CHAPTER ONE

They stopped the forced feeding three months ago.              She still hasn’t had any food or water.

"How does she survive?”

“Says she can convert light into energy and store it in her body - like a plant.”    

              “You’ve got to be kidding.”

              “No, I’m not.”

Detective James Parker sat in the passenger side of a gray unmarked police car flipping through files on his lap.  He tried swallowing the excitement in his voice, but he wasn’t succeeding. 

His partner Sergeant Richard Boyle glowered at him. In the department for over thirty years, Boyle was close to retiring and pissed to be stuck with tan ambitious rookie who was studying for a law degree and taking this case too seriously. That enthusiasm was making Boyle’s thin patience, thinner.

“A precedent was set,” Parker continued haltingly. “Her lawyer, James Scanlon - know who he is?” 

Boyle glowered. 

“Big time!“  Parker continued, ignoring Boyle’s reaction.  “Scanlon brought in evidence that people can exist without food, citing an Indian woman who had not eaten for 55 years, another in Canada who started fasting in 1923...”

“They must have been skinny,” Boyle laughed, patting his ample stomach bulging over the buckle of a cowboy belt, engraved, C.O.P..

Parker pulled a file out.  “The background on this case is interesting.  The state Supreme Court overturned a lower Court decision to continue intravenous feeding against the patient’s will.  It’s all here in the transcript.  Wanna read it?”  Parker held the paper out to Boyle who waved it away.    

“Whataya nuts?  I’m driving. You read it.”

Parker cleared his throat. “The Supreme Court ruling in the case of Jenny Webster, declared unanimously that she has a ‘fundamental right’ to refuse food or drink.”       

“Ha!” Boyle snorted, “rights…”

Parker went on.  “After due deliberation, Judge Robert Gray wrote that for self-determination to have any meaning, it cannot be subject to the scrutiny of anyone else’s conscience or sensibilities.  It is the individual who must live or die with the course of treatment chosen or rejected, not the state.”       

“Yeah?” asked Boyle, skeptical.

Parker raised his eyebrows and smiled. “She’s been in that hospital without eating for three months.”  He paused, waiting.  Again Boyle didn’t react, so he continued.  “According to the reports she’s healthy as a horse.”

              Boyle frowned.  “I don’t believe it.”

             “But its here.  A matter of record.”

“It’s bullshit.  The whole thing’s a put on. Someone’s slipping her something.  Can’t you see it?  You’ve got a lot to learn!”      

Boyle gunned the gas pedal of the late model Chevrolet, swerving around a corner and barely missing a young woman pushing a baby stroller.  Parker didn’t seem to notice as he searched to get his bearings. The car slammed to a stop in front of a two-story apartment  that hadn’t seen a paintbrush in more than ten years. On a dusty lawn in front ,  a gaggle of rumpled old people sat on aluminum folding chairs, gossipingin the pale sunlight.   Parker checked the address against a document in his hand.  He hadn’t expected that Jenny Webster’s apartment would be in a place like this.       

Feeling conspicuous as he climbed out of the sedan, Parker felt six pairs of curious eyes turning to stare as a gust of wind revealed the gun holstered beneath his jacket. Boyle nodded to the group as Parker marched stiffly past them, his eyes straight ahead, his neck prickling with the old people’s stares.  Across the street two young boys, their pale skinny legs bruised and scratched, kicked fiercely at each other as they played soccer on the sidewalk.

Boyle opened the front door using a passkey.  The elderly audience gazed knowingly.  They knew who those men were.  Cops.  They shifted in their plastic webbing, watching the action like it was a television screen.

An old woman with skin like crumpled tissue paper pushed her loose teeth back against her gums with a practiced finger and hissed to a fat woman in the next chair.  “It’s about that girl on the second floor.” 

            “She hasn’t been here for awhile,” the plump woman agreed.

              “Right.”

Boyle puffed his way up the stairs to the second floor and followed Parker down the peeling corridor to apartment 2A.  “I can’t believe this fasting business,” he wheezed as he fumbled through his master keys. “She’s got to be getting something, pills, water - someone’s passing her something.”

“Not according to the hospital,” said Parker, wrinkling his nose against the sour cooking smells that permeated the hallway.

“Hospitals,” snorted Boyle.  “What the hell do they know?  I knew a guy once - cat burglar.  Climbed out of a hospital window every night for two weeks.    Hid his loot in the Director’s office.”   He chuckled.  “One night the guy broke his leg trying to climb back in.  I read him his rights while they set the bone.”       

A child screamed in the apartment across the hall.  A woman’s shrill voice yelled back.  There was a sound of breaking crockery.

“Nice neighbors,” observed Parker as Boyle jammed a key into the lock.   The door opened.

             “Jesus H. Christ,” breathed Boyle.

              “What is it?” asked Parker.

Boyle didn’t answer but walked straight in.  The apartment was sumptuous.  Elegant furniture beautifully placed on polished hardwood floors glinted in shafts of pale sunlight filtered by oriental window screens.  There were potted ferns and palms casting geometric shadows on the glossy white walls, and a white marble Parsons table used as a desk with a sleek lap top computer placed precisely in the center.   Brushed aluminum trays held papers, floor to ceiling bookshelves covered one wall, and a mass of elegantly framed lithographs covered another. 

