Chapter 5
The police come for me in the short-term parking lot, and I raise my arms in the air as instructed.
At first, they look to me and Amaya with confusion on their faces.
I’m not sure what they expected to see, but it’s certainly not me in an outfit I cobbled together from the H&M clearance section that consists of leopard-print pants and a pilling black sweater and Amaya in pj’s and a puffer jacket.
After a few seconds of staring, though, about half a dozen cops point their guns at our heads. At that point, I am sure we’ll be shot dead. They gloss over these parts in my podcasts. Or maybe I’m too busy rooting for the murderer to get caught.
“Get down on the ground,” the police instruct both of us. Amaya does as she is told, terror in her eyes.
“I’m a lawyer,” she says repeatedly, though they don’t seem to care—possibly not believing real lawyers wear glittery pink UGGs.
She explains that she had called them. Finally, they ask for identification, and she pulls it out as guns continue to point at her head.
After reading it, they holster their guns around her, allowing her to stand up, dirt and dust coating the front of her outfit.
They’ve determined she’s not a threat. She pleads with them to be careful with me.
“She is turning herself in. She is willing to do this all the right way. She will cooperate.”
“We will be careful,” they say. They didn’t want Amaya riding with us, so they told her to meet us at the precinct.
As they gently guide me into the police car, I think I am in good hands.
—
When we’re on the move, away from Amaya’s gaze, the police officers sneer at me in the back seat of the car.
When I mention I am innocent, they inform me that I am going to jail for the rest of my life.
They speak slowly like I can’t understand English, though I’m positive I enunciate my words more clearly than this cop speaking with his mouth full.
I try not to imagine him eating a doughnut, because I refuse to stereotype him like he is doing to me right now.
The cop tells me that I’m very “goblity,” by which I assume he means guilty, and thanks me for making it such an easy job for them to solve this…
murder? Case? He finishes whatever he was eating and starts on something crunchy.
“What dumbass kills a guy in the back of her own cab? Thought you could get away with it ’cause you’re a woman?” His words are a sharp contradiction of how they spoke to me in front of Amaya. Or how the cops speak to the suspects on my podcast when they know they’re being recorded.
They were careful with me in front of Amaya, conscious that she is a lawyer documenting my treatment. Conscious that they could get sued by the city for mishandling me. Unlike so many times before, this time there was a witness to this arrest. An authoritative one the city will listen to.
I am dragged out of the car and shoved up the steps to the police precinct.
The walls inside are gray, and officers shuffle in and out past me.
The light above, fluorescent and unflattering, flickers every few seconds.
There is a poster on the wall that reads If you see something, say something with a person who looks remarkably like me committing a crime.
I catch myself in a mirror of the precinct.
My curly hair is even more unruly than normal, and dark circles have formed around my eyes.
I’ve managed to fit their description of what a deranged killer would look like without even trying.
My cuffs are too tight and dig painfully into my skin. I try to catch the eye of the officer who only seems to want to look at my chest.
“Can you loosen these?” I ask politely but assertively. Men often mistake a woman’s confidence for bitchiness, and I don’t need these cops to hate me any more than they already do.
The officer shoots me a disgusted look but doesn’t further acknowledge what I’ve said.
My mouth is dry, but given the last response, I don’t dare ask for water.
For once, I’m following my parents’ advice.
Blend in and don’t cause a stir. It’s the mantra my parents always taught me as immigrants, even though all of us are now full-fledged citizens.
Finally, another officer comes in. He looks friendlier than those before him, and he appraises me with a neutral look, which is decidedly better than the frowns and creepy stares I had been getting.
Maybe his arrival indicates that the booking process will begin.
The sooner it does, the sooner this whole ordeal at the police station will be almost over and I can talk to my lawyer and eventually leave.
I am confident that this will happen, because though I may not be a lawyer, I know it’s happened in many, many podcasts.
It’s protocol. It’s the law. As I don’t plan to give a statement as per the orders of Amaya, I wonder if I’ll just go straight from the station to the courthouse.
Police have to stop questioning me when I invoke my right to an attorney.
“Name?”
“Siriwathi Perera.”
“Occupation?”
“Cabdriver.”
The police officers raise their eyebrows in surprise…even though they are the ones who are booking me for the murder of someone in the back seat of my taxi. I want to protest and say women can be cabdrivers and murderers, too, but this isn’t the time.
“Address?”
These questions go on for a while. I answer them truthfully and succinctly, as Amaya instructed.
Pedigree questions about my background and who I am—my answers reveal nothing beyond my being an entirely ordinary and unremarkable person, which is exactly what I am.
If they ask me any other questions, specifics about the case, I will exercise my right to remain silent, like I’ve seen and heard people do hundreds of times on TV and on my podcasts.
However, the prospect of remaining silent makes me worry.
Were this a show or one of my podcasts, and I were witnessing myself being questioned, I would think that I am guilty. Who doesn’t defend themselves?
A different group of men come in and swab my hands for blood residue. They start to examine the rest of my body for droplets of blood. I inquire if a female officer can do this part, and they just stare at me blankly.
Others take my hands and roughly roll them in ink, as if touching my hands even with gloves on is an offensive act.
Next, they take me into a small room. I look up at the mirror, and though I only see myself, I know that there are cops on the other side watching—likely with a mix of revulsion and curiosity.
I cross my arms over my chest, feeling so exposed and vulnerable, wishing my sweater were bigger so I could just hide.
I want to make myself smaller. I want to disappear.
Two detectives, both white with closely cropped hair and Long Island accents, arrive and sit across from me.
For a second, I think I am on one of my shows, and these two guys are paid actors.
