Clean Slate

Chapter 33

Libby bent down toward her, staring: "Get out. Earl Bucaro? The Superintendent?"

Jessica nodded.

"Him personally?" Mac pressed, not sure he believed her.

She nodded again. Dropping the glowing butt between her work shoes, she crushed it methodically on the stone, watching the work so she did not have to look at either Mac or Libby as she talked. "For about three months," she said. "Every couple of days. He'd come here and I'd do him."

"What was his lever?" Mac asked. "What did he use to --"

"Lever?" Jessica asked, tone at once scathing and weary. "Oh, he had all kinds of levers. I mean, it's not like I rolled over for him right away. Any guy I decide to fuck always turns out to be bad news. It's like a rule with me. But I don't do guys I don't like. Especially way older guys – shit – I was just 21, he had to be 50 something."

"So what did he do?" Libby asked.

She looked up, out into the distance, as if through the row of clapboard houses across the street. "This was after I turned him down, you know, a couple of times? One day, I'm at work? And these four deputies show up. And they grab me and paw me and chain me up, wrists and ankles and belly chain. Right in front of everyone. And they frog-march me to their car. And I end up out at the Stockade for three days. Three days. Said that I'd – I'd come back positive on a drug screen. I hadn't even had a drug screen then. I told them that, but they wouldn't listen."

"So what happened?" Libby asked.

"After three days they said Oh well, paperwork fuck-up, it wasn't you after all. And they let me go. And Bucaro was waiting at the entrance. To bring me home." She looked at Mac, at Libby, at Mac, expression dead. "I got the message."

For a bit the silence was broken only by the occasional blatting of a car on the street. Mac felt bleak. Jessica's tale had the tone and feel of absolute truth. But there'd been nothing in her records about a stay at the Stockade. Her parole record had in fact been exemplary. This was either one hell of a whopper, or evidence of serious and wide ranging corruption at senior levels of the Court House. Though no stranger to corruption, Mac felt ill as he considered the implications.

"So," Libby said. "He raped you."

"I let him," she said softly.

"He forced you. That makes it rape."

Looking down again, Jessica nodded.

"Repeatedly," the reporter added.

Jessica nodded again.

To Mac Libby said, "This needs reporting."

"Not by me," Jessica said, with a shaky, pained laugh. "Crazy enough of me to tell you this shit. You put my name out there, what'll you think will happen? I'm out of the system, you think I'm nuts enough to risk going back in?"

"We can't let this go," Libby countered. "If he's done it to you, he's doing it to others."

"Which brings me to the next question," Mac said. "Who is ‘we'? Jessica?"

"Um. . .I don't follow."

"First time we talked, back at your job – you said something to me like – ‘I know how you work. We all do.' Who is the ‘we' you were talking about?"

Jessica blinked, with that parolee look Mac had seen ten thousand times: Caught. "Well – I – I knew some other work program girls."

Libby said, "Will you go on the record, Jessica? Tell your story in the paper?"

Mac glanced at Libby. "Ease up," he said softly. To Jessica he said, "Let us talk to them. See what information we can gather. We get enough ducks in a big enough row, maybe we can fix this guy. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

Abruptly Jessica dropped off the stone rail. "I don't know. I don't know," she muttered, not looking at either of the others. "I gotta think. You guys wait here. There's something I need to give you." She trotted up the steps and through the wood double doors into the house.

Libby had her Palm Pilot out and was scratching notes on its glass surface. Mac said, "You're not running with this."

"Not yet," she said intently. "But this is gonna be a hell of a story. You know that."

"I see it as a big fix that needs doing. If it's true."

"Come on, you know it's true. She's as on the level as can be."

Closing his eyes briefly, Mac shook his head. "Bucaro. Who'd of believed it. You know, you hear about lower level people doing this kind of thing. Coppers and corrections officers and the like. Not somebody way up the line like this. Shit, man. Bucaro does hey-boy for Judge Wildern – spends part of every day at the right hand of God."

"Really? You know Judge Wildern?"

