Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [59]
Forbes went on: “I’ll give it to you straight. This girl’s father swings some weight around here; he’s been in this office four times already, fartin fire and telling me he’s going to have my ass if you aren’t sent to the gas chamber on the Little Lindbergh Law. I know the girl. She stinks. Just another two-bit chick, stupid enough to go tough. I know both the girls. Sue Franconi is all right, but don’t think she won’t get up on the witness stand with Mona and lie you right into San Quentin or worse. She’d do it to save her ass, and to tell the truth, I don’t blame either of them. You shouldn’t, either. You’ve been in juvenile, you know what it’s like.
“Now, these other charges are still open in San Francisco. I told them I wanted to try the kidnap charge here, and if you get convicted of anything at all, they’ll probably drop. I’m going to ask the grand jury to indict you for kidnaping, and that’ll get Mona’s old man off my neck; and by the time trial rolls around, he’ll be up to his ears in some other wild-ass scrape of hers, and we can accept a lesser plea of contributing or something from you, hear it before a judge, and you’ll be doing your little bit in county jail before he knows what happened. Anyway, by that time I’ll be renominated and he can’t touch me for another four years.”
He looked at Jack intently. “I’ll lay the whole thing out for you. If you don’t cop the plea, if you want to fight it out, you’ll probably win your case. I can get you a damned good lawyer, and he’ll beat it. You can probably find somebody who saw the girls leave town, maybe the bus driver. You can get the clerks from that fleabag hotel down in the city, and they’ll probably testify in your behalf. You’d have no trouble beating it, and you know it. It’s as phony a charge as I ever saw. It’s got vice squad bull written all over it. I’m just telling you so there’ll be no mistake. I ain’t trying to trap you. You can beat it, and I’ll have a big defeat on my record in an election year, and Mona’s daddy will raise all sorts of hell, and I’ll look stupid. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do if you try that: I’ll drop the case and take my medicine, and you’ll go back to San Francisco and face the statutory rape charge. That one you can’t beat, and you know it. I won’t lift a finger to get that charge dropped if I have to drop mine. It’s out of my hands anyway. You’ll do time on that one, plenty of time. Do you see what I’m getting at? I’m telling you I can fix the rape charge and the rest of it, if you’ll cooperate with me. If you won’t, tough tiddy.”
Jack saw. If he pled guilty to the charge he was innocent on, he would not be tried on the charge he was guilty on. It was even kind of funny. As to the rape charge, he realized now that he had always known the girls were underage, but had never given it a second thought. If he hadn’t known, or suspected, it would not make any difference anyway. It was still a felony. It was a joke. Nobody ever went to jail for screwing. Except that they did, all the time. But none of that made any difference. You didn’t go to jail for what you did; you went because they caught hold of you and didn’t know what else to do, and so they put you in jail. They. Yes, they. The filing cabinets in the orphanage. The city hall. The parking meter. The hotel-room door. Batman. Never anybody real sending you to jail. The cops didn’t do it. The District Attorney didn’t do it. His chair is doing it. Sending my meat and bones to jail, and I got to go along. That’s all. Nothing personal.
“Fuck you,” Jack said to the District Attorney’s chair. He felt enraged, seduced, raped. He felt hate, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He wanted to scream. He began saying, “Fuck you,” over and over again, sitting erect in the chair, his hands at his sides, his face empurpling with frustrated rage, tears coming out of his eyes.
“This won’t do,” the District Attorney said. Jack stopped, and stared at him through the film on his eyes. “Think about it. No hurry. I’ll send your lawyer down right