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Karamu (Eastern Illinois University), Volume XIX, Number 2, Spring 2005

Copyright Debra Anne Davis 2005
 
Statements
 
He sat in his unmarked car, his eyes scanning the parking lot. He was waiting for a white woman, in her mid-20s. When I (said woman) arrived, I spotted him immediately. I was looking for a cop, and he was definitely a cop. But this was no late-night TV show, and we were not actors playing parts. Unfortunately.

My friend and I got out of her car; he walked over to greet us. He gave new meaning to the term “plain clothes.” My first impression of him: brown. He seemed to be all brown. Brown pants and shirt and pointy brown boots. Even his car was brown.

“Sam Bass,” he said and stretched out his arm far enough, but not uncomfortably far, so I could shake it.

“Debbie Davis,” I said, my voice cracking like an adolescent boy’s. “This is my friend, Mari,” I continued, nodding my head in her direction. She scowled but deigned to meet his handshake halfway.

Suddenly, I felt young and underdressed and out of place, here in the parking lot of my own apartment building. It was 10:00 on Sunday morning. Other people all over Austin were going to church or eating brunch or still sleeping. But we were here, doing this. A passerby would simply see three people having a conversation; the passerby wouldn’t know, though, who the three people were—a police detective, a rape victim, and her friend.

“Let’s get started,” Sam Bass said to me. “You can leave now,” he said to Mari. “I’ll bring her home when we’re done.”

Mari, an art graduate student, was wearing paint-splattered clothing. Her dark brown hair was chopped short and framed her face. In the center of her face were two glaring, suspicious eyes. She put her hand on my forearm.

“I want to go with her,” Mari said. Though she was the tallest of the three of us, she stood up even straighter. Her eyes didn’t blink.

“No,” he said, unfazed. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.” We had to go into my apartment so he could see the evidence of the crime that had occurred there, fifteen hours earlier, when a stranger had barged in on me, with a knife.

“It’s okay, Mari,” I told her. It wasn’t okay. I wanted her to come with me. I didn’t want to be left alone with this man. Emotionally, I was very wary. Intellectually, though, I could see his point. Instinctually, what? My gut reaction was that he was trustworthy and, more importantly, professional. He was here to start the job of catching the rapist. “I’ll be all right,” I told her, hoping it was true.

She demanded and then wrote down his phone number.

She hugged me, and, reluctantly, she left us to do our work.

I led him across the parking lot, past the swimming pool, and down the concrete walkway of the apartment complex. Outside my front door there was a man sitting on a large black box. He had dark hair and a beard. “Hello, ____,” Sergeant Bass greeted him by name. Then he turned to me, “Debbie, this guy is going to look for fingerprints.” I liked the fact that he called me by name. I liked that he was explaining what was going on.

The fingerprint guy and I nodded our helloes, and then I got out my keys and opened my apartment door. I walked in first, and the two men followed me. We stood together in the living room. The fingerprint guy put his box down.

“Now show me exactly what happened,” Sergeant Bass said. He looked me straight in the eye when he spoke. I felt shaky and reluctant. I knew why I had to do this, but I also realized, as I considered his request, just how difficult it was going to be. I took a deep breath. I considered: What, exactly, had happened?

“I heard a loud knock at the door, so I got up and walked to the door,” I told him. I walked to the edge of the living room carpet and then down the entryway floor. They watched me.
I put my hand on the doorknob. “I opened the door, he pushed it in and pushed me into the wall.” I pantomimed how he had thrown me against the wall: I backed up against the wall and stood there for a few seconds. Sergeant Bass looked at me. His eyebrows gathered themselves together. He didn’t say anything. I felt queasy. I guessed I would just have to go on.

“Then he pushed me down on the floor,” I said. I got down on my hands and knees. “Then I pulled his glasses off.” I twisted around and dragged my hand through the air. “He pushed my face on the floor.” I pressed my right cheek onto the linoleum.

I was on my knees, in my entryway, my ass in the air, my head on the floor. This was not similar to the position I’d been in the evening before; this was exactly the position. And my mind began to scream again exactly the same thing, Escape, how can I escape?

“So he was on top of you—here?” Sergeant Bass asked me.

His question startled me out of the trance I was falling into. I made my mind stop screaming. This is not last night, and I have work to do. His question was so specific, his tone so calm. I considered. Here? Precisely? “Yes,” I answered. “Here.”

