Benefit of the Doubt: A Novel (15 page)

“Hello, ma’am, I’m Tia Suarez. I work with your husband. I mean, Sergeant Sawyer.”

“Wow. Tia Suarez?” Alex put out a hand and shot a glance at her husband. “I’m Alex. It’s great to meet you. Ben’s told me all about you, says you’re a great cop. And believe me, he doesn’t just throw that kind of stuff around.”

Eager to change the subject to anything but herself, she said to the boy, “So you’re Jake?”

“Yep.”

“Nice to meet you,” Tia said, extending her hand. “Your dad tells me you’re a pretty good ball player. You like the Brewers?”

Jake reached out and awkwardly shook Tia’s offered hand. He shot his dad a look before answering. “Nah. Dad is the Brewers fan. I’m a West Coast guy. I go with the A’s. They’re playing in Milwaukee in a week or so. I hope the A’s sweep ’em.”

“That’s kind of why I came by.” Tia looked at Ben. “I’ve got two box seats for one of the games, Sarge, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to make it. I wanted to see if maybe you and Jake might want to go?”

Jake didn’t wait for his dad to answer. “Box seats? Like the ones down by the field? Oh, man, you bet we can go.” Jake turned to his mother. “You don’t mind, right, Mom?”

Tia realized her mistake in an instant. “Uh … I can probably get a third seat, Alex. I mean … I can check on it.”

Hell, she’d call the stadium, get the name of the ticket holder, and make an irresistible offer.

Alex didn’t miss a beat. “Don’t even think about it. These two are the baseball nuts. The game is too slow for me and I’m usually scanning the crowd with my binos by the third inning. Now if you get a line on some Packers tickets, you’d better count me in.”

“Those are a little harder to come by, but I’ll keep it in mind.” She drew the tickets out of her pocket and offered them to Ben. “Sound good, Sarge?”

“Sounds great, but you gotta let me pay you for them. What are those, like a hundred bucks apiece?”

“I got ’em from a friend. Spent about fifty dollars.”

Alex spoke up. “Smokin’ deal, Ben. You should go for it.”

“All right, Tia,” he said. “Fifty bucks sounds great.”

Jake pumped his fist. “Hey, Dad, Officer Suarez’s car is way cooler than ours. Why don’t you get something like that? Something that’ll get up and go.”

Ben gave Tia a look that clearly meant—sarcastically—
thanks a lot.
Alex said, “I’m throwing some steaks on the grill. Will you stay?”

“Thanks, but I don’t want to put you out.”

“Stay,” Ben stage-whispered. “If you don’t, it’ll be hot dogs she throws on the grill.”

Tia looked at Alex and shrugged. “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d love to.”

“Great. Okay, Ben, fire it up. You’re cooking. Come on in, Tia. How about a beer?”

Tia joined the family walking toward the house, and Jake fell in alongside her.

“So my dad said you used to be a Marine. It that true?” Jake asked.

Tia turned to the boy as they kept walking. “Yeah. Four years.”

Jake’s voice picked up a level of excitement. “That’s what I’m gonna do. As soon as I turn eighteen I’m gonna join up. Where did you go? Did you like it?”

Tia noticed that Ben’s expression took on a bit of a sad smile. She wondered about the backstory but answered the boy’s question honestly. “I was mostly overseas. Afghanistan. Yeah, I liked it, but the best thing about it was it got me ready to be a cop. You could do that too, you know.”

“No way. I just want to be in the Marines and travel all over the world.”

Jake ran ahead and Tia walked along with Ben and Alex in a moment of uncomfortable silence. She saw Alex reach out and squeeze Ben’s hand as they headed into the backyard.

After dinner and several beers from a local brewery, the adults sat outside and enjoyed the perfect spring evening. Jake had hung around for a while but eventually retreated to his room. The boy struck Tia as a nice kid who had been through some tough times. Though Tia liked and respected Ben as Sergeant Sawyer, they’d had little personal interaction. Now, sitting with the Sawyers in their backyard, she felt a pang of envy for the closeness of family.

“So how’s your dad doing, Alex?” Tia asked. “We miss having him around down at the station house.”

“He’s come a long way, but it’s been tough. He’s hanging in there, though. Thanks for asking.”

“Let him know I said hello. He hired me, you know. I think he took a lot of heat for it. There were some other top candidates.”

