by Dorien Grey
“I was at Pals earlier, and picked up a trick around eleven. We went over to his place—he lives just down the block on Carter. I was headed back to my car around two-twenty when I saw smoke coming out of the substation. I knew Coffee & was open, so I ran over there to have them call the fire department, but a couple guys already had, and the trucks and squad cars started coming a minute or so later.”
“I just hope it wasn’t arson.” I knew full well the odds were 99.9 to 0.l that it was.
Jared pointed to the parking garage construction site directly across Ash from the station. The wind had shifted slightly, clearing enough of the smoke away to show what someone had spray-painted in 6-ft high letters on the high wooden fence surrounding the site: “No ‘Fags’ on the Force, No Cops in The Central!”
Shit!
Chapter 11
I’d noticed, while watching both the fire and the crowd, the arrival of more and more uniformed police. When I decided it was time to head home and was walking back to my car, I saw that where one squad car had been blocking Ash a block up from Beech when I arrived, there were now two more, facing in opposite directions on the side street. As I passed the first car, an officer stopped me.
“Where are you going?” he asked, not threateningly, but with a definite no-nonsense tone.
Normally, I’d have started bristling right then and there, but I took the question in light of the overall situation, and understood.
“Home.”
He was joined by another officer from one of the cars on the side street.
“You live around here?” the second officer asked.
“No. I’m going to my car.”
The second officer took his flashlight and shined it in my face, though there was plenty of light from the corner streetlight.
“Can I see some I.D.?”
Again, I allowed my rational side to overcome a quick surge of annoyance, and fished out my wallet, opening it and handing my driver’s license to the officer, who turned the flashlight’s attention to it.
“What are you doing in this area at this time of night?” the first officer asked.
Hey, this is my city and I can be any damned place I want to be, my mind voice said. I told it to shut up.
“A friend called me and told me of the fire.”
Now there’s a good reason, I thought.
“You like going to fires in the middle of the night?” the second officer said, handing my license back to me after jotting my name and license number down on a notepad he’d taken from his shirt pocket.
“This isn’t just any fire, obviously.”
“No, it isn’t.”
I saw a couple women approaching, walking up from Beech.
“You can go,” the first officer said, and raised his hand to stop the approaching couple.
*
I got to my car, observing two or three more squad cars arriving, and started to drive off. I’d gotten two blocks when another squad car began to follow me.
Shit!
He turned on his flashers, and I pulled over.
The second interrogation was much like the first and I realized the guy was just doing his job. I told him the first set of officers had already taken my name and driver’s license number, knowing it wouldn’t do any good, which it didn’t, and finally—after going back to the squad and calling my information in to headquarters—he returned my license and told me I could go.
I passed at least two more squad cars heading for The Central before I managed to make it home. Fortunately, I was far enough from The Central at that point that they couldn’t be sure where I was coming from.
When I finally did get home, around 4:45 a.m., I debated on whether I should even try to go back to bed. I was pretty certain I’d be getting a phone call in a couple hours from Mark Richman. But I’d been running pretty much on caffeine and adrenalin for the past several days, and was really beat. So I compromised and just sprawled out on the bed without taking my clothes off and that’s the last thing I remember until the phone rang again, at 7:02.
I was aware I felt like a salmon swimming upstream against the rapids while I struggled to reach a state of consciousness that would allow me to reach for the phone, and I made it just before the machine kicked in.
“I understand you were at the fire last night,” Richman said without even a ‘hello.’
“Yeah.” I was so groggy, I didn’t even wonder how he might know that.
“Well, the shit’s really hit the fan now. Cochran’s demanded a meeting with the chief, and it’s scheduled for eight a.m. How soon can you be down here?”
“I’m on my way.”
Water-splash face wash, quick pass at my hair with the brush. No tooth brushing. No shower. No shave. No change of clothes.
I didn’t care.
That I couldn’t find a parking place and had to park in the Warman Park underground garage and walk the two blocks to the City Annex would normally have pissed me off royally. But I had to spend every ounce of energy I had just getting my head together. There was a coffee vendor’s cart halfway between Warman Park and the Annex, and I stopped long enough to order a large black. It was hotter than hell, but I’d chug-a-lugged it by the time I reached the Annex and pitched the cup in a curbside trash receptacle. I looked up at the huge clock in the lobby as I entered. It was 7:49.
Richman was at his desk when I knocked on his office door.
“Well,” he said, “you look like hell.” He pointed me to a chair, and I sat down.
“Thanks.”
“Sorry to drag you out of bed…. I guess you didn’t get much sleep.”
“Good guess. How did you know I was at the fire?” I didn’t think he could possibly know from my being stopped by the officers—there were too many people and too much confusion for anyone to be that organized.
“Jake Janzer was there. He recognized you from Officer Brady’s funeral.”
We sat in silence for long enough for me to want to just close my eyes and nod off, but I forced myself to sit up straight in my chair.
“So what, exactly, am I doing here?”