Sergeant Bass looked back at the fingerprint guy. “If he was on his knees then, he must have had to push himself off the floor when he stood up again; he must have put his hand down somewhere here.” He pointed down and made a circle with his finger over the linoleum.

I was impressed: Yes, fingerprints on the floor. Of course. I never would have thought of that.
The guy began unpacking his black box. He took out a small roller and a brush and a container of ink and began his work.

I continued my tour. “Then he pushed me in here,” I said and walked into the bedroom.
Sergeant Bass followed me. “Did he touch the blankets and sheets?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I responded.

He saw things I didn’t. While I saw my bed a mess, a room tangled, he saw clues, potential evidence. I described to him what had happened in this bedroom. He continued asking his specific questions, and I became increasingly more confident in giving my specific answers. My initial uneasiness of being alone with him wore off as we went through the apartment. He didn’t ask me anything he didn’t need to know; he didn’t want titillating details. He was serious and polite and very efficient. He watched me and listened to me and calculated all along: Will this lead to a clue? Can we use this for evidence?

* * *

Sam Bass the legendary outlaw…learned gambling and gunplay, and…perfected the art of train robbery. Ranger major John B. Jones brought him down by planting an informer in his gang and setting a trap at Round Rock, where Bass planned to rob the bank in 1878. A close study of the photographs of the legendary outlaws sometimes fails to reveal why they have captured the public imagination. Sam Bass was an unprepossessing runt.

Bern Keating, An Illustrated History of the Texas Rangers, 1980

Whatever irony there is in the situation, I’m certainly not the discoverer of it. A cop named after a criminal. In fact, the “Sam” on the business card he gave me has quotation marks around it. He was born a Bass, I guessed, but he became a “Sam.” A Texas in-joke, perhaps. But so ill-fitting that, like big guys called Tiny or Chihuahuas named Killer, it begins to fit. Sam Bass, my Sam Bass, was no legendary outlaw, did not rob trains (this I’m assuming), and was neither unprepossessing nor a runt. He was a dedicated public servant who, in doing his job well, helped bring down a modern-day villain. This did not capture the public’s imagination. It didn’t even make it into the daily newspaper. But, still, a close study will reveal.

* * *

When we were finished in the apartment, we walked back out to the parking lot. Sergeant Bass held the passenger door of his (brown) American four-door open for me. He continued asking me questions as we drove. We didn’t take breaks; he concentrated on the investigation the whole time. He didn’t ask me anything personal like a hair dresser or dentist does.
He parked in the underground parking structure at the police station downtown. As we walked to the building, several men and women, uniformed and in street clothes, greeted “Sam.” He waved and smiled at each, and kept walking.

He held the building’s heavy glass door open for me, and I walked past him and into the huge lobby. At the security desk, he nodded his hello, and the officer behind the desk waved hers and let the two of us pass through without question. We walked down a carpeted hallway. He stopped at the end of the hallway, opened another door and held it for me.

Before I stepped inside, I noticed a sign that stuck out from the wall over the door, “Sex Crimes Division.” The name made me cringe. This was where I had to go now? The idea that I had been a victim of this kind of crime still surprised me. The idea that a city police department would have to have an entire division devoted to these crimes confounded me. This seemingly supernatural horror that had ripped into my life the night before was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. But here was this big blocky building, with this nondescript office in it, where people in uniforms or in regular clothes came to work every day, from 9 to 5 or 5 to 1 or whenever the time sheet told them to come in, and toiled away, with memos and telephones and coffee machines, working on solving sex crimes. Sex crimes. Were there really that many people committing these crimes? And that many people enduring them?

Sergeant Bass followed me into the office and motioned me to take a seat near a long desk. He asked if I wanted a Sprite and I said yes, not realizing that he was offering to buy it for me from the machine down the hall. His small kindness, a gesture of hospitality, put me a bit more at ease. These activities, the morbid show and now tell I had to do, were extremely unpleasant for me, and he acknowledged this, in his own ways, throughout our time together.

We spent the next two hours in front of his computer. He asked me to recount everything I could remember of the attack and the attacker. I had just told him everything while we were in my apartment. Now I had to do it all again. He typed my words; I watched as they appeared on the screen. He was patient with me when my voice wavered or my hands shook. He asked very specific questions, again, and apologized for the difficult ones, the ones about body parts, the ones about the knife.

Sometimes he’d stop and look over at me. “Were you still in the hallway then, or were you in the bedroom?” he’d ask. Or: “Was he holding the knife on you when he said that?” He wanted me to be very specific. If he got confused about something I’d said, I’d have to think of better, clearer words. I spent so much energy trying to be accurate that the content of my words lost some of its impact.

