by Rich, A. J.
Billie told me to get inside. With a last rush of adrenaline, and everything to lose, I moved to the door of the cage, and just before slamming it behind me, I yanked Billie’s purse off her shoulder, breaking the leather strap.
I had the gun. I also had the key ring. I locked myself inside.
There was an odd lull—the other dogs in the ward stopped barking as though they sensed a shift in command.
The dog beside me was standing, taller than I was in my crouch. I had enough room to stand up and move a couple of feet back from the door. I said, “Good dog,” over and over, a mantra. Gotti was a large brindle pit bull. His ears had been cropped too close to his head and had a yeasty smell, evidence of infection.
I slipped my hand into Billie’s purse and closed it around the handle of the gun. But the dog did not attack. I reached for my cell phone and pressed 911.
“What is your emergency?” a woman’s voice asked.
“I need help. I’m at the animal shelter annex on 119th near the river.”
The phone went dead, but I didn’t know when—before or after I had given my location. But Billie didn’t know that.
“I’m in Ward Four,” I said to the dead phone. “A woman with attack dogs is holding me hostage.”
I had kept my eyes on Billie while I spoke. At this last, she rolled her eyes and said, “You locked yourself in.”
“Please hurry,” I said to the dead phone.
“I’m disappointed in you, Gotti. You didn’t keep up your end.” Billie acted as if I did not have a gun pointed at her.
“The police will be here any minute,” I bluffed.
“There’s no signal here. Nobody’s plan works in here.”
She sat down cross-legged in front of the cage, just as she had done when visiting my dogs. “We never had a chance to compare notes about Bennett,” she said brightly. “You’d been studying men who manipulate women, but the real fun starts when a woman manipulates a man to manipulate women.”
“What did you get out of it?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“What didn’t I get out of it? He entertained me. With all of you. You can’t imagine how thrilling that kind of intimacy is. It is allegiance of the first order, a singular exchange. We held nothing back. We did not judge each other. Well, until he went soft.”
The Dogos were spooking the pit bull. His hackles stood. He started snarling, though nobody had moved.
“I bet sleeping next to the wall isn’t looking so scary right now. Don’t blame Bennett for making you do that; it was my idea. That was getting to be his problem: no ideas. He was wasting his energy on you. When he stopped making fun of you and began to defend you, the fun went out of it. Sure, you take in foster dogs. But you get them killed.”
She had gotten my fosters killed. Not the time to point that out.
“Still, he was drawn to virtue. He may not have felt compassion, but he began to seek it out. And the boy went overboard—he called it ‘love’ and proposed to all of you.”
I still held the gun on Billie but my hand was tired. Billie noticed. I leaned against my side of the cage, and Gotti remained standing inches away.
“You want to know what happened that morning. Fair enough. He wasn’t so far gone on you that he didn’t welcome my visit to your bed. He was less welcoming to Heidi and Gunther. But as I told him, they had a vet appointment later that morning. I told him to put your dogs in the bathroom, and it wouldn’t be a problem. But there was a problem: he couldn’t get it up. That was a first. And he blamed it on me. I did this, I did that, and I brought the fucking dogs. The fucking dogs.
“I had left them outside the bedroom door in a down-stay. I got out of bed, pulled on my clothes, and Bennett failed to apologize.”
The dog whose kennel I shared sniffed the gun and lost interest in it.
Billie had answered my questions, except for one—was I going to have to kill her?
“You going to write me up for your thesis? I’m more interesting than Bennett.”
She was interrupted by the dogs in the ward, all of them, barking. Then I heard what had set them off. I thought I did—I thought I heard a man’s voice call out from somewhere inside the shelter. I strained to hear, and I heard it again. Billie did, too. A man’s voice, a little closer this time, called out so that we could hear the words: “Police! Is anyone there?”
Billie put a finger to her lips and looked out the wired-glass window in the ward door. Her dogs turned their heads in unison, keeping her in sight.
