by Linda Wolfe
“What do you mean, When Do We Laugh?”
“You know,” Carl said. “It’s, like, what do we do? Can we laugh? Are we allowed to?”
Outside the Central Park precinct house, television cameras were illuminating the darkness with their floodlights. Someone from Manhattan North had broken protocol and tipped off the press that a suspect was being questioned inside. Annoyed, Steve Saracco pushed his way past the journalists and hurried into Doyle’s office.
“It’s all over,” Doyle greeted him. “The kid just gave it all up. McEntee’s taking down his statement.”
“No shit!” Saracco’s bad mood evaporated. “The guy’s saying he did it?”
“Yeah. The scratches are from her. He did it.”
Saracco reached for a phone and called his office’s videotape unit. “We need a camera up here,” he shouted.
Closeted with Robert and trying to write down his statement, McEntee thought, This guy is confessing, but he isn’t giving much. He’s saying he killed the girl, but that in a way her death was her own damn fault because she hurt him during sex, hurt him so hard that he strangled her accidentally out of an instinctive reaction to pain. McEntee knew about strangling. It was hard to strangle someone accidentally, because to cut off their air supply you had to hold on to their throat for a long time. Robert Chambers, McEntee told himself, is giving us what he feels we’re gonna accept, but he isn’t telling everything. He’s still lying.
McEntee knew about lying, too. When he’d been in Bronx Narcotics, he’d been in numerous situations where he’d had to hide the truth. He’d told falsehoods about the phony needle tracks on his arms, he’d pretended to overly curious pushers that he was a foreigner who spoke no English, he’d set up a shooting gallery bust and then fled into the street along with the terrified addicts, shaking and panting with feigned fear. But if I’d ever gotten caught, if my life and my future were on the line, McEntee said to himself, I’d have broken. And if I did, I’d have gone all the way. Told the whole story. Got it out. Not this guy. He’s putting on an act.
“She forced my pants down,” Robert was saying. “She sat on my face and began to play with me. Then she began to hit my dick with a stick. And she slapped me and squeezed my balls.”
McEntee, listening, put on an act of his own. “G’head,” he nodded, as wide-eyed as if he believed every word. But to himself he was saying, This guy either made this up while he was sitting here all day, or he made it up last night, got so coked up that he got paranoid and hallucinated being beaten.
“I was in incredible pain,” Robert went on. “I reached down with my left arm, put it around her neck, and pulled back as hard as I could. Jennifer landed behind me.”
There was more, but McEntee didn’t get it all down. He made notes, then rose to go outside and tell Doyle what he’d gotten. As he stood, Robert’s eyes once again filled with tears, and he murmured, as he had to Gill, “What’s my mother going to think?”
His mother! McEntee said to himself. What a character. He’s not upset over the fact that he killed a girl. He’s upset his momma’s gonna find out. Myself, I wouldn’t be worried about what my momma was gonna think, I’d be worried about what the girl’s father was gonna think. And do. To me. Shrugging, he ignored Robert’s question and hurried outside.
Standing in Mrs. Hammerstein’s laundry room, Marilei sorted through Robert’s dirty clothes, separating the light from the dark. Phyllis had asked her to wash Robert’s clothes tonight and had helped her carry his laundry to their employer’s apartment so that she could use the capacious washing machine there. So much laundry! Marilei had lugged a big bag of underwear and T-shirts, and Phyllis had hefted a shopping bag with a heavy pair of jeans crammed into it. Where was the shopping bag? Not here with the rest of the laundry. Well, never mind. She could get it from Phyllis later. She wasn’t going to wash the dark clothes now anyway. Just the underwear and light-colored T-shirts.
She was tossing a handful of them into the machine when a short-sleeved white mesh baseball shirt caught her eye. It was filthy. Covered with earth stains. And with bloodstains, too.
She extricated it from the pyramid of other shirts and held it up to the light. How did Hrobert manage to get it so messed up? she wondered. But it doesn’t matter, she decided. It’ll come clean in the wash. And, measuring out soap powder, she dropped the shirt back into the machine, poured in the white crystals, and started the cycle.
