Tales of River City

by Frank Zafiro

  “Why not? She’s totally hot.”

  “She’s loca, man. Crazy. A fucking loon.”

  “Whatever,” Norris said, and I heard the slight echo of his voice. He must have entered the elevator.

  “It’s in her eyes,” Gilliam said. “She’d fuck you like a wildcat, maybe, but then she’d turn around and stab you in the face with a kitchen knife. Trust me.”

  “In her eyes? What kind of bullshit is—?”

  The door slid shut on Norris. His voice was muffled and then gone.

  I walked around the corner and looked through the glass next to the thick, ornate door to the real estate office. She sat at the receptionist table, arranging pieces of paper on her desk. She had her hair up like a repressed librarian and the thin-framed glasses she wore only reinforced that image. The tan sweater she had on was snug and spotlighted her breasts. I saw that Norris had been right about her nipples.

  Even so, Norris wasn’t fucking her and neither was Gilliam. That was apparent from their discussion, which I believed had been entirely honest. The few times people have known I was nearby and have had conversations for my benefit, it was painfully obvious. Cops are good at detecting lies, but they are not always good liars themselves.

  They were hell on gossip, though. I wondered if the rumor I’d heard was merely that—gossip born out of some scene similar to that which had just occurred with Norris and Gilliam. I could see one of them or someone just like them describing Carie to their buddies over coffee and say how much they’d like to bed her. The rumor mill would need about seven seconds to turn that grist into flour and suddenly “some cop” was sleeping with her and it gets whispered in my ear.

  I watched her for a while longer, until the ding of the elevator interrupted my thinking. All the while she didn’t look up. Her face had a vague sense of panic on it as she worked.

  It was possible, I thought. But not terribly likely. My idea of the rumor mill or maybe just a quick fling was more likely.

  I had other files to return to, I decided. This was a false alarm.

  I got onto the elevator and rode down to the second floor. Back in my office, I got to work on the files on my desk, and mostly forgot about the whole thing.

  Then she came to my office.

  The door to my office is locked with a key code that only I know. Not even the Chief knows it and he’s plenty happy to tell people that so they don’t think we’re in cahoots. None of the patrol officers believe him, of course, but it’s true.

  There’s only two ways into my office without kicking the door in. One is to have the code and enter from the outside. The other is for me to buzz someone in from my desk. That’s how she came.

  The buzzer has an airy tone to it. I replaced the harsh “gggzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz” that the office supply people put in with a nicer one that I paid for myself. When it went off two days after I’d overheard Norris and Gilliam, it surprised me. I didn’t have any interviews scheduled for the entire morning.

  I pushed the reply button. “Lieutenant Hart.”

  There was a pause, then a female voice. “I need to talk to someone,” she said. It was the voice of someone from an old black and white movie. Someone being chased by a villain. Maybe one in a fedora. Or with black gloves.

  I pushed the release buzzer and she seemed to just glide through the doorway. She was graceful, but her movements had a frantic undertone. This was the first time I’d seen her when she wasn’t behind a desk. Her frame was even thinner that I’d thought, though her hips had some curve to them. Her ample breasts appeared even more out of place when she was standing than when she was hidden behind the desk.

  “Are you…the internal affairs officer?” she asked.

  “I’m Lieutenant Hart,” I answered.

  “I need…some help,” she said.

  I motioned toward the door. “Close that.”

  “Oh.” She let the door swing closed.

  I pointed to the chair in front of my desk. “Please, sit down.”

  She took a seat, sitting on the edge and leaning forward. The top button of her white blouse was unbuttoned and I could plainly see the swell of her breasts pressing against her lacy white bra. I reminded myself to be professional and forced my eyes up to focus on her eyes. But my glance kept being drawn down to her cleavage. She didn’t move.

  Even when I focused on her eyes, things weren’t much easier. They were a deep brown and doe-like. It wasn’t just that they were soft, but also that they were suffused with the tension that wilderness prey held. A certain skittishness, as if she were always on the edge of bolting from the room at the first hint of danger.

  But that wasn’t all, was it? No, it wasn’t. Just that much would have made her pitiful, or maybe someone I could even dredge up some sympathy for. There was more, though.

  I broke the short silence. “What can I do for you, Miss?”

  “Carie,” she said with a flicker of a smile. “With one ‘r.’”

  I nodded to her. “Carie, then. What can I help you with?”

  Her eyes cast around the room for a moment. She took a breath, started to speak and stopped short.

  “Anything you say to me will remain confidential,” I assured her.

  Her gazed locked onto me then and I saw with certainty what that other thing was. It was a sultry pull in those eyes, a look that says, I need your help and I will reward you well. It was the look that asked, no, it begged you to be her hero.

  “I’m having a problem with…a police officer,” she said.

  I steepled my fingers, feeling my heart race with excitement, though if it were her eyes and breasts or the prospect of the hunt, I wasn’t sure. “What sort of problem?”

  She took another breath and let it out, stopping short again. Then she shook her head and started to stand up. Her chin dropped to her chest. “No, I shouldn’t have come.”

