Rough Justice

by Brad Smith

  ‘You mean right now?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah. Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said, after considering it. ‘I’m training this new guy at work and there’s no way I can get away. They’d freak if I even asked.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I like the drunken sex part.’ He smiled. ‘We could do that here, you know.’

  She sighed and drank from her glass before setting it aside. ‘I need to get away, though. I really need to get the hell out of here.’

  ‘We’ll go this winter,’ he promised. ‘Your leg will be better then. OK?’ He watched, waiting for a response. ‘OK?’ he repeated.

  She nodded unhappily. ‘OK.’

  SIXTEEN

  She pulled into the mall parking lot and drove along the row of stores until she spotted the Lincoln Town Car, parked across from the pharmacy. She turned and drove to the back of the lot, where she parked. She reached into the back seat for a ball cap, tucked her hair up underneath, then pulled it low over her eyes and waited.

  She took the coffee from the holder on the dash and had a drink. She hadn’t been sleeping well and she was a little wired from too much caffeine and too little food. Her knee ached, especially at night, even though the surgeon kept telling her she should be pain free by now. Him saying it didn’t make it so. She’d smoked a dozen or so cigarettes in the past couple of days. The pack was in the glove box right now, and she told herself she would throw it out when she got home. She’d quit smoking when she was twenty-five but for some reason a few days ago had decided she needed one. The first cigarette had taken her unawares, catching her breath and ballooning her lungs. She had stubbed it out after a few drags. But the next day she’d had another and that time it had been smoother. Trickster.

  She was lighting a cigarette when The Mayor came out of the store. He was wearing a golf cap with a Callaway logo, and pale blue pants and a yellow knit shirt. He carried a small bag with the drugstore’s brand on it and wore his standard benign smile. A couple approached him to say hello. They were his age or maybe a few years older, retirees out shopping, Kate guessed. She saw him nodding his head and speaking and then the couple laughing at whatever he’d said. They chatted for some time. Kate smoked the cigarette and lit another before The Mayor looked at his watch and moved off toward the Lincoln, waving to the couple as he did.

  Kate knew he’d be heading to the golf course next. He played at Grand River National, Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays. There was a nine-hole seniors’ league that teed it up at one in the afternoon those days, and he rarely missed. Kate waited until the Lincoln was out of the lot and moving toward the parkway before following. She hung back in the light traffic, and when he accelerated through a yellow light she lost him for a time. It really didn’t matter – she knew where he was going; but still, for a brief moment, she allowed panic to set in. One day he might break from his routine.

  When she drove past the golf course a few minutes later, the Lincoln was parked by the clubhouse and he was lifting his clubs from his trunk. She slowed down, then on an impulse pulled into the lot, idled past him, almost wishing he would look her way. He didn’t, and she continued on, out to the highway. She headed for the medical center.

  Her appointment was for half past one but she didn’t get in to see Dr Song until after two. He had just come from surgery at the hospital across the street and appeared hurried and harried both. At his instruction, Kate removed her pants and sat on the examining table. He looked at the incision before working her knee a couple times, and feeling the tissue behind the leg.

  ‘No swelling,’ he said. ‘Can you describe what you’re feeling?’

  ‘Like there’s something in there that shouldn’t be there,’ she told him. ‘Maybe it’s scar tissue.’

  He shook his head, dismissing the suggestion, and felt the leg again. ‘And you have discomfort?’

  ‘It’s really not much better than right after the surgery,’ Kate said. ‘There’s no chance something could have been left in there? You know, during the operation.’

  ‘If it had been, you’d have an infection by now,’ Dr Song said. He gave her a look. ‘And I don’t leave things in there during surgery.’

  He stood up and indicated that she could put her pants on. He crossed to his desk and looked at her file there. ‘You’re still taking the painkillers?’

  ‘Yeah, and I’m just about out.’

  He looked again at the file. ‘You shouldn’t be.’

