Night Songs

by Penny Mickelbury

  Feeling a lightness she didn’t understand until she realized it was relief at not having to meet with the Chief, she turned out the lights in the Think Tank and went to meet Mimi, Freddie and Cedric for dinner at Freddie’s restaurant—where the chef always concocted special vegetarian dishes for her and Mimi—and for billiards at a classy new joint owned by a former Redskin teammate of Freddie’s.

  When the beeper went off, Mimi, Gianna and Freddie all put down their cue sticks and reached for their belts and their little black beepers.

  Cedric looked at them and shook his head. “You are pathetic, the lot of you.” He started to say more until he noted the look on Gianna’s face.

  The beeper was hers and her face grew more and more serious as she read the message being transmitted on the tiny screen. She reset the beeper and returned the gadget to its place on her belt.

  “Officer down,” she said quietly. Then, turning to Mimi, she added, “Somewhere in the Fifth District.”

  Mimi knew that Gianna was feeling what all cops feel when they learn that one of their own has been injured, and she understood that it was important to know who and how serious it was. She just wished sometimes that it didn’t intrude so much. All high-ranking officials were informed of the occurrence of certain events, a downed officer being one of them. That knowledge would cast a pall over Gianna for the rest of the evening and a part of Mimi resented it.

  The three of them simultaneously reached for their belts when, several minutes later, a beeper sounded again; and again it was Gianna’s. This time as she read the message being printed on the mini screen all the color drained from her face and her hand shook slightly.

  “I have to go. Mimi I’ll call you later...” She was across the room and out of the door before Mimi caught up to her.

  “Gianna, for God’s sake, what is it?”

  “Cassandra Ali is the officer down.”

  She rushed out of the pool room, followed by Mimi, Cedric, and Freddie, who was offering to drive her to the hospital since she didn’t have her car. In one of those rare and truly blessed moments, a patrol car came cruising down the block. Gianna sprinted for it, flashed her badge at the officer riding shotgun and told him who she was and what she wanted. The car’s driver had activated lights and siren before Gianna was even in the car, and the noise obliterated Gianna’s shout to Mimi that she would call her later.

  The Chief and Inspector Davis were the first people Gianna saw when she burst through the double doors of the crowded emergency room of the Washington Hospital Center.

  “What happened?” she asked, the breath caught painfully in her chest.

  “Somebody beat her up pretty bad, Anna, but we don’t know who or why,” Inspector Davis answered for the two senior officials.

  “How bad?” Gianna demanded.

  “She’s alive and she’ll live,” the Chief answered. “But it’s bad, Lieutenant. It’s real bad.”

  She couldn’t stop the shudder that ran through her body, and the chill that accompanied it made her feel numb. “Thank you,” she said, and turned from them to go in search of Cassie.

  Inspector Davis caught her and grabbed her arm. “This is a first for you, Anna, and I hope it never happens again. But whether or not it does, understand this: the worst mistake you can make as a commanding officer is to walk around with a load of guilt if one of yours takes a hit. It’s not your fault. Do you understand me, Lieutenant?”

  She heard him with the small part of her brain that was still taking in facts; the largest part was processing information, what little bit she had, and what she wanted at this moment was first to find the cops who answered the call and found Cassie, and then to get actively in the way of the Mobile Crime Unit, to learn everything they discovered about what happened to Cassie.

  “Yes, sir. I understand.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Anna?” Inspector Davis’s tone of voice had changed and there was a concern so gentle it made her want to cry.

  “What do I tell her parents?” she asked, and almost did cry. That was one of the functions that she abstractly understood to be part of her job. That she should actually need to perform it had never crossed her mind.

  “We’ll take care of that,” the Chief barked.

  She nodded her thanks to the Chief and to Inspector Davis, and walked down the corridor to the emergency room. She pushed open the double swinging doors and immediately spied the two uniforms. They were young cops—Casssie’s age—one male, one female, and they looked sad, scared, and angry. All cops did when someone got one of their own. She approached them and introduced herself and a little part of her managed a smile at the way they stiffened to attention.

  “Please tell me everything you can about what happened to Officer Ali, beginning with how the call came.”

  She walked them through the story three times until she knew the aspects as well as they did: they responded to a shots-fired call at 10:47 p.m. They were three blocks away and arrived in less than two minutes. A man in his underwear and sneakers was running toward them as their patrol car approached. He was yelling that it was a policewoman who was beat up, that he hadn’t known that when he first called about hearing the gunshot. The responding officers—their names were Peters and Ianello—followed the man into the alley beside his house. As they ran he told them he’d heard a commotion, which he ignored. Then he heard muffled screams, which subsided. But that prompted him to look out of his bedroom window into the alley below. He didn’t see anything, so he returned to the book he was reading. Then he heard a definite scream, followed by a shot, followed by a man’s scream, then footsteps running and they were directly under his window. The man then called police, shoved his feet into his sneakers, grabbed a flashlight from his kitchen pantry, and ran into the alley. He found a woman on the ground, bleeding profusely. She identified herself as a police officer and asked the man to call a number and report an officer down. She made him repeat what she’d told him, the man said, to make sure he got it right. He ran back to the mouth of the alley, toward his house, to make another call to the police when he heard the sirens. He ran to the front of the house just as the first of the squad cars arrived—Peters and Ianello.

