Chapter 2: Hard Time In The House Of Many Doors

It was only about a ten-minute ride to the police station. Lutherville is on York Road north of the Beltway, Towson is on York Road south of the Beltway, and Towson is the county seat and headquarters of the Baltimore County Police. I was quickly brought inside to a fairly clean central area with a big counter and pushed onto a bench against the wall. I was sitting next to another guy, early twenties, kind of scruffy looking, but hey, we were in a jail. He was also sitting there with his hands cuffed. I nodded at him but otherwise kept my mouth shut.

He nodded back. “They run out of the FBI Top 10 and had to bring you in?”

I laughed at this. I looked like exactly what I was, a slightly rumpled school kid from a rich, white neighborhood. “Yeah, they found out I’m the one who shot JFK. What’s your story?”

“I got picked up for boosting a liquor store, but I didn’t do it. They got the wrong guy,” he asserted. I just nodded in understanding. “You?”

“Some kids on the school bus decided they wanted my lunch money.”

He stared at me for a moment. “You’re shitting me. So why are you here and not them?”

“They’re in the hospital.”

He gave me a look of respect, which made me wonder about my standards in my new life. I was getting approval from criminals. I just gave an embarrassed shrug. Any further discussion was ended when a uniformed cop came up and took my new friend by the arm and took him away. After another couple of minutes, a different cop came for me. I was led down a series of hallways towards what looked like an interrogation room of some sorts. I glanced in and then asked if I could use the bathroom first. The police officer led me to a bathroom and followed me in. Thank God the cuffs were in the front. I was able to fumble my zipper down and use the urinal. I don’t pee easily when being watched, but I ran the Fibonacci Series in my head until I relaxed and did my business. I zipped up and was led out. I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. I had a nice shiner starting. A minute later I was in the interrogation room.

“Who do you want me to call?” he asked, pulling out a small notebook and a pen.

“What, you mean my parents?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

I gave a wry shrug at this. “Well, they’re both at work right now.” I gave it a thought. “Listen, I don’t know the number, but my father works here in town at Harry T. Campbell’s. He’s an engineer. His name is Charles Buckman. I don’t know the number, but they must be in the phone book. When you get him, you’d better tell him to bring a lawyer. I have a funny feeling this is going to be a hairball.”

The police officer gave me a funny look at this. “And your mom?”

“Why don’t you ask me that if you can’t reach my father. I think you’ll find him more ... rational, let’s say.”

He just grunted at that and left the room. I had a chance to look around the room. Very stark and utilitarian, lowest bidder government work. A metal table, bolted to the floor. Four metal chairs, bolted to the floor. A mirror along the side, probably one-way glass. No carpet. Plain sheetrock walls painted institutional gray. Single door, steel, small window with the heavy glass and metal mesh, locked.

I sat down on one of the chairs and considered my predicament. In a lot of ways, despite my surroundings, I wasn’t doing badly. Yes, I was cuffed in a jail, but I hadn’t been booked, fingerprinted, photographed, or otherwise processed through the system, and the reality of it was that I probably wouldn’t be. Unlike my new friend out in the lobby, I had been involved in a schoolboy fight on a school bus. Okay, yes, I had put all three of them into the hospital, but the bottom line was that this was a fight on a school bus.

I reflected a moment on the fight itself. How had I beaten up three older bullies so badly, when at the time, the original time around, I would have been so much dead meat? It was purely a matter of surprise and circumstance. They had figured that the three of them could cower a little kid, but I wasn’t thinking like a little kid, but like a fully grown man who wasn’t going to put up with their shit. When I fought back it was like the mouse spitting back at the cat. They were stunned. The last time I was in a fight had been when I was seventeen and working at Pot Springs Pizza, and a punk kid wanted to prove he was a tough guy. He shoved me from behind and I swung around and backhanded him across the face. He was so stunned that somebody fought back it was easy for me to hustle him out of the shop.

Mind you, it usually still works out badly for the mouse. The only reason I managed to win was that I managed to fight in a restricted space, where I could handle them one at a time. The bus aisle was the first place, with two boys tied up and falling all over everybody while I concentrated on Jerry. Later, outside, I had my back to the bus, eliminating 180 degrees of vulnerability, and still managed to get the two boys to attack me individually. If we had all been outside, on a field, with no place to hide, and all three had attacked me at the same time, I would have been the one in the hospital.

So, what was going to happen now? They hadn’t started processing me through the system, so it was much more likely they were going to send me home with my parents. The cops and the courts are not how you want to handle schoolboy fights. But was that what I wanted? It is certainly what I would have wanted back the first time around. I would have been terrified; hell, I would have shit my pants being on a bench next to an armed robber! Now, at sixty-seven, I was nowhere near as impressed as they wanted me to be, even if I was thirteen on the outside.

