Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (5 page)

Perhaps we imagined the flush on Richard's cheeks, the quick downward glance as Katherine approached. But not the crack in his voice.

“Got a name besides Marcus?” Katherine asked. Her voice was huskier, more coarse than we'd expected.

“Richard, ma'am. Richard Marcus.” The words sputtered out soft, his drawl deeper than normal. He no longer leaned against the wall.

Her face twitched, and she smiled, a megawatt smile. “Oh shit, please, no ma'ams. You'll make me feel ancient. Katherine is fine.”

Richard nodded.

“Well,” she said. “Come along, Richard Marcus.”

And then we heard no more between them as we each met our assigned partner and scattered out onto the back lot, listening to the various instructions as to how we were expected to behave (“follow my lead,” “let me do the talking on calls,” and “don't get in the way,” were the most consistent admonitions). But not before one of us overheard Beth Sanderson, an older woman with short bleached hair and sunblasted skin, mutter, “There goes her latest,” as Richard and Katherine passed in the hallway, a comment that carried little weight until much later.

We envied Richard. But we were also relieved. The next week would be a test of our character, a measure of our suitability as police officers. How could you stay inside your own skin if you were assigned to ride with a living legend?

Not well, as it turned out. Not even for someone like Richard Marcus.

 

These days most of us veteran officers, the ones who've been on the force fifteen years or more, bemoan the lack of camaraderie and closeness on the squads that compose a shift. “Everybody's out for himself,” we say with a shrug. “Not like the old days when you could count on cops covering your ass.” Some argue that eliminating two-person units contributed to fewer enduring partnerships and shift choir practices, two essential elements for any good squad. Others claim the move to straight shifts from rotating shifts created competition and hierarchy. But the truth is, there have always been close-knit shifts and shifts that never jelled.

The shift the six of us were assigned to was unusually close; most of the officers had worked together for over a year, an anomaly back
then as officers seemed to be transferred regularly for no good reason other than the whim of the Uniform Patrol Commander.

So we frequently saw Richard and Katherine those first few nights: on calls as backup, at coffee shops and convenience stores, in deserted parking lots around 4:00 or 5:00
A.M
. when officers met to joke, exchange information, stay awake.

It quickly became evident that Joe Boudreaux and Katherine Cippoine were the driving force on the shift. While Joe was loud, blustery, opinionated, and physical, Katherine was steady, contained, mostly quiet except on calls when she seemed to fill up the room. Despite the unexpected obscenities that frequently escaped her lips and the coarseness of her voice, which indicated a childhood lived in some East Coast town, we relished the occasional real smile that transformed her from simply lovely to stunning.

We didn't mingle much with the officers at first, spoke only when spoken to. We listened and we watched. And we talked among ourselves, standing off to one side to compare notes about the calls we'd worked, the partner we'd been assigned.

“What's she like?” Denux asked Richard. Denux was short, skinny, and nearly bald, but he'd flipped all of us with ease during takedown training at the academy. Richard was closer to him than anyone else in our class; they often ran neck and neck on the firing range and during PT, and both seemed to enjoy the good-natured competition.

“Good,” Richard said.

“Yeah?”

“Tough. Professional. She pushes hard. Like a drill sergeant.”

“She given you any push-ups yet, buddy?” This from Hawkins, a scraggly fellow with a huge Adam's apple who was generally considered the academy washout. We all looked at him, incredulous.

Richard pushed his hands into his pockets and looked down at the ground. “Every moment's a test. ‘Where are we now,' she asks me twenty times a night. ‘If something happens to me, you need to get backup and you need to know where you are.' Stuff like that.”

“Yeah, Boudreaux's doing that to me too. Gets pissed off when I don't get it right,” Denux said.

“She doesn't get angry,” Richard said. “She doesn't say a word.”

“Nothing?”

“Just moves on to something else.”

“Like what?”

“How to watch hands and eyes, see in the dark, how to hold a flashlight, how to approach a car, use your hands, the way to talk to people, stand in a room.”

Hawkins frowned. “Sanderson's not telling me much of anything, except don't touch the mike and stay in the car. Goddamn dyke, if you ask me.”

