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This is actually run by the head of their Department of Psychiatry, so they treat the whole thing very seriously.”
    “Your victim?”
    “Her name is Flora. Very fragile twenty-two-year-old who lives with her mother in Flatbush. Met the defendant a couple of years ago when he was her psychology professor at Brooklyn College. She began to see him for therapy after the school year, but was smart enough to stop the sessions when he started coming on to her sexually.
    “Now, almost two years have gone by and she was suffering from depression. Found his number in the book, called him, and he made an appointment for her to come in to the clinic, where he told her he’s currently working. Said he still did therapy on the side.”
    I was taking notes as Patti continued the narrative.
    “Flora got to the office at eight o’clock on Tuesday night. Paid the therapist — his name is Ronald — for the session, and at the end he advised her that she needed to get a job, to engage herself in something serious. He offered her a position as a computer analyst at the clinic. Took out a contract for one year’s employment from his desk, signed it, and had her do the same.”
    I had dozens of questions to ask, but rather than punctuate Patti’s story, I would let her tell it and assume she would cover most of what I needed to know.
    “Finally, Ronald took the contract back and told Flora that he wouldn’t make his boss, the chief physician, enforce it unless she thanked him right now by performing oral sex.”
    “I am definitely in the wrong line of work,” Chapman mumbled.
    Patti went on. “Ronald waved the contract back and forth in front of her and kept repeating, ‘No blow job, no job.’ He reduced Flora to tears in about five minutes, and she complied with the condition. Meanwhile, in a few of the cubicles attached to Ronald’s module, people were sleeping — naked, of course, with monitors attached to measure their breathing, their blood pressure, their REMs, and so on. So when Ronald handed her back her half of the contract, he told her this was better than usual. He said that most of the time he stood there and masturbated while he watched the struggling sleepers try to find the Land of Nod.”
    Chapman was on his feet. “You mean these idiots are paying big bucks to have this frigging pervert get his rocks off watching them toss and turn? That’d cure my insomnia instantly. I’d like to tie him to a chair by his testicles and make him listen to lullabies for twenty-four hours. See how he sleeps. I don’t get it, Coop. This stuff you people work on makes murder look comprehensible.”
    “How’d she come forward, Patti?”
    “When Flora called Ronald yesterday to ask when she could start to work, he told her that there was no job because he really didn’t have any power to hire or fire employees. She stormed right into the clinic and showed the contract to the physician in charge, who said it was bogus. So she went directly to a pay phone on the corner and called the cops. I thought you ought to know about it before I did anything on the case.”
    “Good thinking.” Brownnosing worked with me almost every time. Patti knew that if we, as prosecutors, could direct the course of an investigation prearrest, we could usually build a stronger case for trial.
    “What’s to think about?” Chapman asked. “Cuff him and put him in the can, now.”
    “What’s the crime, Mikey? What does Patti charge him with?” I stood with my back to the air conditioner, trying to cool down as we talked.
    “Sodomy in the first,” Mike suggested.
    “I didn’t hear you describe any force, did I?” Patti shook her head in the negative in response to my question.
    “Public lewdness,” Mike spat out at me.
    “It’s not a public place. Ronald’s sitting right in his own office when he’s playing with himself. Expectation of privacy and all that,” I countered.
    “I told you murder is easy. You got a dead body, an unnatural