The Right Wrong Thing

by Ellen Kirschman

  * * *

  We are back in the living room, the chief, Lakeisha’s grandmother and myself trying not to listen to Ms. Gibbs and her sons weeping in their bedrooms. One howl of pain generates another, then another.

  “My name is Charla Gibbs Bernstein. Bernstein was my husband. We’re divorced, but I kept his name.” She fixes her eyes on me. “Meyerhoff, is that your maiden name or married name?”

  “My maiden name. What a curious question.”

  “Names interest me. I meddle a bit in genealogy. Passes the time now that I’m retired.” For a long moment we stare at each other like guests at a Mad Hatter’s tea party. She faces the chief. “I hope I can believe you when you promise to find out why my granddaughter was murdered.” She pauses to let the words sink in. “You can be sure my daughter and I will be holding you accountable—you and anyone else connected to my granddaughter’s death.” She looks at me, her eyes as green as tumbled sea glass. “I loved my granddaughter and my daughter loved her too, in her own way. I wasn’t angry with her for being pregnant. Getting pregnant without marriage appears to be a family tradition, one that I apparently started when I gave birth to Althea.”

  “You don’t owe us an explanation,” the chief says.

  Bernstein stiffens slightly. “But you owe me. And my daughter. You owe us the courtesy of trying to understand us as people, as a family. Because that’s what we are, a family, however flawed. Don’t put us in a category and don’t judge my daughter too harshly. As she reminds me frequently, I was hardly a fit parent to her.” She massages her long fingers as she talks. The joints are swollen and bent like broken twigs. “I believe I’m a better grandparent than I was a mother. Lakeisha and I were close. I moved in to help Althea with the children because I could see how difficult things were getting for everyone, Lakeisha especially. For some reason my daughter gets along better with her sons. Perhaps because she never knew her own father.” She struggles to stand.

  “You have my word that I will investigate the circumstances of your granddaughter’s death thoroughly and fairly with absolute transparency.” The chief extends her hand.

  “I’m sure you’re aware that people like us don’t have much faith in the promises the police make.”

  Bernstein walks to the door, the hem of her caftan dragging along the floor, leaving the chief, once again, with her hand outstretched. She opens the door. A cuff of silver bracelets tinkles on her wrist. “Chief Reagon, your business card, please?” Chief Reagon pulls a card from her pocket. Her hands are trembling.

  “Yours too, Dr. Meyerhoff.” She smiles, her teeth are perfect.

  * * *

  “What did you think of Ms. Gibbs and her mother?” I ask as we get back into the car. The chief shrugs, looks over her shoulder and slowly pulls out of the parking area onto the street. The speedometer needle stays at the speed limit, not a mile faster or slower, as we drive back to headquarters.

  “I can’t imagine going to work hours after someone told me my daughter was killed. Can you?”

  We pass first one, then two, then three intersections in silence before she responds, never taking her eyes off the road. “You never know how people will grapple with grief. I’ve done dozens of death notifications in my career, some with a chaplain, some without. I’ve done so many I can almost tell the cries of children who have lost parents from the cries of mothers who have lost their children. It’s one of the hardest parts of being a cop. People react in all sorts of ways. Some sink into silence. Others wail and shriek. Some turn on each other or assault the officer who has brought the bad news.”

  “And you remember them all?”

  “I do.”

  “What about the people whose lives you saved? Do you remember them?”

  “In this business, you don’t remember the people you’ve saved. You remember the ones you killed.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I have time enough to go home, take a shower and change my clothes before going into the office. I want to get in early to prepare for the day’s work. There is a note on the kitchen counter from Frank, stuck under the empty bottle of pinot noir. I read it on my way out the door. “If you aren’t busy, let’s pick up where we left off last night.”

  I have two appointments this morning starting at ten-thirty. The first is an officer who is six months away from retirement, panicking about what he’ll do with the rest of his life. His identity is so melted into police work that he can only imagine himself as a security guard, asleep on his feet in a museum. Who will he be when he’s no longer a cop? How he will get along with his wife without the long hours and overtime that has buffered him from the untended fissures in their relationship? How can he replace the fraternity of officers that filled his life? It’s a serious consideration, one he should have begun planning for five years ago. My heart gives a little anxious thump. There’s an uptick in the frequency of suicide among retired cops. I’m irritated with this client. Why is his failure to plan my problem? Except that it is my problem and my job to help him figure it out.

  My second appointment is a pre-employment psych. Another nervous young applicant twittering with expectation, eager to suit up and save the community. They are like bookends, these two men, the young one, shiny and bright, the way Randy was not that long ago, the older man, bruised and dented. Police work changes people. It is my job to make sure that it doesn’t damage them. That’s what I want for Randy. I want to help her come through this wiser and stronger, however long it takes. I want her to find something positive to take away from this tragic experience so that she can retire at the end of thirty years with pride for the good things she’s accomplished, the people she’s helped, the problems she’s solved. My father’s voice rises in the quiet of my office: “Be careful what you wish for, Baby Girl. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”

  I grab a cup of coffee in the staff room on the first floor of my office building and carry it up the stairs. It will have to hold me until lunch. I keep thinking about Lakeisha Gibbs. How lonely and frightened she must have been, pregnant and living in a car.

