by Randy Alcorn
Ollie stood and walked slowly. “I vaguely remember that. Let’s see, wasn’t there something about it in the Trib?” The sarcasm wasn’t sufficient to mask his pain. “Kept thinking you were never going to bring it up.” Ollie sighed. “It’s a long story. Can we talk over lunch?”
“I’ve got the time,” Clarence said. “Lou’s?”
“Yeah. The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, but at least there’s Lou’s.”
They small talked during the five-minute drive. They both bypassed the usual cheeseburgers for a corned beef on rye, Rory’s special he begged them to try.
“Okay,” Ollie said. “So you want to hear the story? Well, it was 1987. All started when this dude robbed a 7-Eleven, you know the one over on MLK and Jack?”
Clarence nodded. It was less than a mile from Dani’s house.
“He was flipped out big time. Later we found out it was crack and PCP. Bad combo. Coming up from L.A., I was still a uniformed, before I got into detective division. I was driving on routine patrol. My partner sees this guy in the store facing off with the cashier. He can’t see a gun, but she looks terrified. He says pull over, so I did. My partner, Rick Campbell, he got out of the car just as the dude was comin’ out. The guy looks at Rick out of the corner of his eye but doesn’t run. Smart move. Rick walks in and sees the cashier on the floor, her face smashed up. Turns out the perp pistol-whipped her with a Browning automatic, but she was still conscious. Rick makes sure she’s calling 911, and he’s back out the door chasin’ the guy on foot.
“The perp cuts across a field, my partner chasing him, while I called 911 too, to make sure the girl gets help. I take off in the patrol car thinking I could head them off on a back street. Sure enough, I come around this corner and there they are, both still running, forty feet between them. I pull up, my partner hops in, and the perp suddenly jumps in a car himself. He leads us on a high-speed chase. We go about twenty miles; he dents up three cars along the way, almost hit half a dozen pedestrians. Amazing no one else got hurt. I still have nightmares about it.”
“And then?”
“After a fifteen minute chase out the Sunset Highway past Hillsboro, we finally pull him over. He shoots at us; we pin him down and run him out of ammo. Then we come after him, hopin’ he isn’t saving a magazine for us. We try to cuff him, but he’s absolutely crazy. Has the strength of five men. We’d handled guys like him with a net before, and no one got hurt, but the ACLU made sure we couldn’t use nets anymore because they’re degrading. Truth is, the nets let us subdue a perp without having to hit him. We can’t just shoot them, of course, unless lives are endangered. Chemical sprays don’t work on the guys flyin’ high on crack, so if they keep fighting, the only thing we can do is hit them with our fists or nightsticks. Which gives bad cops an excuse to do what they want and puts good cops in a position where they have to do what they don’t want to. The bottom line is far greater physical harm both to criminals and cops. All compliments of the ACLU.”
“So what happened then?”
“Well, I didn’t want to shoot the guy, and cool reason wasn’t real effective. He was resisting arrest, hammerin’ us with his fists, and grabbing for our hands and holsters, trying to get hold of our guns. He was dangerous to himself, to us, to everyone, so as a last resort I used the nightstick on him. Hit him a half-dozen times in the shoulders to get him to stay down so we could handcuff him. After the bad publicity in the Trib, there were three or four witnesses who got together and decided I beat him because he was black. Truth is, I didn’t think about what color he was. I just thought about getting him under control and keeping him from hurting anybody.”
“But that’s not what other people thought.”
“Well, the front-page article in the Trib did the real damage. It started something like, ‘White Portland police officer Ollie Chambers, a transfer from LAPD, outraged a North Portland community by his brutal beating of a mentally handicapped black teenager.’”
“You think it came across that bad?”
“Just about. Check it out yourself.”
“I did.”
“Was I right?”
“Not word for word, but pretty close.”
