Suspect, p.9
Suspect, page 9
Both the Rev and Mrs. Langenhalter, even Josea, are all smiling discreetly. As a witness, Cornish is starting to leak oil.
Rik flips through the yellow pad he’s holding.
“Now, you said on direct that your relationship with the Chief was strictly professional, is that right?”
“That’s what I said.”
“And that you were ‘shocked’ when the Chief approached you. That’s a quote.”
“I was shocked.”
“And you were shocked because, again quoting, ‘you didn’t think of the Chief in that vein.’ Right?”
“You take good notes,” says Cornish, in a tone that suggests there is something sneaky about that.
“Now, do you recall ever saying in the squad room at the Highland Isle Police Station to a few officers, quote, ‘The Chief is symphony class on the skin flute’?”
Several people in the room, who understand the remark, can’t contain their sharp laughter.
Cornish, who knows from the way Rik put the question that we have a witness, gives it the back of his hand.
“So what?” he says. “Am I not supposed to kiss and tell?”
“You made that remark?”
He shakes his head. “I guess.”
“Well, do you remember that you made that comment in 2017, a few years before this supposed encounter with the Chief?”
Cornish screws up his mouth while he considers his options.
“Well then, I guess I didn’t say it.”
“So now you’re denying saying that? Which is it? Did you say it or not?”
“I don’t really remember one way or the other.”
“Well, do you know Sergeant Emmitt LaTreaux?”
Cornish snorts. “Oh, it’s him.”
“You don’t like Sergeant LaTreaux?”
“We don’t get on.”
“You had an argument about something you said, and you two stopped speaking in 2018.”
“What I said wasn’t racist, but he thought so.”
Marc stands to object about relevance. The Rev is frowning a little, thinking that Rik is trying to leverage race again, but Rik says, “I’m just putting a date on the conversation in the squad room.” It was Cornish, not Rik, who said LaTreaux thinks Walter is a racist, and the Rev seems to recognize that.
“All right,” says Reverend Dalrymple. “But let’s stick with the squad room.”
“Well, now that I’ve refreshed your recollection by mentioning Officer LaTreaux, do you deny saying in the squad room in 2017, ‘I can tell you, the Chief is symphony class on the skin flute’?”
“Like I said. I don’t remember that.”
“Well, you couldn’t have said it, could you, because you told us that as of March 2020, your relationship with the Chief had been strictly professional and you didn’t think of her in that vein, meaning in a sexual way?”
Cornish just glares. “If I said it, I wasn’t speaking firsthand. Must have been something I heard. I guess she got around. You know. Guys talk.”
“And again. Just to reaffirm. Your relationship with the Chief up to that conversation at the Saloon had been strictly professional, and you’d never thought of the Chief in a sexual vein, and so you were shocked by her request. You’re sticking with that?”
Marc objects that the questions were asked and answered, but Walter talks over him and says, “Because it’s true.”
“Now, Mr. Cornish, you’re a single man, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you were single in 2020?”
“You’ve got that right.”
“Had you been married previously?”
“Unfortunately.”
“And your wife sued for divorce and claimed during the proceedings that you had been constantly unfaithful?”
Marc stands again. “Same objection. Mr. Cornish’s behavior, alleged or true, is irrelevant under the rape shield law.”
“There is no law,” Rik answers, “that prevents showing that a witness has lied under oath about a material matter in the current proceeding.”
Mrs. Langenhalter whispers in the Rev’s ear.
“Then let’s hear that proof,” the Rev says.
“That’s where I’m going,” says Rik. He comes to the table for the package Tonya brought me, which clearly came from Paulette Cornish, Tonya’s church buddy who didn’t want to talk to me because she had no interest in helping the Chief.
“Do you recall learning during your divorce proceedings that your wife’s attorney had hired a private investigator to follow you? And do you remember that her lawyer produced a number of affidavits from the investigator to you in discovery?”
Cornish scowls. “I thought that shit was confidential.”
