Ben had already made it up in his mind he wasn’t confessing to having the drugs in the house. He figured if he just denied it and his mother denied it he would get away with it. He was sure the police wouldn’t find any drugs inside the house. He was sure he’d been careful to get rid of all the drugs and everything associated with it every day when he was done bagging. He had cleaned tirelessly with all types of cleaning agents after Keon had spilled the heroin. There was no doubt in Ben’s mind that all of the drugs were cleaned up and there was not even any residue on his floor or in his nightstand drawer. Ben was confident and he wasn’t budging on his story. He was going to stick to his denial.
“I cannot believe this. I can’t even grieve for my son,” Celeste cried, putting her face into her hands as they started pulling down the block. It seemed as if the entire neighborhood was out watching now.
Ben looked out the window as the cop car drove slowly down his block. When the car got to the corner, Ben could see Quan and all of the corner boys glaring at him. Quan put on a screw face and did some hand signals that were meant to send Ben a serious message. It was ghetto sign language telling Ben that he better not fucking snitch on them. He swallowed hard and turned his eyes away.
Quan noticed that Ben didn’t even want to have eye contact with him. Ben’s apparent disregard immediately made Quan angry. Ben didn’t realize that not acknowledging Quan with at least a head nod was the worst thing he could’ve done. Anytime corner boys or hustlers like Quan and Deezo saw one of their workers get bagged by the cops, they automatically erred on the side of caution that the person was going to snitch. That meant their block was going to be hot and shit was going to have to be shut down for a minute so they could gauge the fallout from the cops. To make matters worse, Ben didn’t have Deezo’s drugs or money and no way to explain to him what happened. That meant that all the people that bought weight from Deezo was going to be dry for a minute while Deezo got more from his connect.
For a hustler, something like that could spell disaster. The drug game was a heavy supply and demand type of business. If a dealer like Deezo couldn’t supply for even one day, he could lose his demand to the next hustler. Deezo’s money was going to be funny for a minute, all because Ben had been careless. All of these thoughts ran through Ben’s mind, while his mother sat crying next to him in the back of the cop car and his baby brother lay dead in the morgue. He felt like disappearing. He wished he could disappear. At that moment, he felt like he would’ve probably been better off dead too.
At the precinct, the detectives separated Celeste and Ben into separate rooms. They weren’t going to question Ben initially, because he wasn’t old enough to give consent and his mother couldn’t sit in on his interview because she was also a suspect.
Celeste was in an interrogation room with her head on the table when the two detectives came back in. She lifted her head in response to them opening the door. Her head was booming with a massive headache, a testament to how much she had been crying.
“Ms. Early, we realize your baby is dead, but we need to find out how he got such a high concentration of heroin in his system,” the lead detective said, acting as if he wanted to be nice to Celeste. She had heard about these types of tactics before. It wasn’t going to work on her.
“I don’t know! I don’t use drugs! I don’t allow my son to bring drugs or use drugs in my house and my baby’s father is not on drugs,” Celeste pleaded her case.
“Ms. Early, somebody in that house had heroin in the house. The baby didn’t go outside and get drugs on his own. He ingested the heroin through his mouth according to the medical examiner’s report,” the other detective said, his tone was cold and kind of cruel. His words made Celeste cry even harder.
“I’m telling you, I really do not know. I don’t know what happened,” Celeste cried out. She put her hands into her hair and began pulling it. She felt like she would go insane.
“Ok. Well, if you don’t want to tell us, I guess we’re going to assume you’re guilty,” the second detective began. He was the mean detective or bad cop to the lead detective’s good cop. “We are sending someone to the midnight magistrate for an emergency search warrant for your apartment. I guarantee you will be arrested within a few hours. We don’t have mercy for baby killers, so I will work all night until I get what I want. You’ll be attending your son’s funeral in leg irons.” The detective had a genuine disdain for Celeste. His face was curled into a frown to display his disgust for the grieving mom. A mom he thought was just faking grief.
Celeste continued to cry. The detective sucked his teeth at her, turned swiftly and stomped out of the room. “I didn’t do anything!” Celeste screeched as he let the door slam.
