I know I promised a review of the book I had finished reading quite a while ago. Well, it is finally here. I received the book as part of our holiday book exchange. “Finish Me Off” by Hillary Waugh, I’m told, was found in the “classics” section and has the picture of a woman and a sheet around her on it. I kind of doubted the “classic” status, but I guess since it is more than 30 years old that it meets someone’s criteria for such a label.
The story starts with two friends, Linda and Gloria, who are rooming together in a high class New York apartment (their rent was a shockingly high $520 a month) and tell people they are models, but in reality they are just prostitutes who hang out at hotel bars and pick up “johns”. Not far into the book, I find the source of the title. Gloria uses “finish me off” as a signature line to make her customers feel special. The story follows the two along on a night out on the job and we find that the night ends with Linda and a lingerie salesman from Kentucky, who is in town for a convention, dead.
In step the homicide detectives, with Detective Frank Sessions leading up the investigation. He and his partner interview the hotel staff, pimps, drug dealers, the lingerie salesman’s family in Kentucky, and the roommate Gloria. The detective realizes that during initial questioning Gloria failed to mention a key person in Linda’s life, her naive older brother who is a doctor. The detectives speak with the brother who had no idea the two were prostitutes or “prosses” as the detectives call them. The brother would come by for dinner quite frequently and seemed to have a crush on Gloria.
The detective is naturally curious why Gloria said nothing to them about the brother and then tries to pull more information out of her. She ends up saying she has information that isn’t related to the case as the reason for not sharing and won’t tell the detective what it is. The police have kind of run into a dead end about the case, so Frank Sessions hones in on Gloria and tries to make her crack and give up the information she is withholding. The detective proceeds to follow her around and says that if she practices her trade he’ll arrest her. His plan is to basically smoke her out and make her desperate because she can’t make any money, so she’ll spill the beans.
As the story is going along I kinda felt like I was watching a Law and Order episode with old Lennie Briscoe trying to solve the case. Then in the story, Gloria decides to go stay with her family for a bit, since she can’t make any money. Her mother runs a bed and breakfast type of place and lo and behold, the detective shows up posing as someone from Chicago who seems to have an interest in Gloria. That evening they end up hooking up, free of charge. As she’s getting ready to slip back into her room, she asks if he’s going to try to get the information out of her. He says that he doesn’t mix business with pleasure, but nevertheless she divulges her secret anyway. By this point, the Lennie Briscoe image has been quickly disposed. Plus, I don’t remember too many episodes of Law and Order where the detectives are sleeping with the suspects.
So Gloria spills her information. She says that she made up a story about a drug dealer guy asking about Linda before she died, and instead of it being the drug dealer, it was Linda’s brother. She tells Frank that she didn’t tell because she didn’t want him to be a suspect or to have the rumors ruin his career. Frank assures her by telling her, “it’s all but impossible to convict the innocent”. He goes on to say, “When we arrest a man and charge him with a crime, it’s not because we think he’s guilty, or even because we know he’s guilty. It’s only because we think we have enough evidence against him to stand up in court.” Eventually, Frank takes the information and soon discovers that the brother has an alibi and the real killer is a drug addict hotel worker who killed Linda for money.
When I read the statement by the detective saying that they don’t convict innocent people, I immediately shook my head. The book was written in 1970, and since I wasn’t alive then maybe the way the police conduct business has changed or maybe the author was just a bit naive about how many innocent people get locked up. There wasn’t that wonderful thing called the Internet which makes it harder to keep people in the dark about what happens in the world, so maybe the author just had a rosy, uninformed outlook on how the justice system works at times.
Interestingly, right after I finished reading the book, I found the article True Crimes, False Confessions which talks about 20 to 25 percent of cases where DNA exonerated a person convicted of a crime, the person had made a confession to the crime. This information lets us know that police focus on certain people and bully them into making false confessions. They don’t have the evidence and instead they browbeat people until they are so mixed up and confused that they don’t know what they did and didn’t do.
I hear and read many times where people say they have nothing to worry about and would freely give up their rights because they have nothing to hide. The same thing happened with the Timothy Masters’ case where the police decided a 15 year old boy killed a woman. His father let the police interrogate the boy without a lawyer for over 11 hours because he trusted the system. Masters ended up being convicted with no physical evidence and spent almost 10 years in jail before DNA evidence lead to a dismissal of the charges against him.
Anyway, there’s my review of the book and my commentary on how it isn’t impossible to convict an innocent person. I’m now reading the book “Islands in the Net” by Bruce Sterling. It is going slow right now so it might be a while before I have comments on it. I’ll try to have something else to write about to tide you over, though.