Free Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard Page A

from the desk, stepped to the wall and swept the surface with paint until MARK joined his brother, both of them now hidden beneath a brilliant socko design on the white wall, a sunburst, a bright red ball of fire, an explosion. . . .
    Robin closed the red-covered notebook, her journal labeled MAY–AUGUST ’70, and sat staring at the design on the white wall. Several minutes passed in silence before she picked up the phone and dialed Mark’s office, murmured quietly to the young woman who answered, keeping her voice low, and then waited. Mark came on the line and Robin said, “Hi, you want to hear something funny?”
    “Love to.”
    “You know the journal I kept?”
    “Sure, I remember.”
    “I was looking through it, I came to something I wrote on August tenth, 1970.” Robin paused. “If I tell you . . .”
    “Wait, August 1970 . . .”
    “We were at Goose Lake.”
    “Oh, right. Yeah, of course.”
    “You promise you won’t laugh?”
    “I thought you said it was funny.”
    “It is, but I don’t want you to laugh.”
    “I promise.”
    “I wrote on that day, August tenth, ‘I think I’m in love with Mark Ricks.’ ”
    “Come on, really? Wow, listen, I don’t think that’s funny.”
    Robin said in her low voice, “You don’t?”

8
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    On Tuesday, four twenty in the afternoon, the young woman with short red hair entered the lobby at 1300 Beaubien and stopped, uncertain. She expected to see police officers. What she saw was a bunch of black people with small children standing by the two elevators and in front of the glass-covered directory on the wall. It could be the lobby of an old office building, all tile and marble, and seemed small with the people waiting, the women holding on to the children trying to pull free. An elevator door opened and two young black guys came off grinning, playing with shoelaces in their hands, and were all at once gathered in by these people, who must be family. The young woman with short red hair edged her way around them and through a short hall that opened into another lobby, this one dismal with deep shadows, until she came to a long wooden counter beneath fluorescent lights. The uniformed police officer behind the nearend of the counter, a black woman, looked up and said, “Can I help you?”
    The young woman with short red hair said, “I want to report a rape.”
    The policewoman said, “This’s Prisoner Detention,” and glanced down the length of the empty counter. “You want to talk to somebody’s with the precinct. They be right back. . . . I’ll tell you what, or you can go up to Sex Crimes on seven, save you some time. Get off the elevator and turn right and it’s all the way down the end of the hall. There be somebody up there will help you.”
    Chris was alone in the squad room, his desk piled with case folders he’d been going through for the past few days, learning about criminal sexual conduct in its varying degrees. At lunch he’d told Jerry Baker he didn’t think he was going to like it. A guy throws a pipe bomb in somebody’s house to settle a score, the guy could be wacko but at least his motive was clear. But why would any guy want to rape a defenseless woman? What was in his head? The interesting thing was that it didn’t have that much to do with sex. Jerry Baker said, “Then what do you call it a sex crime for?” Chris told him the way he understood it, the rapist wanted to dominate or be destructive, or he gets off on somebody else’s pain. So he picks on a woman he can handle. Butthe act didn’t have that much to do with getting laid, per se. Chris said he wasn’t sure he could interrogate a suspect they knew for a fact was guilty and not pound the shit out of the guy. It would require a
certain amount of self-restraint. Or sit down and talk to the poor rape victim. That would be tough. He told Jerry the whole setup was different. Even the squad room. It was cleaner than other squad rooms, the desks were kept