"Why don't you take that money and leave?" Ketcham asked, reasonably.

Prasko considered the suggestion.

"Your father would be very embarra.s.sed if you had to call him and tell him you had been arrested for dealing in drugs," Prasko said. "It would probably cause him trouble at the bank."

"Oh, Jesus!" Ketcham said.

"Who's the girl?" Prasko asked.

"What girl?"

Prasko struck him again with the back of his hand.

"I already told you, bulls.h.i.t time is over."

"My girlfriend," Ketcham said. "She doesn't know anything about this. You could let her go."

"What did you do," Prasko inquired sarcastically, "tell her that tonight you were going to do something new? You were going to rent a motel room and go in, and she was going to sit outside in the car?"

"Take the money. Who'd ever know?" Ketcham said.

Prasko considered that again, then reached down and unlocked one of the handcuffs. He then motioned Ketcham to get to his feet.

"This is really the mature way to deal with this situation," Ketcham said, extending the wrist that still had a handcuff attached, obviously expecting Prasko to free him of that cuff, too.

Instead, Prasko firmly took Ketcham's arm and led him into the bathroom, where he ordered him to sit on the floor beside the toilet. Then he attached the free end of his handcuff to the pipes running to the flushing mechanism of the toilet.

"What are you doing?" Ketcham asked.

Prasko ignored him, went out of room 138 to the car, and tried the pa.s.senger-side door. It was locked.

"Come out of there, honey," he ordered.

He saw the blonde looking up from the floor with horror in her eyes.

"Open up," Prasko ordered.

The blonde tried to move away as far as she could.

Prasko unholstered his revolver and used the b.u.t.t as a hammer to shatter the window. Then he reached inside and unlocked the door.

"You can come out," he said, "or I can drag you out."

She scurried across the floor to the open door, which caused her skirt to rise even higher.

Peggene had legs like that when I first met her. Now her legs look like s.h.i.t.

He took the girl's arm and led her into room 138 and closed and locked the door without letting go of her arm.

When she saw Ketcham handcuffed to the c.r.a.pper, she sucked in her breath.

"What you are, honey," Prasko said, "is an accessory to a felony, possession of controlled substances with the intent to distribute."

"Ronny?" the girl asked, looking into the bathroom.

"We're working something out, Cynthia," Ketcham said. "Just take it easy."

The girl looked at Prasko defiantly.

Prasko walked to the bathroom door and closed it. "He had some money," he said to the girl. "I may let him go. What have you got to trade?"

"I've got a little money," she said.

"He had twenty thousand. You got that much?"

"No!"

"Then I guess you're both going to jail."

"I could probably get you some money," the girl said.

"Twenty thousand? That kind of money?"

She shook her head, no.

"How about five minutes of your time?" Prasko asked.

"Five minutes of my time? I don't understand."

"Yeah, you understand," Prasko said.

"Oh, my G.o.d!"

"That's probably what your mother'll say when you call her from Central Lockup and tell her you need bailing out, and for what."

The girl started to whimper.

"You gonna start taking your clothes off, or not?" Prasko said. "I don't have all night."

Sobbing now, the girl unb.u.t.toned her blouse and shrugged out of it, then unfastened her skirt and let it fall to the floor.

"All of it, all of it," Prasko said.

The girl unfastened her bra.s.siere and then, now moving quickly, pushed her white underpants down off her hips. Then she backed up to the bed and lay down on it, her legs spread, her face to one side, so she didn't have to look at Prasko.

Officer Prasko dropped his trousers and then his shorts and moved to the bed.

When he was done, he went into the bathroom and struck Ketcham in the face with his revolver, hard enough to draw blood and daze him. Then he unlocked the handcuffs.

"Stay where you are for five minutes or I'll come back and blow your f.u.c.king brains out," Prasko said.

Then he went into the bedroom, glanced quickly at the naked, whimpering girl on the bed, took the twenty thousand dollars from the table, and left room 138.

As soon as Ketcham heard the sound of the car starting, and then driving away, he got off the bathroom floor and went into the bedroom and tried to put his arms around the girl.

She pushed him away and shrieked.

"Cynthia," he said, trying to sound comforting, and again tried to put his arms around her.

Cynthia shrieked again.

THREE.

