“Sure,” Jesse said.
“We could eat out here,” Jenn said.
Jesse nodded.
“You gonna spend the night, Jenn?”
“If I may,” Jenn said.
“You may.”
“I think we should have sex before we eat,” Jenn said. “I do so much better on an empty stomach.”
“You do well in any condition,” Jesse said.
“Does it make me especially special?” Jenn said.
“One of the many things,” Jesse said.
5
THE ADA was a tall, athletic-looking woman named Holly Clarkson. Like a lot of assistant prosecutors, she was young, maybe five years out of law school, and earning some experience in the public sector before she sank comfortably into some law firm somewhere as a litigator.
“You want to arrest the principal of the junior high school?” Holly said. “And charge her with what?”
Holly always wore oversized round eyeglasses as a kind of signature. Today she was dressed in a beige pantsuit and a black shirt with long collar points.
“Whatever you can come up with,” Jesse said.
“And you actually want to put her in jail?”
“Yes.”
“You do know that her husband is the managing partner of the biggest law firm in the state,” Holly said.
“Jay Ingersoll,” Jesse said. “Cone, Oakes, and Baldwin.”
“Correct,” Holly said. “And she is accused of picking up the skirts of some junior-high girls and checking their underwear.”
“Yes.”
“That’s idiotic,” Holly said.
“It is,” Jesse said.
“I admit,” Holly said, “that it would be fun to see her do a little time, get her attention, so to speak.”
“It would be,” Jesse said.
“But you can’t arrest somebody because it would be fun,” Holly said.
“I can’t?”
“No,” Holly said. “And if we started prosecuting people for being idiotic . . .”
“Be a hot one for the press and the talk shows,” Jesse said. “Elevate your profile.”
“I’m not that ambitious,” Holly said. “And if I were, the approval of Jay Ingersoll would be more valuable to me than anything the press could give me.”
“You got kids?” Jesse said.
“Not yet,” Holly said. “First I need to get married.”
Jesse nodded.
“Sure,” Holly said. “I know if it were my kids I’d want to strangle the bitch. But to prosecute her for . . . whatever we come up with, and get buried in paper by a platoon of lawyers from Cone, Oakes. You know what they’ve got for resources?”
“More than Essex County?” Jesse said.
“More and better. Not everybody on staff in our office is a legal eagle like me.”
“Anybody in your office got a death wish?” Jesse said.
“No,” Holly said. “And if they did, Howard would fire them before they got a chance to en-act it.”
“The DA doesn’t want to start anything,” I said.
“The DA wants to get reelected next year,” Holly said.
“How about by being tough on crime?”
“When people say that, they mean tough on street crime. And tough on scary black kids with tats. They do not mean tough on annoying school administrators,” Holly said.
“These are thirteen-year-old girls,” Jesse said.
“Oh, please,” Holly said. “I’ve been a thirteen-year-old girl, Jesse. They aren’t adults, but they aren’t innocent babies, either. You know as well as I do that thirteen-year-old girls can be sexually active.”
“And why is that the school’s business,” Jesse said. “What happened to readin’ and writin’?”
“Parents dump it on the schools,” Holly said. “ ‘Where were you when my Melinda was bopping little Timmy behind the back stop?’ ”