The lead detective, the good cop, looked at Celeste with a little bit of sympathy. “Ms. Early, we want to speak to your son, Ben,” the detective stated. “Maybe he can tell us something that he was too afraid to say in front of you. Will you give us consent to talk to him alone since he is a minor? It’s worth a shot if he can tell us what happened without feeling the pressure of your presence.” The detective was laying his game down thick.
Celeste shook her head yes and scribbled her signature on a consent form that the detective had slid in front of her. She didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to be speaking to Ben without the presence of a parent or an attorney because of his age. Her mind was too muddled to even realize anything. She just wanted to get out of there so she could go about making funeral plans for Keon. She pushed the paper back towards the detective.
The detective was happy he had been able to deceive Celeste.
“When can I go home?” Celeste asked. “I already told ya’ll everything I know. I will say it again. I was arguing with my baby father, he hit me, next thing the baby was screaming, I ran and found him having a seizure,” she recounted the moment robotically.
“We’ve heard you, but some stuff just doesn’t add up. We have to hold you here until we can figure out the one plus one of this whole thing,” the detective replied. With that, he was gone. The door to the interrogation room slammed and Celeste was alone again. Once again, she put her head back down on the table distraught. She was overcome with another wave of racking sobs and sadness. She was wondering what she did to deserve all of this.
Ben sat in an open room with a double-sided mirror. Because of the mirror and the missing door, the room couldn’t be considered an official interrogation room. They weren’t able to keep minors in totally sealed interrogation rooms. Due to his nervousness, Ben was battling a bad case of the bubble guts.
The detectives walked in the room and Ben jumped. They looked like they were ready to do the good cop, bad cop routine Ben had learned about from movies. They sat on either side of him. One detective sat on the edge of the table to Ben’s right and the other detective pulled up a chair and sat very close to him on the left. He felt surrounded and he was, literally surrounded.
“Ben, we spoke to your mother,” one of them started. Ben looked at him, expressionless. “And she seems to believe you might know how your baby brother got those drugs in his system,” the detective lied, staring Ben dead in his eyes.
Ben just stared. Deezo had warned Ben against these types of tactics that cops used, when they lied and told one suspect the other had already told on him. Ben wasn’t falling for that one.
“C’mon Ben, if you don’t start talking you’re going to juvie hall and your mother is going to Riker’s Island,” the detective continued.
Ben figured the detective that chose to threaten him with jail was playing the bad cop. The bad cop usually started the conversation and made the threats. Plus, he was usually the best of the two liars.
“Look Ben, we know people make mistakes all the time. This mistake cost your brother his life,” the other cop, the supposedly good cop weighed in. “He was a baby, he didn’t deserve to die like that. We know you didn’t mean for it to happen. We can help you . . . all you gotta do is tell us if the drugs were yours or your mother’s.”
“There was no drugs in our house,” Ben said robotically. He was too smart for their tricks. Both detectives bit down into their jaws. It would’ve been easier for them if either Ben or Celeste had confessed. Now the detectives would have to do a lot of work, which meant less time with their families. Something else they weren’t happy about.
“Well, this is how your brother ended up!” the bad detective boomed. The detective placed a photograph of Keon’s autopsy on the table in front of Ben. The detective was pissed off at Ben and he wasn’t going to hold back any punches.
Ben almost threw up seeing Keon’s chest cut wide open and blood everywhere. It looked like something out of a horror movie to Ben. He wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. He was too angry. He was too much of a man. He kept holding out hope that this would all blow over after the cops realized there were no drugs in their house. At least, there was none now.
“You still don’t want to tell us what happened in that house?” the mean detective grumbled.
“I don’t fuckin’ know!” Ben screamed, banging his fists on the table.
“Listen you little black bastard!” bad detective snapped. “A fuckin’ baby is dead . . . he is your fuckin’ brother and you won’t budge! I’m going to make sure you get locked up and your mother too. You ghetto fucks don’t even care about a dead baby!” The detective gritted, grabbing Ben by the collar and putting his face close to his. Ben could smell the stale coffee and cigarettes on the detective’s breath. He closed his eyes and he immediately saw Deezo’s face. Even if he wanted to tell the detectives the truth, just thinking of his third strike with Deezo was enough to deter him from it.
