“I am. Now let me get this straight. When you came downstairs after seeing Charles van Straadt on the third floor, the first floor of the west building was so full of patients that Michael Pride’s examining room was being used to see cases. Was Michael Pride himself there, by the way?”
“I don’t think so. Everybody said he was in the operating room.”
“All right. What about Sister Augustine?”
Julie shook her head. “Augie was in the operating room, too. At least she was when I was first there. I saw her come out about the time I decided to go back to the east building. I don’t think she saw me. She would have dissed me out.”
“Perfect.” Gregor nodded. He reached for a white pillowcase and began to fold it. “Perfect. The examining room was occupied that way for as long as you were in the west building that night?”
“As far as I know.”
“At no time was the area cleared for any reason whatsoever?”
Julie laughed. “You’ve never been around here in the middle of an emergency. Cleared how? And to where? There wouldn’t be anyplace for people to go except out in the street, and the people here are very big on how they never put anybody out in the street. In the winter when the homeless people come around, Augie won’t even call the city vans. She just gets a bunch of blankets and lets them bed down on the old furniture in the basement space off the cafeteria. That’s when they started getting exterminators out here and putting down rat poison. Augie said you couldn’t let people sleep in the basement if they were going to get bitten, and she wasn’t going to stop letting people sleep in the basement.”
“Perfect,” Gregor Demarkian said again. He put the folded pillowcase on the pile. He got off his stool and put it back into the corner it had come from. He seemed to be bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “Thank you very much, Miss Enderson. You’ve been a great deal of help.”
“Ms.,” Julie said automatically.
“Ms. Enderson,” Gregor Demarkian repeated.
“Have I really been of help? It doesn’t seem that I told you much of anything.”
“You helped me to cut off the avenues of escape,” Gregor said. “Law enforcement has changed since I entered it, Ms. Enderson. It used to be that all you had to do was prove a positive case. Now you have to make sure you haven’t left any gates lying open a good lawyer could drive a defense through. Now you not only have to prove that the defendant committed the crime, you have to prove as far as possible that there was no other way the crime could have been committed. If you don’t do that, the lawyers scream ‘reasonable doubt,’ and half the time the jury buys it, and off walks your murderer, free.”
“Oh,” Julie said.
“Thank you again,” Gregor Demarkian said.
He backed up to the doorway, nodded to her happily, and then disappeared into the gloom. Julie stared into the space where he had gone with perplexity. In the world in which Julie Enderson lived, defendants were almost never let off by juries on grounds of reasonable doubt. Defendants were almost never let off by juries. That’s why so few of the people Julie knew who had been arrested had ever had a trial. They just got themselves lawyers from the Legal Aid Society to cut them a plea bargain. Sometimes they were guilty and sometimes they were not, but it hardly seemed to matter. Surely they had been guilty of something somewhere. Almost always they had been dealing drugs. One way or the other, they had been expecting to land in jail ever since they knew what jail was.
Oh, well, Julie thought now. Maybe it was different for people downtown. Everything else was.
For some reason she couldn’t pin down, she was much calmer now than she had been before she talked to Gregor Demarkian. She could almost concentrate. She didn’t want to concentrate on the abolitionists, though. Julie leaned across the table and flipped through the history text until she came to the page with the colored boxed article on her favorite person in American history.
Sojourner Truth.
3
DOWNSTAIRS ON THE SECOND floor, in a room only three feet from the nurses’ station, Robbie Yagger was lying in a white-sheeted hospital bed, limp. Next to him in a green plastic molded chair was Shana Malvera, fretting. Shana had been there for nearly an hour now, ever since she had heard what had happened to Robbie and where they had taken him, and she expected to be there for a couple of hours more. Shana believed implicitly in the healing power of human connection. She had said so now at least five times. Every time she did, Robbie felt all warm and light. He was supposed to be unconscious, but he wasn’t, not quite. He was floating in something like twilight. He could hear, very clearly, everything that Shana said. He thought he might be able to see, if he could just get his eyes open. His eyes felt weighted down by lead. Mostly what he could do was remember, but it was a strange sort of remembering. Nothing was in order. Nothing was worrisome. Nothing was frightening. Nothing was at all important except the sound of Shana Malvera’s voice.