The Hand That Feeds You

29

They thought I was a cop killer. Maybe, by default, I was. I’d had a chance to kill Billie and her dogs and I hadn’t taken it. I started itching all over. I felt welts rising on my back, on my chest. It made me short of breath. Anxiety could produce any number of somatic symptoms, I knew. I both wanted someone to come into the room and feared it. I was twisting in the chair, trying to scratch my back. And I had to urinate.

I gave up looking at my watch after the first hour. With no idea who might be watching me through the one-sided glass, I struggled with my free hand to pull down my jeans enough to go right there on the floor of the interrogation room. Give them a show, if that’s what they were determined to wait for.

I angled my body as much as I could away from the glass and squatted. But after waiting so long, I wasn’t able to release my bladder right away. I prayed that no one would enter the room now. Though maybe some of the officers were having a good laugh just outside.

The puddle covered a large area under the table I was handcuffed to and leaked out beyond the chair I had occupied. Easier to pull pants down with one hand, I discovered, than to get them back up. There was no getting the zipper up. It did not escape me that soiling their own space was what caged dogs were left to do.

Two plainclothes detectives came in, one holding a folder, the other holding his nose. “The fuck did you do in here?”

“When do I get my call?”

The disgusted one banged on the door. “Get us some paper towels.” When a roll of paper towels was delivered, he tossed it to me and told me to clean up the floor.

“I’m handcuffed.”

“You managed to pull down your pants.”

I made no motion toward doing what he said. “I want my phone call.”

The one with the folder said, “Do you know a Jimmy Gordon?”

I repeated what I wanted.

He tried again, this time showing me a photograph of the crime scene — my bedroom.

“Phone call.”

“You just got a cop killed. If I were you, I’d start cooperating,” said the detective who’d called for paper towels.

“I want my lawyer.” I sensed the detectives were trying to employ the outdated Reid technique of interrogation — I’d learned about it in first-year psychology. A cop looks for signs of anxiety during questioning: folded arms, shifty gaze, jiggling leg, touching one’s hair. They try to play down moral consequences—“Hey, everybody fights with her boyfriend.” The irony is that the case policeman John Reid made his name on turned out to be a false confession.

One of the detectives signaled at the window for a phone, and in a moment he opened the door and was handed a desk phone. He plugged the line into a jack in the wall and set it down in front of me. “Local only.”

I phoned Steven.

“I’ve been waiting up for you.” His relief was palpable.

“They might be listening.”

“Is Billie with you?”

“I’m at the precinct in East Harlem. Billie’s in the hospital.”

“Tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m handcuffed to a table in an interrogation room.”

“Make sense.”

“I understand more right now than I have in the last six months. They haven’t charged me yet, but I think I’m being held as a cop killer.”

“Don’t say anything until I get there.”

Before hanging up, I asked Steven to let McKenzie know, too.

The detectives took the phone with them when they left me in the interrogation room. They left the roll of paper towels, and knowing my brother would be coming for me, I tore off a large wad and started cleaning up the floor, in case he was brought to this room.

By the time I’d left a mound of wet paper towels under the table, the detectives were back, announcing that they were taking me to Central Booking.

“But my brother is coming here.”

“Tell him to call you a lawyer.”

“He is a lawyer.”

“He’ll have to go downtown to see you” is all the detective offered.

I rode in a squad car with the two detectives who’d questioned me. I remembered the day at John Jay that the professor had brought in a Yelp one-star review of Central Booking. I loved that such a thing existed, and when the professor read it aloud, the class went nuts: “Let me start off by saying… Yo myyyy niggggggaaaaa!!!!! I came out that fucker speaking Ebonics. I am college educated, yeah, that don’t mean shit. I manage a pharmaceutical company. I deal with hundreds of professional people in health care who have MDs, PhDs, and degrees in shit I can’t even pronounce. The word nigga this, nigga that, nigga who, nigga what. That’s all I fucking heard.”

Yes, I had memorized it, it was that vivid. Maybe I’d be writing my own.

We cut across Chinatown to the two gray, windowless buildings on White Street — the courthouse and the Tombs, connected by a three-story-high, windowless walkway. Richard Haas’s mural Immigration on the Lower East Side runs across the facade of the detention center. The irony is that its placement seems to send the immigrants straight to jail.

I was processed in the manner known to anyone who watches TV crime shows. But it was one thing to have watched from the comfort of one’s couch, eating chocolate, and another to be strip-searched in Central Booking. I was escorted to a cell where, to my relief, I was the only occupant. So far. I could hear trash-talking female prisoners nearby, but I couldn’t see them. And then a chorus of “Yo — CO!” that went unheeded. The place was freezing. Had I heard that the Tombs was kept at forty degrees?

I should be able to prove that Billie brought the two Dogos Argentinos into the shelter. I should be able to prove that she was in my house the morning Bennett was killed — it was there in Libertine’s e-mails, the e-mails that also proved she killed Susan Rorke and Samantha. But do e-mails constitute proof?