“And then he said, ‘Put your hands behind your back,’” I said. “That’s how he said it; he emphasized the ‘put.’” Sergeant Bass typed out what I’d said and then fumbled around, reading the tops of the keys, trying to figure out how to italicize the “put.”

“My secretary usually does this,” he apologized. “She’s a lot better with the computer than I am.”

At one point he turned to me and said, “None of this was your fault. You did what you could to survive. The fact that you’re alive at all means you did the right thing.” He was looking directly into my face when he said it. I found his spontaneous speech odd; it didn’t seem to fit into the particular conversation we were having at the time. And: I already knew that none of it was my fault, that I wasn’t to blame, that I’d done what I could. But the surprising statement did reassure me, if not in the way he’d intended. I knew then that he understood what had happened, that he knew I’d done what I could, that he, too, felt the evil of the act and of the actor.

While we waited for my now-completed official statement to come out of his computer’s printer, he told me, “You should talk to a counselor. Victims’ Services can help you find one.” I felt that he was telling me this both because he wanted me to get well and because he couldn’t or shouldn’t counsel me himself.

“I will,” I told him. And I did. Talking to the counselor helped me. Talking to the police detective did, too, though I’m sure he never realized it.

***

When he had finished typing my statement, we went back out to the underground parking garage and got into his car. I was surprised to see when we got aboveground that it was already growing dark out.

He pulled up to the curb in front of Mari’s house. He took another business card out of his wallet and held it out to me. “I’m going off duty for two days,” he told me. “If you think of anything else, you can call this detective. He and I work together on a lot of cases.”

I took the card but didn’t look at it. Going off duty? How could he go off duty? The rapist was out there, wandering the streets, looking for another victim—or waiting to stalk and attack me again. And he was just going to go home and rest?

My unconscious expectation had been that he—and the entire police force—would be spending all their time, bending all their efforts towards catching the man who’d raped me. How could they not? This had been the central terror of my life. This, for them, was a job. Not “just” a job, perhaps—an important job that they did with pride. Still, they collected paychecks at the end of the month; they went home at night, ate dinner, sat around with the family.

I would have to learn patience.

I thanked him for the ride. He waited until Mari opened the door for me before he pulled away from the curb.

***

Four months later, Sergeant Bass called me up to let me know they had arrested a suspect and that they were arranging a lineup for the next day. I took the afternoon off work and met him in the lobby of the police department. He again escorted me to the office with the “Sex Crimes Division” sign jutting out over the door.

I sat in his office listening carefully to his lineup instructions, staring at three large cardboard boxes at my feet. Across the top of each of the boxes in black magic marker was the same label, “Victim: D. Davis.” I knew what was in those boxes: my blankets, towels, jeans, underwear. It was eerie. The knock on the door, the shove to the floor, the commands barked and obeyed, all that was stored here in these light brown cubes, neatly sealed, innocuous pieces of Pandemonium.

The boxes certainly distracted me. But they also heartened me. Someone had gone to the trouble to lug these things from wherever they were stored and bring them in here. This was serious. They obviously thought their suspect was the rapist.

And certainly I wanted him to be caught and put away. But I was not looking forward to the process that would lead him there. I was afraid of viewing the lineup, afraid of being in the same room with him again, afraid that I would scream. I didn’t mention all this to Sergeant Bass, though, as he finished explaining everything to me. It was the Robbery Division, he told me, that would be in charge of the lineup. All the other victims there that day, the police believed, had been robbed by the same person who had raped me.

Then we left his office, and he escorted me upstairs. There were a lot of people standing around outside the room where the lineup was to be conducted. There were a few clusters of uniformed and plain clothes police officers and, along the wall, a line of about twenty people, the victims and witnesses.

There were so many of us that we’d have to view the lineup in two shifts. I was near the end of the line. Sergeant Bass was standing up near the door we were lined up to enter. He was talking to one of the cops, gesturing back at me with his hand; the cop nodded his assent to something. Then Sergeant Bass turned and waved at me, short little waves just over his head, Come here. I walked over, and he said to the same cop, “She’ll go in the first group.” He didn’t speak to me directly; it was more like he was speaking for both of us to a third party. Then he nodded to me to take the place at the front of the line, and I did. The others in line didn’t protest my “cutting.”

When the door opened, I led the way, the other victims filing in behind me. Sergeant Bass and the other cops and the man who had been introduced to us as the suspect’s defense attorney stood in the back of the room. The lawyer looked at us all very carefully as we walked past him.

