A convoy of squad cars escorted me to a precinct, the 25th. I was taken straight to an interrogation room and handcuffed to the table.
I had the good citizen’s certainty that I would be cleared. But I felt the soul-honing fear that I would not.
There would be no witness if the second cop died. Even if he lived, he didn’t know who was responsible. It would be Billie’s word against mine, and she had the bullet in her body.
29
They thought I was a cop killer. Maybe, by default, I was. I’d had a chance to kill Billie and her dogs and I hadn’t taken it. I started itching all over. I felt welts rising on my back, on my chest. It made me short of breath. Anxiety could produce any number of somatic symptoms, I knew. I both wanted someone to come into the room and feared it. I was twisting in the chair, trying to scratch my back. And I had to urinate.
I gave up looking at my watch after the first hour. With no idea who might be watching me through the one-sided glass, I struggled with my free hand to pull down my jeans enough to go right there on the floor of the interrogation room. Give them a show, if that’s what they were determined to wait for.
I angled my body as much as I could away from the glass and squatted. But after waiting so long, I wasn’t able to release my bladder right away. I prayed that no one would enter the room now. Though maybe some of the officers were having a good laugh just outside.
The puddle covered a large area under the table I was handcuffed to and leaked out beyond the chair I had occupied. Easier to pull pants down with one hand, I discovered, than to get them back up. There was no getting the zipper up. It did not escape me that soiling their own space was what caged dogs were left to do.
Two plainclothes detectives came in, one holding a folder, the other holding his nose. “The fuck did you do in here?”
“When do I get my call?”
The disgusted one banged on the door. “Get us some paper towels.” When a roll of paper towels was delivered, he tossed it to me and told me to clean up the floor.
“I’m handcuffed.”
“You managed to pull down your pants.”
I made no motion toward doing what he said. “I want my phone call.”
The one with the folder said, “Do you know a Jimmy Gordon?”
I repeated what I wanted.
He tried again, this time showing me a photograph of the crime scene — my bedroom.
“Phone call.”
“You just got a cop killed. If I were you, I’d start cooperating,” said the detective who’d called for paper towels.
“I want my lawyer.” I sensed the detectives were trying to employ the outdated Reid technique of interrogation — I’d learned about it in first-year psychology. A cop looks for signs of anxiety during questioning: folded arms, shifty gaze, jiggling leg, touching one’s hair. They try to play down moral consequences—“Hey, everybody fights with her boyfriend.” The irony is that the case policeman John Reid made his name on turned out to be a false confession.
One of the detectives signaled at the window for a phone, and in a moment he opened the door and was handed a desk phone. He plugged the line into a jack in the wall and set it down in front of me. “Local only.”
I phoned Steven.
“I’ve been waiting up for you.” His relief was palpable.
“They might be listening.”
“Is Billie with you?”
“I’m at the precinct in East Harlem. Billie’s in the hospital.”
“Tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m handcuffed to a table in an interrogation room.”
“Make sense.”
“I understand more right now than I have in the last six months. They haven’t charged me yet, but I think I’m being held as a cop killer.”
“Don’t say anything until I get there.”
Before hanging up, I asked Steven to let McKenzie know, too.
The detectives took the phone with them when they left me in the interrogation room. They left the roll of paper towels, and knowing my brother would be coming for me, I tore off a large wad and started cleaning up the floor, in case he was brought to this room.
By the time I’d left a mound of wet paper towels under the table, the detectives were back, announcing that they were taking me to Central Booking.
“But my brother is coming here.”
“Tell him to call you a lawyer.”
“He is a lawyer.”
“He’ll have to go downtown to see you” is all the detective offered.
I rode in a squad car with the two detectives who’d questioned me. I remembered the day at John Jay that the professor had brought in a Yelp one-star review of Central Booking. I loved that such a thing existed, and when the professor read it aloud, the class went nuts: “Let me start off by saying… Yo myyyy niggggggaaaaa!!!!! I came out that fucker speaking Ebonics. I am college educated, yeah, that don’t mean shit. I manage a pharmaceutical company. I deal with hundreds of professional people in health care who have MDs, PhDs, and degrees in shit I can’t even pronounce. The word nigga this, nigga that, nigga who, nigga what. That’s all I fucking heard.”
Yes, I had memorized it, it was that vivid. Maybe I’d be writing my own.
We cut across Chinatown to the two gray, windowless buildings on White Street — the courthouse and the Tombs, connected by a three-story-high, windowless walkway. Richard Haas’s mural Immigration on the Lower East Side runs across the facade of the detention center. The irony is that its placement seems to send the immigrants straight to jail.
I was processed in the manner known to anyone who watches TV crime shows. But it was one thing to have watched from the comfort of one’s couch, eating chocolate, and another to be strip-searched in Central Booking. I was escorted to a cell where, to my relief, I was the only occupant. So far. I could hear trash-talking female prisoners nearby, but I couldn’t see them. And then a chorus of “Yo — CO!” that went unheeded. The place was freezing. Had I heard that the Tombs was kept at forty degrees?
I should be able to prove that Billie brought the two Dogos Argentinos into the shelter. I should be able to prove that she was in my house the morning Bennett was killed — it was there in Libertine’s e-mails, the e-mails that also proved she killed Susan Rorke and Samantha. But do e-mails constitute proof?
I figured I had a few hours until morning. I had been made to voucher my watch, but it must have been at least 3:00 a.m. The metal bench I sat on was so slippery that I nearly slid off it. Sleeping was out of the question. This was the poet’s “dark night of the soul.” The first thought to slay me was that I was responsible for a man’s death, and the serious injury of another. The blame game did no one any good, as Billie said, but there it was. I read some of the graffiti on the cell walls. Never pick up a dead man’s gun. Forgive me, but I have little choice in these matters. Do whatever you think is in your best interests.
I was treated to an argument from one of the bull pens. Two women fighting about who would get the phone next.
My thoughts went from logical and practical concerns to images and feelings I never wanted to confront again. I actually felt the moment I “snapped to” and found that I was sitting on the floor of the cell, hunched up in the position I took in my bathtub after finding Bennett’s body. I knew what was happening to me: a version of post-traumatic stress. I had just seen a man killed by dogs for the second time. I made myself take deep breaths to try to avoid hyperventilating and to slow my pulse. I made myself envision peaceful scenes of the sea — white-sand beaches, floating in aquamarine water the same temperature as my skin. But even my go-to vision failed — the warm water felt like blood.