The Ten-Mile Trials (2 page)

‘You think I can't see out the windows?' I asked Ray Bailey, who was questioning a suspect in a mobile home park. ‘Quit talking and get in here before that tin can you're sitting in blows away.'

By the time I got a chance to call Maxine's house, the hall outside my door was full of breathless people who'd just come in out of the weather and were standing around dripping and telling each other how bad it was.

Maxine answered in the standard day-care provider's voice, quick and quiet, trying to shoehorn a short conversation into her life before she was interrupted by the urgent demands of a preschooler. Maxine's clientele doesn't like to be kept waiting. Call her in the daytime, you want to state your business briskly, in short words.

I asked her, ‘Everybody still got feet on the ground over there?'

‘Oh, Jake – yeah, we're OK. Something's banging, though. Hold on.' There was more banging, and then footsteps and she was back. ‘That storm door on the back has a tricky latch.'

‘I hope my family is still there with you?'

‘Ben's sleeping, and Trudy just went out. Wait, here she is back.'

Trudy came on and said, ‘Wow, did I get my mind changed in a hurry!' She laughed, not very merrily. ‘I got almost to the car and realized I wouldn't dare open the door for fear the wind would blow it off.'

‘Don't even think about going out. Big pieces of the city are flying through the air. Are you going to be all right over there? Do you need any help?'

‘Wait, I'll ask Maxine.' She said something away from the phone and got a quiet reply, came back on and said, ‘She says we're fine.'

‘Good.' Then I didn't want to let her go, so I said, ‘Sorry about your afternoon jaunt. You got out this morning, though, didn't you?'

‘Twice, actually. And he was fine both times.' She had been spending days at Maxine's house this week, going out often for shopping and coffee dates so the baby would get used to being left. As far as I could tell from the times she'd left him with me, Ben wasn't picky about his companions as long as he got enough to eat. Trudy was the one having anxiety fits. ‘Tell me to quit being a wuss and just go back to work.'

‘OK. Quit being a wuss and just go back to work.'

‘Easy for you to say. What do fathers know?' Her three-month maternity leave was ending. Intellectually, she was itching to get back to her job as a forensic DNA specialist at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in Saint Paul. She knew she was lucky to have the best day-care provider in town, my own former foster mother, Maxine Daly. But leaving the baby she'd devoted all her time to since the day he was born was turning out to be much harder than she'd expected, and she was sharing every bit of the pain with me so I wouldn't feel left out. ‘If I get any more conflicted about it, I'll break in two,' she said. ‘What if it turns out I can't do it?'

‘Please don't worry about that. If you can't go back to work we'll just declare bankruptcy and move out of our house into a homeless shelter.'

‘That's it? That's the comfort you offer your suffering spouse?'

‘I can only give you what I've got.' Unfortunately, what I had was perilously close to nothing. We had remodeled our mortgaged-to-the-max house before we could afford to, using mostly barter and sweat equity, and then had a baby sooner than we intended. We were in hock up to our eyebrows.

But I couldn't stay worried about it because we had this great place in the country with big trees and acres of land, halfway between our two jobs, and now we had Benjamin Franklin Hines, a child I privately judged to be the champ of this year's baby crop. He was learning to wave his fists and kick in triumphant greeting when I leaned over his crib, sometimes actually getting both eyes focused on me and giving me gummy drooling almost-smiles that told me I was a prince of a dad. Every time Benny looked at me like that, I congratulated myself for having been clever enough to assume all this debt before the credit crunch shut off the money spigot. Let other people worry about abstractions like the market. I was sitting pretty with everything I wanted.

Picking my way around broken glass and somebody's mailbox, I negotiated the soggy corner into Marvin Street and parked in front of Maxine's house, relieved to see that her front gate was still there and not sagging much more than usual. Most of her shingles seemed to be still in place, and I couldn't see any broken windows. To my surprise, Maxine's foster son Eddy Payson was squatting in the crotch of the oak tree in her front yard, on the platform I'd built for him there. It wasn't quite a tree house yet, but I had plans for it to grow into one, and a couple of steps and handholds built on the trunk. Nelly Dooley was up there with him. She smiled and said ‘Hi, Jake' when I got out of the truck.

