Powers of Arrest

by Jon Talton

  “I thought you was dead, Borders.”

  “You’re going to be if you don’t step back, Junior,” Will said.

  “Motherfucka’ owes me money. He gotta pay!”

  He said this as if it were a rational justification. Another day at the office. “Ain’t that right, cocksucka’? You give me my money!” He raised the boot to stomp the man’s head.

  Before the surgery, Will would already have been out of the car, at the sidewalk, and had Junior, Clarence Kavon James Jr., prone on the pavement. But he couldn’t do that now. And he didn’t have time to pull out his cane and walk with difficulty the short distance to the crime. As if that would allow him to control the suspect. A small crowd was gathering, encouraging the beating.

  Will unsnapped the holster on his belt and in seconds had his pistol aimed across the car roof.

  “I said stop, asshole.” His voice, at least, was still commanding. The gun was leveled at the man’s chest.

  A wide brown angry face stared at him with the usual empty sociopath eyes. It was dusted with darker freckles on either side of a wide nose. Will and Dodds had put his father in prison seven years ago for murder. The rotten apple didn’t fall too far from the rotten tree. With his leg cocked in the air, he looked like a malevolent drum major. He slowly lowered his boot halfway to the concrete.

  “What, Borders? You gonna shoot another unarmed black man?”

  “Yes, Junior. Did I say police? There, I’ve identified myself. You people, move away now so I can shoot this unarmed black man!” The dozen onlookers backed a few paces away.

  “I’m a man of color!”

  “You’re assaulting a man of color, Junior. Get on the ground, now!”

  “This is a G thang, Borders, none y’all’s bidness.”

  “It’s a police thing now, Junior. Lower your foot or lose it.”

  Junior glowered at him. Will didn’t know what the hell he would do if the suspect didn’t comply.

  The look of defiance seemed to last an hour. Then he spat in Will’s direction and lowered himself to the pavement with studied dignity.

  “Hands! Spread out your arms and show me your hands.”

  The man did as ordered. The victim, wearing layers of old clothes and agony on his face, lay in a fetal position on the sidewalk, moaning.

  “Stay there.” He continued to lean on the roof, keeping the gun on the man. He whispered to himself. “Now, if only the cavalry will arrive.” Traffic went by on Central Parkway. The road had been the Miami and Erie barge canal in the nineteenth century. Underneath it was Cincinnati’s never-finished, never-opened subway. Now it was only a spacious dividing line between Over-the-Rhine and the central business district. Will was sweating, the wet spring air starting to fill the sky.

  He saw the white paint of the cruiser out of his peripheral vision and a uniformed officer sprang out and handcuffed the kicker. Another unit arrived and two more unis walked to Junior, lifting him to his feet.

  “Police fucking brutality! You gonna let The Man do this to a brother!? We need another riot!”

  The onlookers walked away quickly in every direction.

  Junior was far from done. “Every man has his boiling point! His boiling point, bro! You, too, Borders! Every man has his boiling point!” The yelling was muffled when he was placed in the prisoner compartment of a cruiser and the door was shut.

  Will holstered his firearm and sat heavily in his car, using the radio to request a fire department medic unit. The dispatcher acknowledged his request as his cell rang. He swiveled into the seat, using both hands to lift his weak left leg inside, and answered.

  “Good morning, Specialist Borders.” It was Amy Garrett, the chief’s secretary, using the department and union’s technical term for his rank. She usually gave this greeting in a voice where you could almost see her smile, high cheekbones, and tasteful-but-short skirt. Amy could almost make you look forward to a visit to the chief’s office. All the cops wanted to sleep with her. She was happily married. Imagine that, Will thought, happily married. Today she sounded different. “Busy morning, huh?”

  He assumed she meant the homicide that Dodds was working. He had already used his iPad to type out the preliminary report for the police department Web site, not naming the victim, saying that Cincinnati homicide detectives were investigating. The iPad was easier to use for such tasks than the clunky police laptop mounted between the seats. Now he said, “You don’t know the half of it,” as he felt his heart rate start to go down and he could still hear Junior shouting at him from inside the prisoner compartment of the squad car.

  “There’s been an incident in Kenton County.”

  He waited.

  “You need to go down there.”

  His trouble meter was registering high. Kenton was Covington, right across the river from downtown, but another state, another county, another jurisdiction, and, thank God, another public information officer.

  “What’s up, Amy? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Her voice lowered to nearly a whisper. “It’s Kristen Gruber. She’s been found dead. Probable homicide.”

  “What do you mean?” He blurted it in exactly the same way he had heard countless family and friends of dead people do, back when he was a homicide detective delivering bad news.

  “Will, she’s been killed. Are you hearing me?”

  “Yes.” He let himself exhale. “Was she on the job?”

  “No. We don’t have a lot of details yet. She was found on a boat.”

  “Who knows? Anybody in the media?”

  “Nobody yet. But you’d better get down there. This will be national news.”

  “What am I supposed to do? What’s the plan? Is a homicide team coming?”

  “It’s only you,” she said. “Go down and find out what they have. Then the commanders will hold a press conference. This is direct from the chief, Will. He wants you to begin an investigation.”

