Thank You for Smoking

Things were looking a little calmer through Nick's eyes, owing to the 10 mgs of Valium Polly had given him. He would have preferred a couple of stiff vodka negronis, or for that matter a hash brownie, but he refrained from asking for either since it was ten o'clock in the morning. It had not been a pleasant eighteen hours. His fingers still smelled of the stuff they'd given him to wipe off the fingerprint ink, and the rest of him felt stale and clammy, despite the clean shirt, underwear, and socks that Polly — dear Polly — had provided. All night she had shuttled back and forth between the FBI building, where Nick had spent the night being gone over by agents Monmaney and Allman, and the D.C. city jail, where Bobby Jay had spent his night, making all sorts of new friends, many of whom shared his views on gun control. Nick's one consolation was that the quality of person you meet in a federal lockup was, perhaps, slightly superior to the ones you met in the municipal jail. At his arraignment, Polly told him that Bobby Jay had inserted his hook deeply into a delicate part of a fellow prisoner who had expressed the desire to share intimacies with him in the toilets. There was now the possibility that a charge of assault with a deadly weapon would be added to the firearms charge, though his lawyer was optimistic on that count. As for Nick, Carlinsky had persuaded the judge that, grievous though the charge was — conspiracy to commit criminal fraud; criminal fraud; giving false evidence to federal officers; along with a few lesser charges that Carlinsky said were just plain "piling on" — Nick was unlikely to flee to the Canadian border in his BMW, and so he'd gotten him released on bail of $100,000, which the Captain, from his hospital bed, had ordered BR to post. So here he was in the offices of the man upon whom he was now dependent to keep him from being sent away for ten to fifteen years, doing his best to cope."Tell you what about the boxes?"

Carlinsky's already close-set eyes narrowed so much that Nick thought they were going to combine into one big eye, like the ones on the prison guards on the planet Alar.

"Nick, how can I help you if you won't help me?"

"Steve, I don't know how my fingerprints got on the boxes."

Carlinsky pensively made a steeple with his hands. "Let's review."

"Again?"

"They have ten boxes of NicArrest nicotine patches with your fingerprints all over them at a rental cabin in Virginia that was rented sight unseen over the phone. They have a record of calls made to that cabin from your office phone, the second call on the morning of the abduction, and a piece of paper found in your apartment with the phone number of the cabin. Okay, now any paralegal in my office could get that last piece of evidence thrown out on illegal search, and anyone could have placed the call to the cabin from your office— provided we can establish that you weren't in the office at the time it was placed. But the boxes. The boxes are a problem. As evidence goes, fingerprints are very, very tough. I'd rather go up against a DNA match than fingerprints. Do you know why?" Carlinsky was the kind who waited until you said, Why?

"Why?" Nick said.

"Because your average District of Columbia jury does not understand DNA. And being lectured about it makes them feel like they're back in high school, flunking biology. You have to present it to them so sloowly and caarefully that it makes them feel like idiots. They resent you for it, and little good comes of making a jury feel inadequate. But fingerprints — fingerprints are easy to grasp. Much easier than DNA, or such precious bodily fluids as blood or urine or sperm."

"Are you saying your job would be easier if they found boxes of nicotine patches with my blood or sp.?"

"Nick, are you all right? Wait, we have work to do. Where are you going?"

"To kill someone," Nick said, heading out the door.