“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.
About majoring in English there was no question. Some of this surety had to do with John Rothstein and the Jimmy Gold novels; so far as Pete knew, he was the only person in the world who had read the final two, and they had changed his life.
Howard Ricker, his sophomore English teacher, had also been life-changing, even though many kids made fun of him, calling him Ricky the Hippie because of the flower-power shirts and bellbottoms he favored. (Pete’s girlfriend, Gloria Moore, called him Pastor Ricky, because he had a habit of waving his hands above his head when he got excited.) Hardly anyone cut Mr. Ricker’s classes, though. He was entertaining, he was enthusiastic, and—unlike many of the teachers—he seemed to genuinely like the kids, whom he called “my young ladies and gentlemen.” They rolled their eyes at his retro clothes and his screechy laugh . . . but the clothes had a certain funky cachet, and the screechy laugh was so amiably weird it made you want to laugh along.
On the first day of sophomore English, he blew in like a cool breeze, welcomed them, and then printed something on the board that Pete Saubers never forgot:
This is stupid!
“What do you make of this, ladies and gentlemen?” he asked. “What on earth can it mean?”
The class was silent.
“I’ll tell you, then. It happens to be the most common criticism made by young ladies and gentlemen such as yourselves, doomed to a course where we begin with excerpts from Beowulf and end with Raymond Carver. Among teachers, such survey courses are sometimes called GTTG: Gallop Through the Glories.”
He screeched cheerfully, also waggling his hands at shoulder height in a yowza-yowza gesture. Most of the kids laughed along, Pete among them.
“Class verdict on Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’? This is stupid! ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne? This is stupid! ‘Mending Wall,’ by Robert Frost? This is moderately stupid! The required excerpt from Moby-Dick? This is extremely stupid!”
More laughter. None of them had read Moby-Dick, but they all knew it was hard and boring. Stupid, in other words.
“And sometimes!” Mr. Ricker exclaimed, raising one finger and pointing dramatically at the words on the blackboard. “Sometimes, my young ladies and gentlemen, the criticism is spot-on. I stand here with my bare face hanging out and admit it. I am required to teach certain antiquities I would rather not teach. I see the loss of enthusiasm in your eyes, and my soul groans. Yes! Groans! But I soldier on, because I know that much of what I teach is not stupid. Even some of the antiquities to which you feel you cannot relate now or ever will, have deep resonance that will eventually reveal itself. Shall I tell you how you judge the not-stupid from the is-stupid? Shall I impart this great secret? Since we have forty minutes left in this class and as yet no grist to grind in the mill of our combined intellects, I believe I will.”