It was so seldom that Hanson saw a cop on the street in Oakland he knew—much less wanted to talk to—that when he got the call to cover for Morris, a young kid he’d been in the Academy with and liked, he volunteered. Morris needed someone to watch his prisoner, and Hanson was glad for the chance to say hello, the first time since they’d graduated.
The neighborhood houses were old, built back before East Oakland was all black, but the owners were taking care of them. Sometimes out there one street would be falling apart, burned down, trash-blown, drug and gun and gang territory, while the next block over was green and well-maintained.
The suspect was handcuffed in the back of Morris’s patrol car when Hanson pulled up behind it. Morris was interviewing the woman and her husband out on the front lawn, and trying to keep an eye on the suspect at the same time. Hanson stood at the rear of the car to watch the suspect after getting the story from Morris.
The woman had called it in. Her husband was holding him at gunpoint, the would-be rapist.
She’d been up in the bedroom, she said, when somebody came in the front door and started up the stairs. She’d thought it was her husband, who’d left for his shift at Discount Tire half an hour earlier and must have come back to pick up something he’d forgotten. Then the suspect appeared in the bedroom doorway. He told her not to scream and he wouldn’t hurt her. Told her to take off her clothes. It was a miracle her husband had come home when he did.
The husband told Morris that he’d called when he got to work, just to say hello and maybe cheer her up—she’d been feeling down for a couple of days—and no one answered the phone. That had worried him enough to drive home, and when he got home he let himself in and called her name, and she’d come running down the stairs, screaming, wrapped in a sheet. The suspect was still upstairs trying to get the bedroom window open. The husband had held his pistol on him, making him lie on the floor while his wife called the police.
The suspect hadn’t been out of prison two weeks, after doing almost four years of a six-year sentence for possession for sale, assaulting a police officer, aggravated assault, resisting arrest, and public intoxication. All one incident, the only time he’d been arrested except for a couple of juvenile charges years before. He must have pissed the arresting cops off, Hanson thought.
A nice couple, the woman pretty, in her early twenties, crying now. Her husband was fifteen years older, shaved head, a mustache, the kind of guy who’s worked hard all his life. He was angry with her because it had scared him, and he wasn’t the kind of guy who got scared very often. “How could you forget to lock the door when I was gone?” Hanson heard him ask her—probably not the first time he’d asked that—before they went inside to finish the interview with Morris.
“I thought I’d locked it,” she managed, sobbing.
“I’m sorry, baby,” her husband said.
Hanson stayed with the prisoner, who stared straight ahead, refusing to look at him. He wasn’t much older than Morris, good looking, buff, Jheri-curled hair, tough from dealing drugs on the street and four years of prison.
Hanson looked at the house, then stooped down and looked at the suspect again. He didn’t look like the kind of stoned moron burglar who’d walk into an unfamiliar dwelling in the middle of the day, then decide to rape a screaming woman. Steel security bars over all the windows and doors. And he hadn’t touched her. Told her to take off her clothes. Something wasn’t right.
Hanson opened the patrol car door, read him his rights from a card—which, he knew, would piss off the detectives who got the case because they’d want to get all the voluntary incriminating statements they could before Mirandizing him, but fuck them.
“Do you understand what I just told you about your rights?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking through the cage and out the windshield at the house.
“Anything you want to tell me about what happened?”
He hunched up and leaned forward to take the pressure off the handcuffs.
“Let me double-lock those for you,” Hanson said, “so they don’t tighten up. I’m willing to write down your version of things. What really happened?”
“Just like she said.”
“Do you know her?” Hanson asked, finishing the cuffs, putting the keys back in his belt.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. He looked back and up at Hanson. “What are you doing out here?”
“It’s my job.”
“Uh-huh.” The sweat-and-vomit miasma of the patrol car wafted over Hanson. The stink that collected on his uniform and in his hair every night.
“I knew her,” he said, settling into the backseat. “A long time ago I knew her. I thought about her a lot when I was locked up. I called her two days ago and she told me to come over. Just got out of the joint, living with my mother. Can’t find a job, ex-con, you know. Fucked. I rode the bus and walked the rest of the way. She came to the door. She let me in. When I walked inside, I thought, ‘What if this was my house.’ You know? If I lived there, if we lived there, me and her. She locked the door. I followed her upstairs, thinking about that.
“When her old man showed up she started screaming. What else could she do?”
“Why don’t I write this up, man,” Hanson said. “You’ll be fine.”
“I won’t be fine. Do I look like I’m gonna be fine? I’ll be going back anyway. Why fuck up her life? He’s taking good care of her. Better than I could do.”
“You sure? I’d do a good job writing this up. Why go back for something you didn’t do?”
He looked down at the floorboard. “What you think I went in the first time for?” He looked at Hanson. “You work here? I’m guilty. Write that up.” Then he said, “I’m glad I came to see her. It was worth it.”
Maybe he was lying. Maybe she’d planned the whole thing after he called for some reason. Or maybe he wasn’t lying, and she hadn’t planned anything, and they just wanted to see each other. Maybe they used to be in love. That stopped him. He’d never imagined anybody ever was in love out here. Now, wasn’t that a thought? That would make his job just about impossible. And he thought about it all that night. He’d never considered it one way or the other.
And when had he ever been in love?