Through the Cracks by Barbara Fister

Author:Barbara Fister
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429926409
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

SEVENTEEN

Raymond T. Ashe was in a speechifying mood as we left the social club and got back into his car. “You look around this neighborhood, what do you see?” He swept a hand in front of him. “Trash. Weeds. Broken dreams?”

I pointed at one of a row of graystones. “Had a homicide there. Sixteen-year-old girl. Another girl stabbed her over a dress.”

“A crime scene, of course that’s what you’d see. The whole damn neighborhood’s a crime scene. Crime against humanity. Richest, most powerful nation in the world, and look at this sorry state of affairs. Unemployment rate for men in this community is near sixty percent. Everybody has a father, brother, or son in prison or on parole. Got churches here, and bars, more’n enough bars, but no grocery stores, no banks, no pharmacies, no factories like there used to be. We can do better than this. We have to do better than this.”

“Speaking of broken things . . .” I felt for the jagged piece of plastic in my pocket and handed it to him. “It came off that trophy on the table.”

“Trophy?”

“For basketball, I think. It fell over.”

He frowned at it, puzzled, before tucking it in his pocket. “Found it in a closet when I bought the building. How’d it get broke?”

“Chase stood up too suddenly, his chair bumped into it. He was so upset, I told him it wasn’t broken, stuck it behind your desk. Shouldn’t be hard to glue this part back on.”

“He get mad about something?”

“He has plenty to be mad about.”

“When you said you wanted to talk to him private, I wasn’t sure that was such a great idea. Boy’s got a temper on him. We’re working on it, but all those years of abuse at Stateville, locked up with the worst of the worst, no wonder he can’t always keep it together.”

“He’s not the only one with a temper. You shot your neighbor’s dog.”

He laughed, astonished. “What, you have one of your cop friends look me up? I thought that was illegal, using police records for civilian purposes.”

“I read about it in the newspaper.”

“Ought to know better than to believe everything you read in the papers.”

“How did you avoid doing time on a weapons charge?”

“It wasn’t my gun.”

“I thought maybe you had friends in high places.”

“Enemies, more like. People in high places don’t want to hear what I have to say.”

“I notice you don’t waste any opportunity to get your name in print. Just don’t use my investigation to do that. It’ll piss me off, and Chase has nothing to gain being back in the news.”

“People need to know the system failed.”

“They already know. He’s pretty tightly wound. He loses it on camera, in front of a reporter, it’s not going to help.”

“What do people expect? We lock up more of our citizens than any other country in the world, we don’t provide any opportunities for rehabilitation, and then we go and punish them again for having been punished. Court says the state

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