The District Attorney of Philadelphia, the Hon. Thomas J. "Tony" Callis-a large, silver-haired, ruddy-faced, well-tailored man in his early fifties-looked up from his desk, and saw Harrison J. Hormel, Esq.-a some what rumpled-looking forty-six-year-old-standing in the door, waiting to be noticed.

Harry Hormel was arguably the most competent of all the a.s.sistant district attorneys Callis supervised. And he had another characteristic Callis liked. Hormel was apolitical. He had no political ambitions of his own, and owed no allegiance to any politician, except the current inc.u.mbent of the Office of the District Attorney.

"Come in, Harry," Mr. Callis called.

Hormel slipped into one of the two comfortable green leather armchairs facing Callis's desk.

"What do you want to happen to James Howard Leslie?" Hormel asked, without any preliminaries.

"Boiling in oil would be nice," Tony Callis said. "Or perhaps drawing and quartering."

Mr. James Howard Leslie, by profession a burglar, had been recently indicted for murder in the first degree. It was alleged that one Jerome H. Kellog, on returning to his home at 300 West Luray Street in Northwest Philadelphia, had come across Mr. Leslie in his kitchen. It was further alleged that Leslie had thereupon brandished a blue .38 Special five-inch-barrel Smith & Wesson revolver; had then ordered Kellog to raise his hands and turn around; and when Kellog had done so, had shot Kellog in the back of the head, causing his death. It was further alleged that after Kellog had fallen to the floor of his kitchen, Leslie had then shot him again in the head, for the purpose of making sure he was dead.

When Leslie had discussed the incident with Sergeant Jason Washington of the Special Operations Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, Leslie had explained that he had felt it necessary to take Kellog's life because Kellog had seen his face, and as a policeman, would probably be able to find him and arrest him for burglary.

The question Hormel was really asking, Callis understood, was whether the City of Philadelphia wanted to go through the expense of a trial, seeking a sentence that would incarcerate Leslie for the rest of his natural life, or whether Leslie should be permitted to cop a plea, which would see him removed from society for, say, twenty years, which was, in practical terms, about as long behind bars as a life sentence would mean.

Ordinarily, there would be no question of that. The full wrath and fury of the law would suddenly descend on the shoulders of anyone who had in cold blood taken the life of a police officer. Or even someone who had shot a cop by mistake, while in the act of doing anything illegal.

Ordinarily, Callis himself would have personally prosecuted Leslie. For one thing, he really believed that letting a sc.u.mbag get away with shooting a cop really would undermine the very foundations of civilized society. For another, press reports of the vigorous prosecution of such a villain by the district attorney himself would be remembered at election time.

It was not much of a secret that District Attorney Callis would be willing to serve the people of Philadelphia as their mayor if called upon to do so. And neither was it lost upon him that one of the reasons the inc.u.mbent mayor of Philadelphia, the Hon. Jerome H. "Jerry" Carlucci, had been elected and reelected with such comfortable margins was his reputation of being personally tough on criminals.

But the case of Leslie was not like, for example, that of some sc.u.mbag shooting a cop during a bank robbery. For one thing, Officer Kellog had not been on duty at the time of his tragic demise. Perhaps more important, Leslie was going to be represented at his trial by the Office of the Public Defender, specifically by a lawyer whom Callis most commonly thought of-not for publication, of course-as "The G.o.dd.a.m.ned Nun."

Ms. Imogene McCarthy-who had been known as Sister Luke during her ten years as a cloistered nun-had two characteristics that annoyed Callis, sometimes greatly. She devoutly believed that there were always extenuating circ.u.mstances-poverty, lack of education, parental abuse, drug addiction-which caused people like James Howard Leslie to do what they did, and which tragic circ.u.mstances should trigger not punishment but compa.s.sion and mercy on the part of society; and she was a very skillful attorney, both in the courtroom and in the appeals processes.

Tony Callis was determined that The G.o.dd.a.m.ned Nun, as good as she was, was not going to get her client off on this one. Indeed, in her heart of hearts, she probably didn't want to see him walk. What she didn't want was for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to put James Howard Leslie into handcuffs and march him off to Rockview Prison in State College for what the judge had just told him would be incarceration for the rest of his natural life, thereby destroying all of his hopes to be educated, rehabilitated, and returned to society as a productive, law-abiding member thereof.

