In Self-Defense

by A. W. Gray

  Melanie snuggled down on the couch and raised her bare feet up on the sofa, pipe-stem legs bent around knobby knees, legs that in a few years would fill out and be supple like Sharon’s own dancer’s legs. “Will we go to New York someday?” Melanie said. She wore denim shorts which had been Sharon’s, and hand-me-down woven belt cinched tight to keep her pants from falling off. Sharon had tried to buy Melanie jean shorts of her own, but Melanie had refused the offer, thinking that wearing grown-up clothes was really big stuff.

  “It’s likely we will,” Sharon said. In the TV program, the swarthy and handsome defense attorney-hero cross-examined the state’s stool pigeon witness—berating the witness in a manner which in real life would get the hero’s fanny slapped with a contempt citation—and reduced the snitch’s testimony to rubble. Sharon glanced at the clock. Ten ’til ten. Still plenty of time for the hero’s surprise witness to saunter in and blow the state’s case all to hell. In the real world, most defense lawyers looked like Howard Saw, and the only courtroom surprises came from one’s own witnesses when they chickened out and changed their rehearsed testimony on the stand. “Bedtime in ten minutes, Melanie,” Sharon said.

  “Tell me about New York, Mom.” Melanie had heard about the Big Apple no less than a thousand times in her life, but loved for Sharon to tell the stories over and over. Melanie’s sudden interest, Sharon knew, had a whole lot to do with ducking bedtime talk, and also had a lot to do with changing the subject. Even at eleven years of age, Melanie’s understanding that her mother didn’t like to talk about her father was quite grown up. Ten minutes of New York, Sharon thought, then to bed with no more screwing around.

  “It’s big-big,” Sharon said. “Tall buildings and sidewalks so crowded with people that at times it’s hard to move.”

  “Did you ride the subways when we lived there?”

  You already know the answer, you little fake, Sharon thought. “All the time. Nobody in Manhattan drives a car,” she said.

  Commander raised his snout from between his paws, regarded Sharon over his shoulder, and yawned magnificently. The German shepherd had heard the New York stories before as well. Tough luck, big guy, Sharon thought, you can bear it with the rest of us. Commander was a police attack school flunk-out, given to Sharon by the trainer on the day after the shepherd had jumped into a simulated bad guy’s lap and licked the desperado’s face. Oh, Commander did a fairly convincing Rin-Tin-Tin routine, snarling and snapping around the property fence lines, but anyone calling the shepherd’s bluff and climbing into the yard was likely to find themselves smothered with love. Which made him the perfect family pet, Sharon thought, mean-as-hell-looking but no danger to Melanie or any of her playmates. Commander was going on six, which meant that Sharon had acquired the dog during her first year as a prosecutor. Time flies, Sharon thought. Commander laid his great head down between his paws and snored.

  “Did you stand up on the subways?” Melanie said.

  “Most of the time,” Sharon said. “We lived close to the river in Brooklyn Heights, at a place on the line where the car was usually full by the time it stopped at our station. If I was doing a play it would be late when I went home. I could get a seat then.”

  “I want to hear about riding under the river.” Melanie snuggled close to her mother, sneaking a quick and guarded glance at the clock as she did. On television, the hero stood up in the courtroom, locked gazes with the sneering DA, and called—ta-taa—the bust-out witness to the stand.

  “You never really know you’re under the river, sweetheart. The whole subway is in a tunnel, and the tunnel under the river looks the same as any place else on the line.” Sharon told the story by rote, like George in Of Mice and Men, telling Lenny over and over about the farmhouse with the rabbits.

  “You never see the water?” Melanie said coyly, searching for questions now, realizing that the appearance of the surprise witness signified that the program was almost over, digging for anything to put off bedtime.

  “It’s overhead, but you …” Sharon blinked, then narrowed her eyes at the TV screen. In the witness strolled, a street punk, of course, clad in leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and motorcycle boots, a greasy-handsome type who winked at the defendant as he passed the rail, who curled his lip at the DA as he took the oath, and who spat a wad of gum into a Kleenex just before he climbed up on the stand. Good God, Sharon thought. “You never know the water is …” She stood quickly between Melanie and the television. “Time for bed, honey. Now.”

  Melanie’s features squinched themselves into a frown. “Mahum. The program’s not over.”

  Sharon stood firm. “For you it is, honey bunch. Come on, time to hook ’em.”

  “But why, Mom?” Melanie looked as though the climax to The System was the number one event of the century. “Why, Mom?” she said again.

  Sharon gently closed her eyes. Because that greasy witness is your father, sweetheart, Sharon wanted to say. Old Rob had finally made it to the small screen.

  “Because it’s time, Melanie,” Sharon said.

  “I felt pretty stupid when it was over. Talk about overreaction.” Sharon Hays on her bedroom window seat, bare legs curled up beneath her, oversized T-shirt draped over her upper body with the shirt’s hem riding her hips. The window was partway open, springtime night sounds filtering in through the screen: two faraway cats in yowling battle with a chorus of crickets in the background. On the far side of the yard, Commander was a dim shape in the moonlight. The shepherd stood in the flower bed and poked his snout through an opening in the stockade fence. Up and down the block, dogs barked and whined in response to the screeching cats. Commander whimpered and his bushy tail moved from side to side. In moments he would howl like a shape-changing werewolf.

