by Ted Wood
“Too late for that now. You should have thought about it when you were beating on your wife.”
“I din’ mean no harm.” His voice was a whine. “She knows that.”
“You blacked her eye, you kicked her. That's harm, Randy. You're a punk.”
His face began to shrivel and I saw tears in his eyes. “Y're right,” he said. “I'm no goddamn good to nobody.”
“You used to be a nice guy,” I said. “What the hell happened to you?”
He blinked and swallowed. “I don’ know.” He shook his head. “Like I was always, like wild, ask anybody. But jus’ drinkin', I never used to hit her.”
He must have been around twenty-seven, I thought, in the prime of his natural vigor, but now he was sounding like a penitent old man on his deathbed.
“The way I hear it, you were okay up until July fourteenth.” I was forcing the pace but I wanted answers while we were alone.
“Was it then?” He looked up at me, round-eyed over his coffee cup. “Like I'd've said three months.”
“Three months since what, Wilcox?”
I spun around. Ferris was standing behind me, smiling. I smelled the whisky on his breath from six feet away. I straightened up. “Hi, sarge. I'm just getting a statement from my prisoner.”
Ferris ignored me. He passed me in the doorway of the cell and stood over the prisoner who hunched down. “What was it this time, Wilcox? Wife-beating again? Remember what I told you last time you started that nonsense, do you?” Wilcox opened his mouth to speak and Ferris backhanded him, sending him sprawling across the cot, the enamel coffee cup clattering against the wall.
I scrambled to pick it up, coming between Ferris and the prisoner. “No, he wasn't beating his wife, sarn't. She says she fell. But he was ornery when I went in. I'm charging him with obstruct police.”
Ferris was breathing harshly and he looked at me angrily. “Don't you ever try to come between me and a prisoner again,” he said.
“Wouldn't dream of it, sarn't. Just want you to have all the facts, that's all. How about I go and get you a cup of coffee?”
He looked at me without speaking for about twenty seconds, then he grinned. “Yeah, that's a good idea. Why'nt you do that? Bring it out here, in two minutes time.”
“Sure, sarn't.” I grinned obligingly. “Oh, there's one other thing, sarn't.”
“You are starting to seriously piss me off, Bennett,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I wouldn't say anything except that it's important.” I scratched my head ruefully. “Like I took his wife to the hospital, and while we were there the nurse took a look at this guy. She knows he isn't hurt at all.”
“Out,” Ferris said. “Get the hell out and stay out. Understand?”
“Sure.” I left, closing the door to the cells behind me. I felt like a traitor to everything I believe in about doing police work. Ferris was going to beat my prisoner. But I couldn't do anything else without being fired from here and leaving Ferris and Chief Harding in charge for the rest of their lives. My only consolation was that if Wilcox was alert he would have heard the lie I told and would save himself any more pain by threatening to show the nurse the bruises.
It didn't work out that way. Maybe Wilcox felt guilty, felt he deserved the punishment. In any case it took about ninety seconds of thudding before Ferris joined me in the guardroom where I was sitting with two cups of coffee in front of me, reading the occurrence report I'd typed.
Ferris was breathing hard. “Which one's mine?”
I pointed to his cup and he picked it up. “They must've loved you, the last place you worked.” He slurped a mouthful of coffee and sat down, putting his feet on the table.
“Why's that, sergeant?”
“You're a candyass,” he sneered. “That sonofabitch was beating up his old lady. Guys like that don't hear you when you say things like arrest and assault. All's they hear is violence. I just taught him a lesson. It's easy. Wanna hear it?”
There was no choice. “I think I've got it,” I said.
“Make sure you have,” he said. “Lemme see what you've charged him with.”
I passed over the occurrence sheet and he read it through without speaking. He was a slow reader. Then he put the coffee cup down and tore the form in two. “Garbage,” he said.
“You don't want him charged?”
“No. I want him cured of beating up his wife. I just took care of that. Now why don't you finish your coffee and get back on patrol. I'll take him home.”
“Whatever you say, sarn't.” I drank the last mouthful of my coffee and stood up. “I'm on my way.”
He watched me until I reached the door then he called out. “You're gonna be okay, you just have to learn.”
“Thank you, sarn't. I'm trying.” I grinned at him like the court jester and went out to finish my shift, feeling disgusted with him and with myself.
FIVE
The night was endless. I went through the empty motions of checking all my properties every hour and drove out to the mine site, this time finding the gateman asleep in his shack. His dog woke him up and he was embarrassed and grumpy. After that I went back through town and out to the cluster of homes around the deserted pulp mill. It was a tumbledown ghost town and all of the houses were dark. Only eight of them out of the forty or so still looking habitable were apparently occupied. By the light of one streetlamp still working it was a depressing place.
In town, the Chinese restaurant opened at six, in time for any miners who didn't like getting their own breakfast to eat before work. I dropped in and got a coffee from the owner's wife, an endlessly smiling little woman who laughed loud and long at my few words of Mandarin and rattled away at me as if I were a linguist. The coffee was good and I paid for it, ignoring her protests, thanking her in my lousy Chinese and leaving her convulsed.
