Forced Entry by Stephen Solomita

office that sets the deal. I try to haggle, but the deal is usually presented as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. It’s only when the prosecution’s case is weak and they’re afraid to go into a courtroom that anything like ‘bargaining’ takes place.”
    “And how do you handle that?” Moodrow asked, sitting on the edge of his seat. “When you know someone should be put away forever and you hear the judge give him two years?”
    “Or her,” Betty smiled. “We get women crazies, too.”
    “Her or him,” Tilley said. “How does it feel?”
    “Do you like everything about being a cop?” Betty asked. “You don’t have to do shit work sometimes?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “When I have no choice, I do it and try to forget about it. Like everyone else involved in the justice industry. Like the Assistant DAs and judges and even the cops.”
    “Do you ever have a choice?” Rose asked, sensing something behind Betty’s answer.
    “Once in a while, you have to even up,” Betty said, her voice darkening. “You have to step outside the boundaries of professional ethics. If you don’t, you go crazy.” Even as she went ahead with her story, she had a sense that she shouldn’t be saying this, but somewhere between the alcohol and Stanley Moodrow, she’d lost her sense of self-preservation. It drowned in sudden trust. “About six months ago, I went to one of the court pens, where they keep the prisoners, to confer with a burglar/rapist named Morton Heller. He told me he had to speak to me in private; there’s something I had to know. Usually, that means a client wants to inform on someone in exchange for less time.
    “So I arranged for a conference room which took about three hours, because there aren’t enough of them, either, and I went in to talk with Mr. Heller. Fortunately, I had enough sense to let the Court Officer cuff him to the table. That’s standard procedure, but most of the time I don’t bother. I want my clients to trust me.”
    Suddenly, the three of them, Moodrow, Tilley, and Rose, were sitting on the edge of their seats. All slightly drunk and waiting, like kids, for their bedtime story.
    “The minute I came into the room, he started telling me about the women he raped and how he couldn’t wait to get out of jail so he could crawl into my room next. He told me exactly how he’d hurt me and what he’d do sexually and how he’d make me pretend to like it. And while he explained all this, he masturbated with his free hand.
    “Nice, right? Of course, I’d seen all the complaints (he was up for four counts of rape along with assorted assaults, atrocious assaults, and robberies) and the depositions the victims gave were really bad. The rape was the least of it; he beat them, cut them, terrified them. And he dragged it out. He came into their apartments just after they went to bed and he stayed all night.
    “Well, Morton Heller was stupid as well as disturbed and he had this sense of his own power, of his invulnerability, that set him up nicely for what I decided to do to him. I said, ‘Look, Heller, you can sit around jerkin’ off if that’s what you want, but I think there’s a good chance you could beat this.’
    “The truth is I had just come from a meeting with the Assistant DA and I knew the case against Heller was rock solid. The DA was offering twelve years to life for a plea bargain, which means Heller would have to do at least ten, even if he took a plea. Heller, by the way, was only twenty-five, so if he did ten, he’d still be young when he came out. Young enough to ruin some more lives.
    “Anyway, Heller stopped playing with himself and asked me how I could get him off. I said I didn’t think all the victims would show. I ran down a line of bullshit about two of the victims failing to pick him out of a lineup. I told him I’d contact any witnesses who could give him an alibi. I told him that since he never turned on the lights in his victims’ apartments,