  “You don’t think she’d-a recognized him, huh?” Stan Green, prone on rumpled sheets, his outline blending with the shadows cast by his body, his voice now a slow Texas drawl in contrast with his businesslike demeanor on the witness stand.

  Sharon shook her head; strands of perspiration-dampened hair clung to her temples. “No way. She’s only seen pictures, two of them, and they’re twelve years old.”

  “Sounds to me like you blew your cool.”

  Sharon closed her eyes in irritation. Stan Green pictured himself a stud in bed—which he definitely was—a keen personality analyst—which he certainly was not—and had a teeth-jarring habit of stating the obvious. Sharon considered that she’d sunk to the depths, discussing her innermost feelings with a cop who couldn’t have cared less, and made up her mind to change the subject to things more on Green’s level. Whatever that level might be.

  “Maybe you should call the old boy and hit him up for something,” Green said.

  “That wouldn’t make any sense. I’ve spent the last eleven years not asking him for anything.” Changing the subject now was going to be difficult; ex-spouses and lovers were Green’s favorite topic next to the cases on which he was working. There was a rule against discussing the job outside the department, but neither Stan Green nor any of the other cops whom Sharon knew paid any attention to the rule. Police department heads spent a lot of time trying to find out who had leaked what to the newspapers.

  “Hell, he’s bound to be making some big bucks,” Green said.

  Sharon turned her face away from the window, narrowing her eyes in the dimness. Green’s body was long and lean, his belly flat and muscular. The filled end of a condom dangled from his spent member like an airport wind sock. Life as a prosecutor, Sharon thought, no commitments, sex life restricted to one law enforcement guy after another who didn’t bother to take his rubber off when it was over. “I don’t care how many bucks he’s making, Stan,” Sharon said. “I’d just as soon not even know about his income.”

  “Well, I’d damn sure be finding out if I was you. Every time I get a raise, my ex old lady sure knows about it.” Green propped up on his elbow and lovingly touc
hed his own flexed biceps. Green’s former wife was a clerk in city police payroll, who was now sleeping with a divorced FBI agent who used to shack up with one of Sharon’s law school classmates, a short, saucy blond who was a prosecutor in the US attorney’s office. Sharon’s old school chum for a time had slept with Stan Green while he was married to the payroll clerk, so the daisy chain was now complete. Sharon’s own experience as one of the law enforcement crowd had consisted of two relationships. The first had been with a fledgling state prosecutor when they’d both been rookies and Sharon had felt she needed someone to lean on. Stan Green was the second, after a series of civilian-issue men who couldn’t deal with the fact that their lady friend threw people’s asses in jail for a living. The affair with Stan had begun shortly after Sharon had tried a particularly heartrending child-abuse case and had been vulnerable, and Green had provided a much needed outlet for a time. But once the thrill was gone, the problem of communicating with an egomaniac had begun to outweigh the joy of multiple orgasm several times over. She’d been looking for an opening to end things for months, and thought that being on the opposite end of the Rathermore case would make the perfect excuse. Then he’d come over tonight, Sharon had been uptight over seeing Rob on television, and her need for physical contact had taken over. What a screw-up, Sharon now thought.

  “Your ex wants to know about your income because of child support,” Sharon said. “I don’t want any child support because it would mean that I’d have to hear from him. Besides, we were never married.” Outside, Commander’s whimpers had grown into a steady whine as he pawed the crack between the fence boards. The cat’s yowling had ceased, probably just a break in the action, but the chorus of barking dogs had become a din.

  Green scratched his hairy chest. “Don’t talk to me about child support. My kid’s nine. Nine more years of this crap.”

  Christ, Sharon thought, more tender conversation after lovemaking. She stroked her smooth thigh and bent her head to peer through the window at the far wing of the house. In Melanie’s room, gray-green light from the television screen flickered against the closed drapes. Melanie slept like a log; Sharon had checked on her daughter just after she’d let Stan Green in the house. Melanie was getting too old for her mother to have slip-in lovers, another of a thousand reasons for the Stan Green episode in Sharon’s life to come to a halt. She pictured the scene if Melanie should wander in some night to find the big cop parked in mommy’s bed, and was at a loss as to what she would tell her little girl. You know, darling, mommy gets horny just like everyone else. Fuck a duck, Sharon thought. She said to Green, “You did leave your car parked down the street, didn’t you?”

  “Next door. What the hell, everybody knows anyhow.”

  Sharon didn’t try to hide the edge in her voice. “‘Everybody’ only includes all the cops and DA’s, Stan. It doesn’t include my neighbors and it doesn’t include my daughter.” She turned to him, letting her feet dangle from the window seat to touch the floor. “And while we’re on the subject, no one knows because of what I told them. I thought Milt Breyer was going to give himself whiplash, grinning at me when you took the witness stand today.”

  Green now proudly touched his pectoral muscle and stretched out his legs, giving the woman a full-length view of his God-given body. “Aw, you know. People talk.”

