“His dad used to beat him. He didn’t really mean to shoot up his school.”
Richard sighed. “Not so simple. Not so specious. But you do have to look at the individual. Then the angles and distances between him and his surroundings become measurable. What those angles compose is what constitutes perspective. And perspective is exactly what you need to pass judgment on an individual’s actions.” Though his words were running together drunkenly, Richard was still articulate as hell. A practiced drinker.
“How about passing judgment on an individual?”
“Leave that to God. Or Allah, or karma, or the Great Pumpkin. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if someone is evil. It matters what they’ve done and how we deal with it.”
“But we have to carry out our judgment on individuals.”
“Of course. So what determines the strictness of punishment? Irredeemability? Lack of contrition? Unfitness to participate in society? No one so much as examined these factors for my client today. This kid is screwed. He’s gonna have to punk for some gangbanger for the rest of his life over a thirty-seven-cent fucking toilet-paper holder.” Richard’s voice wavered, either from rage or grief, and his face contorted once, sharply, presaging a sob that never came. Instead he grinned. “That’s the reason for our little party tonight, my friend.” He raised a shot glass. “Celebrating the system.”
His buddy put a hand on his shoulder and steered him down onto the barstool.
“It goes both ways,” Tim said.
Richard looked up, his eyes red-rimmed and drooping. “Yeah, yeah, it does.”
“I’ve seen guys walk through loopholes I’d never even dreamed of. Chain of custody. Speedy trial motions. Search and seizure. It’s not justice. It’s bullshit.”
“It is bullshit. But why can’t we have good procedure and justice? So the court spanks the cop for”-his hands fluttered, seeking a phrase-“illegal search and seizure or whatever, and next time around the cop does his job right, with respect for civil liberties. The trial goes clean. Guy gets convicted, receives a fair sentence. Then it’s right all the way around-we have our cake and eat it, too.”
Nick slumped forward, his forehead thumping against the bar. Tim thought it had to be a joke, but Nick remained there. Richard didn’t notice. He leaned in, his breath carrying a sickening combination of breath mints and tequila. “Lemme let you in on a little secret. PDs don’t like their clients, generally. We don’t want to see them go free. We want them to get convicted.” He held up a wobbly finger. “However. More important than that, we want tough guy cops like you and hard-on DAs to respect the Constitution, the Penal Code, the Bill of Rights. And everyone chips away at them, these rights, slowly over time. Detectives, prosecutors, even judges. But not us. We’re fucking zealots. Zealots for the Constitution.”
“Jews for Jesus,” Nick muttered from his facedown slump on the bar.
“And we protect…we protect that thing, that stupid, distant, abstract fucking piece of parchment, despite the scum we represent, despite the crimes they may have committed or may commit after we get them off because some dumb-ass cop doesn’t fulfill the oral announcement of intent to search after the knock and notice and puts us in the fuckdamned position of having to point it out and let some mouth-breathing reprobate walk out the fucking door, in all likelihood to do whatever he’s done again.”
Richard tried to stand but fell back onto the stool. Nick was making raspberry noises against the bar.
“We fight fascism in the petty details.” Richard pivoted to face the bar, letting his hands slide up, covering his face. “And it’s awful. And we lose sight of the prize, the aim, sometimes, because we just wallow in this…in this…” A jerking inhalation led to a sob, but when he lowered his hands, he was smiling again. “We need a shot. Another shot.”
“Trying to break the Breathalyzer record and win a Kewpie doll?”
“What, are you gonna arrest me, Officer? Drunk and disenfranchised?”
“If I do, I’ll be sure to Mirandize you.”
“Funny, that’s funny.” Richard laughed hard. “You’re okay. I like you. You don’t talk much, but you’re okay. I mean, for a cop.” He leaned heavily on the bar, his shirtsleeve soaking up spilled alcohol. “Lemme let you in on a little secret. I’m leaving my office. Going across the street to federal-believe it or not, federal sentencing is even more draconian. I’m gonna go throw myself against that wall for a change.”
“Why do you do it?” Tim asked. “If you hate it so much?”
Nick raised his head, and his face looked startlingly sober. “Because we’re worried no one else will.”
Richard drummed the bar with his forefingers. “And it makes us pretty unpopular. Didn’t used to be that way, not with Darrow and Rogers. The greats. Now a PD’s just a knee-jerk apologist. A pushover. A softie. Dukakis. We’re Dukakises. Dukaki.”
“And Mondale,” Nick said. “We’re Mondale, too.”
“And guys like me feel like guys like you are running the show these days,” Tim said.
“Are you kidding me?” Richard spun around on the barstool, twirling a full rotation before stopping himself. His head jerked back with a hiccup. He looked distinctly nauseous. “Have you been watching the news? This vigilante business-it’s meeting with general societal approval.”
“The people who have been executed are hardly-”
Richard bellowed out a bad imitation of a game-show buzzer, tilting from the stool onto his feet. “Wrong answer.”
“Right. Just have faith in the system. The system you just described to me from your angle and I described to you from mine. Why should we hold on to that faith? Why shouldn’t someone try something better? Take matters into their own hands?”
Richard clutched Tim’s arm, and for the first time his voice was soft and cracked, not giddy or deadened with tired irony. “Because it represents such hopelessness.”
He leaned over and vomited on his shoes.
A girl two stools over looked down at her splattered capris and screamed. The smell rose from the puddle, rank and heated. Richard grinned, his chin stained with puke, and raised his arms, Rocky style.
The bartender was cursing a blue streak, and a gym-enhanced security bozo was closing fast, barking into a radio. The bouncer from outside plowed through the crowd and grabbed Richard.
“All right, asshole, I told you before, you get hammered in my club again, you’re fucking finished.” He threw a full nelson on Richard, bending his head forward and making his arms stick up like a scare-crow’s. The other guy seized Nick’s shoulder and jerked him back off the bar.
“Take it easy,” Tim said. The bouncer slammed Richard against the bar. Tim’s hand shot out and grabbed the bouncer’s thick neck, thumb digging into his sternal notch. The bouncer gagged out a sound and froze. “It wasn’t a suggestion,” Tim said.
He waited for the bouncer to release Richard. The other guy let go of Nick and stepped wide, eyes on Tim, looking for an angle. Several people were watching, but for the most part loud music covered the sound of the commotion. The dance floor remained a swirl of oblivious motion.
Tim removed his hands, holding them up in a calming gesture. The bouncer took a quick step back, coughing.
Tim said, “I don’t much like to fight, and I’m sure you could kick my ass anyway, so what do you say we just do this the easy way. These guys are going to pay their tab-” he nodded at Nick, who fumbled a few bills out of his pocket and onto the counter “I’ll walk my acquaintance out of here, and you’ll never hear from us again. Sound good?”
The bouncer glowered at him.
“Okay.” Tim shouldered Richard and half dragged him to the door, Nick scurrying close behind. They stepped outside, and the cool air hit them like a chest-high wave.
“That asshole,” Richard slurred, rubbing his elbow. “Why didn’t you badge him?” He fumbled in his pocket for his valet ticket, but Tim dragged him to the curb and hailed a passing cab. He deposited Richard inside and stepped back to let Nick slide in.