‘Hey,' I said. ‘Aren't you kids a little damp up there?' It was a rhetorical question. Their clothes were soaked and their hair was plastered to their scalps by the rainwater still dripping off the leaves.

‘Kinda,' Eddy said. ‘But this is the best place to watch all the police cars on the corner. What are they doing, Jake?'

‘I don't know. I just got here.' I turned to look where he pointed, and saw the flashing light bar on an RPD patrol car, turning into the street at the other end of the block. It wheeled into line with three other black-and-whites already parked there. The newcomer had a K-9 cage in back. As I watched, Darrell Betts got out of the driver's seat, walked around to the back gate, and began to unload his dog.

‘Oh, boy,' Eddy said, ‘look at the dog!'

Watching a K-9 dog makes you feel you have been going to work every day with the wrong attitude. I've always said I was proud and happy to be a Rutherford policeman, but next to a K-9 dog I look like a surly foot-dragging slacker. So enraptured about going to work that he can hardly contain his joy, he whines, he yips, he paces his cage. Every muscle in his body seems to be saying ‘Let's go do it!'. He doesn't have to be urged into action by his trainer – from the moment he gets loaded into the vehicle at the beginning of his shift, his brain is focused like a laser on one glorious thought: he is an Alpha dog on his way to another big win.

But I was familiar with the edgy electric aura a K-9 dog brings to a scene – what held my attention now was the change in Darrell. I'd heard he was happy about his move to the K-9 unit. Now I saw that working with the dog was turning Darrell into an Alpha man.

Not that he was craven before, or ever failed to hold up his end – he had always been solid as a rock. A little bit like a rock in every way, in fact. Kind of dense, if you want the truth.

He was on my crew until a few months ago, not my hire but part of the squad when I joined it and still there when I made lieutenant. He'd come on board about the same time as the incandescent Rosie Doyle, and because of her I didn't notice him much at first. There were very few female police officers in Rutherford at that time; and Rosie, red-haired and voluble, was the first to make the rank of detective. Some of the guys had grave doubts about her qualifications, but the chief was impressed by her work record and test scores and admonished us all to play nice.

‘Yeah, keep your PC face on while she gets you killed,' Andy Pitman muttered. He was a big, ugly patrolman, with a stellar reputation on patrol in the toughest parts of town. Nobody could say Andy Pitman ever ducked a fight, but his great specialty had always been defusing hot spots so everybody went home with the teeth they came with. A flat-foot cop of the old school, he thought putting women on the police force was a ridiculous idea and promoting one to the homicide squad was going out of your way to court disaster.

Among her many other achievements, Rosie turned out to be the investigator who proved Andy Pitman wrong. Intelligent and hard-working, cheerful and energetic, she wore down everybody's resistance. All the men of her family were in law enforcement, and she had done five years on street patrol without a whimper. So she was preconditioned to know what to expect, when to go all in and when to be careful, and even when to shut up, although that was always the hard part for her.

Darrell seemed slow and stolid compared to the quicksilver Rosie. In fact, relative to the rest of that crew of detectives, Darrell sometimes came across as the clinker in the heap. A big-shouldered weightlifter who often spoke English as if it was his second language, he became famous on the crew for statements like ‘I told him he was skating on pretty thin water here'. The other detectives on the people crimes crew liked Darrell a lot, though, and in time I came to value the solid virtues that his quirks had camouflaged. He was tireless and patient, he never complained, and he always did what was asked as well as he possibly could.

Watching him now, I saw that he moved with new assurance and spoke to his animal in a voice that had taken on a new timbre of authority. He had added body armor under his uniform blouse, as all the K-9 officers did because they worked the most hazardous situations, usually at night. The added bulk made Darrell's chest and shoulders more impressive than ever – he looked as strong and solid as a tree.