He leaned back in his own chair, elbows on the chair’s arms, fingers spread, tips touching. “The chief wants to see you. I don’t know if he’ll want Cochran present or not.”
“Where’s Captain Offermann?”
Richman gave the slightest hint of a smile. “He’s more involved right now with finding who killed Officer Brady; the loss of a half-million dollar police substation isn’t in his jurisdiction.”
“Black thinks I had something to do with it?” I asked, immediately wondering where I’d come up with that one.
The small smile became a quick small grin. “Uh, I don’t think so.”
His face became serious. “But you know damned well this fire couldn’t possibly have happened at a worse time. And that graffiti doesn’t even allow us to gain a few days’ time by pretending it might not have been arson. The Gay Pride parade is three days away. Three days! Just as almost everybody in the gay community automatically assumes a cop killed Tom Brady, that graffiti makes it pretty damned obvious to us that somebody gay set that fire. Gays aren’t the only ones who can jump to conclusions or deal in generalities. They still insist on painting the entire police department as being out of control homophobes. Well, there are a lot of people in the department who assume that everybody in the gay community is capable of civil unrest and violence against city property. We can all do with a little less conclusion-jumping and a lot more logic.
“And the upshot is that Cochran wins! He’ll do whatever it takes, short of calling in the national guard—and if he had the authority to do so himself, I wouldn’t put it past him—to see to it that tens of thousands of potentially violent gays are not allowed to congregate, let alone hold a parade, on Sunday. And if we try to pull the parade permit, we’d have to seal off The Central to prevent gays and lesbians from gathering there…!”
Well, maybe a little overstating, there,
I thought, but he’d made his point, and I could certainly share his frustration over the entire situation.
At about 8:15, Richman’s phone rang.
“Lieutenant Richman.” A pause, then “Yes, sir. Yes, we’ll be right up.” He hung up, got up from his chair.
“Let’s go.”
The chief’s office, on the floor above Offermann’s, was duly impressive. A considerably larger reception area than Offermann’s had doors to each side of the receptionist’s desk. To the left, I could see through the open door into a large conference room. The door to the right was closed, and Richman knocked—more a token, two-knuckle rap.
“Come.”
Richman opened the door and made a small “after you” gesture, then followed me in, closing the door behind him.
It was a rather comfortable room. A large desk flanked by the American flag on one side and the state and city’s flags on the other. Two smaller desks, one in each far-wall corner of the room, and perhaps eight comfortable-looking but definitely business chairs arranged in conversational semi-circles.
Chief Black sat behind his desk and made no move to get up, not that I’d expected him to. He made a palms-up “be seated” motion toward the two chairs a few feet from the front of his desk, and Richman and I sat.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Hardesty.”
I merely nodded. He sat just looking at me for a moment, then said: “I am gravely disappointed by the burning of The Central substation.”
Jeezus, he is blaming me! I thought for an instant until reality smacked me on the side of the head and said: Get a grip!
“The question,” he said without waiting for any response from me, “is what we are going to do about it. Deputy Chief Cochran, with whom I’ve just spent a few instructive minutes, is right in one thing: There can be no gay pride festival this weekend. Not in The Central. Our problem is in how to stop a massive confrontation between the gay community and the police. Whoever it was who set fire to the substation did the gay community an incalculable disservice and opened the door to official retaliation. Plus the fact that it takes time and manpower away from the investigation into Officer Brady’s death. All of which plays directly into the hands of…those in the department who will go to great lengths to maintain the old ways. Deputy Chief Cochran is demanding that the parade permit be rescinded immediately, and a curfew ordered in The Central—which would almost positively guarantee an insurrection.”
I suddenly wondered if Cochran and his followers could possibly be so desperate to get rid of the chief that they might themselves be involved in the fire? Highly unlikely, but…well, if Hitler could come to power by setting fire to the Reichstag and blaming the communists, what’s one little police substation to someone who wanted the chief out? Cochran was the only one to really gain anything out of it. And if the thought occurred to me, it almost certainly had occurred to the chief.
While I was riveted on his every word, I questioned once again what the hell I was doing here. Apparently that question was written all over my face, because he leaned forward in his chair and put his arms on the desk.
“You are here as our sounding board and because, while you do not consider yourself a community leader, you are a community member with, we believe, a better grasp of both sides of this situation than most. If we can reach some sort of consensus here, I will ask to speak with a very few of those you gathered for us before: The president of the Gay Business League, the president of the Bar Guild, the chairperson of the Gay Pride parade and the head of the Festival Committee, and perhaps the editors of the gay papers, though those are weeklies and I don’t know if there is enough time for them to be of much help unless we could convince them to put out a special edition.”
He leaned even closer and said: “But first I’d like to hear any suggestions you might have to help us avoid what could very well lead to a total disaster for both the gay community and the city at large.”
I didn’t have to think long on that one. “There is one thing you could do immediately that would help relieve a lot of the tension, on the part of the community at any rate,” I said.
“And that is?”
