by Linda Wolfe
“Right,” Chambers said. Then he went right where Saracco wanted him to go, adding, “And for scratching me.”
“Saracco was pleased. “And for spitting at you,” he pointed out.
“Right,” Chambers acknowledged.
Saracco was almost home. “That certainly would have upset you,” he commented agreeably. Then he waited for another “Right.”
He didn’t get it. “I was upset,” Chambers said. But he went on to explain, as he’d done before, that after the girl scratched him she was so apologetic and full of sweet talk that he’d made up with her and only then let her tie him up.
Saracco kept pressing him. “You just told me that she’d gone nuts on you,” he said.
“She did go nuts. And then she came back and started to massage my back.”
He was failing at weaving in his motive, Saracco realized. But he still believed in it, still felt that a pretty boy like Chambers wouldn’t have let a girl tie him up once she’d scratched his face. Probably no man would have. Which made him wonder if there was any truth at all to the sex story. Maybe they never even had sex. “Did you ejaculate at any time?” he asked.
“No. I never did. Never did.”
“Were you erect at any time?”
“Yes. I was.”
Erect even though she was hurting his genitals? Saracco found this idea unlikely. “You became erect?” he repeated dubiously.
To his surprise, Chambers seemed to take his words as an affront to his masculinity and responded as if the question had been designed to explore not how come he’d been erect if she was hurting him, but how come if he had been erect he hadn’t climaxed. “I was in too much pain,” he answered. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
He’d better get into a new area, Saracco decided. This was getting no place. He’d better go for something to shake Chambers up. If he got shook up, the truth might come out. The photographs of the dead girl might do the trick. Grasping them, he slid them across the desk.
It started to work. Chambers got uneasy at once. “Please, I really don’t want to see,” he murmured, and put a hand across his eyes.
“Let me just describe them to you,” Saracco persisted. “Her neck area depicts markings of a degree a lot more severe than could have been inflicted by the way you describe it. Do you see how discolored and even bleeding her neck is? Is there any way you can account for this?”
“Yeah.” Chambers said. He had given the pictures a hasty glance. “Because when I pulled her back, she landed against the tree and just laid there like this.” He put up an arm and demonstrated how the girl had landed, the camera capturing him mimicking her open, glazed eyes.
The pictures had gotten him nowhere, Saracco concluded. He was going to have to try another tack. Come right out and let the guy know, no holds barred, that he thought he was full of shit. “Your story just doesn’t make any sense to me,” he began. Then he added, “I’m not saying this was something premeditated on your part. I’m not saying that you were walking out of that bar and saying to yourself, I’m going to kill this girl in Central Park. I’m sure it didn’t happen that way. But something triggered you.”
Chambers didn’t like being challenged. He waved a hand in the air, as if to brush the unpleasant words away. And when he spoke, anger made his voice shake. “She molested me in the park,” he said. “She hit me with—”
Bingo! Saracco thought. Even if he couldn’t get Chambers to tell the truth, if he got him angry enough maybe he’d blow his cool and reveal on tape the violent side of himself that surely had been in evidence in the park. That too would be useful in front of a jury. “How could she molest you?” he plunged forward. “We’re talking about what?”
“What?” Chambers, a hint in his face of the fury Saracco was after, took the bait. “Girls cannot do it to a guy?”
Saracco kept going. “Wait! Are you telling me she’s trying to rape you in the park? Come on, Robert!”
But Chambers had regained control of himself and now stiffly, his vocabulary stilted and Victorian, he announced, “She was having her way with me. Without my consent. With my hands behind my back.”
“Wait a minute!” Saracco said. “What are we? From Iowa or someplace?”
“I don’t know where you’re from.” Chambers’s voice was icy. “That really doesn’t concern me. But you see, a jogger heard me scream. The jogger even asked, ‘What’s wrong?’”
“Just continue that.”
Chambers’s face turned indignant. “I’m hurt,” he said.
“You’re hurt from what?”
