by Mark Zubro
Fenwick had smiled.
Right now, Fenwick stopped grousing.
“You guys okay?” Molton asked.
Fenwick said, “Flesh wounds. Nothing.”
Turner said, “I’m fine. How’s the kid?”
Molton consulted his phone. “The kid you saved is DeShawn Jackson. Report is he’s a trifle squashed from being underneath a bulky cop. They’re a little worried about his head wound.” He glanced at Fenwick’s bandaged head. “Seems it’s touch and go on which of you bashed harder into the car. He may have a concussion. They’re going to keep him for observation. There were several bullet holes next to the headlight. You were lucky.”
Molton moved the curtain around them and said to the beat cop standing guard, “Would you drag a chair over for me, please?”
In less than a minute, the beat cop pulled a chair into the bay and Molton sat down. He got himself comfortable and said, “I know you’ve given a statement to Wilson and Roosevelt. I’d like to hear what happened directly from you.”
Judy Wilson and Joe Roosevelt were two other detectives on their squad. They’d taken initial reports. First from Turner and Fenwick separately and then with them together.
Molton made no comments as they spoke. When they finished, he said, “You realize you’re involved in the biggest thing so far this year.”
Fenwick asked, “Compared to what?”
Molton ignored him. “Unlike other cops who stood by while one of their own gunned down an innocent kid, you saved his life.”
“That doesn’t make us special,” Fenwick said,
Molton raised an eyebrow. “You cannot possibly be that naïve.”
Fenwick said, “I guess I knew that.”
Molton said, “Need I remind you that in no video from any dash cam I know of anywhere on the planet, or any video from a member of the public, not one has shown a cop, much less two cops saving a kid from one of their own. Even as we speak, your moments of fame are amassing hits on the Internet.”
“Hooray for us?” Fenwick turned the statement into a question.
At the moment, Turner was a little tired of Fenwick’s complaints and protests. He wanted to find out details of what the hell was going on. He knew they could be in a precarious position. While Carruthers was universally regarded as an idiot of the first order, nonetheless, Turner knew far too many cops would rush to his defense, and concomitantly look askance at the other detectives involved in taking him down. He also wondered about Rodriguez, who was their friend. Handcuffing your partner could be a big deal.
The newspapers and television reporters in town often reported on the Chicago Police Department Code of Silence. Turner wondered now, whose side would the code come down on? Fenwick, Rodriguez, and him? Or Carruthers? Or would it be a combination which Turner thought would complicate their lives the most.
Turner asked, “What the hell was Carruthers thinking?”
Fenwick asked, “He thinks?”
Turner corrected, “What was he doing or trying to do?”
Molton said, “He and his union rep will sort out who he’s going to talk to. Certainly not me.” He shifted himself in his chair, “The key is every video that has emerged shows Carruthers had no reason to begin firing. The kid was unarmed. What you guys and Rodriguez did was justified and right. Plus, Buck, you were wounded in the line of duty, so I think you’ll be in the clear with your colleagues and with the brass.”
“Where’s Rodriguez?” Turner asked. “Is he okay?”
“Safe.”
Turner said, “I thought he was going to pound Carruthers’s head into the ground.”
Molton said, “Only after he found out that Fenwick had been wounded.”
Turner asked, “What happens next?”
“Independent Police Review Authority will be around, along with a few other investigative agencies. The usual.”
Turner expected that. The Review Authority was the new version of the old Internal Affairs department, which itself had not been totally disbanded. Rumor had the renamed and revamped group as incompetent as the earlier iteration.
Molton continued, “There’ll be less time spent with them since you guys didn’t fire any shots.”
Fenwick asked, “Is Carruthers going to get fired?”
Molton said, “Yes.”
Fenwick raised an eyebrow. “It’s that simple?”
Molton said, “It will be. It better be. The local media, the Internet, hell, half the planet has seen what happened from numerous angles.” He stood up. “You guys are stuck. Heroes now and forever.” He pointed at Fenwick. “You sure you don’t want to go home?”
Fenwick shook his head. “Not unless the doctor says I have to.” He nodded toward Turner. “I’m not going to let him take all the heat.”
“Or get more interviews than you?”
Fenwick said, “No fucking interviews.”
A female voice from the other side of the curtain said, “How about regular interviews?”
The curtain opened. Madge Fenwick swept in. Turner’s husband, Ben Vargas, followed in her wake.
Madge strode to her husband, pecked him on the cheek, and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Just a flesh wound and a bump on the head.”
Madge eyed both bandaged areas. “You just have so much flesh to wound.”
Madge was one of Turner’s favorite people. She had long since been able to demolish the fortress of Fenwick’s gruffness.
Fenwick asked, “Are you saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing?”
Madge said, “Kinda depends.”
Ben and Paul hugged. Still in their clinch, his husband asked, “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Ben still had on his work clothes from the car repair shop he owned. He hadn’t taken time to change. They smelled of grease, and sweat, and Ben. Paul breathed deeply and held on for a few extra seconds. The smell brought a flash of good memories, good feelings. They were a relief after the mad rush of danger.