What, Callis believed, McCarthy saw from her perspective as a reasonable solution to the case of James Howard Leslie was that he be allowed to plead guilty to Murder Three (voluntary manslaughter), a lesser offense that, she would be prepared to argue, would not only punish him and remove him from society for a very long period-say, seven to ten years-so that he could cause others no harm, but save both the Office of the District Attorney and the Office of the Public Defender the considerable cost in time and money of a trial and the following appeals processes.

There was a certain logic to her position. If Kellog had not been a police officer, Callis might have entertained her plea-bargain offer. But Kellog had been a cop, and Leslie had killed him in cold blood, and deserved to be locked up permanently. Strapping the murdering son of a b.i.t.c.h into the electric chair was unfortunately-thanks to bleeding hearts and the Supreme Court-no longer possible. The only way to get him locked up for life was to bring him to trial.

After some thought-it would do his political ambitions little good, he had reasoned, if he personally prosecuted Leslie only to have The G.o.dd.a.m.ned Nun get him off with something like seven to ten-Callis had decided to delegate the responsibility for prosecuting Leslie to a.s.sistant District Attorney Hormel.

"Phebus wants to prosecute," Harry Hormel said. "He asked me."

Anton C. Phebus, Esq., was another of the a.s.sistant district attorneys under Callis's supervision.

Callis was not surprised that Tony Phebus wanted to prosecute Leslie, or even that Phebus had asked Hormel for the job. Phebus was an ex-cop, and thus felt a personal interest in seeing to it that Leslie, after a fair trial, would be locked up permanently. And Harry Hormel was de facto if not de jure, like one of Mr. Orwell's pigs, the most equal of all the a.s.sistant district attorneys.

"You don't want to prosecute?" Callis asked.

"I will," Hormel said. "But if Phebus does, it will give him the experience."

Phebus was a relative newcomer both to the practice of law and the District Attorney's Office. He had served twelve years as a police officer, rising to sergeant, and attending law school at Temple University whenever he could fit the hours into a policeman's always changing schedule. He had joined the Office of the District Attorney fourteen months before, shortly after being admitted to the bar.

Callis suddenly remembered-he had a very good memory, which had served him well-that Phebus had been a sergeant in the Narcotics Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department when he had been a cop, and that Jerome H. Kellog had also been a.s.signed to the Narcotics Unit.

"He and Kellog were buddies in Narcotics?" Callis asked. "Partners?"

It would be unwise to have a man with a really personal interest in sending the accused away for life serve as his prosecutor.

"No. I checked that out. They never worked together, and they weren't friends," Hormel said.

Callis was not surprised that Hormel had checked out that possible problem area before coming to see him.

"What are you suggesting, Harry? That maybe Phebus couldn't get around McCarthy?"

"We have everything we need to get a conviction," Hormel said. "A statement, everything. Phebus stands as good a chance of getting a conviction as I do. Miss McCarthy'll give him her best shot, which would be a good learning experience for him both at the trial and during the appeals."

Obviously, Callis thought, Callis thought, Phebus has got himself a rabbi. Harry wants him to try this case. Probably because he figures Phebus will not resign to go into private practice anytime soon. Phebus has got himself a rabbi. Harry wants him to try this case. Probably because he figures Phebus will not resign to go into private practice anytime soon.

Only a few a.s.sistant district attorneys make a career of it. Most leave to enter private practice after a few years on the job. Harry's obviously interested in keeping Phebus. Nothing wrong in that. And Phebus is the kind of guy-he's no mental giant, and he has a civil service mentality-who will want to stay on here.

So what's the downside?

The G.o.dd.a.m.ned Nun makes a fool of him, and Leslie walks. Unlikely, but possible. But-even if it's that bad-the public perception will be that I made an understandable mistake in a.s.signing an ex-cop to prosecute a cop-killer. That's better than McCarthy making a fool of me or Harry.

More likely-we've got a strong case-Phebus will be able to get a conviction. The District Attorney's Office will get the credit for the conviction, and I may even get a little credit for a.s.signing an ex-cop to prosecute a cop-killer. The cops, at least, will appreciate that.

The G.o.dd.a.m.ned Nun will appeal, of course, all the way to the Supreme Court, to get that sc.u.mbag out of jail. She may even be able to get away with it. Fighting the appeals will be both a pain in the a.s.s and time-consuming. Right now, Phebus's time isn't all that valuable, and like Harry says, it will be a good learning experience for him.

"Let Phebus prosecute, Harry," Callis ordered. "But keep an eye on him. If there are problems, let me know."