“The funny thing was, the guy was nineteen, but he could have passed for twenty-nine. Besides, when a guy pistol-whips and robs a woman and empties his gun at you, your first thought isn’t to ask him when his voice changed or how long he’s been shaving or whether his neighbors think he’s a nice boy. And mentally handicapped? I didn’t stop to do an IQ test. I’m sure the girl he pistol-whipped felt better once she knew he had a handicap. She had to have reconstructive surgery on her face.”
Clarence nodded, his feelings tearing him two different directions. “I did some homework on your case. I’m curious about something. You didn’t mention just now that your partner Rick was black. Or that the girl at the 7-Eleven, the one he pistol-whipped, she was black too.”
“Didn’t think it mattered. They were people, and they got hurt. Who cares what color they were?”
“Well, people seemed to care about the color of the guy you beat on.”
“Yeah, you got that right. Isn’t it funny? I was concerned about the victims. But some people, all they cared about was the guy who made them victims. They didn’t care about the victim’s skin color, just the perp’s. Weird. I’ll never understand how criminals get turned into heroes.”
“I was surprised you had no comment at the time. You should have explained yourself.”
“I was under department orders to say nothing. Our attorneys wanted a press blackout. Well, the problem was the press just took it and treated my silence as if it were an admission of guilt.”
“I can understand that,” Clarence said.
“If I had it to do over again, I’d violate the gag order. Probably would’ve ended my career, but maybe it would’ve been worth it to stand up for my reputation.”
“So looking back at it, you still feel you were just doing your job?”
“Yeah. I thought so then and I think so now. Internal Affairs thought so too. But after Councilman Norcoast turned the screws on the DA, everybody wanted to take me down.”
“Norcoast?”
“Yeah. You don’t remember what the paper did the next few days? The Trib made the perp and Norcoast both look like heroes. And I don’t have to tell you what they made me look like.”
“Did you complain about the coverage?”
“Complain to who?”
“To the Trib. Or, I don’t know, anybody.”
“Well, sure, I groused about it. But who do you complain to? Who has the money to file a slander suit against a newspaper? My attorney thought about it, but he said we had a snowball’s chance of winning. We’d have to prove malice, and how could we do that? We’d probably have to pay the Trib’s lawyers’ bills. On a street cop’s salary? Right. It’s bad enough to have a newspaper make your wife cry through the night for six months and your kids ashamed to go to school. But to pay them and their lawyers for the privilege? Not me.”
“Did you contact the Trib?”
“I tried to talk to the reporter, but it didn’t do any good. I saw the photographer’s name, so I called her, left a message. Got a call back from somebody else, telling me she was unavailable, and if I had a beef I should contact the publisher’s office. I thought great, now maybe we’ll get somewhere.”
“Berkley has an open-door policy. What kind of response did you get from him?”
“I’ll let you know if he ever calls me back. Yeah, I heard about the open-door policy too. Only I think it was the back door and he sneaked out when he saw me coming. His pit bull secretary told me to have my lawyer talk to his lawyer. I said hey, this isn’t about a lawsuit or something. I just wanted to talk man to man, tell him my side, and what it was doing to my family. He never returned my calls.
“His secretary said something about the First Amendment and, ‘The Tribune stands by the story.’ I thought that was pretty funny
. If today’s Trib headline was, ‘World will end at noon,’ tomorrow’s follow-up would say, ‘We stand by yesterday’s story.’ Captain told me something I’ve never forgotten: ‘Messin’ with the media is like wrestling with a pig. Everybody ends up getting dirty, but the pig likes it.”’
“I was at the Trib when it all happened,” Clarence said. “I remember it, but I think it got mixed up in my mind with a few other police brutality cases.”
“Yeah. One cop deserved to be fired for what he did—I just wasn’t the guy. There’s a lot of people who still think I hit the perp in the face with the nightstick, that I sprayed him with pepper mace after he was under control, that I even whaled on him after he was unconscious, which he never was, by the way.”
“You didn’t do any of that?”
