Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (4 page)

I want a sound. Johnny's is the idle of his pa-pa's bass-boat engine; Joe's is the burps of his family after a meal. Beth Sanderson says hers is the sound of the screen door slamming on the back kitchen door; her daddy was always threatening to run off with another woman. One by one they relate sound stories, guffaw over the funny ones, clink beer bottles over the sad ones.

But I can't hear anything.

Frustrated, I search and search through sounds, trying to detect which one defines my childhood, as though with this sound I will understand the cop I've become, the child I once was.

“Ah Katie, don't scowl and mess up that pretty little face,” Joe says. Joe Boudreaux is Johnny's best friend. He secretly has a crush on me, though it's not all that secret. “It's no big deal, girl. Give me a smile.”

And so I smile, but I direct it at Johnny and he smiles back, all those wrinkles that I love to touch running like precious fault lines across his face, and we kiss, and the others hoot, and for a while, I forget about searching for my sound.

But it's there, the question, in the back of my head, and I keep listening.

In the spring and fall, windows and doors to the houses on the cul-de-sac where we lived outside Boston were thrown wide open. Our short lollipop of a street was filled with children playing hard: olly olly oxen free, kick the can, murder ball, sardines.

Intertwined with our sounds of play was music—a piano being played passionately, furiously. Mrs. Long, Mary and Emma's mother, was a part-time piano teacher and frustrated concert pianist.
Beethoven and Chopin would storm over our heads, and I often pictured the keyboard cracking with the next chord under her large, freckled hands.

I admired yet feared her passion and control of the keys. I was grateful I took my lessons from Mrs. Carruthers next door. Mrs. Carruthers had a Chihuahua named Prissy that nipped at your heels if you moved too suddenly or too fast. Prissy was the only obvious danger in the Carruthers household. Not so the Longs'. Noises other than sonatas and études came far more frequently from their house. On late-summer evenings and early-spring mornings, screaming and the sound of flesh hitting flesh would drift across and around the circle.

“Don't listen and don't mention it,” Emma told me.

It was hard to avoid, hard not to think about my best friends being beaten and slapped by their parents. I had seen this abuse in person, seen them dragged by their hair, thrown against walls, backhanded repeatedly, so in some ways the sounds were worse played through my imagination.

But I didn't mention it. I didn't stop and stare at the house. None of us did. Not the adults, not the children.

Still, screaming isn't the sound of my childhood, though it is part of the answer as to why I chose police work.

Another sound: My brother beating his head against his pillow. Lifting and dropping his head over and over again while a low-pitched O sound comes from the back of his throat. This is a strong, fierce memory that even now binds me to him. Almost every night for four or five years I drifted off to sleep with the sound of my brother inches away on the other side of the wall, pounding, pounding, pounding.

Some nights I joined him, dropping my head down, submitting to that blissful, seductive state, that quiet, painless oblivion, as our voices rose and wove. Some nights we talked, lying head to head with only the wall between us, saying each other's name every five minutes or so. In the den below us, our parents talked in indistinct murmurs, out of reach, indecipherable.

Yet this is not the sound either, although Johnny tells me I hum sometimes in my sleep.

Finally I have come to recognize one sound as emblematic of my
childhood. And it is a sound that cannot be disconnected from touch or smell or sight. I am standing barefoot in my room on the second floor, tucked in the back of the house I grew up in. Books are scattered about. Daylight: sun rushes in through the windows, patterns of light two-step across the hazelnut rug, dust motes float lazily, the sweet smell of grass and earth cocoons me.

There is no sound, for the sound is the absence of sound. A deep, waiting silence. Everyone is outside, somewhere else. Perhaps my mother is in the garden, standing near the wisteria or picking cucumbers under the living Christmas tree we planted when I was seven; my father is raking leaves in his khaki pants and white V-necked T-shirt; my brother is not yet born, or he's in my mother's womb waiting for the world, or perhaps he has arrived and toddles near my father, mimicking the sweep of the rake through the summer, winter, fall, spring leaves.

