“And I have no other option?” I suspected there was an ulterior motive here, and I was right.
“You can pay duty right now and be on your way with your jewelry,” said the agent.
In other words, this clown was working some sort of quota—he needed to collect a certain amount of money each month or his boss would think he wasn’t doing his job. Or maybe he and his pals just pocketed this as a “bonus”.
“How much?” I asked.
“First you need to sign this new declaration,” he said.
It wasn’t so much a declaration as a false confession.
I signed. And then I paid $1,200 as duty and penalty. And I got to keep my nondutiable stuff. And somehow I felt relieved, relieved just to get out of there without a body cavity search or an arrest. Innocence was not the issue. Escape was everything. Survival put pucks and business trips all in perspective.
Later a law school chum of mine went to work for Customs. He learned that LAX Customs targets that particular London-LAX flight for middle- to upper-class travelers who routinely “smuggle” in costly goods without paying duty. Every eighth person in line gets dragged to the cinder-block room. You don’t need to fit any profile, you just need to be number eight in line. Then they make a big show of taking you away, so the seven people who escape will think twice the next time about what they do or do not declare. Random terror replaces real investigative deduction, extortion is accepted in lieu of legitimate legal enforcement, and revenues beget pay raises for the agents involved.
Your government at work, ladies and gentlemen.
Proving that authority obscures rather than encourages truth. I now have a false confession on file with the U.S. Customs Service. I’ve admitted to smuggling that I didn’t do. And I would have demanded credit for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby or admitted that I was O.J.’s accomplice if that would have gotten me out of that cinder-block room. When an animal gets caught in the headlights, it doesn’t run, it freezes.
When Bill Suff was arrested, he froze, stunned, and with good reason—he knew the cops had nothing on him. His arrest was unlawful, and his subsequent interrogation became a travesty. It ended, as you read, with Keers screaming “You did it!” and Bill shouting “I did not!” back and forth at one another, his vast arrogance incredibly one-upped by hers. In between, exhausted though he was, Bill kept asking for a lawyer, to no avail.
Desperate cops. Desperate situation. The cops were determined to stop the killing and they believed Bill was their man. But they broke the rules just as much as he and then justified it by insisting that what they did was okay because they were the good guys. Might made right and right made might.
But what if they were wrong about Bill? The crimes were awfully close to perfect—in the end, only the tire tracks gave Bill away. Keers knew she needed a confession to make the case—hell, she needed a confession even to justify a search—but Bill wouldn’t confess. None of his admissions ever amounted to an “Okay, you got me, I did it”. In the face of insistent accusation, he always maintained his innocence and always explained away the evidence and the theories against him.
Perhaps that was the most guilty-seeming thing he did. Maybe innocent people break down and confess just to get out of the cinder-block room. Maybe, whether you’re guilty or innocent, you just can’t win once the police decide to come after you. Certainly, that was Kafka’s take, and he believed it so strongly he wouldn’t even publish the stories he wrote about it. He even willed that the unpublished stories were to be burned upon his death. He was afraid the authorities could still get at him once he was in the grave.
In fact, it was only after the police decided that Bill was their man that new “evidence” magically appeared to seal the case. Initial searches yielded nothing, but later searches came up with items that had been “missed”.
Once again, the police really missed the opportunity to close this case for good, to shut Bill up for all time. All the cops had to do was do their job according to the rules. They had no lawful reason to stop and question Bill, let alone to arrest him. But, once they had him in their sights, they were afraid to let him go. Despite all their profiles and researches to the contrary, the cops were afraid that this killer would suddenly stop killing and would destroy all possible evidence.
To this day the Riverside cops and prosecutor just don’t understand what a serial killer is all about. They don’t get that, once they suspected Bill, all they had to do was give him enough rope, watch from a distance, and he would try to kill again. Then they’d have him with his hand in the cookie jar.
That is, if he’s really the killer.
Cheryl was giggling so hard, she was on the verge of peeing her pants. Her friend Judy, the store manager, was laughing so loudly, customers in the Circle K at that late hour were sure the two girls were on drugs. It just couldn’t be legal for any two people to be having that much fun.
Down behind the front counter by the cash register, Cheryl had a one-gallon plastic bucket full of water. In the water she was soaking a tampon that shed dipped in blood from a package of hamburger meat. The instant the tampon had hit the water it mushroomed and started to disintegrate. Now Judy was plucking the tampon from the water and dangling it, holding it out of Cheryl’s reach as the younger girl jumped at it. Reddish water was flying everywhere, and, when Judy swung the tampon, it went flying too, out of her grasp—KERPLOP!—landing on the window top of the ice cream freezer.
Judy and Cheryl laughed all the harder.
The experiment was a bust. Cheryl had been hoping she could save a used tampon from her next period, moisten it, and briefly reinsert it to kind of wring out some of the blood back inside her before she had sex with Bill, and have him think that he’d drawn the blood in the process of tearing her hymen.
But, clearly, a tampon was not going to work.
Now she was left with the possibility of squirting a basterful of chicken or beef blood into her, or ketchup even, but what if Bill tasted her like she hoped he would?
“How about—while he’s in you, you reach down there and scratch yourself and bleed for real?” suggested Judy.
“Youch!” replied Cheryl. “Besides, at some point he’ll see the scratch and know that’s what bled.”
“Okay, okay, then I’ve got it—prick your finger with a tack, and then rub it on him when you’re getting him all worked up.”
“A prick, for a prick’s prick?” Cheryl laughed.
“Bill is not a prick,” said Judy, “he’s one terrific guy.”
“Except for this virgin business. What is the big deal anyway? A girl who’s doing it for the first time is lousy at it.”
“And a girl who’s too good at it is a whore.”
“Why are men so fucked up, huh?”
“Who cares—just be glad you got one.”
“You’re so hot for him, you take him.”
“Maybe I will.”
Cheryl dagger-eyed Judy. “Don’t you dare,” said Cheryl.
It was late—Cheryl had overstayed her shift to play around with the tampon. Bill would be home and Bill would be worried about why she was late. He liked to keep tabs on her, liked to know for certain where she’d be when and when shed be where. Right now he’d be reading in bed, and, as soon as he heard her key in the lock, he’d shut off his reading light and pretend to be asleep. Cheryl could see the light go off from under the front door of their apartment. It was just one of his little games.