Blood Relatives Read Online Free PDF Page B

mean.”
    “Or a meeting of the Emerald Society,” Kling said.
    “Or something, you know, that looks like all the cops in the city are gathered to hear the Police Commissioner speak instead of us getting married.”
    “I understand completely,” Kling said.
    “So please don’t get upset,” Augusta said.
    “I’m not upset,” Kling said. “It’s just that most of these guys I’ve worked with a long time, and I’ve got to invite them. I’m not only talking now about the ones I want to invite—like Steve or Meyer or Hal or Cotton or the Lieutenant or Bob or—”
    “Bert, that’s half the squad already!”
    “No, honey, there are sixteen men on the squad.”
    “And if you add wives to that—”
    “Not all of them are married. Gus, I’ll tell you the truth, I’d really like to invite all of them, I mean it. Because these are guys I work with, you know. So how can I invite some of them and not others? I may be on the job, say, with Andy Parker one night, and some hood’ll get the drop on me, and Andy’ll remember I didn’t invite him to my wedding, and he’ll forget to shoot the hood.”
    “Yeah,” Augusta said.
    “So from that aspect alone, it’s really, well, important to keep good working relations with the guys on the squad. But from the other aspect, too, of liking most of these guys, though I can’t honestly say I’m crazy about Andy Parker, still, he’s not too bad a person when you understand him, from that aspect I’d really like them to be there to share my wedding with me. You understand, Gus?”
    “Yeah,” she said, and sighed. “Well, Bert, then I guess we’ll just have to figure on more people than we did originally.”
    “How many did we figure originally?”
    “About seventy, seventy-five.”
    “Maybe we can still keep it down to that.”
    “I don’t see how,” Augusta said.
    “Well, let’s look at that list again, okay?”
    They looked at the list again. He did not mention to her that tomorrow morning he would begin questioning a dozen or more known sex offenders. They talked only about the wedding. Then they went out to brunch, and strolled the city. There were outdoor flea markets, and sidewalk art exhibits, and even an antiques show with stalls set up against the curbstones of four barricaded city blocks. For a little while it felt like Paris.
    On Monday morning he became a cop again.

In the penal law of the state for which Kling worked, all sex offenses were listed under Article 130. PL 130.35, for example, was Rape 1st Degree, which was a Class B felony. PL 130.38 was Consensual Sodomy, a Class B misdemeanor. PL 130.55 was Sexual Abuse 3rd Degree, another Class B misdemeanor. There were eleven separate sex offenses listed under Article 130, which noted, incidentally, that “a person shall not be convicted of any offense defined in this Article, or of an attempt to commit the same, solely on the uncorroborated testimony of the alleged victim, except in the case of Sexual Abuse 3rd Degree.” There were some cops who found it amusing that the exception to this note did not also apply to the third definition of Sexual Misconduct, which was “engaging in sexual conduct with an animal or a dead human body,” it perhaps being reasonable to assume that neither of these victims could possibly give any testimony at all.
    There were other cops who found nothing at all amusing about Article 130. A great many criminals shared their opinion. Sex offenders were the least-respected convicts in any prison society; if a violator of Article 130 could have pretended that he was an ax murderer instead, or an arsonist, or a man who had filled a ditch with fourteen poisoned wives, he’d have preferred that to entering the prison as a sex offender. There had to be something terribly wrong with a man who’d committed a sex crime— any sort of sex crime. Or so the reasoning went, inside the walls and outside as well.
    When it came to degrees of criminality, there were very few