Love or Honor (6 page)

In those fond days, “going steady” meant hand-holding at the movies, the privilege of planting a chaste goodnight kiss on the cheek. Chris went steady with Beth for nearly two years, partly because it was much easier to have a steady girl than to keep gathering up his nerve to ask girls for dates. As unlikely as it seemed, for such an apparently confident guy, Chris was shy. In his whole life he'd never approached a girl to say hello or to ask her to dance. He could never bring himself to say, “Hi, my name's Chris, what's yours? and what are you doing tomorrow night?” He knew other guys did that, and he wished he could too, but for some reason, he absolutely couldn't.

When his family moved to Queens, Chris was considered a smart, streetwise guy from Manhattan by the boys who had grown up in an area that Chris considered “East Cupcake, USA.” Wearing the Dukes of Manhattan black-and-yellow sweater helped his image along. But he was never as experienced or daring as he was thought to be. He'd grown up without any serious romance, and only one close call.

The year he graduated from high school, he was at a party at somebody's house, in the basement rec room. The lights were low; in the darkness, Chris and Beth were dancing to a record by The Platters. Chris had had several beers, then some jug wine, and as he and Beth danced “The Fish”—a close, inside kind of dance—it suddenly seemed to both of them that it was a swell idea to drive down to Delaware or Maryland, where they could be married right away, without a waiting period. They were heading south in his red car, Beth snuggled up against him, when whoosh! his head suddenly cleared. What the heck am I doing? he asked himself, and he made a sharp U-turn at the next break in the divided highway.

Once he began playing in nightclubs, approaching women was no longer a problem. Women approached him. For some reason, women seemed drawn to drummers. He found it astonishing that they would just walk up to him and stand there, openly flirting, sometimes when they had a guy waiting back at their table. He remembered one lady who had kept reaching out to try to touch his hair, telling him over and over that his curls were very sexy.

That surprised him, too, because he'd always hated his curly hair. Once, when he was scuffling with another boy on the street, a neighbor had leaned out her window and, seeing Chris only from the back, with his black curls tumbling to the collar of the pink shirt Katrina had made for him, she had screamed at the other boy, whom she knew: “Jimmy! You, Jimmy! You stop hitting that girl!” Chris was so mortified that he'd gone to a barbershop to have his hair straightened. Afterward, though his hair wasn't really curly anymore, it wasn't what you would call straight, either; it sort of stuck out stiffly around his head, like jangled wires, and it stunk to high heaven. So he had let his hair return to its natural curly mass which, he came to realize, was a romantic asset, encouraging women to want to mother him or go to bed with him, or both.

Beyond the lure of the curls and the dark eyes, Chris was attractive to women because of his genuine empathy. In the late sixties and early seventies, with the women's movement just dawning, and particularly in the macho milieu of the 4-oh, Chris was a standout feminist, though he never would have used that term. He was especially sympathetic to women who had been raped. He thought it ridiculous and wrong that in order to get a conviction, eyewitness corroboration of a woman's story was needed. As cops put it bluntly, the guy needed a glass ass. Because rape victims tended not to have witnesses handy, and because so many suspects therefore went free, Chris was especially pleased when one didn't. After a series of rapes in the 4-oh neighborhood, with a blind woman and a fifteen-year-old girl among the victims, Chris and his partner at the time, Mac, had identified the rapist. When they heard on the street that the man had fled to Puerto Rico, their quest seemed futile. Still, they staked out his apartment, because they'd also heard his wife was pregnant. They had a hunch he'd want to be back for the birth.

Week after week, on their own time, they sat in their unmarked car, smoking cigarettes, drinking endless cups of coffee. When they saw a man appear in the lighted fourth-floor window one night, they almost didn't believe what they saw.

“What do you think?” Chris asked.

“Let's go up,” Mac said.

They radioed the station, then Chris took the front door, while Mac went up to the roof. When the woman opened the front door, and the man saw Chris, he headed out the window. Chris dove out after him, and they grappled on the fire escape. Meantime, up on the roof, Mac was using his flashlight to fight off a guard dog. Chris was being pushed backward over the railing when Mac came bounding down the steps and pounced. Chris told a newspaper reporter that the man had been “as strong as a bull,” so the story labeled him “The Bronx Bull Rapist.”