“I want to see my son,” Bob Chambers, tired of sitting in the auxiliary building, demanded at the high mahogany front desk of the precinct house. Several detectives were standing nearby, but as soon as he spoke, they scattered.
“Just stay a few minutes more,” a man behind the desk said.
Bob wanted to pound his fist down on the wood and say, Damn it, I want to see my son! But it wasn’t his nature. His upbringing had taught him to respect police, be polite in their presence. Meekly he returned to the auxiliary building and continued his solitary wait.
He was sitting there, feeling useless and impotent, when Phyllis called him again. “Listen, I’m at work,” she said. “I can’t come over. I can’t leave my patient. But Marilei wants to come.”
“Okay.”
“She’ll be over shortly.”
He hung up, and just then the door opened and a silver-haired man came in. “I’m Lieutenant Doyle,” the man said. “May I speak to you outside?”
Bob went outside with him, and out there on a roadway the lieutenant started saying that his son had a problem and would have to stay with the police that night. Bob heard him, but he didn’t understand what he was hearing. “I’m a father myself,” the lieutenant was saying.
Bob was listening hard, but he still didn’t get it. Didn’t react. And then Doyle said, “Robert has made some statements. And we’re going to have to arrest him. Book him on murder charges.”
Suddenly, the breath drained out of Bob. “Would you mind if we walked over to a lamppost?” he said, struggling for air. “I want to read a prayer.”
When Doyle escorted him to the lamppost, he fumbled for a copy of the serenity prayer that he kept in his wallet. For some reason he didn’t want just to recite it from memory as he’d done earlier. His fingers shaking, he at last found the copy and, standing in the cold glare of the lamppost, read the prayer.
He felt better after that and asked to see Robert.
He’d have to wait, Doyle told him.
A moment later Marilei arrived. “Who’s she?” Doyle asked.
“My wife’s maid,” he said, though in fact she was Mrs. Hammerstein’s. When she did chores for Phyllis, she always insisted she was doing them just out of friendship. He didn’t explain all this, just went on asking to see Robert.
“Maybe in forty-five minutes,” Doyle said. “Or an hour. He’s busy with Detective Sheehan right now.”
Sheehan? He knew Detective Sheehan. Used to see him at his parents’ bar. Hearing his name made him feel hopeful, gave him something to go on. “I’ll go tell Robert’s mother,” he said to Doyle. “Then I’ll come back and see Sheehan.”
“A girl wantsa sit on my face, you bet I’m not gonna stop her.”
“A girl wantsa fuck me in the park, yeah, all right.”
Inside the precinct house, detectives joked about their newly confessed suspect. They were passing the time as Sheehan finished getting a written statement from Robert. “Altar boy,” one of them said.
“Faggot.”
“Yeah, well, he don’t like women. That’s for damn sure.”
“Oh, are we in trouble,” Bob Chambers said to Marilei in the cab they took to Mrs. Hammerstein’s. “We need a lawyer. You tell Phyllis.”
Marilei knew what had happened. As she’d arrived at the precinct, a photographer had tried to take her picture, and she’d put her hands over her face and run away and then asked a policeman what was going on and he told her that a boy named Robert Chambers had been accused of killing a girl. She hadn’t believed it, but whe
n she’d found Mr. Chambers, he’d said it was true.
“I can’t tell Phyllis,” she insisted to Mr. Chambers in the cab. “You have to be the one.” Then they reached Mrs. Hammerstein’s, and she led him into the kitchen, and Phyllis was there in her bathrobe. Marilei went away and left them alone, and when she came back Mr. Chambers was gone and Phyllis started to cry, cry, cry, cry. Marilei made her a cup of tea, but it didn’t do any good. Phyllis just went on crying.