“Again, Mr. Cornish, no confidentiality order permits you to lie under oath.”
Mrs. Langenhalter nods sagely.
“Now, do you recall, Mr. Cornish, that one of the affidavits from the private investigator stated specifically that he had followed you to the Saloon on Friday, May 16, 2014, that you had left in the company of a woman known to him as Lucia Gomez-Barrera, that you drove to the parking lot of a plant in Anglia and, to the investigator, appeared to be engaging in sexual intercourse in your automobile?”
Marc stands and says, “Isn’t that affidavit hearsay?”
“We can call the investigator as a witness if you prefer, Mr. Hess.”
The Rev intervenes. “Here’s the question for Cornish. Did that happen? That thing in 2014? With the Chief?”
Now Cornish is in trouble, because he may be buying himself a perjury rap, having testified so emphatically that things between the Chief and him were purely professional until 2020. Quickly hip to his problem, Cornish looks at the Rev and says, “I’m not gonna answer that.”
“I’m sorry, Reverend,” says Rik, “but either Mr. Cornish sits for full cross-examination and answers my questions, or the commission can’t consider his testimony. He doesn’t get to come in here and answer all of Mr. Hess’s questions but not mine.”
The Reverend mulls while Mrs. Langenhalter whispers to him, gesturing with her free hand. She clearly agrees with Rik.
Having the momentum, Rik forges ahead to fill the silence.
“Can we agree, Mr. Cornish, that you didn’t get promoted in May 2014 or anytime soon after this earlier meeting with the Chief?”
Cornish, confused about the legal ground he stands on, remains mute.
“Well,” says Rik, “do I assume you also won’t answer if I ask you about yet another prior personal meeting with the Chief?”
The Rev is staring at Cornish, his white eyebrows smelted together in an angry slash.
Walter is done, whether he knows it or not. The essential premise of his testimony has been shown to be a lie. He and the Chief were occasional fuck buddies. Nothing new in 2020. He wasn’t forced. He wasn’t shocked. And having been proven a liar under oath, there’s no reason to believe him on any of the other details. When the Chief says on the stand that Walter came on to her in 2020, which is what she’s told us from the start, her version will be essentially uncontested.
“The City withdraws the witness,” Marc says.
“I’m done?” asks Cornish.
“Oh, you’re done,” says Rik.
As the room begins to clear, the Chief remains seated at the respondent’s table. She has her hand over her mouth and is staring at the space the commissioners occupied, which is empty now. Rik touches her shoulder, right over the epaulets, and she reaches back to grip his hand for a second.
She was pretty defiant in the office about not apologizing for her sex life, but it’s hitting her now how all of this sounds in public. Walter Cornish can initiate a fuckathon every Friday night in the Saloon. But the Chief’s a woman, a personage in Highland Isle, and for a woman in a Catholic town, her behavior will still provoke a lot of nasty laughter. Rik will argue when he sums up that there are no explicit rules against ‘fraternization’ in Highland Isle. But the Chief’s daughters and her neighbors are going to be reading about all of this, skin flute and everything else. She’s won the round, but she isn’t going home in victory.
11. It Takes Me Two Days to See Tonya
It takes me two days to see Tonya. Fact is I’ve enjoyed meeting up with Tonya a lot. I’m pretty amazed by how she’s turned out, how strong and funny and cool she is. But after last time, it’s way too clear what she’s hoping. Like I said, I’m not going there with her again. And it doesn’t do either of us any good to start picking at the scar.
But getting the investigator’s affidavit from Paulette Cornish was a big deal—it changed the case and maybe the Chief’s life, and Tonya deserves to hear me say so. And besides, I know we may need her help again.
I ask her to meet at Mike’s and get there a little early. There is a woman at the bar, a very tall, blonde patrol officer in the Twenty-Second who I went home with from here one night after the second game of the softball season. (Because of the Chief’s case, I’ve missed several games and practices, although, in a totally un-Pinky-like move, I actually explained in advance to Rory Leong, our captain.) This woman—Maura, I think—starts my way, but I give her a squinty little headshake, and she stops and instead lifts her Manhattan in salute, a classy gesture, and I smile back. Maybe another night.
