it this way,” Carolyn said, her eyes moving up his body to his face, “it was about what I expected it to be.”
MARY ALICE HAD SAID TO HIM, “You don’t care about anybody else; you only think of yourself.”
Bob Herzog had said to him, “You know what I admire about you? Your detachment. You don’t let things bother you. You observe, you make judgments and you accept what you find.”
Norb Bryl had said to him, “You spend two hundred and ten dollars on a blue suit?”
Wendell Robinson had said to him, “I don’t mean to sound like I’m ass-kissing, but most of the time I don’t think of you as being white.”
Jerry Hunter had said to him, more than once, “What’s the matter you’re not talking?”
The girl from the News had said to him, “I think you’re afraid of women. I think that’s the root of the problem.”
The woman, Carolyn Wilder, had said to him, “It was about what I expected it to be.”
He had put on his blue suit and left her house because he couldn’t think of anything to say. All the way home he had tried to think of something that would have nailed her to the antique headboard, her mouth open; but he couldn’t think of anything. He went to bed and woke up during the night thinking of lines, but none of them had it. Until finally he said to himself, What’re you doing? What difference does it make what she thinks?
He was working it out slowly, gradually eliminating personal feelings.
But it was not until morning, when he walked into his living room and again saw the broken glass, that he finally realized what he should have said to her and it amazed him that it had nothing to do with him, personally.
He should have told her flatly-not trying to be clever, not trying to upstage her with the last word-that if she continued to play games with Clement the time would come when Clement would kill her.
It was that clear now in his mind. He did not believe for a moment she had had any kind of a kickback scheme going with Guy. She had not denied it directly, because she would feel no need to, would not dignify it. Carolyn Wilder, of all the Recorder’s Court defense lawyers he knew, would be the last one to ever get involved in backcourt deals. Especially with Guy.
He pried flattened chunks of lead from his living room wall and knew by looking at them they weren’t from a P .38. When his landlady came in, approaching the window as though something might again come flying through the broken shards of glass, he told her it was probably kids with a B-B gun, over in the park. The landlady seemed to have doubts, questions, but asked only if he’d reported it to the police. Raymond reminded her he was the police. She told him he would have to pay to have the window replaced.
That morning, Raymond sat at his desk in a gray tweed sportcoat he had not worn since spring-since dieting and exercising-and the coat felt loose, a size too large. He reviewed the Judicial Tenure Commission’s Report on the investigation of Judge Guy, seeing familiar names, Carolyn Wilder’s appearing several times.
He did not tell his squad about the shooting-whether it was an attempt on his life or a challenge-not because he considered it a personal matter, but because he didn’t want to spend the morning discussing it. He was quiet this morning, into himself, and they left him alone. They made phone calls. They worked on other cases. They looked at hard-core sex photos they had picked up during the evidence-search of a victim’s house: exclaiming, whistling, Wendell pretending to be sick; Hunter studying one of the photos and Norb Bryl saying to him, “You go for that kinky stuff, huh?” Hunter saying, “Jesus, Christ, what kind of pervert you think I am?” And Bryl saying, “Oh, one about six foot, sandy mustache, green-striped shirt…” At noon, Raymond told them he was going to skip lunch.
After they had left he took off his sportcoat, unlocked the plywood cabinet next to the GE battery charger and hung his .38 snub-nose with the rubber bands around the grip on a hook inside the cabinet. He brought out, then, a shoulder holster that held a 9-mm blue-steel Colt automatic with a hickory grip, slipped the rig on, adjusted it snugly beneath his left arm and put on his sportcoat again, now a perfect fit.