Now it was my turn to lean forward. “When I left The Central this morning, I was stopped twice by the police asking what I was doing there. I understand why, but I’m sure a lot of those who were also stopped don’t. The entire Central was practically crawling with police: Squad cars everywhere. I even saw a couple mounted units—where in hell they came from at that time of the morning I have no idea, but they were there and it somehow gave me, and I’m sure many of the community who were there, the impression of the Germans marching into Poland.” I gave a quick look at both of them and shrugged. “A little melodramatic and unfair, perhaps, but that’s what it reminded me of. If there’d been a bigger crowd of gays and lesbians there….” I gave a small mental shudder. “Anyway, tempers are understandably high on both sides. I’d strongly recommend the first thing you might do is to reduce the visible police presence to an absolute minimum. The city needs to provide a presence of authority in The Central, let it be the fire department. They have to be there to handle the arson investigation anyway. The community has no beef with the fire department; they won’t be perceived as a threat. Keep a couple of the big rigs on the street and maybe put a few more people on the investigation than are really needed. It would show the presence of city government without overwhelming us with it. Perhaps even keep squad cars as much out of the area as you could—maybe more plainclothesmen and unmarked patrols?”
Chief Black looked at Richman, then back at me.
“We could do that, yes. But that does not address the problem of the parade and festival. The fire gives a good reason for not allowing the parade to go past the fire scene—it’s still a crime scene, as well. But the parade route is straight down Beech, from Olive to Crescent; Ash is almost exactly in the middle of the route, and there’s no way the parade could be rerouted around it: None of the other streets in The Central are wide enough, and most of them are residential anyway. Shifting the parade to another part of the city at this late date would be next to impossible, even if we were willing to risk the serious problems the sheer number of participants would represent. I agree with Deputy Chief Cochran on this one. Mobs have very short fuses, and tension is simply too high on both sides right now.”
Richman, who had been quiet since we’d walked in, sat idly chewing the corner of his lower lip in thought, then said: “Do you think they would go with a postponement? Move it back a week? It would give both sides some breathing room and it would be a form of mutual concession; the community conceding the practicalities of our arson investigation and the tension level in exchange for our not all but guaranteeing a confrontation by canceling the festival and parade outright. I’m sure we can do whatever permit reissuing/rescheduling might be needed.”
“It’s certainly worth trying.” (I’d started to say “What have we got to lose?” but the answer to that one was all too obvious.)
“Can you get Lieutenant Richman a list of the people I mentioned and their phone numbers?” the chief asked. “It might be better if we initiated the calls this time. We want to keep it down to a manageable number, but can you think of anyone else we should include?”
I thought it over a moment: Lee Taylor of the Gay Business League, Mark Graser from the Bar Guild, Charles Conrad of Rainbow Flag, Cathy Holms and Marty Green from the Pride Parade and Festival, perhaps Tony Mason of the M.C.C.—those were probably the most key people. I didn’t think Glen O’Banyon or I needed to be involved, though I was nosy enough to want to be there.
“I think the ones you mentioned should do it. Everything can filter down from there. I have the list at home, and I’ll call Lieutenant Richman as soon as I get there. But I hope you’ll also be doing something with the straight media. We’re all in enough trouble without their making the situation even worse than it is. I know the Journal-Sentinel will milk it for everything they can get out of
it.”
Chief Black nodded. “I have calls in to the editors of all the papers, and the management of the TV and radio stations. We started getting interview requests about ten minutes after the first alarm on the substation fire came in. I don’t want to call a press conference right now; I’ll try the one-on-one approach first. I think most of them realize what is at stake and will be responsible. As for the Journal-Sentinel, I’ve instructed the head of our legal department to advise them that if so much as a single incident of violence or civil disobedience can be traced to their irresponsible handling of this story, we will have them in court and keep them there until they go bankrupt. I don’t think they’ll want to call our bluff on that one.”
Sensing that we’d said just about everything there was to be said at the moment, I got up from my chair. “If we’re through here, I’ll head home and get those numbers.”
Both the chief and Richman got up and extended their hands. We shook, and I turned and walked out of the office.
*
Got home, called Richman with the numbers—I gave him the Tattler’s and Bottom’s Up’s editors’ numbers on the basis that they probably should be included, though neither one could probably afford to put out a special edition, and their current editions were either just out or at the printers. Still, the editors had a lot of contacts within the community. Richman invited me to attend; they hoped to get everyone in to the chief’s office at two p.m., but much as I wanted to go, I declined. I knew if I didn’t get some sleep I’d be a zombie. I could find out how it went afterward.
“Oh,” Richman said before he hung up, “I do have one bit of news. Officer Brady did stop for gas at a QuickieStop. The attendant didn’t notice anything strange, though, and didn’t see anyone else around.”
Another dead end. I said goodbye and thought longingly of sleep.
I did call Glen O’Banyon’s office to let him know what was going on and left a message with Donna, his secretary, to have him call me at home. Then I went into the bedroom, fell face-first across the bed, and went out like a light.