CHAPTER FOUR
A silence fell over the room after the mayor slammed the door shut. But when RJ asked to see who this consultant was and Grant opened the folder to the last page to see just who it was, too, they all gathered around his desk. The picture staring back at them was of a black woman seemingly in her mid-to-late thirties. She had a proud disposition about her. Sophisticated. Overly-serious, it seemed to Grant, as if she was trying too hard to not try too hard.
But his men saw something altogether different. “I knew it!” said Pete as soon as he saw that face. “A diversity hire. That’s what they give us: a diversity hire. All we need!”
Nobody bothered to even look at RJ when Pete made that disparaging comment because RJ, despite sharing the same ethnic background as the consultant, acted more like one of them.
“I heard those gals could be some bossy-ass women if you let’em,” said another lieutenant.
“Black women?” Carter spoke as if he was the expert. “They’re something else. Mad all the time and bossy as hell. You’re right about that.” Then he smiled. “Is that why you married a white woman, RJ?”
RJ smiled, too, but it didn’t reach his eyes. But they didn’t know that. All they knew was that they could kid him like that. All they knew was that he was one of them.
No. She didn’t have an overly serious look , Grant decided on second thought as he continued to stare at the consultant’s photograph. She had a haunted look. An overly traumatized look. As if she was trying too hard to not be exposed.
“She’s probably the worse consultant in America,” said Pete, “and they throw her at us. And a woman of all people.”
“And not just a woman,” said Carter. “A so-called woman of color , like we whites ain’t got no color. A doggone ni--”
Carter managed to stop himself from going that low, and some in the room did glance at RJ. But RJ seemed oblivious to any of it.
But Grant wasn’t. “Okay that’s enough,” he said before it got down in the sewer any further than it already had.
“But can you believe this, Chief?” Carter said to him, tone deaf. “They gonna slap a ni--”
“I said that’s enough, Sergeant Carter!” Grant looked squarely at his sergeant. “Get back to work. All of you!”
“But what you gonna do about it, Chief?” asked another cop.
The chief looked at him. He quickly cowered and began leaving with the rest of his colleagues. When they had gone, Grant looked at RJ, who remained behind. “Why do you let those assholes get away with that racist dribble?”
“The same reason you let’em get away with it,” RJ responded. “I’m ambitious. I’m not letting these nobody racist rednecks stop my climb. They can say whatever they want. I’m moving on up.”
The two men looked at each other. They understood each other. Then they both looked back at that picture staring at them.
“Think she’ll help?”
“No,” Grant said bluntly. “But it is what it is.”
“Can you imagine? For us to be at the bottom like that? Forty-nine percent of our arrests were dead wrong and very likely will be overturned on appeal because of this new evidence.”
Grant leaned back. He was still digesting it too.
“If what Dooney says is true,” said RJ, “that means we’re routinely arresting the wrong people. We’re putting innocent men and women in jail like it’s normal.”
“It’s normal to the men in this department. Think about it, RJ. We’ve been arresting innocent people at a rate unheard of anywhere in the world probably, and what did they get out of all that horrible news? The fact that the consultant is a black woman! That’s their takeaway. Not the horrible stats. But race and gender. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”
Then his anger came from out of nowhere like aways and he grabbed a stack of files on his desk and threw them against the wall, with papers flying everywhere.
As soon as it happened, the office door opened quickly, and Sergeant Carter peeped inside. “We got a mass casualty event at the Wafer House on Ridge Cove, sir.”
Grant and RJ were astonished. “Mass casualty?” asked Grant.
“Are you sure?” asked RJ.
“I’m positive,” said Carter.
Grant, still stunned, jumped to his feet. “Get every available unit to the scene,” he ordered Carter as he grabbed his suit coat from the back of his chair. They’d never had a mass casualty anything in Belgrave before. It was foreign to them. Grant and RJ began hurrying out of the office.
“Should I call those out on vacation back in, sir?” Carter asked, running behind them.
“Not until I assess the situation,” Grant said, putting on his suitcoat. “Just get all available units over there now.”
“Yes sir,” Carter said, and hurried to do as he was ordered.
“I’m riding with you. Let me grab my phone,” RJ said as he hurried to his desk.
Grant kept walking, hurrying out of the same doors Marti Nash was about to walk into. She and Grant nearly collided. But Marti saw the big man coming before he saw her and she was able to move out of his way just in time, prompting Grant to put the brakes on his fast walking too.
But when he stopped, he stopped right next to her. They were within an inch of each other.
And as soon as Grant saw her, it felt as if a kind of warmth entered his body. Like a feeling of something familiar. The feeling of finding something near and dear to his heart, and feeling responsible for what he’d found. It was so out of nowhere odd and strange but so lovely, too, that it threw him for a loop.
But Marti was too focused on her assignment to be thrown. All she saw was an unshaven white man in his late forties or maybe even fifty with unusually deep-blue but bloodshot eyes standing before her. She got the sense that most ladies might find him most attractive, in a shabby-chic way, but to her he wasn’t at all that well put together. She saw a scattered man. A disorganized man. A man in a rush, but too slow to get there. And she recognized his face from the background materials she’d been given. His eyes gave him away. “Chief McGraw?”
Grant stared at her. Had he met her before? And then he suddenly recognized her too! And it was that recognition that snapped him out of his staring unblinkingly at her stupor and propelled him forward. Getting all warm and bubbly over some doggone consultant? The very woman that could write a report that could take his department away from him? Had he lost all his marbles??? “You’re supposed to be here tomorrow,” he said.
“That’s correct, sir, but I wanted to get an early start.”
As RJ hurried out of the station, Grant began hurrying down the steps toward his car, his suit coat flapping as he walked.
Marti glanced at RJ, a tall, slender, very attractive black man. She didn’t know who he was although he was staring hard at her the way blue eyes had done. But she had to present her credentials to the head man. And according to her papers, it was the man she recognized as the chief. She hurried behind him. “I’m Markita Nash, sir. I’ve been assigned by the Attorney General’s office as consultant for this jurisdiction.”
“I know who you are.”
Then why don’t you stop for two seconds , she wondered, as she had to hurry to keep up with the big man’s long strides. “Have you been called out on a case, sir?”
Grant didn’t answer.
“I may as well join you,” Marti suggested as Grant and RJ hopped into the Mercedes-Maybach that was parked in the space reserved for the Chief of Police. It was the same car she had noted earlier as far too expensive for a police chief to afford. And although he had to have heard her suggestion that she ride along with him, Grant, behind the wheel, sped away. He left her standing in the very dust his car was kicking up.
Marti was pissed. Though not surprised. It was exactly what she expected from this broken-down department. And that chief? Rot always started at the top. But she was hired to do a job and she was going to do it. She ran to her aging Dodge Charger that was parked a few feet over, hopped in, and took off after the chief.