The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  “Boy oh boy,” she said.

  “Where to?”

  “Talbot and Twenty-eighth.”

  “At your service,” he said, and put the car in gear, and pulled it away from the curb. The windshield wipers snicked at the rain. The heater insinuated warm air onto her feet and her face. The car felt as warm and as safe as a cocoon.

  “How long were you waiting out there?” he asked.

  “Ten minutes, at least.”

  “This time of night, you never know when a bus is coming.”

  The digital clock on the dashboard read 10:37.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” she said. “But this weather!”

  “Snow, rain,” he said, “what’s coming next? And it isn’t even winter yet.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said.

  “How’d you like tonight?”

  “It was wonderful.”

  “I could see you were enjoying yourself.”

  “I love working for him, don’t you?”

  “I surely do.”

  “Did you ever see him do a TV taping before?”

  “Once or twice. He’s an incredible person.”

  “I know, oh, I know.”

  They fell silent, anticipating the precinct protests tomorrow morning, awed by the fact that they both worked for this marvelous human being who was doing so much for race relations in this city. Lorraine had been assigned to a precinct all the way out in Majesta. She wasn’t even sure she knew where it was.

  “I hope it won’t be raining,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Or snowing,” he said. “Snow would be even worse.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “The Fifth. Down in The Quarter. Near Ramsey U.”

  “My building’s just up ahead,” she said. “On the right.”

  “Okay.”

  He eased the car to the curb, looked at the dashboard clock. It read 10:52.

  “Damn,” he said. “I’m going to miss it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The news. It goes on at eleven. I’m sure he’ll be the lead story.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes. Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “Well, there’ll be other stories.”

  “Why don’t you … well … would you like to come up? Watch it with me?”

  “It’s late,” he said. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”

  “If we don’t hurry, we’ll both miss it,” she said.

  He parked and locked the car, and they dashed through the rain to her building, her spindly umbrella virtually useless now, the rain relentless. Once inside the small apartment, she went immediately to the television set and turned it on, and then asked him if he wanted a beer or anything.

  “Help yourself, they’re in the fridge,” she said, and pointed toward the tiny kitchen, and then went into the bathroom across the hall. He took two bottles of beer from the refrigerator, found a bottle opener in the top drawer of the kitchen counter, and uncapped both bottles. He found two glasses in the cabinet over the sink, and poured beer into each of them. Glancing toward the closed bathroom door, he took a pair of blister-packed white tablets from his jacket pocket, and popped both of them into one of the glasses.

  He was sitting on the couch in the living room when she joined him a moment later. The news was just coming on. As he’d suspected, the Gabriel Foster announcement was the lead story. He handed her one of the glasses.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “This is Bess MacDougal at the First Baptist Church here in Diamondback …”

  “There it is,” she said.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  “There you are! Oh, look, there you are!”

  “Cheers,” he said again.

  “There’s me, too! Look!”

  “… has called a press conference.”

  The pan shot over the photograph of Martin Luther King worked exactly as Foster might have hoped, forging a dramatic pictorial link between the slain civil rights leader and himself. They both fell silent as he began speaking.

  “I don’t care what color you are out there,” he said, “you have to believe that what the Mayor said today was untruthful and unjust. Truth and justice! That’s all there is, and all we need to know!”

  “Yes, Rev!” someone shouted.

  “Look at him,” Lorraine said.

  “Beautiful.”

  “The Mayor said that it was not any of his detectives who marched into The Catacombs downtown on Saturday night and beat up Hector Milagros, and that is not truth!”

  “Character is what comes through.”

  “Sincerity.”

  “Character and sincerity, right.”

  “The Mayor said that Hector Milagros is a self-confessed murderer and not entitled to the pity of the people of this great city, and that is not justice!”

  “Right on!”

  “I don’t care if you are some kind of belligerent black man, all he needs is a gun …”

  “Tell ’em, Rev!”