I figured I had a few hours until morning. I had been made to voucher my watch, but it must have been at least 3:00 a.m. The metal bench I sat on was so slippery that I nearly slid off it. Sleeping was out of the question. This was the poet’s “dark night of the soul.” The first thought to slay me was that I was responsible for a man’s death, and the serious injury of another. The blame game did no one any good, as Billie said, but there it was. I read some of the graffiti on the cell walls. Never pick up a dead man’s gun. Forgive me, but I have little choice in these matters. Do whatever you think is in your best interests.

I was treated to an argument from one of the bull pens. Two women fighting about who would get the phone next.

My thoughts went from logical and practical concerns to images and feelings I never wanted to confront again. I actually felt the moment I “snapped to” and found that I was sitting on the floor of the cell, hunched up in the position I took in my bathtub after finding Bennett’s body. I knew what was happening to me: a version of post-traumatic stress. I had just seen a man killed by dogs for the second time. I made myself take deep breaths to try to avoid hyperventilating and to slow my pulse. I made myself envision peaceful scenes of the sea — white-sand beaches, floating in aquamarine water the same temperature as my skin. But even my go-to vision failed — the warm water felt like blood.

I stood and paced the cell. I remembered a story that Steven had told me when he came home from Afghanistan. While visiting a prison, he noticed an isolated cell at the end of a dank hallway. He looked through the tiny hole in the door and saw a young girl, maybe thirteen years old, lying in a heap facing the door with a blank stare, nothing else in the cell but a cot. No sink or toilet. He asked his interpreter to ask the warden what she was in jail for. The warden explained that her father had brought her there because she’d run away with her boyfriend and their families caught them, and then they ran away again. Steven asked why she had no water and why she was kept so isolated — wasn’t that cruel? The warden said yes, he felt bad for her, but he had no female prison guards to take care of her. The girl was going crazy from this, Steven could see; he reported it to the US embassy, and they eventually negotiated her release.

It was quiet now; the women’s argument about the phone had stopped. No COs were present. I was in the Tombs — buried alive.

This night would either dismantle me or show me what I was made of. Another person might find herself galvanized by the extremity of the situation, find herself searching for what she might have missed that led to one cop’s death and another’s mauling. Go over every opportunity to have stopped Billie, to have prevented the carnage. But that would not change what had happened.

I sat on the floor, leaning against a wall, and the first lines of an Emily Dickinson poem came to me: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes— / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—” Of course that was why it came to me there.

That was the last thought I had until I was awakened by the sound of keys, and a CO saying, “When I call your name, step out, shut up. You’re going into court. Don’t say a word. Don’t motion to anyone in the court. Just sit, look straight ahead, until they call your name.”

Half a dozen names were called, but not mine.

Two cops came for me about ten minutes later. My wrists were handcuffed and secured to a belt around my waist. I was driven to the Criminal Courthouse, less than a hundred yards away, for the traditional “perp walk” up the granite steps.

Once the squad car pulled up, a swarm of reporters with cameras and microphones were waiting for me. I was led past the press into the courthouse. I was taken on an elevator up to the fourth floor, to a small booth off a holding cell where Steven was waiting. The cops left me alone with my brother.

“Fucking unbelievable.” Steven hugged me and kissed my forehead.

At his touch, I started to cry. “What happens now?”

“They’re going to charge you with murder. Of a cop.”

“But the dogs were Billie’s. I was the target, not the cop.”

“Listen, we only have a few minutes. I’m going to ask for bail, but we can’t count on it.”

“What about the second cop? Is he going to be okay?”

“He’s in ICU at Columbia Presbyterian. He’s expected to survive.”

“Not to sound self-serving, but will he be able to talk soon? Maybe he saw what really happened.”

“You’ll know when I know.”

“Is that where Billie is?”

“She was released this morning. It was just a flesh wound. Her grandmother took her home.”

“But her dogs killed a cop.”

“She told the police that you let the dogs loose from their cages. What do you know about those dogs?”

“Billie gave them commands in German. They were attack-trained.”

“Jesus.”

I told him I knew how suspected cop killers were treated. I’d read Mumia Abu-Jamal’s book, Live from Death Row. I had seen the infamous video of Esteban Carpio, beaten unrecognizable and made to wear a Hannibal Lecter — like mask, escorted to his arraignment for killing a cop. I told Steven that if convicted, I would spend twenty-three hours a day in complete isolation.

An officer unlocked the holding cell and told Steven to wrap it up. Steven told me he’d see me in the courtroom in a couple of minutes.

The courtroom was right next door. The officer led me in and sat me at the defense table. To my right, a door opened, and a group of women wearing orange jumpsuits and handcuffs were directed into the jury box. Talk about a jury of your peers.

Steven entered the courtroom through the public entrance and joined me at the table.

The judge read the charges. Steven indicated the moment when I was to declare myself “not guilty.” It was over in less than half an hour. Bail denied.