A voice I didn’t know, a coppish voice, was saying, “Boy, your ass is grass. You’re gone be in jail so long you’ll be able to homestead your cell. I just hope you like what you got off of that little girl tonight, because you won’t get anything else off anybody else for the next twenty years. Indiana don’t care about statutory rape, now. Indiana don’t care for that at all.”
“She did act like a statue at first,” Flick said. “But she was no statue toward the end there. Without you jokers were kicking the door in, she was humping like a camel.”
“Now I told you about your rights,” the cop said. Or maybe it was another cop. If you’ve heard one cop, you’ve heard them all. “And about your rights to an attorney, and how statements made voluntarily may be introduced as evidence in criminal prosecutions against you. You recollect I gave you that warning.”
“Cut the shit,” Flick said.
“Because you’re just digging your grave with your tongue, boy, and I want to make sure you know what you’re about.”
“Something about raping a statue,” Keegan said.
He sounded as unconcerned as Flickinger, and I couldn’t understand it. Neither could the cops. The guys were drunk, but it didn’t seem possible that they were drunk enough to be this way.
Solly said, “That was no statue, that was my wife.”
“Not funny, boy. That young lady was under the age of consent.”
“That was no young lady,” Lester put in. “That was my statue.”
“What’s the age of consent here anyway?”
“Eighteen, same as most everywhere else.”
“And you mean to say that girl was seventeen?”
“No, sir,” the cop said. He sounded very Jack Webbish. “I mean to say she was fifteen.”
“Well, I declare,” Lester said. “Why, the little liar swore up and down she was thirty-five.”
The room rocked with laughter. I didn’t laugh, and neither did the cops. They made threatening sounds and talked about going on down to the station house. Jimmy Joe hummed Dum Da Dum Dum and got a laugh. Flickinger stood up, stepped over me, and started rasping away in his No More Of This Nonsense voice. He saved it for special occasions, and it was very impressive. He told the cops that they could cut out this shit about warning us of our rights, because the same rights meant that they couldn’t kick the door in without a warrant, and since we were in a private room with a closed and locked door, they had no case, and—
“We had a warrant,” the cop said.
“Huh?”
“Naming you six men.” He read our names. “That’s you folks, isn’t it?” Flickinger allowed that it was us, all right. I was relieved, for no particular reason, when he read my name as Chip Harrison. When he was going down the list I had the weirdest idea that he was going to read off Leigh Harvey Harrison, and that was all I needed.
“And charging you six men with fraud, attempted fraud, soliciting without a license, several counts of trespass and criminal trespass, and miscellaneous violations of the following civic ordinances—” and he read off a batch of numbers.
“Now just a minute,” Flick said. He still didn’t seem at all worried; and I decided he was crazy. I didn’t know what any of those numbers were supposed to mean, but it sounded as though they had enough against us to put us away for hundreds and hundreds of years. And the worst part of all was that this had happened before I could get to Cherry. Whatever jail they put me in, the odds were good that there wouldn’t be any women in it, which meant I’d be a male virgin until I was too old to be interested.
I shuddered, then tuned Flick in again. “Where you made your mistake,” he was saying, “was that you came down here without you checked it all out with the sheriff. Now if you would of done this we wouldn’t have any trouble. Now what you got to do is get on the phone and ring the sheriff and tell him what’s happening, and you can let me have a couple of words with him, and we’ll have this whole thing straightened out in a minute.”
“You and the sheriff are close, is that right?”
“The closest. And there’s no hard feelings, and to prove it there’ll be something in it for you fellows, too. More or less to make it up to you for your time.”
“That’s attempting to bribe an arresting officer,” the cop said. “Write that down, Ken.”
“You’ll have to spell it for him,” Keegan said, and then there was an oof sound, as though someone (like Ken) had hit someone (for instance, Keegan) in the stomach.
“Officer,” Hick said, coming down hard on the first syllable, “I think I have to spell it out for you. The fix is in.”
“Is that right?”
“You talk to the sheriff and—”
“I talked to him an hour ago. That’s his signature on the bottom of the warrant there, boy.”
“Like hell it is.”
A long pause. Then Flickinger said, “It says Harold M. Powers. Now who in the precious hell is Harold M-for-Mother Powers?”
The cops all laughed. They really enjoyed themselves. I guess when you’re a cop you don’t get all that many opportunities to cut loose and laugh, and they made the most of this one. “Now who in the precious hell,” one of them started, and they broke up for a while, and another finished, “is Harold M-for-Mother Powers?” and they all fell out all over again.
Until finally one of them said, “Why, I’ll tell you, boy, if you’re so close with him, how come you don’t even recognize the sheriff’s name?”
“What about Barnett Ramsey?”
“Why, we had an election some six or eight months ago, and old Barney got beat.”
“He lost the election,” Flickinger said. Heavily.
“After all those years. Yeah, it surprised a whole mess of folks.”
“Great bleeding shit,” Flickinger said. “Jesus frigging Christ with a tambourine. Holy laminated bifurcated ocellated Mother of Pearl.”
“I never heard the like,” one cop said softly.
“Sweet shit in a bucket,” Flickinger said. “I bribed the wrong man.”
Everybody started talking at once. I took a deep breath and said a quick prayer and rolled under the bed.
Chapter eight
I didn’t really expect to get away with it. But they had been doing such a great job of ignoring me that I figured I ought to give them all the encouragement I could. The easier I made it for them, the better.
So I rolled under the bed, and since I was right next to it already, and on the floor, and more or less face down, it wasn’t that hard to do. In a sense I suppose rolled is the wrong word for it. I sort of crept on my belly like an earthworm. Sideways, though. Earthworms, as you probably know, tend to go back and forth. I don’t know how you tell an earthworm’s back from his forth. It was never very important to me. I don’t even like to go fishing, for Pete’s sake. I do know, though, that earthworms are male at one end and female at the other, so you know what they can do.
Lying under that bed, I decided that the police force of the fifth largest city in the state of Indiana could do the same thing earthworms can do, for all I cared. Because it occurred to me that they, were not only going to give me the royal shaft, but they were going to give it to me for something I didn’t do. In the first place I was only seventeen myself, so what I did to Cherry wasn’t statutory rape, and in the second place I hadn’t done anything in the first place.
Which seemed to indicate that as soon as I clued them in, they would let me go.
But I didn’t think they would. So I stayed under the bed while Flickinger told everybody who would listen that it would take a while to straighten everything out, but that he knew everything would be straightened out, because one thing you couldn’t deny was that he and his men represented Dynamic Termite Extermination, Inc., and that DTE was no fly-by-night outfit but a company that had been a leader in its field for twenty-two-count-’em-twenty-two years, and that was by God a lot of goddamn years.