At five minutes to eight I drove back to the station and filled out my log while I waited for the day men to come out. There were two of them. Smith was there, his black eye turning yellow now. He shook my hand and thanked me awkwardly for helping him the night I'd arrived. He was taking another car but he also introduced me to the man taking over from me.
“This is Al, Alphonse Levesque. Al, this is Reid Bennett, the new guy. He gave me a hand at the Headframe on Saturday.”
“Good thing you were there,” Levesque said. He was short, only about five eight, and muscular. He had the broad face and coal black eyes of an Indian, but his droopy French-style mustache was completely Quebecois. My mother was French, from Calander in Ontario, and I speak the language well, but I didn't tell him. I just shook hands and passed the car over.
He checked the mileage. “Shit. You been drivin’ all night,” he said in disgust. “Eighty-six kilometers. I don’ do’ ‘alf that in a night.”
“Getting to know the area,” I said, but I was learning. One trip to the mine site and none to the old mill was all the driving required. I would have to disconnect the speedometer if I did any prowling.
Ferris was on duty. He looked bandbox fresh, his uniform newly pressed, his boots gleaming. I'd known drunks like him in the Marines. No matter how hard they hit the bottle at night, not a trace of it showed during working hours, if you didn't count the slight tremor in the hands.
“Bennett,” he said. “The chief wants a word with you.”
“Me?” I was surprised. “Something the matter?”
“He'll tell you.”
I went through to the chief's office, nodding at Marcie Sheridan, who had come on duty at eight. Harding was behind his desk, writing. I tapped on the door.
He looked up. “Ah, Bennett. Come in and shut the door.”
I did so and he waved me to the chair. “Sgt. Ferris tells me you arrested Randolph Wilcox last night. What happened?”
“I got a distress call from his wife and went around there. He was drunk and abusive. He'd been assaulting her and he opened the knife drawer in the kitchen when I came in, so I didn't wait. I arrested him before he coul
d get a knife and let it turn nasty.”
Harding sucked his teeth. “Sarn't Ferris didn't say anything about a knife.”
“I charged him with obstructing, sir. He didn't have time to get the knife out, or I'd have booked him with assault.”
“Then you did right,” he said. “Understand that we're not interested in running up our arrest counts in this town. We judge our performance by the lack of arrests, the lack of incidents that require official reports.”
“Understood, sir. I know better than charge him with assaulting his wife. They never press charges; it wastes everybody's time.”
The comment was about twenty years out of date. These days women have established their right to protection. I would have pressed the charges myself. Not in Elliot, it seemed.
“That's what I was going to tell you,” Harding said. “In this town we get our share of domestic complaints. Our practice is to go out and shake down some frightening powder. If necessary, take the guy outside and have a little talk with him to reinforce the message. But don't bring them in unless it gets heavy. You understand?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
“Okay, then, get on home,” he said.
I stood up and he grinned. “You're going to be all right,” he said. “You've got a lot to learn about the way we do things, but if you handled Wilcox with one hand, you'll be okay.”
I nodded, acting as if I were at a loss for words, and left.
Fred was up, making breakfast. She kissed me and asked me how it had gone.
“Boring,” I said. “One domestic complaint and seven and a half hours of driving around. At least in Murphy's Harbour I would have been in bed half the night.”
“This isn't forever,” she said. “Can you stand it?”
“I can stand anything, with you here making pancakes for me when I come home.”
“Chauv,” she said. “I'd insist on your doing some of the cooking but you're lousy at it. How you managed on your own without getting scurvy or beriberi is beyond me.”
“Tell you what. I'll do the dishes, if you promise not to tell the guys at the station.”
“Deal,” she said. “Then what? You going to bed?”
“Depends,” I said, and looked at her until she laughed out loud.
* * * *
When I took the assignment I hadn't expected it was going to be easy. I'd told Fred it would only be a matter of weeks, but I guess I'd known that it would take time for me to get at the truth as the guys in the department came to accept me. In a way it was like the war again. I settled down to endless patrol work, knowing I had to be alert the whole time, on guard for the sudden tiny signal that warned me of trouble. The only difference was Fred. She made the assignment not only tolerable but the best time I'd ever spent working. She was endlessly cheerful. Another woman might have resented the smallness of the town, the poor selection of fresh vegetables in the one store, the ignorance of almost everyone here of the subjects that interested her. But not Fred. She's one of nature's enthusiasts. I guess if she hadn't been that way she wouldn't have taken me on.
One thing that did disappoint her was that none of the other policemen asked us over for a meal. It didn't surprise me. We'd been in town less than a week. We were all working different shifts, it would be hard to coordinate a visit, and besides, cops are not social animals. However, Fred didn't complain. She worked hard preparing the course she was going to give at the community center, starting the following week. About fifty people had already signed up for it, the most students they'd ever had for one offering, Jacques told her. She made several calls to Toronto looking for suitable scripts and was down at the bus stop in town every day picking up the material her friends sent for her to read and select.