Billie ducked as the beam of a flashlight shone through the window.
I screamed, “I’m in here!”
“This next is on you.” Billie opened the ward door and said to her dogs, “Reeh veer!”
They tore out into the hall, synchronized specters, their full attention on their prey.
Billie followed her dogs.
It sounded as though every dog in the place was barking. The noise disoriented me so that I couldn’t pick out Billie’s dogs from the rest, if Billie’s dogs were even making a sound during their attack. But I could hear one of the cops yelling. Then he screamed. Why hadn’t he used his gun? But I hadn’t used my gun.
“Good boy,” I said to my cellmate as I unlocked the kennel door.
The cop was on the ground, but he was no longer screaming. I couldn’t tell if he was still alive, but the white dogs on top of him—I saw them in the dimly lit hall—were covered in blood.
I crept up behind Billie, intending to clock her with the gun I could not make myself fire. I would have to hit hard enough to keep her down. But if I whacked her, what would her dogs do? I had never hurt anyone, nor did I have the skill to hit a moving target. The thought made me sick to my stomach. Then I saw, to the left of me, the door into the fenced exercise yard. When I got out into the yard without Billie’s seeming to see me, I had a thought I almost couldn’t bear in case it didn’t work: maybe I could get a signal on my phone.
In the dark yard, cluttered with balls and a coiled hose that tripped me, I held up the phone, waving it to try to catch a signal. But what I heard first was a gunshot from inside the shelter. One shot. Whom had the second cop fired on? One dog? That wouldn’t stop the other. I waited for a second shot.
Instead I got a signal.
“What is your emergency?”
“A cop is being killed. We’re on East 119th Street, the animal shelter. Please hurry.”
The door into the backyard pushed open. Billie. And one of the Dogos at her side.
Billie made a show of looking around. “Can you imagine this is the only exercise yard they have?”
“Your dogs killed that cop.”
“That cop killed one of my dogs.”
I saw movement behind Billie. And so did the dog. The door opened, and I saw the second cop with his gun drawn. Before the cop was all the way through, the Dogo lunged. The cop got off a shot, but the dog’s attack on his firing arm caused the bullet to hit Billie. She went down, but was not unconscious. She swore and clutched her leg. The Dogo had knocked the cop’s gun out of his hand with such force that it had skittered across the pavement, stopping closer to Billie than to me.
I kicked it past Billie’s reach and turned my attention to the Dogo and the cop. The cop was on his back, twisting and fending off the dog with his arms. I took aim but didn’t trust myself to hit the dog and not the cop.
“Make him stop!” I yelled at Billie.
“It’s the female. That’s Heidi.”
I turned the gun on Billie. “Make her stop,” I said evenly.
“Like you’re going to shoot me.”
As much as I wanted to, she was right.
I shot at the dog and dropped her.
I heard sirens over the chaotic barking, meaning a full-on response—a cop was down. I turned the gun on Billie and waited for the police to find us.
“You can’t say it hasn’t been an education,” Billie said.
“Out here,” I yelled, not knowing if the cops
could hear me yet.
“Always looking to a man to save you.”
Then the door to the exercise yard opened. A stream of cops, guns drawn, pushed through.
“Drop your weapon,” one of them yelled. For an odd moment I didn’t realize he was addressing me. “Put down the gun.”
I set the gun down.
One of the cops kicked it away from me and said, “Down on the ground.” He kicked my legs apart, frisked me, grabbed my arms, and twisted them behind my back to handcuff me.
“She shot me,” Billie called out. “My leg. I can’t walk.”
“Get the EMTs out here,” one of the cops yelled to another.
“Is the other officer okay?” Billie asked.
“I’m not the one you should be worried about,” I said to the cop holding me down. He said nothing, just yanked me to my feet.
“You hurt anywhere else?” one of the cops asked Billie.
“She came out of nowhere. I’m just a volunteer.”
