P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“Go through some Kleenex?” he asked.

“That’s not funny,” she said. “Surely you don’t approve?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to watch it over dinner, not unless I muted that sound of frying bacon.”

“Cam!”

“Well, that little shit killed a woman, her daughter, and a store clerk, probably for a couple hundred bucks, tops. For reasons understood only by you lawyers, he ended up getting away with it. And he was proud of himself. From the perspective of the blindfolded, bare-breasted lady with the scales in one hand and a sword in the other? Seeing that fuck ride the electric pony to meet the baby Jesus didn’t exactly ruin my day.”

“Someone not only murdered him-horribly-but filmed it, for God’s sake. And put it out on the Internet for the whole world to watch. That’s grotesque.”

“So was his crime.”

“Cam!”

“Glad we reversed the order, Your Honor,” he said, reaching for a towel. “Yes, I’m upset that my guy screwed up and you had to let them go. I’m depressed about all the bad publicity and political heat that we’ve been eating, and that there’s more headed our way. But I’m not displeased with the fact that Simmonds got the jolt. If in fact he did-we still don’t know that. I think I’d better go.”

He started to get out, but she raised a leg, hung it over his right shoulder, and pulled. As signals went, it was reasonably effective. Annie did an hour of tantric yoga every day, and she could and did surprise him in the most amazing ways. Even if she is kind of bossy, he thought. After round two, she went to fix them a steak while he went to find some more scotch and catch his breath. Over dinner, he told her in general terms what they were planning to do about finding Marlor and Simmonds. He pointed out that, for the moment, these were just his plans, and that the sheriff might have other plans.

“Lots of fingers going to get into this pie,” he said. “Great steak, by the way.”

“You never could cook, not even on the grill.”

“That’s right, now that you mention it. I married you for your cooking, didn’t I?”

She laughed, and for a moment he envisioned the peaches and cream complexion, ash-blond hair, blue eyes, and endless legs of the woman he’d courted and married so many years ago. She saw the look.

“Every once in awhile, I get this terrible feeling we pissed away a good thing way back then,” she said. She drew her terry-cloth robe around her shoulders as if to ward off a chill.

“I don’t know, Annie,” he said. “I think you would have had to make your run, one way or the other, and I would have just held you back. Look where we are now-this is pretty good.”

She was still beautiful, with one of those faces that defied a lifetime of unfriendly gravity. She gave him a severe look. “Just pretty good?”

“We need more practice,” he said with a comic leer.

She laughed again. “As if,” she said, getting up to clear the plates.

“Was that a little wobble I just detected?” he asked.

“Shut up. I’ll call Steven in the morning, get him in chambers, let him explain the current thinking. This time, I’ll authorize PC for Butts, on the proviso there’s no attempt to force a confession or anything else related to the original crime.”

Cam nodded, more to himself than to anything she’d said. “Myself, I kept hoping we’d find K-Dog,” he said. “Otherwise we’re in for a long couple of weeks. We can’t hold Flash forever, and then… ‘That’s one’?”

“I may have to keep my eye on Mr. Steven Klein,” she said from the kitchen.

“How so?”

“You mentioned ‘political heat.’ You’re not exactly the Lone Ranger when it comes to getting heat over this mess.” She closed the dishwasher door and came back into the room. She could see he didn’t understand, so she laid it out. “I’ve been the subject of some pretty hostile BS these past few months,” she said. “Letting those little pricks off like that, et cetera, et cetera. You ever wonder why it was the judge who spotted the Miranda error in the arrest record, instead of, say, the DA?”

He had to think about that one.

“I mean, you cops work for the DA, not the court,” she said. “I think it’s entirely possible young Mr. Klein did see the problem and then decided to let it come to the hearing anyway. That way, I would be the one tossing the confession, not him, whose people had messed the thing up in the first place.”

“Why would he do that?” he asked.

“Because he knew I’d catch it. Because he knows I read everything in the package, sometimes twice. And he knew I’d toss it because it would never survive trial, much less appeal.”

“And his objective?”

“My term is for five years. I’m up for reappointment the end of this year. Enough political heat, I don’t get reappointed. That’s how vacancies on the bench occur.”

“Why, Steven, you clever little devil,” Cam said. “Who’d a thunk it? But, shit, I thought you judges had to die or go senile or something.”

“Senility is not necessarily a disqualification,” she said primly. “But death is, and so is pissing off the governor. Bet you don’t hear any talk about liberal, pink-ass, Communist ADAs, do you?”

“‘Pink-ass,’” he mused, as if considering the notion. She grinned despite herself, and even blushed a little. Well, well, Cam thought. I’ve done one thing right today. He reached for her hand, and there it was.

At 9:15 the next morning, Kenny Cox, Steven Klein, and Cam entered one of the homicide squad’s interview rooms. The room was built like a small conference room, with a plain rectangular table, eight chairs, four on a side, and a large television screen mounted just above head height on one end wall. There was no one-way mirrored window. In its place was a microcam mounted just underneath the television monitor, and there were four microphones mounted flush in the ceiling. One place at the table had eyebolts to which a prisoner’s handcuffs could be secured. Flash was sitting at that place, although he was not handcuffed.

“They were callin’ him ‘Splash’ last night down in the tank,” the escorting officer said as he let them into the room. Cam wondered if Butts would be up to what he was about to see, given his appearance. His normally dark brown face had a grayish tinge and his eyes were bloodshot and jumpy. The skin on his face was tight across protruding cheekbones, and his county jail jumpsuit hung loosely on his wire-thin frame. He was sniffing hard every thirty seconds or so, and shifting around in his seat almost continuously, as if his butt bones hurt. Cam thought he looked old, even though his record said he was only thirty. He froze when they trooped in, looking from one to another as if trying to determine which one of them was going to start beating on him. He settled on Kenny, who obliged him with a withering glare.

“Mr. Butts,” Klein began. “Relax, okay? You’re not in any trouble with the law, and you’re going to get out of here this morning. You need a cigarette?”

Flash blinked as he tried to process this unexpected information, and then he focused on the offer of a cigarette. Flash lit the cigarette with trembling fingers and sucked half its length into his lungs in one go. He was well and truly wired.

“Mr. Butts, I’m Steven Klein, the district attorney. Let me say at the outset that you’re here because we’re actually concerned about your safety.”

Flash spoke for the first time. “Say what?” he said after a second deep drag on the cigarette. He inhaled every molecule of the smoke, then didn’t exhale for almost thirty seconds. Cam found himself holding his own breath. They’d agreed that Klein would do the talking. Kenny continued to look at Flash the way one would look at a rat who’d appeared next to the family picnic hamper. Cam stared into the middle distance and pretended he wasn’t very interested in what was going on.