The Overton Window

  A moment is only a moment, and just like that, it’s gone. Noah felt the first savage blow to the back of his head, and maybe another. And then he felt nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 13

  He opened his eyes, and found her looking down at him.

  It was the wide variety of aches and pains that told him for certain she wasn’t a figment of his imagination. His head was resting in her lap, and Molly held him steady as the crowded police van bumped and jostled along the patchy downtown streets.

  Police van?

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  The light glaring down was bright blue-white, fluorescent, and harsh. As he turned his head he winced at a sudden stitch in his neck, like a bee sting to the spinal cord. The rear compartment was filled to capacity and beyond, packed with people he vaguely recognized from the bar. Most were sitting up, but some were reclining, as he was, in various states of physical distress.

  Noah looked up at her again. “What happened—”

  She hushed him with a fingertip to his lips, and he saw that her wrists were bound with nylon ties.

  The vehicle lurched and slid to a stop, the double doors in back swung open, and he was pulled away from her and out onto the street. Somehow the news crews had arrived and set up for on-scene reports even before the paddy wagons rolled in. Hot lights flicked on as local and network correspondents began shouting questions and their cameramen pushed in close to capture the scene. Noah’s legs would barely stay under him as he was herded into line along with the others.

  Once the reporters were left behind, the remaining perp walk through the police station was a gauntlet of pat-downs, prodding, and barked orders, ending with a final, distinctive clang as the holding-cell door swung closed.

  The pen he was locked in was one of several lining the hall; the total census must have been over three hundred. These were all men, of course; the women were taken elsewhere. Most of the guys nearby him seemed to be from the group at the tavern. Some others around the cell, clearly seasoned veterans of the penal system, appeared to have been brought in for day-to-day offenses ranging from vagrancy to prostitution to drunk-and-disorderliness.

  The flood of detainees from the bar had filled the place far beyond its capacity. Most of the people seemed stunned into brooding silence but some inmates were belligerent: shouting, picking fights, taunting the guards, or calling out for their lawyers, their mothers, or any other savior within earshot.

  Noah had been among the last to enter and he ended up pressed against the bars at the front of the cell. His head was still swimming and he needed to sit, but the cell felt like the 6 train at rush hour: there was barely enough room to turn around.

  After a time he saw something that he couldn’t begin to understand; he must have been mistaken. The man from the back of the tavern, the one with the gun, was being escorted from an adjacent cell. He wasn’t in handcuffs or restraints of any kind. He was just walking along with the officers toward the exit.

  “Gardner!”

  Hearing his name shouted out from somewhere down the hall snapped him back to reality. A police sergeant with a clipboard soon appeared with two other officers behind him.

  He reached out through the bars. “That’s me. I’m Noah Gardner.”

  The three men gathered around and looked him over, comparing his physical details against whatever description they’d brought with them on the clipboard. It was his gold class ring from Riverdale Country School that seemed to cement the positive ID.

  The sergeant double-checked his orders, rattled through his keys until he found the proper match, and unlocked the door. As Noah exited the cell a delirious man behind him made a weak attempt to follow and was firmly encouraged to resume his place among the crowded inmates.

  “What’s going on?” Noah asked as they walked him out.

  “Your attorney’s on his way,” the sergeant replied, in a tone meant to telegraph a palpable disgust for the entire fickle enterprise of American jurisprudence.

  After a short walk through a maze of halls, Noah found himself sitting in a small side office across the desk from a person he presumed to be his arresting officer. The man was in plain clothes, unshaven, and rumpled, as though he was either near the end of a double shift or had been called out of a sound sleep for the beginning of a new one. It wasn’t the officer he’d confronted at the bar; that was a face he would have remembered.

  The desk was stacked with dog-eared files and clerical debris, the bulletin board an untidy splash of sticky notes, memos, duty rosters, rap sheets, marked-up photographs, and one unfunny faxed cartoon. Overworked, short-staffed, and underpaid: that was the prevailing message in the cramped, stuffy space.

  “Mr. Gardner, you have the right to remain silent,” the policeman said, his main attention on a printout of some sort in front of him, “and to refuse to answer questions. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have the right to consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an attorney present during any questioning, now or in the future. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you without cost. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Now.” The cop looked up at him for the first time. “Before I ask you if you’re willing to talk to me, I want you to understand something else. This isn’t a parking ticket we’re talking about here. Somebody’s going to jail tonight.

  “You and your friends are going to get on a big bus with some armed guards and take a ride to central booking at the Manhattan Detention Complex—most people call it the Tombs. Over there they’ll get your mug shots, your DNA and your fingerprints, and then you’ll be formally charged and arraigned in the criminal court and bound over for trial. Though to be honest with you, since it’s Friday night and I hear they’ve got a full house, it might be Sunday or Monday before they get all of you sorted out and ready to appear before the judge.