Everything pauses in the quiet. It is the last heartbeat before death; it is the next heartbeat of life. I am in the house all by myself. I am alone. Waiting. Waiting on the edge of my life, and it's as though the whole world holds its breath on the lip of the canyon of the universe. Anything is possible, and the child, the cop, the woman come together in this memory. And the feeling is power.

We heard about Katherine long before we ever saw her. Every cadet who attended the Baton Rouge Police Training Academy learned about Johnny Cippoine and his widow, Katherine, sooner or later. Officers who visited our academy class in the former city court building off North Boulevard all mentioned, at some point, the story of how Johnny Cippoine had died, tragically, three years earlier. Although it's been twenty years now since we graduated, they're probably still telling the story.

We heard lots of stories about a lot of cops, but this one was different. Each officer relayed the event in the same manner: briefly and with a clipped, matter-of-fact tone, yet with a touch of lingering regret, the way one might refer to an old lover let slip away. At least that's the way it seemed to us. Such emotion was rare, still is, and this made Johnny and Katherine even more intriguing.

So when Johnny Cippoine's name was evoked, we all paid attention a little closer. It's a simple story, really, told to illustrate how even a good cop can get killed. But Katherine's part in it made the story compelling.

Johnny Cippoine had been a seventeen-year veteran known for his strict adherence to procedure, superb instincts, and passion for bass fishing. His wife, Katherine, was much younger and worked uniform out of what was called Highland Precinct in those days. They'd been married five years, two years after she joined the force. That's a good love story, how Johnny and Katherine met, but we didn't hear about it until much later, when it was unsettling instead of satisfying.

The day Johnny died, he and Katherine were about to meet for lunch. Johnny stopped two teenagers in a neighborhood off Monterrey that had been plagued recently with a rash of daytime break-ins. He did it all by the book, Johnny did; he was never one to take unnecessary risks.

He put those two teenagers on the ground right away, patted the first one down, found a gun, secured it, called for backup, then moved to pat the second teen down.

It was cool that day, early in December, with probably the first hint of winter in the air and the crape myrtles finally dropping their leaves. Katherine had just pulled into the Shoney's parking lot nine blocks away when she heard Johnny go 10-7 with two white males loitering in a driveway. She drove over to back him up, something we had drilled into our heads like a mantra: If you're available, always back up the closest unit out on call, no matter how small or insignificant the call appears to be.

When Katherine and another unit arrived on the scene only seconds after Johnny's call for backup, two white males were running up the street, away from Johnny sprawled out on the ground beside his unit.

“Officer down,” Katherine barked into her radio mike. “Ambulance 10-18.”

Witnesses said later that when Johnny moved to pat the second kid down, the first one pulled out another gun, one buried deep in his groin that Johnny had missed, and shot him three times, real quick: twice in the chest, neither of which penetrated his bulletproof vest but was enough to put him on the ground; it was the third shot that did it, point-blank in the head.

This all happened in less than a minute.

Many of the officers who told us the tale would snap their fingers
at this point in the story. “It can happen like that,” they'd say. “Boom, you're dead. Reflexes. You've got to react before the act,” and they'd snap their fingers again. “Think like the perps. Suspect everyone.”

And we would nod, all of us cadets, visualizing the scene, already thinking that we would never ever let our guard slip the way Johnny had.

According to the story—and everyone told it the same way, memorized as carefully and faithfully as the Miranda warning—Katherine ran to Johnny, checked for a pulse, removed his sunglasses, kissed his face (some said his eyes, some said his cheek, but they all mentioned she had his blood on her when she arrived at the hospital later), then took off running in the direction of the two suspects.

“Don't move him,” she yelled.

Even as the ambulance was taking Johnny to the hospital, Katherine was searching the neighborhood alongside fellow officers, looking for the two white males, questioning residents, peering in sheds and under houses, climbing down into the concrete drainage ditch three blocks over.

“They're here,” she kept telling the others. “They can't have gone far.”

