The Broken Window

building was long gone, but everybody still used the name when describing this place: the Manhattan Detention Center, downtown, in which Arthur Rhyme was now sitting, his heart doing the same despairing thud, thud, thud it had regularly since he was arrested.
    But whether the place was called the Tombs, the MDC or the Bernard Kerik Center (as it had been temporarily until the former police chief and corrections head went down in flames) to Arthur the place was simply hell.
    Absolute hell.
    He was in an orange jumpsuit like everyone else but there the similarity with his fellow cons ended. The five-foot-eleven man, 190 pounds, with corporate-clipped brown hair was as different as could be from the other souls awaiting trial here. No, he wasn’t big and inked (he’d learned that meant tattooed) or shaved or stupid or black or Latino. The sort of criminal Arthur would resemble—businessmen charged with white-collar crimes—didn’t reside in the Tombsuntil trial; they were out on bond. Whatever sins they’d committed, the infractions didn’t warrant the two-million-dollar bail set for Arthur.
    So the Tombs had been his home since May 13—the longest and most wrenchingly difficult period of his life.
    And bewildering.
    Arthur might have met the woman he was supposed to have killed, but he couldn’t even recall her. Yes, he’d been to that gallery in SoHo, where apparently she’d browsed too, though he couldn’t remember talking to her. And, yes, he loved the work of Harvey Prescott and had been sick at heart when he’d had to sell his canvas after losing his job. But stealing one? Killing someone? Were they fucking mad? Do I look like a killer?
    It was a hopeless mystery to him, like Fermat’s theorem, the mathematical proof that, even after learning the explanation, he still didn’t get. Her blood in his car? He was being framed, of course. Even thinking the police might have done it themselves.
    After ten days in the Tombs, O.J.’s defense seems a bit less Twilight Zone .
    Why, why, why? Who was behind this? He thought of the angry letters he’d written when Princeton passed him over. Some were stupid and petty and threatening. Well, there were plenty of unstable people in the academic field. Maybe they wanted revenge for the stink he’d made. And then that student in his class who’d come on to him. He’d told her, no, he didn’t want to have an affair. She’d gone ballistic.
    Fatal Attraction . . .
    The police had checked her out and decided she wasn’t behind the killing but how hard had they worked to verify her alibi?
    He looked around the large common area now, the dozens of nearby cons—the inside word for prisoners. At first he’d been regarded as a curiosity. His stock seemed to rise when they’d learned he’d been arrested for murder but then it fell at the news that the victim hadn’t tried to steal his drugs or cheat on him—two acceptable reasons for killing a woman.
    Then when it was clear he was just one of those white guys who’d fucked up, life got ugly.
    Jostling, challenges, taking his milk carton—just like in middle school. The sex thing wasn’t what people thought. Not here. These were all new arrestees and everybody could keep their dicks in their jumpsuits for a time. But he’d been assured by a number of his new “friends” that his virginity wouldn’t last long once he got to one of the long hauls, like Attica, especially if he earned a quarter-pounder—twenty-five to life.
    He’d been punched in the face four times, tripped twice and pinned to the floor by psycho Aquilla Sanchez, who dripped sweat into his face as he screamed in Spanglish until some bored hacks (that is, guards) pulled him off.
    Arthur had peed his pants twice and puked a dozen times. He was a worm, scum, not worth fucking.
    Until later.
    And the way his heart kept thudding, he expected it to pop apart at any moment. As had happened to Henry Rhyme, his father, though the famed professorhad died not in an ignoble place like the Tombs, of course, but on an appropriately stately collegiate sidewalk in Hyde Park, Illinois.
    How had this happened? A witness and evidence . . . It made no sense.
    “Take the plea, Mr. Rhyme,” the assistant district attorney had said. “I’d recommend it.”
    His attorney had too. “I know the ins and outs, Art. It’s like I’m reading a fucking GPS map. I can tell you exactly where this is going—and it’s not the needle. Albany can’t write a