The Best American Crime Writing

by Otto Penzler

  The cops, Officers Cullen and Morales, saw passengers exiting the train in a neat stream, and they saw Darius conscientiously inspecting the track with a flashlight. They had just begun questioning the conductor and train operator when Darius rushed up and co-opted an answer: “Yeah, the train went BIE and we think it caught some debris, so we’re evaluating the track—the rear brakes checked out, the passengers are all clear.” When Darius had gone back to work, the train operator pulled the cops aside and whispered, “This guy’s not one of us. He’s an impostor.”

  They found that hard to believe. Everything about Darius—his gear, his carriage, his total comfort with protocol—suggested authenticity. But the train operator had recognized Darius from a Transit Authority wanted poster, and he told the cops to ask for ID. Darius produced his study-group letter, which essentially convinced them that he was legitimate (they had encountered track-study notices many times before), but the operator was adamant, and they asked Darius to have his supervisor come vouch for him. Darius led Officer Cullen back to the tower, unlocking the door and turning on the lights and telling Officer Cullen to sit down and make himself comfortable. Darius got a drink from a water cooler and sat down at a desk to call a friend. Cullen, short and thick-limbed, with a gelled part in his hair and multiple tattoos and nine years on the force, felt faintly guilty for inconveniencing Darius.

  On the phone, Darius asked to speak to someone and then said, “Oh, okay, I’ll try back.” His boss was out to lunch, he said. Cullen said not to worry, they could wait, and apologized for the annoyance. Out the tower window Darius glimpsed an unfriendly superintendent conferring with the train operator. Darius started laughing. He said, “All right, you got me.” Officer Cullen asked him what he was talking about. Darius—now narrowly smiling and incipiently prideful—said, “You got me! I don’t work for the TA. The letter’s a forgery. I stole the letterhead and did the letter myself. The uniform and keys I got from people I know. I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s actually easy if you know what you’re doing.” Officer Cullen stood silent and staring, suspended in his disbelief. “Here’s some articles about me,” Darius said.

  On the way to a formal interview with Assistant District Attorney Michael Dougherty at 100 Centre Street, Darius offered unsolicited, sophisticated descriptions of the NYCTA surface crews the police car passed. Cullen and Morales wondered how he knew so much about the minutiae of surface work; Darius responded with monologues about his mastery of the system. To the officers it seemed that he couldn’t speak fast enough, that his confession had energized him and elevated his self-regard. The sight of the Brooklyn Bridge reminded Darius that he had plans to go to a barbecue the next day on the Manhattan Bridge: It was a Friday tradition of a bridge crew he had been working with. He asked if there was a chance he would get out in time. Officer Cullen said that, whether or not he got out, it might not be such a great idea.

  At Centre Street, Darius was interviewed by ADA Dougherty and Detective Martin Mullen. He gave no sign that he knew a transgression had occurred, that there was a permanent divide in the room and that he was alone on one side of it. With a single exception, neither interviewer noted any change in his demeanor, which was one of subdued bliss. According to Detective Mullen, “emotionally Darius was even-keeled the entire time. The fact that he was carrying these articles from his previous arrests—it was almost like he dug the publicity, like there was some prestige in the experience.”

  The exception came when ADA Dougherty suggested that Darius might have had something to do with the train’s emergency stop. The absurd, pejorative idea that he would ever compromise service quality and passenger safety disturbed Darius. “That’s exactly what I’m trained not to do,” he said. He explained that stopping the train would have required both override permission from the City Hall control tower and access to the switch room in the back of the 57th Street tower. Neither was available to him—though, as he admitted, he probably could have guessed the location of the switch-room key. City Hall later confirmed Darius’s story, and evidence indicated that he had never been in the switch room. His theory of the event—a wheel-detector device had tripped the train’s emergency brake because the train had exceeded the posted speed—was later determined to be the most plausible.

