Corruption of Justice

by Brenda English

  A third man, who hadn’t been in evidence earlier, now was approaching the lone car from the far end of the parking lot, where the bicycle path that paralleled the main highway ended. The newcomer arrived at the car and reached to open the door just as Magruder and his captive stepped onto the parking lot’s paved surface. I saw Magruder raise an arm in a gesture to get the man’s attention, and then he went right on up to the car, prisoner and all, and spent a couple of minutes in conversation. Soon, however, he turned and started back across the park in our direction, while the man at the car got inside and drove away.

  As Magruder and the exhibitionist drew nearer to us, I noticed the children once again moving closer to their mother, though she had released her hold on them when Magruder had walked to the parking lot. Clearly, the children’s encounter with the suspect had frightened them at least somewhat.

  “You might want to take them inside until after he’s got the guy in the car,” I suggested to Mrs. Ferry, nodding my head down toward the two kids.

  “I will,” she replied, smiling at me in gratitude for the suggestion, and took the children into the house, holding each of them by the hand and speaking to them reassuringly. By the time she returned through the back door, Magruder and his guest had reached the edge of the yard. Mrs. Ferry looked hard at the disheveled, unshaven man, and Magruder passed me with a look that told me this wasn’t going to be much of story, either.

  Mrs. Ferry and I followed him through the side yard and back out to the front of the house, where we watched as he put the handcuffed man into the rear seat of the cruiser and closed the door. With the man who had frightened her children now securely locked away, I saw Mrs. Ferry visibly relax. Magruder opened the driver’s door, reached inside, and came back out with his clipboard, which he brought over to where we stood.

  “Now that he’s taken care of,” Magruder said to Mrs. Ferry, gesturing with his head back toward the cruiser and the man inside, “why don’t you fill me in on what happened?”

  “The kids decided they wanted to go play in the park,” Mrs. Ferry told him, watching carefully as Magruder wrote her name and the address on the top of the incident form. “I always go with them, but I was just finishing up preparing one of the back flower beds to put in some fall plants, so I let them go on ahead without me for once, when I didn’t see anyone else out there. I told them I’d be right over in just a couple more minutes.”

  “Where was our friend?” Magruder asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Ferry answered, obviously feeling somewhat guilty with the fear that she had put her children at risk. “I think he must have been sitting down on the other side of the playground equipment, where I couldn’t see him. All I know is that before I could even finish the flower bed and walk over there, Shay and Matthew came running back across the park, yelling for me at the top of their lungs. It scared me half to death. I started running out to meet them, and they told me that he had unzipped his pants and… and exposed himself to them.”

  Magruder looked back at the prisoner in the cruiser for a moment, then asked Mrs. Ferry if he could go inside and speak with the children.

  “I just need to hear directly from them what happened,” he explained, “but I’ll try not to scare them or upset them.” Mrs. Ferry agreed, and we followed her into the house’s small but traditionally and tastefully furnished living room. I sat in one of the two Williamsburg blue upholstered chairs while Magruder sat in the other. The two children perched alertly on the blue-flowered sofa with their mother.

  “This is Shay,” Mrs. Ferry said, touching the top of her daughter’s head, “and this is Matt.” She draped her right arm around her son’s shoulders.

  “Hello,” Magruder said solemnly. “I’m Officer Magruder.”

  Mrs. Ferry looked closely at each of the children in turn.

  “I’ve explained to Officer Magruder what you told me about what happened in the park,” she said to them, her voice gentle and reassuring. “He’s arrested the man and is going to take him to jail so he can’t bother you again, but we need to have you tell Officer Magruder yourselves what happened just so he can make sure he has the information he needs to put the man in jail. All right?”

  Shay and her younger brother shook their heads in unison. Matthew popped his thumb firmly into his mouth. Seven-year-old Shay, however, clearly perceived that this situation called for her to be the big sister, as I had no doubt she did often and with relish. She stood up from the couch and said to Magruder, in a firm little voice, “That bad man came over and showed us his penis!” Apparently, with the culprit safely ensconced in the police car, she was now far more indignant than traumatized. Magruder swallowed hard, and I suddenly had to look away toward a pair of large watercolors of the Potomac that hung over the pecan-wood spinet piano sitting at the other end of the room.

  “Did he say anything to either of you?” Magruder asked, his voice not betraying the amusement I knew he felt at Shay’s little-adult demeanor.

  “No-o-o,” she answered thoughtfully as I finally got myself under enough control to look back at her.

  “Did he touch you or your brother or try to touch either one of you?”

  “No-o-o.” She still was thinking hard for the nice policeman.

  “Did he do anything else at all?”

  “Yes!” The shouted answer had found its way past Matthew’s thumb. All our heads swiveled in surprise to look at him. “He peepeed!”

  With that pronouncement, Matthew looked back at us as if surprised at himself, then put his thumb back in his mouth.

  “He did! He did!” Shay said, not wanting to lose her place in the spotlight. “He went to the bathroom right in front of us!”

  Magruder suddenly had to write several things down on his form. I studied the Potomac watercolors in more detail. Finally, Magruder looked back up at Shay.