Videotaping the confessions of criminals was a relatively new phenomenon. Until the early 1980s, stenographers took confessions down in dictation. The videotapes were better because they were unchallengingly accurate. But they took a lot longer to set up. Saracco, waiting restlessly for his technicians to unpack their equipment, chain-smoked and thought about what to say during the videotaping. He didn’t have much leeway. Mostly the thing was just boilerplate. You introduced yourself casually, like it was no big deal that you were from the DA’s office, so the suspect didn’t turn skittish when the tape started rolling. You read him his rights on camera, so no defense attorney could claim you’d tricked him into confessing. You got him to tell his story, speaking to him guy-to-guy, not lawyer-to-client or priest-to-penitent, so he felt relaxed. You got him to put some fine-tuning on the details so you could check out the story. And then, if you didn’t believe it, you took your run. Got confrontational. It was in the last two areas that strategy came in. Some ADA’s spent three to five hours on the details. Not him. That wasn’t his style. And some went light on confrontation. Not him. He hadn’t been a Marine for nothing.
He was probably going to have to take a hard run at this Chambers, he figured. Because one, he’s a liar. He told Jennifer’s girlfriends he wasn’t even with her. Because two, he’s a calculated liar. He didn’t just say to the cops that he went home, but he gave them the name of TV shows he’d supposedly watched, shows he’d have had to have researched to know what was on. And because three, he’s telling lies. This story he’s been giving out lately makes no sense. I’ve seen the pictures of the girl. She wasn’t killed in any accident.
Four cigarettes into the ashtray, he was done with his planning, and he went into Chambers’s room to eyeball him for the first time.
What he saw surprised him. Sheehan had told him the kid was a preppie and not the kind of Frankie So-and-So from uptown they were used to dealing with. Given that, Saracco expected to see some fear or at least nervousness. But there wasn’t any. Chambers was just sitting there, not crying, not wringing his hands. And when they were introduced, he didn’t act worried, didn’t recoil or even seem scared. He just looked blank.
When the cameraman was ready, Robert rotated his shoulders as if he were preparing for a strenuous exercise, groomed himself by pushing back his hair, and began talking clearly to Saracco, Sheehan, and McEntee, who sat opposite him across a big desk. Jennifer had gotten insane with rage because he told her he didn’t want to see her anymore, he said sincerely. “She freaked out. And she just—she like got up and—knelt in front of me and scratched my face. I have these marks here.” Touching his cheek, he showed the scratches on his face to the assistant district attorney. “I got all upset and I stood up and I was saying, ‘I’m going to go. I’m going to go. This is crazy.’”
The ADA maintained an interested, sympathetic look on his face. Robert saw it and mentioned that, while he’d been pissed off at Jennifer for laughing at him when Jo Perry chewed him out at Dorrian’s, he’d gotten really pissed off at her after she scratched him in the park. But he forgave her, he went on, because once she’d scratched him, she calmed down and got really nice. “She came up behind me and started to give me a massage, and she said, You look cute, but you’d look cuter tied up.”
“Your face is scratched at this point, right?” Saracco asked.
“Right,” Robert said patiently. The camera was whirring softly. He launched into what he’d already told Gill and McEntee and Sheehan, explained how she’d tied his hands behind his back with her panties, pushed him flat onto the earth, and seated herself on his chest. “She started to take off my pants,” he said. “She started to play with me. She started jerking me off.” As he spoke, he rubbed his right hand up and down along an imaginary penis, indicating to the ADA what she’d done. But he wanted him to know this was no ordinary jerk-off. “She was doing it really hard,” he said, the camera catching him in a masturbatory gesture. “It really hurt me. And I—you know—I started to say, ‘Stop it! Stop it! It hurts.’”
His entreaties hadn’t softened her, he went on a moment later. “She kind of laughed in a weird way, like more like a cackle or something. And then she sat up and she like sat on my face and then she dug her nails into my chest and I have scratches right here.”
The assistant district attorney made him show his ravaged flesh to the camera and kept interrupting his account, but after a while he was able to get back to the story. He concentrated on his pain and anguish. “It was nonstop,” he said. “She was just having her way. And then she squeezed my balls and I just could not take it. So I was wiggling around, wiggling around, and she was leaning forward, jerking me off and squeezing my balls and laughing, and I managed to get my left hand free. So I kind of sat up a little and just grabbed at her.”