  Once it became clear that Darius wouldn’t plead to the charge of reckless endangerment, Dougherty and Mullen decided to let him talk. He talked for two hours and seemed willing to talk indefinitely. He was cagey when it came to identifying collaborators or detailing certain methods whose secrecy was essential to his freedom of movement; otherwise, almost any question elicited long tales of his exploits that gave way episodically to ornate, unnecessary digressions. Once I asked Darius what he was doing at 57th Street before his arrest. My question implied that he’d been in the station. His answer began like this: “No, no. I was mainly in the tower, not the station. Now: Towers are for what is known as train-traffic control. The board lights tell you where everything is at. All right? Okay. So every single train from Fifth Avenue, on the N and the R, down to Canal Street. Not only that but there’s a communications box for listening to the crew on every train. You also have what is known as fire watch. I watch the board for anything relating to a fire condition. Now, if it’s something minute, I can hopefully go down and end the problem without having to call the fire department. If it’s close to the third rail, use a dry chemical. If it’s something major, call the fire department, call Command, have the power turned off for that section because otherwise the fire department cannot go on the tracks, that’s part of their protocol …. And if need be you can have EMS on standby, just in case. So you always take all necessary precautions. Okay! Now on this particular day, I’m in the tower …”

  Darius’s obsession has always been concentrated on the subway, but a long interview with him will teach you how far beyond it he has roamed. He may describe his experiences as a substitute engineer on the freight trains of Conrail, Norfolk Southern, Delaware & Hudson, or CSX. (“CSX is definitely my favorite. Every single engine is freshly painted.”) He may tell you now to manipulate the employee-transfer protocol of the Metro bus system to get a job as a shifter (cleaning and prepping buses at depots), and how to use that position to take buses out on express routes. He might explain Job 179 (conductor) on the Long Island Railroad: what track you’ll be on (17 or 19), how to let the crew know when you’ve finished preparing the train for departure (two buzzes on the intercom), how you return to Penn Station “as equipment” (without passengers). It is unlikely that Darius will omit the year he spent wearing an NYCTA superintendent’s shield. While he was doing a stint as a conductor, he discovered that he could have a shield made in a jewelry store. He began wearing it on a vest he pulled over his TA-specified shirt and tie. He had a hard hat and pirated ID. Darius considered himself a track-department superintendent, so he signed out track-department vehicles and radios and drove around the city, supervising track maintenance and construction projects and responding to emergencies. He was sensitive to the threat of close scrutiny by superiors, but given his high position and network of allies, that was rare. Darius worked regular hours: eight to four from Tuesday to Thursday, seven in the evening to three in the morning on Friday, and three until eleven on Saturday morning. That way he was off from Saturday morning until Tuesday morning. “Because of my title and my position,” Darius told me, “I figured I had the seniority to do it.”

  At the end of the Centre Street interview, Darius was facing felony charges to which he had confessed. He had twice been convicted of felonies. He had just dramatically violated his parole, and he had multiple parole and probation violations on his record. But he never asked Detective Mullen or ADA Dougherty about his legal situation. He shook their hands and was led out in handcuffs, his still face showing contentment.

  On that day Darius’s parents, who had retired from New York to North Carolina, awaited him uncertainly in their house outside Winston-Salem. Since his release, Mr.
and Mrs. McCollum had prevailed on him to apply for a parole transfer and recommence his life in North Carolina, where Mrs. McCollum’s nephew had found him a job through a state program for parolees. Darius stayed with them for a few weeks, and then went up to New York for a parole hearing. But weeks had passed; Darius’s aunt, with whom he’d been staying, no longer knew where he was or what he was doing.

  What he was doing, while sleeping and eating and showering at Nelly’s or in NYCTA crew rooms, was driving a de-icer train from Coney Island to Prospect Park on the D line; putting out track fires (a train dripping battery acid caused a small explosion at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue; a tossed cigarette butt kindled a small rubbish fire in Brooklyn); investigating a busted water main at 110th Street on the A line; flagging traffic, on weekends, around a transit construction project at Queens Plaza (“The guys from transit that do street flagging, they look as if they’re stiff, and see, when I do it, I look like I’m with DOT, because I make it look so efficient—I know how to do the hand signs”); assisting the track crew he mentioned to Cullen and Morales with inspections of the Manhattan Bridge on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and entirely repainting a crew room after hearing a supervisor say that it would make a good project for someone. This all happened, Darius says, because he ran into some old friends at Queens Plaza soon after he got back to New York and they invited him to hang out and take some of their shifts, and he thought he could do a few and go back to North Carolina, “but it just kept going, and that was it.”