When they parted Ben said, “I stopped at home. The boys are glued to the Internet and television. Everybody knew something happened. From the part of the video I saw, it seemed it was all over in seconds.”
Paul nodded. “Just kind of a whirl.”
When they were on their way to the hospital, Turner had called to let them know he was all right. He didn’t want them to worry.
Turner said, “We gotta go back to the station and write all this up. Our shift isn’t even half over.”
Madge asked, “Are you sure you’re okay to stay?”
Fenwick grumbled, “Yeah.”
Final bandaging done, a prescription for pain pills obtained, hugs given to spouses, and they were on their way.
In the car, Fenwick said, “You could have inserted a fat-guy-needle comment back there.”
“No need. More appropriate coming from you. And with luck, there will come a perfect time.”
“We needed something to break the seriousness. I’ll work on it.”
But Paul sensed that at the moment, Fenwick wasn’t in the mood for finding something humorous, a sure sign his partner was more upset than he was letting on. He himself wasn’t in much of a mood for such, either.
Thursday 5:37 P.M.
It was still hours before sunset on the June late afternoon when they got back to Area Ten headquarters. The breeze bringing humidity and storms from the Gulf of Mexico had continued to rise.
Area Ten’s boundaries were Belmont Avenue on the north and Ashland Avenue on the west, and all along the lakefront south to Fifty-Ninth Street. The building itself was south of the River City complex on Wells Street on the southwest rim of Chicago’s Loop.
The structure was as old and crumbling as River City was new and gleaming. Years ago, the department purchased a four-story warehouse scheduled for demolition and decreed it would be a new headquarters. To this day, rehabbers put in appearances in fits and starts. The building had changed from an empty hulking wreck to a people-filled hulking wreck. N
one of the so-called improvements, departmental or structural, had caused crime to increase or decrease. In all that time, the number of new personnel hired to fight crime hadn’t increased.
In the Chicago police department, the Areas still took care of homicides and other violent crimes. The Districts took care of all the minor incidents and gave out traffic tickets. There hadn’t been Precincts in Chicago since O.W. Wilson was in charge of the department in the 1960s.
Barb Dams, Commander Molton’s secretary as well as being a friend, caught Turner and Fenwick as they were on the stairs on their way up to their desks on the second floor. “You guys okay?”
“Yeah,” they both murmured.
Dams’s eyes twinkled, “What I do not understand is why neither of you simply pulled out a gun and shot Carruthers. Seems that would have been the simplest thing.”
Fenwick said, “More paperwork if we’d shot the bastard.”
Dams nodded. “Kind of makes sense. Commander needs to see you.”
“Now?” Fenwick asked.
“Or sooner. You can both go, but I think he only wants Paul.”
Turner asked, “What’s up?”
“He’ll tell you.” Even if she knew what it was about, he knew she’d keep her boss’s secrets.
They trooped into Molton’s office.
“You guys okay?” he asked.
More mumbled, “Yeahs.”
Molton shook his head. “Home for you both would probably be good.” He sighed, “But we’ve got to get all the paperwork done on this now. It’s got to be written up while it’s fresh.”
Nods from both detectives.
Molton added, “Carruthers is being held in an interrogation room here.”
“Why not headquarters?” Fenwick asked.
“This whole thing will be done carefully, and it will be done right. Every god damn “t” will be crossed and “i” dotted. I can finally get him out of my command and off this department. No clout in this city is powerful enough to save him now. You guys will be in the clear, although there might be some diehards who think you should be loyal to Carruthers.”
Fenwick slammed a ham-handed fist down on Molton’s desk. He blurted out, “The dumb fuck was shooting at us.”
Molton let Fenwick calm down for a few moments then said, “You know how it is.”
Turner and Fenwick nodded. They knew.
Molton sighed then pointed at Turner. “The new, strangest thing from the last ten minutes is Carruthers wants to talk to you.”
“What for?” Turner asked.
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Is that wise?” Turner asked. “Hasn’t he been advised to keep silent?”
“Yep.”
“Will it be recorded?” Turner asked.
“Do you want it to be?”
Turner thought for a second. “Whatever you work out with Carruthers, and whatever you think is right, is fine with me. Do you think I should talk to him?”
“Whatever you do is okay with me. I think we’re going to forgo recording or having witnesses for this one.”
Turner nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”
Thursday 5:52 P.M.
Carruthers sat with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed. He was no longer handcuffed. He looked up when Turner entered the gray, cinderblock, featureless room. It was one of the rare spots in the building in which the air-conditioning worked. Turner had been told the oddity occurred at this point because of a fortuitous confluence of pipe from some inept new rehabbing being incorrectly placed near a century old conduit. Instead of making the temperature comfortable and pleasant, it made the room cold and clammy.
Carruthers gave him a tentative smile then stopped when he saw the neutral expression on Turner’s face.
Carruthers said, “Thanks for agreeing to see me.”
Turner said, “You shouldn’t be talking to me. You should keep silent. Your union rep should be here at the least.”
“I know you’ll be fair. You’ll listen. Probably the only one who would.”
