by Frank Zafiro
I stopped there. The Chief sat still, watching me. His face was impassive. After about thirty seconds, he said, “Continue.”
“That’s all I have, sir.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
The Chief steepled his fingers in front of him. “Sergeant, let me get this straight. You used excessive force on this guy’s brother three years ago, and somehow we miss it. According to witnesses, at this restaurant last week, you taunt this guy to the point of attacking you. You hit him with a gun, make racial and anti-gay remarks, and threaten to kill him. Then you disobey the first officers on scene and argue with the first supervisor on scene trying to make heads or tails of the situation. And then, if that weren’t enough, you argue with and insult the IA investigator and all but take a swing at him.” He leaned forward. “After all of that, Sergeant, you have the balls to sit there and give me this song and dance about how it was all self-defense?”
I said nothing. Which was apparently the wrong thing to say.
“Answer me, Sergeant!”
“Sir, yes, sir. That is my position.”
Redness crept up from his collar. “Do you know what the papers are saying about his incident? Do you know what the Hispanic community is saying? You’ve set our relations with them back a decade with this stunt.”
“Stunt?”
“Do you know how long and hard I’ve worked to build bridges with these people?”
“Sir, this guy was not a member of any community other than the criminal community. I didn’t figure we cared much what they thought.”
The redness flooded his cheeks.
“Do you have anything else to say, Sergeant O’Sullivan?” he gritted.
I resisted the urge to tell him to shove it up his ass and shook my head instead.
“Fine,” The Chief said. “I’ll render my decision within the week.”
I rose and left without a word, not looking back.
“How’d it go?” I could hear the concern in her voice.
“Not well,” I told her.
“Did he yell? I heard from Aaron Norris’s wife that he yells in those meetings a lot.”
“That’s the last Chief. This one doesn’t yell much. Aaron Norris’s wife should get her facts straight. Besides, she’s not even his wife anymore. They’re divorced.”
Rebecca didn’t answer right away. She just waited quietly, giving me a chance to fix things.
“Sorry,” I told her, and I was.
“It’s all right,” she said.
And it was. But when we were finished talking, I still sat and listened to that goddamn dial tone and cursed myself.
In the end, I took a ten-day rip.
I thought for sure they’d fire me, giving the way the political winds were blowing. But between Gutierrez’s fingerprints on the gun and Rebecca’s testimony, I guess the waters got muddy enough that they figured I’d win on appeal if they fired me. Plus, I heard from Butch that Gutierrez didn’t do himself any favors in the interview, changing his story several times until it didn’t resemble my account or their precious witnesses.
As far as the Hispanic community goes, The Chief trotted out Gutierrez’s criminal record and the fact that it was his gun and then tossed in my ten-day suspension and they were as satisfied as any advocacy group ever is. After a few days, even the news got tired of reporting that everyone was happy with the outcome.
I took the ten-day rip without a word. Butch wanted to appeal, especially when it included a re-assignment back to patrol, but I told him not to worry about it. Instead, I called Rebecca.
“Can you get two weeks off from work?” I asked her.
“Probably. I can’t really afford it, though.”
“I’ll take care of that part,” I told her. “Can the kids miss school?”
“Miss school? Why?”
“I’m taking all of you to Disneyland.”
“What?”
“I said, I want to take you and the kids to Disneyland.”
She was quiet for a minute, then started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” She kept laughing.
“Rebecca?”
I heard a small snort through the telephone receiver.
“Rebecca? What’s so funny?”
“It’s just…I just imagined you on TV, like those pro athletes, you know?”
I started to smile.
“You know the ones, Connor? Where they win the Super Bowl or whatever and they get on TV and they tell the announcer guy, ‘I just won the Super Bowl and I’m going to Disneyland!’” She dissolved into laughter again.
My smiled widened. She was definitely a cop’s wife with that sense of humor.
“Connor O’Sullivan,” she said, her voice raising in pitch as she tried to control her laughter, “You just took a ten-day suspension. What are you going to do now?”
I gave it to her. She worked hard for the set-up. She deserved it. “I’m going to Disneyland. You and the kids wanna come with?”
She laughed for a while longer. I closed my eyes and saw her face. I imagined the lines near her mouth and could almost see her wiping a tear from her eye. I could smell her hair. I saw the kids laughing and screaming in the warm California sun and that fucker Mickey Mouse waving at us.
I continued to smile, and wait.
When she finished laughing at me, she said, “You know what?”
“What?”
“Save Disneyland. I’ll take the time off from work and get my Mom to watch the kids.”
I paused. “And?”
“And you can take me to Vegas. Adult Disneyland. Just you and me.”
Another pause. “That sounds…good.”
“Yeah. I think so, too.”
I took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay. Well, I’ll let you get back to work.”
“Okay,” she said. “See you tonight?”
“Sure. I’ll come by.”
“Okay.”
There was the moment again. That small window of opportunity that I always let fly by. Not this time, though.
“Rebecca?”
“Yeah?”
“I…”
“I know, Connor. I know.”
“You know?”