  “If you’re not granted bail—and by the nature of these offenses in the prevailing climate, and with Homeland Security getting involved, I seriously doubt you will be—then you’ll all get on another bus, and that one’ll have shackles on the seats and bars on the windows, because it’ll be headed to Rikers Island.

  “What you’re going to be charged with”—he paused to flip a set of reading glasses down onto his nose—“is inciting a riot, resisting arrest, and aggravated assault on a police officer. That last one carries a minimum sentence of three and a half years in the state penitentiary. And someone among you, I don’t know who, is going to be charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon. If that sounds more serious than the others, that’s because it is.”

  He took a sip of coffee and flipped his glasses back up. Noah got the distinct impression that this cop had performed the routine he was witnessing once or twice before.

  “Now, unless somebody comes forward and enlightens me on the circumstances—and by that I mean someone like you—well, I’m just as happy to let the officers from the scene separate the innocent bystanders from the perpetrators.

  “So we can talk here and now, or you can keep on thinking about it while you’re making some new friends with the general population down in the Tombs. And I don’t know what you may have heard, but trust me”—he motioned to their gloomy surroundings—“it’s not nearly this nice down there.”

  The policeman leaned forward in his creaky chair and lowered his voice as though a passing colleague in the hall might overhear him going soft on a suspect.

  “Listen, you look like a good guy to me. This isn’t something you need to be involved in. But my hands are tied here; we’ve got an eyewitness in the other room who says you hit a cop with a nightstick. I don’t want to believe that, but you need to stand up for yourself or I can’t help you.

  “I’m sure you were just in the wrong p
lace at the wrong time, and we can figure this out, Noah, but you’ve got to talk to me right now.” He opened his drawer, removed a small voice recorder, checked its display, pressed its thumb switch, and placed it on the blotter between them. “Now that I’ve advised you of your rights, are you willing to answer questions?”

  Before Noah could respond there were three quick raps on the door frame and the Gardner family attorney, Charlie Nelan, walked in without waiting to be asked. He picked up the recorder from the desk, flicked it off, and slipped it into his pocket. An objection from the cop was swallowed before it fully escaped, stifled by a gesture from the counselor that assured him he would get all the attention he could handle in due time.

  Charlie turned to Noah. “Have you said anything?”

  “No—”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “I haven’t said anything, just that I understand my rights.”

  “Good boy.” Charlie Nelan was one of those old-school, silver-haired überprofessionals who swore by the power of image. No matter where you happened to see him, he always looked as though he’d just stepped out of the “Awesome Lawyers” issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Fortunately, he was every bit as sharp as he looked.

  Nelan touched Noah’s chin and turned his head to get a better view of the damage sustained in the arrest. Then he closed the door and turned back to the other man across the desk.

  “Detective …”

  “Halliday.”

  “Detective Halliday, I want my client released, and his charges dropped, and I want that arrest report in the shredder.”

  The policeman released a low snort, but his bravado wasn’t totally convincing.

  “I put in a call to your captain on my way here,” Charlie said. “Right now this is between the four of us, and that is precisely where it will stay.”

  “Now you listen to me,” Halliday said. “I don’t care what you want or who you called or how far you want anything to go—” His desk phone had begun to ring, and he did a double take when he read the caller ID.

  “You should take that,” Charlie said. “We’ll be right across the hall in room G when you need us.”

  Room G was another interview cube. When the door was closed Charlie sat Noah down, took a bottle of mineral water from his inside coat pocket, and handed it to him.

  “How did you even know I was here?” Noah asked.

  The look that came back said that young Mr. Gardner was worrying about something far beneath his concern, given the circumstances. Charlie was already punching more numbers on his cell, and as he put the phone to his ear he motioned to the water bottle, as though adequate hydration was the only substantive thing Noah could bring to the party at this stage.

  From the sound of it, this new call was either to an assistant district attorney or the DA himself, but before he could pick up the gist of the conversation something grabbed Noah’s full attention through the thin window by the door frame.

  Out in a common area, a dozen or so men were gathered together having coffee and a collegial chat with some uniformed police. He stood and stepped closer to the glass, trying hard to believe his eyes.

  In this surreal gathering was every heckler, every troublemaker who had made himself apparent during the speeches at the bar. Every one of them was dressed similarly, the differences being confined to the inflammatory slogans on their clothing and their selection of cracker-chic accessories. When scattered among a larger group they’d been harder to spot as co-conspirators, but all together like this, with their guard down, their costumes were obvious and their mannerisms out of character. It looked like the after-party of a Larry the Cable Guy stunt-double audition at Central Casting.

  One of them matched a picture in Noah’s memory to the very last detail. He was sure this time: the man was wearing a loud flannel shirt, a hunter’s vest, a do-rag torn from the corner of a Confederate battle flag, and a shoulder holster.

  He heard the call end and the phone snap closed behind him.

  “Okay,” Charlie sighed. “Let’s sit down and talk about this, Dillinger.”

  “Charlie—”

  “Correction. You stay quiet and let me talk to you.”