“No, I didn’t. Look, I’m not saying I haven’t ever gotten in an extra lick that maybe wasn’t absolutely necessary, but it’s subjective, you know? Every cop realizes the people you lock up tonight are out tomorrow. The justice system is like a merry-go-round, minus the merry. So sometimes maybe the cop tries to get in a little justice figuring the courts won’t. What I’m saying is, I’m no saint. But the pepper mace and the nightstick were both last resorts. I only used them because he was still out of control and nothing my partner and I did was working.”
“You use mace often?”
“Maybe four times in fifteen years as a uniformed. Nightstick less than a dozen times. See—and I’ll talk slowly because you people in the press don’t understand this—some of these guys won’t come with you to police headquarters if all you say is, ‘Pretty please.’ Truth is, I went to the hospital too. The guy bit me. See this?” He showed him an inch and a half scar on his left hand.
“That’s from this guy? No kidding?”
“No kidding. I could show you all my scars and tell you the stories, but I don’t disrobe for journalists.”
“Thanks, Ollie. You have no idea how much I appreciate your restraint. So what happened next?”
“The DA’s office came after me. They needed a scapegoat. The Trib and Norcoast made me out to be this brutal racist cop. They described the perp as a ‘mentally handicapped motorist’ and a ‘possible suspect’ in a robbery. Didn’t mention we’d seen him do it, that he pistol-whipped this girl, that he was out of his mind on drugs, trying to kill us and bystanders, that he’d taken us on a high-speed chase, he was resisting arrest, bit me in the hand, and so on. No mention that he was a convicted drug dealer, and who knows how many kids had turned to crime and gangs and died or become killers because of him. None of that mattered. He was a victim. Then the next thing you know they did interviews with him, and he was a hero, a martyr talking with this peaceful childlike voice about how he wished people could just love each other.”
“You sound bitter,” Clarence said.
“Maybe I am. You know the worst part? See, my mom was from Idaho and my dad from Arkansas, so I grew up bilingual. My dad was no racist, no matter what you might think, but I had some uncles and cousins that were the worst, like rejects from the Klan, the kind that used to tell stories about how black kids were born with tails and they had to be cut off by the midwives. Psychos. Next thing I know they send me a postcard and say, ‘We’re on your side, cousin—we’re glad you beat the crud out of that nigger.’ One of them said that to me at a family reunion, and I just lost it. I slapped him silly. Hurt him worse than I hurt the perp. Thought my cousin was going to press charges. Oh, well. One less Christmas card to send.” Ollie pretended it didn’t matter. “Did you see the front-page picture they ran of me, the closeup?”
“Yeah. Barely recognized you.”
“Nobody recognized me. This scuffle went on like fifteen minutes. I guess someone at the Trib was monitoring the police band, and this photographer was already out in Hillsboro, so she had time to get to the scene. This gal keeps getting in close while the perp is swinging these big meathook arms. I was afraid he was going to take her out. She wouldn’t back off. Anyway, she takes these photos, and I swear, I come up lookin’ like Hitler on a bad hair day. My wife said she’d never seen me look so mean. I didn’t know it was possible to make this beautiful mug look that ugly.”
The photographer was a woman? Must have been Carp. “So you blame the Trib for what happened?”
“Jake told me, ‘The press goes to scandal like a buzzard to entrails.’ They crucified me,” Ollie said.
“You’re seeing the media through the lens of your own bad experiences,” Clarence said.
“Sure. Isn’t that the same lens you see cops through? Whose experiences do we operate by if not our own? What bothered me is that I became a cop not to bust heads, but to do some good. I didn’t mind risking my life, but once I was accused of this, suddenly all those years—my career, my record—none of it mattered. I believe to this day if Jake Woods hadn’t done his own investigation and found out the other side and written it up in the Trib, I would have gone to jail.”
“Must’ve been tough.”
“The worst part was when my youngest daughter, then she was sixteen, kept getting harassed by kids and teachers at school who believed the newspaper. One day she comes and asks me, ‘Daddy, did you really do those things to that black boy?’” Ollie’s eyelids got heavy. “That’s when it hurt. Sure, police brutality happens and sure, there are racist cops. I’m not one of them. But I was made to pay for their sins.”