The EMTs arrived and began working on the mauled cop. Seconds later, another pair moved quickly into the yard and knelt beside Billie.
“Were you shot anywhere besides your leg?” an EMT asked.
“I can’t feel my leg.”
I finally found my voice. “Those white dogs are hers. They’re attack dogs. She commanded them to attack the officers.”
“I don’t think I’m hit anywhere else,” Billie said.
A cop came into the yard and said to his partner, the one who was holding me, “We lost Scott. Fucking dogs ripped his throat open.” The cop grabbed me by the throat. “I should rip your fucking throat out.”
“Not here,” said the cop holding me.
After the EMTs got an IV going for Billie, they lifted her onto a stretcher, but waited for the unconscious cop to be evacuated first.
Despite the activity all around me, I sensed things as being done in slow motion. I looked up at the run-down apartment buildings that flanked the open backyard. Lights were on, windows were open, and people on every floor were watching and taking pictures with their phones.
A dozen or so cops moved to surround me—the guilty one—and pushed me back inside. When they marched me past the body of the dead cop, they stopped and forced me to look. I threw up. Billie was right—this one was on me.
Out front, the scene was militaristic; helicopters shone searchlights on the shelter. As I was being shoved into a squad car, one of the cops Mirandized me.
A convoy of squad cars escorted me to a precinct, the 25th. I was taken straight to an interrogation room and handcuffed to the table.
I had the good citizen’s certainty that I would be cleared. But I felt the soul-honing fear that I would not.
There would be no witness if the second cop died. Even if he lived, he didn’t know who was responsible. It would be Billie’s word against mine, and she had the bullet in her body.
They thought I was a cop killer. Maybe, by default, I was. I’d had a chance to kill Billie and her dogs and I hadn’t taken it. I started itching all over. I felt welts rising on my back, on my chest. It made me short of breath. Anxiety could produce any number of somatic symptoms, I knew. I both wanted someone to come into the room and feared it. I was twisting in the chair, trying to scratch my back. And I had to urinate.
I gave up looking at my watch after the first hour. With no idea who might be watching me through the one-sided glass, I struggled with my free hand to pull down my jeans enough to go right there on the floor of the interrogation room. Give them a show, if that’s what they were determined to wait for.
I angled my body as much as I could away from the glass and squatted. But after waiting so long, I wasn’t able to release my bladder right away. I prayed that no one would enter the room now. Though maybe some of the officers were having a good laugh just outside.
The puddle covered a large area under the table I was handcuffed to and leaked out beyond the chair I had occupied. Easier to pull pants down with one hand, I discovered, than to get them back up. There was no getting the zipper up. It did not escape me that soiling their own space was what caged dogs were left to do.
Two plainclothes detectives came in, one holding a folder, the other holding his nose. “The fuck did you do in here?”
“When do I get my call?”
The disgusted one banged on the door. “Get us some paper towels.” When a roll of paper towels was delivered, he tossed it to me and told me to clean up the floor.
“I’m handcuffed.”
“You managed to pull down your pants.”
I made no motion toward doing what he said. “I want my phone call.”
The one with the folder said, “Do you know a Jimmy Gordon?”
I repeated what I wanted.
He tried again, this time showing me a photograph of the crime scene—my bedroom.
“Phone call.”
“You just got a cop killed. If I were you, I’d start cooperating,” said the detective who’d called for paper towels.
“I want my lawyer.” I sensed the detectives were trying to employ the outdated Reid technique of interrogation—I’d learned about it in first-year psychology. A cop looks for signs of anxiety during questioning: folded arms, shifty gaze, jiggling leg, touching one’s hair. They try to play down moral consequences—“Hey, everybody fights with her boyfriend.” The irony is that the case policeman John Reid made his name on turned out to be a false confession.
One of the detectives signaled at the window for a phone, and in a moment he opened the door and was handed a desk phone. He plugged the line into a jack in the wall and set it down in front of me. “Local only.”
