The Right Wrong Thing

by Ellen Kirschman

“Are you saying you think she shot Lakeisha Gibbs on purpose, to prove something?”

  “No way. What I mean is she didn’t call for backup because it would make her look like she couldn’t handle the situation by herself. Stupid move. They may have been riding her, but when a cop puts out a Code 3 call for help, everybody comes. So what if they ragged on her some more? Big deal. It would have been better than this.” He pulls his sunglasses off his hat and puts them on. “I’d better go look for her.” He stands. Puts out his hand for me to shake. “Thanks, Doc. I hope you know what you’re doing. She’s stubborn. Always has been.”

  * * *

  I check my office phone for messages. There’s a message from Chief Reagon. She wants me to know that she has been trying to get Randy on the telephone, but that Randy isn’t answering. She left a message strongly recommending that Randy meet me as soon as possible, hopefully today. She wants me to tell Randy to take all the time she needs. It is her inclination to have an outside agency investigate Randy’s shooting to avoid any potential accusations of conflict of interest, but Captain Jay Pence has advised her that doing so would be an insult to the integrity of the department. Because he knows the department culture so much better than she does, she’s accepting his advice and has, once again, put him in charge of the investigation. I am to keep him apprised of Randy’s progress.

  I call her back on her cell phone. When she picks up I can tell she’s in her car. I can hear traffic noises in the background.

  “You promised Lakeisha’s mother and grandmother that you would personally oversee this investigation. And now you’re handing the investigation to Jay Pence. Have I missed something? Is anything wrong?”

  “Jay Pence reports directly to me. When I said I would personally oversee things I didn’t mean that I would conduct all the interviews myself. I still have a department to run. I count on my staff to do the day-to-day work.”

  “But you’re the public face of this department. Not Jay Pence.”

  There’s a pause. Horns honk in the distance.

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “I don’t think Ms. Gibbs or Ms. Bernstein will understand this. You gave them your word.”

  “They don’t need to understand it. And frankly, Dr. Meyer-hoff, neither do you. I’m sorry to be abrupt but I’ve arrived at my destination.” She clicks off.

  Heat rises in my cheeks, and I’m glad there’s no one here to see me getting red in the face. How dare she talk to me like that? I’m a consultant, not a subordinate. Something is going on with her and I wish I knew what the hell it was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Popcorn and red wine make up my fallback cuisine. I curl up on the couch in my bathrobe and turn on the evening news. Jay Pence stands like a cardboard cutout on the steps of police headquarters, stiff and emotionless, parsing his words so carefully that even I am inclined to think he’s covering up something.

  “There is an ongoing police investigation upon which I cannot comment. Rest assured, our investigation will be thorough, fair, and transparent.” There’s a barrage from the reporters, each one stepping on the other’s question. Pence looks out over their heads and calls on none other than Jack Shiller, the young reporter who accosted me in the lobby.

  “Where is the chief? Why isn’t she in charge of this investigation?”

  “I am keeping Chief Reagon in the loop, every step of the way. She is and continues to be fully informed. She has already made personal contact with the family of the young woman who was shot.” I notice he avoids calling Lakeisha Gibbs a victim.

  “When will we hear from the chief in person?” Shiller continues as though he hasn’t heard a word of what Pence has just said.

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” Pence starts to close his briefing book.

  “Who shot Lakeisha Gibbs?” Shiller has now edged closer to the steps.

  Pence takes a long sigh as if he is condescending to tolerate an interrogation not his own. “I will not release the officer’s name while there is an ongoing investigation.”

  “Randy Spelling. Isn’t that the officer?” Two KPD officers move in front of Pence, effectively blocking Shiller’s physical access. He’s a very skinny young man, hardly a match for the two broad-chested cops in front of him or for Pence, who’s twice his age.

  “I repeat; the law prevents me from releasing any names. As you know, when an officer is involved in a shooting, they are placed on administrative leave for a minimum of three days. Longer, if required.”

  “So, Spelling is suspended?”

