George Higgins - A change of gravity

She overrode what he was saying before he could finish. "No," she said, shaking her head. "Don't make it what it isn't. You're taking an awful chance here, and a stupid one to boot. The papers get ahold of this, they'll ruin both of you, you and the judge both. And you'll deserve it. You have no authority to do what you're doing and you know it. You've told me that yourself. Place the case on file, as you put it, and then make the defendant accountable to you. Set yourself up over this unfortunate creature as though you were her keeper. Rule her life.

"It's okay. The two of you've decided in your wisdom that what's legally available, the agencies and so forth, aren't effective enough for you. They don't do things the way you'd like to see them done. So the hell with the legislature and the laws and all of that stuff. You and Danny Hilliard; that's where this got started. The two of you spent so much time thinking up ways to manipulate people to get him elected, and then when he was elected, using every bit of power he could get, any way that he could get it, to do what you two wanted done, you lost sight of everything else.

"Something happened to you. You've got this disdain for the whole process. For you it's become a charade. Everything official's a show you put on for the dummies out front, to distract them while you do what was best for them. What the law says is not important; what matters is who's got the fix in. The law's what you want the law to be, and never mind what it says; you'll decide what matters.

"Who the hell do you think you are? Barging into her life, like you own it? Who on earth gave you that right?

"No one did. You've got no right. And in the second place, just what are you going to do, to punish her, if she doesn't do what you tell her, or does what you tell her not to do? Have you given that any thought? What are you going to do to her if she decides to call your bluff, get into trouble knowing you will help her? You create a dependency when you inveigle a person into reposing her trust entirely in you, knowing she's not bright or strong-willed — that's what enabled you to do it. A low-affect personality you've compelled to abdicate responsibility that for all you know she might've been able to handle for what happens in her life. Instead you make all her decisions.

Amby, this is a dangerous game. Therapists who play it often find themselves wishing they hadn't."

"I know it," he said. "That's what I've been trying to tell you. I really wish now that the judge and I hadn't taken this thing on.

Basically what I had on my mind when I told her to come in and see me yesterday was what Sam Paradisio told me. I told you about him, my friend in federal Probation. He called me last week, said he's got information Janet's shacking up with this bank robber — most likely a stone killer, too, 'cept nobody's proved that yet. And his concern in my place would be that this vicious bastard'll decide it's time for Janet to disappear.

"Sammy thinks he's the type of guy who solves problems that way. When someone complicates his life, homicide is a thing he can do to simplify it. Sammy's afraid his guy'll kill this woman we've been trying to help."

"Marvelous," Diane said. "Perfectly wonderful. He kills her and then of course there's an investigation, and that's when it comes out that she shouldn't even've been in the situation where someone could get at her to kill her. When she got in trouble, a year ago, she should've been sent to an institution, a supervised, structured, protected environment. Either getting punished or else getting some help. And that's where she would've been, if the judge and his clerk had enforced the laws. But instead they decided to take the law into their own hands. "Cause they knew better."

"Well, naturally this worries me," Mernon said.

"I should think it would," she said. "It would certainly worry me.

"But I talk to her," Merrion said. "I have a heart-to-heart talk with her, and I tell her to stay away from this guy, have nothing more to do with him, and she assures me she will not. She'll stay away from him."

"Amby, you're a dear man," Diane said, 'but how is she going to do that? How on earth… if the reason you don't want her seeing this man is that someone who knows him thinks that he might kill her, how do you think your Sad Sack of a woman's going to make him leave her alone?

Isn't it more likely she'll set him off completely if she tries to do that? Provoke him into doing the very thing that you're afraid he'll do?"

"I don't think so," he said. "Or at least this morning, down at the station, I didn't think so. From what Sammy told me and you understand this's confidential stuff that he's only telling it to me because he has to, do his job and I need him to, to do mine, so I shouldn't really be telling it to you this's all very hush-hush and so forth."

"Right," she said. "At least 'til they find the body. But once that happens, I think you'll find it becoming general knowledge fairly quickly."

"Yeah," he said. "Well, I'm sorry I brought it up. But this squatter-lady last night, Linda Shepard, with her three kids named after movie stars and her dog-ass boyfriend, of course, to go with her and the kids: I had no idea at all what the hell to do with the five of them.

"So I say to Ev Whalen, I said: "Ev, 've you by any chance got any ideas here, what I can do with these folks? Assuming as I am of course that you don't want to keep 'em here, locked up in the jail overnight and tomorrow until Social Services opens up again Monday? I never run into anything like this before, where I couldn't release somebody when there wasn't any reason why they should be locked up, because they didn't have a place to go when they got out. Something you can do to just get these people under cover for a while, a day or two. You know?" And he just looks at me. Then he says: "No, not really, no.

They don't pay me here to have ideas." '"Well, you're a big help," I say to him. He gets kind of pissed off at me. "Hey," he says, "don't look at me. You've got these people here charged with a crime and you don't know what to do with them. I'm not in charge of homeless."

"Well, he's right, isn't he?" Diane said. "It isn't a crime to be homeless. The police aren't supposed to do anything except call the proper authorities when it looks like otherwise they might freeze to death, starve, or die without immediate medical care. Back when we were building the new station, I don't recall making any provision for that kind of problem, facilities for short-term family shelter."

"We didn't," Merrion said. "There aren't any."

"Well, doesn't that tell you something?" she said. "The sergeant was right."

"Well, that's what I'm trying to tell you, for Christ sake," Merrion said. "If you'd just… you know what it is about you people all the time, that gets on people's nerves? It's that it's always so important to you, matter what the situation is, to never get excited. Act like anything ever really mattered to you. You've always got to be completely in control. Always superior, cool, calm and collected, never upset about anything. That and the fact that you just will not listen. When somebody tries to tell you something that you may not understand, maybe don't know all the facts about even though you always think you do; always sure of that well, you got no time to hear it.

"You're always sort of lookin' down your nose all the time, at people like me who look to you as though we're getting' so riled up and everything, like I guess I am right now; doing things you look at, and then sit back and say: "Well, that's a stupid idea." The reason you can do that and the reason we can't, and that we do what we do, is because we're in the situation. We don't have your luxury, being able to stand back and shake our heads and say: "No, I don't like the looks of that one. I wont take that case. That problem don't appeal to me.