  I stood with her, holding my hands out. “No, no, it’s all right. Carie, wait.”

  She paused at the sound of her name and looked up at me. I was surprised that I had used her first name so easily. It wasn’t professional. I’d been around people for years and still called them by their last name or title. Just because the rest of the world had become so informal and unprofessional didn’t mean I had to follow suit.

  But I felt I knew her already, having seen her through the glass next to the solid oak door on those occasions. And the way she looked at me, singling me out to help her…it forced a sense of duty upon me.

  “Everyone wonders if they are doing the right thing when they come in here,” I said in a soft voice. “But the answer is always yes. And you already know that, because if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have come in here in the first place.”

  She continued to watch me from beneath her long lashes. “Really?”

  I nodded. “You’re doing the right thing. It’s the only way to make things better.”

  She let out a long, wavering sigh.

  “Please,” I said. “Sit back down.”

  She lowered herself into the chair, her eyes locked on mine. I felt a small ripple of exhilaration in my chest and a larger flooding of warmth and hardness in my cock. I swallowed, but only the ripple went away.

  “Where should…where should I start?” she asked me.

  “At the beginning,” I said, trying to sound strong and full of authority. I sat down and hoped she didn’t see the small beads of perspiration at my temples.

  “The beginning,” she said. “Okay.”

  She spoke in that same tentative voice, as if she were afraid that the words themselves were the predators that she had to be wary of. I had to reassure her several times that she was all right and that she was doing the right thing. My efforts were rewarded with a grateful, almost beaming look from those dark eyes.

  In the end, though, she didn’t say much. She’d met and dated a police officer on a couple of occasions. They’d slept together once, a fact which she was quick to label as an awful mistake. Her mother had been sick ba
ck in Cleveland and she’d been lonely for home and he’d simply taken advantage of that.

  She broke it off with him a few days after the sexual encounter, but he hadn’t taken it well.

  “Sometimes men…,” she told me, “don’t listen to me. They think what I say doesn’t matter.”

  I nodded that I understood and that it was wrong of them and she continued her story.

  The officer had called her repeatedly, even after she stopped answering the phone or returning his calls. Sometimes he would call for hours at a time. He’d leave messages, and the messages scared her. In the background of some of the calls, she could hear a police radio, so she believed he was calling her from work.

  “What scares you about the phone calls?” I asked her.

  “They’re possessive,” she said. “And…he changes. Sometimes he says he loves me, sometimes he calls me terrible names. It’s not stable.”

  I gave her another nod. “He sounds obsessed.”

  “Yes,” she answered. “And it’s not just the telephone. He comes by my house and parks up the street.”

  “In his police car?”

  “Sometimes. Other times in his truck.”

  “Does he do anything?”

  She shook her head. “Just watches. Or calls me on his cell phone.”

  “What else does he do?”

  “Comes by my work.”

  “On duty or off?” I asked her.

  “Both,” she said. “That scares me even more than at my house, because I work right here in this building.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, up on the third floor. Gambini Real Estate?”

  I nodded and wrote it down. “Why does that scare you more?”

  “Because it’s so…close. I mean, his workplace is in the building right next door and I know that there are police units here in the building, too.” She met my eyes with gaze that was a mixture of prey and seductress. “If he’s willing to do that so close to his job, it makes me wonder how far he’ll go.”

  I was still nodding. She was right. If we were willing to risk his career, then he’d risen to a danger level that was very concerning. In fact—

  “Is there anything you can do?” she asked me and her voice had the same quality as those eyes.

  I nodded. “Of course. What he’s doing isn’t just harassment or chasing girls on duty. It amounts to stalking, and that’s a crime.”

  Her eyes widened. “A serious one?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a misdemeanor if the guy’s never been convicted of it or a DV crime before. But it’s still a crime.”

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I don’t want him to get in trouble.”

  My mouth fell open. “Carie, he’s stalking you!”

  “He’s…in love. I want it to stop, but I don’t want to ruin his life over it.”

  “I thought you were afraid of him.”

  “I am,” she said. “And I’m afraid of what he might do if I have him arrested, too.”

  “Meaning what?”

  She averted her eyes and they flitted around the room. “He might…kill me,” she managed.

  I dropped my pen and leaned back in my chair. This didn’t make sense.

  Her eyes came back and fixed me with another one of her enigmatic looks. Her eyes were glassy now, filled with tears that didn’t fall. “You don’t believe me,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “Oh, I believe you that this is happening,” I said. “I definitely believe that. It’s not the first time a cop has let his relationships get him in trouble on the job.” I was thinking of the phrase that old TAC officer at the academy used when we neared graduation. Sergeant DeMarcus had been his name.

  Two things will get you in more trouble on this job than anything else, boys, he’d said. Two things. Then he’d paused and let a little grin touch the corners of his mouth before letting us in on the bit of wisdom. A wine glass and a woman’s ass, he’d said and everyone laughed. But Sergeant DeMarcus, who also laid out some bullshit about things no longer being black and white, was dead accurate on this particular count. Right in the ten ring.

