I told Doris not to worry and that when we got to Chester I was sure he would let us off somewhere safe and sound.
I told him that I had over $500 in my pants pocket and he could have that. In fact, I said he could have the car for all of that. It was a ’73 Eldorado and easily disposed of for cash, I thought. He never replied to any of this and spoke only to give directions. When we got to a deserted spot in the middle of nowhere he hit me on the back of the head with the gun, behind my right ear. I made a suitable noise and collapsed on the car seat.
Doris didn’t scream. She said, “What are you going to do to me?”
And he said, “Climb in the backseat, white bitch.”
And she said, “No. What are you going to do to me?”
“If you don’t climb in the backseat I’m ’onna shoot your fucking brains out and then I’m ’onna shoot your papa in the balls.”
I felt her climb over. Actually she stepped on my hand in her haste but I cleverly suppressed any reaction.
“Now, little pussy,” he said, “suck on ’is and swallow the come.”
I heard the noise in the backseat and felt the car rock after he ordered her to turn over and began to thrust into her dry virginal anus. She sobbed, almost quietly, the whole time. She never once screamed. What a brave girl.
You see, she recognized the importance of quiet, of not agitating the demon holding the lethal weapon trained at all times on our vital organs. In many ways over the years I had prepared her for this moment.
She did as I did. No one could or should fault me for my inaction in this time of crisis. I won’t use grogginess as an excuse. Indeed, I need none. Strategy was my game. And Doris instinctively played the same game with her soft silent sobbing, as he rocked the car with each painful thrust of his penis.
My erection was a normal healthy reaction to an incident of sexual explicitness. Neither do I make apologies for that. My father’s credo “Never Explain, Never Complain” is part of my formula for living.
No, not cowardice, not painful inaction, not grogginess, not preoccupation with sexual acts foreign to me. No, none of these called into play my silent passing of the tragedy played out behind me in the backseat.
It seemed like hours.
My motive was twofold. First, to come out alive. Second, to get justice.
Alive we were when he pulled away, leaving us in the night of a Pennsylvania hillside. He had pushed me clear of the car and I wasn’t certain he had released Doris until after the car pulled away and I heard her faint silent sobbing near my right ear.
“Daddy, Daddy, are you alive?” she pleaded. I waited a respectable time, groaned and rolled over, holding my right ear.
“What happened?” I asked.
I made a promise to her in no uncertain terms that very night, as we stood there in a soybean field holding each other while she described to me the things he did to her mouth and anus, that I would never rest until he suffered greater harm.
Next, we agreed to keep our secret sacred. We would report the theft of my car, our kidnapping, the blow to my head, and nothing more than that would we say. The penalty for victimization vis-à-vis rape would be a matter not left trusted to those in the modern rehabilitation industry.
Epilogue:
And so was born out of intense personal tragedy, forged in the fires of hell itself, a bond between man and girl that would last the ages and would found a movement so large and so strong and so powerful that the very foundations of American society would quake. Upon the back of this young girl, this thirteen-year-old sacrificial virgin, would rest the future course of the social history of the next quarter century.
I put the pages on the passenger seat and stared at my own reflection from the interior light hitting the windshield.
30
The high-beam lights in the rearview mirror broke my reverie, and the car pulled up dangerously close behind mine.
I rolled down my window and watched the state boy approach. He was awfully, awfully young and very cautious. Probably these days they had to be cautious. He was tall and trim, with a prominent Adam’s apple, and brown hair frizzing out from the blue forest ranger–type hat that went along with the dark-blue coat and the gray trousers with gold side stripes form-fitted into big black boots. There were gold buttons on the jacket, black leather straps across the shoulder and around the waist, and what looked like a stainless steel .357 cannon in the holster.
He held a foot-and-a-half-long chrome flashlight in his left hand and shined it directly in my eyes as if it were an immobilizing ray gun.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Jumpy?”
“License and registration,” he snapped, still shining the big beam in my eyes.