There were several tactics the police could use to get me out of their hair. They could threaten me and/or my parents. They could knock me around and show me how tough they were. Never mind the nonsense about how that was illegal. It was 1968. The Escobedo decision was only four years old, and the Miranda ruling was only two years old, and I was underage in any case. The cops could do any damn thing they wanted to a criminal and realistically get away with it.

Still, that wasn’t going to happen. After the war, when the highway system was developed and it became possible to move out of the cities, Baltimore developed a large network of suburbs just like every other city in America. This was where the rich white people moved to get away from the niggers. Don’t blame me if you don’t like the language. This was 1968, not 2022, and this was south of the Mason-Dixon line and that was how people talked. So, my parents moved to the new suburbs, and the richest and whitest suburb in the state was Towson. There was no way I was going to end up in the basement getting the rubber hose treatment.

I was in the interrogation room for over an hour and a half when the door opened, and two large men stepped in. The first man in was a big man, tall and stocky, dressed in a suit, and his hair was gray, and his face was red. The second man was similar, only a bit shorter, and his face was a normal color.

I stood up and turned towards the red-faced man. “Hi, Dad.”

“WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE NOW?” he roared.

“Well, so much for ‘innocent until proven guilty’,” I commented. I turned towards the other man as my father fumed and seemed to get redder. “Hi, I’m Carl Buckman. Who are you?” I held out my right hand to shake his, but of course the left came with it since they were cuffed together.

The other man quickly came around to stand between me and my father. He stared at the cuffs for a moment before shaking my hand awkwardly. “I’m John Steiner. I’m a lawyer.”

“I asked what the hell you have done!” yelled my father again.

“Why don’t we sit down so I can tell you?” I answered calmly.

The lawyer pushed my father towards a chair opposite mine. “Charlie, sit down so we can figure this out.”

“I want to know...”

“Charlie, sit down and shut up,” replied Steiner.

My father sat down with no small amount if ill grace and stared at me. In a low and dangerous voice, he said, “This had better be good.”

“I will tell you everything in just a moment, Dad. Just believe me when I tell you that I am not the bad guy here. Please, just believe me. First, I need to ask Mister Steiner a question.”

Dad looked like he was about to explode, but the lawyer grabbed his arm and kept him under control. He sat down next to my father and looked at me. “Yes?”

“Mister Steiner, I presume you are my father’s attorney.”

“Yes, I have been for several years. Why?”

“The question is, are you now my attorney or are you his?”

Steiner sat back in his chair and eyed me curiously. Dad just looked confused and was on the verge of some more yelling when Steiner leaned forward and held his hand up. “Hold it, Charlie, this is good.” He turned back to me. “I will be your attorney.”

“Even though he is paying you?” I pressed.

He glanced at my father and then turned back to me. “Even though.”

“And if his wishes were different than mine?”

My father was staring at the pair of us like we were speaking in Martian. “What in the world are you two...”

Steiner simply held his hand up to silence my father. “I know where this is going.” He turned back to me. “If there was that much of a difference of opinion I would arrange for a new lawyer for you. Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes, sir, thank you very much.” I stood and reached across the table and offered my hand again. “Like I said earlier, my name is Carl Buckman.”

He shook my hand much more firmly. “I’m John Steiner and I’m your lawyer. You want to tell us what you’re doing here?”

“Yes, sir, I would very much like to do that.”

The sense of rationality in the room had grown by several orders of magnitude. Even my father seemed calmer now. In a much more reasonable tone, he repeated himself. “This still had better be good.”

“That all depends on your definition of good.” I told them everything, about how the three boys had decided to begin ganging up on the kids on the bus, taking lunch money, and how they had told me they were going to charge me five bucks a week. This was announced on the bus yesterday afternoon on the ride back from school. Then I described the fight. Dad’s a pretty tough guy himself, but it’s mostly his size and looks. He might look like a stevedore, but he’s actually a design engineer. Dad blanched when I described what I thought were the final results. “Jerry has got to have a busted nose, some busted teeth, and probably a broken jaw. Tim was just knocked out, a concussion, I guess, and Bob’s knee is totally shattered. I would bet all three are staying in the hospital for a few days.”

“Jesus Christ!” Dad said. He was finally looking at me with a mixture of horror and respect, the lawyer, too.

Steiner asked, “Have you told this to the police?”

“They never asked. I’ve been sitting here for the last couple of hours waiting for you. Besides, I’m not talking to them without a lawyer. Miranda v. Arizona comes to mind.”

