Best Intentions

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Rounding out the foursome was Captain Henry Coopersmith, the commanding officer of the state police barracks. Coopersmith was a former Marine Corps drill sergeant whose chief claim to fame was that he’d once collected a $1,000 wager by performing 100 pushups with three live howitzer shells strapped to his back. If he’d gained forty pounds since then (pretty much compensating for the removal of the howitzer shells), at fifty-three he still cut an imposing figure, with his ramrod-straight posture and his silver-gray hair.

  The command post was connected to the field operations team by both two-way radio and land line. The radio was tuned to the same dedicated-frequency channel as the unit worn by Investigator Todd Stickley. The result was that Stickley’s transmitter operated as an open mike, sending everything he said, and most of what was audible in his immediate vicinity, not only to his partner in the unmarked car parked outside the South Chatham Drug Mart, but to the command post, as well.

  Thus was the foursome able to monitor the situation from a distance, while at the same time being ready to leap into action as soon as any was called for. Or, as Captain Cooper-smith put it, “We’re loaded for bear!”

  A remark that immediately produced a nervous tic in Ed Sprague’s facial muscles.

  The South Chatham Drug Mart was actually the second stop that Stephen and Penny Barrow made that morning in their hunt for Cheracol. They’d already tried the Eckerd in nearby Chatham, without luck.

  Stephen found a parking spot for the Renegade that turned out to be less than 100 feet from the unmarked state police car idling in the same lot. But the investigator behind the wheel of that car was busy monitoring the radio, hadn’t been provided a description of the Renegade (even though it was available from the same Department of Motor Vehicles that had supplied the photo from Stephen’s driver’s license), and therefore failed to spot the father and daughter who walked into the store.

  Once inside, they wandered around until they found the cold-remedy section, which was toward the pharmacy in the back of the store. At one point, Penny noticed a tall, thin man who seemed to be talking to his own chest. Only a week earlier, her teacher had introduced the class to a child’s version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It was all but required reading for schoolchildren in New York’s Hudson Valley region.

  “Is that Ichabod Crane?” she asked her father now.

  Stephen studied the man, who studiously averted his eyes. “Could be,” he said. “Either that, or some other kind of crane.” Then, realizing the nuance might be lost on a six-year-old, he added, “A crane’s a tall, skinny bird.”

  “Duh,” said Penny.

  There was, alas, no Cheracol to be found. Penny drifted over to the toy aisles and was about to zero in on the Barbie section, but Stephen steered her back up front. And they’d almost made it out the door when something stopped Stephen. Although he couldn’t later pinpoint exactly what it was, it may have been nothing more than the familiarity of the checkout counter. I was just here yesterday, he would remember recalling. And from that thought flowed the next: I dropped off a roll of film. The second thought stopped him in his tracks and prompted him to fish into the pockets of his jeans, the same jeans he’d been wearing the day before, and most of the week, for that matter.

  Writers are like that.

  And sure enough, there it was: the little stub from the envelope, the receipt he’d need to pick up the developed photos.

  “Hold up!” he called to his daughter - who was by that time nearly out the door - loudly enough to cause the tall, thin man to speak even more excitedly to his chest, and to reach nervously toward his waistband. What a weirdo, thought Stephen. He caught Penny’s eye and motioned her to come back and get into line with him.

  “bingo!” came the transmission from the Stick to the undercover car in the parking lot outside. “Bingo!” heard the fearsome foursome at the command post in Jim Hall’s living room. All ears waited for details.

  “The subject is on the checkout line,” they heard next.

  The rest, as they like to say, is history. Stephen and Penny Barrow stood on line until it was their turn at the register. Stephen handed the stub to the clerk, a plump woman with gray hair. She thumbed through the tray of envelopes until she came across the one that matched the number on the stub, noticed the red piece of paper wrapped around it with a rubber band, and remembered the instructions given her by the tall, thin man who’d shown her his badge that morning and scared her half to death. She handed the envelope to the customer.

  “That’ll be $12.95,” she told him.

  She took his $20 bill, made change, and gave him his copy of the register receipt. Then, just as she’d been instructed to do, she hit the bell on the counter three times. It was one of those old hotel bells they used to use to call bellhops, something she was old enough to remember.

  She need not have rung. As soon as Stephen stepped away from the counter, envelope in his hand, the Stick was on top of him, grasping him firmly just above his right elbow.

  “Huh?” said Stephen Barrow. The comment would typify his reaction to a large majority of the events that were about to unfold that morning.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to step outside with me,” said the tall, thin man.

  “What for?”

  “You’re under arrest.”

  “Huh?” said Stephen Barrow again.

  “You’re under arrest,” the man repeated.

