Under the Bridge (20 page)

She realized then, the adults, with their broad shoulders and bellies and bald spots, these were undercovers.

Syreeta saw them take Tara away, and she thought to herself,
Why are they taking Tara when she did not do anything?

As she moved toward Marissa, she heard the adults ask:

“What is your full and legal name?”

“Where were you last Friday night?”

“Have you ever met a girl named Reena Virk?”

“Have you seen Kelly Ellard?”

She saw Marissa crying, and she heard an officer say, “Marissa, we have information you were under the bridge last Friday. We'll need you to come with us.”

She turned then, past Geoff and Paul. Geoff, with all the attitude, saying, “I ain't got nothing to tell you, man. Yo, I never been under that bridge.” She heard Paul say, “Why you axing me? I'm not a rat. I didn't see anything.” She heard the boys, and they were keeping it on the down low.

The field she walked through was now a ruined assembly, an intrusion of something more than adults, but of that adult word as well:
consequences.
She heard the pregnant woman police officer yelling at Laura Taylor, “We're talking about a missing girl here!”

She thought then of the words Warren whispered in his bedroom.

Haven't you wondered why that girl hasn't been around?

No, I didn't know she hadn't been around.

She recalled with a start the promise she'd made.

Don't tell anyone.

I won't.

She had not even moved across the field when the man came right up to her. His hair was neatly combed. She could not see his gun. She could smell his aftershave.

He said, “We're looking into a missing girl. We need to know your name.”

She gave him her name, and she thought he peered at her then, with abrupt recognition, but he let her keep walking, and she walked off the field, hoping she could find Warren.

Warren, he was not on the field but wandering around near the train tracks. He knew the police were at Shoreline. He'd heard it from Geoff
and Paul, but yet he did not consider running. He thought to himself,
Where can I go? I ain't got no money. I'm just a stupid drunk kid. Emotionally wrecked. Fucked up large.

He wanted only to find Syreeta.

He was not the tough rapster in the music video, powerful and brazen, armed with glocks or an Uzi, though his pants were baggy and he wore a blue bandanna. He was not a Crip with a crew, and he was only dizzy and very hungry. He thought of Syreeta's sarcastic rebuke.
Oh, that's cool. You kicked a girl in the head. You're real cool.
He thought of Syreeta and hoped he would find her on the field before he was taken away. He wanted not to warn her but to tell her he loved her. Near the Mac's, he saw a dark-haired young girl under the lights where gas was sold. Syreeta, he thought, and he walked quicker now.

But in front of the Mac's store, Syreeta's friend Felicity was by herself, shivering.

“What's going on, Warren?” she cried. “Why are the cops all over the field?”

He didn't answer Felicity.

“I probably won't see you again,” he told her. “I'll probably be going to jail soon.”

He asked if he could borrow some money and Felicity gave him a few dollars and he bought a Vanilla French Latte from the machine inside the bright store.

Sober up, he told himself. Stupid drunk kid. Emotionally wrecked. Fucked up large.

Felicity had told him Syreeta was at Shoreline, and so he hurried toward the school, knowing that the undercovers would likely be there as well, but it didn't matter to him. He walked very quickly, with his head down so low he thought he might fall into the gasoline spilled on the pavement.

Before he was on the field, Warren stepped onto the parking lot where gravel gave way to concrete. The names of all his teachers were painted on the small yellow markers, and a few feet in the distance, he could see the green field with the pieces of grass seeming separate and silver-tipped from the light of the moon.

Syreeta was just getting into the back seat of Diana's dad's car, just fastening her seat belt, when she saw Warren through the window. Warren did not see Syreeta.

He saw instead the gold Taurus moving toward him, and he knew then that the gold Taurus would take him away.

A man, lean and looking like his father's twin, this man who looked so much like his dad, left the gold Taurus and said his name. “Warren Glowatski?” Bruce Brown inquired, and Warren nodded, and he lifted his hand as if to be polite, as if they were being introduced. Bruce Brown shook his hand, and then told him he was under arrest for the murder of Reena Virk.