Me, I went on checking the silent town at nights. Weekdays were easier than Sunday night had been. There were people in the bar at the Headframe until one, then drivers to caution when it closed. The Chinese place stayed open until then, and I got my coffee there and learned a few words of Cantonese from Wang Luk and his wife, whose name I still didn't know. But nothing broke about the case until the following Friday night.
I was in the car at a few minutes after midnight. Levesque was on duty at the station from seven p.m. until three in the morning. He told me that was the practice. One man stayed at the radio while the other patrolled on his own. That way there was backup if somebody called in with a problem. It made sense I guess, but I knew that the main trouble would occur at the Headframe. All those miners would be drinking their way into the weekend and there were going to be fights. For that reason I had brought Sam with me.
It had been a bit of a charade, breaking Ferris's order to leave him behind. I'd brought Sam to the station and left him in my own car until I'd taken over from the afternoon man. As soon as he had gone into the station I had moved Sam into the front seat of the police car. My left arm was still not working well and I knew I wouldn't be able to handle a couple of fit young drunks any better than Smith had the week before.
When I reached the hotel I could hear the uproar as soon as I got out of the car. I called Sam to heel and went in.
Two guys were hammering away at one another, big roundhouse swipes I'd have had no trouble with if both arms were working. I walked over to the back of the crowd, slowly. You never run into a fight, you give them time to let one of the guys realize he's getting the worst of it. That way you only have one battler to deal with.
The crowd was beery and excited but not hostile. I worked my way through to the center and said, “That's enough, guys.”
I had to speak up to be heard, but as I'd expected, one of the fighters was glad to see me. It didn't make him stop, just gave him fresh energy to take another few swings at his opponent. But I could tell from the way he glanced at me that he was waiting for me to step in.
“I said knock it off,” I repeated, and the crowd roared.
The only words I made out were, “The hell with him, you can take him, George. Finish the Polack first.”
Somebody ran at me from behind, shoving me towards the fighters and the tougher of the two, then both of them, threw punches at me. It was the perfect out for the weaker guy. He would team up with the other guy in punching my lights out. Their own argument would be forgotten.
I shouted “Speak.”
Sam barked his way through the crowd like a knife through butter. They scattered but the two fighters were too fired up to stop swinging at me. “Fight,” I shouted, and Sam lunged at the man nearest me.
The guy roared with alarm and backed up and Sam turned on the other one until he quit.
“Now hold it right there,” I commanded and they stood, meek and scared while Sam raged at them.
“Easy, boy,” I said and he relaxed, standing beside me, watching the two men. A waiter scrambled to pick up the tables they'd knocked over. Another one appeared with a dustpan and a mop to get the broken glass. I ignored them
“Okay,” I told the biggest of the two fighters, “Let me see some ID.”
He didn't argue. He pulled out his wallet and I said, “Just the ID.”
He pulled out his driver's license and I stood and wrote down his name and address.
“You too,” I told the other one and he did the same. I copied it down and then stood and looked at the pair of them without speaking. The crowd had gathered on the far side of them, still swigging their beer from the bottle, watching, silently.
“Couple of champions, eh?” I said and laughed. “You couldn't punch your way out of a paper bag.”
One of the men swore but the other said nothing. I laughed again. “Still wanna finish it? That's good. Come on outside, the pair of you.”
“What for?” the smaller one asked.
“You're going to fight fair where you won't smash anything. No kicking, no gouging, just a good clean fistfight.” I laughed. “That's what you wanted, wasn't it?”
“That bastard said something about my old lady,” the big one said.
“So come on outside, get your coats off and settle it.” I waved at them.
They turned and looked at one another, like two schoolkids singled out by a teacher.
“Come on. I haven't got all night. Get on with the entertainment,” I said.
The big one broke first. “The hell with him. He ain't nothin'.”
The shorter one hesitated. His pride was hurt, but he knew that something more serious might be damaged if he argued.
“The hell with you too,” he said and turned away.
“Hey,” I called, and he stopped and turned back.
“You're a couple of dorks,” I said. “I want you out of here and home. If I see either one of you in the hotel again tonight you're answering to me. Understood?”
They stretched the pause as long as pride demanded, then each of them nodded and they walked away towards the door. I followed them out and watched until they got into their cars and drove off. Then I stooped and fussed Sam, rubbing his head and telling him he was a good boy. I put him in the front seat of the car and went back inside.
The crowd has hooting with laughter, slapping one another on the back, reliving the battle. I said nothing, just walked up to the bar where Berger was handling the draft-beer tap, running it nonstop as his waiters filled their trays with new glasses.
He looked up and nodded to the barman who was dispensing the hard stuff. He was doing some business but not so much as his boss.
“Take over, Charlie,” he said and rang up the order he had just completed. Then he spoke to me. “Thanks, off'cer. Come in the back.”
He lifted the flap on his counter and I walked through and followed him into his office. It was like any bar office, small and cluttered, cases of liquor on the floor and the desk littered with invoices and business papers.
He sat down and indicated the other chair. “Take a load off. You like anything?”
“No thanks.”
He looked at me levelly. “You AA or what? I'm not gonna ring up the chief and tell him you took a nip.”
