You Have the Right to Remain Silent Read Free

sergeants had gritted their teeth and said Yes sir , wanting to believe him. Once a week Marian and Ivan got together and debated which of them had the lousier job. Ivan’s new partner was a hotshot rookie who saw himself as an irresistible force chosen by destiny to clean up New York’s crime scene all by himself; consequently he had to be watched all the time. Marian would gladly have traded Foley for him.
    At first Marian had looked on Foley’s hostility as just another challenge, but after a month she’d given up on him. She wished to god Foley had passed the exam; the two of them would never find a way of working together. Sergeant Larch ma’am sir , he’d called her.
    Sergeant Larch. Still Sergeant Larch. But Marian couldn’t dwell on that; she had enough to be dejected about.
    She put Foley out of her mind and re-immersed herself in the life and times of the Downtown Queens; and right away she felt the chronic sadness creeping in that plagued her whenever she arrested someone for murder. This time it all seemed especially senseless. Why had the Queens killed Mrs. Maria Alvarez? A harmless, helpless woman with no connections. What did they possibly have to gain from her death? Mrs. Alvarez was a native Jamaican whose husband had long since disappeared from her life; she was struggling against great odds to make sure her four children stayed clothed and fed. Her English was poor enough to keep her in menial jobs, whenever she could find one—usually cleaning office buildings at night. She’d been on and off welfare for the past ten years.
    Marian had first come across Mrs. Alvarez while investigating a minor scam a paper boss was working. Paper bosses oversaw the distribution of the dailies, dealing with both carriers and newsstands. Unsold papers were returned to the bosses, who cut off the banner and date from the front page to be turned in for credit; the rest of the newspaper was discarded. But one paper boss had gotten the idea of clipping all the manufacturers’ coupons from the papers and selling them to grocery store managers at a discount. The managers then sent in the coupons for their full value plus a handling fee and the books showed a little extra profit that week. The arrangement had grown into a big enough enterprise that the paper boss had had to hire Mrs. Alvarez to cut out coupons for him.
    But that was the only dishonest venture Mrs. Alvarez had ever been associated with. She’d steadfastly refused to have anything to do with the business of the project house where she lived. She’d even managed to keep her four children free of drugs. But Mrs. Alvarez had been found with forty-three stab wounds in her body. Why? She was no threat to the gangs; she was no threat to anybody.
    Their tip that the Queens were responsible had come from a male gang calling itself, theatrically, the Symptom of Death. The gang coveted the Queens’ turf, and because of that Marian had been inclined to discount the tip at first. But then the Symptom had turned up two witnesses, a ten-year-old boy and an old man, both scared witless. The kid and the old man were afraid of the Queens if they talked, and afraid of the Symptom of Death if they didn’t. But eventually the story came out. The Queens had been waiting for Mrs. Alvarez when she came home from her night job; they’d jumped her and stabbed her repeatedly, right there in the street. It was like they wanted ever’one to know, man , the kid had said. Yes, there were other witnesses.
    Those other witnesses would start creeping out of hiding once it was known all fourteen Queens were safely locked away at Riker’s Island. Marian sighed. They had a case. What they didn’t have was a reason. All those girls with their colorful names … Denzella, Little Leticia and Big Leticia, Ti-Belle, Guadalupe, Frisky Nell, Encarnaçion (nicknamed “Ree”), Large Marge—they’d all been counting on