We took our seats. The lights went out, and the stage was lit up. I stared up at the five men who stood behind the thick one-way mirror a few feet in front of me. I listened to the men as they spoke, one by one, the words they were commanded to. I watched their arms and faces. Number three, yes, I don’t know, number three could be him. I think. Sergeant Bass of course had warned me about this. “People change,” he’d told me, but this was not an observation on the human psyche. “They shave or grow a beard,” he explained. “They gain or lose weight, purposely squint or stand a different way.” I concentrated and tried to imagine such changes.

After about fifteen minutes, the viewing was over. We had to leave to make room for the second group to come. I had been the first one in and had taken the far left seat in the front row. The door was in the back of the room, on the right, so I would be the last to leave. As the others filed out, I tried to get a better look at number three. I tried to seem nonchalant about it, just glancing back over my shoulder as I walked. When I passed by him, Sergeant Bass gave me a little short hand wave again. “Did you get a good look?” he asked me.
“I think,” I said. “But I would know more if I could see his face better, if I could see it up close.”

We spoke quickly, familiarly, while a couple of the other cops and especially the lawyer watched us, unabashedly. Though only the two of us were talking, it was not a private conversation. “Would it help if you could look directly through the glass?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said. Sergeant Bass glanced at the defense attorney, the lawyer for one of those five men behind the glass, and the defense attorney frowned.

“Go ahead,” Sergeant Bass said to me; then he shoved me, not a violent gesture but a decisive one, towards the glass. I would have been too timid to shove myself.

I walked straight up to the mirror. I heard him taking care of things behind me. “She’s just going to look through the glass,” he said, defending our actions to the attorney. “She can look closer if she wants; there’s no one else in the room.”

I looked deep into the face of number three, quickly. Then I dutifully left the room. One of the cops then led me to the Robbery Division for a debriefing. Sergeant Bass followed me, half mother hen, half Sherlock Holmes. I was taken to yet another office in the huge building. A different cop was waiting for me; he greeted me with a smile. I took the seat he offered. Sergeant Bass stood by, not close and not far. Did I recognize any of them? the cop asked me. Well, yes, maybe. I told him I thought it could possibly have been number three. “How sure are you,” he asked, “say, on a scale of one to ten?”

“Eight,” my mouth answered, and I realized that I was almost entirely sure. He wrote this down but offered no reaction.

After I was dismissed from Robbery, Sergeant Bass escorted me back to Sex Crimes. He seemed agitated, excited. He asked me the same questions the other cop had. He did not try to influence me one way or the other. It was a bit frustrating, his neutrality, because I was used to taking cues from him. I couldn’t tell if I’d even picked out the right guy. Maybe number two or number five had been the real suspect.

***

The man I had picked out of the lineup later pled guilty to the crime of raping me. He’s been in jail now over a decade, and still has decades to go.

In the Old West, perhaps (and perhaps not—how much of all of that is fiction, anyway?) when a woman was ruined, her menfolk sought vengeance, quick and lethal. Not for me. Instead, I did my duty as a citizen: I called in the authorities and trusted them to do their duties. And they did.

None of this was your fault.

Of course it wasn’t. I knew that. And he did, too.

The most summary history of the Rangers, a history that avoids extravagant and undocumented legends, nevertheless teems with stories of incredible heroism and dashing action.

An Illustrated History of the Texas Rangers

It was not, perhaps, dashing action nor even anything incredible that led to the capture and conviction of the man who’d raped me. It was hard work, compassion, and unwitting empathy. Sergeant Bass, I knew, took his job very seriously. But, either out of humility or naiveté, he saw his role as very limited. He would collect the evidence, the things left behind, the words formed to describe the crime, and use them to find and apprehend the criminal. He wanted to know, “exactly,” what had happened; this was all in his line of duty. He knew his job, but he didn’t know, really, all the work he did.

He did not counsel me, even withheld his advice at times. He was a Sex Crimes Detective, and I was a Victim. These labels both did and did not fit us each. When I felt unsure, he pushed me, once even literally, forward. But through this, I saw that I had my own duties, too. I had been victimized, but now I was a key witness, an integral member of the team that, eventually, successfully removed a rapist from our society, locking him away so he could not victimize another.

People change. They get fat or get their hair cut or begin to stand or walk differently. They get old. They respond to the events of their lives. Most people don’t ever exist even as a flicker in the public imagination. And only some deserve to.

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