"Yeah, he's always been my sort-of career rabbi. He --"

The door reopened and Jessica came out and down the short stair to them. She'd shucked the orange ear plugs and lighted another cigarette. In her hand was something small, square, and yellow. To Mac she reached it out: a sleeved data CD. "From Eddie," she said simply.

There was no label. "What's on it?"

"I don't know. And I don't want to know. He gave it to me to hold for him. ‘Just in case,'" is what he said."

"When was this?" Libby asked intently.

"I don't know," Jessica said dully. "Week or two ago. Just before he --"

"Before he died," Libby finished, eyes gleaming. "You know what that probably is," she said to Mac.

"Uh-huh." He put it in his shirt pocket.

"After we talked that other time I decided to give it to you," Jessica said. "I don't want it any more. It's bad luck. Look what happened to Eddie. I don't want any of his luck. I don't want anything more to do with any of this."

"You need to go public," Libby said. "Put your story in the paper. That'll --"

"You've been a big help," Mac cut in. "We appreciate it."

"I gotta go now," Jessica said, and turned and fled up the steps.

Libby looked like she was going to say something more, but an upraised hand from Mac halted her. "Thanks again, Jessica," he called to her.

She opened the door, hesitated, looked down at them. "Diane Privette," she said. "Kim Cheppy. That's all I remember." And she was gone.

"You get those down?" Mac asked as he and Libby crossed the street toward their cars.

"Locked in," she answered, scratching at her Palm.

"I'll look them up tomorrow." He'd been thinking. "There's one big problem."

"What's that?"

"The statute of limitations on rape."

"What is it?"

"I don't know, but it might have run already."

"Doesn't hurt the story," she shrugged.

Kills any chance of getting real justice, though, Mac thought.

They neared their cars. Mac looked at her, and inside felt the burning, stronger this time. He simply could not conceive of them parting at this point. "Free for dinner?"

"'Course," she said simply, and veered with her long-legged stride toward her car. "Been planning on it. I know a good place. Follow me?"

"Right behind you."

---

"This place good enough?" she asked.

"This place," he answered, "is, uh. . .mighty fine."

"Thought you'd like it," she murmured.

"I like it indeed."

The first surprise – admittedly, not much of one – had been the place to which Libby had led him. Not a restaurant, but to a small anonymous complex of single story apartments along Stones Creek, in the treed, hilly Sherman Park neighborhood.

The second surprise had been the apartment itself. Given Libby Lewis's vivid appearance, striking attire and flashy, sexy car, he'd have expected her home to be a lavish and showy palace of sights and sounds and scents. Rather, her apartment was a wholly generic two-bedroom where neutrality ruled: off-white walls, beige carpets, motel room furniture. Inoffensive prints disappeared into the walls. A TV with DVD player and CD changer sat silent and lifeless on an open-backed entertainment center. In one corner an assemble-yourself computer table held a dark screened laptop computer. The place had the faintest scent of tobacco smoke, something he had not picked up on Libby at all. To the extent that Mac examined the place – and, perhaps understandably, to this point of the evening he had not troubled himself with an exploration of the kitchen or the bathroom or the second bedroom – the place looked less like a home and more like a place simply to hang your hat and lay your head.

And the third surprise had been, of course, Libby herself.

He'd known she was long and rangy. He'd observed with great appreciation the red hair and the excellent legs and the shapes in between. What he had not known, until this amazing early evening time of discovery and exploration, was that, unconstrained by clothes, she was not so much the greyhound type she'd seemed, but lavish and curvy in the manner of a Goya nude: ample firm breasts and strong hips and a smooth ass just the right fit for Mac's strong and needy hands. And she did, as claimed, have tattoos: a small sunflower on her lower back, a cluster of red roses on her right thigh.

And her hair? It was the same brilliant red in all the right places.

