They thought it absurd even to consider constitutional questions which get in the way of police work. “We’ll worry about the United States Supreme Court when we’re writing our arrest reports,” as Spencer Van Moot succinctly put it.
And Baxter Slate believed that was the general attitude of all policemen, not just the choirboys. It was absurdly easy for any high school graduate with a year’s police experience to skirt the most sophisticated and intricate edict arrived at by nine aging men who could never guard against the fact that restrictive rules of law simply produced facile liars among policemen. There wasn’t a choirboy who had not lied in probable cause situations to ensure a prosecution of a guilty defendant.
Not a choirboy except Baxter Slate who had heard too much about Truth and Honor and Sin in Dominican schools. Even Father Willie Wright lied but when he did it from the witness stand he always held his hands under his legs, fingers crossed.
And in the case of Tommy Rivers Baxter Slate need not have lied. He simply had to open the unlocked door and enter Lena Rivers’ home and walk through her house ignoring her drunken threats and search for the real Tommy Rivers. But since he had only a suspicion, since he was not sure, since he could never be convinced that people lied so outrageously, since it was too bizarre to suspect foul play when Mrs. Rivers had several other healthy children, since he was Baxter Slate and not Roscoe Rules, he threw in his hand and lost to a bluff. And Lena Rivers was free to continue with her gradual murder of Tommy Rivers.
When Baxter Slate read Bruce Simpson’s arrest report the first time, his heart was banging so loud he actually believed the man next to him could hear it, and he foolishly cleared his throat and shuffled his feet on the asphalt tile in the squad-room. The second time through the report he believed his heart had stopped, so shallow was his breathing. The third time through he didn’t think about his heart at all.
Bruce Simpson’s arrest report was a minor classic in kiddy cop circles because he did not write like most policemen in the bald vernacular: “Person reporting stated…”
Arresting officer Simpson composed a horror story which included every tiny fragment of gruesome detail-when it was necessary and when it was not. Simpson did it because there was a policewoman named Doris Guber, whose pants Simpson was trying to penetrate, who loved to work the sex detail and always asked teenage runaways about their illicit sex lives and included in her reports exactly how many times an illicit penis was inserted and withdrawn from an illicit vagina. Which wasn’t all that important to the prosecution of delinquent youngsters.
Doris always loved to find out about the orgasm, whether it occurred, and if so how big it was and of what duration. She’d get Simpson hot just talking about it so he started doing his reports the same way.
“Did you have an orgasm with the girl?” Doris once asked a surly eighteen year old black boy she wanted to prosecute for banging his neighbor.
“Did I have a what?”
“Did you come?” asked Doris Guber, eyes shining.
“Oh yeah. Like a hound dog.”
Bruce Simpson’s inimitably colorful prose left nothing out. The pages reeked of agony and death. He described how Lena Rivers had shredded the little sailor suit from Tommy Rivers the first day. He hypothesized how Tommy had resembled the long gone, fair haired sailor who had shattered the romantic dreams of Lena Rivers by taking his discharge from the Navy and heading for parts unknown. Bruce Simpson delineated in the sharpest detail how Tommy Rivers entered hell that day and was not released from torment until he died ten months later.
Lena Rivers had begun by subjecting Tommy to a sustained barrage of verbal abuse which was unrelenting up to and including the period when daily beatings gave way to starvation and torture. But as cruel as Lena Rivers was to Tommy she was kinder than ever before to her other three children who ranged in age from seven to ten. And she was exceptionally kind to the older children of the neighborhood and frequently entertained the teenage boys by supplying beer and gambling money from her bimonthly checks from the Bureau of Public Assistance and finally by deflowering three of them after a game of strip poker.
It became gossip among the adolescents of the block that Lena Rivers was awfully tough on the new arrival, her six year old son Tommy. Then later it was positively established that at least two of the lads, who were learning more than poker from Lena Rivers, had seen acts amounting to felony crimes committed on Tommy Rivers. Lena had been observed on two occasions thrusting the boy’s hand into the flame of the gas stove for bedwetting. On another occasion she had ordered the child to copulate orally one of her poker playing sixteen year old lovers but the older boy claimed he declined, during his testimony at Lena’s trial. Finally, no less than three teenage boys who were ordinary products of the ordinary neighborhood saw Lena Rivers carrying the naked, screaming, twenty-eight pound child through the house by a pair of pliers clamped to his penis.
Lena Rivers had less exotic punishment for Tommy Rivers during that ten month siege of terror, such as locking him in a kitchen broom closet every time he cried for his grandmother whom he would never see again. The broom closet eventually became a refuge for Tommy, and Lena Rivers would often forget he was there and leave him alone in the peaceful darkness for hours at a time. His older siblings sometimes brought food to him beyond his daily ration but never enough to sustain him in health, and eventually the broom closet became his permanent bedroom. He built himself a nest of rags and newspapers next to a water heater which was warm in the night.
Baxter Slate was always to rationalize that even if he had been less indecisive that day he might never have found the little figure cowering in the corner of the broom closet, might never have verified his suspicions that Lena Rivers had shown him the wrong son.
Baxter was to question more experienced Juvenile officers at a later time and consult texts on abnormal psychology and ask again and again: “But how could the other children, especially the older neighborhood children, have failed to report it to the police? They knew what was going on. Even the little ones knew how wrong it was!”
But the most frequent explanation was: “Kids are awfully curious and have a morbid fascination for the bizarre. She was supplying booze and sex for the older ones and her own could see by Tommy what could happen to them if Mama stopped loving them, so …”
Later as a kiddy cop Baxter encountered case after case of witnesses who ignored flagrant acts of brutality, not just youngsters, but adults: neighbors and family. Then Baxter Slate, former Roman Catholic, age twenty-six, learned how tenuous is the life of the soul. And realized that his soul, if he truly had one, was starting to die.
Baxter asked for and received a transfer back to patrol for “personal reasons” and decided to quit police work. But he made inquiries and discovered how valueless was his education in the classics. He had an offer to teach elementary school but that job was conditional since Baxter did not have a teaching credential and had not the ambition to get one. And actually policemen received a better wage.
So he became satisfied with working uniform patrol again and did not aspire to a more exalted position. He never again tried to borrow money from his mother who was now divorced for the fourth time, and most of all he was very cautious never to let anyone know he was intelligent and educated since it could offend people like Roscoe Rules who assumed that Baxter had studied police science in college.