  Will hesitated. “Amy, I’m the PIO.”

  “You’re a veteran homicide detective, Will. You’ll be the liaison officer between this department and the Kentucky cops. As far as the chief is concerned, you’re the lead detective on this for us.”

  The lead.

  She added, “Now be nice to them down there.”

  “On my way.”

  “So are you going to…” A tall young uni stood at the car door. Then he saw it was Borders. The one who walked with a cane.

  “He was kicking the other guy,” Will said. “Clarence Kevon James Junior. Street name of Junior. He’s on probation. I’ll add to your incident report later.”

  “Great,” the kid said sarcastically. “You have powers of arrest, detective.”

  “Paperwork comes with the job, son. I’ve got to go.” Before the uni could protest further, Will slammed the car door, backed up, and raced toward the Ohio River.

  ***

  Kristen Gruber. Officer Kristen Gruber. He could see her face as he raced past Piatt Park, the Netherland Plaza Hotel, and the dense cluster of buildings that lined both sides of Fourth Street. The intense blue eyes, easy smile, and the blond hair worn in a pixie cut. But she was no pixie. She was one of the most gung-ho cops he had known. He even remembered her badge number.

  In a roundabout way, Kristen was responsible for him having this job. She had been the public information officer. With her girl-next-door good looks, athletic build, and perfect television presence, she was ideal for the department’s makeover after the riots. She had set up the Web site and the Twitter account that Will now had to feed like a machine. Transparency, the chief said. She could have remained the PIO forever if it hadn’t been for the show.

  LadyCops: Cincinnati was a reality TV show featuring three female officers, but Kristen was the star. She always had the first segment. Of course, the show was heavily sanitized, the calls routine and low-priority, the department always appearing business-like and professional. It was great publicity. Virtually every suspect was black, but nobody involve
d mentioned this fact. They had to sign releases for their faces to be shown, and many did so happily—such was the power of television.

  As a result, the PIO job came open at precisely the time Will was able-bodied enough to return to work, at least to a desk job. Years before, he had been one of her instructors at the academy and she recommended him as the new PIO.

  Will had a cop’s dislike of the media. He didn’t trust reporters. They got in the way and their stories could send a case sideways. The exception had been an old hand with the Cincinnati Post who smoked cigars, knew when to withhold detail, and had earned the respect of both Will and Dodds. The man had been on the police beat for twenty years and knew more about the department than most of the officers. Otherwise, about the last thing Will wanted was to be the department’s face to the media.

  But the chief liked the idea—Will thought cynically because it would get the Cincinnati Police points to have a disabled cop in front of the cameras. He hadn’t been shot and wounded. But the cameras didn’t know that. Still, being PIO got him back on duty. He learned that most of the reporters were very lazy: they would take what he posted on the Web site or recorded on the information line and simply put it on the air or in the newspaper. The Post had closed and the Enquirer rotated through a string of rookies, none of whom had time to learn their jobs—this when the last newspaper in town wasn’t laying people off. The television stations only wanted “visuals,” as they called them.

  It would have made for an easy job if the department wasn’t still living with the fallout from the riot: a class-action lawsuit, Justice Department intervention, and federal court oversight of reforms. Will was no different from most of the cops, who felt the politicians, the media, hell, even the police commanders had sold out the working officers, had no idea of conditions out on the streets. But when the issue reared up again, Will read the statements given him by his masters and drew his paycheck.

  Now he crossed the Roebling Suspension Bridge, hearing the metal grates under his tires, feeling them rubbing against his brain. The riverfront had undergone a dramatic transformation in his lifetime and now it was all devoted to pleasure. The old rail yards were gone, as were most of the gritty multistory brick warehouses. Even the flying-saucer-shaped Riverfront Stadium had been supplanted by two showy and expensive replacements, one each for the Reds and Bengals. Even as the city lost population, it gained new development close to the water. The National Underground Freedom Center was new, and a fancy mixed-use project called The Banks was going up.

  Will barely appreciated any of this at the moment. He was thinking too much about himself. There was always a danger that someone video-recorded his encounter with Junior and on television it would be made out as a new sign of racial insensitivity. That would land him in an internal investigation or worse, charges of racial profiling and excessive use of force. What really happened didn’t matter. The cop was guilty until proven innocent.

  That led to brooding on his limitations, too. His weak left leg’s muscles were now in fierce spasms from the effort of standing. He pushed his left foot into the floor of the car, barely stopping the limb’s protests. What had happened on Central Parkway was an intense reminder of what he could not do.

  Yes, he was lucky to be alive—he told himself that every day. And the surgeons had removed the rare tumor inside his spinal cord in time so, with much work, he could walk again. Only a few months ago, he had been in a wheelchair. Now he could stand and walk. The tumor hadn’t been cancerous. All lucky things, miracles even. But they couldn’t return him to what he was: a fully functional man, a real cop. They couldn’t take away his feelings that he had been allowed to return to duty out of a sort of professional pity rather for than the skills he still possessed, even if he couldn’t run and jump. That he had been allowed back in no small measure because his father’s name was on the wall: the memorial to police officers killed in the line of duty.

