It took an effort to get my mind off Christophe's missing thumbs, but the ropes were cutting into my arms. "Agent Christophe," I said, getting almost indignant, "I don't know where you got this notion, but it simply isn't even arguable. There is no chance I was anywhere near Daleylab in the last month or more."
She looked at the two bullies, then back at me. "No chance," she repeated thoughtfully.
"No chance at all," I said firmly.
"No chance at all," she echoed. Then she held out a hand.
One of the bullies filled it with a file folder. The top item inside the folder was a photograph. She glanced at it to make sure it was right way up, then held it before me so that I could see it clearly. It was a man at the door of a building.
The man was me.
He was me but wearing a suit I had never owned, a sort of one-piece coverall of the sort Winston Churchill made famous in World War II. But he was me, all right. "This was taken," Christophe said colorlessly, "by the surveillance cameras at Daleylab night before last. So were these others." She flipped through them quickly. They were not all taken with the same camera, because the background was different from the first one. But it was the same familiar face, in the same unfamiliar clothes. "And these," she said, taking a cardboard form out of the folder, "are your fingerprints as filed with your college I.D. at Northwestern. The ones under them were found at the lab."
There were only four prints below the full line of ten on the sample-all they'd recovered from the scene, I supposed. But even an amateur could see that the spirals and grooves on the thumb and middle finger of the right hand, and the index fingers of both, looked a lot like my reference prints above.
"But it's not true!" I wailed.
"Are you going to stick to your story?" Christophe asked incredulously.
"I have to! I wasn't there! I didn't do it!"
"Oh, hell, Dominic," she said, sighing, "I thought you had better sense." And she locked her thumbless hands together and gazed down at the ground. She didn't signal to her helpers. She didn't have to. They knew what came next and, as they moved toward me, so did I.
They didn't beat me very much. You know the gossip about how they treat suspects. By those standards they barely laid a finger on me. It isn't all gossip, either, I think, because I wrote a mortgage for a bartender once, and then he got arrested on suspicion of selling hard liquor to a person under the age of thirty-five. He didn't need any mortgage after that. What his widow whispered to me about the condition of the body when they gave it back to her for burial would pretty nearly turn your stomach.
I got nothing like that.
I got slapped around. It hurt, sure. It hurts twice as much when you're tied up because you can't hit back—well, you wouldn't do that anyway, not if you knew what was good for you-or even try to catch some of the blows on an arm instead of the side of the head. My head was ringing long before they were through, but it was all open-hand stuff, no bruises, no breaking the skin, and they stopped every few minutes so Agent Christophe could pick up the questioning:
"That's you in the pictures, isn't it, Dominic?"
"How do I know? It—ouch!—looks like me, a little."
"And the fingerprints?"
"I don't know anything about fingerprints."
"Oh, hell, go on, boys."
After a while they got tired of the side of my head. Or maybe they noticed that I was beginning to have trouble hearing Christophe; anyway, they began punching me in the belly or whacking me across the back. Since I was still wearing only the bathing suit, there was no protection. It hurt. But hitting me on the back must have hurt their hands some, too, because they weren't nearly as enthusiastic. They paused more frequently.
"Want to change your mind, Dominic?"
"There's nothing to change, damn it!"
And then they'd switch to the belly again. That did hurt. It took the wind out of me. I doubled over and could hardly hear what Agent Christophe was saying.
And so I almost missed it when she said, "Jerk, are you still denying you were in Daleylab on Saturday, August thirteenth?"
I gasped. "Wait a minute." Naturally they didn't wait, just kept trying to get a good punch in at my doubled-over belly. "No, please," I begged, and Christophe stopped them. I took a couple of deep breaths and managed to say, "Did you mean last Saturday? The thirteenth?"
"Right, Dominic. When you were caught at Daleylab."
I sat up straighter. "But I couldn't have been, Agent Christophe," I said, "because last Saturday I was weekending in New York City. My fiancee was there. She'll testify. Honest, Agent Christophe! I don't know who it was but it couldn't have been me!"
Well, it wasn't as easy as that. I took a couple of good shots after that before they were convinced-or not convinced, exactly, but at least confused. They got Greta out of bed to confirm my story, and she told them her whole crew would remember me, and they got all of them on the phone too. They all did. I didn't often go with Greta on her New York runs, and they were in no doubt about the date.
They untied me and let me stand up. One of them even lent me a trenchcoat to put on over my bathing suit to go home in the bright dawn. They weren't graceful about it, though. Agent Christophe didn't speak to me again, just put her head down over the file folder, gnawing at her lips furiously. One of the beaters-up was the one who told me I could go. "But not far, DeSota. No New York trips, understand? Just stay where we can find you when we want you."
"But I've proved I was innocent."
"DeSota," he snarled, "you've proved nothing. We've got all the proof we need. Surveillance photos, fingerprints. We could put you away for a hundred years with just that."
"Except that I wasn't there," I said, and then said no more, because Nyla Christophe had looked up from her folder and was looking straight at me.
It would have been only decent of them to give me a ride back home, but I didn't think it was worthwhile lingering long enough to ask. I found a cabby who took me, and waited outside while I went in to get my wallet and pay him off. Twelve dollars. A day's pay. But I never paid a bill more gladly.
Deputy Chief Inspector William Brzolyak, walking into his local precinct house with a .45 automatic in his hand, explained that he had shot and killed his wife and five children because they were staring at him behind his back. "They should've left me alone," he told reporters.
Bathers along the South Side beaches complained that the presence of dark-brown, greasy balls of matter floating in the lake waters made swimming unattractive and constituted a possible health hazard.
The summer storm that dropped as much as 3.4 inches of rain on New York City suburbs within a four-hour period was described by U.S. Weather Bureau spokespersons as "a meteorological freak." It was not associated with any identified frontal system or low-pressure area. Property damage in Queens and Richmond counties alone was estimated in the millions of dollars.
18 August 1983
11:15 A.M. Nicky DeSota
A day later none of it seemed so bad. "Just mistaken identity," I assured Greta when she called to say good-bye—she was on another New York run.
"Even the fingerprints?"
"Come on, Greta," I said, looking at my boss, who was looking thoughtfully at me, and at the clock behind him, which was telling me I only had two hours before I was due in traffic court. "You know where I was that night!"
"Of course I do," she said with a sigh in a tone of voice as though she weren't really sure any more. I guessed that was what being questioned by the FBI did. I could hear her yawning. "Goodness sake," she apologized, "I hope I'm not like this on my run. It was all that noise last night."