  “What is suspended, ladies and gentlemen, is our press briefing. Thank you for your attention.” He turns his back to the TV cameras and starts up the steps while Shiller and the other reporters shout questions at him.

  Now the TV screen fills with a close up of Althea Gibbs, dressed in black, clutching Lakeisha’s prom photo in one hand. Tears roll down her face. “I want justice for my child and for the grandchild I’ll never know.” She leans against Chester Allen, Esquire, everyone’s go-to guy in police brutality cases. He steadies her gently and bends toward the thicket of microphones. There is a whirring and clicking from the cameras.

  “This is an outrage. A child, struck down in the prime of life, defenseless and unarmed, murdered in cold blood by the very people who are charged with protecting her. It is my duty and my honor to help Ms. Gibbs find justice and to provide my services pro bono.” He has a booming bass voice and speaks in the rhythms and cadence of the black church. It is high drama of the first order. An address appears on the TV screen. Interested viewers may donate funds for Lakeisha Gibbs’ funeral to an account in her name at the Monument Bank.

  I turn off the TV. Had I been too quick to judge Ms. Gibbs this morning? Whatever the truth, the facts speak for themselves; a teenage girl is dead and a young officer’s life is forever changed.

  * * *

  The telephone rings—never a good sign at night. It is my mother, taking time out from poker, line dancing, her investment club, and her Red Hat society hijinks to see if Frank and I have gotten married yet. She’s only met him twice but considers him an ideal candidate for matrimony, the nicest man she’s ever met.

  “Having a good day, sweetie?”

  “Hardly. Have you seen the news?”

  “I don’t watch the news anymore. Too depressing.”

  “We had a shooting. A young officer killed a pregnant teenager.”

  “Being pregnant isn’t a crime.”

  “No mother, it’s not a crime, it’s a tragedy. The officer mistook a metal cell phone for a weapon and thought the young woman was going to shoot her.”

  “Shoot herself? I don’t understand.”

  “There are two of them, mother. The officer and the teenager are both female.”

  “Oh, I see.” I’m not sure that she does. My mother has always lived in a world of her own making, a perpetual optimist, picking and choosing her favorite realities and ignoring the rest. This despite of or because of my father’s neverending diatribe against the world, most forms of humanity, and all forms of authority. “Why are you involved?”

  “It’s my job. I’m supposed to help the officer get through this. I’m sure it was a mistake on her part, not a deliberate act. I really can’t tell you anymore, but listening to what she’s going through made me think of Dad. How much he hated the police. How he could never imagine a cop feeling bad about anything.”

  “Well, you know how your father was.”

  “He never got over the beating he took. I feel sad that he let it poison the rest of his life.”

  “Oh my dear. Do you still believe that story?”

  “Don’t you? Didn’t you?” I had no idea my mother doubted the truthfulness of my father’s experience. The shock of it rumbles me. She heard him tell the story as often as I did and never contradicted him. “What are you saying, Mother? Do you think he lied about that? That he pulled his own arm out of the socket?”

  “Of course not. But he
was clumsy. I always suspected that he got hurt because he fell or got stepped on in one of those demonstrations. The police would never beat someone deliberately. It made him feel better to think that he was some kind of a hero of the student movement, like it wasn’t for nothing that he got hurt. Why would I challenge him and make him feel even worse?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Randy Spelling has no extra weight to lose. Yet, in less than a week she looks as though she’s lost ten pounds—her jeans bag at the seat and her collarbones and shoulders protrude like sticks under her t-shirt. Her cheeks are sunken and her eyes are glossy from lack of sleep. She takes off her baseball cap. Her hair is matted and dull.

  “How long does this last?”

  “How long does what last?”

  “This PTSD stuff.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. I can’t stop thinking about what I did. I don’t dare go out. Rich told me not to watch TV, but what else am I going to do? Guess you know, somebody leaked my name so now my picture’s in the paper. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet it’s Tom Rutgers.” She’s walking around my office as she talks, pacing from the door to the window to the bookcase, tracing a wobbly triangle on the carpet.