“From her!”
“I know you’re angry. From her scratching you.”
This time Chambers made a guttural sound in the back of his throat.
“Look, if I were here telling you this story,” Saracco said, “you’d be laughing.”
“No. I doubt I’d be laughing.”
“And I don’t mean laughing because it’s funny. But laughing because it doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes no sense?” Chambers seemed at last on the verge of a true rage. “It makes no sense that somebody could put your hands behind your back and push you down and then get on top of your chest?”
“Exactly!” Saracco said. “You’re exactly right.”
But although he’d made Chambers hopping mad, made him come to the verge of exploding, no explosion occurred. Nor did his story change. He just kept petulantly repeating it. Disappointed, and needing time to formulate a new plan, Saracco turned the questioning over to Sheehan.
“Did there come a time when after she spit at you and everything else,” Sheehan said, “you slapped her in the face or shoved her away from you or punched her in the eye or something?”
“I never slapped her or punched her or anything,” Chambers said. He sounded utterly convincing.
“You just let her scratch you?”
“What am I going to do? Hit her with a stick?” Under Sheehan’s questioning, Chambers had grown calm, even casual, once again. Time for a Jack Webb, Saracco decided, and broke in. “She’s dead. You’re not. Something happened. That’s a fact, isn’t it, Rob?”
But Chambers merely grunted, “Yeah,” and held firm.
A short while later Saracco took a parting shot for the sake of the trial that he now felt was an inevitability. “It seems to me,” he intoned in his best summation style, “that it wasn’t her that freaked out. That it was you. You that lost your temper to some degree. That you killed her. That you knew you killed her. That you intended to kill her. That you left her there dead. You went home. You went to sleep. And through good police investigation, they found you. The account you give is just an accommodation.”
When he was finished, he gave Chambers one last chance to change his story.
Chambers didn’t want it. “I’ve told you exactly what happened,” he said. “I’m sorry if you can’t see it. I’m sure that I’ve heard of other men being raped, other men being tied up.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Saracco snapped. “I haven’t.”
“Well, good. You’re lucky.”
“I’ve been in this business for a while, and you’re the first man I’ve seen raped in Central Park.”
“Good. That really makes no difference to me. But it happens. It can happen. It did happen.”
Saracco delivered a final Jack Webb. “You didn’t wind up raped,” he said. “And she wound up dead. That’s all I know.” But Chambers wanted the last word. “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he said. “I liked her very much. She was a very nice person. Easy to get along with. Easy to talk to. She was just too pushy. And she liked me more than I thought. More than anyone actually thought.”
See you in court, Saracco thought, and a moment later announced that the taping was finished. Although Chambers hadn’t budged from his story, and although he himself had failed at weaving in a motive, he’d taken a pretty good statement, he told himself. One that no defense attorney would be happy with
. And that made him happy.
He was leaving the room when Detective McEntee, who had been silent throughout the taping, spoke up and said to Chambers, “You’re under arrest.”
Sheehan was exhausted. All he wanted was a shower and a beer, or a beer and a shower. He was trying to make up his mind which of them he wanted first when Lieutenant Doyle beckoned to him and said, “Hey, did you know Robert Chambers from before?”
“No,” Sheehan said.
“What about his father? You know him?”
“No.”
“Well, the old man knows you. He mentioned your name to me.
“You’re kidding.”
“No. He said something about Is this Detective Sheehan the one from Sheehan’s bar on Third Avenue?”
Unhappily Sheehan breathed, “Oh, boy,” and just then Bob Chambers entered the precinct-house door.
