Twenty-one

Dickie sat alone and forlorn in the holding cell at Greenwich police headquarters. It had been a quiet night, and in the course of things, there was little common crime in Greenwich, often no more than a dozen arrests in a week, most of them for drunken driving or petty theft. When it came to millions of dollars, the criminal record was longer and more interesting, but the movers in this increasing list of multimillion-dollar crimes and litigations never saw the inside of Greenwich police headquarters.

Dickie was frightened, because he had no idea of what awaited him. He had tried to glean some information from the two officers who had arrested him, but they were close-mouthed and gave little. The one instance he had experienced in his past was for disturbing the peace, when he and three of his friends had too much beer and had marched down Greenwich Avenue at two o’clock in the morning, when Greenwich Avenue is like a graveyard, shouting and singing at the top of their lungs. Then they were picked up, taken to the police station, where their parents were called to come and get them and pay their fines. This time was different. Dickie knew that he was being charged with assaulting an underage girl. He knew very little about the law, but the word assault terrified him. He never read newspapers, but watching network television, he had seen many an assault case punished with years of imprisonment. What would he do if they sent him to jail for five years? Five years was an eternity. He had heard, via TV and film, about young men made slaves of the tougher prisoners, raped and beaten, and sometimes killed. Whether this would happen to him in a Connecticut prison, he did not know, but his imagination ran wild. He was seventeen, too old to be tried as a juvenile? He didn’t know.

Finally, past two in the morning, he fell asleep on the hard bench in the holding cell.