Two women had made positive IDs, and one woman's husband had been able to finger the guy. That woman had been followed home from the subway and forced at knifepoint to the top-floor landing, where she was sodomized. When her assailant was running down the stairs, he passed a man coming up—the woman's husband, on his way home from work. Amazingly, the suspect had even boasted of his crimes. “If you put my picture in the paper, you'll hear from forty women I raped,” he told Chris.

With the IDs and the admission, Chris felt they had a rock-solid case. But at the arraignment, the judge remanded the guy on only five hundred dollars bail. Chris was so enraged that as the judge stepped down, Chris hurled his briefcase at the bench, using both hands, and was nearly cited for contempt.

When the trial got underway, Chris thought the judge was more concerned with the well-being of the defendant than of the women. “Did you have anything to eat, Mr. Rodriguez?” Chris parroted him later. “Did the police officer read you your rights, Mr. Rodriguez? Did you understand the police officer when he read you your rights? Are you very sure you understood, Mr. Rodriguez?”

Chris had decided, early in his career, that a detached cynicism was his most viable response in a courtroom. It was theater of the absurd, he felt, with stock players saying the same lines over and over; an unbalanced chess game with too many pawns. So he'd trained himself not to get upset when somebody he'd nailed was turned loose, for one reason or another. Thieves, muggers, pushers were going to be back on the street sooner or later, probably sooner, so Chris had developed his own simple philosophy. “My job is to take the man off the street and see that he's locked up. Then I have to do the paperwork, get to court on the right day, be there on time, bring in the evidence, and make sure my testimony is correct. After that, what happens, happens. My act is over.”

Only once had he screwed up his act. “Did you advise my client of his rights?” a defendant's lawyer asked.

“Yes, I did,” Chris said.

“And how did you advise my client of his rights?”

“Well, I just advised him of his rights.”

“You just
told
him?” the lawyer pressed.

“Yes, I did.”

“You didn't
read
them?”

“No, I didn't.”

“Do you know them that well, Officer?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then please recite the rights for this court now,” the lawyer said, as Chris went blank. Totally blank. He knew the rights upside down and backward, and he also knew that he could sit on that witness stand forever and a day without being able to recite them. He felt like a total jerk, especially when the lawyer then made a motion to suppress.

From then on, he carried the scrap of paper with the rights written out everywhere he went. When a lawyer asked, “How did you advise my client of his rights?” Chris would say, “I read them from this piece of paper,” and he would whip out the scrap. If a lawyer then tried to trip him up by sneering, “You mean you don't even know the rights without reading them?” Chris would smile and say, “Yes, I know them, but I wanted your client to have the best possible presentation.”

Chris had absolutely no use for lawyers. “Even Shakespeare said, ‘Get rid of all the lawyers and we'll have a better society,' or something like that,” Chris pointed out. “I think maybe Christ said something like that, too.” He felt cops were often trapped in a tough, even an impossible situation. “Legislatures take months to put something into law, then they expect a cop to make a split-second decision, with no time for a committee meeting or a conference or any kind of huddle, and then enforce the law instantaneously and exactly right. And they say to a cop, ‘If you make a mistake, we'll prosecute
you
.'” One way or another, Chris felt, a suspect was likely to slip through—by copping a plea, or claiming mitigating circumstances, or by having some sharp Legal Aid guy confuse the issue enough so that the case got thrown out. And Chris had learned not to take it personally.

Except in the case of “The Bronx Bull Rapist.” Chris remembered how terrified the fifteen-year-old girl had been, how she'd backed away from him, whimpering, her face quivering, when he tried to talk to her. “Once a woman is raped, she's never the same again,” Chris said moodily. “A part of her is stolen and she will never get it back.” He'd handled a rape case in which the woman had just sat there as he tried to get her to speak, with her jaw so tightly locked, the doctor found, that she physically couldn't open her mouth to get the words out.

Chris was determined that the Bronx Bull not get away. He called up some women he didn't know but knew something about, whose bylines he'd seen, including “the one with the glasses,” Gloria Steinem. “I think the judge is coddling this guy,” Chris told them. “I think he's completely insensitive to the women who were raped, and I'm afraid he's going to sabotage this case and let the guy go.” On the next trial day, Chris's team was lined up in the front rows. Each woman had a notebook and pen in hand, and kept her eyes riveted on the judge. Chris watched happily as the judge's attitude changed, “from night to day. He got sixty-five years, baby!” Chris told Liz.