  “Did you hear the mother on TV talking about me like I’m a monster? I went out for groceries and got stopped twice by people asking me why I had to kill Lakeisha, why didn’t I shoot her in the leg? I should’ve shot her in the leg, you know. I wish I had never seen her. I wish I had let someone else take the call.” Now she sits, her leg jiggling like crazy, strangling her baseball cap between her hands. “Pence called this morning; told me I can’t come back to work until the investigation is complete. Not even light duty. I’m going crazy at home. I feel like I’m in prison.”

  “Is there anyplace else you could go to wait this out?”

  “Ms. Gibbs wants to sue me.”

  “That’s standard procedure after this kind of incident.” Her face goes red.

  “That’s just it. I’m a person, not an incident. Don’t you get it?” Before I can apologize, the door opens and Rich comes in.

  “I’m okay.”

  “No you’re not. I want to talk to the doc.”

  “Have at it.” She slaps her cap on her head.

  “You got to stop her, Doc. She wants to talk to that girl’s mother. She’s been threatening to do it all weekend. She wants to apologize. Thinks that will make things better. She needs a lawyer. The POA will get her one, but no, she thinks lawyers make things worse. She wants to talk, woman to woman. I told her how crazy that is, but everything I do or say is wrong. How long is she going to be like this?”

  “It hasn’t even been a week. In my experience, life won’t really return to normal until the investigation is over and the lawsuit—if there is one—is resolved.”

  “Hear that, Rich? That’s what I told you. A year. Not a week. A year.” She turns to me. “I must speak at a dog’s pitch because only dogs and other women can hear me.”

  “This is my life too, Randy. Guys at work are slapping me on the back, congratulating me for hooking up with you ‘cause you got balls. Asking if you strap on when you come to bed. They think you’re hot. They don’t know I’m living with a crazy person who can’t sleep, won’t eat, and yells at me every time I open my mouth. I didn’t shoot that girl, but I wish I had. I’d have handled it better.”

  “You don’t know how you would have handled it. Nobody does. Not until it happens.” Randy springs up and heads for the door. “You have no idea how I feel.”

  He reaches for her arm. “I hate seeing you so miserable. If I could of switched places with you, I would have. You can’t think or talk about anything else. It’s like I’m invisible. You bark at everything I say, I snap back, and then I feel like shit for yelling at you. I want our lives back. I know this is happening to you, but it’s happening to me too.” He lets go of her arm and sits down on the couch, fighting tears.

  Randy sits next to him, one hand on his leg. “I know how to fix this,” she says. “Why won’t anyone let me talk to the mother? Why does everyone know better than me?”

  “Because if you apologize, it’s going to sound like you did something wrong and you didn’t,” he says. “You did what you’re trained to do. What I would have done. She was less than ten feet away. You had to shoot her. It’s a legal shoot.”

  “It’s a bad idea, Randy,” I say. “Ms. Gibbs is very angry. Nothing you can say will help her—not now—maybe never. Like Rich says, it could be trouble for you.”

  Now I’ve done it. Lost my neutrality. Stepped over an invisible scrimmage line to Rich’s side.

  “How much more trouble could I be in than I’m in now? I’m not an executioner. I didn’t get into this job to kill people.” She puts her hands on her thighs and pushes herself into a standing position as though she is lifting a thousand pounds of dead weight. “I need a break.” She opens the door and walks out. I look to Rich to follow her, but he is leaning back staring at the ceiling.

  “No worries, Doc. She’ll wait for me downstairs. She can’t go anywhere alone. She thinks people are watching her. She even thinks she sees that girl’s family on our street.” He sits up. “What about meds? Can you give her anything?”

  “Didn’t her internist give her something to take after the incident at the creek?”

  “She dumped them. Right after the shooting. Didn’t want anybody to know she took drugs.”

  There’s a brief pause in the conversation. I have to ask this question although I’m not sure I want to hear the answer. “On the night of the shooting, had she taken any medication?”

