Close Case

by Alafair Burke

  “Is that true, Sam?” Mike asked derisively. “Does Hamilton really stand any better chance with you in the room instead of Russ Frist?”

  “Look, I told you guys, I’m sorry I didn’t bring up the reassignment. I knew there were strong feelings in this room about the case, and as your friend I should have said something.” I pretended not to hear Mike’s scoff at my use of the word friend. “Beyond that, it would be incredibly inappropriate—and in fact illegal—to comment on the impaneling of a grand jury. I came over here to talk to you about the Crenshaw case, and, if it’s OK, that is what I would still like to do.”

  Chuck closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “As I’m sure the rest of you know by now,” I said, looking at Walker and Johnson, “Judge Lesh suppressed Corbett’s confession. I managed to avoid a motion to dismiss the case outright.” Mike sighed from his seat at the table, and Chuck threw him a correcting glance. “You didn’t get to see Lesh’s reaction, because you rushed out of the courtroom. He may have denied the motion to dismiss, but he made it clear that without the confession he didn’t think much of the State’s case. I agree with him. Long story short, Hanks agreed to flip. I had to give him a rock-bottom deal, but this way we’re assured convictions for both of them.”

  “And what’s a rock-bottom deal?” Mike demanded.

  “Seven years. It’s not that unusual when we need the cooperation.”

  “You mean when you don’t want to go to trial.”

  It was times like these that I wished prosecutors occupied a link somewhere squarely within the chain of command of the police hierarchy. It was never quite clear where we stood with one another when push came to shove. Sure, rookie cops knew not to cross a Russ Frist, but only because they’d eventually feel the heat from someone on high. And baby DAs knew not to rankle a captain, or Duncan would hear about it. But in a straight-up pissing match between Calabrese and me, I didn’t know whether to dress him down or not.

  “That is totally unfair. If anyone should know I’m willing to go out on a limb, it’s you guys. But walking into a trial to crash and burn is not an option. Without that confession, we were screwed.”

  “We lost that confession because you did all Lopez’s work for her. What was up with all those questions? And why didn’t you get her off my back about my IA file?”

  “I didn’t ask you for anything other than the truth, Mike. It’s not my fault the facts were what they were. And I told you she had the complaints. If it weren’t for me, she would have had the entire file; she would have been all over you about your transfer from NYPD.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “This is getting out of control,” Chuck interjected.

  We both ignored him. “It means I left out the part of the file where a precinct commander might have cut a couple of corners to get you into the bureau. I was trying to protect you, and it still wasn’t enough.”

  “Protect me? You don’t know shit about why I moved here, and you’d be smart never to mention it again.” Mike’s voice was louder and shriller than I’d ever heard it. “You cut a deal, and you want to blame it all on me.”

  “I didn’t say anything to blame you, Mike. And, in case you didn’t notice, I took a beating in there at least as much as you did over that entire fucked-up interrogation, so don’t pretend like I don’t have something riding on this too. And, more important than either of our fragile fucking egos is the fact that I’m the one who has to call Percy’s parents tonight and explain to them why a redneck piece of shit like Trevor Hanks will be out by his twenty-fifth birthday.”

  The room was silent. None of them—except Chuck, of course—had seen me truly angry before. I knew from experience what they were seeing: my cheeks reddened, my eyes piercing, my jaw set, and the white cotton of my blouse seriously pitted. I had, in short, lost it in front of them for the first time.

  “OK, then,” I said. “I’ve told you what I came to say. I’ll let you get back to work.”

  Chuck actually caught up with me in the Justice Center staircase. Damn heels.

  “Talk to me, OK? I think you owe me at least that. Do you know how stupid I felt when they asked me about that grand jury notice?”

  “I know. I fucked up, and I’m sorry. But I was so relieved last night when you weren’t mad at me, and I just wanted to be with you and get a hamburger, and—” I felt tears starting to form, threatening to violate my hard-held no-crying-in-the-courthouse-halls rule. “Please, Chuck,” I said quietly, “just please let me go. I promise we’ll talk at home. I’ve got a ton of work I have to wrap up, and then I really do just want to be at home with you.”

  “Well, I won’t be there.” He could tell from my expression that I was confused. “I called Matt to see how he’s holding up. We’re meeting for a beer a little later.”

  “Two cops commiserating about their broken relationships?”

  “We’re not broken, Sam. Talk to me about what’s going on with you, please?”

  “After you get home. I promise.”

  He looked at me with that expression I’d seen so many times now—too many times. It was a look of frustration and helplessness, resulting from his mistaken certainty that he could make everything better if I’d just let him.

  “If you want to do something for me, talk to Mike. He’s prideful, and he’s taking it out on me.”

  “I could say the same thing about you.”

  “That I’m taking it out on you or on Mike?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll see you at home.”

  16

  Heidi showed up at Papa Haydn on 23rd Avenue and Irving at seven o’clock, prompt as usual. To her surprise, Jack Streeter was already waiting for her in the cramped alcove. A relationship with the trusted public face of the police bureau already had its advantages. Heidi had spent countless hours over the years waiting for overage, trust-fund hippie kids.

