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political views. I believe in human rights: I liked Jimmy Carter for that reason alone, though I later came to believe that he had sold out his own cause in the game of pure Politics. I think the Miranda ruling has generally been good, though the public will never know what a pain it can be to work with. I believe in due process, but enough is enough: I’m a fan of a just and swift execution where vicious killers are concerned. It’s just ridiculous to keep a guy like Ted Bundy on death row for ten years. I don’t believe it when psychologists tell me the death penalty doesn’t deter—take a look at kidnapping statistics in the 1930s, when it was made a capital crime after the murder of the Lindbergh baby, before you start to argue with me. I think justice started collapsing under its own weight when they let shrinks into the courtroom. The plain fact is, for some murderers, I just don’t care whether they were incapable of reason, were whipped as children for wetting the bed, or had a mother who bayed at the moon. Gacy, Bundy, Manson, Speck—you’ll never make me believe the world is a better place with that quartet alive and kicking. I hate abortion, but I’d never pass a law telling a woman she couldn’t have one. I believe in the ERA, find it hard to understand why two hundred years after the Bill of Rights we’re still arguing about rights for half our people. I like black people, some of them a lot. I supported busing when it was necessary and would again, but there’s something about affirmative action that leaves me cold. You can’t take away one man’s rights and give them to another, even in a good cause. I was burned out, and never more than today. My police career had been solid, some said brilliant, but I was on a long slide to nowhere, a treadmill to oblivion, as Fred Allen called it. These are the days that try men’s souls. I wanted to fight Jackie Newton with a broken bottle and a tire iron, and society, decency, and my own good sense said,
You can’t do that
. There was something about gun law that was immensely appealing: it really cut through the crap and got to the heart of things. Barbaric? Maybe. But I’ll tell you this: watching a guy kill people and not being able to do a damn thing about it, that’s no bowl of cherries either.
    My apartment, as always, was the great healer. I stripped off my sweats, turned on a light, and sat surrounded by treas-ures. I looked for a while at an old AB: my fascination in the life of the bookman was almost as acute as my interest in books, and I had been a faithful subscriber to the bookseller’s trade journal for almost five years. I thumbed through Wyeth’s Helga pictures, lingering on that lovely scene in the barn. Carol Pfeiffer, of course, had long gone: she had been gone when I had come in earlier and changed for my run. I took a cold shower and dressed slowly, planning my day. Barbara Crowell’s statement seemed to alibi Jackie Newton nicely, which meant I had to start from scratch. It never occurred to me to call Hennessey, or to check downtown and see if we’d been assigned to the case. Hennessey would just be turning over for his second forty winks, and downtown they’d know we were on it. They knew all about my work habits.
    I drove out Sixth to Colorado Boulevard, went north to Colfax, then east to the bookstores. This was my turf: I was as much at home along Book Row as I was in the world of hookers and pimps that surrounded it. Colfax is a strange street. It used to be known as the longest street in the world: people with more imagination than I have used to say, in the days before interstate highways, that it ran from Kansas City to the Great Salt Lake. Its actual length is about twenty miles, beginning on the plains east of Denver and dwindling away in the mountains to the west. Just about every foot of it is commercial space. About twenty years ago, urban renewal came in and ripped out old Larimer Street, and the whores and bums