Handcuffed, he bent slightly to move into the Taurus, and just then he saw Syreeta through the cop car window. She too was behind glass. They looked at one another through the small windows in the cars of adults. Her mouth was open, as if she had started to scream, and there were tears on her face. He thought,
She shouldn't be seeing this. She shouldn't be seeing this at all.
He ducked into the car, and he looked down at the rug of his captor's car.

“What's Warren getting arrested for?” Diana's dad said, “Vandalism or something?”

“I have to get out,” Syreeta screamed. “Stop driving!”

Mr. Davis stopped the car. He seemed to consider the vagaries of letting Syreeta escape. The policeman would probably not appreciate a somewhat hysterical girl throwing herself on the vehicle. He braked, but turned to tell Syreeta to stay in the car.

“Why are they taking Warren away?” Diana said. “He didn't do anything!”

Syreeta's seat belt was already unfastened. She saw Warren raise his head and look at her through the glass. She began to get out of the car.

But as she opened the door, Diana's dad stepped out of the front seat of his car, and he put his hands on her shoulders.

“Syreeta,” he ordered, “you get back in the car!”

“Please,” she yelled. “Just let me say good-bye!”

Mr. Davis kept his hands on her shoulders. “Get back in the car!” he ordered once more, and he blocked her escape. Besides, they had already taken Warren away from her.
Just let me say good-bye,
she yelled, even though he was already gone.

B
Y
11:00, the police station was, as one lawyer would later recall, “a total gong show.”

“It was chaotic,” Sergeant Poulton admits. The interview rooms and cells were full of teenagers. Mothers were vomiting in the bathroom. Lawyers began to arrive.

This is pandemonium,
Sergeant Poulton thought.
The station is teeming with kids.

Officers tried to keep the teenagers apart so they could not “contaminate their stories.” Pagers were going off, and girls were screaming.

In the waiting room, the mothers were like a chorus. The mothers, together, they wailed.

Belle sat with the mothers of her daughter's friends, women whom she had known for years. She had been with them at bake sales and barbecues and nights at the kids' dances when together, they were chaperones. Now, their daughters were detained for
murder.
In the uneasy moment, she found herself silent while the other mothers wailed and sobbed and hugged. She was not part of this chorus, for she could not cry, not yet. “Jill was devastated, and shocked,” she recalls. “And Rosemary was hysterical, totally hysterical. It was all very emotional and there was a lot of fear. We were all pretty afraid. ‘What's going to happen?' I remember being really worried about that girl who was missing because at that time there really wasn't any proof that she was dead. We were all in one room. We didn't know what was going on. Finally, John Bond came in and he told me that they couldn't decide whether to move the girls to jail or to keep them in the cells at the station.

“I think I went into a robot state. I'd been there before with my brother. I think that's where I went. I have to do that. Have to do that or I'll fall apart.

“When I looked at Jill and Rosemary, oh, I just felt like we were in a dream.
This cannot be happening.”

•   •   •

The lead detectives were assigned to different suspects, and as he'd later recall with a slight laugh, John Bond and Bruce Brown “took” Warren. “We just thought it was a job for him and me,” he recalls.

Sergeant Poulton, said by John Bond to be “a class act, a very intelligent guy,” entered the interview room where Kelly lay on a sofa. “Kelly, you're here under arrest for murder,” Sergeant Poulton said to this very young girl with a stud in her nose and sleepy brown eyes.

“You haven't yet been charged. We're trying to get a hold of your mother. I've read you your rights. Now….”

She interrupted him, and her concerns were not those of a murderer but those of a teenage girl. “Where are my friends? When can I see them?”

Before he could answer, she spoke up once more, her voice more indignant than terrified.

“When can I go? I don't know anything about what's going on.”

She slept for a while then, lay down on the couch, and slept in the children's interrogation room, on a couch beside a box of building blocks and teddy bears.

