Immoral Certainty Read Online Free PDF Page B

city is about forty-three times a day, whenever some asshole decides to do anything like that, in the rare instance where the case attracts the attention of the fucking law, then for some strange reason I get the case. Even though, my dear boss, I have mentioned this to you from time to time, that I cannot stand any more to—”
    “Marlene, you know that’s not true. All the cases get assigned off a rotation schedule from the complaint room.”
    ”—stand any more to see little. Punctured. Bodies. Or talk to their mommies and daddies. And, as long as we’re being technical about it, do you know how many child homicide, child rape, and child felony assault cases I have had in the past year? You do not? Let me tell you. One hundred and fourteen. This is coincidence? The luck of the draw? Can you recall the last time Ray Guma, let’s say, had a case like that? Or Roland? Or any of the male attorneys? I’ll tell you, Cindy Pitowski has got ’em, and so does Ruth Kammer, and that’s all the ladies you got working for you right now.
    “So I put it to you, counselor, on the preponderance of the evidence, is somebody saying, ‘who wants to fuck with this messy doo-doo, there’s no challenge, it’s a piece of shit, open and shut, smoking gun, it’s not roughie-toughie armed robbery, assault with a deadly, drug-crazed shoot-out, so let’s give to the cunts !’”
    She stared at him so intensely that he dropped his gaze. At moments like these it appeared that she was flashing emotions from both of her black eyes, even though Karp knew that the left one was glass. Marlene lunged furiously toward her bag for another cigarette, and the motion caused a minor landslide of paperwork off her desk.
    “You ought to get some of this cleared up,” Karp ventured, knowing instantly that it had been exactly the wrong thing to say. He saw her face grow tight and her lovely soft mouth knot into a ridged pale line. “Oh,” she said carefully, “is this what I owe the honor of your visit to? The inspector general is making his rounds. I’m sorry my desk isn’t all neatsy, sir, but I’ve been over to Bellevue, to the morgue, to see the child, a little girl named Lucy Segura. What her loving mother did to her body wasn’t too bad. She just cut off one of her fingers and shoved something into her little twat, and then strangled her. It wasn’t as bad as the one where they baked the little girl in the oven. You remember that one? I do.
    “So I didn’t have time to clean up! I better do it now or the big man will be mad at me.” She sprang to her feet and began to sweep the piled papers off her desk with broad, violent movements of her hands and arms.
    “Marlene! Stop!” shouted Karp. He rose from his seat and grabbed her around the shoulders. This was the only thing that really frightened Karp. Like most naturally brave men, he had little imagination, which doth make cowards of us all, and physical pain held no terrors for him, but when the black screamers took charge of Marlene it turned his bones to jelly.
    She struggled and turned a stranger’s face up to him. “I can’t stand it,” she said, her jaw rigid. “I can’t can’t can’t can’t can’t! It’s too much. All the little children….”
    Wisely, Karp kept his mouth shut for once, didn’t give a pep talk or useful advice, just held Marlene, who began to cry. After a while her sobs subsided into loud snuffles and her body relaxed against his.
    “Whew, God! Sorry. Where’s the Kleenex?”
    “Use my tie.”
    She giggled. “No, I got them here.” She broke away and rummaged through her huge bag until she extracted a wad of tissue the size of a cabbage. She blew lustily into it. Then she sat on the edge of her desk and lit a cigarette.
    “Sorry about that,” she said. “Things are getting hairy again. I used to wait for the dullness to set in, to where I get tough and cynical down deep inside. I don’t mean the pose. I got a pose as good as anybody’s.