Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests by Linda Fairstein Page B

the gray cargo
     van parked in the shadows. Lois Stone opens the sliding door and steps out into the afternoon heat. She’s wearing a dark green
     pantsuit that complements her auburn hair. There’s something on her lips—lipstick or gloss—that leaves them shiny. I’d like
     to think she did it for me, but that’s wishful thinking.
    “Did you get it?”
    “Loud and clear. There’s enough for arrest warrants. Eve Toscar and Dexter Bass won’t be spending her money anytime soon.”
    “How’d you know he wouldn’t find the bug?”
    Stone grabs the van’s door handle. “Jack, guys like you and Bass always think you’re smarter than the rest of us. That’s your
     downfall. Once he frisked you and didn’t find anything, I knew he’d stop looking. There was no way he’d suspect we bugged
     the john.”
    I know she’s right. “So is our deal back on?”
    “Yeah, it’s back on. You’ve got until Monday to get your affairs in order.”
    I shake my head. “I’m gonna die an old man in prison.”
    Stone’s face softens for a moment. “Cheer up, Jack. With good behavior, you could get paroled in fifteen, twenty years. You’ll
     still have plenty of life left.”
    “Not quite what I had in mind.”
    She shrugs. “A word of advice?”
    “Sure, what’ve I got to lose?”
    Her eyes sparkle. “When you’re in the shower, don’t drop the soap.”

THE LETTER
    BY EILEEN DUNBAUGH
    T he rag-and-bones man was the terror of my childhood. “Useless girls, like useless things, go to old Rags,” my mother would
     say if I slacked on the chores she’d assigned. We knew him only as “Rags,” the small, swarthy collector of junk, until the
     day my father got saddled with him as a client. Despite my mother’s constant warnings, Daddy always seemed to be in the courthouse
     at the wrong time, when some judge or other was assigning lawyers to represent the latest crop of indigents who’d come before
     the bar. There were no public defenders back then, and the fool lawyer who ended up at the end of a judge’s pointing finger
     took the case pro bono. It was possible to decline, but woe to the attorney who did if he found himself before that particular
     judge again.
    I don’t know why Daddy was always at the courthouse, unless it was because he was lonely. Each evening before he came home
     my mother would comb her hair and change her dress—and then spoil it all by talking at him, endlessly, and mostly in the same
     groove, telling him that a smart lawyer would keep away from the courthouse except when it was necessary to be there on a
     paying case, and that the way to feed your family was with last wills and testaments. I used to imagine that she was a record
     and that her voice would distort and finally stop if only I could figure out how to make the machine wind down.
    She and Daddy had moved to Chicago from Missouri, mostly because of Mama’s “aspirations.” That was the word she used, proudly
     and without irony; she “aspired” to a better life. So instead of taking his share of the family farm, my father went to law
     school, moved to Chicago, and set up a one-man office on the fifth floor of a building on State Street. For a while, my mother
     was satisfied. The business boom of the twenties was big enough to bring well-paying work even to unambitious lawyers. And
     it wasn’t that Daddy was lazy; his “problem,” as Mama put it, was that he “pondered” too much. In the evenings he’d read,
     and when he could get away from the office, you’d find him puffing contemplatively on his cigar as he threw his fishing line
     into the stream not far from our house. We lived on the North Side then, in a tiny one-story, two-bedroom wood house that
     had seen better days. The neighborhood grew all around us in the twenties, but we still had country at our backs.
    If Mama reminded me of a record, like all records of that time she played only two songs. She didn’t like the grammar I picked
     up