Assistant DA Chaplin tried keeping an upbeat demeanor as best she could, entering the black tie affair with all eyes watching her. She was alone, unusual for such an attractive young woman in her position, but the man who was to be her companion had been killed only earlier that evening, Detective Lieutenant Richard Richards. She tried not to think about that, but of course she had to. Someone would have to mention the matter and a glib offer of condolence. After all, Richards was a cop.
It was a simple matter of his number being up, but in connection to the Electric case what could she have said. Barry Electric was a particular kind of fiend; a man on a mission of vengeance and anyone who got in his way was asking to be sacrificed like a lamb to his personal slaughter. She wasn't grieving. She was too terrified to grieve. Her own feelings were mixed because she had concluded that Electric had his own brand of justice that wasn't written in law books was not to be understood by mere flesh and blood.
Sitting in the back of the cab on the way to the banquet, she had foregone the requisite taxpayer's limo, Electric had become for her something other than flesh and blood. He was a man, yes, but not just any man—and not just any fugitive. He was Electric. Very, very Electric: a shock wave that ran all the way down her spine and made her skin tingle with goose flesh. There was also the thought that she might actually be face to face with him one day and she saddened with the realization that their meeting might only take place at his trial or his execution.
Patricia Chaplin had managed to transform herself from a weary overworked civil servant into a vivacious party doll by slipping into a strapless white silk dress cut high above her stocking knees, ivory flesh made lustrous. The slight make-up she'd applied highlighting her deep rich blue eyes and rounded cherry blossom lips. Her dirty blonde hair was clean and silky, her long legs shapely and shimmering.
More than one man noticed the tight ensemble fitted her so snugly that the impression of her sheer lace garter belt was clearly visible in relief against the curvaceous frame. So radiant, women noticed her too and soon their catty buzzing filled the large domed room.
The question "Why is she alone?" being repeated so often and loud enough for her to hear that she reddened, shoulders sagging ands slumped dejected and alone to open bar. Her flesh becoming a vibrant crimson did nothing to lessen her allure, in fact heightened it making her seem too hot to touch, her sad but placid face appearing to be ethereally distant and disdainful.
"Scotch, neat," she said loudly over the bustling business of superficial chatter and tinkling glass against silver trays.
The whisky swam in what looked like a wide glass fishbowl and she was about to drink it when her name cried out from the crowded floor. She turned as she was swallowing the smooth hot liquor to see the large oval face of judge Sunset Ng, the magistrate's puffed cheeks creased with a wide disingenuous grin, the pinched close set eyes crinkled at the edges like crumpled brown wrapping paper, hands outstretched and coming for her.
"Patricia!" the judge howled again and Patricia nearly cringed.
The judge's reputation was almost completely in the shade. Her sentencing seemed haphazard and contingent upon the due notice of her mortgage payment or sabbatical. Ng spent a lot of time on 'the Island' sunning herself in the company of a variety of pool boy, handyman or convenient house guest, whoever would have her, could stand her or she could afford for the night, week or weekend. She was cheaper by the hour, seldom with the same man twice, if the man could help it, was an inveterate slut and men had been known to brag that they had not slept with her.
Ng fancied herself Chaplin's friend, god only knew why. Patricia certainly didn't. Ng came too close too suddenly for Patricia to retreat so she downed her drink and quickly begged the bartender for another. He complied smoothly with a double. Pat downed that too and immediately requested a triple. Sunset was humming in her ear like a bloated bumblebee, ogling her dress with small bulging red eyes begrudging her figure.
Girl talk had Sunset as a closet lesbian who kept up the parade of boy toys as a cover for her true nature. She dare not come out of the closet. Her career would be ruined, her wealthy Asian-American family disgraced though what she did instead didn't warrant much aplomb either.
"What's this I hear about this Electric fellow?" she asked forwardly, affecting a mannered and genteel inflection, wanting to hear dirt. Sunset knew Patricia had sent Anna Sukowski on a fact finding mission and also knew Joseph Hsu intimately, was warm and cozily in his pocket.