  As she hesitated, his cell phone rang. He reached for it. ‘My purse was stolen out of my car at the mall,’ she said quickly. ‘I lost my last script.’

  He nodded and turned away as he answered the phone. He told someone he was on his way and ended the call. He looked at her.

  ‘We’ll give it another week and then try the physiotherapy again,’ he said. He wrote a new prescription. ‘I think you have some inflammation that’s limiting the flexibility of the joint.’

  Kate stood up and took the slip of paper from him, wondering if he was telling her what he might tell her if he didn’t know what was wrong with her knee.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. And he left before she could say anything more.

  She found Elaine Horvath’s street address in the phone book. The neighborhood was part of an older subdivision in the east end, a cluster of attached semis and wartime houses that the years had not been kind to. The streets ran every which way into dead ends and cul-de-sacs and it took Kate a while to find Cleary Avenue.

  It was Friday afternoon and Elaine Horvath was sitting on the front porch when Kate pulled up in her car. The house was a single story bungalow with dented aluminum siding. The roof had a sag in it and the screens in the windows were either ripped or missing altogether. The lot was narrow, with no more than ten feet separating the houses on either side. Behind the house, though, Kate could see that the yard stretched out toward a garbage-strewn industrial lot beyond. Presumably that was where the circus tent had been poorly pitched.

  The woman on the porch was roughly Kate’s age, she guessed, although she could have passed for older, with yellow blond hair showing black at the roots and a couple of inches of stomach hanging over her belt. She wore jeans and a t-shirt with a NASCAR logo, and she was reading a paperback while drinking coffee from a take-out cup. Her skin was terrible, her cheeks splotchy and red.

  When Kate got out of the car the woman looked up from the novel, her mouth turning slightly as if encountering a bad taste.

  ‘Well, aren’t I the popular one?’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Kate said.

  ‘You people from family services. You got nobody else to bother?’

  Kate approached the porch and stopped by the bottom step. ‘I’m not from family services. Are you Elaine?’

  The woman looked past Kate to her car, trying to figure out who she was, as if the vehicle might tell her. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Kate Burns.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Kate had decided on the drive there that she would get right to the matter at hand. ‘I want to talk about Joseph Sanderson.’

  ‘Then you’re a cop? It’s about fucking time.’

  ‘I’m not a cop. Joseph Sanderson raped me, seventeen years ago.’

  Elaine Horvath smiled then. She didn’t have a lot of teeth and those that were there weren’t impressive. ‘You shitting me? Why would you come here? You wanna start a club?’

  Kate stepped up on to the porch and moved to sit on a wooden chair. ‘I’d like to hear your story.’

  ‘And what’s that gonna get us?’ Elaine asked. She took a closer look at Kate. ‘Wait a minute. You’re one of ’em that took him to court.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Elaine drew the cigarette down to the filter and dropped it into the coffee cup, where it sizzled briefly before going out. ‘What the fuck you doing coming here?’

  ‘Did he rape you?’

  ‘You got a smoke?�
��

  ‘Yeah, I do. In my car.’

  Kate was aware of the woman watching her as she went for the cigarettes. It seemed that a decision was being made in the time it took her to walk to the curb and back. They both lit up and then Elaine settled back in her chair, looking over at Kate with the same amused expression, as if she knew something that Kate did not. Maybe Peter Dunmore had been right. It had been a tall tale all along.

  ‘Well?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Well what? Did he rape me?’ Elaine pulled on the cigarette and exhaled. ‘Make you a deal – I’ll tell you my story and then you decide.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Me and my girlfriend Jill went camping up on Lake Sontag. Nine years ago this summer. Bunch of us used to camp on the government land there. You weren’t supposed to but nobody ever bothered us. We had a little tent, couple bottles of wine, some joints. Maybe mushrooms that time, I can’t remember. My friend dropped us off, there was a couple guys supposed to meet us there but in the end they never showed. So we got no car, right? Anyway we set up camp, built a fire, got high. Ended up crashing, I don’t know, late. Next thing you know there’s this wicked fucking thunderstorm happening. Tore the tent pegs out of the ground, tipped the thing over. We came crawling out and then the wind blew the fucking tent right across the lake. Thing was bouncing like a ball across the water.’