I try to dissociate from reality, but sweat still forms on my brow.
When I realize this must make me look guilty, I perspire more.
At first they ask me softball questions. How am I doing? Do I like to bake? Which makes me wonder if these cops has watched too many tradwife TikToks. I answer them through gritted teeth. Maybe this won’t be so bad. Then they ask the real questions they came here for.
“Why did you kill the guy? Maybe there’s a good reason?
Did he try and rape you or something? You can trust us—we believe women in this precinct.
” The detective on the right is trying to play it nice, but I detect a hint of sarcasm in his tone.
He’s a bit taller and bulkier than the detective on the left, but otherwise I can’t discern a difference between the two.
“I’m sorry. I can’t answer your questions. I cannot speak without my lawyer present.”
I hope this ends the questioning and I can be made ready for my criminal arraignment in the courthouse downtown. I know that police can’t keep talking to me after I’ve invoked my right to counsel and my right to remain silent. It foiled police, temporarily, in a Dateline podcast once.
“You got somewhere to be?” the smaller detective demands. He is certainly no kind, strong, and independent detective, like Olivia Benson.
The detectives look at each other, communicating by some silent language that must have developed over years of being partners.
One of them furrows his brow and clenches his fist. That’s when I know the next questions will be aggressive and angry.
As a taxi driver, I know it’s easier to yell at someone you’ll never see again, someone whom you don’t have accountability to.
Unlike in my taxi, the police officers here have more power than just determining my tip.
“Why did you kill him?” the detective demands, his voice lowering into a growl.
When I remain silent, he continues. “How did you know him? Were you just trying to rob him and then it got out of hand? It’s okay, you can tell us.
We know you did it. We may even be able to help you if you cooperate.
Besides, they’ll probably go easier on you because you’re a woman. ”
I am tough, I try to convince myself. This interrogation has nothing on Ammi questioning me after coming home from a party with the faint scent of beer on my breath, even after I turned twenty-one.
When she announced my full name, including my middle one, which she never uses, I knew I was in trouble.
At least, this is what I tell myself. But my heart thrumming so loudly reveals my fear.
“I’d like to speak to my lawyer,” I tell the cops again.
This statement must feel like a challenge to them, because the detective questions me even more aggressively.
I jump when the detective bangs his fist on the metal table bolted to the ground.
I start to anticipate it as it happens more and more, to the point that I don’t physically jump, though I do rattle all the same.
The other detective steps in. The one who so far has been silent.
“You’ll get life in prison. We can help you avoid that,” he promises. “If you want us to help you, you have to help us.”
This isn’t true. Detective Benson frequently argued with ADA Cabot over charges on Law & Order, because it’s police who gather evidence and the assistant district attorney who decides the charges.
“We want to help you, sweetie,” he says slowly and with a smile, as if I couldn’t understand or hear him the first time.
“We understand how hard the life of a cabdriver can be. It must be doubly hard as a woman. Strange men hitting on you. Did this man make advances? Was this self-defense? It would be understandable if you stabbed him because he was getting fresh.” As though on instinct, both cops immediately eye my chest as if to decide whether it’s worthy of being assaulted over.
I remain silent, so the detective continues.
“How frustrating it is to shuttle rich people around when you’re barely making ends meet.
I get it. I’m the son of an immigrant. I understand the struggle. ”
I look at the man who, outwardly at least, seems to have the highest privileges society can bestow upon him.
“Thank you for offering to help,” I reply. I know my insincerity is rolling off me in waves, but I can’t even fake politeness anymore. “I wish I could give you information that would be helpful, but I am innocent and I can’t.”
Perhaps it is my stubborn silence that is annoying them. This explanation, though unsatisfying to them, is the best I can give, and maybe it works, because they leave the room. They come back a few minutes later holding a USB thumb drive.
“We have footage of you from a street camera doing it. We just got it back. It’s you clear as day. We know you did it,” the angry detective says.
And for a second, in my sleep-deprived, dehydrated haze, I wonder if I did do it. If I blacked out and just don’t remember it. No.
“I didn’t do it,” I mumble, wondering what else I can say, forgetting Amaya’s advice to stay silent.
I try to sound confident, but truthfully, I’m so scared.
This isn’t another case of me just trying to get a drunk dude out of my cab.
The police are no longer following the rules.
Are they going to keep me here unless I confess to something I didn’t do?
I lose track of how long they question me.
I need water and want to pee. Initially I tried not to ask for these things as I assumed I’d be let go soon, but I reached a point I needed to.
Yet each time I make a request, I am refused.
Until finally when I prepare myself to pee right there in my pants, they say that I can go to the bathroom, and I am spared at least one indignity.
Afterward, they continue to question me, and I continue to tell them I’d like my lawyer.
I read somewhere the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different response.
I wonder if they think the humiliation of this situation will erode me over time.
I think, eventually, even an innocent person would confess under these circumstances.
Is this why innocent people end up in prison?
They break under the weight of questioning and think it’s easier to confess?
Finally, after many hours that felt like days, the detectives give up trying.
“You’re done,” someone says from the corner of the room.
I don’t bother to even look up, and it feels like an anticlimactic end to the torture. “You’ll go to court now,” the same voice informs me, “but not before we take your clothes.”
For a second, I grip my clothes tightly to myself.
But resistance is futile. They shove what looks like a white hazmat suit at me, and I change in the corner of the room as the detectives step out, fully aware they’ve only given me the illusion of privacy.
They can watch me on the other side of the two-way mirror.
I would do anything to go back to the moment I picked up the dead man. He would tap on my window and I would drive away as fast as I could. I would appreciate the things that I had, that now seemed like they would be gone forever.