“I know. But we both need the same thing.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“To be free of the past without losing it.”
She continued to stare at him. He couldn’t decipher what was in her eyes.
“I’m being honest with you,” he said.
“You sure as hell are. You think I’m stuck here in some kind of cobwebby, self-imposed purgatory on earth because of what happened to Harry.”
“Yeah, I think that.
“And you think I can somehow ease the loss you feel for your wife.”
She’s right!
The knowledge, its clarity, so bluntly stated, struck Beam like a bullet.
“And you have the formula that will help us both,” she said.
“It isn’t a formula.”
“Then what is it?”
“A plea.”
“You don’t sound so sure of yourself now.”
“I’m not.”
“What I said, do I have it right, Beam?”
“As far as it goes.”
“It goes farther?”
“You know it does.”
“I know I want you to leave.”
“Question is, do you want me to come back?”
Her gaze locked with his own. “I want you to leave.”
Finally she removed her hand from the phone.
He could feel her watching as he let himself out, the bell above the door tinkling a message in a code he didn’t know.
He did know she hadn’t told him not to return, and she’d hesitated a beat before telling him again that she wanted him to leave.
A beat. An infinitesimal fraction of time.
A change in the rhythm.
Adelaide understood that publicity was the oxygen of her business. Not that she wasn’t sincere, but why not make her plight known? Why not speak for the other poor people in the same predicament as hers, being pushed around by the system? This was her opportunity, and in a way her responsibility.
Responsibility. That’s the word Barry used when finally he’d warmed to her idea, and even sort of adopted it as his own. “We average citizens can’t let ourselves be pushed around by the system,” he’d said. “Somebody has to speak up, even if it means falling on his or her sword.”
“Like a real sword?” Adelaide had asked.
“Like a book contract,” Barry told her. “And talk shows and acting jobs.”
So here she was on the steps of City Hall, with maybe a hundred people gathered beyond the dozens of TV cameras and smaller camcorders directed toward her. One of the TV people had given her a tiny mike to clip to her lapel, with a wire running down inside her blouse to a small black power pack they’d attached to her belt at the small of her back.
Adelaide looked young and beautiful in her tight jeans and her yellow blouse, tailored to emphasize her breasts and tiny waist. Her blond hair was piled high and with seeming recklessness on her head, with a few loose strands left to dangle strategically over her right cheek and left eye. Her tiny figure made even more diminutive by the solemn stone of City Hall, Adelaide looked soft and vulnerable. Adelaide looked cute.
In her right hand, she held a sheet of crumpled white paper. She raised it high and told the assembled what they already knew: it was a jury summons.
“It’s unfair!” she said in her high stage voice that would have carried even without a microphone. “I’d be eager to serve on a jury if the city could guarantee my safety. And your safety. They cannot. It’s asking citizens to perform much more than their civic duty when they’re asked to risk their lives.” She waved the summons in her tight little fist. “This isn’t a draft notice! We’re not at war. I don’t feel I should have to pay a price because the city can’t perform it’s first duty to us, its citizens, and that is to protect us!”
The crowd beyond the media had grown to almost two hundred now, and they began to cheer. Some of the cameras swiveled away from Adelaide and toward the mass of onlookers.
“I’m not a criminal,” Adelaide continued. “And I shouldn’t be asked to pay for someone else’s crime. But that’s exactly what might happen, because the police aren’t doing their job. They haven’t done it well enough so far, anyway. Maybe it is a tough job. And I’m sure they’re doing the best they can. But it isn’t my fault-it isn’t our fault- that it isn’t good enough!”
Another loud cheer. Some in the crowd began waving the ADELAIDE’S RIGHT signs that looked homemade, but that Barry had had printed up yesterday by a friend of his who had a graphics art business in the Village. ADELAIDE’S ARMY and FREE ADELAIDE signs were already printed and being held in reserve.
“I have no choice but to announce publicly that until the Justice Killer is apprehended and the city is no longer in the control of a madman-”
“You mean the mayor?” a man shouted from the crowd.
“I mean the Justice Killer.” Adelaide began waving both arms now, palms out in an appeal for a moment’s silence so she could be heard. “Until the city’s safe again, I will not obey this jury summons. I will not serve. I will not be a sacrifice.”
The crowd was getting ever larger, and uniformed cops were having difficulty keeping it contained. A tall, skinny cop near the front used his nightstick as a probe to move a man back, but the man brushed it aside and pushed forward.
“I will go to jail first!” Adelaide screamed. “I mean it! I pledge that I will go to jail!”
“We got rights!” a woman in the crowd screamed.
“And sometimes we have to fight for them!” Adelaide responded. The crowd roared its agreement. She set her jaw and gave them her left profile. Cute as a feisty twelve-year-old, only with a grown woman’s sexuality. “This is one of those times.” She raised her dainty fist high above her head, as she had when she auditioned for Les Miz.
The half dozen men Barry had hired began chanting, “Adelaide! Adelaide! Adelaide!” The crowd joined in, many of them pumping their fists in the air. At a subtle signal from Barry, his hirelings pushed forward, knocking over a police barricade. The crowd followed, surging toward City Hall.
The cops moved fast, but they’d been taken by surprise and there weren’t enough of them. A line had been crossed, an invisible switch thrown. Suddenly the crowd became a mob. It was held back only a few seconds before it surged forward, knocking over some of the media, sending equipment smashing to the ground.
“Holy shit!” Adelaide thought.
“Barry!” She began calling for Barry, but in the maelstrom of motion and shouting no one heard her. “Barry!”
Adelaide could count crowds, and she estimated that at least five hundred frenetic people were charging toward her. A uniformed cop was on the ground and couldn’t climb back to his feet. He scooted backward, his soles scraping on the pavement, then he was lost from sight in the rush of humanity. That really scared her.
“Barry!”
She saw Barry emerge from the left side of the crowd and start toward her. His face was flushed an improbably bright red and he looked out of breath. He staggered, went down, and disappeared.
God! Barry, don’t have a heart attack, please!
Adelaide began backing up the steps, afraid to turn away from the crowd, almost falling as her heel caught. She realized her face was frozen in a meaningless smile that masked near panic.
The blue of a police uniform appeared in the corner of her vision, then another. More and more cops were on the steps. Some of them had long, curved shields as well as nightsticks and were forming a kind of line that was meant to hold back the crowd.