There was a time in my life when I thought of sex as the most important thing I was going to do each day. I generally had no clue who I was going to find to hook up with that night, but the thought that that person was out there was exciting in itself, something to discover, knowing that the intense reality of the act would, like a glowing star, outshine anything else that would happen to me in the hours in between.
Although I don’t like to admit it, my life is tamer now. The club scene is not so fun anymore. The men are all looking at the twenty-year-olds, and the lesbian places where I’ve gone for years sometimes make me feel like an old maid. This is a better venue, and most nights I arrive here after a game, I’ll leave with someone, man or woman, maybe someone I’ve slept with before, more often someone new. I don’t know if cops have more sex than other professions. Lawyers? Probably yes. NBA players? Probably no. At Mike’s, there’s always a squad of cop-girls, groupies looking their best, or what they think is their best—lots of scent and makeup, big hair, tight clothes—women who, to be plain, get wet at the sight of a badge and gun. And there is also the wartime WTF thing in the atmosphere at Mike’s, turning this into a sexual free-fire zone. Many days on the job are as boring as a file clerk’s, but most file clerks don’t go to work knowing they will pass somebody on the street with a desperate wish to shoot them. And there’s also cop privilege: I know the rules, I know the rules are important, I enforce the rules, so I don’t need to follow the rules. Anyway, people here feel safer to me than some rando. Sex is just sex, doing one another a solid for a couple hours—then go home and don’t look back. Catch and release, as they say.
When Helen died, Pops’s rabbi, who presided at the funeral with a priest Helen liked, said very urgently, as part of her eulogy, ‘We are not our bodies.’ This was some big spiritual point that what was great about Helen was her spirit. And I thought Helen crushed it, she was almost as important to me as Pops, and I was truly shook when she died. But as I was sitting there at the funeral, I thought, Hell if that’s true about me. I will always be awkward with people, and I’ll eternally have a hard time maintaining focus on paperwork or reading. But for the most part, I’ve always been able to count on my body. I was a three-sport athlete in high school, a for-real Olympic hopeful on the board and even now I remain a standout pistol shot. And sex fits in with all of that, because in this realm, I deal with someone else with confidence and get back really positive responses.
Tonya arrives while I’m thinking about all this. She’s carrying a draft beer for each of us. She puts the glasses down on the table and jumps up on the stool but doesn’t remove her coat, sending the message she’s not expecting this to become an evening, which is a relief.
“So I just need to say how totally awesome that was of you,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “Don’t thank me too much. I wasn’t even sure at first if I was going to give the affidavit to you. Paulette—Cornish’s ex—spent all this time going through the boxes in her attic because she wanted me to see what she had against the Chief. She was like, ‘Show your friend that next time she wants to talk to me.’ I warned her that everything is backwards in a trial sometimes, and it might even help you guys by showing Walt’s a liar. But that was okay by her. Best of both worlds: Lucy’s a tramp and Walt couldn’t pick the truth out of a lineup.”
“Well, Mrs. Cornish kind of got her wish. You can be as feminist as you like and say, ‘I own my body and will do whatever I like with it,’ but for a woman, you know how that goes down in public.”
“Word,” Tonya answers. I don’t really need to explain this to somebody who was closeted into her early twenties. “Once I heard how it all played out at the hearing, I was pretty relieved, because I’ve kind of been waiting for the Chief’s security system to bite her in the behind.”
There’s a beat while I try to remember what Tonya’s talking about, which leads to that lost-in-space moment of panic because I’m not understanding something that everybody else does. But finally, I have to ask, “What security system?”
Tonya grabs my arm across the small table.
“Girl, don’t you know there are cameras all around the Chief’s house? The force put them in like four years ago. I was the liaison on that.”
