Never the Crime

by Colin Conway

  The chief did not appear to be in a good mood. “Let’s go,” he said and walked into his office.

  Stone looked to Marilyn for a show of support, but her focus remained on her computer. He turned and followed the chief.

  With his foot, Baumgartner pushed his chair away from his desk, banging it against a credenza. He turned around and dropped into the chair. “Get straight to the point, Stone.”

  “Well, sir, yesterday morning, after talking with you, I drove out to meet with—”

  “Stone!”

  “Sir?” It did not go unnoticed by Stone that the chief was not calling him by his first name.

  “Did he do it or not?”

  “It’s not that cut and dried, sir. If I can explain—”

  Baumgartner slapped his hand on the edge of his desk. “Gimme the file.”

  Stone stepped forward and handed the folder to the chief. Baumgartner pulled the papers from it then tossed the file to the desk. He leaned back in his chair and read the report. It was three pages long. Baumgartner’s scowl never lessened as his eyes scanned the papers.

  From the corner of his eye, Stone noticed Marilyn was slowly closing the door to the chief’s office.

  Since he hadn’t been invited to sit down, Stone remained standing. He crossed his arms over his chest, inhaled once, and let the breath slowly out. His eyes then wandered around the office. There were various commendations, photos, and police memorabilia on the wall. Baumgartner had a long and distinguished career, and it was obvious he liked showing it off as well as remembering it.

  The chief slowly lowered the report and lifted his eyes. Stone returned the chief’s gaze and smiled hesitantly. The big man studied Stone’s appearance and shook his head in disgust. When Baumgartner’s eyes returned to the page, Stone realized how he was standing. He corrected his position and placed his hands behind his back while straightening. He stared directly forward, his face passive.

  The chief finished the report, returned to the beginning, and reread it a second time, albeit quicker. When he was done, he laid the report on the desk and studied Stone. He nodded a couple of times, then said, “At ease, Gary.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Is this the only copy?”

  He’d been prepared for the question and confidently answered, “Yes.” Even though he was prepared for the answer, it still made his stomach hurt, and he wanted to use the restroom.

  “Good. That’s good. Did you talk with anybody about this?”

  “No, sir.”

  Baumgartner studied him. “Not even your sergeant?”

  “No.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  Stone shook his head. “No, sir.”

  “No copies, right? Right. You already said that. What about notes? Anything in your notebook?”

  His stomach felt like it was doing flip-flops and he needed to get to the bathroom. Stone pulled his small notebook from his back pocket and opened it. He flipped through it, found the two pages of notes from the Betty Rabe and Councilman Hahn interviews. He ripped them out and put them on the chief’s desk. Stone returned to his position of standing at ease.

  Baumgartner picked up the report again along with the notebook pages. “How’d you clear your contact?” Baumgartner asked. “One-David?”

  Stone swallowed. “I…I actually didn’t check out on the call.”

  Baumgartner peered at him. “So no record in CAD, either?”

  “No,” Stone said. Then he added, “I don’t always check out with radio. Only when there’s an officer safety concern.”

  Baumgartner considered, then looked back down at the report. “Good work, Gary,” he said, without looking up. “I mean it. You did good. Dismissed.”

  Stone turned as smoothly as he could and left the office. He walked by Marilyn without saying goodbye. When he was in the hallway, he hurried toward the restroom.

  CHAPTER 14

  Captain Dana Hatcher refilled her coffee cup from the oversized pot in the detectives’ division. The coffee oasis was located just up the hall from her office. Tom Farrell told her about it when she was first promoted. He called it one the most important resources within the department, and membership was a steal at a few bucks a month per person.

  He was right about that this morning. This was her fourth cup so far, and while the caffeine had done some of the work cutting through the hangover fog she had when she first rolled into the office, it didn’t do much for the headache or acid stomach.

  She shuffled back down the hallway, ignoring the sideways glance one of the detectives gave her. He probably thought she was mooching the coffee instead of being a paying member of the coffee club.

  I’m never drinking hard liquor on a work night again.

  It was a bullshit promise, though, and she knew it. There was an old saying: “The danger past, and God forgotten.” She figured it worked with booze and hangovers, too. Besides, Margaret Patterson was fun to be around, and she’d become a good friend.

  Friends were hard to come by for cops. A slew of weird social dynamics got in the way, as well as the attitude that some cops developed in response to what they experienced. Hatcher had come into the career with a wide circle of friends from the neighborhood, from school, from her jobs at the grocery store and doing loss prevention at JC Penney. Slowly, though, that circle tightened, as the natural progression of life conspired with her status as a cop to push many of them out. Sometimes it was the other person, but she knew sometimes it was her.

  How does someone go to a barbecue with a bunch of people who ask about work when her last shift ended with a call involving a dead child? It’s not like she could ever explain it to them. Trying to do so would come out as gruesome, and they’d resent her for pouring that kind of poison out where everybody could see. Yet, keeping it to herself made her response seem secretive and fake, reinforcing the cop stereotype. Not to mention that the poison ate up her insides.