  Randy Spelling and Rich are in my waiting room, sitting still as stones. A chair separates them. They are leaning forward, elbows propped on their knees, holding paper cups of coffee in their hands. They both have that thousand-mile stare. Rich is wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a backwards baseball cap with sunglasses resting on the bill. Like the Roman God Janus, looking into the future and the past. Randy, minus the baseball hat, is dressed the same. Rich and Randy, they sound like a sitcom.

  “Randy, I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon.”

  “Chief’s orders,” she says. So much for my little speech to the chief about mandatory counseling.

  “Well, I would have suggested you wait a day or two, but since you’re here we might as well…Just give me a minute to get settled.”

  “Take your time. I’ve got all day.”

  I wait for her to introduce her husband, and when she doesn’t, I introduce myself.

  He stands up and shakes my hand. He’s quite tall and slender with the gangly body of a late-blooming adolescent. His light brown hair is brushy and spiky, his eyes are pale green. He is tan, a surprise for someone who works in the jail, and has ruddy cheeks. “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Nice to meet you, too, although we could have wished for better circumstances.” He sits down without responding, picks up a magazine from the pile on the table in front of him and starts leafing through it.

  “Give me a few minutes, please, to get organized.”

  My office is cold and damp. I turn on all the lights and sit down at my desk trying to recover from the surprise of finding Randy in my waiting room. I used to scuba dive. It was one of my ex’s inspired solutions to our marital problems. We needed something to do together besides talking shop. Turns out we had as much trouble communicating underwater as we did above it. The night before a dive I would vibrate with anxiety at the prospect of submerging myself in the col
d, gray Pacific Ocean off the San Francisco coastline where the visibility rarely exceeds ten feet and the water is home to large fish with sharp teeth. I feel that same night-before-a-dive churning in my gut now. It could be that my gut is reacting to drinking coffee on an empty stomach. Or it could be the enormity of facing a young woman who has just taken an innocent life. A mistake of this magnitude calls for a priest, not a psychologist.

  * * *

  Randy and Rich sit at opposite ends of my leather couch, putting their coffee cups on the table in tandem. Before I have a chance to start, Rich jumps in: “I want to put this out there right now. This is my fault. I tried to tell the DA that, but he didn’t want to talk to me.”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s my fault. Mine. No one else’s. I told you.” Randy tilts her head in his direction without looking at him.

  “After the creek thing, Rutgers bad mouthing her all over the place, I told her. Get tough. Show ‘em what you can do. Beat the crap out of somebody so they’ll leave you alone. I didn’t mean for her to kill anyone.” He shakes his head. I can see tears at the corners of his eyes.

  This is how it is. Behind every cop who’s been through something tragic is a loved one, suffering in silence, uncertain about how to help, a target for the misplaced rage that is fueled by a mix of fury and fear. In a matter of seconds my client load has doubled. Rich will need my help, maybe as much as Randy. But, for the moment, Randy is my primary client, and I need to talk to her first.

  “Rich,” I say. “You’re in a lot of pain. That’s understandable and normal, given the circumstances. But, would you be willing to give me a few minutes alone with Randy and then you and I can talk?”

  He’s on his feet before I finish my sentence. “Whatever,” he says and walks out the door, leaving it partially ajar.

  Randy gets up and pushes it shut. Then she walks to a side chair next to the bookcase, pulls it out into the room and turns it around. She straddles it, facing me, her arms crossed over the back, creating a small barrier between us. Her legs are bouncing and her jaw muscles clench and unclench rhythmically.

  “It’s not his problem. It’s mine.”

  “He loves you. When you hurt, he hurts.”

  “He didn’t kill someone, I did.” She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a folded sheet of newspaper, unfolds it and holds it in front of her face so I can read it. The headline says “Cop Shoots Pregnant Teen.”

  “Why did I have to find out that she was pregnant from the newspaper?” Her face puckers. “I killed a homeless, seventeen-year-old pregnant girl who was only trying to call her mother. Guess that makes me cop of the year. Jesus, I thought running away from the creek was the worst thing that could happen to me.” Her head drops to her folded arms.

  “You thought she had a gun. You did what you were trained to do. What any reasonable cop would have done.”

  “Any reasonable cop would have handcuffed her and put her in the back of a patrol car, not shoot her.”

  “Nobody can predict how they’re going to react in a crisis. It’s not fair to second guess yourself based on what you know now but didn’t know at the time.”

  She lifts her head, her jaw juts forward. There are eggplant-colored shadows under her eyes. “Fair? What’s fair about what I did? I can still taste her blood in my mouth.”

  I wince inwardly at the image. What other profession mandates that you attempt to resuscitate a person you’ve just tried to kill?

  “Don’t read the newspapers, Randy, and don’t read the blogs. The minute Lindsey Lohan gets another DUI you’ll be off the front page. What I mean is there’s history here. The Kenilworth Daily hates the police department. Back in the sixties, there were campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the police broke into the Daily’s office and confiscated photos of the demonstrators. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. I doubt anyone from that era still works there, but they still carry a grudge against the police, particularly Kenilworth cops.”

