4th of July

Chapter 82

DESPITE EVERYTHING YUKI HAD told me about the media frenzy, I was stunned to see the square block of mosh pit at the Civic Center Plaza the next morning. TV satellite vans lined Polk on both sides of McAllister, and a somewhat malevolent, shifting mob fanned out in all directions, blocking traffic to City Hall and the Civic Center Courthouse.

I parked in the garage on Van Ness, only a three-block walk to the courthouse, and tried to blend into the crowd on foot. But I didn’t get away with it. Once I was spotted, reporters stampeded, shoved microphones and cameras into my face, and screamed questions that I couldn’t understand, let alone answer.

The “police brutality” accusations, the baiting, the almost painful noise of the crowd, made me dizzy with a kind of grief. I was a good cop, damn it. How had it happened that the people I’d sworn to serve had turned against me like this?

Carlos Vega from KRON-TV was on the “Dirty Harriet Trial” big-time. He was a tiny man with a rabid style, known for interviewing people so courteously they hardly felt the evisceration. But I knew Carl—he’d interviewed me before—and when he asked, “Do you blame the Cabots for taking this action against you?” I almost snapped.

I was about to give Mr. Vega an ill-advised sound bite for the six o’clock news when someone plucked me out of the mob by my elbow. I jerked away—until I saw that my rescuer was a friend in uniform.

“Conklin,” I said. “Thank God.”

“Stick with me, Lou,” he said, steering me through the crowd to a barricaded police line that offered a narrow path to the courthouse. My heart swelled as my fellow officers, grasping hands to give me safe passage, nodded or spoke to me as I passed.

“Go get ’em, Lieutenant.”

“Hang tough, LT.”

I picked Yuki out of the crowd on the courthouse steps and made straight for her. She took over from Officer Conklin, and together we put all our weight into opening the heavy steel-and-glass doors of the civil courthouse. We climbed a flight of marble stairs and moments later stepped inside the impressive cherry-paneled courtroom on the second floor.

Heads turned toward us as we entered. I straightened my freshly pressed collar, ran a hand over my hair, and walked with Yuki across the carpeted floor of the courtroom to the attorneys’ tables at the front. I had gained a measure of outward composure in the last few minutes, but I was absolutely seething inside.

How could this be happening to me?