  Elizabeth McCollum is unreserved and accurately judgmental and dresses well and cannot discuss her son without becoming fervent; she retired a decade ago from an administrative job at a textbook company. Samuel McCollum, a former plant supervisor, is bulky and skeptical, has an impulsive falsetto giggle, and tries, when discussing the actions of others, to discover decent motivations that have been obscured by mistakes or cruelties. Like his wife, he has been injured by the experiences of his only child: “Darius won’t open up and talk about anything. He would never elaborate on an answer. That’s all we ever wanted. Now, how do you get somebody like that in touch with himself?” On the day of the final arrest, Mrs. McCollum was still hopeful: “You can’t let negativism cloud you, because with Darius, once that comes in, forget it.” She and Mr. McCollum talked about the life Darius might have in North Carolina, and thought about getting him a driver’s license and a pickup truck, which he had always wanted. They didn’t say it, but they were each thinking that in their house Darius grew restless immediately.

  The McCollum house stands at the edge of a rural two-lane, on a four-acre grass lot that runs to a curtain of hardwoods. The neighboring houses, similarly situated, occasionally give way to grazing horses. When I visited, the only thing in one big field down the road was a tethered mule. The problem for Darius was that he couldn’t walk out the front door and easily go anywhere. The McCollums had furnished their house ardently: Chiming clocks and porcelain figurines and hand-stitched antimacassars and graven glassware and pictures of sunset-silhouetted African kings left no blank space. Emptied from many rooms in many homes over a lifetime and now tensely converged in this final house, these encroaching objects in their familiarity had become largely invisible to Mr. and Mrs. McCollum, but in an attempt to understand the propensities of her son, Mrs. McCollum had preserved every document—subway notes and journals, school reports, letters from prison—that might explain him, and this expanding collection never entirely disappeared from her or her husband’s awareness. Much was boxed; much lay around, visible and frequently handled; the things that Mrs. McCollum liked to look at every few days remained enshrined in convenient places. One was a letter from prison, dated June 12, 1987:

  Its me again saying hello along with a thought … my thought goes like this. There once lived a young man and a very bright man. This young man had … such good parents … they did everything that they saw was good for this guy …. The guy was actually great until he [got] into his teenage years and started hanging out around trains, trucks and buses, but one day it all caught up with him and this young man was confused …. This guy is away somewhere to where he can’t runaway from and has to face his problems. He is sorry for everything and wants to forget about everything he has done. That is the end of that story. This is a beginning step. I am wondering what is going to happen when this young man comes home …. I’m sure there will be sortie changes but what I mean is will he be able to find his destiny.

  Darius’s call from Rikers Island didn’t surprise Mr. and Mrs. McCollum. They had long since learned how to entertain ambitious plans for him while anticipating legal dilemmas. They replaced his court-appointed attorney with a family friend named Tracey Bloodsaw. Bloodsaw decided on a psychiatric defense and got the access order required for an examination, but corrections officers at Rikers Island, on various bureaucratic pretexts and over a period of months, refused to admit her psychiatrist. Justice Carol Berkman declined to intervene on the psychiatrist’s behalf, and eventually precluded a psychiatric defense, declaring that adequate notice of such a defense had become impossible. Bloodsaw told Berkman what she thought of the ruling, explained to the McCollums that she had become a liability to Darius, and removed herself from the case.

  Darius’s next lawyer, Stephen Jackson, accepted a plea, and Justice Berkman scheduled a sentencing hearing. This empowered her to order—as opposed to merely authorizing—a psychiatric examination. A prison psychiatrist, after a cursory evaluation, noted that a neurological disorder called Asperger’s syndrome might explain Darius’s behavior. Almost simultaneously, Jackson was contacted by members of several Asperger’s support groups. Darius, whose arrests had been covered in newspapers for twenty years, had become well-known among Asperger’s experts and activists, and his case had been cited in at least one scholarly work. There was a strong consensus in the Asperger’s community that Darius suffered from the syndrome, and dismay that his treatment had consisted entirely of jail time. Jackson decided to request an adjournment in court so that Darius could be examined and might receive a counseling-based sentence.

