A Ticket to the Boneyard by Lawrence Block Page A

deposits on his right hand, evidence that he’d fired a gun. It was indeed unregistered, and he had no license to possess a firearm, or to carry one on his person.
    He swore he’d never seen the gun before, let alone fired it. His story was that he’d come to the Fifty-first Street premises after having made prior arrangements over the telephone to engage her services as a prostitute. He said he’d never seen her before the night in question, that he’d had the opportunity to have sex with her because I had burst in and attempted to work a version of the badger game upon him, extorting him out of additional funds, and that when that failed I had launched an unprovoked attack upon him. Nobody bought any of this. If this was the first time he’d turned up in her life, why had she sworn out a complaint against him almost a week earlier? And his record might not be admissible evidence and the jurors might not be entitled to know about it, but the district attorney was damn well entitled and so was the judge who set bail at a quarter of a million dollars. His attorney protested this, arguing that his client had never been convicted of anything, but the judge looked at all those arrests for violence against women, along with a supporting statement that Connie Cooperman had been persuaded to give, and turned down a request for lower bail.
    Motley stayed in a cell awaiting trial. The state brought a whole laundry list of charges against him, with attempted murder of a police officer up at the top. His lawyer took a good look at his client and the evidence against him and came around ready to cut a deal. The DA’s Office was willing to play; the case was low-profile, the public didn’t have a big emotional investment in it, and Elaine and I might come off looking pretty dirty after a round of intensive cross-examination, so why not plea-bargain the thing and save the state time and money? They reduced the main charge to an attempted violation of Section 120.11 of the penal code, aggravated assault upon a police officer. They dropped all the collateral charges, and in return James Leo Motley stood up in front of God and everybody and agreed that he was guilty as charged. The judge weighed his priors against the lack of convictions and came up with the Solomonic sentence of one-to-ten years in the state penitentiary, with credit for time served.
    After sentence had been passed Motley asked the court if he could say something. The judge said he could, but not without reminding him he’d had the opportunity to make a statement prior to sentencing. Maybe it was shrewdness that had led him to hold his tongue until afterward; if he’d made the same statement earlier the judge would almost certainly have given him a sentence closer to the maximum.
    What he said was, “That cop framed me, and I know it and he knows it, the pimping bastard. When I get out I got big plans for him and the two bitches.” Then he turned to his left, tilting his head to point his long jaw at me. “That’s you and all your women, Scudder. We got something to finish, you and me.”
    Lots of crooks threaten you. They’re all going to get even, same as they’re all innocent, they were all framed. You’d think nobody guilty ever went to prison.
    He sounded as though he meant it, but that’s how they all sound. And none of it ever comes to anything.
     
     
    That had been something like a dozen years ago. It was another two or three years before I left the police force, for reasons that had nothing to do with Elaine Mardell or James Leo Motley. The precipitant, though perhaps not the cause, for my leaving was something that happened one night in Washington Heights. I was having a few quiet drinks at a tavern there when two men held up the place and shot the bartender dead on their way out. I ran out into the street after them and shot them both, killing one of them, but one shot went wide and fatally injured a six-year-old girl. I don’t know that she