Dominion (40 page)

Just as Clarence was packing up his briefcase at four-thirty, Sid Grady stopped him. “Mount Hood courts tomorrow morning at eight, right?”

“Right,” Clarence said. “See you there, man.”

“Hey, look out, big guy. I feel my luck changin’. Beat Ekstrom a couple days ago, 6-3, 6-2.”

“Wow. Wish I had time to get ready for you.”

Grady was a sportswriter who’d played singles in high school and a year or two in college and was still a good athlete. Clarence headed to his car, smiling to himself, feeling slightly guilty he’d misled Grady. He wondered what Grady’d think if he knew Clarence’s racquet and sports bag full of tennis balls were in the back of his car and where he was headed now. It wasn’t just Grady he was gunning for. Sid would be a tune-up for Norcoast.

Clarence did what he’d done twenty years earlier, in college. He went to the local courts to hit against the wall. He wouldn’t leave until he hit a hundred forehands, a hundred backhands, fifty volleys on both sides, and fifty good serves each to the deuce and ad courts. It didn’t matter if it took him thirty minutes or two hours. He would stay until he accomplished his goals. He always did.

Clarence had taken up tennis his junior year of college, a strange sport for an offensive lineman and even stranger for a black man. A white teammate, Greg, a wide receiver, introduced him to the game. But what really turned him on to tennis was Arthur Ashe.

It was 1975, and for the first time ever Clarence watched Wimbledon. He witnessed Arthur Ashe, toward the end of his career, bobbing and weaving his way to the final against Jimmy Connors, the number one player in the world. The commentators congratulated Ashe for making it so far. To be number two at Wimbledon was nothing to sneeze at. Everyone knew Connors would win.

It wasn’t just that tennis was a game of upper-class suburban privilege. It was that Connors was quicker and stronger and hit harder than Ashe. Clarence watched that day, hoping Ashe would surprise them all and maybe take it to four or five sets. But something happened that day, and as he watched, something happened inside Clarence. Ashe out-thought Connors, strategized, refused to play into his power game. He didn’t give him anything to tee off on, nothing to let him establish his rhythm and take over the game. Clearly, Connors should have won. But he didn’t. The gold Wimbledon trophy landed in the hands of a black man, and the favored white man held only the silver tray. Clarence screamed and hollered in front of his television set as if he’d won the match himself.

That afternoon Clarence had gone out and hit against the walls and practiced serving for three hours. The next day when he played his teammate Greg, he beat him for the first time.

Almost every day back then he’d gone out and hit against those walls. He played hard through his junior year, meeting players on the tennis team and getting their help. His senior year he went out for the team. Incredibly, he made it, first as a backup player, then as fourth doubles, and by the end of the season as third. The tennis coach told him he’d never seen anyone take up a sport his junior year and make a major college varsity team his senior year. It was unthinkable. But Clarence did it. His coach told him it probably helped that he took up so much space on the court his opponent couldn’t hit it where he wasn’t.

A hundred forehand ground strokes.

Clarence habitually beat players born and bred in elite racquet clubs. He once whipped a guy who paid more for his tennis racket than Clarence had for his car, that 1967 Hillman Minx that he filled to overflowing. He loved the discipline of readiness, physical and mental. He loved every facet of the game, from his crushing serve, to rushing the net, to hitting the hard topspin passing shot or the lob four inches from the baseline. He watched his opponents swear and kick the court and occasionally throw down their racquets in frustration, wondering how this guy was beating them. In contrast, he always smiled and acted the gentleman.

A hundred backhand ground strokes.

What drew him to tennis was strategy. It was a thinking man’s sport. Clarence belonged to Cascade Athletic Club in Gresham, a great facility where he could play through the winter. But on any nice weekend, he played outdoors if he could. He looked forward to facing off with Grady. He knew the face he’d see on the other side would be Norcoast’s, not Grady’s.

He hit the ball over and over against the concrete wall. He never liked the theory that blacks are naturally supeiror athletes. It implied they could get away with being lazy, undisciplined, or stupid, whereas white guys could make it only because they’d overcome their genes by being smart and working hard. One of his favorite football players, whom he’d personally interviewed once, was Jerry Rice, the all-pro Forty-niners receiver. No one worked as hard as Rice. He always came to practice early, always stayed late, always studied the game films over and over. Rice wasn’t the best receiver in NFL history just because of black genes. He was a hard worker, disciplined, smart, and studious.