  “People only talk when someone gives them something to talk about.” She looked over her shoulder out the window. Commander was now on his haunches with his snout raised to the moon. The howl began, low in volume at first and then lifting toward a crescendo. Sharon rapped on the windowsill and said sharply, “Commander. Here.” The shepherd cut if off in mid-howl, trotted over to sit beneath the window, and peered up at her with his tongue lolling to one side. One hound dog outside, Sharon thought, another crashed in my bed. She very nearly laughed out loud.

  Green now said out of the blue, “I wish y’all could plead that fat girl.”

  Sharon’s hackles rose. She said stiffly, “I beg your pardon?”

  “I got a lot to do. If you were going to plead the fat girl, I could quit worrying about her case and concentrate on some other stuff I’ve got going.”

  Sharon wanted to scream. A poor dull-witted child, about to be sacrificed to the great god Media Coverage, and as far as Green was concerned—ditto for Milt Breyer, though Kathleen Fraterno would have more compassion—the Rathermore case was just another fat-girl file he’d like to get rid of so that he could go on with his rat killing elsewhere. Through Sharon’s anger a warning bell sounded inside her head. Keep your cool, she thought, and you might find out something. She said carefully, “We haven’t even talked about a plea bargain. I doubt she’ll get an offer to plead, with all the TV and movie interest.” She watched Green and cocked her ear to listen.

  “You’re right, with the money Milt Breyer stands to make on a movie.” Green lifted the weighted end of his condom and then dropped it. The jism-filled rubber bounced heavily on the sheets. What a disgusting asshole, Sharon thought. Green said, “’Course, somebody could make Milt come up with a plea offer.”

  Green’s even mentioning plea bargain meant that the case wasn’t as strong as the state was letting on. Sharon had prosecuted two trials with Green as her investigating officer/witness, and both times she’d been tempted to muzzle the detective away from the courtroom to keep him from giving away the farm with his mouth. Now that she was on the other side, Sharon could pump Stan Green and never have a twinge of conscience. “What’s the matter, Stan?” Sharon said softly. “Your two schoolboy witnesses have some memory problems?”

  “Naw. Those little pricks remember good. It’s politics, dealing with these rich kids. The fat girl goes to Hockaday and the boys to St. Marks. The boys’ daddies got a lot of stroke with the DA, political contributions and whatnot, and the papas don’t want junior up in front of the cameras for the world to see.” As he spoke, he rolled his latex-encased penis between his thumb and forefinger, looking his member over as if infatuated. Which, Sharon thought, he probably is. “You know I’m not s’posed to be telling you this,” Green said.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s between us.”

  “That’s the way it has to be. But if you and old Russell Black could work out a plea, those boys’ daddies would be tickled to death.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind.” Sharon turned her face to the window to hide her grin. “Maybe we’ll—”

  Beneath and outside the window, Commander moved. He rose from his haunches, growling deep in his throat, and charged across the lawn to the fence. He leaped against the wooden slats, snarling and snapping at something outside the yard.

  Sharon lifted her chin. “Commander. Here, boy.”

  The shepherd ignored her. He backed away from the fence and charged again, hitting the wood with such force that the boards quivered. His growls were murderous.

  Sharon stood and leaned toward the open window. “Good God. What’s gotten into that dog?”

  “Probably nothing,” Green said. “Probably just a bitch in heat.” He let go of his penis and slid downward on the sheets. “And speaking of that, c’m’ere.”

  Sharon sat on the window seat and regarded her bare knees. Bitch in heat, she thought. Come to think about it, that’s just what I’ve been acting like. As Commander continued to rage outside, Sharon chewed her lower lip. She touched her thigh. She rubbed her eyes.

  “I think you’d better go, Stan,” she finally said.

  As the big caramel-colored German shepherd snarled and snapped at him through the fence, Bradford Brie thought, One mean-ass fucking mutt that is. I got just the thing for mean-ass mutts, he thought. One jumbo slab of raw beefsteak, laced with a tad of strychnine, comin’ up. Not enough poison so that the shepherd dies quickly, no way. Make that fucking dog sick—sick as a dog, Brie thought with an insane laugh—then watch him whimper and whine and beg until he dies. That’s just the thing for mean-as
s mutts, Brie thought, let ’em know you’ve outsmarted their stupid fucking ass before they go.

  He didn’t see the dog as a really big problem. Brie even got a kick out of the dumb brute, standing just out of reach of the snapping jaws, just far enough from the fence so that the shepherd couldn’t bite him. Brie made a game out of it, feinting a charge in the darkness, acting as if he was about to climb over the fence, driving the snarling dog out of its mind. It won’t be long for you, you dumb yokel police hound, Brie thought.

  Bradford Brie had brought a small Canon camera along with him. He already had shots of the house’s front, sides, and rear, using an infrared flash and slowing the camera’s shutter speed a fraction, and he now squinted through the viewfinder and pressed the button just as Commander hurled himself against the fence, snapping and growling. Click. Beaut of a picture. This silly dog didn’t amount to a popcorn fart, not to a man who’d once outsmarted the bloodhounds down at the Texas Department of Corrections.