  So she did what most cops do. She socialized with other cops, where she could speak shorthand if work came up. Where she could tell jokes only cops would get. And where sharing that dead child call was met with understanding and empathy.

  Slowly, most of her old friends gravitated away. Or she did. Everyone had their lives and careers, but none of them operated with the same round-the-clock hours that Hatcher did. As her career progressed, her social life became steadily more insular. Her time with good friends outside of law enforcement dwindled, until one day she realized that almost everyone she knew was a cop.

  At her desk, Hatcher popped a couple of aspirin and sipped the coffee. Then she closed her eyes.

  Goddamn Moscow Mules kick like their name.

  The silence of her office was welcome, but it was lonely, too. The terrible irony of the police experience was that it involved a devious bait and switch. After surrounding herself almost exclusively with police officers and dispatchers and other department members, she took a promotional exam and made sergeant. Immediately, she noticed a shift. She was a sergeant, and that seemed to create a distance. Cops she knew well suddenly treated her differently. Not quite at an arm’s length, but with a small measure of caution. People she was only acquainted with never seemed to get past the formality that came with rank.

  She overcame that distance by developing strong relationships with everyone she led on her squad. All her team’s officers came to trust and respect her, and she worked hard to earn that every day. Each year, regardless of the personnel on her squad, she created something akin to a family.

  It wasn’t lost on her that her circle had gotten smaller.

  Later, when she became a lieutenant in charge of an entire shift, she lost that ability to build a tight-knit team and to be a part of that group. One of the loneliest moments of her career came shortly after she got her gold bar and was assigned to graveyard. She ran roll call, then sent the shift out into the night. Standing in the empty roll call room, she realized how separated
she really was from the people that used to be her support system. She was part of the brass now, and that gold bar was all most cops saw, just like her old friends who only saw the badge.

  This was that terrible irony, the bait and switch. Because of her job, she’d grown apart from most of her old friends, replacing them with her police family. Now her rank was separating her from most of that same police family, leaving her more and more alone.

  Fortunately, that was about the time she met Councilor Margaret Patterson at a neighborhood watch meeting. The two of them talked and Hatcher realized right away that Maggie was in much the same place she was. The two women had a lot in common, and it didn’t take long before an easy friendship began.

  Easy, Hatcher mused, except for these occasional mornings after.

  “Captain?”

  Hatcher opened her eyes to see Ray Zielinski standing in her open doorway. “Hey, Ray.”

  “Am I interrupting?”

  “No,” she said, setting down her coffee. “Just thinking about some things. Come in, sit down.”

  Zielinski took the seat in front of her.

  “How are you?”

  He shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”

  Hatcher waited for him to continue. She’d been Zielinski’s sergeant when he went through his first divorce, and it had been an ugly one. They’d had more than a few cups of coffee during that period, some to talk about the divorce and some to keep him from thinking about it. Of course, since he was a man and she was a woman, a few rumors circulated, but Hatcher ignored them. She did the same thing when the inevitable lesbian rumors swirled around her, too, something every female cop of her generation seemed to get hit with at some point. People couldn’t seem to decide if she liked women or liked sleeping with her subordinates. The rumor mill was nothing if not inconsistent.

  “You always do that,” Zielinski said.

  “What?”

  “Wait. You let the silence sit.”

  Hatcher smiled. He was right. It was a common enough interview tactic, though it seemed difficult for some cops to master. The approach worked because of the natural human desire to fill the silence. The problem was, it worked on the interviewer as much as the person being interviewed.

  “See? You’re still doing it.” Zielinski’s voice didn’t sound irritated, though. If anything, Hatcher heard some affection or nostalgia there.

  “I’m just surprised to see you,” she said. It wasn’t often a patrol officer stopped in to visit the patrol captain. She was four full steps up his chain of command.

  “I figured I should check on you,” Zielinski said. “Make sure you haven’t forgotten your roots.”

  She spread her hands. “I remain well grounded.”

  “Good.” He fell silent for a moment.

  Hatcher knew about Zielinski’s second divorce, too, though none of the details, only that it had happened. She’d been divorced once herself, and she remembered feeling like a complete loser, like she failed the marriage test. She wondered if Zielinski was feeling the compounded sting of being twice divorced.

  “Look, I’m sorry to bother you,” Zielinski said.

  “It’s no bother.”

  “It’s just that…well, you were one of the best sergeants I ever had, and I thought you were pretty damn good as a lieutenant, too.”

  “Thanks.” A flush of pride washed over Hatcher. Zielinski’s words were clearly sincere, and welcome ones.

  “I’m sure you’ll do good as a captain, though why you’d want to hang out with brass all day long is beyond me.” He gave her a rueful grin, but it had a distracted quality to it. “Anyway, I know it’s been a while since we had one of our talks, but…”

  “You can always come talk to me, Ray. You know that.”

  “I wasn’t sure. You’re a captain now.”

  “Close the door,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She flicked a finger toward her open office door. “Close it.”

  Zielinski stood and did as she asked. Then he sat down again.

  “Turn off your portable,” Hatcher said.