  Gianna looked from one to the other. Because they didn’t know her, all they saw was clear, calm hazel eyes. Because they didn’t know her, all they heard was a low, controlled voice, pleasant to the ear. So when she asked, “Did she say anything to you?” and when Peters responded, “She said something like, ‘Get Sophie,’” neither of the young officers was prepared for the transformation.

  “If she told you who did this to her, you will remember and you will remember exactly what she said, not ‘she said something like.’ I hope you both understand that.” And she left them standing there while she went to talk to the medical staff.

  When she found the emergency room charge nurse and introduced herself, there remained no hint of the anger of a moment ago, just the concern of a superior officer for an endangered subordinate. The nurse reiterated what the Chief had said: Cassie was alive, but in grave danger. “She may lose the eye, Lieutenant,” the nurse said.

  Gianna went to find a phone to call Eric. Her surprise at not finding him at home gave her the momentary shift of focus that she needed. In the time it took for her to call his beeper and wait by the bank of pay phones in the emergency room hallway for him to respond, she took control of herself. She would have to be in control when Eric called, especially since he would not recognize the number, and she’d left only her name and the pay phone number instead of the details of the message because she didn’t want him to learn the truth from the tiny screen of the beeper as she had.

  “Eric, it’s me,” she said when she picked up the phone.

  “Where are you and what’s wrong?”

  She felt his tension. “MedStar ER. It’s Cassie. Somebody...did her. She’s not in good shape, Eric.”

  She was listening to a dial tone.

  It was not Cassie
she allowed herself to see in the bed, but a victim. She flashed her ID to the uniform stationed at the door, and again at the Mobile Crime Unit technician who stood near the bed watching while another tech took samples from beneath Cassie’s nails. When he stood and turned, they recognized each other and his eyebrows shot up in surprise and he let go a low whistle.

  “Jesus, Maglione, she one of yours?” He whistled again. “Fuck. I’m real sorry. What the hell was she working this time of night over near C.U.?”

  “She wasn’t, Kozlowski. She lives over there.”

  “Jesus.” Kozlowski whistled again. “She looks like a baby, Maglione. How old is she?”

  “Twenty-four. You finished yet?” Gianna wasn’t in the mood to be civil, though she knew that Kozlowski had come as close as he ever would—or could—to exhibiting the human emotion that was concern for the well-being of another human being. He was without question one of the best evidence techs in the Department. What his eyes didn’t see, his cameras did. He was to a crime scene what the forensic pathologist was to a murder victim. But Willie Kozlowski responded to facts, to evidence, not to people.

  “Who’s working the location, Kozlowski?” Gianna asked.

  “Greer, probably, or Anderson. Why? You want me?”

  “If I can’t have God,” she replied with simple honesty.

  He chuckled and finished marking and sealing the plastic envelopes into which he’d deposited hairs and fibers and dirt and whatever else was under Cassie’s nails, on her clothes, in her hair, on her skin. Then he got out his cameras, one loaded with color film, the other with black and white, and began taking photographs of Cassie—close-ups of her face and her hands and her body showing all the damage, and then of her clothes, torn and blood-stained. And it wasn’t until Gianna saw the ripped garments that she wondered whether rape had been a part of this attack, and that’s when Cassie ceased being a victim and Gianna had to leave the room.

  She collided with the nurse on her way out, and asked her.

  “No, Lieutenant, but it’s not because they didn’t try. That kid put up one hell of a fight. When you find who did it, you’ll find pieces missing from his face.”

  “Good for you, Cassie,” Gianna muttered. “When do you take her to surgery?” she asked the nurse.

  “They’re waiting for us right now. I hope your people are finished,” the nurse said, and she gave Gianna’s shoulder a gentle squeeze on her way into Cassie’s room.

  Gianna was headed back down the corridor to the phones to call Mimi when she heard her name called. She looked around to see Eric barreling down the hallway toward her, followed by Lynda Lopez and Bobby Gilliam. Before they asked, she told them everything she knew and then Eric told her that Tim McCreedy and Kenny Chang were already en route to the scene. Gianna told Lynda and Bobby about the two responding officers who needed a brief memory improvement course, and she told Eric to grab Kozlowski when he was finished with Cassie and meet her at the scene. Then she hurried down the hall, through the waiting room crammed with gunshot and stabbing victims, with crying children and pregnant women, with frightened old people, out of the emergency room, and gratefully inhaled the night air, still warm but with the first hint of a cooler undercurrent that signaled the advent of fall. A siren split the silence and an ambulance screeched out of the circular driveway and headed west.

  The automatic doors of the emergency room whooshed open and a middle aged man pushed a squeaky wheelchair out on to the walkway, its passenger working hard to stifle a groan of pain. Gianna looked down on a tiny, ancient, white haired woman the color of roasted pecans, bundled and huddled within a pink crocheted blanket. The old woman failed to stifle another groan of pain and Gianna winced at the sound of it.

  “I’ll get the car, Mama, and I’ll be right back.”

