There were a group of people in that office. Two men and a woman. When she was able to focus again, she realized that one of those men was Mick. He was standing furthest away from her, at the window. And as soon as she saw him, she knew she was going to be alright.
When Mick saw Roz, and saw that she was shackled like some vicious animal, his jaw clenched and tightened and that cold look appeared in his eyes. Roz felt so beaten down that she, at first, thought he was looking chillingly at her. As if he blamed her too. But then he immediately looked, not at the man standing behind the desk, whose office they were apparently in, but at the woman.
But she was stubborn. “Not until I find out what happened,” she said.
But Mick’s jaw tightened again. He was stubborn too. “Now,” he ordered.
Roz could tell the woman didn’t appreciate that order one bit, and wanted to tell Mick so, but she didn’t tell him anything. She looked at the jailers. “Unshackle her,” she said. “Now.”
The jailers quickly did what they were told, and then were dismissed by the man behind the desk. Roz wanted to run to Mick, she needed to feel his big, warm arms around her, but he remained where he was. He was in business mode. She’d seen him that way before. Nothing got in his way when he was handling his business.
“You’re Rosalind Anita Graham?” the woman asked her. She was a short lady, petite and red-haired. But it was obvious she was a woman with considerable influence.
“Yes,” Roz responded.
“I’m Margaret Hammer, the Manhattan DA.”
The District Attorney, Roz thought. She was the ultimate decider. She was the one who could seal her fate. Mick had gone for broke. He had called in the big gun. Roz could only hope that he had as much sway with this DA as he had with everybody else she saw him in contact with.
“According to Chief Salinger,” Hammer said, acknowledging the man behind the desk, “you were involved in an altercation with Mr. Barry Acker that led to his death.”
Roz swallowed hard and glanced at Mick. Mick continued to just stand there, like a man on the verge of exploding. Like a man still making assessments. Roz looked back at the woman. “It wasn’t an altercation,” she said. “Barry, Mr. Acker, called me to the theater to discuss a possible acting role in his play. When I showed up, he told me to follow him to one of the private rooms upstairs to discuss that role. When we got up there, he said the part was mine, but only if I had sex with him.”
Again Roz glanced at Mick. Only this time she saw a break in his armor: she saw his strong jaw clench. He was either believing her, not believing her, or angry as hell with Barry. She made the decision then to be as graphic as Barry was. “He said he wanted to do to me everything he assumed my . . .” Her what? Boyfriend? Could she call Mick her boyfriend at this point? He never referred to her as his girlfriend. And if he was all business now, did he even want them to know about the nature of their relationship? “He said he wanted to do to me everything this guy I’ve been seeing does to me.”
“Sexually, you mean?” Hammer asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Sexually. And he was very graphic and very vile. So I told him what he could do with his wants, and I left the room.”
“You angrily left the room?”
“Yes, I was angry,” Roz admitted. “You should have heard the language he used. I wasn’t going to stand up there and let him talk to me like that.”
“Go on,” Hammer said.
“He followed behind me, yelling at me, telling me he would kill me if I told my . . . if I told the guy. I was going down the stairs when he grabbed my arm. I was trying to snatch away from him. I was terrified of him by that time. He was no longer the Barry I knew. But he wouldn’t let go. So I jerked away from him and jerked away from him. When I finally jerked away and turned to leave, he apparently thought he still had me in his grasp and reached for me. That’s when he lost his balance and fell down those stairs. I never once touched him when he lost his balance. I didn’t push him. I didn’t trip him.”
“You didn’t try to help him either,” Chief Salinger said.
Mick looked, not at the chief for saying such a tough comment, but at Roz. He looked hard at her. He needed to see what she was made of in the face of this kind of pressure.
“No,” she said as she looked at the chief. “I have no interest in helping somebody who was trying to harm me. I didn’t push him, I didn’t do anything to help him along, but he was the one who was coming at me. He was the one who brought me there under false pretenses and was threatening to kill me. His ass deserved to fall.”