Fifty forehand volleys.

In college Clarence had chosen for a course project to do a study of all the arguments for keeping blacks out of professional sports, articulated in the newspapers of the thirties and forties. The sportswriters reasoned that blacks lacked the mental discipline, the brains, the ability to focus that athletics demanded. Now, fifty years later, blacks had carved out a dominant role in many professional sports, and did anybody credit some of this to discipline, smarts, and ability to focus? No. It was just the luck of good African jungle, plowboy, cotton-pickin’, bale-liftin’ genes. In the ways that mattered to Clarence, blacks didn’t get any credit before, and they got little now.

Fifty backhand volleys.

When Joe Louis whipped Max Schmeling, when Jesse Owens won the gold to the dismay of the lily-white Hitler in the stands, it sent a message that would later open the door for Jackie Robinson and finally burst the floodgates. Whites had so many heroes, from presidents to the Wright brothers, from Einstein to Schweitzer, from Superman to the Green Hornet, from movie stars to Miss America, from Red Grange to Joe Dimaggio. As a child, Clarence had clung to every black hero he knew, including his father. Maybe that was why it was so hard for so many to let go O. J.

Fifty good serves to the deuce court.

Fifty good serves to the ad court.

After an hour of hard work, soaking with sweat, Clarence headed home, feeling ready for his match with Grady the next morning. Clarence would be lying in wait for him and for Norcoast. Grady had never beaten him. Tomorrow would be no exception.

“Accosted right out in front of your sister’s place?” Ollie shook his head. “You got protection?”

“She’s carrying pepper spray when she walks,” Clarence said, “but she’s not walking alone any more. If no one’s with her, she’s driving. I borrowed Jake’s shotgun and ordered a handgun. Familiar with the Glock 17?”

“Sure. That’s the hardware that caused all the ‘plastic gun’ hysteria in the eighties. You know, supposedly wouldn’t trigger the alarm in airport metal detectors? Ever see
The Fugitive
? Tommy Lee Jones carries a Glock 17. Then he uses its little brother, the Glock 19, for backup. You know, the gun he pulls out of the fanny pack in the storm sewer.”

“Interesting what different people notice in a movie,” Clarence said.

“Cops notice cop stuff. Like, every time Jones puts the Glock 17 in his hand, he racks the slide to chamber a round. Truth is, there’s not a cop in the country who carries his gun with an empty chamber. The slide rack makes for good Hollywood, I guess. On the street it could get you killed. ’Scuse me, Mr. Armed Felon, but see, I haven’t chambered a round yet, so could you hold off pluggin’ me till I do it, just to even the odds?’”

“I got one with a laser on it,” Clarence said.

“No kidding? Why?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t fired a gun in years. Guess it could help my accuracy.”

“Maybe. Cops tend to shy away from lasers. They can make you dependent and overconfident. Then you get out on a bright day, you can’t even see the thing and you freeze. And you can imagine the confusion of a room full of laser equipped SWAT cops. You don’t know whose dot belongs to who. A friend with DC Metro police told me about some officers who got in the habit of playing laser tag around the station. Well, one of the guys forgot to unload. He tagged an officer with a round to the stomach. He lived, but it was all pretty embarrassing. The moral is, be careful with your laser gun. It’s not a toy.”

“If it was, I wouldn’t have bought it.”

“The really cool lasers are the infrared ones,” Ollie said. “They’re only visible with night vision equipment, so the subject doesn’t know he’s being tagged. Talk about stealth. Some of those lasers can go three hundred yards. Can you imagine? Wonder how long before the gangs get them.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure. Some gangs have started using explosives. Dynamite, bombs, Molotov cocktails, military weapons. The fully automatics. Look at our HK53. It escalates. Morals and respect for human life are all that would hold you back from using that stuff. Otherwise, it’s just, ‘If I can get my hands on it, I’ll use it.’ All it takes is money, and drugs bring in plenty of that. You just spend your illegal money to buy illegal weapons. It all adds up to a war zone with lots of casualties.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Already has. Unless things turn around, it’ll get worse. What’s going to stop it? It’s all a battle for dominion. Who’s going to rule the turf? Who’s going to have the final word?”

