This would not go down easily, and I expected that the girl would get confrontational. With Ruth and Carol in my office, and Mrs. Harwind in the conference room, I waited at the foot of the staircase for the detectives from the squad to come downstairs. Before they appeared, a man who seemed to be forty years old got off the elevator holding two cans of soda and headed straight for Laura’s door. I heard him ask for Ruth.
“Excuse me, are you Wakim? I’m Alex Cooper, one of the D.A.’s working on Ruth’s case. We’re almost done, but I’m going to need you to go back to Carol’s office until we finish the interview, okay?” Without protest, he handed me a soda and asked me to give it to Ruth, and walked back to the elevators. I didn’t want him anywhere around when I explained to Ruth that she wasn’t going home with her boyfriend.
Sergeant Maron and Detective Kerry Schrager arrived within minutes. “This could get ugly. I’ve got a very unhappy teenager here who needs to make a court appearance in Queens. Just stand by while we break it to her, okay? And then you can help me get transportation for her.”
I opened my office door to walk in. Maron and Schrager stayed in the doorway, and Ruth immediately sensed this was trouble.
“Why don’t we go back to a couple of basic questions, Ruth. What’s your date of birth?”
“I told you, I’m nineteen,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder at the cops. “Why are these people here?”
“I didn’t ask how old you were, Ruth. Tell me the year you were born.”
She was smart, but like many of us, lousy at math. The subtraction was off, and the year she gave would have made her sixteen.
“Your mother tells me that you’re only fifteen. Is that true?”
Ruth picked up a copy of the Penal Law from the top of my desk and threw it toward the window, missing my right ear by a couple of inches. “I hate my mother. All right, y’all, is this what you want to hear? Bruce Johnson didn’t rape me, okay. Bruce Johnson gave me ten bucks to get him off, and you know what? I did it. And you know what else? It wasn’t the first time.”
The tears began to flow. “Wakim woulda killed me if he caught me in that room with Bruce. And Wakim don’t ever give me nothing. No money, no clothes, no presents. You woulda made up a story, too, if it was your ass that woulda got broke.”
I spoke softly to Ruth as I tried to give her some tissues. “You just can’t go into a court of law, swear to tell the truth, and then lie about something. I realize Bruce is a bad guy, but you can’t put him in jail to save yourself. How old does Wakim think you are?”
She was sniffling. “He know the truth. He know I’m fifteen.”
“You understand that he can be arrested for having sex with you, because you’re underage? When you try to act like a big girl, Ruth, you’re gonna get stuck with the consequences.” I paused. “Your mother’s down the hall.”
She got up from her chair, shouting curses at the top of her lungs and trying to push past the detectives. I told Kerry to stop her. I made her sit down and explained that she had to go before the judge in Family Court, since she had absconded from the program and was wanted, AWOL.
“You can do this the easy way, like a young lady. I’ll let you leave here with your mother, and put you in a taxi to go to Queens. Or you can do this the hard way. That means the detectives would have to handcuff you and take you there like a prisoner.”
“Well, you can all go screw yourselves, ’cause I’m not going anywhere with her or with any of you.” She was screaming again and kicking the side of my desk. “I don’t care what you do with me, ’cause I’ll just run away again and Wakim’ll take me home.”
Sergeant Maron raised a pair of handcuffs and looked at me questioningly. “I guess that’s the way our customer wants to go.”
Ruth looked me straight in the eye and spat across the desk, hitting an old indictment on top of a pile of papers. “And you, you bitch, I hope you get what’s coming to you. I hope you-”
“Attitude,” I said. “Attitude from a fifteen-year-old. Save your breath, Ruth. You know how lucky you are to have a mother who cares about you and who-”
“Where’s Wakim?” She was screaming now, at full pitch. “I wanna go home with Wakim.”
While Kerry Schrager cuffed Ruth behind her back, I called Witness Aid to make sure that Margaret Feerick, one of our social workers, could go with the detectives and Mrs. Harwind to Family Court. Pat McKinney came to my doorway and started yelling over Ruth’s wail. “What the hell is going on in here? This is an office, Cooper, and the rest of us are trying to get some work done.”
I asked Sergeant Maron to go to Carol’s waiting area, find Wakim, read him the riot act about hanging out with a minor, and send him on his way.
Eventually, the miserable troupe of characters was ready to leave the office, with Ruth Harwind in tow. By the time I got them off to court, contacted Bruce Johnson’s parole officer to find out if we could have his parole revoked for statutory rape-the sexual acts with an underage teen-wolfed down a light yogurt, and dealt with the stack of messages on Laura’s desk, it was a quarter of five and time to go to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
With summer vacations in full swing, the elevators were practically empty as I rode down to the lobby. I chatted with some of the secretaries who were walking out onto Hogan Place with me, then made the left turn onto Centre Street for the short walk to McFadden’s office.
The area in front of the Supreme Court, Civil Division, had been under renovation for almost a year in an effort to convert a cement triangle into a small green park.
I crossed with the light and had just passed in front of the plywood frame of the construction area when a dilapidated livery cab with tinted windows veered across the sparse line of cars moving north on Centre Street. Brakes squealed and horns blasted, so I picked up my head to see what was happening.
The gypsy cab was coming directly at the sidewalk, where I was trapped between a parked police car and the wooden fencing behind me. The driver slammed into the patrol car, which jumped the curb and was catapulted toward me, as I flattened myself against the plywood boards. The marked police vehicle caught its right fender on the fire hydrant in its path, but as the left fender made contact with the lumber, the fencing gave way and I fell backward into a small ditch.
My embarrassment was greater than my discomfort as I lay on the ground in the dirt, my heart racing and my lip quivering. Three court officers had seen the accident from the steps of the courthouse and came running down to check if I was all right.
“Are you a juror, ma’am? You’re gonna have some great lawsuit against the city,” the first one to my side remarked.
“I’ll be fine,” I said as they helped me to my feet. I wiped pebbles out of my hair and brushed the soot off the rear of my pale aqua suit. There were long scratches on my calves and one of my elbows was bleeding.
“Did you get a license off that car?” one of the men asked me, as onlookers gathered to see what the disturbance was about. “We’ll help you make out the police report.”
“No, thanks. I couldn’t see the plate at all.” But I had no trouble making out the face of the driver.
“Must’ve been a madman,” the second guy said. “Did you hear him?”
I shook my head to indicate I had not. But as I thanked the officers and continued on my way to Kim’s building, the driver’s words-“You’re dead meat, bitch”-were still reverberating in my ears.