Twelve Rooms with a View (19 page)

“When the public defender shows up, he can call people for you,” I offered, leaning against the bars. I had no idea how long I would be
stuck there, so I had no interest in sitting down just yet. Plus those chairs looked fiendishly uncomfortable. You know they put in separate seats like that just so people can’t lie down.

“I’ve been waiting for four hours for the fucking public defender! When’s the fucking public defender supposed to fucking show up?” She was fraying at the seams.

“Sometimes it takes a while,” I said.

“This is so fucked,” the girl repeated, glancing down the hallway. The lady cop was coming back now with her slow, bored walk. I couldn’t figure out why she had left in the first place—probably she had to go to the bathroom.

“So who are we calling?” she said as she handed me the receiver through the bars. This was the usual drill; they give you the receiver, you tell them the number you want to dial, they dial it for you, and you talk. I thought for a second about calling my so-called lawyer, Ira Grossman, whom I had never met. I thought about calling Lucy. Then I thought about calling Alison and Daniel, who would just call Lucy, who would then call the lawyer. And then I’d have to go home with one of them, because I wasn’t allowed to stay in the apartment anymore. If it was Lucy, I’d have to listen to her bitch at me all night, even though this clearly wasn’t my fault. If it was Alison and Daniel, I’d have to listen to them hanging out in their tiny kitchen, whispering about my sleeping on their crummy couch, and whether Lucy would be able to put me up, and wasn’t there anyone else Tina could stay with, and why doesn’t Tina ever have any money or seem to be able to hold down a job. I had lived through this delightful conversation more than once, truth be told, and I was not looking forward to hearing it again. The thought made my head hurt.

“Hey, Kilt Girl,” I said. “What’s your mom’s phone number?”

“What?”

“Is that who you want to call?”

“She’s not allowed another call until the PD shows up,” the lady cop informed me, irritated.

“Yeah, but I get a phone call,” I said.

“You want to call my mom?” the kid asked.

“Isn’t that who you want to talk to?”

“Yeah, but …”

“So what’s her number?”

The girl looked at me. The cop looked at me too. She was moving out of irritated and more firmly into pissed off. “Look, this isn’t up to you,” she told me again. “She’s not getting another phone call.”

“It’s not her call, it’s my call,” I said.

“You aren’t getting another call. You call this kid’s mother? That’s your call.”

“I know that’s my call.”

“You call her, you’re stuck here,” she said again, like I wasn’t getting it.

“What’s your mother’s phone number, kid?” I asked.

“And she’s not allowed to talk to her.”

“She’s not going to talk to her; I’m going to talk to her. Kid, what’s the number?”

The kid spit out the number so fast I almost didn’t get it. I mean, this sudden stroke of good fortune had definitely commanded her attention, and she had no time to affect disinterest or suspicion. “Tell her I really need her to come down,” she said. “Tell her they said I was doing drugs but I was totally not doing them at all. It was totally these three other kids at this party. And it’s a total mistake.”

“I totally will tell her that,” I said. Now that she had a shred of hope that someone was going to help her out, she was sort of charming in a way that made me suspect she was not in fact eighteen. Someone picked up the phone at the other end of the line.

“Hello,” said a kind of tony fake voice. You could practically see the whole apartment from the sound of that voice.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m a friend of …”

“Colette,” Kilt Girl said, fast.

“I’m a friend of Colette’s,” I said, thinking this kid looks nothing like a Colette. “Is this her mother?”

“Yes, I am her mother,” said the voice, sounding a little worried now but also kind of exasperated, like someone who was already exhausted by Colette’s recent shenanigans and not looking forward to a new chapter.

“Well, I’m afraid Colette, unfortunately she’s having some trouble with the police right now, nothing serious—”

“It’s a mistake, a total mistake,” Colette dictated.

“A total mistake,” I repeated. “But she does need for you to come down to the precinct and pick her up.”

“Oh my god. You’re kidding. She’s at the police station?” said the tony voice, rising an octave. “PAUL! COLETTE’S AT THE POLICE STATION! What is it, has she been arrested? Is she all right?”

