“That’s not true, mother. I talk to you all the time.”
“Yes, but only because I call you.”
“That counts.”
“Counts, shmounts. If I didn’t call you, for all I know, you could be lying there dead in that, that apartment of yours.”
“It’s not an apartment, Mother. It’s the entire top floor of a house.”
“It’s very depressing, is what it is. But look, I don’t want to upset you. Why don’t we change the subject, okay?”
“Okay.”
“So, sweetie, what’s new? Are you seeing anyone special these days? We’re not getting any younger, you know?”
Which is precisely why God created the answering machine in the first place.
“Hello, Terry, you there?” The voice was decidedly that of a man. No deeper than her mother’s, and none of that endearing raspy quality. But definitely a man’s. “It’s Neil, Neil Witt.”
Her boss. Another reason God must have had in mind.
“Pick up if you’re there, Terry. There’s something important breaking, and I need you to get on it right away.”
She picked up.
“Hello, Neil.”
“Terry, you’re there. Thank God.”
Which only suggested that He was playing both sides of the fence today.
“This better be good,” she told him.
“It is good,” he said. “I need you to get over to the town hall in South Chatham right away. The state police have just picked up some guy for sex abuse. It seems the victim is his own six-year-old daughter.”
“Sex abuse? This sounds like a crime story to me.”
“Okay, it’s a crime story. But didn’t you tell me you’d do ‘From the Police Blotter’ until Tom Grady got back?”
“Right,” Theresa admitted. “But you said that was just phone calls. Come on, Neil, it’s me you’re talking to, remember? I do garden shows, pet adoptions, antique fairs, human-interest stuff. I don’t do crime.”
“Well, you do until Tom gets back.”
If Theresa Mulholland’s instructions were to get over to the South Chatham Town Hall right away, the state police had other business with Stephen Barrow before they’d get around to taking him there. Under their procedures, set out in considerable detail in a thick volume (that, despite its catchy title, The New York State Police Procedure Manual, Revised and Annotated Edition XIV (1994), is unlikely to make the New York Times bestseller list anytime soon), they first had to process their prisoner. This could only be accomplished at their nearest facility, which, in this case, was the K-Troop barracks, down in Claverack. Which meant that, following his arrest, the first thing Stephen Barrow would be doing was going for a ride. And, sitting in the backseat of the black Crown Victoria, his wrists handcuffed painfully behind him, it promised to be a pretty uncomfortable ride at that.
The tall, thin man waited until the other one had strapped Penny into the Renegade, started it, and pulled up behind them. Then, convoy style, they pulled out of the parking lot.
“Can you tell me what I’m being charged with?” Stephen asked.
“Sex abuse of some sort.”
“For doing what?”
“Better for you, you don’t say anything, sir.”
“But I have no idea what this is about.”
“I’m pretty sure,” said the man, “that it’s about them pitchers.”
Pitchers. Stephen tried his best to make sense of that. He pretended it was a crossword-puzzle clue, tried to come up with a synonym. Pitchers, as in vases? Madison Avenue admen? Baseball pitchers?
“Pitchers,” he said aloud, hoping the sound of the word might somehow reveal some secret meaning that hadn’t yet occurred to him.
“Snapshots,” said the man. “The ones you just picked up back there in the store.”
“Pictures!” he shouted, and realized immediately that he’d insulted his captor, probably the worst thing he could have done. But his mind was already on the pictures, the photographs. What on earth did they have to do with sex abuse? He tried to visualize the prints, tried to remember what they’d be of. They had to be mostly shots of Penny - his photos almost always were - playing, laughing, doing silly stuff, whatever. They’d been out hiking, hadn’t they been? Then back home-
Stephen felt his jaw drop open. The bathtub . . . the shampoo . . . the unicord hairdo . . . the mooning1
“Oh my God,” said Stephen Barrow. And laughed out loud. “That’s really it?”
Much later, Stephen would recall allowing his body to relax just a bit at that point, to shift his cuffed hands slightly to one side and let his weight slump against the imitation leather seatback of the Crown Victoria. And the thought he had went something like this: Even though he’d known all along that he hadn’t actually done anything, it had nevertheless occurred to him that whatever it was they thought he’d done -albeit mistakenly - might be so serious that it could take a little time before it got straightened out. But this - this was nothing. This was a joke.
It would be the last time he would think that way.
The booking process took place in a basement-level set of rooms collectively called the Prisoner Processing Unit, or PPU. Stephen was led, still handcuffed behind his back, to a holding cell, where finally the cuffs were removed. He was patted down by the tall, thin one and told to empty his pockets. His watch was taken from him. His shoelaces were pulled from his shoes. He was locked in a six-foot-square cage with metal bars. There was no window, no chair, no lightbulb. A metal bench protruded from the back wall. That was it.
“What’s happening with my daughter?” he asked a gray-uniformed trooper who sat at a desk across the room. He looked like he was still in his teens. I thought they had to be at least twenty-one, Stephen caught himself thinking.
“Don’t worry,” the trooper told him, “she’s okay now.”
