But while it’s obvious to Ryan that they’ve got the wrong man, Quinn seems bent on doing the bad cop thing, caving under pressure from the DA’s office to make an arrest. Despite suspicion and public speculation, the only evidence they have against Devor is circumstantial, and within the department, many have begun to express doubt that the Nøøse founder was involved in the riot, let alone the murder. They were surprised to learn that Sanders, Cortes’s doorman, had attended the Funeral for Capitalism.
None of which makes him a criminal, though Quinn might disagree. It’s amazing to Ryan that even during this moment of pervasive unemployment, people like Quinn remain fixed in their fears of a welfare state. On multiple occasions, Quinn has expressed his opinion that even laid-off beat cops should have worked harder, as he did, to make detective. And while Ryan’s tried to explain the arithmetical problems with this line of thinking, Quinn isn’t interested in any point of view but his own.
But while Ryan has no interest in trying to bully a false confession from Sanders, his own motives aren’t pure either. This morning at dawn, after the rumbling G train woke him from sleep and he lay freezing in bed, desperate to pee, but too cold to leave the comfort of his blanket, Ryan wondered if his premature verdict on Jay Devor is, in fact, a product of unconscious self-interest. Because, while nailing Donnell the doorman might lead to a small raise and nominal promotion, to take down a figure of Devor’s stature would make Ryan, himself, a celebrity by proximity, his picture plastered next to the headline hero cop for every salad-eating minx in Bryant Park to see.
“We have you on video leaving the rally,” says Quinn, who’s pacing the room, tapping the cement walls with his knuckles as if testing their solidity.
“I told you,” says Donnell, “I took the subway home, ate leftover Thai food, watched the second half of Knicks-Pacers in bed, and drafted a blog post.”
They’ve been over this ten times.
“And there’s no one who can corroborate this story?” asks Quinn. “No one you talked to on your walk to the subway, or on the subway, or on your walk from the subway, or at home, who can validate your story? I find that hard to believe.”
“How many people do you talk to while you’re walking down the street or riding the subway? Not all black people know each other. Just because I live in Harlem doesn’t mean I walk by the barbershop every day on my way home and stop in for a lineup and neighborhood gossip. My life is not a Tyler Perry production. I was tired and I went straight home. Jackie was at her aunt’s in the Bronx. If you had drones watching me at the rally, then how come you don’t have me on camera walking to the subway?”
But though Donnell asks, he’s not actually naïve enough to believe that innocence and justice are linked. He’s seen friends put away on trumped-up charges, and if they’re not put away then they’re bogged down in legal bullshit, held in lockup for weeks, or forced to plead out and pay fines. No, he’s not naïve, but he does believe that this particular charge and the detectives’ response to it are so out of proportion that at some point someone’s got to realize that a mistake is being made.
“That’s what we’re asking,” says Quinn. “How come the camera loses you when you leave the rally? Where were you sneaking off to?”
“Where do you think I was sneaking off to? I was going home, I told you. I was tired so I went home.”
“So you admit that you were sneaking off?” says Quinn.
Donnell looks to Ryan for backup, but the snub-nosed detective’s eyes appear to be shut, lashes trellised together like the strands of a withered toothbrush. And the truth is that though Germanic Quinn is doing the gestapo-style questioning, it’s red-faced Ryan who scares Donnell. At least with Quinn you know what you’re getting. There’s precedent there. Donnell knows from a lifetime of fitting descriptions that all he has to do is stay calm and answer Quinn’s questions clearly and concisely in some approximation of white American English, not using big words or saying anything too obviously intelligent, but not dropping double negatives either, inspiring the idea that a jury could be convinced of his criminality based on syntax and vocab. Detective Ryan, on the other hand, is unreadable, and in Donnell’s experience, this means a larger capacity for random acts of violence. He can picture the sleeping man snapping awake and beating Donnell with his nightstick. He can picture the building’s manager telling him he’ll have to wait until his black eye fades before returning to work, that it’s a classy condo with an elite clientele and those just aren’t the kinds of optics that they want to put forth. He can picture Steve from Verizon staring, eyes alight with idiotic revolutionary vigor, raising a fist in the air, rapping “Fuck the Police.” He can picture his ex-wife on the far end of a phone, refusing to believe that this isn’t, in some way, Donnell’s fault. He can picture Jackie waiting up for him at home.
“No, I wasn’t sneaking.”
“We have evidence that suggests otherwise,” says Quinn.
“Why do you care where I went?” says