They both sat quietly, sagging under the weight of the topic.

“Ollie?” Clarence wondered if he looked as uncomfortable as he felt. “What was the deal with your brutality charge?”

Ollie stood and walked slowly. “I vaguely remember that. Let’s see, wasn’t there something about it in the
Trib
?” The sarcasm wasn’t sufficient to mask his pain. “Kept thinking you were never going to bring it up.” Ollie sighed. “It’s a long story. Can we talk over lunch?”

“I’ve got the time,” Clarence said. “Lou’s?”

“Yeah. The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, but at least there’s Lou’s.”

They small talked during the five-minute drive. They both bypassed the usual cheeseburgers for a corned beef on rye, Rory’s special he begged them to try.

“Okay,” Ollie said. “So you want to hear the story? Well, it was 1987. All started when this dude robbed a 7-Eleven, you know the one over on MLK and Jack?”

Clarence nodded. It was less than a mile from Dani’s house.

“He was flipped out big time. Later we found out it was crack and PCP. Bad combo. Coming up from L.A., I was still a uniformed, before I got into detective division. I was driving on routine patrol. My partner sees this guy in the store facing off with the cashier. He can’t see a gun, but she looks terrified. He says pull over, so I did. My partner, Rick Campbell, he got out of the car just as the dude was comin’ out. The guy looks at Rick out of the corner of his eye but doesn’t run. Smart move. Rick walks in and sees the cashier on the floor, her face smashed up. Turns out the perp pistol-whipped her with a Browning automatic, but she was still conscious. Rick makes sure she’s calling 911, and he’s back out the door chasin’ the guy on foot.

“The perp cuts across a field, my partner chasing him, while I called 911 too, to make sure the girl gets help. I take off in the patrol car thinking I could head them off on a back street. Sure enough, I come around this corner and there they are, both still running, forty feet between them. I pull up, my partner hops in, and the perp suddenly jumps in a car himself. He leads us on a high-speed chase. We go about twenty miles; he dents up three cars along the way, almost hit half a dozen pedestrians. Amazing no one else got hurt. I still have nightmares about it.”

“And then?”

“After a fifteen minute chase out the Sunset Highway past Hillsboro, we finally pull him over. He shoots at us; we pin him down and run him out of ammo. Then we come after him, hopin’ he isn’t saving a magazine for us. We try to cuff him, but he’s absolutely crazy. Has the strength of five men. We’d handled guys like him with a net before, and no one got hurt, but the ACLU made sure we couldn’t use nets anymore because they’re degrading. Truth is, the nets let us subdue a perp without having to hit him. We can’t just shoot them, of course, unless lives are endangered. Chemical sprays don’t work on the guys flyin’ high on crack, so if they keep fighting, the only thing we can do is hit them with our fists or nightsticks. Which gives bad cops an excuse to do what they want and puts good cops in a position where they have to do what they don’t want to. The bottom line is far greater physical harm both to criminals and cops. All compliments of the ACLU.”

“So what happened then?”

“Well, I didn’t want to shoot the guy, and cool reason wasn’t real effective. He was resisting arrest, hammerin’ us with his fists, and grabbing for our hands and holsters, trying to get hold of our guns. He was dangerous to himself, to us, to everyone, so as a last resort I used the nightstick on him. Hit him a half-dozen times in the shoulders to get him to stay down so we could handcuff him. After the bad publicity in the
Trib
, there were three or four witnesses who got together and decided I beat him because he was black. Truth is, I didn’t think about what color he was. I just thought about getting him under control and keeping him from hurting anybody.”

“But that’s not what other people thought.”

“Well, the front-page article in the
Trib
did the real damage. It started something like, ‘White Portland police officer Ollie Chambers, a transfer from LAPD, outraged a North Portland community by his brutal beating of a mentally handicapped black teenager.’”

“You think it came across that bad?”

“Just about. Check it out yourself.”

“I did.”

“Was I right?”

“Not word for word, but pretty close.”

“The funny thing was, the guy was nineteen, but he could have passed for twenty-nine. Besides, when a guy pistol-whips and robs a woman and empties his gun at you, your first thought isn’t to ask him when his voice changed or how long he’s been shaving or whether his neighbors think he’s a nice boy. And mentally handicapped? I didn’t stop to do an IQ test. I’m sure the girl he pistol-whipped felt better once she knew he had a handicap. She had to have reconstructive surgery on her face.”