“There he is,” Doyle said, and Sheehan stared. He didn’t recognize Bob right away. The man he was looking at was clean-shaven and trim, and the Bob Chambers he’d known had always worn thick muttonchop whiskers and seemed a little sloppy. But a moment later, when he saw Bob shrugging his shoulders at him familiarly, he realized with a start that of course it was Bobby Chambers. Holy Christ, he thought. So the intelligentsia was Robert Chambers’s dad! I didn’t know the guy had a son. Then he thought, Jeez, the poor guy. This stuff with his son is all he needs. Even back when he used to come into the bar, he was having tough times, talking about how bad his marriage was, and now look what’s about to happen to him. Concerned, he walked up to Bob, shook his hand, and said, “Jeez, Bobby, it’s been a long time, eh?” Then he added, “I didn’t know Robert was your son. If I’d’ve known, I wouldn’t’ve continued on the case. But the kid didn’t say anything. I even gave him my card. He never said his father knew me. Never said, Hey, did your family own Sheehan’s bar?”
Bob just shrugged again. Then he asked, “How’s your mom?”
“Mom’s great.”
“I hope your family’s not mad at me. I mean, because I haven’t been by in five years.”
Sheehan couldn’t believe his ears. Here the guy’s son has just been arrested for murder, and he’s shooting How’s mom? “It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’s all right.”
“Mike, I want to apologize for not coming by these past five years,” Bob persisted.
“Forget it. It’s nothing,” Sheehan assured him. But Bob wouldn’t let the matter go. “It’s not because of the bar or your family,” he said. “It’s because I have a problem. I’m an alcoholic.”
Holy Christ, he hadn’t known that either, Sheehan thought. Damn, if only the guy had opened up about it back in the old days, maybe I could’ve helped him. But there was no point in crying over spilt milk. It was now that the guy really needed help. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “I mean, What are you going to do now?”
Bob’s voice was glum. “I was going to ask you that. What the hell should I do?”
“You gotta get a good lawyer.”
“Yeah, but the whole thing is, I haven’t got the dough. I don’t know if I can afford one.”
“Yeah, well. You could wait, I guess. They’d give you a guy. A public defender.”
“Yeah.” Bob sounded resigned. But a few moments later he said, “Who’s a good lawyer?”
“There’s lots of guys,” Sheehan said. Then he rattled off a few names. One of them, Bob would later tell a friend, was Jack Litman, who had just that past June won an acquittal for a Brooklyn cop accused of shooting an unarmed black man.
Inside, in the precinct house, the videotape technicians were packing up their equipment and Saracco was preparing to leave. Robert seemed almost forgotten. He was alone except for young Detective Mullally, who had been asked by Sheehan to keep an eye on him. The two were sitting quietly on opposite sides of the room when suddenly the door opened and Bob Chambers walked in. Mullally saw Robert start, stand up, and throw his arms around his father. Then he heard him say in an excited voice, “That fucking bitch, why didn’t she leave me alone?”
Bob Chambers didn’t hear the remark. Or if he did, he managed to deny its passage from his ears to his brain. He heard not a rush of angry, accusatory words but the sound of sobbing. And he saw in front of him, not an angry young man but a distraught boy, one whose eyes were watery with tears. “I’m here,” he said at once. “I’ve been trying to see you. But I’m here now, and that’s the important point.”
Robert put his head down in his hands.
“I’m with you all the way,” Bob said. “Your mother is with you. And we’ll do everything we have to do to take care of you.” But although he put his arm around his boy’s shoulder and continued to speak in a soothing voice, Robert didn’t pull himself together. He went on crying.
About an hour later—it was 2 A.M.—Robert was taken on “The Walk.” The Walk is a courtesy the police department generally grants the press, a chance to photograph a criminal before he leaves the precinct in which he has been arrested and disappears into the bowels of Central Booking. The Walk gives photographers the opportunity to get enough mugs to last them from the day of arrest to the day of bail—or right through a criminal’s trial if he isn’t granted bail. Robert, his hands cuffed and his body surrounded by police, did The Walk from the precinct house to a nearby van along a route jammed with jostling newspeople.
He tried to ignore them. But their cameras were pointing at him like guns, their lights were so bright that the roadway seemed illuminated by a brilliant dawn, and the newspeople kept calling out to him as familiarly as if he and they were intimates.