I’ve noticed the cameras whenever I come by the Chief’s place to deliver papers Rik wants her to see, which, given the nature of the P&F proceedings, I can’t usually drop off at the central police station.
“But the Chief said the video output is saved for thirty days,” I answer. “Standard commercial system.”
“No no no,” says Tonya. “That was the original NVR. A few years back, some asshole was harassing her and sticking dog poop in her mailbox every couple months. The fact that we had such a hard time grabbing the guy kind of got the commander, George Leery, thinking dark thoughts and saying we were lucky it was just dog shit and not some crazy street gang that came to kidnap Lucy, because our security setup sucked. So we changed out all the equipment and I put a Thunderhead NVR in her den. Forty-eight terabytes. And it uploads every month to a cloud system with some really cool compression that only saves what you’d want to see, meaning images with full-frame motion. We can go back close to four years. Searching is a bitch, because most of it is people walking by when they take their pooch out, but a year later we nabbed Mr. Dogshit. He started in with, ‘It’s just a prank, I did it once.’ We reviewed seven months and got him five more times. He caught ninety days in jail.”
“Nice.”
“Definitely. But the Chief was recused on the investigation because she was the victim. I guess she never got the details. Or paid attention. She’s not exactly a techie. We all got our flaws.
“But I was worried,” says Tonya, “with these guys saying she brought them home that it would all be on the system and would corroborate them and look pretty, you know, swampy.”
With Cornish, it might have. But the Chief says DeGrassi’s story is all wrong. And if she’s telling the truth, there should be no sign of Blanco.
“Can you show me how to search the storage system?”
She makes a face and kind of draws her full shoulders in around herself.
“I dunno. That really puts me in the middle. And I mean technically, the department is paying for the storage and the equipment.”
“Well, she’s the Chief. Who else can give permission?”
Tonya touches her beer glass and says that she’ll think about it. She’s shaping her eyebrows these days, which she would have never even thought about in her lumbersexual days, and it makes it more noticeable when she shifts into that pensive look. By now I recognize it and realize things are about to go sideways.
“How’s the dude in your building?” she asks.
“Interesting,” I say. “But very mysterious.”
“Is it a thing?” She is hunched over her glass now, almost like she’s ducking.
“It’s a weird thing,” I say. “Rik keeps telling me to give it up.” I’m just making this up on the fly as fast as I can.
“Will you?”
“Not clear.”
She nods several times and sinks back into radio silence for a while. I want to change the subject fast but, typically, find myself stuck for words.
“So, you know,” she says, focusing exclusively on the table and running her finger in the circle of moisture that has gathered beneath her beer, “I was thinking the other day, just kind of wondering, I don’t even know why, but if I had ever been like, ‘Okay, you go be with boys if you have to,’ if I could have ridden with that, you think it might have worked with us?”
It’s all I can do to keep myself from groaning. I have been trying for several weeks now to kind of figure out what’s going on with Tonya. And I am slowly understanding that I am a significant person to her.
Not that I ever had the same experience. My first time was at snowboard camp on Mount Hood in Oregon. I was fourteen, and my mom used a little bit from her trust fund to pay for the summer. It was like, Any price to get Pinky out of the house.
So I was feeling pretty vulnerable anyway, and I said yes to this guy from California named Milos who was seventeen and not a completely bad dude. He wasn’t as smart as me, but he was really good-looking and seemed to have been with a lot of girls. But as soon as he rolled off, this hole opened inside of me, a canyon of regret. Not about the act, which wasn’t much. Generally, I’ve never been very good about the future—it’s just been a place I won’t go—and at that age all I could see for myself was boarding. But even that young, I suddenly knew I’d be dragging this guy Milos around with me for the rest of my life. Not only was I hearing everybody at school discussing their first time, but I’d listened to an entire radio call-in show a few months before on the same subject and was just blown away about how vivid it remained to all these people, eighty-year-olds with great-grandchildren and soldiers phoning from Afghanistan.