  “All right, son,” the old woman whispered, the love and gratitude in her voice overriding the pain. A distant siren wailed and grew ever closer and the ancient woman looked up at Gianna and whispered through her pain, “Lord have mercy, there’s so much misery in the world.”

  “Too much,” Gianna whispered back but the siren’s scream made it impossible for the woman to hear, so Gianna touched the woman’s hand, gnarled and twisted like the roots of an old banyan tree, and, trying to close her ears to the sounds of pain, to the songs of the night, she re-entered the hospital because she remembered that she had no car, and while she waited for Eric she called Mimi to tell her that it would be quite some time before she came home.

  David Bradley worked for the Bell Atlantic Telephone Company as a line maintenance supervisor. He was forty-six years old, divorced, the father of three, and had lived in the rented house in the Brookland section of northeast D.C. near Catholic University for three years, since his divorce. No, he did not know the young woman whom he had found beaten up in the alley beneath his bedroom window. Yes, he knew she lived across the street—he’d seen her several times, had exchanged pleasantries with her, had commented to himself what a polite and well-mannered young woman she was. So many of today’s young people were not. Yes, he did have some idea why she might have been in the alley: He knew for a fact that she rented garage space from the woman on the next street over and the garage backed onto the alley. She walked through it every night to get home. No, he’d had no idea that she was a police officer until she’d told him so, when she asked him to call and report a police officer down.

  Gianna sat on David Bradley’s couch in his neat, sparsely furnished living room, drinking a cup of peppermint tea laced with honey which he had insisted would calm her nerves. He was right. She found the tea soothing as she quickly explained to him who she was, who Cassie was, and why the police would most likely be a fixture in his life for some days to come. Then she asked him to tell her what’d he’d already told to at least three other cops.

  She sat back, crossed her legs, and listened intently as Bradley told her exactly what she’d heard earlier from Officers Peters and Ianello. She was grateful for the man’s calm, factual recitation, and she didn’t speak until he came to the point when he repeated Cassie’s words.

  “Mr. Bradley, tell me again exactly what Officer Ali said when you and the other officers were with her.”

  “She said, ‘Don’t let ‘em get to Sophie.’ Over and over she said it. Three, maybe four times. ‘Don’t let ‘em get to Sophie.’”

  “Did you see anyone else in the alley?”

  “No, ma’am. Not a soul. Just her.”

  Gianna called the Fourth District watch commander and had a car sent to Sophie Gwertzman’s house, then she went out into the alley to watch Kozlowski begin the tedious but exacting process of converting bits and pieces of dirt and gravel into evidence.

  Gianna sat on the bed. Then she lay down beside the one she always thought of as most like herself. She wanted to hold her but she knew not to touch her. Too much damage. Too much pain. She couldn’t even take and hold one of her hands: tubes ran into both arms. So she lay there beside her, listening to the labored breath. She didn’t turn her head to see her. She didn’t need to look again. The devastating destruction was forever etched in her memory. The left eye that the doctors questioned would ever see again. The bruises on the head and face that signified a brain swollen from the trauma of being kicked repeatedly in the head. She just lay there and listened to the in and out of the breath, listened to assure herself that there was no danger of the breath stopping.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Since no member of the Hate Crimes Unit had been home the night before, no one of them minded that all of them looked like hell. Six pairs of bloodshot eyes tried to look everywhere but at each other. Six pairs of lips slurped too hot, too bitter coffee without a single complaint. Six pairs of hands fiddled with paper clips or ink pens or crime folders, just to have something to do with themselves. Finally Gianna spoke.

  “Eric, you handle Cassie today, I’ll stay with the hookers. Maybe they’ll let you help with the Mobile Crime stuff and the house-to-ho
use search. Somebody had to see something.”

  “It was the fuckin’ Nazis.” Tim’s voice was so flat and dead nobody would have recognized it as his had they not been watching his mouth move.

  “We don’t know who it was, Tim,” Gianna said, her own voice void of the tone and tenor that made it so distinctive.

  “It was the fuckin’ Nazis,” he said again. “Can I work with Detective Ashby?” Tim looked her, dull blue eyes meeting dull hazel ones.

  “Yeah. You and Kenny work Cassie with Eric for the day. Lynda, you and Bobby work with me on the Daniel Boone thing. Everybody back here at five-thirty sharp.”

  When Mimi identified herself, Carolyn King opened the door wide and invited her inside. The first thing Mimi saw when she stepped into the homey, comfortable living room was a framed photograph—the high school graduation photograph—of the woman she knew as Shelley Kelley. The woman Carolyn King knew as her daughter, Sandra Ann King.

  “I’m very sorry about what happened to your daughter, Mrs. King,” Mimi said, crossing to stand before the mantle.

  “She was getting ready to quit. Did you know that? She was going to leave all that.”

  The woman sighed heavily. Close scrutiny of her face indicated that she was not old—Mimi would guess that she was barely fifty—yet the weight of her sadness made her feel at least twice that.

  “She had stopped doing drugs and she was eating right. Even got me to stop eating red meat. My blood pressure dropped so fast it scared the doctor.”