  He pushed the thoughts aside, passed through the 150-year-old masonry of the bridge’s southern tower, and then he was in Covington. Except for the expanse of river and different tax rates, it was really a contiguous part of downtown Cincinnati. Before the new building done on the southern bank, Covington’s street grid exactly matched up with Cincinnati’s. He passed the new high-rise hotels and the wild black-and-white curve of the Ascent condos facing the Cincinnati skyline, then the hulk of the Internal Revenue Service, before he was on the familiar streets lined with their vintage buildings. In ten minutes, he reached the police station in the southern end of the little city.

  He had a dead cop. And he was the lead.

  Chapter Seven

  The drive to the Butler County jail took a long half hour, past the thick cornfields and sleepy rural crossroads that gradually gave way to the shabby outskirts of Hamilton. Like so many smaller blue-collar cities in the Midwest, it had been suffering for decades and looked it. Cheryl Beth didn’t care for the town, but that might have been because the Miami University extension, where most of the nursing classes were held, was located in soulless new buildings separated from downtown and fronting on a huge a parking lot.

  The main part of Hamilton had good bones even in bad times, the old buildings built for a hopeful future that came and went. Even the huge empty factories with their dead smokestacks held a mysterious grandeur. When she had been younger, most of these plants had been operating. No longer. The big recession in the early ‘80s had started the process and manufacturing jobs lost to Mexico and then China had pretty much finished them off. As a result, many who lived there were taking classes for jobs in health-care or commuting long distances to work in Cincinnati or Dayton.

  Hank Brooks drove in silence. Cheryl Beth looked out the car window. It wasn’t until they crossed the white arched bridge across the Great Miami River and started down High Street that the apprehension again gripped her middle. She distracted herself wondering how many Ohio towns had High streets.

  The jail was sterile and sprawling, sitting beside the railroad tracks. It was one of the few things in the little city that appeared new and successful. He led her through the reception area, which was empty save for one young woman sitting watchfully on a bench.

  “You ought to see this place on the weekends,” Brooks said as he signed them in. “Packed with families to see inmates. Thing that breaks my heart is the kids. You have kids, Cheryl Beth?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve got two, girl and a boy. They make life worthwhile.”

  She ignored him and showed her driver’s license to a deputy. He searched her purse. Brooks handed his gun over and it was locked in a steel cabinet. Then she heard a loud buzz, and Brooks led her through a glass door, which led to more and heavier doors, more guards, and a gathering sense of isolation.

  They moved through white corridors with neatly spaced banks of fluorescent lights overhead and shiny white floors with wide dark stripes on the outer edges that encouraged you to walk in the middle. She wondered again what she was doing here. The long walk led them to a room, which a deputy unlocked. It had a metal table with metal chairs. Noah wasn’t there.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” he asked, beckoning her to sit.

  “No.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “You want me to, don’t you? I’m a pleaser.”

  “A sarcastic one.”

  “And this involves my students.”

  Now it was his turn to say nothing, merely open his portfolio and turn to a fresh sheet of lined yellow paper. She looked at him, wondering what angle he was playing. He looked like a man of hidden agendas, but one was pretty obvious: He thought Noah was guilty, and she was sure he’d be on her during the long drive back to Oxford. Why hadn’t she brought her own car?

  The room echoed with a loud metallic sound and two deputies led Noah Smith in, pulled out a chair across from them, and sat him down. One deputy left, closing the door. Noah was in loose-fitting prison stripes, shackles on his arms and legs, a chain ar
ound his middle and an ashen expression on his face.

  Brooks introduced himself, spelled his last name. He read Noah his rights.

  Noah ignored him.

  “Thank you for coming, Cheryl Beth.” He reached a manacled hand across the table toward her and a female deputy instantly intervened. “Prisoner! Hands in your lap.”

  Noah cringed and dropped his hands. He looked shrunken in the inmate garb. She searched his face: Noah Smith from Corbin. Somebody’s son, brother, cousin? Nothing. He didn’t look like anyone she had known there. And it was a place she had tried very hard to forget.

  “I don’t need to tell you that you’re in a lot of trouble, Mr. Smith,” Brooks said. “You can make things easier on yourself if you tell me what happened out there.”

  “I didn’t…”

  “Noah,” Cheryl Beth said. “You’d better not say anything until you talk to a lawyer.” She didn’t look Brooks’ way, felt his cosmic annoyance flooding her.

  “I didn’t do anything.” His voice shook.

  “Tell me about the two girls, Holly and Lauren?” Brooks asked it in a confidant’s voice. “I can help you, Noah, if you’ll help me. Lawyers are going to get in the way of that. Now’s the time to work with me, before things get more complicated. Tell me about the girls.”

  Noah swallowed hard enough that his Adam’s apple, his laryngeal prominence her interior voice said, bobbed up and down. He said, “We were drinking in town and went back on campus to party some more.”

  “Noah!” Cheryl Beth stared at him. “Wait for your lawyer before you say anything.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Brooks said, “You all were together?”

  “Sure. We were together at the bar.” He gave the name of the place, a popular hangout for students.

  Cheryl Beth wanted to slap him silly. He was a fool to be talking or to trust Hank Brooks.