Clarence thought about how often he’d been made to pay for the sins of black criminals who were the exception to the rule. “One last question. Jake told me something, but I want to hear it straight from you. Tell me about Bam Robie.”
Ollie looked surprised, as if he hadn’t heard the name for a long time.
“Prostitute. Crack fiend. Arrested him a half-dozen times. One night, this was maybe a couple months before the brutality charge, I was bringing Bam in for soliciting Johns. Suddenly, right outside the police station, he drops down on the street. Stops breathing.”
“And…?”
“I did what I was trained to do.”
“Which was?”
“CPR. Then mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”
“What happened?”
“He revived. The paramedics worked with him awhile. He ended up okay, brief stay in the hospital, and later that night, at the end of my shift, they brought him in and we booked him.”
“Did you know he had AIDS?”
“Yeah, I knew. Bam was high risk, to say the least. You get to know a lot of these guys on the streets, the regulars. He’d lost a lot of weight, was pretty scrawny by then. Everybody knew he had AIDS.”
“And you gave him mouth-to-mouth anyway?”
“I was just doing my job. Was I supposed to let him die?”
“I’m not sure I would have done it,” Clarence said. Silence. He cleared his throat. “You didn’t mention Robie was black.”
“You keep bringing that up like it’s important.”
“To me, it is important.”
“You’d think even if I didn’t win points with the black caucus, I would have been a hero with the gay lobby or some AIDS group. Don’t know if there’s a prostitutes or cross-dressers union, but they could’ve given me a medal too, I guess. No awards. Got a lot of razzing from the guys, though, for doing a mouth-to-mouth on Robie. I figure, hey, it’s not like I married him.”
“Why do I see the events on earth in succession?” Dani asked Torel. “Why do I seem to experience the passing of time? Doesn’t the Bible say, ‘And time shall be no more’?”
“You are quoting a hymn, not the Bible,” Torel said. “Have you not read Elyon’s Word where it says, ‘There was silence in heaven for half an hour’? For finite beings, there is always time, wherever they are. As fish live in water, the finite live in time. Timelessness is for the infinite. Only Elyon exists outside of time, and to interact with his creatures, even he enters into it. Time is measured in the succession of events. One thing happens first, then another. There is a before, a
during, and an after. That is time. Christ came once to earth, he rose and ascended, he will return again. The inhabitants of heaven eagerly await that day. In that sense, heaven is on earth’s timetable. Consider the music you have heard in heaven and the music you make here. Does it not have meter, tempo, and rests? All these require time.”
“There’s something else,” Dani said. “I thought we would forget the things of earth here. True, some things don’t come to mind, but they haven’t been erased, just eclipsed. I have such vivid memories of earth. Not only that, but I can still see what’s happening on earth. I always thought that for heaven to be heaven we couldn’t be aware of pam on the earth.”
“Heaven does not make your mind duller, but sharper. You are aware of the rebellion on earth and the ugliness of hell. Happiness here does not depend on ignorance of reality. It depends on having God’s perspective on reality. Elyon and the angels know there’s evil and pain on earth, but heaven is still heaven for them. Your joy can be full even though there is evil in the universe, since you know that soon evil will be destroyed and the Carpenter’s just dominion established forever.”
After a long plane flight with a connection in Denver, Clarence walked into the Chicago Ritz around six o’clock, feeling more like a tourist than a customer. It dripped with class. He couldn’t help but feel a little self-important walking around here. He was wearing his best suit, a Nick Hilton, and Alden shoes, usually reserved for only the most important occasions. But here, just walking in the front door was important.
The bellhop, a young black man, led the way to his room. Clarence looked at the sculptures and artwork all around him. Even the ashtrays looked straight out of an art gallery. He tipped the bellhop and wandered around his room. Incredible. A mammoth king-sized bed, a lavish flower arrangement and fruit basket, and a personal note of welcome from Mr. Sam Knight, Raylon’s friend. A bar, a kitchen, a living room with beautiful sofa, two TVs. Geneva would love it here. Why hadn’t he thought to invite her?