In sync as they were, with six hours to think about it, they had not, upon arriving at her place, engaged in much by way of preliminaries. She led him through the front door, stopped short so he bumped into her, and that was about all it took. Mac kissed her, a long questing kiss tight close together as they ventured across the uncharted frontiers of aroma and texture. Then, after a brief period of tongue, which set Mac's heart to pounding so hard that it hurt, she broke back with a smile and said, hoarsely, "Well, then!" and led him to her bedroom.

There the proceedings, prompted by urgency and need, were less smooth and more bumptious as they tried to kiss and feel and breathe and disrobe all at the same time. Their lack of efficiency in this regard was typified by Mac's discovery, much later, after all was said and done, that his left pants leg was still knotted to his otherwise bare ankle. They had a brief breathless condom discussion, agreeing, when it became clear that neither had one, to take care of each other by means other than fucking. And so he did her first, a long slow and exquisitely intermittent exercise of tongue and fingers that had her chuckling, then pleading, then gasping, ever louder, to her eruption point, which had her thrashing so hard she inadvertently gave Mac a knee to the head that had him seeing stars too.

Now Libby, flushed and sated, determined to take care of Mac, went to work on him with lips and tongue. And he lay there watching, strips of evening light splashing through the gaps in the vertical blinds across Libby's red hair and freckled face and dark lips and pink tongue as she sucked him with long smooth strokes – and the sensations, so familiar yet so distant, they were incredible, yes, amazing. But now, only now, he felt apart from himself somehow, in a place away from this bed with this woman in this apartment. And in this other place he was by no means alone. There was someone else with him. And that someone else was Suzanne.

That realization made his heart sink. He tried to banish it, but instead, and quite perversely, a line from an old poem came to mind --

Only that poem, Mac thought, was about a dead woman, a forever love, and a despairing man – none of which pertains here –

Just then Libby paused, rose on an elbow to look at him, her pale freckled face concerned: "What's wrong?"

"It's okay, it's great."

"Am I going too fast?" She felt him. "You're hard as a rock still. What can I do for you?"

"Just come here." She slid up to him and he took her warmly in his arms, his cheek to hers, and then kissed her. "You're amazing," he said, knowing how terribly inadequate the words sounded.

She interlocked her ankles with his. "What's the matter?" she asked, in an unfamiliarly plaintive tone that Mac knew would occur only here.

"You need to know," he said. "I'm married."

He could not see her face, of course. Physically, she did not react at all. She answered, tone soft and absolutely neutral, "Really."

"We're separated," he added.

"How long?"

"Year and a half."

She squeezed him. "Hey," she said warmly. "That's tantamount to divorce."

"I don't know that we're entirely through with each other, her and me."

Libby pulled away, looked at him, smiling, and gave his cheek an affectionately light pinch. He thought she'd ask the kid question. He wondered what he would say about Nicholas, how he would put it. But instead she said, "You're an amazingly honest man."

"I like you. I don't want you hurt."

"I'm okay, Mac. God knows," she chuckled, "I'm more okay at this instant than I've been in – just about ever."

"That's good."

"Now what we need to do is get you okay."

"Don't worry about me."

She put a freckled finger on her lips, bent close to look deeply into his eyes, and whispered, "I have a plan."

"Oh?"

"Just be still for a minute." Rising, Libby crossed one long smooth leg over him and straddled him, her damp red swatch tantalizing his long hard cock. Bracing herself with one hand on his chest, she used the other to fondle his cock, draw him close, as she lowered herself down. "Ready?" she breathed.

"I thought we said no," he whispered.

"You know we didn't mean it." Biting her lip, she inserted him deftly, just an inch or so. "You knew we couldn't be through till we'd been completely together." Rotated her hips in microinches, moist mouth open, squinting. "Are you worried?"

"No," he said faintly, surrendering already to her moist velvety warmth.

"Didn't think so." With downward pressure, in several intermittent movements, Libby engorged his cock fully inside herself. They froze there, Libby upright, hands on his chest, watching him, as he savored her.

And this was when she said, "How about this? This place good enough?"

"This place," he answered, "is, uh. . .mighty fine."

"Thought you'd like it," she murmured.

"I like it indeed."