  It wasn’t that Stephen hadn’t heard him the first time; it was just that the remark had been so utterly incomprehensible to him that he had trouble absorbing it. Had he been driving, for example, he could have understood an officer’s pulling him over for some violation, real or imagined. Had he pushed ahead in line, or caused some sort of disturbance, or argued over the amount of his change - if any of those things had happened, he could have at least conceived that there was some misunderstanding on the part of the man, whom he was willing to assume was a police officer of some sort. But none of those things had happened: He’d waited his turn in line, caused no disturbance, and accepted his change without even counting it.

  Then it occurred to him, and he smiled with relief. “You mean, from when I said, ‘Hold up,’ right? I’m sorry, I simply meant ‘Wait up!’ The thing is, I just didn’t want my daughter here wandering out into the parking lot without me. It wasn’t that I was going to hold up the store or anything like that. See?”

  But if the man saw, his only reaction was to talk to his chest again. “He’s got the girl with him,” he said. “Don’t start shooting or nuthin’.”

  Shooting? Later on, Stephen would remember experiencing the bizarre feeling that he’d somehow been trapped on the set of a movie, a B movie being acted out all around him in slow motion. At one point, he actually caught himself thinking, Who could that guy possibly have hiding down inside his sweatshirt?

  But as disoriented as Stephen Barrow may have felt, it was, of course, no movie scene that was being played out around him. With Investigator Stickley holding him firmly by one arm, and a bewildered Penny in tow, he was led out of the store and into the parking lot. Stickley’s partner had by that time climbed out of the Ford Crown Victoria, in time to aim a camera at the three of them and snap away. Although the resulting image would be slanted and slightly out of focus, it would nevertheless accomplish its objective: Magnified, it would catch Stephen Barrow still grasping in his right hand the envelope containing the photos he’d just been handed by the clerk at the checkout counter.

  Or, as District Attorney Jim Hall would proudly announce to anyone who was willing to listen, “Right there, I got me all I need. Proof of possession is what I got.”

  A remark that may have struck some who didn’t know Hall as just a bit personal.

  Theresa Mulholland hung up the phone, completing her eleventh conversation in the past hour. “Coming Events” was coming along, but it was proving to be every bit as big a pain in the butt as she’d imagined it would be. The Ladies’ Auxiliary - what they were
auxiliary to, she had absolutely no idea - was holding a tea. The Canaan Volunteer Fire Department was hosting a Sunday breakfast fundraiser. Auctions were scheduled at Mike Fallon’s down in Copake, and Meisner’s over in New Lebanon. The Catamount Ski Resort was having a February Festival.

  Theresa was beginning to understand what had driven Tom Grady back to the bottle.

  Still, it had only taken her an hour, and she already had enough stuff to fill a column and a half, even more if she fluffed it up a bit. What worried her, though, were all the events she hadn’t found out about. How could she be sure she wasn’t leaving anything out? She thought about calling Neil Witt, the managing editor who’d talked her into taking the assignment. She even thought about trying to reach Tom Grady himself. But for all she knew, he was in rehab somewhere, locked up in a rubber room, folding paper airplanes.

  She reached for another Tums - she’d stopped counting at five - and popped it into her mouth. “High in calcium,” announced the wrapper. Keep it up, she was going to have the strongest bones in Columbia County. She bit the thing in half and winced at the bitter, chalky taste.

  “‘Chalky’ is a consistency,” she could hear her boss correcting her, “not a taste.”

  Well, fuck you, Neil Witt.

  And you, too, Tom Grady.

  As far as “From the Police Blotter,” was concerned, she could only imagine what a nightmare that was going to be.

  Over in South Chatham, Stephen Barrow’s nightmare was just beginning. As soon as he’d had his photo snapped (he assumed, wrongly, by a newspaper photographer), he heard the arresting officer - the tall thin one who still had him by the upper arm - say something to him.

  What he said was this: “The envelope, please.”

  Which only threw Stephen further off balance. Having failed to make the connection between the envelope and his arrest, he’d proceeded to forget completely about the envelope, despite the fact that it was still clutched in his hand.

  So when the tall, thin man said, “The envelope, please,” Stephen had no idea what he was talking about. All he could think, as a matter of fact, was of the Oscars, when the presenter of an award, having read off the list of nominees, was about to announce the winner.

  “The envelope, please,” is what they always said.

  Which only added further to Stephen’s notion that he’d been suddenly and inexplicably transposed into some minor character playing a role in an unfolding movie scene. And now, as if that hadn’t been unsettling enough, here he was at the Academy Awards.

  For as upset as Stephen Barrow was - after all, he’d just heard the words, “You’re under arrest,” unmistakably directed at him - he felt no overt panic yet, no sense that his life was about to implode. All that would come later, to be sure. But for the moment, Stephen could only feel as though he were floating, floating through some strange movie he couldn’t comprehend. So even when the tall, thin one pried the envelope loose from his hand, Stephen stood there dumbly, still failing to make the connection.

  And it’s likely he would have remained in his fog had he not overheard, as though the words were coming to him from across a great distance, a request the tall, thin one made of the other one, the one Stephen had thought was a newspaper photographer, but who was evidently another cop of some sort.