  “Thank you very much,” he told her. “You and Matthew both have been very helpful. Now I just need to talk to your mom for a minute outside again, and then we’re going to take the man who bothered you away. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Shay agreed and sat back down on the couch beside her brother.

  Magruder stood up, and Mrs. Ferry and I did likewise, following him back outside. Once in the front yard, Magruder told us his reading of the situation.

  “This guy,” Magruder explained, “is pretty inebriated. He has no ID on him, and just looking at the way he’s dressed and everything, I’m guessing he’s one of our homeless guys who managed to bum a few dollars off somebody and treated himself to a bottle of something cheap and alcoholic. My gut tells me he barely knew where he was, that he just decided he needed to relieve himself and did it where he happened to be standing. I don’t think he really was exposing himself to the children; they just happened to be there, and he’s not thinking too clearly. I even went over to ask the guy in the parking lot if he had seen anything, just trying to make sure I wasn’t sizing the situation up wrong. But he wasn’t around at the time, apparently.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Mrs. Ferry asked.

  “I’m going to lock him up at the station and let him sober up. We’ve got enough to hold him on for that long. We’ll run his fingerprints and whatever name we can manage to get out of him through the computer. If I find he has any sort of record, especially anything involving children, I’ll throw the book at him. At any rate, I don’t think you need to worry about him again. These guys pretty much confine themselves to Route One, and God knows how he got over here, but I don’t think he’ll be back anytime soon.”

  Mrs. Ferry was satisfied with that answer, and we took our leave of her, waving at the two little faces that we could see watching us now through the clear panel of the front storm door. We got into the cruiser to the sounds of drunken snores from the backseat.

  “I noticed the backup cruiser never showed up,” I said to Magruder as he backed out of the driveway and onto Buckner Road.

  “I canceled them,” he explained, gesturi
ng to his microphone. “This guy wasn’t any trouble.”

  “I can see why,” I commented, glancing into the rear seat. The snoring continued at multidecibel levels throughout the ten-minute drive to the Mount Vernon Station. I used the time to jot a few notes to myself for my article, thinking that, for all its anticlimax, this probably was the closest thing to a lead I was going to get for the story I still had to write.

  Two

  The exhibitionist drunk didn’t really merit being the lead in a feature story, but he was all I had. It was eight o’clock on Friday night, a time when most of the weekday reporting staff had finished their weekend pieces and gone home, and the editors are well into the anxieties of their second deadline of the evening. A time when I would have liked to embark on the social life that I wished I had but didn’t.

  Instead, I was sitting in the metro room at the Washington News where, after a valiant struggle, I had managed to come up with a lead about how many times every day police officers have to walk into unknown situations, situations that often turn out to be little more than a nuisance but that carry the potential for something much more dangerous. Situations such as the guy in Grist Mill Park with the drinking and bladder problems, who finally had told the police his name was Clinton Sheets, and who could have been a child molester or even armed. The outline of the rest of the story was forming itself in my mind when my phone rang.

  “McPhee,” I answered somewhat absentmindedly, my attention still focused on the words on the computer screen.

  “Sutton, it’s Bill Russell,” said the familiar voice on the other end.

  “Hey, Bill,” I responded, turning both mind and body away from the computer to talk to the man who heads up the Fairfax County Police Department’s Public Information Office. “What’s up?”

  I was hoping it wasn’t anything pressing, given the feature I still had to write. I eyed the police scanner on my desk, which carried the Fairfax County Police open frequencies. It had been spouting nothing but the usual Friday night fender benders, shoplifters, and fistfights. But new technology has given police departments more access to closed frequencies as well as the in-car computers, and the most important information these days often gets transmitted out of the hearing of any Tom, Dick, or Mary who has the dough for a scanner. It was why I felt at least somewhat dependent on Bill and worked to stay in his good graces. Nothing required him to call and tell me what was happening, but he often did, partly in the interest of good relations with the press and partly, I suspected, because he had seen me mad once too often.

  Bill not only is the chief liaison between the police department and the reporters who cover it and, thus, an important source for me, but he also is someone I’ve come to admire and to like. He daily walks a fine line between the openness that the press demands and the insistence of the department’s investigators that he keep the information in their files out of public view until their cases are made. It’s a line that sometimes must look like an obstacle course, made more difficult by the competition pressures among reporters and by the paranoia and distrust that the press engenders in the police ranks.

  Bill apparently long ago had learned that the best policy was honesty. If he could answer a question without jeopardizing an investigation, he would. If he couldn’t, he said so, no matter how frustrating that answer might be for the reporters and for him. But I had yet to see him have to backtrack on something he had said. In the process of working with him, we all had learned to respect him, knowing he only infrequently indulged in semantics, and never in intentional deception for the sake of deception.

  Both police investigators and reporters often were unhappy with his answers to our questions, answers the detectives felt were too informative and that we told Bill were just the opposite. But Bill had learned through years of experience just how much juggling and ego-stroking each case required. And, I was sure, he spent a lot of time behind the scenes educating and placating reporters and police alike so they wouldn’t ask the impossible of him.

