Fighting Chance(19)

“And he left word that he wouldn’t talk to me? And all he’ll say is—?”

“Is that he has the right to remain silent,” Bennis said. “Yes. According to what the people in John Jackman’s office have been able to find out, anytime anybody tries to talk to him, all he’ll do is take the Fifth. But Gregor, it’s not just that he won’t talk to any of us—he won’t talk to anybody. They had a guy come down from the Public Defender’s Office, and Tibor wouldn’t talk to him either. He just keeps saying he has the right to remain silent.”

“You’re right,” Gregor said. “Whatever’s going on here, it’s not that Tibor murdered somebody.”

Bennis brightened. “Do you mean that? Are you sure?”

“I’m absolutely sure,” Gregor said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know why I’m sure.”

Bennis’s face fell again. She got up from her chair to tend to the coffee. Gregor could see that she had also started crying again.





THREE

1

By the time Janice Loftus was released from the courthouse, she had been hanging around for four hours, and she was fighting mad. Even the more than slightly relieving fact that she had not been required to go down to a police station somewhere didn’t help. Rights were much more than being left alone, no matter what those idiots in the Teabaggers Party said, but being left alone was certainly a right. Janice had not been left alone. She had been harrassed and intimidated. She had been accused of a dozen things she couldn’t possibly have done. She had been asked questions nobody had a right to ask and been told—all right, not outright—that if she didn’t give the answers, it would be very suspicious.

Very suspicious.

They really thought she was going to fall for that kind of thing. No wonder so many people of color were in jail. It would be hard to stay out of jail if your schools absolutely sucked and you barely had a fourth-grade education and you were subjected to tactics like that.

In a free society, your thoughts were you own. It didn’t matter what you thought. It only mattered what you did. Or sometimes it did matter what you thought, and America wasn’t a free society, and—

Janice couldn’t think straight. Every muscle in her body was twitching, going off like a string of firecrackers. It took everything she had not to run down the street. It took more than everything she had not to say something nasty to the reporters who ringed the building and crowded the halls. There was something that would be all over the place in a minute. The police had had no business accusing her of taking that video, and no business confiscating her cell phone as evidence.

She was around the corner and down the street and—well, she didn’t know where she was, exactly. She’d been walking without looking where she was going. Now that she looked around, she thought she might have landed in a very bad neighborhood. It was wrong to categorize people by what they looked like but even so, the people around her right now made her very nervous. She was the only white person she could see.

The important thing was not to be afraid. Predators against women were always male, and they were always on the lookout for fear. You couldn’t look intimidated. You couldn’t give out vibes that said you were intimidated.

The taxi emerged out of nowhere. It could have been sent by God in a poof of smoke but Janice didn’t believe in God. God was not just the opium of the people. God was the Big Lie that kept everybody else in line.

Janice ran out into the street and raised her hand. The cab pulled over immediately.

Janice grabbed the door and hopped in. She shut the door behind her with a slam. She gave the address of the offices of Pennsylvania Justice. Then she buried her head in her bag so that she couldn’t see what was going on outside.

As an example of white skin privilege, getting that cab had been pretty spectacular. Janice was willing to bet the cab wouldn’t have stopped for anybody else on the street.

The offices of Pennsylvania Justice were apparently not very far away. At least, the cab didn’t take a long time, and the meter didn’t go up much. Janice tried to think, but she really couldn’t remember where anything was in relation to anything else.

She carefully counted out too much money and put it into the cabdriver’s hand. She got out of the cab and shut the door carefully and slowly behind her. The worst of the evidence of shock and angry was draining away. She was able to walk slowly toward the door in front of her without giving the impression that she was afraid of the cabdriver and wanted to get away from him quickly.

Pennsylvania Justice had a storefront office with a plate glass window, with private cubicles in the back for anything that shouldn’t be seen by the general public. They wanted to encourage walk-ins, people with problems who might be intimidated by the stiff formality of an ordinary office.