“That's a bit off base, Hawkins,” Richard said.

We all looked over at Beth Sanderson, who was talking to a couple of guys from her squad, and wondered who had the rawer deal: Sanderson for having to ride with such a dipshit or Hawkins for having to ride with a woman who seemed habitually grouchy.

“Hell of a lot more interesting than the academy,” Denux said.

Richard nodded. “They both have their place.”

We were all silent for a moment.

“She ever mention Johnny?”

“Jesus, Hawkins!”

Richard shook his head, grimaced slightly. “No.”

“You gotta admit,” Hawkins pressed on, “she is something else.”

Richard nodded slowly and changed the subject.

By the third night we felt more relaxed and, through some unspoken invitation, became a part of the semicircle of six or seven units parked in an old run-down high school parking lot off Evangeline Street. It was warm and humid, as most nights are midsummer in Louisiana, and some of the officers had taken off their bulletproof vests, laid them on the hood of their cars beside their portable radios.

It seemed that when cops weren't working calls, they're telling stories. Sanderson was telling about Hawkins leaving his flashlight in the car on a burglary alarm (“You got night vision, boy?” Boudreaux asked.), and pretty soon the officers started telling stories about other officers, mostly the ones who'd done something funny or stupid like Hawkins.

“Remember that rookie Boudreaux had a couple of years back, Jack something or other?”

“Holy shit, that boy was a fuckup from the word go,” Joe said. He played a coffee straw around his broken tooth as he talked. “Fresh out of
the academy and we're chasing this 42 suspect down Acadian Thruway, and the boy asks me at what point do we load our guns. Shit! When do we load our guns. He's running around with an empty goddamn gun.”

We all laughed, shot glances at one another, wondering at poor Jack something or other's stupidity. Hawkins giggled like a girl.

“He didn't last long after that,” said a corporal named Akers who looked like an eggplant, both in color and in size, and whose voice faintly resembled Darth Vader's. “What, another couple of months?”

“Didn't make it through probation,” Katherine said.

“Should've had you as his training officer,” Sanderson said. “You'd have gotten him in line.”

“Let it the fuck go, Beth.” Boudreaux's tone was cutting, but his body language never changed.

“Fuck you, Joe.” Sanderson's fingers curled tightly around the buckle on her gun belt.

“That's a whole lot of goddamn fuckin' going on,” Katherine said mildly, looking up at the night sky.

A short burst of air escaped Boudreaux's lips.

“Hawkins.” Katherine looked at him, and his whole body lurched forward like a marionette. “Why'd you join?”

“Ma'am?”

“Why did you join the police department?” She spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable.

“Well, ma'am, my granddaddy was a Texas Ranger.” He looked everywhere but at Katherine as he spoke.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” Akers snorted.

“And he's the one who taught you to call women less than ten years older than you ‘ma'am'?”

“Ma'am?” Hawkins squinted at her.

We all laughed, even Katherine. Hawkins smiled hesitantly.

“What about the rest of you boys?” Boudreaux asked. “Why'd you want to become the po-lice?”

Our answers, delivered mostly in a shy, offhanded way, hardly varied: to do some good, to give back to the community, to help people. Richard didn't say a word.

Bemused smiles greeted our answers. The officers cut glances at one another, lifted eyebrows, nudged one another. Only Katherine
watched us silently, her fingers playing with a small pearl earring in her left ear.

“Well, that'll get shit out of you within the first couple a months riding the streets,” Joe said. He lit a cigarette and pulled hard on it, expelling the smoke in a sharp exhalation. “Doing good and helping people is crap, lemme tell you. All we do out here is answer calls, cover our asses, and try not to get hurt.”

“That's about it,” Akers said, nodding, the flesh under his chin jiggling slightly.

“And what about you, Richard?” Katherine brushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear, and we caught a faint whiff of perfume, something fragile and sweet.

Richard looked around and smiled. “The adrenaline.”

“Now there's an honest answer!” Joe reached over and slapped Richard lightly on the shoulder. “Katie, we've got us a keeper here.”