“Oh yeah, she’s fine, she just needs you to come pick her up,” I reassured the voice.

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” the lady cop sneered.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I told her. “What precinct is this again?”

“The Forty-ninth.”

“We’re over here at the Forty-ninth Precinct, I don’t know the exact address, but you can look it up. Oh, and can I ask—how old is Colette again?”

“How
old
is she?” asked the voice, all frosty now. “She’s sixteen, why?”

“Okay, you might want to mention that to the guy at the front desk. When someone under seventeen gets picked up, the police actually aren’t allowed to hold them unless there’s an adult present. Colette may have lied about her age, so I wouldn’t be too mean about it? But you know, it’s not legal for them to hold her without you being here.”

“Who is this again?” asked the voice.

“Okay, see you,” I said, and handed the phone back to the officer. She stared at me.

“You’re quite the expert on juvenile arrests,” she observed, hanging up the phone.

“Yeah, weird, huh,” I said. “I’m going to need a PD.”

About twenty minutes later she came back and picked up Colette, which I thought was a good sign—I mean, her folks didn’t make her sweat down there; they came right away and got her. She didn’t even look at me, she just followed that lady cop down the hall.

“You’re welcome,” I yelled, but I didn’t watch to see if she even flinched.

So now I was stuck there by myself. I sat down in one of those ridiculously uncomfortable chairs, and then I tried to lie down across three of them, which was truly backbreaking, so I ended up sitting on one of the corner chairs and stretching my legs out to the second chair in the row across from me. This position turned out to be just barely comfortable enough to sleep in, once I took my sweater off and figured out how to lodge it between my head and the cinder-block wall at an angle that held up my neck. Then, of course, as soon as I managed to pass out, a different lady cop, this one Hispanic and skinny, woke me up.

“HEY!” she yelled. “Tina Finn! You Tina Finn?”

“Yeah,” I said, picking my head up way too fast, given the crazy position I was in. My poor neck felt like it was in pieces, and one of my eyes seemed to have glued itself together, so I figured I had slept longer than it felt like, but it was clearly one of those odd sleeps where you pass out so thoroughly you don’t have any sense of what day it is when you wake up.

“What day is it?” I said.

“They want you in interrogation,” she answered. I nodded and picked up my sweater, which had fallen on the floor, and then I followed her down the hallway. The fluorescent lights are always on in those places, so it really is impossible to tell what time of day it is. I had utterly no clue until I got into the interrogation room, where a clock informed me that it was a little past two in the morning.

“It’s two in the morning,” I said to the officer.

“That’s right.”

“Well, the PD isn’t coming at two in the morning,” I said, still feeling kind of stupid and like it was taking too long to wake up.

“This is interrogation, they want you for interrogation,” she said, and then she left, like this made any sense at all.

“How come they didn’t interrogate me when I got here?” I said, but the door had already closed behind her. So there I was in a totally empty room again.

The whole thing seemed completely surreal, and I’m someone who has a relatively high tolerance for strange adventures. I looked around for a minute, thinking about the shit that goes down in a place like this.
There was no sign of it here—like everything else in this too-clean police station, the walls gave up nothing at all. I felt like I was trapped in one of those science fiction movies where they bore you to death and then suck your brains out and everyone becomes a complete automaton; seriously, I was feeling significantly creeped out when the door opened and Detective Pete Drinan walked in. At which point, nothing seemed surreal anymore.

“Oh, it’s you,” I said. “Such a surprise.”

“Yeah, how you doing?” he asked, tossing a manila file folder on the table. “You want anything, a cup of coffee or something? You want a Coke?”

“A Coke sounds kind of good, sure,” I said. Drinan went to the door and leaned out, yelling, “Hey! Can somebody bring me a Coke?” It sounded so much like cops on television I almost started to laugh. Nobody answered immediately, and after glancing up and down the hall for a minute he disappeared, letting the door swing closed behind him. After a few minutes I was bored, so I picked up the manila file and started to read it.

The door swung open again. “Hey, what are you doing? Don’t do that,” Drinan said. He came over behind me and took the file out of my hand impatiently. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the big deal, it’s my record,” I said. “It’s not like it’s a big secret.”