“Yes. I’ll see you tonight. You can tell me in person, if you want.” Her voice had softened. “I’ll see you then.”
“See you,” I whispered, and she hung up.
I put the receiver back on the hook and realized I was smiling.
I’m going to take my ten-day rip without filing an appeal.
I’m going to take Rebecca to Vegas.
Maybe I’ll come back.
Maybe I won’t.
Maybe after I tell her that I love her face to face, we’ll decide this shithole town can kiss our asses and we’ll just go somewhere else and get a fresh start.
Maybe.
I just don’t know yet.
GLEN BATES
From the Roof
“See that one there?” Bates said, which struck Romeo McClaren as ridiculous since both of them were looking through binoculars.
“Which one?”
“The one with the short hair, right next to the guy in the blue shirt with the wild-ass afro. See him?”
Romeo adjusted the focus of his binocs. The hot noon sun blared down on them and he sweated heavily underneath his dark, crisp uniform. “Guy in the FUBU sweatshirt?”
“Yeah, the yellow one.”
“I see him.”
“That,” Bates told him, “is Antoine Ballard. He’s been down on The Block since he was nine.”
Romeo lowered his glasses and looked over at Bates. The older, white officer leaned on the brick ledge with his elbows and peered down at the street. The gray at this temples and the slight paunch in his mid-section spoke to his age, but his shoulders were broad and his forearms were thick with corded muscle. Romeo had seen him in action twice since being assigned to the training officer. Bates was a t
ough old bastard.
“Nine? Jesus.”
Bates shook his head. “Jesus didn’t have nothing to do with it, but Antoine’s mother did.” He lowered his glasses and turned his gaze toward Romeo. A toothpick dangled from one corner of his mouth. “She was crack whore back in the early nineties. She was down here all the time, either getting crack or working to get money for crack. Whenever she came calling, she brought Antoine along.”
Romeo shook his head in disgust. “Poor kid.” He thought of his little brother, who was eleven. He couldn’t imagine Kevan down on the drug-infested Block, but of course he was a late-in-life baby and their Moms pretty much spoiled the kid. Hell, Romeo did, too.
“At nine, maybe it was ‘poor kid,’” Bates said. “But Antoine learned quick. He ran errands for the guys slinging dope and pretty soon they realized that if a kid was holding when the cops showed up, they might not even search him.”
“And if they did, no kid is going to get serious time, anyway,” Romeo added.
Bates nodded. “That’s right. But we figured out he was holding for them and he got popped for possession at ten and was introduced to the juvenile system.”
“How’d he get caught?”
“Coupla guys saw it from up here on the roof.”
“You?”
Bates shrugged.
Romeo shook his head in disbelief. “How is it that this here nest never got burned?”
Bates smiled, stretching out the small, jagged scar on his chin. “They don’t ever believe us. I’ve flat out told them I saw them from up on the roof through binoculars. I’ve even testified to it in court. They don’t believe it, though. They just think I’m lying.”
Romeo bridled a little at the word ‘they,’ and wondered, not for the first time, what Bates was thinking when he said it. Having a white training officer was something he knew he’d have to get accustomed to, since there were only half a dozen black cops on the entire River City Police Department. That’s the way it was everywhere in the lily white Pacific Northwest and Romeo was used to it. It didn’t bother him much, unless someone said something like ‘they’ and he got to thinking about it.
He raised his binoculars to his eyes again and watched Antoine and the wild-afroed associate. He tried to imagine the twenty-year old in the FUBU shirt and sagging, oversized jeans as a ten year old victim and couldn’t.
“He looks like a player now,” Romeo said.
“He thinks so,” Bates said. “And I suppose he is. He worked his way up the food chain. Still, he’s too stupid or maybe too greedy to get someone else to sell the shit. He just stands on the corner himself, taking all the risk.”
“Maybe he should take some business classes over at the community college,” Romeo joked weakly. “Learn how to maximize profits.”
“I think he’s got that part down.”
Romeo watched for a while longer. Antoine stood on the corner, leaning casually against the stop sign. His demeanor was more than calm; it was lazy. The wild-afroed kid with him paced back and forth, moving his body in dance rhythm to music Romeo couldn’t hear.
The two police officers watched in silence for a while. Romeo wondered how much longer the surveillance would last. Their shift was half over already, and all they’d done was eat breakfast and come up to the roof. He wanted to get back into the patrol car and chase after some bad guys. He was barely out of the academy and the thrill he felt every time he slid behind the wheel of the police cruiser was like nothing he’d experienced before. Sitting on a rooftop watching drug-dealers through binoculars wasn’t quite the same.
A car pulled to the curb next to Antoine and he ambled over and leaned in. There was a brief discussion and a quick exchange. Romeo was surprised at how fast the hand movements were.
“That’s it, right?” he asked Bates. “Now we can arrest him?”
The silence that came from Bates caused Romeo to lower his binoculars again and look over at the training officer. Bates stared at him with the expression of a frustrated teacher.
“Arrest him for what?” he asked the Rookie after a long moment.
“Dealing dope,” Romeo said.