  “Maybe I should go,” Carie said, but she didn’t stand up right away.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I can help you. I just don’t understand something.”

  “What?”

  “Well,” I said, leaning forward again, “on the one hand, this guy is stalking you, you’re afraid of him, even think he’s capable of tipping over and killing you. But on the other hand, you don’t want anything bad to happen to him. I don’t get it.”

  “I never said I didn’t want anything bad to happen,” she said, her voice a little wounded. “I just don’t want to see him go to jail.”

  I considered that. “So you don’t want to press formal charges?”

  “Does that mean criminal?”

  I gave her a short nod.

  “Then no. But can you still do something? Maybe informally?”

  I thought about that. Before I could wrap my mind around it, she said, “Please?” I looked into her eyes and had no choice but to say yes.

  She smiled, relief and joy radiated from her face. “Thank you,” she said and this time the tears did fall, two of them. She wiped them away self-consciously and stood.

  “I have to get back to work,” she said.

  “Wait,” I said, not wanting her to go. “There’s a lot we still have to go over. I don’t even know who the officer is. I have to arrange to pick up your answering machine tapes, and we have to discuss—”

  “Tomorrow,” she whispered. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  And she was gone.

  That night I sat next to Marianne on the couch, a comfortable distance between us, and watched a re-run of Little House on the Prairie. She sat with rapt attention, laughing and crying in all the right places, but the episode was one of the later ones where Laura Ingalls is all grown up and married, so it didn’t hold much appeal for me. I stared at the flickering light of the television screen and thought of her instead.

  She came the next day, true to her word.

  I had only one appointment scheduled and that was at 0700 hours. It was an interview with a south side officer regarding my suspicions that another patrolman was sleeping with one of the prostitutes from out on East Sprague. The suspect, Officer Hiero, was already a black sheep to begin with. Only two years ago, his partner had been shot and killed on a traffic stop. The passenger of the suspect vehicle had ran from the car and Hiero had chased him, even though that was clearly against department policy and training. While he was off chasing someone he had no legal right to detain, his partner, James Kahn, tried to take the driver into custody. The driver somehow managed to pull out a small caliber handgun and kill Kahn. Shot him right through the eye, as a matter of fact. By the time Hiero returned to the scene, empty-handed, the car was gone and so was the shooter. The car ended up having a stolen license plate and no real evidence was found at the scene, even though forensics tried everything. They even tried to get fingerprints from Kahn’s uniform. Nothing worked and neither suspect was ever apprehended.

  That began Hiero’s tumble into the abyss. He took his lumps for his actions that day (three days off for policy violation, pretty light in my mind), but his work product suffered and his sergeant had constant, minor discipline issues with him. I’d heard his wife left him and took him pretty hard in the divorce, so he was living downtown in an apartment building that police respond to regularly on calls-for-service. Truth be told, I fully expected to be investigating him for some kind of graft or theft, given his money situation, but what came to light was this thing with some prostitute.

  Officer Jack Willow had about ten years on and worked in Hiero’s platoon on graveyard shift. He seemed like a decent enough officer, but that might have been because he had one of those faces that was perpetually young. I knew he took some ribbing as a rookie for being baby-faced and when that feature didn’t change, the teasing continued
.

  I tried to remember if I’d heard anything negative from my stoolies about Willow, but drew a blank. I hoped it was only because there wasn’t anything to recall and not because flashes of Carie’s eyes and the swell of her breasts kept intruding on my thought process.

  I’d read Willow his administrative rights and gone through my broad questions with him. Those were the ones designed to see if something else popped up outside the scope of this investigation. Sometimes a guilty conscience showed through when I asked vague questions and an answer like “is this about such and such” would come where such and such had nothing at all to do with the case at hand. Then I’d have a whole new lead to investigate. It worked more with the younger officers and those just about to retire than with the ones around Willow’s tenure, though.

  Willow answered all my questions directly and immediately and nothing suspicious came up. He admitted that Hiero made a lot of prostitute contacts but said that was “his thing.” Hiero wrote a lot of FIs and kept tabs on the whore trade out on the East Sprague corridor, and frankly, at least according to Willow, the guys on the platoon appreciated that. It freed them up to chase burglars and dopers.

  The whole time I was asking questions and Willow was answering, it felt to me like I was sitting in the next room, overhearing the entire exchange while working on something else. Something more important.

  In the end, Willow gave me nothing I didn’t already have and may have even served to exonerate Hiero just a little. I was starting not to care, anyway. Let Hiero talk to the hookers all he wanted. Even flirt with them if he wanted.

  I had bigger fish to fry.

  It was two hours later when she buzzed the door.

  “Lieutenant?” came her hesitant, needy voice and my breath quickened.

  I buzzed her in without answering and she made her way to my desk. She was smiling ambiguously, as if she wasn’t sure if it was all right to smile or not.

  When she sat down, I wasted no time. “I need to know who the officer is that is stalking you.”

  Her smile faded and she gave a small shake of her head. “I don’t want him to get in trouble. I just want him to stop what he’s doing.”