Why in the world, though, was he unloading his dog on Maxine's street? She lived in a marginal neighborhood of older one-family bungalows, admittedly the kind that often slide into deeper poverty and dysfunction. But Maxine's block had always been filled with hard workers like her who kept it peaceful, partly by never having much in sight to steal or envy.

Fighting my instincts, I called Dispatch. The new Dad in me wanted to skip the information, grab my wife and child, and beat it out of there. I stuck with procedure because I'm a cop; I cared about Maxine and all the other kids in her house, and knowing always beats not knowing.

Dispatch said the problem evidently started at the height of the storm, when two men ran out of the house on the corner, jumped in a car at the curb, and drove away in the rain. A third man came running out after them, yelling. A big gust of wind caught the storm door just as he opened it, and blew it off its hinges. The yelling man, holding on to the doorknob, was pulled out with it and dumped on his face in the driveway. A neighbor, watching the storm out his window, called 911 to report a householder in trouble.

The first responder was Anton Hruska, a one-time Preston High wrestling champ with a crooked nose, always called Ruskie by his fellow cops. He fought his way out of his vehicle in the wind, helped the man out from under his house door, and led him staggering back into his house. Once inside the incredibly messy living room, Ruskie saw at once that a bloody nose and the cost of repairing the door were going to be the very least of this skinny fellow's problems.

Hruska called for backup, hard to get right then. One patrolman came over from the east side as fast as he could. It must be bad, Dispatch said, because the second officer requested help from Domestic Violence and then, a bit later, a K-9 team. Beyond that, she said she didn't know anything yet – but wasn't that enough?

As I closed my phone, a cop I didn't know came out of the house leading the skinny young man, still damp, in ragged jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt. He had a wispy goatee, a long, thin pony tail, and elaborately tattooed arms and hands, which right now were handcuffed behind his back. Behind him, Bo Dooley led a pale, sobbing woman in dirty cut-offs and flip-flops, with a wet towel pressed to her bloody face.

‘Oh, look,' Nelly said, behind me in the tree. ‘There's Daddy!'

‘He's working,' I said. ‘He won't be able to talk to you.'

‘Well, I know
that
,' she said, insulted.

‘Excuse me,' I said. ‘Of course you do.'

It was mind-bending to see my one-time icy-eyed vice cop at his new assignment in Domestic Violence. His appearance had always walked some interesting line between flaky and elegant, carefully calculated to blend into any bar scene or rave. Usually, Bo wore diamond earrings and a neatly trimmed beard, often with spit-shined Western boots and an ancient, cracked leather jacket. Now he was clean-shaven and wore a neatly pressed cotton shirt and slacks. Otherwise, he seemed to be the same Bo he'd always been, poised and tightly wound, fully in command of his situation.

Last out of the house was a county agent that I recognized from the Department of Social Services. She had the hardest job, carrying a terrified child who was literally kicking and screaming. ‘Help me, Mommy!' the little girl yelled, to the woman Bo was loading into his car. The mother turned toward her child, crying, but Bo put his hand on the woman's head, pressed her firmly into his squad, locked all the doors, and drove away.

When she was gone, the child's hysteria escalated. Beating on her rescuer, she tried to wriggle free, and went on screaming till she was belted in and carted away. It was hard to watch, but too riveting to turn away from. Uneasy about the two kids behind me on their observation platform, I looked up and recognized with a shock their stoical, matter-of-fact expressions. That's how it goes, their small faces said.

I myself was once one of those waifs and strays that Maxine takes care of, a ward of the State of Minnesota from the day I was found in a Dumpster, a wailing infant nobody wanted. Besides not knowing who I was, nobody ever figured out what race I belonged to, since I had indeterminate brown skin and a face that looked as if it was composed of spare parts from several continents.

It came back to me now how readily I accepted the suffering of others when I was Nelly's age. I've been lucky enough to build a happy life for myself as an adult, and I guess it must have softened me up a little – I hated watching that little girl get dragged away. I bet Bo Dooley, right now, was wishing he was back on my crew.