It was as a result of that single grab that she had died, he continued, and pointed out that when she landed he, too, got hurt, injured a bone in his right hand. The hand was paining him badly. “It—it was just really quick,” he said, “she just flipped over and then landed, and she was kind of twisted on the tree. On her side.”
He had done nothing to help her, he admitted. But that was because he thought she was just trying to frighten him. “I just, I stood there for like ten minutes waiting. Maybe five minutes. I don’t know how long. Trying to see if she’d move. If she’s just trying to, you know, scare me.” Then after a pause he described his inertia further. “I was in shock,” he explained. “I didn’t know what was going on.”
“What were you in shock about?” the assistant district attorney asked, as if he hadn’t understood anything.
“That this girl that I knew and I left the bar with and just wanted to talk to was—did what she did to me.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “And that now she’s not moving.”
A few minutes later he described how he’d gone home, gotten undressed, and fallen asleep, and how when he’d awakened this morning the whole thing had seemed like a dream. Then he was done, completely drained. He’d said everything there was to say.
As Robert talked, frustration kept gnawing at Steve Saracco. The tape had been rolling for God knows how many minutes and still, so far, he hadn’t gotten the young man to deviate one iota from the story he’d told earlier. I’m going to have to give him a couple of Jack Webbs, Saracco thought. Hit him hard with the fact that the girl is dead and he’s alive. And I’m also going to have to hedge my bets. There’s a good chance this guy won’t crack no matter what I ask him, that he’s gonna stick like glue to this accident bullshit. And if he does and we indict him for murder, which from the look of the girl’s neck is what he ought to be indicted for, this videotape is gonna be played in court someday. I want the jury that sees the tape to know I don’t give his bullshit any credence. That you could do that on a tape was the beauty of the thing. When you cross-examined a guy on the stand, you weren’t allowed to communicate your personal beliefs and disbeliefs. But you could on a videotape. “I wasn’t there,” he said to Robert. “The detectives weren’t there. But there are certain things that don’t lie. The condition of the body. The condition of your face and chest.” That stated, he paused and then, as if he were asking a very casual question, said, “How tall are you?’ Six-four?”
Chambers saw where he was going. “Three. Six-three,” he said.
“How much do you weigh?”
“One ninety.”
“What is she? About five-eight? Five-seven?”
“Five-nine,” Chambers said. “Probably weighs like o
ne twenty or something.” But then, as if to prove that despite her height and weight the girl had been a match for him, he added, “But she was strong. I mean, she would just burst into these fits and freak out.”
Saracco back-pedaled. Chambers was growing defensive, and he didn’t want him to clam up. Not before he established how well he’d known the girl. He began asking about their relationship and the nature of their sexual encounters. “When you had sex with her,” he inquired, “did she use any protection or did you use any prophylactics?”
“It never even entered our minds at all,” Chambers told him.
Never entered their minds? Middle-class kids? Saracco hurried on to the next question.
“You had sex with her three times. Was there anything out of the ordinary? Any tying up? Or was it just regular sex?”
“Just regular sex. Except for the third time. On a roof. She took pictures of me while I was asleep?”
“How did you know she took pictures of you?”
“Because she woke me up and showed them to me. She said, ‘I thought you looked cute like that.’”
“You fell asleep on the roof naked?” Saracco couldn’t keep a note of surprise out of his voice.
“Yeah. I was exhausted.”
“What was your reaction?”
“I was shocked,” Chambers replied primly. “I thought it was odd. It was out of the ordinary. I’d never come across somebody that did that.”
Saracco wasn’t satisfied with what he’d gotten. What I need now is to weave in a motive for the killing, he thought, and he let the past go and moved back to what had happened in the park. He had a theory about the motive. Chambers looked to him like the kind of guy whose whole ballgame was his face, and it seemed to him that once the girl scratched him—messed up his looks, for Christ’s sake—he’d flipped out. “You were mad at her,” he began, heading toward weaving in the motive. “For laughing at you in the bar.”