By the time we got to the hospital, I was getting questions that seemed to imply that maybe it was all a domestic affair—like most of their calls: some spaced-out chick who’d run away once and got brought back and then, still unstable and crazy, decided to knife her own dad and disappear again. Now he was understandably covering for her. Happened more than you’d think.
I kept stressing that Lou was former FBI and not the sort to invent such a whopper, but this was listened to in skeptical silence. If it was a kidnapping, they then wondered aloud what was the motive and where were the demands of the perpetrators? I was ready to start yelling at them by the time we parked in the Seventh Avenue driveway of the emergency room at St. Vincent's.
They next made me cool my heels in the waiting room while they went back to interrogate Lou. They were with him for almost an hour, then came back to where I was and asked me to read and sign the report they'd written.
A troubled girl, who had emerged from a coma and apparently was suffering bouts of non-rationality, had disappeared and her father had been stabbed but not seriously. He was the only witness to the incident and claimed she'd been kidnapped. However, the girl had run away once previously, and there was no physical evidence she'd been taken against her will; in fact, her father admitted she had declared just the opposite. The whole incident would be investigated further after he came downtown and made a complete statement.
"I'm not going to sign this." I handed it back, fuming.
"Is there anything here that's not factually correct?" The
Hispanic cop was looking me straight in the eye, her expression cold as Alaska.
The question made me seethe. Sarah was probably already on her way out of the country, and here I was trying to reason with two women who practically thought she was the criminal. But I knew a lost cause when I saw one.
"Forget about it. I want to see Lou."
An intern was coming out and I snagged him, announced I was next of kin to a patient, and demanded to be taken through the official door and into the back. At that moment, the stout cop's radio crackled. They were being summoned to a Christopher Street gay bar where somebody had just been knifed in a back room. She looked at me, as though to say, "This sounds like a real crime," and then they hurried out for their squad car. Christ!