Final Option

wait for you. I could have taken her into custody for obstructing the police, not to mention some of the things she said. You’d never guess that such a little bit of a thing could have such a mouth.”
    “I see that you two haven’t been formally introduced. Dr. Claudia Stein, meet Detective Ruskowski.” I took a moment and glanced at the subpoena. “It’s all in order,” I said, clutching my purse under my arm.
    “This is going to take a couple of hours. Why don’t you go across the street and get yourself a cup of coffee?”
    I weighed the alternatives before answering: “I’ll just stay and watch if you don’t mind. I wouldn’t want you to succumb to temptation and plant something. Let them in Claudia.”
    White-faced, my roommate stepped aside.
    “Does this have to do with your client getting shot?” she whispered as Ruskowski divided his men into teams and dispatched them to various parts of the apartment.
    “Yes,” I replied. “You stay with the ones in the bedroom. I’ll keep an eye on them in the kitchen. I don’t want them out of our sight for a minute.“
    “I don’t like this,” began Claudia. “They’re not going to look in the freezer, are they?”
    “I’ll handle it,” I broke in grimly and followed the low rumble of male voices into the kitchen. Ruskowski had taken up a supervisory position, lounging against the kitchen sink as two plainclothesmen went through the cupboards.
    “Not much of a cook, are you Katie?” Ruskowski needled. “These cupboards are pretty bare.”
    “There’s something I want to talk to you about,” I said.
    “Does it have to do with Bart Hexter?” demanded Ruskowski.
    “No.”
    “Then put a sock in it. I’ve had enough legal bullshit for one day.”
    “But I think—”
    “Button it,” snapped the detective.
    I considered a third try, but I figured it served him right. Instead, I casually removed my raincoat, draping it over the arm that held my purse, and hoped for the best.
    “Holy mother of God will you look at this!” exclaimed one of the policemen, his hand resting on the handle of the freezer door, his face stretched into a caricature of amazement. “What the fuck? Come and look at this, Rusty! Jesus!”
    Ruskowski walked over to the freezer and looked. I stood on tiptoes and took a peek over the top of his head and suppressed a chuckle.
    “You want to tell me what this is?” demanded the detective angrily.
    “What do you think it is? It’s an arm.”
    “A human arm?”
    “No,” I replied. “It’s the arm of a giraffe. Of course it’s a human arm.”
    “So what’s it doing in your freezer?”
    “My roommate, Dr. Stein, is a surgeon. She rotates between the University of Chicago and Michael Reese Hospitals. Sometimes she gets a dissection specimen at one hospital and she takes it to the other hospital to work on the next day. In the meantime, she stores it in the freezer here overnight. Let me show you.”
    I took the gruesome parcel from the freezer—a human arm, folded neatly at the elbow, hard as a frozen pot roast and wrapped in plastic. I passed it to the plainclothesman with a little toss. He caught it, surprised. “You can see it’s tagged from Michael Reese.” The cop held the bag away from his body as if it might come to life and grab him.
    “Put it back, you joker,” exclaimed Ruskowski in disgust. Then he turned to me. “No wonder you don’t do much cooking,” he said.
     
    For the better part of three hours Claudia and I trailed policemen around our apartment while they looked in every cupboard and every drawer, beneath every cushion and under every chair. They took my keys to the basement and turned our storage locker inside out. Out in the alley behind my building, they searched my car and, after some expostulating with the janitor, they went through the contents of the building’s garbage dumpster.
    Eventually I overcame my indignation and began to formulate a hypothesis based on the pattern of their search. For example, they seemed to have ruled out objects of less than a certain size, because they didn’t look in small containers, including the small, stone box on our coffee table. But they did roll up the rug in the living room which caused tornadoes of dust to swirl up around our ankles and precipitated a flurry of cracks about our housekeeping. By far the most intensive scrutiny was reserved for my clothing, which the police examined with microscopic interest. The brand-new pair of