Liz had been singing at a nightclub in Manhattan, when Chris dropped in one night to hear the flute player in the combo. He'd always liked the flute. The owner of the place knew Chris and, between sets, brought Liz over to say hello.

“I hear you're a policeman,” Liz said lightly.

“Well, yeah, I am,” Chris mumbled awkwardly.

“Well, I feel real safe now,” Liz said, and everybody laughed. Chris stayed until she was finished, then drove her home to her apartment on the upper east side. When he dropped her off, he didn't ask for her phone number.

When he went back to the club a few nights later, she asked why not. Chris mumbled something vague, because he didn't have an answer. Liz was lovely, with blond hair in a classic pageboy cut, wide blue eyes and, in her black dress with a ruffled skirt and a string of pearls, she was sexy in a cool, sophisticated way.

“Well, here it is,” she said, handing him a slip of paper. “Call me up sometime.” So he called, and they went to dinner. When she got a part in an off-Broadway revue, he went to see it twice. When the show closed, she invited him to Massachusetts for the weekend, to the small town where she'd grown up and where her parents still lived. Chris enjoyed the trip and he liked her parents, who seemed to like him, too, even though Liz's dad was an avid golfer and Chris had always hated golf, along with most sports. As a kid, he'd always been the last to be picked for a team, any team, in any game. When he was the only kid left, just standing there, one team captain or the other would shrug and say, okay Chris, you're with us. On Saturdays and Sundays, when other kids were playing ball, Chris was at home, practicing drums.

Chris had never said “I love you” to anyone. Even when he felt that he loved someone, he didn't say it in those words, not even within the family. He'd never told his mother he loved her, and certainly he'd never told his father. In a romantic relationship, he just couldn't seem to get the words out. He hated the way people said “I love you,” so loosely, sometimes so falsely: At the station he heard guys on the phone, talking to their wives, saying they were working late, don't wait supper, just go on to bed, see you tomorrow, I love you, then hanging up and heading out to meet their girlfriends.

So Chris went to the other extreme and never said it. He assumed that people who knew him would know how he felt and, if he loved them, they would know it without him saying so. When Liz asked him, “Do you love me?” he was embarrassed and mumbled, “Well, yeah.” He knew certainly that he'd never met anyone so talented and glamorous, while still being so nice and so easy to talk to. He'd never known anyone like her. “Why are you interested in me?” he asked her. “I'm just a cop.” While the question was a trifle disingenuous—by now he was no longer oblivious to his masculine charm—he really did want to know. “I don't meet many straight, normal people in my line of work,” Liz told him. So maybe she hadn't known anyone like him, either.

Chris liked being married. He no longer needed to spend so much time after hours at McSherry's, now that he had a wife to come home to, share his day with. Shortly before he met Liz, he'd had the bout of hepatitis that the doctor blamed on alcohol. Getting married and settling down was a good way to straighten out, Chris thought. And as long as he'd stopped drinking, he thought he might as well go one step further, and he'd stopped smoking.

Liz seemed content, too. She'd had a couple of roommates, each of whom had married and moved away. With the instability built into her profession, she welcomed some emotional and social security, too. She was understanding of Chris's irregular schedule, because hers was. When she got a part in the road company of a Broadway musical, Chris flew out to Cleveland to see her.

At home in Forest Hills, Chris discovered a domestic streak in himself that surprised him. When he was living with his mother, he'd been accustomed to not lifting a finger. Now, when he had a day off, he enjoyed doing the laundry. Liz liked to sleep late; he liked to bring her breakfast in bed. He could whip up a fine Greek salad. He especially enjoyed their trips to Massachusetts. Every year since they'd met, they'd gone there at Christmastime. Chris would spend Christmas Eve with his mother, then, very early on Christmas morning, he and Liz would pile into his car, loaded with gifts, and set off for the country, lighthearted as children, singing. Chris couldn't match his wife's trained voice, but he managed to hold his own. He thought that the more he sang, the better he sounded.