  “I don’t care if that’s the kind of bellicose person you are, or whether you are an abstemious soul goes smiling at white folks and behind their backs wishes they were dead …”

  “Oh Lordy!”

  “Whatever kind of African-American you are, rich or poor, whether you a doctor or a homeboy, whether you clever or dim …”

  “Cheers,” Lorraine said at last, and raised her glass.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  “… whether you a telephone operator or somebody scrubs floors on her hands and knees …”

  They clinked glasses and drank.

  There were at least three dozen people marching back and forth and chanting in front of the station house when Arthur Brown got to work on Wednesday morning. A black man carrying a sign reading TRUTH AND JUSTICE gave Brown a dirty look and said, “I wouldn’t go in there I was you, brother.”

  “I work here, brother.”

  “You should fine another job.”

  Brown walked right on by, and up the familiar steps, and past the uniformed officer standing on the top step in front of the scarred wooden doors flanked by green globes with the numerals 87 on each. Sergeant Murchison, sitting behind the muster desk said, “They still dancing out there?”

  “Looks like,” Brown said, and started up the iron-runged steps leading to the second-floor squadroom.

  Actually, he didn’t know how he really felt about those people outside marching and yelling. He knew it was wrong for two detectives to have gone in there and beaten up a prisoner in custody, white or black. But that man down there in The Catacombs worked for a dope dealer and the job he performed for him was the same as what had happened to him: he beat people up. Sometimes killed them, in fact, like he’d done to Danny Nelson. The question Brown had to ask—and this was a question the reverend Foster never asked—was whether the man had been beaten up cause he was black or just cause he was an evil piece of shit. Wasn’t no way you could learn the truth of that situation till you found the deuce of dicks who’d gone in there for whatever reason. Way Brown figured it, you let somebody beat up any black man just cause he was black, then next time it could be your own ass. He knew there were white sons of bitches in this world would think nothing of laying a pipe upside his head just for his color alone, he knew that. But he was a cop. And in his day and time, he had clipped many a black son of a bitch coming at him, and in those instances color’d had nothing to do with anything. Nor had he regretted it. That was the truth. Justice was another story.

  First thing he saw on his way into the squadroom was a redheaded girl sitting at Bert Kling’s desk.

  Meyer told him she was waiting for somebody from the Rape Squad.

  She didn’t look like a cop at all, much less someone here to talk to Lorraine about a rape. She was in her mid-thirties, Lorraine guessed, with black wedge-cut hair and brown eyes behind designer eyeglasses, a slender woman of medium height wearing what looked like a naval officer’s greatcoat, hatless and gloveless though the t
emperature outside this morning was in the low twenties and the wind was blowing fiercely. A blue leather shoulder bag dangled from a strap over her left shoulder. Lorraine guessed there’d be a pistol in it if she was a cop, though she didn’t look at all like a cop. “Miss Riddock?” she said, and extended her hand, “I’m Detective Annie Rawles.” They shook hands briefly. “Let’s go down the hall, okay?” she said. “Be a bit more private.”

  Lorraine nodded and followed her through the gate in the slatted wooden railing, and then down the corridor to a door marked INTERROGATION on its upper frosted-glass panel. There were no windows in the room. They sat at a long table scarred with cigarette burns. A mirror hung on one wall. Lorraine wondered if it was a one-way mirror. She wondered if anyone was watching and listening beyond the smudged apple green wall.

  “Want to tell me about it?” Annie said.

  The girl did not look like your average rape victim. Usually, there was a stunned demeanor, a glazed look to the eyes. Usually, the shoulders were slumped, the fingers interlaced as if in prayer, the knees pressed together defensively, a shamed expression on the face. Instead, Lorraine Riddock’s eyes were filled with anger, her mouth a tight little line across her face, her fists clenched. When she spoke, her voice was clear and resonant.

  “I was raped,” she said.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last night.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t …”

  “Sometime after eleven o’clock.”