  He looked confused but snapped off his patrol radio.

  “There,” Hatcher said. “Now it isn’t Captain Hatcher and Senior Patrol Officer Zielinski anymore. It’s just Dana and Ray, okay?”

  Zielinski gave her an appreciative nod. “Thanks, Sarge,” he said meaningfully.

  She laughed. “Close enough. What’s on your mind?”

  He took a deep breath. “You know Amber and I split up, right?”

  “I heard. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m more sorry that the judge decided to give her max alimony for the full two years.”

  Hatcher nodded sympathetically. “She was younger, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A lot?”

  “She was twenty-three when we got married,” Zielinski admitted. “Halfway through college and never had anything but entry-level jobs. Once we got married, she quit work and school.”

  “Why?”

  “We wanted to start a family, but that didn’t happen.”

  “Not for lack of trying, I assume.”

  Zielinski smiled at that. “No, ma’am.” His smile faded. “Anyway, that’s why the judge gave her the ruling on the alimony. Now that the two-year window is closing, she’s threatening to take me back for an extension.”

  “I’m sorry. Do you have a good lawyer?”

  “Is there such a thing?”

  It was her turn to smile. “Do you have an effective lawyer?”

  “Not really. I can’t afford it. The guy I’ve got would have a problem arguing that the world isn’t flat, you know?” He shook his head. “Now I know how those mopes we arrest feel when they get the public defender. Except I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Hatcher considered for a moment. “I could ask around for a better family law attorney, Ray. Someone who will take payments, or—”

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “I can cover the expenses, but only because I’ve been working a lot of extra details. My seniority lets me pick up most anything I want, so I use my days off to earn some extra money.” He paused, then shrugged. “I work some evenings, too. That’s part of why I came to day shift, so I could catch those early evening gigs.”

  “Sounds tough.”

  “It’d be a lot easier if I was a fireman, working once every three days, but I’m making it work. It’s tight, but I’m scraping by.”

  “Be careful not to overextend yourself,” Hatcher said. “You know what Sergeant McGee used to say.”

  “A distracted cop is a dead cop,” Zielinski dutifully repeated. “I know, but I’m being careful.”

  “I hope so.”

  “The problem is that I got this bullshit demeanor complaint a couple weeks ago, and it’s hanging over my head.”

  “A shift-level complaint?” Hatcher had handled plenty of those as a sergeant, resolving a majority of them to everyone’s satisfaction without involving Internal Affairs. Most of the time, the person complaining just wanted to be heard, and if she could endure thirty minutes of listening to a citizen gripe about one of her officers and save them an official complaint, she considered that time well spent.

  “No,” Zielinski said. “Full-on IA.”

  “Over what?”

  He sighed. “I mouthed off a bit. Nothing that would have made a difference on power shift, but it’s a different breed of citizen out and about on day shift. You know what I mean.”

  She did, without a doubt. “Have you talked to Dale Thomas?”

  Zielinski snorted. “El Presidente? He’s a tool.”

  Hatcher didn’t respond to that, though she generally shared the sentiment about the union president. Instead, she told him, “I haven’t seen the complaint yet, but I won’t until IA finishes their investigation and forwards it through the chain of command.”

&nb
sp; “Who decides on a demeanor complaint? Is it the chief, or…?”

  “All IA complaints are decided by the chief,” she said. “But for less serious complaints, he tends to go with the recommendation from the chain.” She tilted her head at him. “Are you here trying to sway the jury, Ray?”

  “No,” he said. “Honestly, I just want to know where the thing is at. IA isn’t telling me shit. Thomas will turn it into a federal case if I ask him about it. I have no idea how long this is going to take, or if it looks like I’ll get tagged with a founded complaint, or what. It’s stressful.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  Zielinski leaned forward. “Here’s the biggest stress for me. If it ends up being founded, then that comes with an automatic three-month suspension from the extra duty list. If I can’t work extra details, I can’t pay my bills. The alimony, the child support, my rent…I’m upside down without the extra work.”

  Hatcher nodded in understanding. “Can you downsize at all?”

  He let out a desperate chuckle. “I’m already living in a tiny apartment. No cable or internet. My only real luxury is my phone, and that’s a pay-as-you-go plan.”

  “I didn’t know it was so bad.”

  Zielinski frowned. “I thought it would only be temporary, but now who knows? I…I just need to know so I can be prepared for the financial fallout, that’s all.”

  She leaned forward. “I’ll see what I can find out, Ray. All right?”

  “That’d be helpful.” He looked relieved. “Thanks, Sarge…er, Cap.”

  Hatcher smiled at the term. Officer Dana-gerous to Sarge to El-Tee to Cap. Her career progression in nicknames.

  He stood. “I should get back on the street. I’m sure the calls are stacking up like cord wood, making you look bad.”

  “Then go clear the screen, Ray. My career rests in your hands.”

  “You got it.” Zielinski reached for the door handle, then paused. “Thanks again.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Something must have occurred to Zielinski, because he chuckled suddenly for no reason.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He pointed to the closed door. “People are going to start talking again, like old times.”