  ‘You don’t have a lot of luck with tents,’ Kate said.

  ‘Aren’t you fucking amusing? You want to hear the story or not?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So it’s pouring rain. I mean you can’t hardly see the lake it’s raining so hard. And it’s cold too. Me and Jill start walking and we end up at this guy’s cottage. Well, guess who?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He’s there by himself. And he invites us in, it’s gotta be three in the morning at this point, and he gives us dry clothes, and he pours us drinks even. Then he gives us both a bedroom. We said we’d share but he’s like, no, you each get a room. And we go to sleep. We’re both baffed, right?’

  She took another long drag on the cigarette and looked at Kate, as if to see if she was still listening.

  ‘Next thing I know, I wake up. And he’s in the bed with me. All he’s wearing is a t-shirt. And he’s got a hard-on and he’s trying to push it into me. Got my panties off to one side and he’s on top of me. Fucking freaky. So I try to push him off, and I’m like – I’m like I don’t even know what’s happening. I’m half asleep, half stoned. I tell him to quit, and he doesn’t say a word, he just keeps pushing. And after a while, I don’t know – I’m just so fucked up, after a while I quit fighting him. And he came in like two minutes and he got off me and walked out.’

  Kate was staring straight ahead, trying to focus on the woman’s story but instead seeing herself, seventeen years earlier, in nearly the identical situation, possibly even in the same bedroom. The old man pushing her down. The noises emanating from him, grunting like the pig that he was. The attitude afterward, the dismissal, as if the encounter meant nothing more to him than a handshake.

  Now Elaine Horvath leaned forward and glared at Kate, as if challenging her. ‘So you tell me. Did he rape me?’

  With an effort, Kate brought herself back to the present. ‘Did you want to have sex with him?’ she asked.

  ‘No fucking way.’

  ‘Then he raped you,’ Kate said, knowing it was the truth, knowing all along it was the truth.

  ‘Thanks for telling me what I already knew.’

  ‘What happened in the morning?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did he say anything about it?’

  ‘Not a fucking word. The storm was over and he basically kicked us out. Said he had to get back to the city. But we saw his car there later, so I know he was lying.’

  ‘You never told anybody at the time?’ Kate, knowing the answer, wondered why all the stories were alike.

  ‘I never even told Jill. It was just so fucking weird, like maybe I had imagined it or something. Didn’t seem real. It just …’

  Kate saw her eyes look up the street then and she turned to see a boy of eight or nine approaching on a bicycle. The boy’s hair was shorn and he was riding the bike carelessly, weaving back and forth across the sidewalk. A woman out walking had just passed the house, and she had to step off the concrete to let the boy pass. He rode on to the narrow yard of the house and flopped the bike down while it was still moving. He noticed Kate and glared up at her. He had scars on his head and a fresh cut on his lip, or maybe a cold sore. His eyes were gray, familiar-looking.

  ‘Hi honey,’ Elaine said to the boy. ‘How was school?’

  ‘Sucks.’

  Inside the house a phone began to ring. Elaine stood and went inside to answer it, flicking her cigarette butt over the railing. When Kate turned back to the boy, he was staring openly at her.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m Kate. What’s your name?’

  ‘Gimme some money.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gimme some money. I want to go to the store.’

  ‘I’m not giving you any money.’

  The boy scowled. ‘You’re ugly,’ he said.

  ‘Nice,’ she said. ‘That ought to get you lots of cash.’

  ‘You’re ugly,’ he said again and went into the house.

  When Elaine came out she didn’t sit down but walked to the top of the steps to lean against the newel post there. ‘So there you go. And I don’t need to hear your story, if you don’t mind. I read the papers when the trial was on. I knew he’d win. I coulda told you that all along.’