Patricia became ice cold, the hot liquor coursing through her veins and her pale color returned. Her skin became whiter than her roaring white dress. She sipped.
"What do you hear, Sunset?" she bit off.
Sunset's eyes rolled and eyed pat from the other side of her head. She pressed two pink manicured fingernails to her thin yellow lips, looked at the bartender and batted her eyes girlishly, for a woman of forty-seven.
"Scotch, dear boy, just like my friend is having."
"Yes, justice Ng," the young man replied somberly.
He put as much liquor as he could into the deep bowl of a glass. If Ng got drunk enough and she would, she would do things to herself and to others, obscene and ludicrous things that she would later pretend not to recall. She had bared various body parts at any number of official and unofficial soirees and had always ended with a blushing apology to all who remained and any who cared. No one was offended anymore by the heavyset Asian's lewd antics. She'd become something of a highlight of the otherwise tedious and overly formal affairs.
Her drink in hand, sipping quickly and going through the liquor in seconds, she put the glass forward for a refill, eyeing Patricia gamely.
"Oh, I hear he shot Richards. I was so sorry to hear. I liked the lieutenant," she said, sincerity poorly pasted onto the callow remark.
Patricia frowned and straightened her lips. As much as she despised Ng, she had to use her on occasion to push through a difficult conviction.
"Yes—he liked you, too, Sunset."
The truth was that Richards hated her, but Kosova had taken a number and was waiting in line. He was due some vacation time and had been the last man to lose his watch down her dress, a strangely reoccurring misfortune.
Ng came closer to Pat's pearl studded ear and whispered: "I hear Electric's a great big hunk!" She said the words with a throaty obscene hiss. Pat recoiled, not entirely for effect.
"Just where did you hear that? I hear he's never been seen," she prompted Sunset, knowing full well that Ng's ears were as full of dirt as her pockets.
Scuttlebutt ran both ways and Sunset's big mouth spilled guilty knowledge like the incontinent drunk she was. The judge seized Chaplin's arm ferociously and pulled her away from the watchful bartender, away from the gawking partygoers, dignitaries and functionaries towards a tall curtained window where Ng produced a long white cigarette, lit it and smoked and breathed into Patricia's face. Patricia was rapt.
Ng whispered, her voice only slightly less loud than a bullhorn, "You know he wasted the Avenging Shadows down in Chinatown— Well, two of them got a really good look at him—before he shot them. Well, they told Joe Hsu—he just happened to be in the hospital at the time—and saw some tragic looking Asian boys lying bleeding from all over— So, he talked to the two that survived—The others must have seen him too, but—Do you want another drink?" She paused to blow smoke.
"No, go ahead," Chaplin urged, sipping her drink, looking into Ng's piggy eyes as they slanted so hard they seemed about to slide off her face. Ng took a breath, stuck the cigarette between her white capped teeth, snaring the butt like an animal caught in a trap, sucked and talked.
"Hsu says they told him about a guy—about six, six, made of nothing but rippling white muscle! Can you imagine? Blond? Oh, sister, he must be a demon in the sack!"
Suddenly Sunset blanched, threw her dead butt at the curtain, the filter dropping at her open toed heels and she crushed it viciously unprovoked. She had a thought swirling in her brain that made her reconsider everything.
"I don't know about all those guns. They were pretty big—and he did kill all those cops,"
Her eyes veered back to Patricia. "You know what they say about men and their guns. They're a substitute for—you know—for a little wiener."
Ng's lips curled, foaming at the colored corners. "I wonder if Electric's got a tiny one—you know, like a Jap or a Jew—"
Thoroughly disgusted, Patricia thrust her arms out wide.
"No, Sunset! He's got a big red one!" she shouted, tipsy and wide mouthed, Sunset stare at her in shock.
Others froze too and turning towards the red-faced prosecutor, the entire huge room quieted to a murmur and then to a dead hush. With her arms held aloft, Patricia slowly faced the gathering and worked an embarrassed humorless grin onto her lips.
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