  “I doubt it. She didn’t like taking it. Made her feel weird. I’ll bet the bottle was totally full when she dumped it. They took blood. Did they find any?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She could use something now. She has these nightmares where dead people come up from under the ground chasing her.”

  “I’ll look into it. There are a couple of drugs that help with nightmares.” He stands up. “Looks like you need some support yourself. Who’s backing you up?”

  “I got friends. And my family. They know what’s going on.”

  “No psychologist or peer support at work?”

  “No way. We’re in the dark ages. The crooks get counseling. Deputies get nothing.”

  “What about Randy’s family?”

  “They’re not much help. I work with her brothers at the jail. Bunch of hard-asses. Telling her to ‘man up,’ and deal with it. Her mother said ‘I told you to be a school teacher,’ and her father scared the crap out of her by telling her about cops he worked with who shot someone and went to jail because of it. Took me two hours to get her to calm down after she talked to them. And then we got into another fight.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Randy and I are standing on the corner, two blocks away from the spot where Lakeisha was killed. It’s a lovely neighborhood. The houses are old, each one a unique architectural gem, different from its neighbor. Totally unlike the cookie-cutter townhouses in my faux Italianate development. Bowers of magnolia trees create a canopy over the street, their huge leaves screening the early morning sun, dappling the sidewalk with splotches of light. I doubt the newly planted trees around my house, their spindly trunks encased in rubber sleeves and tethered to the ground, will ever grow to such magnificence.

  I’ve persuaded Randy to do a walkthrough with me before she gives another statement to the DA or to the investigation team. She’s wearing street clothes, her billed cap pulled down over her face just low enough that I can see her relentlessly chewing her bottom lip. She’s shifting her weight from one foot to another as though she’s preparing to sprint.

  “Deep breaths, Randy,” I say. “Take deep breaths.”

  “Suppose someone recognizes me?”

  “No one is going to recognize you. You’re not in uniform and we’re using my car.”

  “Tell me again
why you’re making me do this.”

  “I’m not making you do anything. You agreed.”

  “Yeah, but why? I forgot.”

  “My point, exactly. When you’re under extreme stress, your memory degrades. You thought you were going to be killed.” She starts to protest. “It doesn’t make any difference if that was true, that’s what you thought at the time. It was dark, you couldn’t see, Lakeisha had a metal object in her hand and she wasn’t cooperating. Remember?” I put my hand on her shoulder. It feels like a bird’s wing, bony and cold. “When humans are forced to make quick decisions in response to sudden threats, all they can do is focus on the threat. It’s called ‘selective attention’ or ‘tunnel vision.’ It makes sense, right? Focus on what’s relevant to survival and ignore what isn’t relevant.” Randy continues to shift back and forth, her sneakers making soft, scratching sounds on the pavement.

  “When people make decisions, they usually have enough time to use rational, logical, conscious thinking. Look at the houses around us. Think about the architects. All the planning that went into designing them so they are beautiful and structurally sound.” Randy barely glances at them.

  “You didn’t have that kind of time to think. So you went on automatic pilot which is below the level of conscious awareness. And because it’s below conscious awareness, it impairs your ability to recall parts of the incident or to articulate the reasons why you chose to do what you did. Things are going to look different to you in the daylight. It may jog your memory, help you fill in the blanks.”

  She takes a deep breath. “All right. Let’s go.” She starts to walk down the street.

  It takes me a few seconds to catch up. “What were you thinking as you were driving to the call?” She closes her eyes for a second.

  “Be there first. Don’t cry.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Can we please just get this over with?” she says and strides away from me. She is my height, but her legs are longer, and in no time at all she disappears around the corner. And that’s where I find her frozen in front of a small memorial. Multicolored balloons are tied to a tree, a clutch of teddy bears and candles tucked among its enormous roots. Cards and placards are pinned to the trunk like dying leaves. Randy bends over them and reads. “RIP Lakeisha. We love U, baby. Not 2 B forgot. Revenge 4 Lakeisha. Spelling is a baby murderer.”