‘You need a therapist.’
‘I’m a citizen of the Commonwealth, aren’t I?’ Rhoad argued.
‘Why did this woman grab your genitals, Officer Rhoad?’ Tittle had never met such an idiot in his life. ‘Did she swoop in out of nowhere? Was she provoked? A spurned lover?’
‘She tried to stop me from putting a parking ticket on her car,’ Rhoad explained.
‘I don’t buy it.’
‘Well,’ Rhoad said, ‘I’d done it a few times before.’
Brazil was wise enough to ask Governor Feuer to drop off his guest passengers a block from the police department, thus avoiding a scene that would be difficult, if not impossible, to explain.
‘I’m going to take you to MCV,’ Brazil said to Weed as they walked along the sidewalk. ‘Then let’s get your mother to come for you. You don’t want to be locked up all night.’
‘Yes I do,’ Weed told him.
Brazil noticed Weed was very agitated, looking all around as if afraid someone was following them.
‘You’re not making any sense to me,’ Brazil went on. ‘And you know why?’ He opened double glass doors on the lower lot of headquarters. ‘Because you’re not telling me everything, Weed. You’re holding back.’
Weed had nothing to say. Brazil checked out a car and let the radio room know where he was going. He and Weed sat in MCV’s emergency room, where Weed could not be treated without one of his parents being present. Weed’s mother didn’t answer the phone and she wasn’t at work. Weed’s father was out cutting grass somewhere and didn’t return Brazil’s call. Brazil’s radio would not transmit from inside the hospital. He felt cut off from the world, angry, helpless and miserable.
Brazil finally had to get a judge to grant permission for treatment, which would have resolved the matter had there not been a school-bus accident midafternoon. The E.R. could not get to Weed until almost eleven P.M., when a nurse cleaned Weed’s cut and put a butterfly bandage over it.
‘I don’t get it,’ Brazil was saying to Weed as they drove back to headquarters. ‘Are you sure you have a mother?’
The remark hurt Weed. Brazil could tell.
‘She don’t answer the phone very much, especially when she’s sleeping, and she sleeps a lot in the day.’
‘Why wouldn’t she answer the phone otherwise?’
“Cause Daddy’s always calling. He says real mean things to her. I don’t know why, and he has to have the number ’cause I stay with him sometimes.’
They parked in the back lot and Brazil escorted Weed inside the police department. They walked past the information desk and Weed didn’t seem to care where he was being taken. His mood continued to sink.
‘You know something,’ Brazil told him. ‘You know something big. Something so big you’re scared, real scared.’
‘I ain’t scared of nothing,’ Weed told him.
‘We’re all scared of something,’ Brazil replied.
Handcuffed prisoners drifted in and out, heading to lockup, muttering, staggering and swaggering, some wearing sunglasses and cool clothes, many of them high or drunk. The air smelled of body odor, alcohol and marijuana. Brazil turned right, passing through another set of double doors. He opened one leading into a small drab room with desks built into the walls, and plastic chairs, and ugly green upholstered benches stained with unpleasant, recalcitrant life.
Brazil went to a phone and dialed the pager number of the intake officer on call. There was an old radio on a table and Brazil tuned it in to 98.1. He sat on top of a desk and looked at Weed.
‘Talk to me,’ Brazil said.
‘Got nothing to say.’ Weed sat on a bench.
‘Why did you decide to paint the statue?’
‘Felt like it.’
‘Did someone tell you to do it? One of the Pikes?’
‘I don’t know nothing about Pikes.’
‘Bullshit,’ Brazil said. ‘Where’d you get that number tattooed on your finger?’
A radio announcer was going on and on about the ATM homicide, and at first the news and the name of the victim did not penetrate Brazil’s fatigue and frustration. Then he caught it.
‘… confirmed her identity as a seventy-one-year-old Church Hill woman named Ruby Sink…’
‘Wait a minute!’ Brazil turned up the volume.