  “Find out what we’re supposed to do with the little girl, willya?”

  Do with the little girl. The little girl was his daughter. Slowly it dawned on him that this was about him, about them, and that it was serious business.

  “What do you mean,” he heard himself asking, “do with the little girl?”

  But the tall, thin one seemed to look right through Stephen as though he weren’t there. “Find out,” he instructed the other one again.

  A small crowd had by this time begun to gather in the parking lot, and now Stephen found himself - and therefore Penny as well, since he continued to hold her hand - steered over toward the same black car that the photographer cop had gotten back into. They ended up right against the side of the car, so close to it that they could hear the photographer cop speaking into a radio microphone.

  “Whaddaya want us to do with the girl?” he was asking. “Keep her separate from him?”

  It was right about then that Stephen Barrow found himself yanked back to the present.

  District Attorney Hall sat hunched over the Motorola unit they’d set up in his living-room command post, the other three members of his team surrounding him in football-huddle fashion.

  “Of course I want you to keep her separate,” he barked into the microphone. “This is a sex-abuse case, and she’s the victim.”

  “Well, whaddawe do with her?” the staticky voice in the radio asked. “We didn’t bring CPS or anything.”

  CPS was Child Protective Services, the county agency that took temporary custody of minors when their parents were arrested for abuse or neglect. Apparently no one had had the foresight to alert them ahead of time. Which was an understandable oversight, seeing as the general level of expectation shared by the authorities was that the perp would most likely be keeping the victim chained up in his basement, subsisting on bread and water.

  It was around then that Henry Coopersmith reached for the mike. Coopersmith was the commanding officer of K Troop, the regional division of the state police that covered the area.

  “This is Captain Coopersmith,” he announced. “Did the subject and the girl arrive at the set in a vehicle?” Only he pronounced the last word vee-hickle.

  There was a pause, followed by another staticky transmission. “Uh, we don’t know, sir.”

  “Why don’tcha ask him?” It wasn’t for nothing that Coopersmith had risen through the ranks to his present status.

  There was another pause, then, “That’s affirmative, sir.”

  “Good. One of you transport Mr. Barrow in the cruiser. The other of you bring the victim in Mr. Barrow’s vee-hickle. You copy?”

  “Ten-four, sir.”

  “And they call themselves investigators,” grumbled Coopersmith, handing the microphone back to Hall. “That there pair couldn’t investigate a busted taillight.”

  Standing next to the black car in the parking lot, Stephen Barrow was, of course, able to hear the entire conversation, spared only Captain Coopersmith’s appraisal of his field troops. The phrases he did hear hit him like a series of electric shocks. Keep her separate. . . . This is a sex-abuse case. . . . She’s the victim. Next the tall, thin one was asking Stephen if he’d driven there, and would he kindly point out his car to them, and hand over the keys.

  And then they were taking Penny away from him, prying her little fingers from his.

  “What’s happening, Daddy?” she was asking, looking up into his face and expecting him to be able to explain things, as he always could.

  But he couldn’t explain things; he had no answer for her; in fact, he had absolutely no idea what was going on, or why. All he could do was kneel down so that he was more or less her height, look her in her eyes, and say, “You do what they say, Cookie. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Promise?” Her eyes tearing up.

  One of Stephen Barrow’s cardinal rules of parenting was to never promise anything unless it was completely within his control to make good on it. As a result, he rarely promised his daughter anything. Stephen was, remember, a believer in the inevitability of traffic jams, flat tires, and random acts of God and Nature. And the last thing he wanted was to promise Penny something and then have it not happen. Yet now, Stephen held his daughter’s hands with his own (the tall, thin man having displayed the good sense to release both father and daughter for this moment of parting), looked into her eyes, and spoke to her in as calm a voice as he could possibly muster.

  “Yes,” he told her. “I promise.”

  Then he straightened up and watched as the photographer cop reached for Penny’s hand, was firmly rebuffed, and had to settle for placing a hand on her shoulder before leading Stephen Barrow
’s child away from him.

  The next thing Stephen would remember hearing - for tears that had been welling up in his eyes now spilled over, making it difficult for him to see - was a ratcheting noise, a noise that reminded him of the sound made by a fishing reel when something big has suddenly taken the bait and tried to run with it. He felt his arms being moved to his sides, and his hands being pulled together behind his back, and he realized he was being handcuffed. Then he was being bent over forward and helped into the backseat of the car, one hand pushing him forward, another pressing down on the top of his head to keep it from hitting the door frame.

  Just like in the movies.

  Theresa Mulholland decided to let the phone ring. You answered it on a Saturday, you deserved whatever you got. It could be a telemarketer, a crank call, an insurance salesman, for God’s sake. Worse yet, it could even be her mother.

  “So, tell me, Theresa, talk to me. You never talk to me, you know? I mean, I’m only your mother.”