But, as the academy staff continually reminded us, you've got to think like a criminal and remember fear can make feet fly and desperation can create cunning just as easily as stupidity and blunders. The officers were angry, a savage anger provoked by their own sudden awareness of vulnerability and mortality. Units gunned down streets, tires squealed, brakes screeched: by God, they'd flush out the sonsofbitches who'd dared shoot one of their own.

We thrilled to the adrenaline that surged inside us with this story, felt the fury in our blood, our bodies tense and breathless from imagining ourselves there on the streets, looking. And we hated at that moment, more than ever, being confined to the white, overly bright classroom.

And Katherine, we knew, was thinking of Johnny even as she was doing her job; of course she must have been frantic, though she didn't show it. But she was right: those boys hadn't gone far, at least one of them hadn't. She and another officer found him hiding in a drainpipe nearly a half-mile from the scene.

“And let me tell you, she was PROFESSIONAL about it,” the
academy staff told us. She handcuffed the boy—he was only fifteen—while the other officer read him his rights. She even protected the boy's head, one hand pushing down on his crown, as she put him in the back of a unit.

“She did what had to be done, and she did it right,” the training officers said. Of course she did, we thought, it was in her nature. You could tell just from the way she'd reacted when she saw Johnny on the ground.

But the other suspect eluded capture. Finally, after more than an hour, with Johnny's blood turning black on the cement, the Crime Scene officers collecting samples and combing the ground for evidence, the Homicide detectives beginning a house-by-house investigation, and every officer not on the scene calling every CI they had a number on (and those who had neglected the nurturing of confidential informants beginning their own aggressive shakedown on every corner within a five-mile radius), Katherine's captain physically placed her in his unit and drove her to Earl K. Long Charity Hospital.

Yes, we thought. Of course it would be Earl K. We already knew that Earl K, the dilapidated hulk out on Airline Highway that passed for a hospital, was the place to go if you were shot or stabbed. They'd wheel your gurney in right past the fifty or so drunks and drug addicts, scumbags, poor white trash, bafus, prostitutes, and low-down good-for-nothings who'd been waiting, some of them, over five hours to see a nurse, and the best doctors in the business—the ones without name tags or fancy surgical garb who treated more stab and gunshot wounds in a week than the Lake or BRG treated in six months—would save your ass.

Katherine sat beside Johnny for nearly two days, watching his brain swell larger and larger from the bullet lodged inside until two faint pencil lines were all that remained of his eyes, and his nose sank as the flesh around his face bloomed with fluid. She listened to the slow
blip blip
of the heart monitor and watched the downward path of numbers that signified brain activity. When the numbers hit the thirties, she had them disconnect the air tube and the IVs and held his hand until he stopped breathing.

Whoever was telling the story would pause for a moment, and for the first time not make eye contact, but would look out over the
class, above our heads, to some spot on the far wall and pronounce softly yet emphatically, the words varying slightly, but the judgment the same:

Strong woman.

Damn fine officer.

One tough lady.

Handled it like a man.

Never broke, not once.

Did the uniform proud.

Oh, we could all see her, tall and straight in her charcoal gray and black uniform at the funeral, brass polished, the black band over the badge perfectly centered, her shoes buffed to such a shine you could see your reflection in them. Hat pulled firmly down on her head, the brim just even with her eyebrows. She would have worn dark glasses, and everything about her would have screamed restraint and professionalism. Perhaps tears fell, but quietly, without any distortion to her features. And she would have saluted her husband at the casket, not kissed him, her wrist snap as sharp and accurate as any honor guard.

And every one of us males in that class, just like the academy classes before and after ours, fell a little in love with Katherine, and every female wanted to be just like her.

We itched, how we itched to hit the streets and show what we were made of.

