Do Not Become Alarmed(35)

There was a knock at the door. Benjamin leaped out of bed. He experienced a stab of regret: He could have just flown, in the dream, to the children. But now he was awake, and the children were gone. He felt crushed. It was as if they’d been taken away all over again. Liv, beneath the covers, murmured a protest. The clock radio said 5:01. Benjamin went to the door and answered it in his T-shirt and boxers.

The tall detective was standing outside in the hall with a male cop a foot shorter than she was. Benjamin was afraid of what they were going to say.

“I’m Detective Rivera,” she said. “We met before. This is Officer Arnal. Will you please come answer some more questions?”

“Did you find anything?” he asked.

“If you come with us, we can talk about it.”

“Do you want my wife to come?”

“Just you,” Arnal said. His tone was mildly threatening. Benjamin thought he must hate being the little guy with the towering female partner.

“Wait—are you arresting me?”

“No,” Detective Rivera said.

“What if I don’t want to go?”

“You want to find your children?” Arnal said.

“Shit,” Benjamin said, rubbing his eyes. It was hard to think clearly. He was still half in the dream. Did they have important information? Should he ask for a lawyer? “Let me get my clothes.”

He closed the door without latching it, so they wouldn’t think he was locking them out.

“Is everything okay?” Liv mumbled from the bed.

“Yeah,” he said, pulling on his pants. “I’ll be right back.”

He found his wallet and phone, and started a text to Kenji Kirby. He kept hitting the wrong letters with his thumbs. Finally he got it sent: Police picking me up,

no explanation.

Then he went out and closed the door behind him. The two cops flanked him down the hall. This felt like a perp walk, but why? What did they think? They rode the empty elevator down to the lobby and he got into the back of their car, in the predawn darkness. No reporters were camped out this early, and he was grateful for that.

Then he was in an interrogation room at the police station, just like in a movie. Detective Rivera and her partner sat across from him.

“So what’s going on?” he asked.

“You told me when I first interviewed you that you had never been arrested,” she said.

“Right.”

“But you were. For assaulting a police officer in 1996.”

He frowned. “Wait—what does that have to do with my kids?”

“So it’s true?”

“No! I mean, the arrest is true. But I didn’t assault anyone. And they said it would be expunged from my record.”

“Why were you arrested?”

Benjamin sighed. “I thought you really had something.”

“We have to follow everything,” she said. “We need to understand why you lied.”

“I didn’t lie!”

“We could send you home,” Arnal said.

“Are you fucking kidding me? While my kids are missing?”

They both waited. Benjamin stared at Detective Rivera’s smooth, impassive face. She had warm, light hazel eyes, almost golden. He was disappointed in her. She had seemed like she was on his side. He guessed that was her job.

“Okay,” he said. “I was in college. I was at a bar with my friends. A guy hit on one of the girls I was with. When she told him to go away, he threatened her, said he was going to rape her. So we called the college cops, and this old white Berkeley cop showed up and was really shitty to the girl, Tracey, who was black. He kept asking where her parents were from and why she wore her skirt so short. I was impatient, because the cop wasn’t doing his job. But I was just standing on the street with my friends, talking to him, and all of a sudden I was flat on my back on the concrete. The cop had sucker punched me before I even knew what had happened. But he can’t hit a college kid in the face without some reason, right?”

The cops said nothing.

Benjamin sighed and went on. “So he said in his report that I assaulted him, which wasn’t true. My father hired a lawyer, who told me it was my word against the cop’s, with some drunk witnesses, and I should plead nolo contendere. I didn’t want to, because it sounded like ‘no contest.’ But he said if I did, the incident would be expunged from my record. So I could honestly answer ‘no’ when asked if I’d ever been arrested for a crime. Which is what I did, when I talked to you. But obviously it wasn’t expunged, if you guys dug it up.”

Officer Arnal didn’t seem to have followed the story.

Benjamin wished he could explain in Spanish. “Sucker punched?” he said. “What’s the word for that here? No warning. He cold-cocked me. Punched me in the face, out of nowhere.” He mimed it, fist tapping his chin, head turning away from the impact.

He remembered the strange violation of it, the way the pain hadn’t kicked in until he was lying on the sidewalk, looking up at a streetlight, watching Tracey in her short skirt yelling at the cops. She later told him that he’d called the cop a racist asshole before he got punched, though he didn’t remember that. He’d never been hit before. His face had been tender and bruised for days.

The whole thing had made Benjamin disgusted and depressed. He’d thought about dropping out of school. He lost weight. Everything seemed pointless, if people with power could abuse it like that, and get away with it. Tracey had told him to get on with his life. Shit like that happened all the time, just not so much to white dudes. He shouldn’t be so surprised.