Clarence nodded, his feelings tearing him two different directions. “I did some homework on your case. I’m curious about something. You didn’t mention just now that your partner Rick was black. Or that the girl at the 7-Eleven, the one he pistol-whipped, she was black too.”

“Didn’t think it mattered. They were people, and they got hurt. Who cares what color they were?”

“Well, people seemed to care about the color of the guy you beat on.”

“Yeah, you got that right. Isn’t it funny? I was concerned about the victims. But some people, all they cared about was the guy who made them victims. They didn’t care about the victim’s skin color, just the perp’s. Weird. I’ll never understand how criminals get turned into heroes.”

“I was surprised you had no comment at the time. You should have explained yourself.”

“I was under department orders to say nothing. Our attorneys wanted a press blackout. Well, the problem was the press just took it and treated my silence as if it were an admission of guilt.”

“I can understand that,” Clarence said.

“If I had it to do over again, I’d violate the gag order. Probably would’ve ended my career, but maybe it would’ve been worth it to stand up for my reputation.”

“So looking back at it, you still feel you were just doing your job?”

“Yeah. I thought so then and I think so now. Internal Affairs thought so too. But after Councilman Norcoast turned the screws on the DA, everybody wanted to take me down.”

“Norcoast?”

“Yeah. You don’t remember what the paper did the next few days? The
Trib
made the perp and Norcoast both look like heroes. And I don’t have to tell you what they made me look like.”

“Did you complain about the coverage?”

“Complain to who?”

“To the
Trib.
Or, I don’t know, anybody.”

“Well, sure, I groused about it. But who do you complain to? Who has the money to file a slander suit against a newspaper? My attorney thought about it, but he said we had a snowball’s chance of winning. We’d have to prove malice, and how could we do that? We’d probably have to pay the
Trib’s
lawyers’ bills. On a street cop’s salary? Right. It’s bad enough to have a newspaper make your wife cry through the night for six months and your kids ashamed to go to school. But to pay them and their lawyers for the privilege? Not me.”

“Did you contact the
Trib
?”

“I tried to talk to the reporter, but it didn’t do any good. I saw the photographer’s name, so I called her, left a message. Got a call back from somebody else, telling me she was unavailable, and if I had a beef I should contact the publisher’s office. I thought great, now maybe we’ll get somewhere.”

“Berkley has an open-door policy. What kind of response did you get from him?”

“I’ll let you know if he ever calls me back. Yeah, I heard about the open-door policy too. Only I think it was the back door and he sneaked out when he saw me coming. His pit bull secretary told me to have my lawyer talk to his lawyer. I said hey, this isn’t about a lawsuit or something. I just wanted to talk man to man, tell him my side, and what it was doing to my family. He never returned my calls.

“His secretary said something about the First Amendment and, ‘The
Tribune
stands by the story.’ I thought that was pretty funny. If today’s
Trib
headline was, ‘World will end at noon,’ tomorrow’s follow-up would say, ‘We stand by yesterday’s story.’ Captain told me something I’ve never forgotten: ‘Messin’ with the media is like wrestling with a pig. Everybody ends up getting dirty, but the pig likes it.”’

“I was at the
Trib
when it all happened,” Clarence said. “I remember it, but I think it got mixed up in my mind with a few other police brutality cases.”

“Yeah. One cop deserved to be fired for what he did—I just wasn’t the guy. There’s a lot of people who still think I hit the perp in the face with the nightstick, that I sprayed him with pepper mace after he was under control, that I even whaled on him after he was unconscious, which he never was, by the way.”

“You didn’t do any of that?”

“No, I didn’t. Look, I’m not saying I haven’t ever gotten in an extra lick that maybe wasn’t absolutely necessary, but it’s subjective, you know? Every cop realizes the people you lock up tonight are out tomorrow. The justice system is like a merry-go-round, minus the merry. So sometimes maybe the cop tries to get in a little justice figuring the courts won’t. What I’m saying is, I’m no saint. But the pepper mace and the nightstick were both last resorts. I only used them because he was still out of control and nothing my partner and I did was working.”