Love or Honor by Joan; Barthel

after him, and they grappled on the fire escape. Meantime, up on the roof, Mac was using his flashlight to fight off a guard dog. Chris was being pushed backward over the railing when Mac came bounding down the steps and pounced. Chris told a newspaper reporter that the man had been “as strong as a bull,” so the story labeled him “The Bronx Bull Rapist.”
    Two women had made positive IDs, and one woman’s husband had been able to finger the guy. That woman had been followed home from the subway and forced at knifepoint to the top-floor landing, where she was sodomized. When her assailant was running down the stairs, he passed a man coming up—the woman’s husband, on his way home from work. Amazingly, the suspect had even boasted of his crimes. “If you put my picture in the paper, you’ll hear from forty women I raped,” he told Chris.
    With the IDs and the admission, Chris felt they had a rock-solid case. But at the arraignment, the judge remanded the guy on only five hundred dollars bail. Chris was so enraged that as the judge stepped down, Chris hurled his briefcase at the bench, using both hands, and was nearly cited for contempt.
    When the trial got underway, Chris thought the judge was more concerned with the well-being of the defendant than of the women. “Did you have anything to eat, Mr. Rodriguez?” Chris parroted him later. “Did the police officer read you your rights, Mr. Rodriguez? Did you understand the police officer when he read you your rights? Are you very sure you understood, Mr. Rodriguez?”
    Chris had decided, early in his career, that a detached cynicism was his most viable response in a courtroom. It was theater of the absurd, he felt, with stock players saying the same lines over and over; an unbalanced chess game with too many pawns. So he’d trained himself not to get upset when somebody he’d nailed was turned loose, for one reason or another. Thieves, muggers, pushers were going to be back on the street sooner or later, probably sooner, so Chris had developed his own simple philosophy. “My job is to take the man off the street and see that he’s locked up. Then I have to do the paperwork, get to court on the right day, be there on time, bring in the evidence, and make sure my testimony is correct. After that, what happens, happens. My act is over.”
    Only once had he screwed up his act. “Did you advise my client of his rights?” a defendant’s lawyer asked.
    â€œYes, I did,” Chris said.
    â€œAnd how did you advise my client of his rights?”
    â€œWell, I just advised him of his rights.”
    â€œYou just told him?” the lawyer pressed.
    â€œYes, I did.”
    â€œYou didn’t read them?”
    â€œNo, I didn’t.”
    â€œDo you know them that well, Officer?”
    â€œYes, I do.”
    â€œThen please recite the rights for this court now,” the lawyer said, as Chris went blank. Totally blank. He knew the rights upside down and backward, and he also knew that he could sit on that witness stand forever and a day without being able to recite them. He felt like a total jerk, especially when the lawyer then made a motion to suppress.
    From then on, he carried the scrap of paper with the rights written out everywhere he went. When a lawyer asked, “How did you advise my client of his rights?” Chris would say, “I read them from this piece of paper,” and he would whip out the scrap. If a lawyer then tried to trip him up by sneering, “You mean you don’t even know the rights without reading them?” Chris would smile and say, “Yes, I know them, but I wanted your client to have the best possible presentation.”
    Chris had absolutely no use for lawyers. “Even Shakespeare said, ‘Get rid of all the lawyers and we’ll have a better society,’ or something like that,” Chris pointed out. “I think maybe Christ