  “Where, Miss Riddock?”

  “My apartment.”

  “How’d he get in the apartment?”

  “I invited him in.”

  “Was this a date?”

  “No. We work together.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “You don’t …”

  “I don’t remember. But I know I was raped.”

  “Were you drinking, Miss Riddock?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much did you drink?”

  “All I had was a beer. We were drinking beer while we watched television. Reverend Foster had done an interview earlier that evening. We were watching it on television.”

  “Reverend Foster is?”

  “Gabriel Foster. Who’s protesting all over the city this morning. Don’t you know Gabriel Foster? I should be in Majesta right now.”

  “So you were watching television …”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “But you say you were raped.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you can’t remember anything …”

  “There was blood,” Lorraine said. “When I woke up this morning. In my bed. On the sheet. I’m not due for two weeks,” she said. “It wasn’t my period. Anyway, it wasn’t that much blood. Someone raped me,” she said.

  “Lorraine …”

  “I’m a virgin,” she said. “I was raped.”

  A female doctor at Morehouse General examined Lorraine and discovered a freshly ruptured septate hymen and multiple genital lacerations indicative of forcible entry. A nurse prepared two vaginal-smear slides, gathered samples of whatever loose hairs she could comb from Lorraine’s pubic area, clipped comparison samples of Lorraine’s own pubic hair, and then did an acid phosphatase test on a swab from Lorraine’s genital area. The immediate purple reaction indicated presumptive presence of semen. They were still well within the seventy-two-hour testing limit for Rohypnol: they found in her urine sample the metabolite that indicated exposure to flunitrazepam.

  Annie Rawles herself went to make the arrest.

  Annie spotted him easily among the forty or so men and women marching in the bitter cold outside the Fifth Precinct. Like all the others, he, too, was carrying a sign that read TRUTH AND JUSTICE. Like all the others, he, too, was chanting the words over and over again. But he was the only white man in the group. Lorraine Riddock had described Lloyd Burton as a somewhat nerdy type wearing eyeglasses, some five feet, nine or ten inches tall, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a zitty complexion. He fit the picture exactly.

  Annie fell into step beside him.

  “Mr. Burton?” she said.

  He turned, startled.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Lloyd Burton?”

  “Yes?”

  Their breaths clouded the brittle air between them.

  “You’re under arrest, sir,” she said.

  A black woman marching behind him said, “You goan ’rest him, you better ’rest me, too.”

  “Not unless you committed rape, ma’am,” Annie said, and yanked a pair of cuffs from her shoulder bag, and began reciting Miranda.

  She questioned him in the same room where three hours earlier Lorraine Riddock had described him. He had a somewhat reedy, high-pitched voice that resonated irritatingly in the small windowless space. In the adjoining room, Lieutenant Albert Genetti, Annie’s immediate superior on the Rape Squad, watched through the one-way mirror, listening intently.

  “Where were you last night at eleven o’clock?” she asked Burton.

  “Home watching television,” he said.

  “Where’s home?”

  “637 South Third.”

  “Anyone with you?”

  “No, I live alone.”

  “Sure you weren’t up here on Talbot and Twenty-eighth?”

  “Positive.”

  “1271 Talbot?”

  “No.”

  “Apartment 3D?”

  “Don’t know it.”

  “Watching television with a girl named Lorraine Riddock?”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was home alone.”

  “You know Lorraine, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. But I wasn’t with her last night.”

  “Well, you were with her at the First Baptist Church, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, but not later. Not at eleven o’clock, which is what you asked me.”

  “You were present at Gabriel Foster’s press conference, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “The television tape substantiates that.”

  “I know. I saw it.”

  “Lorraine’s standing right there next to you. On the tape.”

  “I know.”

  “Where’d you see it? The tape.”

  “On the news that night. At home.”

  “Didn’t you drive Lorraine home after the press conference?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Didn’t you go up to her apartment at a little before eleven last night?”