“Don’t I have any rights?” I squinted. I handed him my Brazilian license and the rent-a-car registration.
He didn’t reply but focused the beam for a quick look on the passenger seat and the floor, then back to my eyes, then a flash on my Brazilian license.
“I’m on the job,” I said. “Wilmington dicks. I don’t have my shield with me. I gave it to a little kid yesterday to play with.”
“To play with? Are you kidding? Have you been drinking?”
“I was just about to ask you if you’ve been drinking?”
“Kill your ignition and get out of your car.”
“All right,” I said as I got out, “but don’t push it.”
“Is that a gun in your belt?” he barked at me.
“You’re one sharp cookie,” I replied.
“Turn around and put your goddamn hands on the roof of your car and spread your goddamn legs, hotshot, and be quick about it. Pronto quick. Comprende, amigo from Brazil?”
I stared into his eyes as best I could, considering the beam of the flashlight. “Make me,” I said. He stepped back and lifted his cannon from his holster with his right hand. He pointed the muzzle at K-5, the highest score on the paper targets of the human body at the firing range.
“Hands on the roof of your car, José. Turn around and spread them.” But something in me wouldn’t let me.
“Make me,” I said again. Adrenaline shot through the alcohol in me.
He stood and stared at my clothes for a few seconds, trying to figure me. It was cricket quiet. He walked backward to his car and put the flashlight on the hood while he kept the gun at K-5 and used his radio with his free hand. He was calling for backup. This was getting to be something. I didn’t care how light-headed I felt. I didn’t much care about anything right then. All I knew was that I wasn’t getting arrested again in my life.
“Are you related to Covaletzki or what?” I called over to him.
He said, “Hands on roof. Spread ’em.”
“Don’t give me any of that ‘spread ’em’ shit. Elmo Covaletzki. You know who I’m talking about.”
“You’re drunk, and you’re no Wilmington detective. Not out here in that pimp getup.”
He walked back to me and stopped when he was four and a half feet away. He sniffed at the alcohol in the air coming from my breath. I leaned my backside into the Granada door.
We stood that way for a little while, a goddamn Mexican standoff. He kept a hard grip on his piece of gun and aimed it, more or less, at my heart.
Two cars arrived at the same time, one behind the other and both behind my trooper’s car. A heavyset sergeant got out of the first, and a younger trooper with a big thick neck got out of the second. I smiled, very relaxed. My trooper turned his head for a quick glimpse of them getting out of their cars, I guess to make sure it was his backup and not mine.
“You better take my gun before your sergeant gets here or you’ll wind up on charges.” I leaned my right hip toward him. He reached for the gun with his left hand and I swept his front foot with my left foot, continuing my body into his. At the same time I banged up
on the elbow joint of his gun hand, and the instant his grip on the gun loosened I peeled it from his palm with a backhanded sweeping motion of the fingers of my left hand.
A radiant Taiwanese doctor I lived with for eighteen months in the jungle until the WHO transferred her would have been very proud of me. I was the sole possessor of his .357, and his body shielded mine from the other two. I flipped his gun through my open window and laughed, probably insanely.
I wrapped my arms around the trooper, and the force of his body trying to get into my car window pinned me against the Granada.
“Sergeant, he took my weapon,” he yelled. “He threw it in his car.”
“I got him, Sergeant,” I said. “He was impersonating a state trooper. No trooper would let me take department property.” I laughed some more.
The sergeant reached in the window and picked up the .357. I let go of the trooper, caught my breath, and held the roof of my car to steady myself.
“Look, mister,” the sergeant said, pointing his finger at my nose and ignoring the embarrassed trooper, “you’re under arrest for driving under the influence of intoxicating beverage. You can come easy or you can come hard, but you’re coming. Now put your nice little fuckin’ hands on the roof of your fuckin’ car. We’re gonna pat you down, then we’re gonna put you in the police car.”