  “Hey, there you are,” he said, kissing her cheek. “Believe it or not, they’ve actually got the table ready for us, but I was afraid you wouldn’t find me.”

  They followed their hostess past a crowd of waiting bodies to a table adjacent to the front window.

  “I still love this place,” Heidi said. Papa Haydn had been an old standby for years, outlasting many trendy hot spots.

  “Good. It’s important, you know, that the site of our first date still be open years from now.” He clinked his water glass against hers and smiled.

  Heidi didn’t know whether that was the best first-date opening line she’d ever heard or a reason to be wary. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt but to keep one eye open.

  “I never even look at the menu. French onion soup to start, gorganzola pasta for dinner; then I evaluate the good stuff,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the long case of pies, cakes, custards, mousses, tortes, and tarts at the front counter.

  When the waitress stopped at the table, Jack ordered for both of them, throwing in a bottle of Pinot Gris. Again, Heidi was torn between believing she’d found the man she was going to marry or the cheesiest chick magnet on the planet.

  When the wine arrived and two glasses were filled, Jack lifted his for a toast. “To the prettiest crime-beat reporter I’ve ever met.”

  “No, to the best,” she said, tapping her glass against his. Oh, God, she thought, was that confident and sophisticated or just really embarrassing?

  “So how come I’ve never met you before?” Jack asked, setting down his glass.

  “Honestly? Because I’ve been here for three years and never written a single inch of significant type.” Heidi gave him a quick overview of her paper résumé, skipping the part where she could have had a much more powerful position if she’d left it up to her parents.

  “Got it. Not too different than life on patrol, where a quiet guy with a master’s degree in psychology gets less attention than a muscle head who shakes things up on the corner a little more than he should.”

  �
��I take it you’re the psych degree?”

  He filled her in on his credentials. “I thought I was going to be the male Clarice Starling, chasing down serial killers with my dead-on criminal profiles. Then I realized the FBI’s like joining the military; for all I knew, they’d send me off to investigate bank robberies in Alabama. I didn’t want to leave the Northwest—the mountains, the ocean, my family. So I joined the Portland Police. They decided they liked the way I talk,” he said, moving into a exaggerated announcer voice, “and look,” he added, striking an anchorly pose, “and here I am.”

  “Do you miss the police work? I mean, not to say that what you do isn’t police—”

  “I know what you mean. Yeah, I miss the adrenaline sometimes. But I think I do a lot of good as it stands. I control the message, and as you know that can mean everything. Not that I’d ever spin you, of course,” he said, smiling.

  “Of course not. But, I guess I’ve heard it said that cops and reporters can have mutually beneficial relationships.”

  “Exactly.”

  Heidi had no idea whether this was intense flirting or grooming for a future story. “Is that what your friendship with Percy was like?”

  Jack almost spit out his wine laughing. “I was sort of hoping that you and I would have something a little different than what I had with Percy.”

  Heidi blushed. “I’m sorry. It’s just the most obvious topic, given how we met.”

  “Right. So years from now, if we’re happily paired up, we’ll have to come up with another cover story, OK?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Good. But, to answer your question, yeah, I got along real well with Percy. We mostly knew each other through PAL.” He caught Heidi’s quizzical look. “Police Activities League. We do summer camps and after-school programs for kids. The bureau runs it, but we’ve got all kinds of volunteers. Percy was an absolute ten for us during the summers. OK, maybe a nine-point-eight. Man couldn’t play Ping-Pong for shit.”

  “Wow. I don’t think I ever heard him talk about that stuff.”

  Jack smiled. “No, I guess he wouldn’t. Can’t spoil that hard-nosed-reporter image, right?”

  “Is that what he was like in your experience? Hard-nosed?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But reasonable, for the most part. You knew him, so you know he never pulled his punches. But he always at least heard me out on the bureau’s side. And a couple of times, I think he actually toned a story down because of it.”

  “You know those numbers I asked you for today?”

  “Yeah. Did you get them all right?”

  “No problem. Thanks. I asked for them because I think Percy was working on something involving them, but he never wrote the story, from what I can tell. I was hoping to put the pieces together, sort of like a posthumous thing for Percy. Did he ever talk to you about it?”

  “No, but he could get those numbers without going to me. A public information request, maybe, or any of the sources you know the guy had.”

  “Right, I’m just making sure. He might not have even put it in terms of these numbers, but did he say anything having to do with the racial makeup of arrests or anything like that? He seemed really interested in it.”

  Jack shook his head. “Sorry. I can ask around the department—check with some of the guys who knew him—if you want.”

  “No,” she said quickly. “It’s probably better if I figure out a little bit more before I start asking questions. I wouldn’t even know what to ask at this point,” she added, laughing.

  “All right. Just let me know if I can help you.”

  “It would help to know how exactly the information you gave me is compiled. Like, do the officers enter their own numbers, or do they report this stuff from their cars, or—”

  “Boy, you don’t let up, do you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Heidi said, meaning it. “It can take me awhile to get my head out of work sometimes.”

  “I’ll tell you what: I’ll give you whatever you want to know about stop-and-search cards, if you promise to let me ask you a question next.”