“Could be,” Katherine said. “You a fuckin' cowboy, Marcus?” Her enunciation was just as studied as it had been with Hawkins.

“Do I look like a fucking cowboy?” Richard spoke quietly, but his tone was tight.

We all gaped.

“She only wishes,” Sanderson muttered.

Katherine inspected the toes of her boots, lifting one up slightly to catch the streetlight. “Beth, you want to start exchanging tales, you better ask yourself what I know.”

Joe pitched his cigarette. “Whether or not—”

“I killed a man when I was fourteen,” Richard said.

“Well hello,” Akers muttered.

The 5:00
A.M
. train rattled down Choctaw in the distance. We all looked at Richard.

“Man broke into the house. Just my mom, my little brother, and me. My daddy'd disappeared not long before. Another woman, we figured.” Richard looked only at Katherine as he spoke. “He had a knife; I had my daddy's shotgun.”

“Well didja now.” Boudreaux smoothed a thumb across his mustache, looked Richard up and down. “God bless shotguns. They'll trump a knife any day. Sounds like a clean kill to me.”

“It was a mess,” Richard said flatly.

“They usually are, boy. But it felt good, didn't it?” Boudreaux grinned at him.

“Headquarters, 1D-84.” The dispatcher's voice was impersonal and no-nonsense.

Sanderson scowled, creating even more wrinkles than we thought possible, and pulled the portable radio out of its case and up to her mouth. “1D-84, go ahead.”

“Got a signal 45, possible shots fired, Starling and 12th. Code 2.”

“10-4; enroute.” Sanderson moved toward her unit as she spoke, gesturing sharply at Hawkins to join her.

Boudreaux keyed his mike, moving rapidly toward his unit as well. “1D-79 enroute as backup.”

Starling and 12th—still a place that gives a cop pause. Back then there were pockets of danger—the Sip and Bite off Acadian that most cops called the Shoot and Stab; a pool hall off Greenwell Springs; Gus Young and 39th; a trailer park off Harding; individual houses and blocks off Plank Road and North Foster—there are even more spots today. But twenty years ago, Starling and 12th was the pucker-up zone: you didn't go in there without backup, even in daylight.

So no one was surprised when Sanderson called for more backup as she and Hawkins arrived. Even with Boudreaux and Denux behind her, realistically she had only one officer as backup. Denux and Hawkins had no guns and little authority. But then Boudreaux's voice came booming through the radio seconds later, calling for more backup
now
, a note of agitation so unusual that Katherine, already in her unit, flicked a look at Richard and told him to buckle up and hold on as she hit the red lights and siren. Four units followed close behind her.

When a second call for backup came from Boudreaux, most of us were only two minutes away. But two minutes can feel like two hours when you hear someone like Boudreaux shouting, “Signal 63, possible CU, Signal 100.” And in the background, behind Boudreaux's words, a ragged mass of voices yelling and cursing.

Signal 63—the call that opens the adrenaline floodgates and shakes any officer's gut. Not just that help is needed immediately, but that bodily injury or worse is imminent. Very few officers abuse this call for help—they don't last long on the streets if they do—and
someone like Boudreaux probably uses it only three or four times during his career.

The dispatcher's calm voice came right back, clearing the frequency for emergency traffic only. “Headquarters all units, 10-33. Any units available respond Code 3, Starling and 12th. Possible riot situation, possible sniper situation. This frequency is 10-33.”

Starling and 12th is one of those strange intersections where five streets converge and create a weird geometric layout that no doubt some traffic engineer way back when thought was classy, brought a little élan to this then blue-collar, white neighborhood of wooden shotgun houses. It hasn't been white in decades. Blue-collar either. The drug dealers like it because they can flee quickly in any number of directions, if they choose to flee rather than dropping their cache in the weed-choked ditches. The cops like it—if any cop can truly claim he or she likes that intersection—because there's a fairly clear view, a quick snapshot of who's where doing what, no matter which street you approach on.

Three blocks away we could see a crowd converged around the two police units and up in the yard of what must have once been a yellow house but now could only be described as dingy. A crowd of thirty-five to forty people, mostly black, of every age, the number growing by the second. It was not a friendly group.