“Don’t I know you? Didn’t you transport me to the workhouse fifteen years ago?”
“Yes, sure,” said the sergeant. “Sure I did, but you were a good boy to me then. Now just turn around nice and peaceful and be a good boy now. There we go. You know how it’s done. That’s it, now face the car.”
“He’s crazy, Sarge,” my trooper said. “Be careful.”
“No, wait a minute, Sarge. I’m serious. It was fifteen years ago.” I turned back around to face the sergeant.
At that point the other trooper with the big neck engulfed me from behind in a tight bear hug. Sarge snapped a cuff on one wrist. Hard and tight. Neck released me and pulled my free wrist behind my back, and Sarge cuffed that one to the first. Ouch.
“Ground him,” said the sergeant. Neck tripped me, and Sarge kicked me in my left thigh on my way down. I landed mostly on my chest and chin.
Th sergeant frisked me and pulled my .38 from my pants.
“Oh yeah,” said my trooper, “I forgot. He’s got a gun.” The sergeant held it in his hands and looked pointedly at the first trooper for not having told him about the gun. The sergeant kicked me again. This time in my triceps. But I knew on that kick he was really mad at the trooper, so it didn’t count.
“Carrying a concealed deadly weapon, resisting arrest, and driving under the influence,” the sergeant barked at my trooper. “You had the legal right to search him, trooper.” The sergeant then stepped on my right ankle and said to me: “You could’ve got yourself killed, asshole.”
I was put in the rear of Big Neck’s car to be taken to Troop One.
“I am drunk,” I said from the backseat. “I haven’t been locked up in years.”
The trooper said, “Tough shit.”
When they got to the troop they put me in a cell within earshot of the front desk. They took my belt and shoelaces to keep me from hanging myself. I could tell from their conversation they knew by now who I was.
“Can he drive in Delaware on this Brazilian license?” I heard the original trooper ask. No one answered him. “What’s ‘The Target Manifesto’?” asked another. “I don’t know, I’m reading it now” was the reply. “It looks like a short story he wrote, but it jumps around a lot.” The thought of them reading it hit me hard in the stomach, and I grabbed a cell bar and squeezed. I heard bits and pieces of other things they were saying, and the word Gandry came up more than once, and the original trooper said a couple of times that he didn’t recognize me.
He came back and asked me if I wanted to take the omicron intoxilyzer test, and I refused. I guessed I’d stay there until they could figure out what to do.
I was feeling the effects of the alcohol metabolizing and mixing with my lack of sleep, and I put my body down on the cot very gently to keep from throwing up on myself. I pictured Sarah for an instant just as my head hit bottom. She didn’t look very happy with me, but at least she was looking at me. I fell asleep before she could speak.
31
DiGiacomo looked like a giant from Greek mythology when I opened my bleary eyes and saw him glaring down at me in my cell. When I did my bit a prisoner referred to his cell as his house. My first thought was to wonder excitedly what DiGiacomo was doing in my house. Why was he in my house? Had Figaro and Janasek confessed? Was I cleared? It was an old recurring fantasy I’d had in prison before Janasek died, that the boys would get me out. When I finally adjusted my senses I asked Rocco what time it was, and I got up and sat on the edge of the cot and yawned.
“Ten-fifteen,” he said.
“A.M. or P.M.?”
“A.M.”
“I must’ve slept twelve hours. Am I free?”
“Yeah, they’re not pressing the resisting charge. They all want to forget what you did to their rookie trooper. It just embarrasses all concerned, and you got a right to carry a gun, so they’re dropping the CCDW. But they are pressing the DUI.”
“Why?”
“Probably ’cause you were DUI.”
“No accident. No witnesses. No cop arrests another cop for drunk driving. What’s going on? Did the sergeant call Covaletzki?”
“Nobody said. I’m sure they probably called their troop commander at home and he probably called Covaletzki, especially since you were throwing Covaletzki’s name around. We know the sergeant pretty good. We could’ve handled this, but it’s too late now.”
