You said twenty-five years?'
'According to the statute, yes.'
'And sodomy, you said. What's that amount to legally, anal?'
'Anal or oral.'
He frowned. 'I gotta stop this. Everything we talk about I immediately translate in terms of Francine and
I can't do that, I just make myself nuts. You can get twenty-five years for fucking a woman in the ass and a max of fifteen for hacking her tits off. There's something wrong there.'
'It'll be tough changing the law.'
'No, I'm just looking for a way to make it the system's fault, that's all. Twenty-five years isn't enough, anyway. Life's not enough. They're animals, they should be fucking dead.'
'The law can't do that.'
'No,' he said. 'That's all right. All the law has to do is find them.
After that anything can happen. If they go to prison, well, it's not that hard to get at somebody in prison. There's a lot of guys in the joint don't mind turning a buck. Or say they beat it in court or they make bail awaiting trial, they're out in the open and easy to get at.' He shook his head. 'Listen to me, will you? Like I'm the Godfather sitting back and ordering hits. Who knows what's gonna happen? Maybe I'll lose some of this heat by then, maybe twenty-five years in a cell's gonna sound like enough by then. Who knows?'
I said, 'We could get lucky and find them before the police do.'
'How? By walking around Sunset Park not knowing who you're looking for?'
'And by using some of what the police come up with. One thing they'll do is send everything they have to the FBI office that draws up profiles of serial killers. Maybe our witness will fill in some of the holes in her memory and I'll have a picture to work with, or at least a decent physical description.'
'So you want to stay with it.'
'Definitely.'
He considered this, nodded. 'Tell me again what I owe you.'
'I gave the girl a thousand. The lawyer's not charging her anything.
The computer technicians who tapped the phone-company records got fifteen hundred, and the room we used cost a hundred and sixty, plus fifty dollars' deposit on the phone, which I didn't try to recover. Call it twenty-seven hundred even.'
'Uh-huh.'
'I've had other expenses, but it seemed reasonable to pay them out of my end. These were unusual expenses, and I didn't want to delay action until I could get your okay. If anything seems out of line, I'm prepared to discuss it.'
'What's there to discuss?'
'I get the feeling something's bothering you.'
He sighed heavily. 'You do, huh? The first conversation we had when I got in the other day, seems to me you said something about asking my brother.'
'That's right. He didn't have it, so I raised it myself. Why?'
'He didn't have it or he said wait until you got an okay from me?'
'He didn't have it. In fact he specifically said he was sure you would cover the expense, but that he didn't have any cash to speak of.'
'You're sure about that?'
'Absolutely. Why? What's the problem?'
'He didn't say he could let you have some of my dough? Nothing like that?'
'No. As a matter of fact—'
'Yeah? As a matter of fact what?'
'He said you undoubtedly had money around the house, but that he didn't have access to that. He said something ironic to the effect that you wouldn't give a junkie the combination to your safe, not even if he was your brother.'
'He said that, huh?'
'I don't know that he meant you personally,' I said. 'The sense of it was that nobody in his right mind would give that information to a drug addict because he couldn't be trusted.'
'So he was speaking generally.'
'That's how it seemed to me.'
'It could have been personal,' he said. 'And he would have been correct. I wouldn't trust him with that kind of money. My big brother, I'd probably trust him with my life, but cash running into six figures? No, I wouldn't do it.'
I didn't say anything.
He said, 'I talked to Petey the other day. He was supposed to come out here. He never showed.'