  “No, I dropped her off downstairs.”

  “Didn’t you go up to her apartment to watch the eleven o’clock news?”

  “No, I went home to watch it.”

  “Didn’t you sit drinking beer with her while you watched the news?”

  “No, I went home to watch it.”

  “Didn’t drink beer with her?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t drop two tabs of rope in her beer?”

  “I don’t know what that is, rope.”

  “Where’d you get the rope, Mr. Burton?”

  “I don’t know what rope is.”

  “Mr. Burton, you know we’re permitted to take your fingerprints, don’t you?”

  “Well, no, I don’t think you are. If you plan to do that, I want to change my mind about having a lawyer here.”

  “You can have a lawyer anytime you want, but it won’t change the fact that we’re allowed to take your fingerprints. If you want to call your lawyer …”

  “Truth and Justice has its own lawyers.”

  “Good, go call one of them. You want to make this a political issue, fine. All I want to do is charge you with first-degree rape.”

  “Then I’d better call a lawyer right now.”

  “Good, I’ll get you a phone. And if it’ll make you feel more comfortable
, I won’t take your prints till he gets here. What I’d like to do, you see …”

  “You already told me. You’d like to charge me with first-degree rape.”

  Yes, you rapist bastard, Annie thought.

  “That’s the plan,” she said. “But first I want to compare your prints against whatever we get from a pair of beer bottles in Lorraine Riddock’s kitchen.”

  Burton’s face went pale.

  “Forget something?” she asked.

  Junius Craig was one of a staff of five black attorneys employed by Truth and Justice. Alone with Burton, he informed him that “engaging in sexual intercourse with a female incapable of consent by reason of being physically helpless” constituted violation of Section 130.35 of the Penal Law, defined as Rape in the First Degree, a Class-B felony punishable by a minimum of three to six and a max of six to twenty-five. He suggested that if Burton for a moment believed his fingerprints might match the latents on the beer bottles in the victim’s kitchen, or if he thought for a further moment that samples of his pubic hair might match anything they’d recovered from the girl’s pubic area, or if—as yet another possibility—he felt DNA testing might come up with a positive match between his semen and anything they’d swabbed from the girl’s vagina …

  “And make no mistake,” he warned, “they are going to get those samples from you. My guess is they’ll seek a court order …”

  “Make them get a court order for my fingerprints, too,” Burton said.

  “They won’t need one. In fact, under Miranda they won’t need one for the samples, either. But they’ll play it safe because they snatched you from a line of civil rights marchers. So what do you say?”

  “About what?”

  “About any of these possibilities.”

  Burton did not answer.

  “Because if you think any of them are possibilities, I suggest we start shopping a deal right now. Twenty-five in a state pen is a long time.”

  “She wanted it as much as I did,” Burton said.

  “You’re lucky you’re white,” Craig said.

  “Anyway, Walter Hopwell gave me the rope,” Burton said.

  They had him so doped up he couldn’t even remember his own name, but oh how sweet was the release. One swift kick of the needle and all the throbbing pain in his thigh disappeared, and all at once he was floating far far away on clouds of sweet contentment, floating. He tried to remember how long he’d been a cop, but he couldn’t even remember how he’d got shot tonight. Last night? Two nights ago? What case had they been working? He tried to remember how many cases the Eight-Seven had worked over the years, but he couldn’t even remember where the precinct was. He lay in his hospital bed smiling, trying to remember, conjuring victims and villains alike, cataloguing the cases by their key characteristics, then arranging them alphabetically to achieve some semblance of order, smiling as he worked it through, pleased with what a smart detective he was, even though he’d got himself shot—until he lost his place and had to start all over again. Well, okay, how many had there been? Ten, twenty? Who knows, he thought, easy come, easy go. Forty maybe? Who’s counting? Who remembers, who even cares, I got shot! I deserve a medal or something just for being here. Two medals if I die.