  “Deal.”

  “It’s really very complicated,” he said, pretending to be deadly serious. “The officer makes a stop, maybe conducts a search, then fills out a little card that we keep in the patrol cars, saying what kind of stop it was, whether there was a search, and the race of the person involved. Then, at the end of the shift, they all drop their cards in a box in the report writing room. The shift sergeant reviews them—if he or she so chooses—and then delivers them to the records desk. Someone there enters each card into the computer. I hit PRINT, and you pick up your reports. Voilà! We are a well-oiled machine at PPB.”

  “But can you pull the information up by individual officers?”

  “No, just by precinct. The troops were mad enough about having to do it at all. You can imagine if we kept track of this stuff by individual officer.”

  “If the cops don’t like it, why do they bother filling out the cards?”

  “Because their sergeants want to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to. I don’t know where you live—yet.” He smiled, and she smiled back. “But in our hot spots, our most frequent calls aren’t for robbery or rape. They’re for stuff like loitering, graffiti, and street-level drug crimes. That’s the kind of stuff that makes a neighborhood feel unsafe. And, once it feels unsafe, the good guys start hiding inside and the bad guys take over. All the warm, fuzzy talk about community policing aside, our whole philosophy right now is to get our guys out there, talking to these kids on the corners, and stopping and searching them when necessary. The cards were required as part of the racial profiling stuff, but sergeants have been using them as a way to make sure the patrol guys are being proactive instead of sitting around eating doughnuts.”

  It made sense to Heidi. “What about the cards? What happens to those?”

  “Garbage. Or, hopefully, the recycling bin. Once it goes in the computer, we don’t need the card.”

  “What about the officer’s police reports? Would those have the stops on them?”

  “Nope. We don’t write reports for every encounter, just arrests or other incidents that need to be documented. That’s why they passed the law about the cards.”

  “Can the press see those?”

  “Usually, unless the case is sealed during the investigation. We keep a press binder in the records departments at the precincts with copies of recent reports. Your buddy Dan Manning trolls those every week. So did Percy, probably closer to every day.”

  “So I could look through them too.”

  “Just show your ID at the front desk. Are we done now? Can I ask my question?”

  Heidi figured she better stop grilling Jack about record-keeping if she had any hope of a second dinner invitation. “Ask away.”

  “What was it like growing up with a name like Heidi Hatmaker?”

  It was the perfect question. Heidi told him stories about growing up with two sisters and a brother in Woodstock, Vermont, where the closest she ever came to evil was kids on the playground who called her Hearty Fartmaker. When he was still laughing by the time she’d finished the last drop of her French onion soup, she knew it was the beginning of a really good date.

  Heidi was full of energy when she got back to her apartment after dinner. And coffee. And a walk through the Rose Gardens and the sweetest good-night kiss at her car door. There was no way she was going to fall asleep.

  She took another look at the search-record printouts Jack had given her, comparing them to the identical numbers that Percy had recorded in his notes. The trend was clear: The cops were searching plenty of African-Americans in Northeast Precinct, then arresting them at lower rates than their Latino, white, and Asian counterparts. But without access to more information, Heidi had no idea who was responsible for the disparity or what it meant.

  She thought about driving out to Northeast Precinct to look at the press binder of police reports, but it was a little too late to sta
rt a job like that. Then she realized she had been so focused on cracking the numbers Percy had been tracking that she hadn’t gone back to his original notes.

  She had been able to rule out some of Percy’s entries because of their apparent connection to other projects, like the recent team-written article about Nike and Percy’s ongoing coverage of a former mayor’s newly emerged sex scandal. But there were more than a few odds and ends that could relate to Northeast Precinct.

  Meeting dates and time were scribbled in the margins. Names, but apparently only first names: Tom, Peter, Amy. Recently, Percy had added a reference to Powell and Foster streets. Did he meet someone at that intersection? Had something important happened there? Percy had definitely never intended for these notes to be interpreted by anyone other than him. They could relate to anything.

  Heidi did understand some of them, though. Sat. 2:00 Kennedy School. Given its placement in Percy’s book, the note had probably been made in the last month or so. The Kennedy School was the big McMenamin’s complex in North Portland. Chances are, he’d met someone at the bar, in which case she’d never know who it was or whether the meeting related to his investigation. On the other hand, the Kennedy School had meeting rooms.

  She looked up the telephone number and dialed.

  “Hi. I’m wondering if someone there could help me with sort of an odd request. I’ve got a monthly report due to my boss tomorrow where I’m supposed to summarize all of the meetings and conferences and things I’ve gone to, and I’m having a hard time reconstructing a few dates from my calendar. Is there someone there who could help me figure out what meeting I might have had there a few Saturdays ago?”

  After several minutes of the loud background noise of Thursday night partiers, someone else picked up the phone. “Yeah. You need some help with the events calendar?”

  She repeated her cover story.

  “What Saturday was it?”

  “I’m not even sure. Probably about a month ago. I think I’m getting early Alzheimer’s.”

  “Happens to everyone. OK, let’s see here. Actually, we don’t have a lot of Saturday events. It probably wasn’t a kids’ party, right?”