 

Richard Marcus was born to be a cop, we could all see that right off, which is why we made him our academy class captain. He wasn't very tall, maybe 5' 9" or so; some might even call him stocky, but his build was compact and muscular. He'd grown up in one of the Carolinas and had the drawl particular to that area. His fingernails were always trimmed and clean, his cadet khakis pressed, his strawberry-blond hair razor-shaved. He was top of our class in all areas: academic, out on the pistol range, the physical agility tests—he made it to the top of the rope and touched the gym rafter first, the only one who didn't even grimace initially when Sergeant Jackson walked across our stomachs as we did leg lifts. He had a peculiar combination of relaxation and intensity about him that was engaging yet kept you at a dis
tance. He and his fiancée, Ellen, who was just as clean-cut and sweet as you'd expect, didn't drink at our after-hours parties, kept themselves slightly apart as though theirs was a world no other could truly enter. But no one held this against them; it was just the way they were, and we envied them their calm assuredness, the steady glances they gave us, the way they moved on the dance floor as though they belonged there.

And Richard was a kind man, still is even today from all we can tell, those of us left on the force.

Back then, the academy lasted twenty-three weeks, and just over halfway through, our thirteenth week, we went out on the streets before returning to another ten weeks in the classroom. That's all changed now. No thirteenth week patrol—you get assigned to an FTO, field training officer, when you graduate and spend four months under careful supervision by someone who's learned how to train new officers. But in the early 1980s, they threw us to any cop with at least three years' service who was willing to ride with a raw, eager cadet without a gun—or they'd put you with whomever the Sergeant or Lieutenant was pissed at that week. Some of us ended up with old farts who'd never passed the sergeant's test and were just working out their time in between stops at relatives' houses and coffee shops. But most of us ended up with the hot dogs, the cops who liked to shake things up and believed that the more trouble you were in, the better you were doing your job.

Richard was assigned along with five of us other guys to what cops called the dog shift, 11:00
P.M
. to 7:00
A.M
., out at the old Winbourne Precinct, the high-crime, high-poverty area of town. We were nervous that first night, coming into roll call, and it's only now, years later, that we know how obvious our nervousness really was. We stood out: shoes too spit-shined, hair too neat and short, faces too blank and smooth, gestures too jerky. Most of us had spent a good two hours getting ready: polishing our name plates, PD pins, and belt buckles with Brasso; rubbing saddlesoap into our shoes; clipping all the loose threads—Sergeant Jackson called them ropes, and if he found one during academy roll call, it was worth at least ten push-ups.

The first few minutes in the precinct are still a blur: crammed with uniforms, sweaty bodies, shotguns being checked out, portable
radios being tested and clipped to gun belts, telephones ringing, radios chattering, keys rattling, loud voices and laughter, shoving and jostling, swearing and stories, men and women who knew what they were doing and looked like they belonged in the three small beige tile rooms that made up the bulk of the precinct.

We hung back against a wall, awkward in our uneasiness, wanting to fit in, knowing we didn't, unsure what to do with our hands as roll call started. Only Richard seemed certain of himself, leaning up against the wall, his arms folded, an alert, watchful look on his face.

Roll call hasn't changed much over the years: a short lecture by the Lieutenant about errors in report writing or signing out subpoenas, hot spots of illegal activity, BOLOs—be on the lookout fors—and just basic riding-your-ass reminders like wear your hat, keep incidental chatter on the radio down, stay in your zone. Depending on the lieutenant, roll call is either straightforward boring, or a mixture of joshing, fingerpointing, and veiled threats. Then the squad sergeants throw in their two cents, and units are assigned to their designated zone and told to get out there and go 10-8, in service.

Despite our jitters and the parade of faces and information, we all agreed later that two people stood out from the moment we entered the precinct: a big linebacker of a coonass with a broken front tooth and a kettledrum voice, and a tall slender woman with dark hair done up in a tight French braid, thick eyebrows, and makeup so artfully applied that her uniform was a jarring contrast.

One of us, Mark Denux, was assigned to ride with the linebacker coonass, a Vietnam vet named Joe Boudreaux. And one of us, Richard Marcus, was assigned to ride with the tall woman.

It took a minute for the name to register. “Marcus, you'll ride with Cippoine,” the Sergeant said, and both Richard and the woman nodded.

It wasn't until she came toward us, a shotgun propped against one shoulder, and we saw her nameplate—
K CIPPOINE
—that we truly believed that this was the Katherine, Johnny's Katherine, our Katherine.