Drowsing for the last time in my morning bed, I took in a deep, satisfied breath; then the doorbell rang.
The bedroom of our Queens home was on the second floor, and I wasn’t due in to work until the afternoon. I was naked and very tired; anyway, Monica knew how to answer a door.
I stretched a bit, thinking how much I loved my little family and that a promotion to captain was not an impossibility once I single-handedly busted the largest heroin ring to ever exist within the borders of the greatest city on earth.
“Joe!” Monica yelled from the entrance hall, which was downstairs and all the way at the front of the house.
“What?” I bellowed.
“It’s the police!”
The one thing a cop’s wife never says is, It’s the police. That’s what criminals and victims of criminals say. Sometimes we said it about ourselves while pointing a service revolver at the back of some perp’s head. The mayor called us the police and now and then the newspapers did, but a cop’s wife saying it’s the police would be like my black-skinned grandmother calling out to my ex-sharecropper grandfather that it’s some Negroes at the do’!
I knew there was something wrong and that Monica was trying to warn me. I had no idea that that would be her last loving act in our marriage or that her call heralded the end of any kind of normal life I could expect.
After the arrest, my union-supplied lawyer informed me that the prosecutor said there was a small sign posted next to the front door of the Park Slope brownstone. It read, PROPERTY UNDER ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE, so I had no expectation of privacy.
“Ms. Malcolm said that you presented her with the choice of either going to jail or performing fellatio,” Ginger Edwards explained.
I’d been at Rikers for only thirty-nine hours and already four convicts had attacked me. There was a white adhesive bandage holding together the open flesh on my right cheek. I broke the slasher’s nose and knife hand, but the scar he gave me would last longer.
“That’s not true,” I said to Ginger.
“I saw the tape. She wasn’t smiling.”
“What about when she was kissing me?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Then the tape was doctored.”
“Not according to our guy. We’ll look deeper into it, but the way it stands they got you on this.”
Ginger was short with light brown hair. She was slender but gave the impression of physical strength. In the middle of her thirties, she had a plain face that wouldn’t look much different in twenty years.
“What should I do?” I asked the diminutive white woman.
“I’d like to float a plea with no jail time.”
“I’d lose everything.”
“Everything but your freedom.”
“I need to think about this.”
“The prosecutor intends to bring rape charges.”
“Come back day after tomorrow,” I said. “Ask me about a plea then.”
Ginger’s eyes were also light brown. They opened rather wide when she asked, “What happened to your face?”
“Cut it shaving.”
I decided to take my chances with the system. In the next two days I got into half a dozen fights. They’d given me a private cell, but on the fourth morning of my incarceration, a crazy-looking fellow named Mink splashed a bucket of urine through my cell door. Mink was gray-eyed with olive skin and kinky blond hair.
The guards didn’t have anyone clean my cell.
It was in that stink that I became a murderer-in-waiting. The next time Mink passed my cell door he leaned forward, pretending to get a whiff of me. He miscalculated by five inches and I got him. Before the clown-man knew it, I had him in the chokehold I’d used against many of his peers. I’d kill him and anybody else who even thought about putting a hand on me. I’d be in prison for the rest of my life, but everybody from Mink’s friends to the warden would know better than to ever get within reach again.
The guards got to us before I could kill the ugly, piss-slinging convict. They had to open the door to pry me loose from my victim. Then the peacekeepers and I had one helluva fight. I never knew what it was like to be pummeled with a truncheon; you don’t feel the blows through the rage, but that night the bone bruises hurt like hell.
Just a few days and I’d switched allegiances from cop to criminal. I thought that was the worst thing…but I was wrong.
The next afternoon, when I had grown accustomed to the smell of piss in my clothes, a group of four guards approached my cell wearing head-to-toe riot gear. Someone hit the switch to pop the door open and they rushed me, pinning me to the floor and chaining my wrists and forearms around the waist and to the leg irons on my ankles. Then they dragged me down one hall after another until I was tossed into a room so small that three men wouldn’t have been able to play blackjack at the miniature metal table that was soldered to the floor.
I was chained in a metal chair to the table and the floor. Many a suspect had been tethered before me like that while I interrogated them. I had never really understood how they felt or how anyone could expect someone to have any kind of revelatory conversation while being hog-tied in that manner.
I struggled against my bonds, but the pain from the previous day’s bruises was too great and I had to stop.
When I quit moving, time congealed around me like amber over a mosquito that had taken a small misstep. I could hear my breaths and feel the pulse in my temples. It was in that moment I understood the phrase serving time. I was that servant.
Just as I gave up hope, a tall and, some say, handsome Irishman walked into the room.
“Gladstone,” I uttered. It might have been a psalm.
“You look like shit, your highness.”
“And I smell like piss.”
“I wasn’t gonna mention that,” he said, taking the metal chair across the table from mine. “They called and told me that you put a convict in the hospital along with three guards to keep him company. You broke one dude’s nose and another guy’s jaw.”
The grin on my face was involuntary. I could see my pain reflected in Gladstone’s eyes.
“What’s wrong with you, Joe?”
“It’s like a crazy house in here, Glad. I been beat, cut, and showered in piss. And no one even gives a damn.”
Dispatch Sergeant Gladstone Palmer was lean and mean, six foot one (two inches on me), with a mouth that was always smiling or getting ready to do so. He stared at me and shook his head.
“It’s a shame, boyo,” he said. “They turned on you like a pack of dogs.”
“Who signed the papers on the girl?” I asked.
“It was an e-mail from the chief of Ds, but when I called his office they said that they never sent it.”
“I didn’t force that woman.”
“It would help if your dick wasn’t so big and black. Just looking at her look at it, you could imagine how scared she was.”
“What about the rest of the video?”
“The only camera was in the living room. That’s all it showed.”
I remembered then that she wanted to go up to the bed after the first movement of our tragic opera. It was a plan.
“They framed me, Glad.”
My friend winced and shook his head again.
“They framed me!”
“Look, Joe,” he said after a full thirty seconds of silence. “I’m not saying they didn’t. But we all know what you’re like with the ladies, and then there’s that other thing.”
“What thing?”
“If it’s a frame it’s airtight. From the video to the girl’s testimony, they’ve got you as a predator. You were pulling her by the hair, for chrissakes.”
“She asked me to,” I said, realizing what those words would sound like in front of a jury.
“No audio on the tape. It looks like she was begging you to stop.”
I wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right words.
“But it’s not that that’s the problem,” Gladstone said. “The problem is you got powerful enemies who can reach in here and snuff you out.”
“I need a cigarette,” I replied.
My only friend in the world lit a Marlboro, stood up from his chair, and placed it between my lips. I took in a deep draw, held it, and then blew the smoke from my nostrils.