“As long as the ones she’d been giving after we got privatized prisons?”
“I don’t know off the top of my head,” George said. “But if I were going to go after somebody to bribe, Martha Handling would be the one. With other people, if they started to give out those long sentences, you’d be surprised. But nobody would be surprised with Martha. It would just look like business as usual.”
“You said we had an appointment to see people at Homicide?”
“Yeah,” George said. “We do. Are you feeling all right? You look kind of funny.”
TWO
1
Janice Loftus was as angry as she had ever been in her life, so angry that she was having a hard time keeping it from affecting her teaching. Janice didn’t believe in anger, any more than she believed in hate. They were useless emotions. They cluttered up your life. They imprisoned you in the past and cut you off from the future.
Today, though, no matter what they did, Janice found it impossible to keep clear of them. She was beginning to wonder if she had somehow become trapped in the patriarchal paradigm. Aggressive emotions were always patriarchal. Women were oriented toward cooperation, the way all oppressed peoples were, and they were now living in a world where only cooperation would work.
But there was no cooperation, not from anybody. Even Kasey Holbrook was not cooperating, and that was her job.
“I want you to stay out of it,” Kasey had said yesterday, when Janice had been trying like mad to make her make sense. “This is a murder case. It’s a spectacular murder case. It’s all over the news. It’s going to be all over the national news in no time flat. It wouldn’t be good for the organization and it wouldn’t be good for you to be right in the middle of it.”
Janice had begun to feel her head throb, right then and there.
“But we can’t pretend I’m not in the middle of it,” she said. “I found the body, everybody knows that. I was interviewed on the local news. They’ll play it over and over again.”
“That’s no reason for you to make your part bigger than it has to be,” Kasey said. “All I’m saying is to lie low and stay out of it as much as you can.”
“But I can’t stay out of it,” Janice said, the first of a whole series of ugly suspicions blossoming in her brain. “You must be able to see that. I’ll have to testify at the trial—”
“If there is a trial,” Kasey said, “and even if there is, it’ll be months away. Maybe even years.”
“But I’ll still have to testify,” Janice said. “And of course there’ll be a trial. That man is a friend of Gregor Demarkian’s. Do you think Gregor Demarkian is going to let him plead guilty? And I don’t see the point of shutting up for a year or two. Don’t you see what an opportunity this is? We’ve been talking about Martha Handling for years. And now we’ve got her. We’ve got everything. The bribe taking, the sentences that went on forever—”
“We don’t actually have any proof that she ever took bribes,” Kasey said, “and everybody’s known about the sentences for as long as Handling was giving them. Nobody cared, in case you didn’t notice. Harsh sentences are politically very popular with just about everybody but the families of the inmates, and practically nobody will listen to them.”
“But this is different,” Janice insisted. “She’s a big noise in the news now. Everything about her will come out and be in the papers. Things we couldn’t get any traction on before will be news. And the news will make all the difference.”
“No,” Kasey said. “It really won’t.”
That was when Janice realized what was going on. It was a disease, power was. Kasey had it. Kasey was used to getting all the publicity and attention for herself. She was used to making all the waves and seeing herself on the six o’clock news. She obviously hated the idea of anybody else getting a little attention.
Really, Janice had thought when she finally got off by herself and was able to think. She should have known it all along. She really should have. Kasey had been showing all the signs for years. All that talk about “collegiality” and “leading by consensus.” It was just a lot of words to mask the grab for power. And the power was a soft power because only with soft power could you go on pretending as if you really believed in equality.
It happened to all of them. It really did. Janice had never belonged to any organization anywhere that was any different.
By the next morning, she’d managed to calm herself down. She’d gone in to school and taught her first class. She’d answered a few questions from fellow faculty members and one from a student. Most of her students never watched the news, so they knew nothing about the fact that Janice had become the pivotal element in the country’s most famous murder case.