Don’t worry, be happy!
Stephen didn’t like the way he’d said now. “Can I see her?” he asked. There didn’t seem to be any harm in asking. What did they say? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And there didn’t seem any downside to it. The worst that could happen was that he’d be told no.
Or so he thought.
“You know what you can do?” the trooper called out to him.
Something in his tone told Stephen that the question was somewhat rhetorical, and that the answer was about to follow.
“You can shut the fuck up, is what you can do, you fucking pre-vert.”
After about forty-five minutes, an older trooper, one with gray hair, came into the processing area and spoke to Stephen through the bars of his cell.
“Mr. Barrow?”
“Yes.” Stephen suppressed the urge to make some clever remark about his being the only one in there, not to mention the only one in sight who wasn’t wearing a uniform.
“Captain said for me to ask you who you want us to call to come pick up your daughter.”
Pick her up?
“Can’t she just wait here until we’re finished?” Stephen asked. “Until I can take her home?”
The two troopers shared a chuckle.
“How long is processing going to take?” Stephen asked.
“Oh, processing isn’t going to take long at all,” said the gray-haired one. “Hour, hour and a half, tops.”
“Well?”
“Well, the thing is, when we’re done with you here, we gotta take you back up to South Chatham, bring you before the town judge there.”
“You mean they spent half an hour driving me down here,” said Stephen, “so you could spend another half an hour driving me back up where we started from?”
“Like they told you, you gotta get processed.”
“But after that, I’ll be going home, right?”
“Not unless you got the money to make bail,” said the young trooper.
Bail?
“What kind of bail?”
“Sex abuse?” said the gray-haired one. “Six-year-old girl? If I were a
betting man, I’d start at, say, 50,000. Whaddaya think, Tommy?”
“Me? I think any bail’s too low for a pre-vert.”
“So who do we call to come pick up the girl?”
Stephen tried his best to focus on that. But he was having a hard time getting past the image of standing before a judge and having bail set. For the first time, it was beginning to dawn on him that he might not be going home at all that night.
“Captain said if you don’t come up with a suitable relative of the child, we’ll have to call BCW.”
“What’s BCW?”
“Bureau of Child Welfare,” explained Gray-hair. “They’ll pick the kid up, put her in a shelter until . . .” His voice drifted off.
“Until what?”
“Until they can place her with a foster family.”
Foster family?
“You can call her mother, I guess.” Stephen couldn’t think of anyone else.
“We’ve been trying that,” said Gray-hair. “Haven’t been able to reach her. Any other ideas?”
Stephen looked at his watch, remembered they’d taken it from him. “What time is it?” he asked.
“One-thirty.”
He had no idea where Ada would be at one-thirty on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of February. Skiing, probably, or shopping. “I’ve got her cell-phone number,” he said. “It’s in my wallet.”
The young one retrieved Stephen’s wallet from on top of his desk. “Does she know about any of this?” he asked.
“Any of what?”
“That she married a pedophile.” Only he pronounced it pee-dophile, which prompted Stephen to wonder if the trooper might possibly have had his perversions mixed up.
Some of those who later listened to Stephen Barrow’s account of the hours following his arrest would remark that they found many of his reactions to the events surprisingly clinical and detached. One observer would be moved to describe his affect as “flat,” meaning that, considering the circumstances in which he suddenly found himself, Stephen seemed to lack a level of animation appropriate to the situation. Another evaluator (for in time, there would be many observers, evaluators, and other professionals asked to offer their opinions on the subject, as well as a myriad of other subjects) would go so far as to suggest that Stephen may well have been in a state of shock that first afternoon, so traumatized had he been by the arrest.
Stephen would see things somewhat differently. “Remember,” he would tell one interviewer, who had suggested that his early reactions bordered on the bizarre, “I’m a writer by trade. I spend a lot of my time observing, analyzing. My livelihood depends upon my being able to notice things like humor, absurdity, and irony in even the most catastrophic of events.
“I was off the wall when they arrested me, just like anyone else would have been. But at first, I had to remain calm for Penny. If she’d seen me freaking out, there’s no telling what it might have done to her. So I had to seem as though I was in control, even if I wasn’t. Then, later on, even as I was going through this truly frightening experience, at the same time there was a surrealness to it, a Kafkaesque quality that kept part of me detached from it. Like when the troopers and investigators kept saying things meant to scare me out of my wits. But each time they came to the most menacing part of what they were saying, they’d somehow manage to mispronounce a word, or use the wrong word altogether. And each time that happened, the writer in me couldn’t help but notice it. In spite of myself, I kept on seeing the humor, the absurdity of the situation. After a while, I found there was a part of myself that was actually enjoying each new intimidation, just so I could find the silliness in it. You know, sort of the way you listen to a joke, trying to figure out the punch line in advance?
“Who knows? Maybe it was my way of protecting myself from the insanity of it all. I mean, if I’d taken every dire prediction to heart, I’d have ended up believing I was never going to go home, that I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison, and that my daughter was going to become - what do they call it? - a ward of the state. That’s one of the things they told me. If I’d believed that, really believed that, I’d have killed myself right then. With or without my shoelaces.”
