Chapter 27

I expected to be there for a good while, knowing how police investigations work, and I was right. I also expected I wouldn't learn much from Sergeant Sauceda – again because I know how investigations work. No matter what irate citizens may think, they don't have a right to know everything the police uncover during an investigation, especially when that information might be crucial to solving a crime. Sometimes in this country we hire people to protect us, then pay them scandalously low salaries and do our best to handicap their efforts. When I figure it out, I'll sell the secret and buy out Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and Ross Perot with my pocket change.

I did learn one thing, though, and that almost as soon as Sauceda stalked in the door. I'd wondered about it, but hadn't gotten around yet to asking. Sergeant Sauceda asked right away, and I found out that Dr. Bernard had sent everyone else home since they hadn't seen anything. She'd kept Davey there because she – Davey – had been too upset to drive, and of course once I arrived and started investigating, and Dr. Bernard called the cops, Davey had to stay for that.

With only three people to question, and only one of them a witness to the crime, and with the crime itself being a minor one as law enforcement ranks things, Sergeant Sauceda found herself without a lot to do. She wasn't, though, pleased with that. A lot of people like finding that a job will be easy, but I got the impression she would have rather stayed at her desk shuffling papers. Most cops hate paperwork, because it interferes with preventing and solving crimes, but some – the lazy ones – would rather write and file reports than get out there and deal with the real world. I suppose there are lazy bums in just about every job – lazy bakers, mechanics, school teachers, bus drivers, carpenters, librarians, and whatever else you can think of.

Seeing that Sergeant Sauceda wasn't likely to let any of us go soon, and that she wasn't going to be able to spend much time on me, I waited till she was interrogating Davey and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed the house, but got no answer. I just said "It's me" to the answering machine, and checked my watch. It was the first time I'd looked all day, what with the emergency, and I realized that it was closer to lunch than time to take Darlia to school. There was no telling where Cecelia was – she has her own life and doesn't ask my permission to go visit a friend, dish out mashed potatoes at the rescue mission, hold the hand of a pregnant teenager at a Christian pregnancy counseling center we support, or just go for a run.

I dialed Cecelia's cell phone ... actually I found the number in the menu and hit the button to dial it, since I don't know her cell phone number by heart. It rang twice, and then came Cecelia's voice. "Is everything all right there?"

"Yeah, just some guy tossing red paint on the floor. Of course what he intended it to look like is pretty clear..."

"And the symbolism is apt, however unconscionable the act itself. No one, then, received any tangible hurt from the gesture?"

"Naw – scared a lady to death, but she didn't even get a pinhead splatter."

"Fear, however stressful to the system, is less dangerous than a blow; if she had to suffer at all, I'm happy it was the former. However, I doubt that you called just to advise me of her safety." I of course couldn't see her, but I guessed from her voice that Cecelia was smiling.

"No, that wasn't it. I just wanted to let you know that things are cool here, I'm okay, and I'll be tied up till the cops untie me."

"I appreciate the call, Darvin. And now I must depart – I am currently sitting with three women who are somewhat irked, since at the moment you called I was expatiating on the rudeness of those who engage in public cell phone conversations."

I chuckled. "Tell your friends that I won't call again till they've done gone. I love you." And for once I beat her to the hang-up. We neither of us like talking on the phone, but usually Cecelia manages to get off the line before I do.

I'd come away without a book, not having time to grab as I was running out the door. I looked over the reading material in the waiting room. At least the standard women's magazines weren't there, but I didn't find anything I really wanted to read. A pamphlet on a woman's right to choose just wasn't what I was looking for – especially since the only choice the pamphlet acknowledged was abortion, out of all the variety of choices that face every woman who's capable of becoming pregnant.

I tossed the pamphlet back into the rack where I'd found it. I knew what sort of literature I was likely to find when I began looking. I sure didn't expect to find copies of the Bible, and arguments for chastity, abstinence, adoption, and raising children, in an abortion mill. It still galled me, though. Cecelia and I have never used any sort of birth control and she's only gotten pregnant once. I'd been with many girls while I was in school, and none of them had ever gotten pregnant. I'd been with Tina for years, some of the time monogamously, and she'd never gotten pregnant even though she'd quit the pill when I moved in with her. I only had one child in the world, and Cecelia only had the one, and here was a place devoted not to helping women have children, but to massacring those children lest they become an inconvenience to women too selfish to think of someone other than themselves.

Perhaps I was being too generally condemnatory. I suppose that some women don't think of a child as an inconvenience – they're teenagers and unmarried, or the victims of rape or unwilling sex, and are scared to death when they find they're pregnant. Maybe I was being too hard on such women, few though they are. But I knew that abortion is, almost completely, a means of post-pregnancy birth control that women use simply because they don't want to bother with a baby.

By now I'd wandered, skirting the splotch of drying paint, to the glass front of the building. I looked out at the parking lot, and the traffic going by on Montgomery. "How on earth did I get into this gig?" I asked myself. There was no answer, but I knew exactly how I'd gotten into it. And I knew I wasn't going to quit either. I might loath abortion, I might regard those who perform abortions as serial killers and the women who have abortions as accomplices if nothing else, but that didn't mean that some psychopathic thug had the right to do the kinds of abominable things he was threatening to do to the women who worked here. The reason it's a cliché is it's true – two wrongs don't make a right. Abortion is dead flat wrong, but so is the murder, rape, and torture of grown women. And allowing the one to go ahead wouldn't end the evil of the other.