Her stomach growled again, making a noise like a squeaky yawn. Lenhardt and Infante shared a smile at her expense, but didn’t invoke the nickname.
“Do we have time for a pit stop?” Nancy asked.
“Depends on where,” Lenhardt said. “We’ve got city uniforms standing by waiting to escort us into Southwestern. So we can’t dally long.”
“Something fast. Dunkin’ Donuts. Burger King.”
“Is that on the blood-type diet?” Infante asked, brow furrowed. “Or is it cabbage soup this time? Do they have cabbage doughnuts?”
Nancy waited until Lenhardt’s back was turned, then mouthed at her partner “Fuck you.” Infante shot her the finger. It was all harmless. They were kids, squabbling behind Daddy’s back, which made the job bearable for some reason. Especially when they knew it was going to be a long day, a long week. The case may have been a gimme, but even gimmes extracted their price. Nancy had still been in the academy when she learned that it wasn’t the clever perps who kept you up at night, it was the indifferent types who didn’t bother to cover their tracks, literally or figuratively. The ones who were too stupid, or too young, or maybe both.
She shook the memory off, tried to concentrate on what kind of doughnut was going to have the honor of wrecking her diet in the thirty-sixth hour.
“So,” Lenhardt said, his tone supercasual, “you let Bonnie handle the press?”
“Yeah,” Nancy said. “Absolutely.”
“Good girl.”
She loved those words. Lord help her, she loved those words.
Thursday, April 9
3.
There are no seasons in the basement of the Clarence Mitchell Courthouse, and Sharon Kerpelman sometimes had to glance at her clothes to remind herself what kind of weather she had passed through on the way to work that morning. No seasons, no weather, no sense of time passing. Today’s date was vivid in her mind because of the arrangements she had made to free her afternoon, but the day had no reality beyond her schedule; it was not connected to spring or even the day of the week, which also had a way of slipping her mind. She’d hate for anyone to know how many Saturdays she had schlepped into the shower and been half dressed before she realized the masculine voice on her radio was saying Weekend Edition, not Morning Edition.
Today-a Thursday, definitely a Thursday, a fact ascertained by a quick look at the date book in her lap-she was meeting with a family in the hallway when she saw a secretary walking past with a basket of colored eggs and chocolates, and thought, Oh, yeah, Easter. Had it come and gone, or was it about to happen? And didn’t that mean Passover was somewhere around here as well? Had she missed it? But no, her mother would never allow that to happen. Passover must be late this year, for Sharon had not yet received the annual phone call about the Seder and whether she was going to bring a date, and what would she think if her mother invited the Kutchners’ son, who had just moved back to Baltimore and was very nice.
Her client’s little sister, no more than five or six, followed the basket with a gaze full of longing and guilt, as if she knew better than to yearn for anything. The client himself, twelve years old and facing his second charge for selling drugs, was staring at the ground, bored by his own fate. His mother stood over Sharon, hands on her hips, jittery from want of a cigarette.
“Cullen,” the mother was wailing. “How’m I gonna see him if he’s all that way out there? I got no car. I thought he was going to Hickey, if he went at all. You said probation, maybe home detention. You promised.”
“I promised I’d try. It’s his second offense. Didn’t help that it was on the school grounds.”
“So why not Hickey?”
“Cullen has a bed in its unit for kids with addiction problems. Gordon’s not going to stop selling drugs until he stops using them. Besides, it’s smaller. He’d get eaten alive at Hickey.”
“Cullen won’t do,” the mother said, as if she had a say in the matter. She was furious, with the kind of fury peculiar to the nonpaying client. Those who can’t afford private attorneys, Sharon had learned in her decade as a public defender, assumed legal aid was incompetent. Do-gooders were simply losers in disguise.
“Hit’s only his second offense,” the mother hissed in the strange mountain accent that had somehow survived for decades in Baltimore, the legacy of the West Virginians who flooded into the city during World War II. Sharon secretly thought of their descendants as the fish-white people, evolutionary holdouts holed up in the city’s last white precincts. She knew these people better than she wanted to, for she had tried living in some of the neighborhoods they favored, beguiled by the old stone mill houses in one, the cheap loft spaces in the other. In the end, her hillbilly neighbors had driven her out, all the way to the suburbs, to a sterile condo behind a gate. At least she had tried.
“Look, your son started sniffing spray paint when he was eight. He has been smoking marijuana since he was ten. It’s only a matter of time before he moves on to speed or OxyContin.”
“I don’t use. I just sell a little,” Gordon said, primed to tell the lie over and over. His idea or his mother’s? Sharon wondered. His mother couldn’t honestly believe that her son didn’t use. Every time Sharon saw him, he had watery, bloodshot eyes and this spacey can’t-give-a-shit demeanor. Not that she blamed him. Hell, she’d use, too, if this were her mother, her life.
Sharon ignored his rote excuses. “I know it’s hard for you, Mrs. Beamer, him being so far away. But it’s the best thing. There’s something to be said for getting him out of the city. Kids at Hickey don’t get that same culture shock, that sense of displacement. Besides, Hickey’s too…too…”
The bailiff called them to court. Sharon stood, finishing the thought for herself. More and more, Hickey seemed to her an internment camp for teenagers, the place where Maryland was holding its potential enemies until some undeclared war finally ended. She hated to send anyone under fifteen to Hickey. Boys Village, near D.C., was worse still, Middlebrook the worst of all.
She shook out the folds of her dress, creased from sitting for so long. The saffron-colored dress was high waisted, with a long, voluminous skirt falling to her ankles. Heavy cotton, more of a winter dress than a spring one. The forecast for today must have been unseasonably cool for her to have chosen this dress. Or was it because she wanted to look nice, for later, and this was her best dress?
Gordon’s mother studied the way Sharon smoothed her skirt, the self-satisfied pats to the rich fabric.
“You pregnant?”