“I’ll tell him, Tia.” Alex got up easily from her low-slung Adirondack chair and lightly patted Ben on the head. Tia noticed that Ben turned his head up at her touch, much like a happy dog. “I’m going to tackle the kitchen. You guys keep talking.”

“No way, Alex. I’m helping.” Tia started to stand.

“I got it, Tia. Ben loves shop talk that he doesn’t have to filter for me.” She tousled his hair again. “Cause you know, growing up a cop’s daughter and all, I just can’t take it…” She paused and looked straight at Tia. “By the way, Tia, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Jake smile like he did today. The whole adjusting to a new town, changing schools, trying to make new friends, all that. It’s been tough on him. When you pulled out those baseball tickets, you made his day and mine. Actually, you made my month. Thanks for that.”

“Thanks, Alex, that’s really cool to know.”

Tia watched her boss as Alex walked away; emotions flickered over his face, too fast for her to identify. She wouldn’t think of prying, but she hoped the Sawyers were as happy as they should be.

With their fill of beef and brew, the two cops opened up a little more than the separation of rank and a dozen years would normally allow.

“Alex and I, neither of us was quite twenty-one yet when we just blew out of town. Drove all the way to California. We stopped in Vegas and got married.” Ben laughed. “Jesus, her old man hit the roof. If he could have put his hands on me, I would’ve been swinging from a tree branch.”

“So you got on with Oakland?” Tia asked.

“Not right away. I applied for LAPD first. I was all set to be a big-city cop only to find out my eyes weren’t good enough. Doc told me I didn’t meet the vision requirements and that was that. DQ’ed me on the spot.”

“So what? Oakland didn’t have the same requirement?”

“Yeah, actually they did.” Ben took a swig of beer. “But I memorized the eye chart before I took the test.”

“Bullshit.” She wasn’t buying it.

“No. It’s the truth. Haven’t you noticed that all doctors use the same eye chart? The twenty/twenty line is D-E-F-P-O-T-E-C.” Ben took another, larger gulp. “I know it backward, too.”

“Are you serious? You memorized it?”

“I like to think of it as studying.”

“Yeah. More like you copied off another kid’s paper.”

“What would you expect? I plan on being a cop all my life and then I’m going to let some geek with a stethoscope turn me away? Bullshit.”

“Oakland PD.” Tia’s voice filled with admiration. “Bet you got some fish stories out of that.”

“One or two.” Ben drained the longneck, dropped the empty bottle onto the grass. “I’ll bet you’ve even heard a few of them.”

“Just the one.”

“Which is…?”

“Story is you invoked a little street justice on some sack of shit, something about stoving in his teeth with a forty-cal? Word has it you got tossed out of OPD.”

“That’s pretty close.”

Tia laughed and took a long pull of beer. Ben found he was enjoying their candor. He opened another beer and turned a bit more serious.

“Actually, your version gives me too much credit. It had nothing to do with justice. I snapped and nearly killed a guy. Lucky I didn’t end up in my own jail.”

Tia spoke with genuine understanding. “I went online and read the case file, Sarge. You should know, most of the cops at the PD have read it. Public record, ya know. And all the press shit too. The guy was right out of the joint and wanted for murder. From what I read, he was pretty close to killing a cop when you showed up. That means all bets are off. You could have shot the son of a bitch on the spot, but you took him into custody alive.”

When Ben sat quietly, staring across the yard, she went on.

“So you probably save a cop’s life
and
you avoid killing the crook, and they railroad your ass out the door? Hell, if you hadn’t intervened—”

“None of that matters.” Ben looked at Tia, respecting the honest nature of her inquiry. There was no denying it felt good to have a cop come to his defense, especially a cop of her quality. But it didn’t change the facts and he knew it.

“There’s no ‘use-of-force’ expert in the country willing to testify that deep-throating a guy with the barrel of a gun is an acceptable way to make an arrest. No way, nohow. Believe me, I checked. It was a jacked-up situation, no doubt, but I had other options. I knew better, and in the end I got what I deserved.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. You made an on-the-spot life-or-death call. Then some jerk-offs in a courtroom come along and start taking it apart frame by frame. Didn’t you want to fight? Push back on those sons of bitches?”

“It doesn’t work that way, Tia. Hell, I guess if just one person had offered me the slightest support, maybe I would have pushed back. If someone had shown the slightest benefit of the doubt instead of filling in the blanks before we even got started, yeah, maybe I would have tried to tell my side.”