  They sat, with Noah taking a chair that preserved his view to the

  hall.

  “I don’t know what you did or didn’t do,” Charlie said, “and I don’t want to know. What matters is what they could charge you with, which is putting your hands on a cop while he’s doing his duty, and that’s a first-degree felony in this state. Look at me. If you did that, in the eyes of the law it doesn’t matter why you did it—self-defense, heat of the moment, temporary insanity, doesn’t matter—conviction is a virtual certainty.

  “Now, I called in some major favors, and they still wanted to charge you with something less egregious, simple assault, disorderly conduct, whatever. Then I called in some more favors and we worked that out, too. You’re going to walk out of here tonight like this never happened.”

  “Listen to me for a second—”

  “This is a big deal, Noah. And I’ll tell you something else: this is it. I spent all your get-out-of-jail-free cards tonight. Until further notice if you so much as jaywalk, miss a trash can with a gum wrapper, or play your car stereo too loud, and any of these guys get wind of it? Forget about it. Starting now, if you step out of line below Thirty-fourth Street there won’t be much I can do for you.”

  “I understand, and thank you. Can I say something now?”

  Charlie checked his watch. “Go ahead.”

  “This whole thing was a setup.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Those guys, right out there”—Noah pointed through the glass, and Charlie looked briefly in that direction—“they were at this meeting tonight, where all this happened, and they were there specifically to start something. When they got tired of waiting for the people to get violent they did it themselves.”

  “Let me see if I understand you. You’re saying that you think an undercover New York City police officer discharged his weapon in a crowded bar to incite this whole incident?”

  “Yes.”

  “No way. Absolutely not.”

  “Okay, not a cop, then. I didn’t see any badges on the men who burst into that place, maybe they were … I don’t know, contractors, hired security men who did the dirty work and then turned us all over to the NYPD—”

  “Noah,” Charlie said. His voice was patient but firm. “Calm down. Whatever really happened, none of this matters to you.”

  “How can you say that? That guy right there, the one with the visitor’s badge and the holster under his vest, that’s the guy who fired the shots that started all this! Then the men in riot gear came busting in immediately, there was no call to nine-one-one, no delay, they were right there waiting outside the door. And the press—all those reporters were already here outside the station; how would they have known—”

  “Okay, so it was a setup. And what do you think we can do about that, you and I? Who are you now, Nelson Mandela? News flash, son: there’s no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, and no Legal Fairy who cares about what you think you saw. Injustice exists in this world, and while you’re lucky enough to be insulated from the worst of it, most people aren’t.” He patted Noah on the arm. “Your righteous indignation is noted and filed. Now come on, let’s go count our blessings and get a slice of pie, somewhere uptown.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “I’m sorry … what?”

  “Not without everybody else who was brought in with me.”

  Charlie didn’t respond right away.

  “You’re sure about what you saw,” he said at last.

  “Positive.”

  “Because if I open this can of worms again and I come up empty-handed? There’s a good chance we’re going to blow this deal I just made.”

  “Charlie, I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” the lawyer said quietly. “Let me look into it and I’ll see what I can do. But I’ll
tell you right now, whatever I find out, this is going to take a lot more chips than I’ve got in my pocket. That means I’ll have to call your dad.”

  That wasn’t welcome news, but Noah took a deep breath and nodded his permission.

  CHAPTER 14

  He’d kept calm as he walked down the last long hallway toward the exit of the First Precinct, but as Noah finally stepped out onto the sidewalk his heart began to work so hard he could nearly see it pounding beneath his borrowed shirt.

  Injustice exists, Charlie had said, and for that fact his young client was now profoundly thankful. If it had been an abuse of power that put him in jail for most of the night, then it was surely a second abuse that had coerced the authorities to let him go. But, however it was won, it was still freedom, and maybe for the first time he fully understood the meaning of that word.

  According to Charlie, after he’d started digging, a group of cops had eventually come forward to corroborate Noah’s version of the evening’s events: they’d apparently wanted to play no part in the railroading of this harmless group of like-minded citizens. Just as a minor rebellion was threatening to break out between the actual uniformed officers and the contract security forces who’d been working the scene, a phone call had come in from some high echelon, and right away everything was abruptly and quietly settled.

  Noah stopped near the street, suddenly spent and unsteady, and leaned against a lamppost for support. He took in a deep breath of the cold, sobering night air, right through a thin dagger of pain that jabbed hard between his ribs. It hurt, but not as though anything was permanently damaged in there; bent for sure, but not broken.

  All the others had begun filtering out behind him, checking their watches, counting and pocketing their returned personal effects, everyone looking thoroughly relieved and happy and hardly any the worse for wear. The out-of-towners were scanning the urban horizon for landmarks as though they’d been airdropped into the darkest corner of Borneo without a compass. But one by one they helped each other, and before long most of them seemed to have gone their separate ways to sleep off the evening’s adventure, safe and sound in their own rooms instead of a prison cell.