“Hey, Robert! I’m over here,” a voice rang out.
“Yo, Rob!” another one sounded. “Why’dja do her?”
He turned several times, lights exploding in his eyes. Sheehan was with him. Sheehan who had a few minutes earlier taken him into a men’s room and made him drop his pants, examining his genitals for what proved to be nonexistent traces of squeezing and scratching. He’d suffered passively through that indignity. But this one, the surge and onslaught of the press, made him angry. The press was like a pack of wild dogs hot for his blood.
While Robert was departing the precinct in police custody, Brock Pernice, still out in the Hamptons, was startled by the sound of a telephone piercing the nighttime silence. He picked the phone up and heard his mother’s voice. She was crying.
It’s my grandfather, Brock thought. He’s died. It has to be that, because the last time my mom sounded this tearful was when someone else in the family died. “What is it?” he asked at once. “Is it Grandpa?”
His mother said, “No,” and the next thing Brock knew, he was saying, “Is it Jen?” He didn’t know why he said that. But somehow he just knew that something had happened to Jen.
When his mother told him yes, and said that Jennifer was dead, he threw the phone down, flung it from him as if it were a messenger of evil tidings whose destruction he could effect. He broke into a sweat, began perspiring all over, and he couldn’t stop.
The holding cells at Central Booking in lower Manhattan were jammed when McEntee and Robert arrived at about three-thirty in the morning. The place had the look of a zoo, with herds of men, most of them dark-skinned, standing upright in a crowded pen. It smelled like a zoo, too, because there were no toilets in the pens. If a prisoner wanted to go to the toilet, he had to ask a cop or a corrections officer to take him to it, and some didn’t bother to ask. They relieved themselves right on the cement floor. Robert, his eyes dazed, took in the sights and smells that greeted him and stayed close to McEntee.
His fingers were bandaged, and he had with him antibiotic pills for his scratches and a small ice pack for his aching hand. On the way to Central Booking, he’d been taken to a hospital, where his bites, scratches, and hand injury had been examined and prescribed for. McEntee told him he’d probably be able to keep his ice pack once he was booked, but not the pills. Jail was funny about pills.
They went first to photo
graphy, so he could get his mug shot taken. He stood in front of a Polaroid camera on a tripod, and a female police officer pressed the shutter. But nothing happened. The camera was broken. The officer sent for another, but it, too, was broken. She sent for a third, but when it arrived it turned out to be unable to expose color film, which was the only kind of film she had. Each time a new camera appeared, Robert wiped perspiration from his forehead and combed his bandaged fingers through his hair. Finally a working camera that could expose color film arrived, and four views of his face were recorded. The pictures that resulted were unlike any for which he had posed in the days when he had hoped to be a model. Despite his efforts to tidy himself, he appeared as disheveled as any common criminal—his hair unruly, his face dirty, his chin stubbled. But what was most striking about his appearance were the brownish-red scratches that streaked across his pallid cheeks like the warpaint on a movie Indian.
Once his pictures had been taken, McEntee led him to a counter where he was asked to relinquish any money he had with him. He had none. Then he was asked for his sneaker laces. “They don’t want you hanging yourself inside,” McEntee said. Stooping, Robert undid the laces and handed them over. Then he started to move forward, his sneakers suddenly gaping on his feet and the metal grommets into which the laces had tongued looking like tiny empty mouths. “That string, too,” McEntee said and pointed at the waistband of his sweatpants. Robert untied the pants, removed the string, and laid it on the counter. As soon as he did, the pants began to crawl down his hips. He clutched at them with a gauze-wrapped hand and held them up as best he could. Then McEntee took him to get his prisoner number and have his fingerprints taken.
That process should have gone smoothly but didn’t. The computer that assigned numbers and fed the prints to a central clearinghouse in Albany was down. There was no telling when it would be working again, a corrections officer informed McEntee. In the meanwhile his prisoner would have to wait in one of the pens.