“So then,” she asked quietly, “what was your side?”

Ben only stared ahead and Tia tried to prompt him. “I read about the Oakland cop that was killed a couple of weeks before all this shit went down. Shot to death. You were on that call too, weren’t you?”

Ben looked at Tia with what struck her as mild surprise. “Damn, Suarez. Maybe I should make you a detective.”

They went quiet for almost a minute, then Ben started back up. “That was a tough time to be a cop in Oakland. We lost four in eight months. This jerk-off Espudo had it in his head he’d do number five.” Ben took a hit off his beer. “Fuck him. I should have just blown his head off before he could get his hands up. Then everything would’ve been fine.”

“So what happened? I mean after the actual…” Tia didn’t know what to call it. “I mean, what happened after the event?”

“The event, huh? I like that. Kind of like something where you’d charge admission.”

He paused as if thinking, then went on. “What happened? The world spun off its goddamn axis is what happened. The press went absolutely bat shit. They practically penned the stories in blood. Course there was that damn picture. Seemed like it was on the front page of every newspaper in California.”

Tia had seen the photograph, and it was something to behold. The sharply focused photo depicted Ben Sawyer as an Oakland PD officer, his eyes hidden behind dark mirrored glasses, mouth open as if in midshout, the veins in his neck bulged and pronounced. Clad in a black, militaristic uniform complete with load-bearing vest and leather gloves, he straddled a prone and terrified Hector Espudo. In his hand, Ben held the gun that practically raped the man’s throat. Tia knew it didn’t help that the picture perfectly captured the whole white-on-brown thing.

“Yeah. I’ve seen it. Nice Ray-Bans. And the gloves were a great touch.”

“Very funny.” Ben laughed, flipping her his middle finger, then went on.

“It started the first morning. The media found our house, and they went into some kind of feeding frenzy like they hadn’t eaten a cop alive in years. We could hardly get out of the driveway. Things got rough for Jake. We had to pull him out of school. All the teasing, name-calling. Even a few threats. Crazy stuff.” Ben’s voice turned serious. “Used to be that boy couldn’t wait to be a cop. It was all he ever talked about. Now … well, you heard him. All he wants is to get away from me.”

Ben sat silent, and Tia couldn’t think of anything to say. She hadn’t expected this kind of revelation. Of course she had heard the stories and read the newspaper, but it had never dawned on her how the whole mess might impact the Sawyer family. Ben seemed to want to keep talking, so she just listened.

“Then there’s Alex. Man, I know she was really trying, but I think she was hating me right about then.”

Another moment of apparent reflection and a long taste of beer while Tia waited patiently. Ben went on. “Just when things seemed like they might die down a little bit, one of the cable news channels would get hold of another grainy cell phone recording and it would start all over. Course I didn’t do myself any favors with some of my more colorful comments. Those got plenty of air time.”

Another swig. Tia hoped it felt good for him to open up.

“Yeah, old Hector ended up beating the rap for the whole trying-to-kill-a-cop thing. The district attorney wouldn’t touch the case, said I poisoned the water with my over-the-top reaction. But homeboy still had the murder of the gang member to deal with. He got twenty-five to life for that.”

The tone of Ben’s voice finally lightened, and he looked at Tia and winked. “He’s gone and made quite a name for himself. I hear he even got a couple of marriage proposals from his jail cell. But the word from the joint is the son of a bitch has one hell of nasty lisp.”

Tia laughed and Ben joined in.

After a few seconds, she asked, “But they still went ahead and fired you?”

“Not fired. I resigned in lieu of termination, which I guess is pretty much the same thing. The PD bosses threw my ass under the bus, then drove over me a few times. My union reps hid under a rock. My lawyer was from the bottom of the barrel. The county DA said resign or he’d rain hell down on my ass like I couldn’t imagine. And at that point, I could imagine a lot. He said it would all go away if I would go away.” Ben shrugged. “So I did.”

Ben drained his beer and looked with surprise at the empty bottle.

“I thought I’d be able to find another department in California willing to take me on. You know, just start over as a patrolman. But no one wanted anything to do with me. Eventually I reached out to Lars … Chief Norgaard.”

Ben stared into space for several seconds. “Let’s just say he wanted his daughter to be happy. He took a chance on me. Brought me on and let me keep my sergeant rank. You know the rest. All that effort to make it on my own, and I still end up in the shadow of the great Norseman.”