Whatever it was, Stephen’s sense of detachment stayed with him for the duration of his processing. He was taken out of the holding cell so that he could be photographed and fingerprinted. He’d always thought that the photographing process was done professionally, that the creation of all those mug shots you saw was performed by trained technicians using sophisticated machinery. Instead, the young trooper handed him a wooden placard with little plastic letters and numbers slid into it, movie-marquee style, and told him to hold it beneath his chin, while the trooper aimed a huge Polaroid camera that looked older than he was. Twice the flash failed; then they ran out of film. Stephen couldn’t help wishing he had been so unlucky the day he’d photographed his daughter.
The fingerprinting was accomplished without incident, and while Stephen was trying to wash the ink off his hands, the tall, thin man who’d arrested him and later driven him to the barracks reappeared.
“When you’re finished,” he told Stephen, “come on in here and have a seat.” With that, he motioned to a door marked INTERVIEW ROOM. Stephen dried his hands; the remaining ink would take the better part of a week to fade.
The interview room was an enclosure, maybe ten by ten, with a table and chairs. Set into one wall was a large mirror, which Stephen right away decided was one of those that allowed people on the other side of it to observe them. Only he couldn’t remember the name for it.
“Do you call that a two-way mirror,” he asked, “or a oneway mirror?”
“I just call it a mirror,” the tall, thin one said, in perfect deadpan.
Sure. Or was it possible he really didn’t know? Could it be that he’d never been in the adjoining room? That he honestly thought it was just a mirror?
“I’m Investigator Stickley,” the man said. “I need to ask you some questions. But first I’m going to advise you of your rights.” With that, he proceeded to read a list of questions from a piece of paper. Each time he read a question - for example, did Stephen understand that he had a right to remain silent? - he looked up and waited for Stephen to answer “yes” or “no.” Each time Stephen answered, Investigator Stickley wrote something on the paper. When he was finished, he slid the paper across the table and asked Stephen to read it and sign it if the inked-in responses were accurate. They were, and Stephen signed it.
The first part of the interview dealt with what Stickley called pedigree questions. How old was Stephen? What was his date of birth? His address? His Social Security number? How tall was he? How much did he weigh? Was he employed? And so forth.
Stephen answered them all, and Stickley noted each of his answers on one or the other of several printed forms. Then, the pedigree portion of the interview apparently over, he moved to the next phase. Stephen caught himself wondering what the second part was called, what the opposite of pedigree was. Mixed breed, perhaps?
“Whose film was that,” Stickley began, “that you picked up at the Drug Mart?”
“That actually wasn’t film,” Stephen explained. “You drop the film off. What I was picking up was prints.”
“I see,” said Stickley. “Whose prints?”
“Mine.”
“And who had earlier dropped off the-”
“Film.”
“-the film?”
“I had,” said Stephen.
“And who had taken the-”
“Pictures?” In spite of everything, there was a part of Stephen that was getting into the absurdity of this.
“Right. The pictures.”
“I had, most of them. I think my daughter might have taken a few of them. If you want to show me the prints, I’m pretty sure I can tell you who took which.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Which meant Stickley didn’t have the prints anymore. “How about the ones of your daughter in the ba
thtub? Who took those?”
“I did.”
“When you took those, were you aware that your daughter was naked?”
“Excuse me?”
“When you took the shots of your daughter standing in the tub and, uh, bending over like that, did you know she had no clothes on?”
“Of course I did.”
Stickley wrote for several minutes without looking up. Evidently, this was the essay part of the exam; the pedigree portion had been the short-answer part.
“Okay,” he said finally.
“That’s it?” Didn’t he want to know the circumstances of why Stephen had taken the bathtub shots, the context? Wasn’t he interested in whose idea it had been that Penny bend over and stick her tongue out at the camera? Didn’t he care that those were no more than three or four isolated shots at the end of an entire roll of film?
“That’s it,” said Investigator Stickley.
“But don’t you want to know what was going on when I took the pictures?”
Stickley shook his head slowly, from side to side. “Nope,” he said. “Better off saving that kinda stuff for your lawyer.”
My lawyer?
Until that moment, until he heard the word spoken aloud by Investigator Stickley, the thought had never occurred to Stephen Barrow that he was going to need a lawyer. So certain had he been that this whole thing was going to simply go away, vanish, as soon as everyone realized their mistake, that he’d not once thought to himself, I’m going to need to get myself a lawyer. And as strange as that may sound at first, to hear Stephen explain this lapse makes a certain amount of sense.
“There were at least three separate times that day that I was absolutely convinced that whoever these men were who’d arrested me, they’d made some sort of a mistake, and I’d be let go within the hour, as soon as it was cleared up. I felt that way when I first got arrested inside the Drug Mart; I was sure they had the wrong guy. Then I heard it was for some kind of sex abuse, and I knew they had the wrong guy. Finally, when they told me it was about the photographs, I realized it was me they were talking about, but I refused to believe they could really be serious about charging me with something for that.
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