“What’s your probable cause?”
Romeo gave him a confused look. “You said he was a dope dealer, right?”
Bates nodded.
“Convicted, too?”
“Twice, but never as an adult.”
Romeo shrugged. “Still, there’s history there. And we just watched him make a deal down on The Block, which everyone knows is where the drug trade is in this city.”
Bates didn’t answer, only continued to stare at him. Romeo fidgeted and licked his lips.
“That’s it?” Bates finally asked.
Romeo nodded.
Bates shook his head. “Sorry, son, that dog don’t hunt.”
Romeo clenched his jaw at the word ‘son,’ but said nothing.
“First off,” Bates said, “how do you know it was a drug transaction? Did you actually see the drugs? He could have sold that guy a recipe for brownies.”
In spite of himself, Romeo smiled.
“What’s so funny?” Bates demanded, a slight edge to his voice.
Romeo chuckled. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”
“Thinking what?”
“That if he were selling brownies, they were probably the special kind with a little chronic baked right in.”
Bates didn’t laugh and he narrowed his eyes. “Second,” he continued, “if you make an arrest off of supposing it was drugs he sold and then you search him and find the drugs, any defense attorney worth a damn will get it thrown out.”
“Why?”
“Fruit of the poisonous tree,” Bates told him. “You didn’t learn that in the Academy?”
Romeo nodded, a little dejected. “Yeah, we did.”
Bates twirled his index finger. “Go on. What is it?”
Romeo sighed and recited, “If we enter someplace without legal standing and then we find evidence there, the evidence is not admissible because the search was not proper.”
“Right. And that applies to people, too.”
“I know,” Romeo said. “I just figured that the arrest would be legal here, so the search would be, too.”
“What do you need for an arrest?” Bates asked.
“Probable cause.”
“Right. And what you have here is not probable cause. It’s probably cause, though.”
“Probably cause?”
Bates cracked a smile. “Relax, Rook. It’s an old joke.”
Romeo nodded and forced a smile back. He didn’t like being called ‘Rook,’ but when he asked around, he found that Bates called all of his recruits that.
“So how do we solve this little dilemma?” Bates asked him.
Romeo thought about it for a while, watching Antoine through the binoculars again. Finally, he said, “Well, I guess it would pump things up some if we saw him make more than one contact.”
“You guess?”
“It would.”
“Good,” Bates answered.
Another car came along five minutes later and the brief contact at the window repeated itself, complete with the swift hand exchange. Three minutes later, a third car pulled up for another sale.
“That’s it,” Romeo said. “Let’s go arrest him.”
Bates shook his head.
“Why not? That’s three contacts inside of fifteen minutes. Along with everything else, that’s enough PC to arrest him.”
“You’re right,” Bates told him.
Romeo hesitated. “If I’m right, then let’s arrest him.”
“No.”
Romeo sighed. “Why not?”
Bates moved the toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. Romeo felt a tickle of frustration high in his chest.
“You want him to go to jail or to prison, Rook?”
“What?” Romeo looked at him, confusion mixing with his frustration.
“You go down there now
in your pressed, new uniform and shiny new badge, and arrest Antoine, you’re just wasting your time.”
Romeo clenched his jaw. “How’s that? I’d be arresting a drug—”
“Yeah, you would.” Bates removed his toothpick, examined the wet, chewed end and tossed it over the side of the building. “I ever tell you the story about the young bull and the old bull?”
Romeo pressed his lips together and shook his head.
Bates reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a fresh toothpick. “It’s an old story,” he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard it.”
Romeo didn’t respond. He wished Bates would get to the point.
“There was this old bull and a young bull and they’re up on top of a hill,” Bates explained. “Down below there’s a dozen or two cows, just grazing away. The young bull says to the old bull, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s run down there real fast and fuck one of those cows.’ The old bull shakes his head and says, ‘I’ve got a better idea. Let’s walk down there…and fuck them all.’”
Bates watched him as Romeo processed the information.
“You see?”
Romeo shrugged. “Sorta.”
“If we go down there now, we have enough PC to arrest Antoine. We’ll get his dope and he’ll go to jail. Everyone down there will see you’re a bad-ass rookie, built like a linebacker and taking no shit. That’s all fine and good. But the case isn’t going to get signed up by the prosecutor, so he’ll go free. He won’t go to prison.”
“Why?”
“Say the prosecutor has a hundred cases. He can take maybe two of them to court. Those are gonna be against his high profile dealers. After that, he has time to work out a plea for another thirty, maybe forty. That means sixty of them have got to go.”
“Sixty?”
“Facts of life, Rook. Sixty percent of them just die on the vine. But if we take our time and pile on the contacts before we head down there, there’s no way the probable cause gets questioned and maybe this case moves into the forty percent. Now you see?”
Romeo nodded reluctantly. “That’s messed up.”
“Welcome to the real world.”
They watched Antoine from the rooftop for another thirty minutes. He made four more contacts in that time and each time Romeo considered telling Bates he figured that they had sufficient probable cause to make an arrest. But he hesitated.