I phoned Steven.
“I’ve been waiting up for you.” His relief was palpable.
“They might be listening.”
“Is Billie with you?”
“I’m at the precinct in East Harlem. Billie’s in the hospital.”
“Tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m handcuffed to a table in an interrogation room.”
“Make sense.”
“I understand more right now than I have in the last six months. They haven’t charged me yet, but I think I’m being held as a cop killer.”
“Don’t say anything until I get there.”
Before hanging up, I asked Steven to let McKenzie know, too.
The detectives took the phone with them when they left me in the interrogation room. They left the roll of paper towels, and knowing my brother would be coming for me, I tore off a large wad and started cleaning up the floor, in case he was brought to this room.
By the time I’d left a mound of wet paper towels under the table, the detectives were back, announcing that they were taking me to Central Booking.
“But my brother is coming here.”
“Tell him to call you a lawyer.”
“He is a lawyer.”
“He’ll have to go downtown to see you” is all the detective offered.
I rode in a squad car with the two detectives who’d questioned me. I remembered the day at John Jay that the professor had brought in a Yelp one-star review of Central Booking. I loved that such a thing existed, and when the professor read it aloud, the class went nuts: “Let me start off by saying . . . Yo myyyy niggggggaaaaa!!!!! I came out that fucker speaking Ebonics. I am college educated, yeah, that don’t mean shit. I manage a pharmaceutical company. I deal with hundreds of professional people in health care who have MDs, PhDs, and degrees in shit I can’t even pronounce. The word nigga this, nigga that, nigga who, nigga what. That’s all I fucking heard.”
Yes, I had memorized it, it was that vivid. Maybe I’d be writing my own.
We cut across Chinatown to the two gray, windowless buildings on White Street—the courthouse and the Tombs, connected by a three-story-high, windowless walkway. Richard Haas’s mural Immigration on the Lower East Side runs across the facade of the detention center. The irony is that its placement seems to send the immigrants straigh
t to jail.
I was processed in the manner known to anyone who watches TV crime shows. But it was one thing to have watched from the comfort of one’s couch, eating chocolate, and another to be strip-searched in Central Booking. I was escorted to a cell where, to my relief, I was the only occupant. So far. I could hear trash-talking female prisoners nearby, but I couldn’t see them. And then a chorus of “Yo—CO!” that went unheeded. The place was freezing. Had I heard that the Tombs was kept at forty degrees?
I should be able to prove that Billie brought the two Dogos Argentinos into the shelter. I should be able to prove that she was in my house the morning Bennett was killed—it was there in Libertine’s e-mails, the e-mails that also proved she killed Susan Rorke and Samantha. But do e-mails constitute proof?
I figured I had a few hours until morning. I had been made to voucher my watch, but it must have been at least 3:00 a.m. The metal bench I sat on was so slippery that I nearly slid off it. Sleeping was out of the question. This was the poet’s “dark night of the soul.” The first thought to slay me was that I was responsible for a man’s death, and the serious injury of another. The blame game did no one any good, as Billie said, but there it was. I read some of the graffiti on the cell walls. Never pick up a dead man’s gun. Forgive me, but I have little choice in these matters. Do whatever you think is in your best interests.
I was treated to an argument from one of the bull pens. Two women fighting about who would get the phone next.
My thoughts went from logical and practical concerns to images and feelings I never wanted to confront again. I actually felt the moment I “snapped to” and found that I was sitting on the floor of the cell, hunched up in the position I took in my bathtub after finding Bennett’s body. I knew what was happening to me: a version of post-traumatic stress. I had just seen a man killed by dogs for the second time. I made myself take deep breaths to try to avoid hyperventilating and to slow my pulse. I made myself envision peaceful scenes of the sea—white-sand beaches, floating in aquamarine water the same temperature as my skin. But even my go-to vision failed—the warm water felt like blood.