Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [58]
But eventually he got better, and they took him back to the county jail, and the day after that he was brought in for a conference with the District Attorney.
His name was Forbes and he was a very fat man, large, big-boned, without any of the weaknesses of self-indulgent fat, but with the strength of pure bigness, a powerful barrel of a man, whose heavy florid face was pleasant rather than jolly, his mouth sensual but not cruel, and his eyes hard and alive and humorous. When Jack sat down across the desk from Forbes he knew right away that there was going to be no phony stuff; in other circumstances, Jack probably would have liked him.
Forbes had a Manila folder in front of him, and he flipped it open and read silently for a moment. “I don’t believe a word of this,” he said to Jack. “But don’t think I won’t try you on it. If I have to, I will. Are you going to cooperate?”
“No,” Jack said. He wanted a look at the papers in the folder, but he refused the idea of asking.
“I didn’t think you would. You look like a tough boy. I don’t have to tell you not to get tough around here. We have your record from Oregon, so we know you know how things go. You’re no cherry. Will you make a statement?”
“No,” Jack said, but the big man had already heaved himself up out of his chair and gone over to the door behind Jack, opened it, and called out, “Myra, would you come in here, please?” When he got back to his desk and settled, he said to Jack, “Talk loud, she’s kind of deef.” The woman, about fifty, with brightly dyed red hair and a petrified face, came into the room and sat in a chair by the window. She had a notebook and a pencil ready, and she twitched a smile at Jack and said loudly, “All right, dearie.”
District Attorney Forbes began asking questions, and the woman began writing; after each question, both of them would pause and wait for Jack to answer, and when he did not, the District Attorney would say, “Refuses to answer,” and go on to the next question. They were ridiculous; they had nothing to do with Jack. From the import of the questions, Jack understood that he was supposed to have been in Balboa County about six weeks before, in a car, to have picked up Mona and Sue in front of the Ritz Theater at gunpoint—forced them into the car with a threat of bodily harm if they did not comply—driven the pair of them to San Francisco, and installed them in the hotel. He was supposed to have threatened them by saying he would have them arrested as prostitutes if they did not stay, and he was supposed to have forced them to perform acts of a sexual nature, and to have lived with Mona in a state of unlawful carnal cohabitation. Further, a wallet was found in his possession, belonging to someone named Dennis Mellon; and Jack was asked to explain this, and to explain the fact that Mr. Mellon was at present in the University of California hospital in San Francisco, suffering from multiple fractures of the jaw. Jack was also asked to explain why he assaulted two police officers who had come to his room to question him. He answered no questions, and explained nothing. He also refused to sign a statement denying everything. The woman went out of the room, and District Attorney Forbes sighed.
“I talked to San Francisco a couple of times,” he said. “What probably happened is these two girls got braced by the vice squad, and the boys had nothing better to do, so they made up a story for the girls to cop out to. They probably told the girls they’d have to waste away in the juvenile home for the next four or five years if they didn’t lay the blame on somebody else. Hell, there was a missing persons report on both the girls laying around the SF police station for about a month. Trick is, to find out how much of Mona’s statement is bullshit, how much true. Did you pick em up at the theater?”
Jack said nothing. He