Both men stared at me for a second, and then Steiner stood up and pounded on the locked door. It opened a few seconds later and he spoke quietly to whoever was on the other side. He then came back and sat down at the table. “Okay, a detective will be in shortly. I want you to tell him everything you just told us. We’ll get out of here afterwards. I can’t imagine they’ll charge you with much more than a misdemeanor. Fighting on a bus or something.”

“Mister Steiner, I have no intention of agreeing to anything of the sort. I’m the victim here, not them. They attacked me, not the other way around,” I replied.

This sort of disagreement was what my father used to call ‘back talk’, ‘lip’, or ‘sass’, and you could see his face clouding up again. At home he’d have started swinging at me by now. Mr. Steiner just nodded in understanding and motioned for Dad to keep calm. “Let’s talk to the detective first. I won’t agree to anything without discussing it with you first.”

After another minute, the door opened up and another man in a suit, smaller and thinner, with a noticeable bald spot even though he was still in his thirties, came in. He was carrying a legal pad and a pen and a manila folder. He looked at us and tossed his things to the table. “Hello. My name’s Robert Ritchie and I’m a detective.” He waggled a finger at the two men, pointing in turn at them. “Mister Buckman?”

“This is Charles Buckman, and I’m John Steiner, Mister Buckman’s attorney,” answered Mr. Steiner.

Detective Ritchie shook their hands before turning to face me. “And you must be Carl. Can I call you Carl?” he asked, a big friendly smile on his face. Yeah, we were all buddies. He was my friend. He would remove my cuffs and send me home to my loving parents. I would leave the horrible police station. And to do this, I only needed to make a little confession. Kidnapping the Lindbergh baby came to mind as the little confession.

“Sure thing, Bob, you bet,” I answered happily.

Ritchie started at this and stared at me. Smiling to himself, he shook his head. “Okay, I deserved that, I suppose. Let’s sit down and get this over with.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, much more politely.

“Can we do something about the handcuffs?” asked Steiner.

“I suppose, but these are some pretty serious charges,” replied Ritchie. It was like watching poker players raise and fold on their hands.

“There’s three of us. I think we can take him if we need to,” was the dry response.

Ritchie shrugged and removed my cuffs. I guess this gave him some form of card for later in the game. He put the cuffs and keys in his pocket and picked up his pad and pen. He turned to me and said, “So, tell me your side of it.”

I glanced over at Steiner, who nodded silently, and told my story again, just like I had before. He made several notes, most specifically when I mentioned names. At the end he commented, “That’s not precisely the story I got.”

It was important that I stay in control as much as possible. Before my lawyer could respond, I said, “I imagine not, but who would you have heard differently from? The other three are all in the emergency room. No way have you talked to them yet. Who’s left? The bus driver?”

Ritchie gave me a very sharp look at this. “According to the driver, you attacked all three boys on the bus, and then attacked the two he rescued when you got outside.”

I snorted in derision. “He rescued them? That’s rich. Let me guess, he stated he saw the whole thing, right?”

“Yes, he did.”

My father was keeping quiet, which was good. He simply couldn’t understand what had happened to his nerdy little asshole son. More importantly, the lawyer was keeping silent. He could always step in and claim I was being coerced or stupid if something came up that was bad, but in the meantime, if I was asking questions, the detective might just screw up himself. I was taking control of the interview session.

“You may consider that report as fine a work of fiction as anything Hemingway or Faulkner ever wrote. It has about as much relation to the truth. The driver was sitting in his seat, facing forward, looking through the windshield when this all started. The only place he could have seen anything from was standing in the aisle, but that is where all the kids getting on the bus were, so he wasn’t there. He was sitting, face forward. When he heard the fight start, he would have turned around, but there were at least a dozen kids between us and him. He never saw anything.”

“Uh, huh.” Ritchie wasn’t letting me know what he was thinking. He would have been a good poker player.

“Then later, after he threw my last two attackers off the bus - the phrase he used was ‘get the fuck out of here’ - he was kneeling on the floor trying to see to Jerry. He was three feet below any windows on the bus, which are six feet off the ground in any case, so how did he see me attack the other two? He didn’t know anything about what happened until after the police and ambulance arrived and he came down off the bus.” I continued.

“So why did he say different?” he asked.

“Well, what was he going to say? That he had no idea what was happening and couldn’t keep control of the kids on his bus? How long would he stay employed after that? I would bet that he’s not actually a school employee and protected by a union, but a part time employee of the contracting company that operates the busses.” On the first go around, the same driver had reported that nothing at all had occurred, despite what some of the passengers had said.

Chapter 3 »