I spent hours at the briefing room table trying to study the map of Saint Amelia; I’d say over and over to myself, “north, east even,” which is how the street numbers progress, while Ken made his lists and talked on the phone in the little office off the briefing room, interminably, in his slow, low voice. He had begun conducting interviews with children in the evenings and had confirmed four victims. “The important thing in a case like this, in a city like this,” Ken told me, “is not to move too quickly. We don’t want to cause a panic. That’s the one thing we don’t want.” And I said, “But we’ve got a molester in a classroom, who has no reason to suspect anyone knows, who will therefore continue molesting.” I heard Ken in the Chief’s office, trying to get out of handling the case, and the Chief saying, “You’re the only one who can handle it right now, Kenny, we’re all feeling the pinch.”
I’ll admit to you, I’m a daydreamer, and I did not make the best use of my study time because I hated memorizing code. In the office supply closet I found the old police ledgers dating from the turn of the century, written in lead pencil like a lifting fog. I stopped listening in on Ken’s phone call — he was talking to someone in the FBI about accessing the teacher’s hard drive — and I read them one by one with tunnel vision.
So engrossed was I that I did not glance up at the sound of the back door being unlocked, nor did I see when a stocky, bearded man, former Second Sergeant Donald, walked into the briefing room carrying a shotgun. There were some confused moments then, when the dispatcher, who saw him entering the back door on the video monitor, locked herself in the bathroom and ignored the phone. Ken pleaded with Donald to put the shotgun down, while I watched, holding my place in the ledger with my finger. Finally the Chief, who was away at a meeting, was phoned and the whole thing sorted out. The Chief, a naturalized Swede who blushed a violent crimson every time he spoke — with me, with anyone — had neglected to tell anyone that Donald had won his last appeal and was reinstated, albeit demoted in rank to patrol officer.
“I’m not saying you should have pulled your gun on Donald; that would definitely not have been good,” Ken said, “but my point is, you should have reacted somehow. You should have seen him first from where you were sitting.” Ken was furious with me. I didn’t feel like arguing with him, saying how highway patrol guys and even plain-clothed detectives from the Sheriff s department came in the back door all the time to eat their meals or stop off and write paper, and no one ever explained or introduced themselves to me. I felt that the quickest way out of this lecture was silence, compliance. “You just sat there! Reading, or whatever,” Ken said. This observation renewed his indignation. Shortly afterward, I was moved to swing shift to drive with Jason, due to the intensive nature of Ken’s case.
This is when it started, I think, when it was decided that I did not see, that I lacked the faculties of a trained observer. That my competence as a police officer was fatally flawed by an inability to process details of the concrete, physical world around me, and that only a plan to ensure that I remarked on every car parked in a red or blue zone, every expired reg tab, every loud muffler or tinted windshield, could potentially redeem me.
Jason, or Baby Cop, as he was known, looked like he was twelve years old. His wife had just given birth to their first child, and he handed out Hershey bars with customized wrappers that said, “Here-she-is,” giving me extras “to keep my blood sugar up.” It was his first time as a field training officer, and he wanted me to like him. “Ken tells me you really need to work on your observation skills,” he said. “What we’ll do — maybe later — is work on some observation techniques,” he said. “I’ll name an object, and you call out when you see it,” he said. “For example, can you tell me right now where this is: a giant tomato?”
“Are you serious?” I said, mildly offended. “That’s Pizzeria Pomodoro.”
“Good, very good,” he said, like I’d just performed a trick surprisingly well. “Can you give me the address where there’s a lawn jockey?” he said, upping the ante.
“No clue,” I said. Oh, he was pleased to have stumped me. He beamed.
“We’ll work on it some more later. Don’t worry about it. It’ll come.”
Jason told me I really should get the brass snaps changed out on my belt so that all the snaps were uniformly silver, as directed in the dress code. Also, I might want to invest in a matching pen-and-pencil set like his, to wear in my pocket. He recommended using a mechanical pencil. Pencil, Ken might have neglected to tell me, as traffic was not his thing, was necessary for writing comments on the back of tickets. He asked to see my ticket book. “This is kind of a mess,” he said. “Let’s see if we can fix this.” He showed me how he’d arranged his ticket book, where he’d taped his cheat sheet and kept his Qwik-Codes and his crayon for marking tires. After I promised to change my snaps all to silver, buy a pen-and-pencil set, and reform my ticket book, Jason seemed to relax. “It’s a shame Tony can’t be here to train you,” he said, referring to the deceased who’d made my hiring possible. Tony had been the senior training officer.
That first swing shift I put on my rain suit and rubber boots, checked my radio, readied the car, scanned the police log, and waited to go. I sat at the briefing table clutching my FTO manual for an hour before I realized that the Chief and Sergeant were both away, and therefore the pace would be slower. My heart sank as the sun disappeared, as surely as any lost hiker’s. I had wanted to drive during the precious remaining hours of daylight, to acclimatize my eyes before plunging into the wet darkness. Jason talked three hours with Rolando, who was halfheartedly trying to catch up on reports at the computer. Rolando and Jason were the newest hires, and their favorite topic, when they were alone, was what the department would be like when all the old-timers retired. When Rolando and Jason were not talking about the future of the department, they talked about women. Jason always initiated these conversations and gradually drew Rolando in. Once Rolando actually salivated and smacked his lips as he described an Italian girlfriend of his who had “the most gorgeous black peach fuzz” all over her arms and legs — like a connoisseur describing a stinky cheese or a wine made from mummified grapes.
My best work as a police officer always involved investigations or writing reports, both of which I could do independently and efficiently, unlike traffic stops. Which means I did not fit the profile of the average officer, I inverted it. For example, after we’d arrested Wexler for felony possession of firearms, I followed my gut and found it was an invalid arrest, then let the Chief and Deputy DA know so they could prepare for his lawsuit. Wexler was another pervert, which had me thinking Saint Amelia had more than her share of perverts per capita. I remember an old priest who moved from Chicago to the Napa Valley telling me once that he believed the low crime rate must be directly related to the extreme physical beauty of the place. I wonder now if the beauty tempts perversion, like Blake’s “Sick Rose.”