Murder on the Metro by Margaret Truman

Author:Margaret Truman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER

36

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Why’s the book called that, Catcher in the Rye?” the inmate in the third row asked Sister Mary Alice Rose.

“It’s a metaphor,” Sister Mary Alice, who’d celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday the preceding week, told him.

“What’s a metaphor?”

“Saying something other than what you mean, to make your point.”

“That’s more fucked up than a black man trying to ice skate, woman.”

“That’s a metaphor, too,” Sister Mary Alice followed, drawing a ripple of laughter from the classroom. “But in the case of the book we’ve been reading, the title comes from a poem by Robert Burns called ‘Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,’ which is about preserving the innocence of childhood.”

“This Holden dude,” commented another inmate, “he don’t seem so innocent to me. That boy knows how to sling the shit, and he don’t take no shit from nobody.”

“The dude’s cold, man,” a third voice chimed in. “Like this place was when the power went dead last winter.”

That drew a smattering of chuckles from the inmates squeezed into school desks too small to accommodate their bulk, aligned in neat rows before Sister Mary Alice. They were neat because she’d straightened them out herself prior to the beginning of class.

The Metropolitan Detention Center was located on Twenty-Ninth Street in Brooklyn, a ten-story processed slab of a building housing prisoners who had pending cases in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. MDC Brooklyn was also a potential stop for prisoners serving brief sentences. Only within the past few years had it begun housing prisoners interned for longer stretches, many for drug-related crimes, violent and otherwise.

A nun for some sixty years now, Sister Mary Alice had no idea what crimes the inmates seated before her had committed or how long their respective sentences ran. She knew the bulk of them only by the eight-digit ID numbers displayed on their khaki prison jumpsuits, the only exception being those inmates she saw regularly for tutoring sessions.

“It’s drugs that fucked him up,” a new voice, attached to a face and ID number Sister Mary Alice had never seen before, chimed in. “His parents loading him up on this shit and that. Fucked him up good.”

“He grows up, I can sell him the good shit,” an inmate who invariably sat in the back row said, high-fiving the men on either side of him.

“I don’t get where he’s going,” the inmate who’d started the conversation put forth. “Dude’s running away, but where’s he running to, exactly?”

“Maybe that’s the point,” Sister Mary Alice said, aiming her words in his direction.

“Everybody’s running from something,” a new voice agreed from somewhere in the middle of the makeshift classroom.

“Mostly the cops,” said the same inmate who’d drawn chuckles a few moments before, drawing all-out laughs this time.

Sister Mary Alice joined in.

“So what you running from, Sister?” a man in the front row asked her. “How is it you come to be here with a bunch of lowlifes like us?”

“You think you’re a lowlife?”

“I’m here, ain’t I?”

“Which would make me a lowlife, too, wouldn’t it?” Sister Mary Alice challenged him.

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