“Why in the hell would she live in a neighborhood like this?”  Parker whispered.  Chills ran down his spine as he looked at the exquisite room.  He had never seen anything like it except in magazines.  He wondered at the dichotomy; extreme elegance in working class rent control.  There was a paradox here, a huge contradiction.

“Cheap rent,” said Boyle, as if reading Parker’s mind.  “She makes decent, but not great money at the News.  Maybe the furnishings were gifts from her boyfriend - her late boyfriend.”

Parker shook his head.  It didn’t fit. 

Boyle picked up a book from the coffee table and frowned.  “Take a look at this,” he said handing it to Parker.  The title read  “Tantric Art; a Guide to Ecstasy”. “Some kind of porn.  Keep it as evidence.” 

Parker started to say something, thought better of it, and put the book in a plastic bag he unfolded from his briefcase.

There was a slight thump from the bedroom.  Parker put down the briefcase and moved toward the bedroom door. 

“Where are you going?” asked Boyle irritably.

Parker didn’t answer.  The bedroom was like the rest of the apartment - stylishly furnished with a thick piled carpet and a king sized bed.  Parker looked up, fascinated by the folds of a huge and delicate canopy that hung from the ceiling like a softly billowing tent. 

“Nice place for an orgy.”  Boyle was standing beside him.   “Can you imagine what that cost?”  he said, shaking his head at the opulence of it all.  “I could have put my kid through college with what’s in this place.”  Boyle turned on his heel, making for the kitchen.

Parker wandered to the window and squinted through the blind.  Down in the street, a bag lady was pushing a shopping cart piled high with debris gathered from heaven knows where.   Parker turned and surveyed the room again.  As with the rest of the apartment, everything was perfectly placed.  Silk pajamas lay on a pillow, folded as if for a shop window display.   On the opposite pillow sat a porcelain doll, smiling vacantly in a state of permanent welcome.   Suddenly he frowned.  His eyes had fixed upon a small water glass that was lying on the carpet close to the night table.   Could this have caused the noise, which had drawn him into the room?   Parker almost laughed at himself for thinking it.  There was no breeze in here, and all the windows were closed.  The noise had probably come from next door.

“Seen enough?” yelled Boyle from the living room.  “Time for lunch.”

Parker turned to see Boyle entering the bedroom with a crystal jar of almonds in his hand. 

“Lunch?” he echoed.

“Yeah lunch, that stuff you eat off plates when you’re hungry.  What are you staring at?”  asked Boyle, lifting the jar to his lips and shaking almonds into his mouth.

“Isn’t that against regulations?”

“Perks of the job.”  Boyle chuckled.  “She won’t miss them.  She’s going to be in Clifton for awhile, and then prison.”   

Parker watched as his partner munched.  “Clifton’s an expensive sanitarium isn’t it?”      

“So,” shrugged Boyle, “her boyfriend paid for it. Maybe it was the hospital bills that killed him.

“You know,” said Parker. “ I really don’t understand this.  How can we charge a woman with murder when she was locked away in a hospital room thirty miles from where her boyfriend died?    It doesn’t make sense.”

“Look,” said Boyle.  “The D.A. thinks she did it, her fingerprints were there, and we have to find out how.”

“It’s crazy,” said Parker.  The charge can’t stick.”

“I don’t know how she did it,” said Boyle, “but she did, believe me.” 

“But how?” Parker’s brow furrowed with exasperation.  “She never left the sanitarium.”

“Oh for Christ sakes,” growled Boyle, finishing the almonds.  “Don’t you get it yet?  Its an alibi.”

            “Some alibi!  She was locked in a hospital room.”

            “Okay, so it’s the greatest alibi ever - but, I’ve got a nose for these things.  She did it and she’s not going to get away with it.”

“With what?  They’re not even sure how he died...”

“She sets up the alibi by asking the hospital attendant to call the police...”      

“That’s no reason to pin a murder rap on her.”        

“So, you tell me, how did she know this Jenkins guy was going to die?” challenged Boyle.  “Do you think she was clairvoyant or something?”

Parker stared at the carpet. 

“Come on, you’re out of your depth.  You need to eat. Food’s good for the brain.”  Boyle turned back into the living room and opened Parker’s brief case, methodically he tipped the contents of the aluminum trays into the case and began to close it.

“Wait,” said Parker, crossing to the computer and picked it up. “If it’s evidence you’re after, it’s here.”

“Right,” said Boyle, with a defiant look.  “I was going to do that.”       

Parker stared back at him and snapped his case shut. 

“We passed a place on the corner,” said Boyle moving toward the front door.  “Italian food.  Cheap.”

Parker glanced around the room for the last time, and then slowly followed Boyle out of the apartment.   When the front door had clicked shut, only the soft ticking of the bedroom clock disturbed the silence.  Then, a slight shadow flitted across the bedroom wall.  Someone was moving beyond the half opened door.  A woman’s hand was picking up the fallen glass and replacing it neatly beside the lamp on the night table.