“What happens next, do they book me?”
“No, I talked them into giving you a summons. Here’s your ticket with your trial date, and here’s your jacket, your weapon, your shoes, your belt, your wallet, and your stuff.” He handed me a green plastic bag with my stuff, and among my things were Carlton’s writings.
“What now?” I said as I looked over my bruises from the sergeant’s kicks. “What do they have on me? Drunk sitting? I wasn’t driving when he rolled up on me.”
“Your interior light was on, and that drew the trooper’s attention to check up if you needed help. Then he smelled the booze. You had the key on and you were behind the wheel. They got you for actual physical control. It’s the same as drunk driving. They have half a dozen troopers who will say you were loaded. Plus you told one of the troopers in the car ride back here that you were drunk. Plus you refused the test.”
“Can they use that stuff against me? He didn’t read me my rights.”
“You don’t get rights with drunk driving.”
I suction-clicked like Carlton, but not as well.
“Anything turn up on Harrison Lloyd?” I asked.
“None of the witnesses at the train station saw the perpetrators’ faces. Only their backs running away. At least we got him for a few years on that other shit. Something’ll turn up. Maybe Shy’s service revolver’ll turn up in some Saturday night shooting, and we deal for information and trace it back to Lloyd. Meantime, we got money out on the street. We might not have to wait for a shooting for Shy’s weapon to turn up.”
We walked out of the cell. Leaving jail is one of life’s truly underrated highs.
We passed the front desk. There were state troopers in the area, but nobody looked directly at me. It reminded me of a scene from the movie Lady Godiva where no one in the village looks at Maureen O’Hara in the nude on her horse, but every little boy in the movie house is straining for a peek.
When we got outside I said, “I bet that rookie is Tim Gronk’s brother.”
DiGiacomo said, “Lou, I feel like hitting you where you stand. You’re lucky. They figure you tied one on over Gandry’s release. The whole Gandry thing is in the p
aper this morning. They can relate to that. And they don’t like it that Covaletzki took some cheap shots at you in the paper. He said that Gandry was bungled by an old-style cop who took it on himself to go outside his assigned duties and investigate a case he had no authority to investigate. He made it sound like you were washed up. And now you played right into his hands with this drunk driving. Lou, I’m pissed off. I gotta tell ya, I’m pissed. You promised me you’d get a good night’s sleep.”
We picked up my Granada, paid the towing fee, and I locked Carlton’s writings in the trunk. By the time Rocco got me to work it was half past noon. I was four and a half hours late, and a mess, but I was strangely looking forward to work. I needed something. I thought about what Honey had said that time in intake about cops, self-pity, and alcoholics. Rocco gave me shaving gear. I fixed myself up in the mezzanine bathroom and hurried over to Youth Diversion at one o’clock, still wearing my soiled and wrinkled white linen “amigo” suit.
Covaletzki, Gronk, and the two lieutenants who tagged along behind Covaletzki, Flopsy and Mopsy, were crowded into the room, and all four stood up when I arrived. I opened the glass door and looked directly at Covaletzki, waiting for him to speak.
“Sergeant Razzi, you are on administrative leave with pay for two weeks from today,” he said. “At that time, at oh-nine hundred hours, I am convening a departmental Trial Board in my office. The charge is conduct unbecoming in that you were arrested for the offense of driving under the influence, together with surrounding circumstances. As of right now this minute you are suspended from police duties. Please turn in your service revolver and your ID to records by thirteen-thirty sharp. If you are cleared, you will be reinstated. If you are found guilty by the board, your maximum penalty can be dismissal, and you will lose your pension if so convicted and dismissed. You have the right to be represented and the right to call witnesses on your behalf. These are your charge papers.” He put his hand out to me with sheets of paper in it. There was unconcealed joy at the corners of his mouth, as if he were turning over four aces and telling me to read ’em and weep.
The Right to Remain Silent Page 17