Turner sat across from him on a cold, metallic chair. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
Carruthers launched into a tirade about kids today having no morals, and rioters and protesters flooding the city, and people hating cops. Turner let him foam, froth, and foment. When white bits of spittle appeared around the corners of his lips, Carruthers wiped at them with a hand encrusted with red, scaly blotches.
Turner had heard avalanches of wild justifications from any number of suspects over the years. Carruthers as detective didn’t sound much different.
Carruthers finished with, “It’s just like 1968 in this town. Nobody respects the law.”
Turner spoke in his softest voice. “Nobody is rioting in the streets. Not the public. Not the police. All the cops in the city so far have been calm. Except for you.” He paused for a moment then asked, “Why did you want to see me?”
“You’re the one they’re going to talk to.”
“They have eighty-seven million or so feet of video footage of what happened.”
“But you’re one of us.”
Turner said, “I’m not one of you. I’m nothing like you.”
“The kid had a gun.”
Turner just gaped at him. Finally he managed to say, “We saw no gun.”
“He threw it away.”
“If you knew that, you knew he was unarmed, so why did you shoot? He was standing still, with his hands up, and his back to you.”
That stopped Carruthers for only a second. “I thought he might have had another gun.”
“Which you didn’t see, couldn’t have seen because it didn’t exist.” For that matter, Turner doubted if the first gun existed except in Carruthers’s fevered brain.
“Traitor,” Carruthers snarled.
Turner said, “Traitor? Really?” In another second, he thought he might get up and leave. The fascination of watching the wreck that was Carruthers kept him seated, and Turner himself had a few things he wanted to say to the vile betrayer sitting across from him.
Carruthers said, “We gotta stick together.”
Turner drew a deep breath. He wondered if Carruthers was truly that far from connecting with reality. Turner said, “Randy, who was feeding the Catholic Church information about the police investigation on the bishop’s murder case?”
“Wasn’t me.”
Turner spoke in clipped tones. “You will not deny reality to me, not now or ever, you stupid son of a bitch.”
“How can you know I gave them information?”
“They talked about you. We heard them.”
Carruthers switched tacks. “You’ve got to help me.”
“Why?”
“I already told you, I…”
Turner cut him off. “Why did you think I would? Did you think we wouldn’t find out about you betraying us?”
“They’ll fire me.”
“If you get near Fenwick, he may execute you himself. You shot a cop, you numbnuts-dumbfuck.” Turner thought Fenwick’s usual description of Carruthers fit perfectly at this moment. He was a little torn about throwing it in the guy’s face at a time like this. Calling names wasn’t his style, but his fury at the long-time squad joke was deeper than he’d expected. Actually confronting him was drawing forth reserves of anger he hadn’t been aware of.
Carruthers was likely to lose his job, career, and maybe even his pension. If for no other reason, Turner thought, post-cop work, Carruthers would be hard to employ because he was a jerk. That was if he didn’t go to jail, and civil lawsuits against him, the department, and the city didn’t drain his resources.
Turner asked, “Why was betraying us so important to you?”
“I didn’t do it.”
“We have it on video. They said it was you. They said your name.”
“It wasn’t me.”
Turner asked, “Is the sky blue?”
“Huh?”
“I was wondering if you’re connecting w
ith reality.” Turner took out his phone. He turned the screen toward Carruthers and played the damning clip.
When it finished, Carruthers didn’t look at him. He mumbled, “Someone doctored the tape, edited it to make me look bad.”
Turner said, “I feel sorry for you.”
The beaten-down detective again had his shoulders slumped, head down. He didn’t look up. Turner wondered if the poor guy had a friend in the world. If the man didn’t have any, Turner understood why. While he did feel a little sorry for Carruthers, it wasn’t enough to move him to help the guy. Even if he wanted to, as far as he could see, there was no help available to Carruthers. Not from himself or anyone. He got up and left the incompetent creep.
Thursday 6:34 P.M.
Turner trudged up the stairs to his desk. Fenwick looked up as he crossed the room. All the windows were open to catch the breeze. Storms could blow up at any moment. They’d have to remember to close the windows before their shift was over or make sure maintenance was paying attention.
They’d invested in fans smaller but more powerful than the ones the department had kept probably since the building was wired for electricity soon after the Great Chicago fire. Those had been on their way to clanking, sputtering death. At least the ones Turner and Fenwick purchased offered real relief. The amount of un-fanned sweat that fountained off Fenwick no longer threatened to cause rivulets of rust to seep through the ceiling to the squad room below.
Their desks abutted each other, front to front.
As Turner sat, Fenwick raised an eyebrow.
Turner shrugged. “He wanted sympathy and help.”
“So he’s not dead?”
Turner shook his head.
“Pity.”
After they’d done paperwork for thirty minutes, Rodriguez stomped into the room. He pulled a chair over to their desks and sat. “You guys okay?” he asked.
Turner and Fenwick nodded.
“How about you?” Turner asked.
Rodriguez had soft brown eyes and a mustache that trailed down to his chin in a modified Van Dyke. It gave him a perennially sad expression. Rodriguez sighed, “I hope I will be. It’s already started.”