Susan, Kelly's mother, a slight woman with soft gray eyes and a soft voice and a soft sweater, arrived near midnight. Her husband, the soccer champion, waited outside, pacing, thinking, “How can this be happening?” His stepdaughter, who never missed her curfew, arrested for murder. How could this be?

“Mom,” Kelly cried when she saw her mother. “I was just with my friends and I got taken in. I didn't do anything. I don't know what is going on.”

Sue sat beside her daughter, slowly, as if dazed and unsure. (“Nothing like this has ever happened to anyone I know,” she would later say.) Protectively, she seemed almost to enfold her daughter; she stroked Kelly's hair; she held her hand; she looked at her daughter with worry and tenderness.

“We're just trying to get to the bottom of what happened to a girl
named Reena Virk,” Sergeant Poulton explained to the shocked mother.

“Reena? I thought her name was Trina,” Kelly said, and she yawned.

“Where were you last Friday night?”

Yawn. She placed her hand over her mouth, yawned again. “I told you. I went to the Mac's, and then I went to the Comfort Inn and then I went home.”

“Well,” he said, “we've heard quite a different story. We have a number of witnesses who have given us information that—”

“All those people are fools!” Kelly screamed. “They're just trying to save their asses.” She turned away from the detective decisively and raised her head so she seemed taller than her mother, and certainly, she seemed the stronger and more assertive of the pair.

“Mom, I want to go home now,” she announced.

Her mother stayed silent, continuing to stroke her daughter's hair.

“Why were you telling people you beat up Reena that Friday?” Sergeant Poulton inquired.

“I did not tell anyone that. Rumors fly around. This is high school. It's gossip, gossip, gossip!”

“How can I make you understand?” Sergeant Poulton said, after hearing of gossip and rumors, frustrated by the vagueness of her answers and her petulant tone. “This is murder! Of a fourteen-year-old girl! A mother has lost her child! You're looking at a murder rap here. Get a grip!”

“I have nothing against her,” Kelly insisted. “I don't even know her. Listen to me! I'm very pissed off right now! So quit asking me stuff! Leave me alone!”

Poulton moved toward the door. He'd been working for fifteen hours straight, chasing down girls in flared pants and hooded sweatshirts. And now he was facing the logic of this fifteen-year-old alleged killer. It was gossip.
It's gossipy gossip, gossip.

“I'll be right back,” he said sighing, and he left the room, left mother and daughter alone.

“Why is this happening to me?” Kelly wailed.

“It's happening to everyone,” her mother replied. “They're all crying now.”

“I hate this asshole,” Kelly said, “He's intimidating me.”

There was a video camera on the wall taping her, and Kelly's mother pointed this fact out to her daughter. Nonplussed, Kelly stared at the camera.

“I hate cops!” she screamed. “I hate the system!” She raised her middle finger to the camera. She scowled. She persevered with her outrage at her own misfortune: “I'm going to beat up everybody who said this about me,” Kelly roared. “I am going to kill them. I'm not going to school anymore.”

Susan Pakos put her head in her hands.

“Mom,” Kelly commanded. “I'm scared! Can't you take me out of here?”

“I can't just take you out of here, Kelly.”

“You own me! You're my mother. Get me probation!”

“I knew something was going on on Wednesday,” Sue said, as though to herself, since Kelly was not listening. Full of fury, Kelly stood up and stormed over to the box of stuffed animals sometimes used to help children describe and remember sexual abuse. Kelly kicked a teddy bear across the room.

“Pick that up,” Kelly's mom said wanly, and when Kelly ignored her, she herself got on her knees and picked the teddy bear up because her daughter had kicked it halfway across the floor.

Sergeant Poulton moved to interrogation room 3 and looked inside to see both Brown and Bond interviewing a boy. That's Warren, he thought, surprised, for he had imagined the lone boy in the case would be a burly kid, a deadened thug, and there he was, spritelike, with his hair bleached and curly, and he was even smaller than Kelly. He thought Warren was smaller than Kelly, although later he would find they shared a strange physicality, as if they were twins. Both were 5′4, and both weighed exactly 115 pounds.