Four Walls

'Yes, Mom,' Stella said with a chuckle. 'Trust me, in this traffic, I want both hands on the wheel. I'll see you in a little while.'

'Okay.' Lindsay hung up.

* * *

Marty Johannsen couldn't believe the way he was being treated.

It wasn't enough that he had to have all those cops just pawing through his stuff like that, but then they had to arrest him? There was no feeling in the world worse than being handcuffed. Marty had done it once at the request of a girlfriend, and he hated every second of it-lost his hard-on and the girlfriend all in one shot, but if she was gonna go for that sort of thing, he didn't want her for a girlfriend. Handcuffs hurt, biting into your wrists the way they did, and Marty felt completely helpless in them. Wearing them willingly in the bedroom was bad enough-having them forced on him by cops who were pawing through all his stuff was much, much worse.

Then he had to sit in the damn holding cell. Marty had spent all night in jail once before, but that was in college, and he was so wasted, he didn't really remember it. (Come to think of it, he was probably handcuffed then, too, but that had been lost to the booze.) The NYPD hadn't been kind enough to let him go on a bender, so he recalled every miserable second of it, from the homeless guy in the corner who hadn't bathed since the first Bush administration, to the mean-looking Hispanic guys in the other corner, to the wooden bench that it was just impossible to get comfortable on, either sitting up or lying down.

In the morning, they handcuffed him again, and then they shoved him into a van that had no AC, which sat in traffic for hours, taking him into Manhattan somewhere. Marty didn't really pay attention to where; he just wished he could wipe the sweat out of his eyes.

Finally, they brought him into a dank room and made him sit there. They took off the handcuffs, but then put his left hand in a cuff that was attached to the table. The only way he'd leave was with the table attached. Not that he wanted to-this room, at least, had AC. The sweat cooled on his head, and he started to feel almost human for the first time since he'd buzzed the cops into his building.

Marty had no idea how much time passed before Bonasera, that stupid bitch of a detective, and some other stupid bitch came in. The second bitch had been at the apartment as well, but Marty never got her name. She was kind of hot, actually.

Before they could say a word, Marty said what he'd been saying to anyone who'd listen since they showed up with the warrant. 'I didn't do nothin'!'

Bonasera stared at him for a second. 'How much do you know about computers, Marty?'

'Huh?' That wasn't the question he was expecting. 'Uh, I mean-I dunno, is this a trick question?' Figuring he had nothing to lose, he looked at the other detective, the hot one, but she just stared at him so hard that he had to look away.

Bonasera smiled insincerely. 'Not at all. See, the way computers work is that when files are created, they also create a pathway to that file. But that's not the interesting part. You see, when you delete a file, you don't actually remove the file from the computer. What you do is cut off the pathway to the file, so the computer can't see it. But the information? That's still there. Eventually, it'll get written over if the space is required for something else, but if it isn't? It's all still there.'

Marty stared at Bonasera for a second, parsing what she had just said. Then his face fell and he felt a new sheen of sweat bead on his forehead, even with the AC. 'You mean-?'

'That's right, Marty. We were able to retrieve the love letters you wrote to Maria Campagna, which perfectly matched the printouts that Maria's boyfriend gave us.'

Marty's jaw dropped. He hadn't thought that he needed to do anything except erase the letters. Damn it!

'Too bad for you that Bobby gave them to us,' Bonasera continued.

Shaking his head, Marty said, 'That Neanderthal.'

'Who's that?' the other detective asked.

'DelVecchio! The big dumb jock wasn't good enough for Maria!'

'So you tried to woo her away?' Bonasera asked.

'Exactly!' Marty let out a long breath. 'Damn it, she deserved better than him, but she just wouldn't leave him. I actually cared about animals-DelVecchio used to, I swear to God, kick puppies when Maria wasn't looking. I saw him do it once! Really!'

The hot detective said, 'So you killed her.'

Forcing himself to remember that the love letters didn't actually prove anything, he said, 'No. Why would I kill her? I loved her!'

Scowling at him, the hot detective-who didn't look so hot when she scowled like that, Marty thought-said, 'You know how many killers sit in that chair after murdering people they love, Marty?'

'Well, I ain't one of them. I'm tellin' ya, I didn't kill her!'

'So the bruise on your face didn't come from her punching you, even though the size of her fist matches the size of the bruise?'

'That was the Great Dane-Rex.' He hoped he sounded convincing.

'And then there's the blood on Maria's necklace.'

Now panic suffused Marty. There was blood on her necklace? Jesus, how the hell did he miss that?

'The blood's yours, Marty-we checked it against your DNA. Maria kept that necklace sparkling, so the only way that blood could've gotten on it was if it happened right before she was killed. Say, when she punched you in the cheek, loosening a tooth enough for it to bleed some?'

Marty couldn't believe he missed that.

'And then there's the fingernail on your sweatshirt. The same sweatshirt that your coworkers said you were wearing the night Maria was killed. One of Maria's fingernails was missing when we examined her body, and the very same missing fingernail was lodged in your shirt.'

Oh, Jesus. Jesus Jesus Jesus, he had no idea. He thought about doing laundry, but he always did laundry on Saturdays. If he broke his routine, that was a pattern cops looked for. Marty watched television; he knew how cops thought. If he washed the clothes, he'd look like a suspect, so he wouldn't wash them.

How was he supposed to know there was a fingernail in there?

'All right,' he suddenly said, 'fine, you got me.' He threw up one hand-the other one, still handcuffed, he couldn't raise high enough. 'Yeah, I killed her. I didn't want to, but when she hit me, I couldn't believe it!'

The hot detective said, 'So you went into Belluso's at closing?'

'Yeah. That long-haired guy who takes karate-he was just leaving as I was locking the vet up. I saw she was alone, so I figured I'd take a shot, see if she'd leave that big dumb ape for a real man.'

Marty could hear the disgust in Bonasera's voice when she said, 'A real man who kills her when she gets uppity? That's what you mean, Marty?'

'No! Look, it wasn't supposed to happen like that, okay? It just got-' He sighed. 'Out of hand, I guess.'

'You guess?' Bonasera asked.

He found he had nothing to say, so he just looked down. 'I guess I'm going to jail, huh?'

'Good guess.' Bonasera got up from her chair and left the interrogation room.

The hot detective got up a second later. 'They already read you your rights at the Fiftieth Precinct, so we'll just put you in holding until we can finish processing you. You'll be at Rikers by dinnertime, and you'll stay there until your trial, you sorry son of a bitch.'

With that, she too left.

Marty hoped that prison would at least be air-conditioned.