Detective Drinan took a seat and gave me a look. “You always act like this when you get arrested?”

“I do when the cops are acting like jerks,” I told him.

“Most people would have the sense to keep their mouths shut when the cops are acting like jerks, Miss Finn,” he said. He tossed my file back on the table and ran his hand over the back of his neck, like he was trying to figure out some big annoying puzzle. “What happened to your arm?”

I looked down to see what he was talking about. I hadn’t noticed anything when I had my sweater on, but now, with just a tank top and in that horrible green light, I could see that my arm was covered with bruises from elbow to shoulder where the arresting officer had yanked
me around. I suddenly felt so embarrassed I didn’t know what to say. Even more mortifying, my face turned red, and I was so surprised by my own embarrassment and so exhausted that for a second I thought I might start crying. Drinan was really watching me, so I stared at the broken corner of the tabletop and tried to focus. The tabletop was fakewood Formica, and I wondered why they kept trying to make plastic look like wood, when even a half-wit like me knows it’s just not possible.

The door opened again, and the skinny Hispanic police officer stuck her head in.

“You wanted this?” she asked.

“Yeah, thanks,” Drinan said, and he reached out to take the can of Coke she held out to him. While his back was turned, I picked up my sweater and wrapped it around my shoulders, fast, so the bruises didn’t show as much. When I looked up, Drinan was watching me with those sad brown eyes, which registered nothing more than a mild detectivelike curiosity. He shrugged a little, put the can on the table, and popped the seal with one hand. He held it out to me, then sat down and started reading my file while I drank my Coke. It tasted amazing, frankly.

“Don’t bolt it,” he advised. “I’m not going to get you another one.”

“I’m thirsty,” I said. “I’ve been here since god knows when.”

“Since 4:37
P.M
.,” he said, reading off the front page of the arrest report. “You resist arrest?”

“It doesn’t say that,” I said.

“‘Belligerent and provocative’ is what it says, right here.” He held it up briefly to show me.

“We’re not allowed to talk back?”

“No, in fact you are not allowed to talk back to your arresting officer. What are you, a moron?”

“I come home and find my apartment full of police officers and I haven’t done a fucking thing and I’m not allowed to have an opinion about that?”

“It’s not your home,” he informed me.

“Far as I can tell, it’s not yours either.”

He paused without looking up, like he was thinking about responding to that, then got more interested in why I persisted in my
stupidity. “You might want to watch your mouth,” he finally suggested.

“Yes sir,” I said. He looked up at me, but he wasn’t annoyed by my problematic tone of voice. Now his face was bent around the words that had come out of my mouth.

“Wait a minute, what did you say before? You came home and found them there?”

“Yes sir.”

“So, what, you opened the door and found them in your so-called apartment?”

“No.”

“So what happened?”

“I was out buying some toothpaste and then I came home, and I got off the elevator, and I was going to go in, but Mrs. Westmoreland told me the cops were in there and I should get out. So—”

“You know Mrs. Westmoreland?”

“I saw her that night she was trying to get you to come in and have a drink with her.”

“That night you were spying on us.”

“Yeah, that night.”

“Well, maybe that night you heard she’s not someone who’s going to go out on a limb and do you any favors. And now you’re claiming what, that she
warned
you there were police officers looking for you? Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t her, maybe it was someone else.”

“She lives there alone.”

“Well, I don’t know who it was. She was standing behind the door.”

“And whoever this person was said get out of here the cops are here.”

“Yes.”

“So then what did you do?”

“Well, then the arresting officer—”

“The one who put his hands on you?”

“Yeah, that guy, he stepped out into the hallway and said could you come in here, please?”

“Did he put his hands on you then?”

“No, he just told me to come inside.”

“So that’s what you did.”

“Yes.”

This seemed like bad news to Detective Drinan. He was in a pissy mood now, you could see it in his face. His eyes were hooded and his hand covered his chin, which made it look like he was trying to be businesslike while he looked at my file. But he was biting the inside of his lip like he had a canker sore that was giving him hell. He shifted in his seat and looked up at me.