I can’t, no matter what. I won’t.
Andy Halliday might have been an English Leather-wearing homo, but he had been right about Morris’s motivation. Curtis and Freddy had been in it for cash; when Morris assured them the old guy might have squirreled away as much as a hundred thousand, they had believed him. Rothstein’s writings? To those two bumblefucks, the value of Rothstein’s output since 1960 was just a misty maybe, like a lost goldmine. It was Morris who cared about the writing. If things had gone differently, he would have offered to trade Curtis and Freddy his share of the money for the written words, and he was sure they would have taken him up on it. If he gave that up now – especially when the notebooks contained the continuation of the Jimmy Gold saga – it would all have been for nothing.
Cafferty rapped his phone on the Plexi, then put it back to his ear. ‘Cafferty to Bellamy, Cafferty to Bellamy, come in, Bellamy.’
‘Sorry. I was thinking.’
‘A little late for that, wouldn’t you say? Try to stick with me, if you please. You’ll be arraigned on three counts. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to plead not guilty to each in turn. Later, when you go to trial, you can change to guilty, should it prove to your advantage to do so. Don’t even think about bail, because Bukowski doesn’t laugh; she cackles like Witch Hazel.’
Morris thought, This is a case of worst fears realized. Rothstein, Dow, and Rogers. Three counts of Murder One.
‘Mr Bellamy? Our time is fleeting, and I’m losing patience.’
The phone sagged away from his ear and Morris brought it back with an effort. Nothing mattered now, and still the lawyer with the guileless Richie Cunningham face and the weird middle-aged baritone voice kept pouring words into his ear, and at some point they began to make sense.
‘They’ll work up the ladder, Mr Bellamy, from first to worst. Count one, resisting arrest. For arraignment purposes, you plead not guilty. Count two, aggravated assault – not just the woman, you also got one good one in on the first-responding cop before he cuffed you. You plead not guilty. Count three, aggravated rape. They may add attempted murder later, but right now it’s just rape … if rape can be called just anything, I suppose. You plead—’
‘Wait a minute,’ Morris said. He touched the scratches on his cheek, and what he felt was … hope. ‘I raped somebody?’
‘Indeed you did,’ Cafferty said, sounding pleased. Probably because his client finally seemed to be following him. ‘After Miss Cora Ann Hooper …’ He took a sheet of paper from his briefcase and consulted it. ‘This was shortly after she left the diner where she works as a waitress. She was heading for a bus stop on Lower Marlborough. Says you tackled her and pulled her into an alley next to Shooter’s Tavern, where you had spent several hours imbibing Jack Daniel’s before kicking the jukebox and being asked to leave. Miss Hooper had a battery-powered Police Alert in her purse and managed to trigger it. She also scratched your face. You broke her nose, held her down, choked her, and proceeded to insert your Johns Hopkins into her Sarah Lawrence. When Officer Philip Ellenton hauled you off, you were still matriculating.’
‘Rape. Why would I …’
Stupid question. Why had he spent three long hours tearing up that home in Sugar Heights, just taking a short break to piss on the Aubusson carpet?
‘I have no idea,’ Cafferty said. ‘Rape is foreign to my way of life.’
And mine, Morris thought. Ordinarily. But I was drinking Jack and got up to hijinks.
‘How long will they give me?’
‘The prosecution will ask for life. If you plead guilty at trial and throw yourself on the mercy of the court, you might only get twenty-five years.’
Morris pleaded guilty at trial. He said he regretted what he’d done. He blamed the booze. He threw himself on the mercy of the court.
And got life.
2013 – 2014
By the time he was a high school sophomore, Pete Saubers had already figured out the next step: a good college in New England where literature instead of cleanliness was next to godliness. He began investigating online and collecting brochures. Emerson or BC seemed the most likely candidates, but Brown might not be out of reach. His mother and father told him not to get his hopes up, but Pete didn’t buy that. He felt that if you didn’t have hopes and ambitions when you were a teenager, you’d be pretty much fucked later on.