Wayne changed channel again.
‘Homer, I’ve been reading Bart’s report card,’ said Marge. ‘It says our boy is academically challenged.’
‘Really?’ said Homer, drinking some beer. ‘Academically challenged, huh? That sounds good. He probably gets it from me.’
‘It mean’s he’s stupid, Dad,’ said Lisa.
‘Eat my shorts,’ said Bart.
‘Sorry about that,’ said Wayne, and flipped to another channel.
‘Leave it on,’ Scout protested. ‘I like The Simpsons and I don’t think I ever saw that one.’
‘Later, precious pie.’
Another reporter was speaking out of the screen. ‘… and so these two “Ordinary Americans” have taken refuge in the home of the man who foresaw their coming, who, some might even argue, brought them forth…’
Bruce shouted at the TV, ‘Nature makes killers not movies!’
Wayne turned the television off.
‘Well, I guess if you’re just going to keep on talking we might as well have the damn TV off. Can’t hear it none, anyways.’
Farrah spoke up. It had taken her some time to recover from the terror of staring down Wayne ’s gun barrel, but her spirit was returning. There were already hundreds of police officers outside. Maybe they were going to make it after all.
‘Look,’ she said, lighting a very long, very thin cigarette, made with pink paper and a golden filter, ‘if the cops are here you can’t escape-’
‘I told you already, lady, I don’t want to escape. I asked them to come here. I called them when I came down to get you.’
Bruce could make no sense of this at all. ‘You called the cops?’
‘Well, no, as a matter of fact I called NBC, told ‘em to get all the stations down here. I guess they must have called the cops as well. It don’t matter none. Me and Scout here are used to ignoring cops.’
There were now so many cops in the grounds of Bruce and Farrah’s mansion that Wayne would have had to have been Buddha himself in order to ignore them. There were nearly as many cops as journalists, and more were arriving all the time. Detectives Jay and Crawford passed them as, with heavy hearts, they themselves left the scene of the action.
‘Nothing more for us to do here,’ Jay had been forced to admit.
It was a bitter pill to swallow. Having pulled off a brilliant piece of intuitive police work, locating two desperate and elusive felons, he was now forced to accept that virtually the whole force had been only seconds behind him. There was nothing left for them to contribute and so, as the helicopter and trucks disgorged squad after squad of paramilitary human gunships, the two detectives retired from the scene with what dignity they could muster.
One of the helicopters swooping overhead contained the chief officer of the LAPD, and he was in a hurry. Chief Cornell had been woken with the thrilling news that the Mall Murderers had Bruce Delamitri and his family held hostage in the Delamitri mansion. Chief Cornell had immediately decided to take charge of the operation himself.
He had no choice. He desperately needed the air time.
Thirty years before, when he had joined the police, Cornell had not done so in order to turn into a showbiz tart. But that was what had happened. He, who as a boy had dreamt of catching crooks, now spent half his time having lunch with them. In fact he had become one himself. His actions were no longer governed by the need to uphold justice as laid down by law. They were governed by the necessity of balancing the various social and political consequences of whatever action he took. He wasn’t a cop any more, he was a politician – and a crooked one at that. All city officials were, whether they liked it or not, because the whole sad, crumbling edifice was built on lies and halftruths. Nobody could tell it straight any more because there was no straight to tell. Every group, be it defined racially, financially, geographically, sexually, by religion or by choice of knitwear, had its own truth. And that truth was diametrically opposed to everyone else’s truth. More than that, it was threatened by everyone else’s truth. The city was out of control and the police chief’s number one job, like that of every politician, was to persuade people it wasn’t.
For that he needed profile. He needed air time.
And today he was going to get it. The chopper landed and Cornell stepped masterfully and purposefully into a barrage of clicking cameras. He was a general in a war zone, and beyond the cameras he could see the might of his army manoeuvring into position. It felt good. This was a dream come true. Suddenly, when he had least dared to hope for it (which is to say, three months before the city elections), Cornell had a real, one hundred per cent macho, shitkickin’, buttwhippin’, asskissin’ siege to deal with. A genuine proper piece of highrolling, highoctane, highprofile police work, which above all, above double all, above all and hallelujah, was race free! A racefree crime! In election year! Chief Cornell thanked his stars. He thanked his God. He would have happily conceded that somewhere in his youth or childhood he must have done something good, because all his Christmases (or holiday seasons, as the city now referred to them) had come at once. For the first time in a long time he was dealing with a crime of citywide, statewide, national and international significance in which race was not an issue. He had never dared to dream he would see its like again.
Chief Cornell was himself black. He had experienced plenty of racism in his life and he hated it. But his particular private and current hatred of racism was to do not with his colour but with his job. He was the city’s top cop. He was proud of that and he wanted to do a good job, but racism, from whichever hue it emanated, had made that impossible. Proper police work was no longer an option available to him. Every day he encountered what appeared to be openandshut cases. The man killed the woman, the gang beat the guy. Simple, it would seem, but no, then it turns out that the main protagonists are of different races and suddenly the openandshut case turns into an impenetrable maze in which what people actually do is irrelevant. What matters is what the jury, and ultimately the public, feel about it.
But now, glory of glories, he had a racefree case. Victims and villains were the same colour. Imagine, Chief Cornell thought, if those had been black or Asian punks in there, shooting white Playboy centrefolds and holding little white girls hostage. Absolutely everything about the case would be different. Nearly as bad would be if the director or the model had been black and the punks white. Either way, the case would already be a political football, there would be pickets and protestors at the gates. It did not bear thinking about.
But the chief’s luck was in. Fate had delivered to him the perfect case in which to do, and above all be seen to do, a bit of proper policing, and by hell, Hades, glory and damnation, he was going to make the most of it.
Unfortunately for Chief Cornell, there was another chief on the scene and he was equally excited. Brad Murray, Chief of NBC News and Current Affairs, recognized the Delamitri siege as probably the sexiest bit of news and current affairs it had ever been his extreme good fortune to preside over.
‘If this one wasn’t true,’ Murray remarked to his gorgeous power PA as they stepped off their own helicopter, ‘I’d never have dared to invent it.’