  “Were you there?”

  I wasn’t, but demonstrating runs in my family. My father was a student agitator at UC Berkeley. I still have news clippings of him standing on a patrol car, giving the finger to the cops in riot gear, before they pulled him down and beat him senseless.

  “Look at her.” Randy opens the newspaper to an inside page and shows me a picture of Lakeisha Gibbs dressed for a prom. It is the same picture that is hanging in her mother’s apartment. She was a pretty girl, slightly overweight, with a wide smile and deep dimples. She looks happy. Her braided hair is wound with flowers, and she’s wearing a white satin strapless gown. The boy holding her hand is resplendent in his tuxedo. I wonder if he is the father of her child.

  “Just a kid, a normal kid.” At twenty-four, Randy is barely more than a kid herself.

  “We don’t know that. She seemed to be in a lot of trouble.”

  “She was scared. I can’t imagine my parents kicking me out of the house for getting pregnant.”

  I start to tell her that Lakeisha may have run away from home, but I stop myself. It won’t make any difference. Compassion is Randy’s Achilles’ heel. On the one hand, it will make her a better cop. On the other, it will obliterate the emotional distance she needs to do her job. My father’s voice rises in my head. He would turn over in his grave if he heard me use the words compassion and cops in the same sentence. “Cops do what they do because they’re sadistic bullies,” he told me so many times that I could recite his rant by heart. “They liked beating me; they were laughing the whole time.”

  Randy stands up. “I want to talk to Lakeisha’s mother. I need to tell her what happened. I didn’t do this on purpose. I’m not a monster.” Her eyes bulge with tears.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. She’s in mourning. She might not understand. It might even be dangerous. You can’t presume anything about Lakeisha or her family. You just said that her mother kicked her out of the house. Maybe she had a good reason.”

  “You think she doesn’t feel guilty? You think she isn’t beating herself up over this, like I am? We could help each other.”

  “Do not do this, Randy, it’s dangerous. Examine your own feelings first. I know you didn’t intend to kill her. You were frightened, you thought your life was in danger. You went on automatic pilot, the way you were trained.”

  She folds the newspaper up into a flat square, sticks it back in her pocket, and sits down again.

  “No,” she says. “I didn’t do what I was trained to do. I should have called for backup. That’s how I was trained. But I didn’t, because I was worried about what everyone would think if I couldn’t handle a seventeen-year-old girl by myself? They already think I’m a wimp. I didn’t want to hear it anymore, the snide comments, the snickering…and now they love me. Look at this.” She leans to the left, lifts her backside off the chair, digs in her other pocket and pulls out a crumpled greeting card. “I found this on the front step this morning. It’s a congratulations card. I’m one of the boys now because I killed somebody. The same creeps who called me names because of what happened at the creek. The same jerks who gave me extra whacks in defensive tactics, just for the fun of it. Now I’m their hero. Well, fuck them. If that’s what it takes to join the good old boys’ club, I don’t want it.” And before I can stop her, she’s on her feet, out the door, through the waiting room, and down the stairs, Rich staring after her.

  “My turn now, huh?” He stands, still holding the magazine he was reading.

  “Don’t you want to go after her?”

  “She’s probably better off alone. Let her cool off.” He walks into my office, looks from the chair to the couch and chooses the couch.

  “She needs time,” I say. “It’s not even twenty-four hours yet. Her bloodstream is still clogged with hormonal debris. She won’t be easy to live with until she calms down and expels all that adrenaline. In the meantime, it’s as though she thinks she’s still fighting for her life.”

  “Last n
ight I got out of bed to take a leak. When I got back into bed, she thought I was attacking her and started kicking and punching me. This morning I came up behind her to give her a hug, and she jumped two feet in the air. The phone’s been ringing off the hook. Cops, calling to see how she is. She won’t talk to anybody. Even the chief, who called three times already. I told her to call her family. They’re all cops, they’ll understand. She made me do it instead, just so they wouldn’t hear it on the radio. I don’t know what to do.”

  “These are early days, Rich. There are only a few things you can do. Let her talk if she wants, but don’t force her. Keep her away from alcohol and caffeine, they potentiate the chemicals in her body, and try to get her to do some mild exercise. It’s a good way to get the adrenaline out of her system. And keep her from watching TV news or reading the paper. It will only upset her. Sorry to say, but she’s going to be irritable and have a short fuse for a week or two, maybe more.”

  He grimaces. “That long?”

  “It’s chemical, not voluntary. She doesn’t get to vote on it and neither do you, so try not to take it personally. This is tough, but it’s temporary. You’re going to need a lot of patience.” I say this knowing that patience is usually not a cop’s best asset. “What about you, have you ever experienced anything like this in your career?”

  He shakes his head. “I suppose I gave some extra love to a few folks in the jail who didn’t love me back for it, but nothing like this. Never killed anyone although I felt like it sometimes. I can’t even take my weapon into the jail. I knew she was having a hard time at work. The cops were ragging on her about wimping out in a fight. She’s not a wimp. She’s tough. I told her to man up, show them what she could do.”