  Stooped and silent at his sentencing, in late March of last year, Darius stood at the very edge of the courtroom, just in front of the holding-cell door through which he had been led. In accordance with the law, he faced Justice Berkman, who sat on a high plinth before a ten-foot mural of the Lady of Justice, between half-furled flags on eagle-tipped poles. The justice had black-gray hair and a squinty, repudiative face. She often listened to the lawyers with her chin on her upturned palms and her incredulous mouth open; she often rolled her eyes with unusual vigor and range, her head following, as if drawn by her eyes, until it almost touched her shoulder. Darius looked around only once, for his mother. Mrs. McCollum, anxious and carrying an accumulation of anger at the legal system, forced herself to smile at him. Darius says he wasn’t thinking about anything: He knew what was going to happen.

  I arrived before Darius and watched a few brusque bail hearings. The distant ceiling diminished the few spectators. Then the clerk called Darius’s docket number and the lawyers identified themselves. They had spare tables at the foot of Justice Berkman’s plinth. ADA Dougherty—plain, young, resolute—sat alone. Stephen Jackson sat with Alvin Schlesinger, a former colleague of Justice Berkman’s who had been recruited by the president of an Asperger’s organization. Jackson is tall; every aspect of his appearance had been managed. His manner was measured and grandiloquent: He seemed to take a special pleasure in formality. (When I called him afterward and asked for an interview, he said, “Certainly I would be amenable at some point in time. Would you like to do it telephonically?”) Schlesinger, who had retired to the country, seemed patient in a practiced, almost impervious way; after the sentencing he would drive back to Vermont without stopping, drink a double scotch, and write Justice Berkman a letter he would never send.

  Jackson rose. “Your Honor,” he said, “after the Court agreed to provide a plea to satisfy the indictment, I was
inundated with information regarding Darius’s possible psychological condition. It is apparent that he may be afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome …. The Court is aware of the letters that were sent to the Court providing the Court with information regarding the disease, and—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jackson,” Justice Berkman said, staring hard at various faces in the courtroom, “but perhaps we could bottom-line this … having educated myself on the website and with the DSM and so forth, Mr. McCollum has some characteristics which are very much inconsistent with Asperger’s. He’s got a lot of friends. You told me he has a fiancée, and one of the major signs … is social dysfunction. Not just, gee, his friends think he’s a little strange sometimes but an inability to relate to others ….” Mrs. McCollum started to get up and was pulled back down by the people on either side of her.

  “In any event,” Berkman said, “I don’t understand what the point is …. So far as I can tell there’s no treatment for Asperger’s. That is number one …. Number two, Asperger’s would not disable him from knowing that he’s not supposed to form credentials identifying him as an employee of the Transit Authority and go in and take trains or buses or vans or cars or other modes of transportation, which I gather has been his specialty …. I don’t see any reason to delay this further, because for some reason the press thinks that, oh, Darius is not responsible. Darius is responsible …. He can stop doing this, if his family and friends would stop telling him, Oh, isn’t this amusing. Right?” Mrs. McCollum rose rapidly and was pulled down.

  Mr. Schlesinger stood and requested an adjournment so that the defense could have Darius examined and explore treatment options. Many experts felt that Darius had the disorder and to deny treatment was to risk indefinitely perpetuating his past: a limbo in the alternating forms of furtive impersonation and incarceration. Schlesinger had secured a promise from an Asperger’s expert at the Yale Child Study Center to examine Darius and recommend a residential treatment facility. Assistant District Attorney Dougherty stood and opposed the request. Given his history of parole and probation violations, Darius was a bad candidate for any treatment program. Stephen Jackson stood and pointed out the circularity: Darius is not a good candidate for treatment because of his condition, and his condition persists because he’s not a good candidate for treatment.