Ben just kept his mouth shut until the two detectives became so disgusted they finally gave up. He thought his tactic was working. He put his head down on his folded arms. Ben was just waiting for the cavalry to come and release him and his mother.
The detectives were able to get enough probable cause for an emergency search warrant based on the fact that Ben, Celeste and Drake had been the only people in the house when baby Keon overdosed on heroin. The detectives gathered their squad and a few uniformed police and went in and executed the search warrant. They tore Celeste’s apartment up. They went through both Ben’s and Celeste’s bedrooms with needle-in-a-haystack precision. They dumped out her dresser drawers, flipped her mattress, pulled things down in her closet, searched through her toiletries and even dumped out her powders and lotions. The detectives were determined to find something.
“Ay, I think I got something in here,” one of the search team officers called out. About five other cops raced to Celeste’s room. “It was down in the bottom of her closet,” the cop who found the item told them. The lead detective on the case snatched the cloth newspaper bag from the cop who had found it. The detective used a gloved hand and reached down into the nearly empty bag. He pulled out a crumpled up gallon sized plastic baggie. He unfolded it and noticed a pair of latex gloves inside.
“What the fuck is this,” he whispered to himself, noticing the baggie had a white dusty residue inside. “Hey! Somebody get me a die kit stat!” the detective hollered to the other cops, who were still ransacking the apartment for evidence.
One of the cops came with the die kit that police departments used in the field to test substances that needed verification as to whether or not it was a narcotic. The detective carefully opened the baggie and used a Q-tip to swab off a little bit of the white residue from the bag. He squeezed three drops of a substance from the die kit onto the Q-tip. The end of the Q-tip lit up like a light bulb. The cotton tip immediately turned violet in color. The detective looked at the color chart for different drugs.
“Fucking bingo! We got her! We fucking got her!” the detective screamed out excitedly. Some of the other cops and detectives came rushing into Celeste’s bedroom to see what all the excitement was about. The detective was holding up the baggie and the Q-tip like he had just won a gold medal at the Olympics.
“This bitch had a baggie with heroin residue right in her closet inside of an old newspaper delivery bag!” the detective told the other cops and detectives who had rushed to the scene. “She let her baby ingest heroin and die. I have no sympathy for a piece of shit mother like her. She is going under the jail.”
They all started mumbling and grumbling about Celeste. They were all seething mad. They all wanted to see Celeste go down for killing her baby.
Celeste had been inside of the interrogation room at the precinct for hours. She had dozed in and out of sleep so many times she didn’t even realize that an entire day had changed. Every time she closed her eyes for longer than a few minutes, she saw Keon’s face and she could even hear him crying and trying to talk. She winced at the thought. Her back ached from sitting on the hard chair. She had walked around the room, sat down, laid on the table and stretched out on the floor all in attempts to get comfortable. A uniformed cop finally came into the room and Celeste stood up, her eyes stretched wide.
“Why are ya’ll holding me here? I should be free to go. I have to plan my son’s funeral! I lost my baby and ya’ll treating me as if I’m a criminal. This is ridiculous,” Celeste rambled, flailing her arms in protest.
Suddenly, Celeste noticed the two detectives that had taken her from her home step from behind the uniformed officer. Her eyes grew wide. She looked from the detectives to the uniformed cop and back again. “What is going on?” she asked, her voice edging on frantic.
“Ms. Early, you are under arrest for the death of your baby. You will be charged formally at your arraignment,” the detective who played bad cop started. “Cuff her and take her for processing,” the detective told the uniformed officer.
“Wait! What are ya’ll talkin’ about? What are ya’ll tryin’ to do to me?” Celeste screamed at the top of her lungs as the uniformed officer laid hands on her and started manhandling her to put the handcuffs on her. “Help me!” she cried. Celeste was moving around and making it hard for the cop to get the cuffs on her.