'Yeah, but I didn't think he had the brains to use Mark. That's what he seems to be doing.'
'I guess you don't need brains if you're rich.'
'Woody comes up with these shlock ideas--he loves those big Broadway musicals, Oklahoma, you know, Fiddler on the Roof. The next one they're doing is Seesaw.'
'Never heard of it.'
'Full of hit tunes like 'Lovable Lunatic' and that show-stopper 'It's Not Where You Start It's Where You Finish.' Meanwhile Mark's dying to put on rock concerts. Remember 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'?'
'Sure, old Iggy and the Stooges.'
'Mark wants to sign Iggy Pop and make him a superstar.'
'I'd go for that.'
'Woody wants to get in touch with Gordon Macrae and see if he'll do Carousel.'
'Who's Gordon Macrae?'
'Remember Savage Grace? Ten Years After? The Flying Burritos? Mark dug out these old tapes Woody has-- Iggy doing 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'--all the groups we heard at Goose Lake, the summer of 'seventy.'
Skip said, 'That rock concert? I wasn't at Goose Lake. They had me in the Washtenaw County jail for littering, passing out all your pamphlets everybody threw away and I got blamed for. I think ever since we met I been doing the heavy work and you been having all the fun.'
'I'm going to look it up,' Robin said, 'but I'm pretty sure Mark's in my Goose Lake journal. Something I wrote I think was like a prophecy.'
'Goose Lake, sounds like a kiddie show.'
'It wasn't bad. Woodstock without the rain and mud.'
'Get laid by strangers. Was that your trip?'
'I knew everybody I slept with,' Robin said. 'You should've been there.'
'I should've been anywhere but in jail. Hey, I got one for you. You remember Dick Manitoba and the Dictators?'
'Never heard of them.'
'See, you don't know everything, do you?'
'I miss you,' Robin said. 'Anyway, if Mark's in my Goose Lake journal I'm going to take it as a sign.'
Skip said, 'Does that make sense? If Woody's in charge, what do we want to go after Mark for?'
'Because he needs a friend,' Robin said. 'Mark has a major problem and could use some help. Trust me.'
'Hey, Robin?'
'What?'
'I got another one. You remember Manfred Mann's Earth Band?'
' 'Get Your Rocks Off,' ' Robin said. ' 'Bye.'
She picked up the spray can from the desk, stepped to the wall and swept the surface with paint until MARK joined his brother, both of them now hidden beneath a brilliant socko design on the white wall, a sunburst, a bright red ball of fire, an explosion. . . .
Robin closed the red-covered notebook, her journal labeled MAY-AUGUST '70, and sat staring at the design on the white wall. Several minutes passed in silence before she picked up the phone and dialed Mark's office, murmured quietly to the young woman who answered, keeping her voice low, and then waited. Mark came on the line and Robin said, 'Hi, you want to hear something funny?'
'Love to.'
'You know the journal I kept?'
'Sure, I remember.'
'I was looking through it, I came to something I wrote on August tenth, 1970.' Robin paused. 'If I tell you . . .'
'Wait, August 1970 . . .'
'We were at Goose Lake.'
'Oh, right. Yeah, of course.'
'You promise you won't laugh?'
'I thought you said it was funny.'
'It is, but I don't want you to laugh.'
'I promise.'
'I wrote on that day, August tenth, 'I think I'm in love with Mark Ricks.' '
'Come on, really? Wow, listen, I don't think that's funny.'
Robin said in her low voice, 'You don't?'
Chapter 8
On Tuesday, four twenty in the afternoon, the young woman with short red hair entered the lobby at 1300 Beaubien and stopped, uncertain. She expected to see police officers. What she saw was a bunch of black people with small children standing by the two elevators and in front of the glass-covered directory on the wall. It could be the lobby of an old office building, all tile and marble, and seemed small with the people waiting, the women holding on to the children trying to pull free. An elevator door opened and two young black guys came off grinning, playing with shoelaces in their hands, and were all at once gathered in by these people, who must be family. The young woman with short red hair edged her way around them and through a short hall that opened into another lobby, this one dismal with deep shadows, until she came to a long wooden counter beneath fluorescent lights. The uniformed police officer behind the near end of the counter, a black woman, looked up and said, 'Can I help you?'
The young woman with short red hair said, 'I want to report a rape.'
The policewoman said, 'This's Prisoner Detention,' and glanced down the length of the empty counter. 'You want to talk to somebody's with the precinct. They be right back. . . . I'll tell you what, or you can go up to Sex Crimes on seven, save you some time. Get off the elevator and turn right and it's all the way down the end of the hall. There be somebody up there will help you.'
Chris was alone in the squad room, his desk piled with case folders he'd been going through for the past few days, learning about criminal sexual conduct in its varying degrees. At lunch he'd told Jerry Baker he didn't think he was going to like it. A guy throws a pipe bomb in somebody's house to settle a score, the guy could be wacko but at least his motive was clear. But why would any guy want to rape a defenseless woman? What was in his head? The interesting thing was that it didn't have that much to do with sex. Jerry Baker said, 'Then what do you call it a sex crime for?' Chris told him the way he understood it, the rapist wanted to dominate or be destructive, or he gets off on somebody else's pain. So he picks on a woman he can handle. But the act didn't have that much to do with getting laid, per se. Chris said he wasn't sure he could interrogate a suspect they knew for a fact was guilty and not pound the shit out of the guy. It would require a certain amount of self-restraint. Or sit down and talk to the poor rape victim. That would be tough. He told Jerry the whole setup was different. Even the squad room. It was cleaner than other squad rooms, the desks were kept neater. There were even artificial flowers on some of the desks, if you could imagine, inside 1300. See, because it wasn't a twelve-man squad, it was a twelve- person squad, half the investigators were policewomen. Chris said he wasn't complaining, not at all, it was just different.
Yesterday he'd walked down to six and stuck his head in at Firearms and Explosives to see what was going on. It reminded him of when he was in the eighth grade his family moved from the West Side to the East Side and all that summer he rode buses back to the old neighborhood to be with his friends. Chris was going to meet Jerry at Galligan's at five, have a couple before driving out to St. Clair Shores. Working Sex Crimes in his dad's Cadillac.
It was almost four thirty. Maureen Downey had the night duty. At the moment she was off somewhere. Maureen had spent a few years in Sex Crimes, then was in Homicide for a while and came back, she said because she didn't like all the blood you found at the scene or going to the morgue to look at bodies and get the Medical Examiner's report. Chris heard that sharp, clean sound of high heels on the tile floor and looked up expecting to see Maureen.
It was a young woman with short red hair, very attractive, maybe late twenties. She came in, Chris couldn't
