“Yes. This is Krieg Bannen speaking.”
“Mr. Bannen, this is Detective Lieutenant Grace Speers. Are you the owner of a green, 1971 sedan, with the license number DFG 606?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Bannen, we have a complaint lodged against your car,” said Lieutenant Speers, more coldly and distantly than before, Bannen thought.
“A complaint? What kind of complaint?”
“Mr. Bannen, I’m not allowed to discuss the nature of the complain t on the telephone. What I would like is for you to drop in and see me sometime this morning. The sooner the better, for everyone concerned.”
For everyone concerned? Then, there were others involved. But involved in what?
“This morning, you say.”
“Room 712, County-Municipal Building.”
“This morning? I really don’t see any way, Lieutenant Speers. I have lecture classes to teach all morning at Shoreline Community College. I’m a professor of philosophy there. If you could perhaps give me some idea of the nature of this complaint, perhaps it can be cleared up without my having to make a personal appearance.”
“I’m afraid that cannot be done, Professor Bannen. Can you arrange to come in sometime this afternoon?”
Something must have happened on the way to the paper box. Or earlier in the week. Some act involving his car. Was it some kind of collegiate prank being perpetrated against him. Spring weather had that kind of effect on young students. He had done nothing that he could recall. Absolutely nothing.
Now Lieutenant Speer’s official voice came firmly across the line, mincing no words. “Professor Bannen, please don’t force me to draw a warrant for your arrest. It can be done with a simple telephone call.”
His arrest? That didn’t sound at all good. What could he have done that was considered an offense serious enough for an arbitrary arrest?
“Can you make it for eleven o’clock this morning, professor?”
“Eleven o’clock,” said Bannen, numbly confused. “Yes, I’ll be there.”
Lieutenant Grace Speers put up the phone quickly, as though it contained a communicable disease. In the main, she liked her work in Juvenile, got satisfaction helping youths out of trouble and getting them back on the right track at home, in the schools, in society.
Five years a widow, before children of her own had filled her life, Grace Speers was compensating for that void by counselling and guiding the children of others. Female law officers still were not given the heavier, more physical field assignments; these were still rightly the province of the males. But here in Juvenile, happily and luckily, she’d found a real niche and a real need.
In her department only one. kind of crime left her inadequate, nauseous and revulsed: morals crimes. There was a depth of ugliness to these offenders which frightened her to her very marrow. She would rather sit across from a murderer at an interrogation table than a sex criminal, whose insidious unfatal acts killed by degree, killed by the implantation of its evil seed early in a young girl’s life or young boy’s life. And then walked away from a crime that was still happening, an offense that would have its greatest impact upon its victim much later.
Lieutenant Speers knew of what she spoke through painful personal experience. Her niece, her sister’s oldest daughter, was fourteen now. At nine, while returning with a small bundle of groceries from a neighborhood store, a man had driven up along side her in a “black car that looked like a big fish.”
He rolled down the passenger window and summoned the girl to the car. He was a friend of her mother’s, the man told the girl. She shouldn’t become alarmed, but her mother had been taken to the hospital. If she would get in, the man would drive her there just as fast as he could.
Two hours later, Lieutenant Speers’ niece was found dazed and wandering in a city park. She was stiff with muscular catatonia and could not speak. Her clothing was soiled and in tatters and the bluish bruises on her arms and shoulders were large and ugly.
It was six days before physical movement returned to her bruised body; and eight days before she could once again speak. Police and psychiatrists questioned her diligently and with great care. They learned only that the man had a black moustache, wore a ruby ring and had a black car that looked like a fish. Nothing more, and nothing of the foul acts he had done.
Grace Speers had seen it happen many times, but only in the case of her niece had she been able to keep close watch on the development of a victim. At fourteen, she showed little interest in boys. After dark, she would not go out of the house alone, not even to visit a neighbor girl across the street. She was reluctant to discuss problems concerning sexuality with her mother and as she grew she acquired a certain aloofness where her father was concerned.
These were the real crimes being committed; these were the tangible acts of moral offense. And Grace Speers, as the girl’s aunt, was helpless to do anything for her but pray that she would in time outgrow her fears and nightmares.
Lieutenant Speers took a call about a runaway girl, turning a pencil in her hands as she listened to the girl’s mother explain the circumstances. She thanked the woman for calling immediately and assured her they would do everything they could to locate her missing daughter.
Putting up the phone, she continued twirling the pencil. Runaways, kids on drugs, incorrigibles in the home and at schools, the mixed-up and the disturbed youths. These she could handle in stride. But the other. The other always let her speechless and shook.
Now, she found herself thinking again of Professor Krieg Bannen, of Shoreline Community College. Professor of Ethics and Morality. She set her lips and teeth in seething anger, pressing them together harder and harder. Until the pencil she held in her fingers snapped into two jagged pieces.
Krieg Bannen rode up in the elevator in silence. Along for the fide were two men in dark suits and two sullen youths, looking disenfranchised in grimy untucked shirts and hippy-hair tangled like dark snakes.
Bannen guessed they were under subtle arrest by the men in the suits. Next to them, he felt criminal and soiled.
Room 712 was narrow and gray-walled. The desks had been stripped of everything except essentials: typewriters, telephone and detectives. At a reception desk, Bannen gave his name to a flaccid, red-necked man.
“I have an appointment with Lieutenant Speers.”
“Grace, you got business!”
Lieutenant Grace Speers wore a dark blue suit and flowered neck scarf. Her blonde hair was styled slightly out of fashion, as brittle looking as the woman herself. Her total appearance told Bannen she was not there to impress men but to do her job.
“Professor Bannen, will you follow me, please?”
“If it isn’t into a room with an electric chair.”
“Just follow me, please.”
The interrogation room was just large enough to accommodate the two of them: a raw oak desk, two metal chairs and a manila folder centered on the desk and closed.
Lieutenant Speers verified some basic data about Bannen and then cleared her throat. She looked frightened to death of him.
“Professor Bannen, can you tell me where you were this morning between eight o’clock and eight-fifteen?”
“I can tell you precisely where I was. At eight o’clock I was on my way to a paper box at Elmwood Avenue and 33rd Street, necessitated by the fact that our delivery boy, absent-mindedly struck with the beauty and promise of a new Spring, missed our house. I went to pick up a paper.”
Yes, thought Bannen, that was it. Sometime during the morning, a crime had been committed somewhere in Cresthill Circle or nearabouts. They were narrowing down suspects and sifting rumor from fact.
Lieutenant Grace Speers could not look Bannen in the eye. Very possibly that was because she knew she would see in his deceitful face the unknown features of the man who had molested her niece. Very possibly she would sense behind his eyes a twisted brain concocting evils even as it was being picked by her.