  ‘What’s your son’s name?’

  ‘Bobby.’ She offered her challenging stare again. ‘You wanna ask, go ahead and ask.’

  ‘OK. Who’s his father?’

  ‘You know the answer to that. Or you wouldn’t be here.’

  The phone rang again and Kate could hear the boy answer inside. He said something and then walked out on to the porch. ‘It’s Aunt Rene.’

  Elaine nodded slightly, but kept looking at Kate. ‘So why you here? The cops told me to go screw myself. So where you going with this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You ain’t going nowhere. Nobody like you ever beat anybody like him. Don’t you know that?’ She went inside to the phone.

  Kate got up and walked down the steps to the sidewalk. She sensed the boy following her.

  When she got into her car, she picked up her cell phone and rolled down the window and took his picture, him standing there on the dying lawn, his hateful eyes on her.

  ‘Now you gimme some money,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, and she drove away.

  Prosecutor Grant held the phone with the photo in his hand a moment before passing it back to her. He got up and walked around his desk to close the door behind where she sat. It was Monday morning and they were in his office at the courthouse. He was about to try a city man for second-degree murder. The accused was one Dwayne ‘Big Dog’ Reese, a street punk and convicted drug dealer who had gotten into a fight outside a tavern and, pulling a handgun, fired several shots at his antagonist. One of the shots had killed a woman just leaving the bar.

  ‘I’m about to present a second degree murder case that is ironclad,’ Grant had been saying a few minutes earlier. ‘I’ve got eyewitnesses, I’ve got forensic evidence, I’ve got ballistics. Not only that, but I have a perp with a record as long as the Mississippi River. This is as pure a slam dunk as I’ve ever seen. But I’m not going to get a conviction for second degree. In the end this guy will go down on manslaughter, because he wasn’t actually trying to kill the woman in question. He was trying to kill somebody else, but that’s not why he’s in court. He’ll get double time for the eighteen months he’s been in custody, and be out on the street in a couple years. There’s your justice.’ He sighed. ‘My mother wanted me to be a pharmacist.’

  All this information had come tumbling out of the
prosecutor when Kate first arrived. She’d been hoping to find him in a more optimistic frame of mind.

  ‘Yes, I know who Elaine Horvath is,’ he said now.

  ‘And you know her story,’ Kate said.

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  Kate waited for more but it didn’t come. ‘It isn’t something you wanted to pursue?’

  ‘No,’ Grant said. ‘When we first heard about her last spring we’d already built the case against The Mayor using you and the other three women. We were just a couple months from going to trial. Then the narc squad tells me that they’ve busted this grow-op over in the east end, and the grower has stories about The Mayor. Did I want to talk to her? Well, I had to talk to her. Did I want her within a mile of the courthouse? I most certainly did not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’ve met the woman,’ Grant said. ‘Would she have a chance against Miles Browning?’

  ‘Not on her own,’ Kate agreed. She showed him the picture again. ‘But this changes everything. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘You’re operating on the assumption that he really is The Mayor’s progeny.’

  ‘I’m operating on that assumption.’

  ‘OK, let’s get hypothetical. Let’s say I presented this in court and demanded a DNA sample. If the blood work showed that The Mayor was not the father, then suddenly the rest of my case is every bit as suspect as that. I wasn’t about to risk everything on a story by a woman looking to make a deal on a drug bust. You can understand that, Kate.’

  ‘But what about now?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to lose,’ Kate told him. ‘Go after the DNA test now.’

  ‘Unfortunately, that’s not even an option,’ Grant said. ‘Browning and The Mayor and his cronies have managed to sell this whole thing as a witch hunt. The buzz is that he’ll run for mayor again next fall and I have no doubt it’s true. To present this now would suggest that somebody is trying to hurt him politically and probably open us to a lawsuit.’