  “Apparently, one of our officers has just been found shot to death,” Bill said, the emotion he felt about such an event coming through clearly in his voice.

  “Oh, shit!” I said, knowing how personally every police officer on the force felt the killing of a fellow officer. “What happened? Where?”

  “Down in the Belle Haven area,” Bill answered, his voice still sounding a little shaky. I heard paper rustle. “River View Towers; 1780 Wakefield. It’s off the George Washington Parkway, just south of Old Town Alexandria.”

  “I know it,” I told him. “I looked at apartments in that area. Any ID on the officer?”

  “Not yet. Officers just arrived on the scene and called in confirmation a few minutes ago. A neighbor called it in. Apparently, the officer lived there. The neighbor said the door to the apartment was open and when he looked in, he could see the body lying facedown, but he recognized the uniform from the shoulder patch.”

  “I’ll see you there,” I said, already pressing computer keys to save my story and exit the file. There would be no more work on it tonight, I knew. “Thanks for the call.”

  Bill said good-bye and hung up, clearly anxious to get to the scene himself.

  On my way out, I stopped at Rob Perry’s computer at the copy desk. His chair was empty, and so was his metro editor’s office a few feet away. Rob keeps a foot in both camps. Although he is editor of the metro section, which means he has an assistant editor on duty at each daytime and evening shift, Rob has never divorced himself from the goings-on at the copy desk. I’ve always been impressed by his ability to juggle being metro editor while also lending a hand at the copy desk as if he were a subordinate. He oversees the content and layout of the metro pages for each edition, yet he also makes himself available to edit copy, take stories over the phone, and do whatever needs doing to get the pages out by the daily deadlines.

  Figuring Rob had only wandered off somewhere for a few minutes, since a deadline was approaching, I jotted my whereabouts down on a yellow Post-it note, along with a suggestion that he hold some space for me in the final edition. I knew better than to leave him in the dark on what had happened. In his role as metro editor, Rob insists on knowing what his reporting staff is up to at all times. It’s the only way, he says, that he can fight in the editors’ meetings for the space our stories need. Reporters under Rob’s supervision usually require only one lesson in what happens to those who let Rob end up looking uninformed. I long since had learned mine.

  * * * *

  River View Towers looked as if it were under siege by the time I arrived. An ambulance and numerous police cars—both marked and unmarked cruisers—were parked helter-skelter throughout the parking lot, many with their emergency lights still flashing. And, having driven out from the District on a summertime Friday night (otherwise known as The Traffic Nightmare of the Week), I knew I also was arriving after the reporters from several other area papers as well as from at least some of the radio and television stations. That was clear from the scene at the usually unmanned entrance gate to the twin eight-story brick buildings, where one uniformed officer was checking the IDs of people who lived in the complex before letting them drive into the parking lot and where a second cop was having a heated argument with the driver of a TV station satellite remote truck, who apparently wanted in as well.

  I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and turned right onto Potomac Avenue, where I parked my white ‘76 VW convertible too close to a fire hydrant and prayed to the parking ticket gods for a break. Then I walked back up to the River View entrance and showed the first policeman my press ID. He waved me through without comment, and I waded my way into the chaos to look for Bill Russell.

  I found him standing to one side of the entrance to the west building, surrounded by other reporters, TV cameramen, and a growing knot of tower residents and other onlookers. The members of the Fourth Estate were bombarding him with questions. Bill’s answers all sounded like “I don’t know yet.”
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  “If you’ll all be quiet for a second…” he was saying loudly, just as I walked up to join the group. The knot of reporters shut up long enough to see if he was going to be forthcoming. Bill drew a deep breath.

  “Thanks,” he said, his voice more conversational now. “I just got here, myself. Before I can tell you anything or answer your questions, I need to go inside and see what the situation is. If you’ll just be patient for a few minutes, I’ll be back down as quickly as I can with whatever I can tell you. Okay?”

  There were a few mutters of agreement from the group and irritated sighs from a couple of TV cameramen as they lifted their cameras down from their shoulders.

  “Don’t take too long, Bill,” I said above the heads in front of me. “I am on a deadline, you know.”

  “Right,” he said, turning his mouth down in a slightly sour expression but not looking in my direction. He didn’t have to. I knew he recognized my voice. A moment later, he caught my eye as he went past me without speaking, on his way inside the building, and gave me a quick wink. I hadn’t been worried that he was mad. Bill and I were friends when we both were off the clock, but in front of others, we occasionally indulged in some give-and-take for the sake of appearances. It wouldn’t do either of us any good to have the rest of the press—or the police department, for that matter—think that I got special treatment. But it was rare that either of us meant any of the gibes we tossed back and forth.

  At Bill’s departure, most of the other reporters scattered to various parts of the parking lot and driveway, looking to lasso unsuspecting residents and ask them pointless, predictable questions about how a murder in their building made them feel and whether they could feel safe living there now. Having once looked at apartments in River View Towers, however, I took myself off to the east building, where I knew the management office was located, in hopes of finding someone there who might know something helpful.