Free The Savage City by T. J. English Page A

told, he hadn’t been brought to the station house for “routine questioning.” The cops inside looked at him like he was a criminal. Whitmore was taken upstairs and placed in “the cage,” a makeshift holding cell in the detective squad room. The two cops disappeared.
    Damn , thought George, why they treatin’ me like this? What’d I do?
    The two cops returned. Detective Aidala took George into another room and told him to stand. Unbeknownst to Whitmore, in an adjacent squad commander’s office, Patrolman Isola and a woman named Elba Borrero were awaiting his arrival. It was Elba Borrero, a twenty-five-year-old Puerto Rican woman, who had been assaulted on Bristol Street two nights before.
    Isola instructed Borrero to look through a peephole in the wall at a person she’d been told was a suspect. Borrero was a small woman, barely five feet tall; she couldn’t reach the peephole until the cops stacked some phone books for her to stand on. She peeked through the hole and said, “That’s the man.” Then she thought about it for a moment and said, “I want to be sure. Can I hear his voice?”
    Whitmore was instructed to say, “Lady, I’m going to rape you; lady, I’m going to kill you.”
    When George said the words, Borrero began to tremble. It took the cops twenty minutes to calm her down. “He’s the one,” she said.
    George was brought into the squad commander’s office to face Elba Borrero. He’d heard her through the door claiming he was the person who assaulted her. “Ma’am,” he said, “you makin’ a mistake. I never seen you before in my life.”
    The woman recoiled in horror; she was immediately led out of the room.
    Whitmore stood dumbstruck. The odd confluence of circumstances that had brought him to this moment had fallen like dominoes: if Whitmore hadn’t chatted amiably with Officer Isola the previous morning, volunteering information about what he’d seen on Sutter Avenue, he probably wouldn’t be standing in the precinct house at this moment. If the officer had copied down his name correctly as Whitmore, not Whitman, Isola and Aidala wouldn’t have concluded that George was a liar and therefore worthy of suspicion. If George hadn’t been a meek and pliable person—a blank slate—he might not have intrigued Isola and Aidala as the ideal suspect, a wayward Negro boy you could pin crimes on and no one would ever know or care.
    There is an expression cops use when they have a suspect who fits the profile of a perpetrator they’re looking for: “I like him for that assault,” they’ll say. “I like him for this murder.” Officers Isola and Aidala liked George Whitmore. They liked him a lot. In fact, they thought he fit nicely into another case that was being investigated in the Seventy-third Precinct—the murder of a woman in a Brownsville alley two weeks earlier.
    The cops immediately called the lead investigator on that case and summoned him to the precinct. In the meantime, George needed to besoftened up. The three of them—Isola, Aidala, and Whitmore—were in the squad commander’s office with the door closed. As Whitmore recalled:
    The detective kept on saying that I was suppose’ to have raped this lady, and then he started punchin’ on me…and I kept telling him that “I don’t know anything about this,” and at the same time the officer came in and he was rollin’ up his sleeves…and he came over and started punchin’ on me, too. He had a big ring on his finger, and that ring kept hitting me in the chest, in the same spot, over and over. Then they stood me in front of a chair, and every time I said, “I never seen this lady before,” I got knocked into the chair until I thought the chair was gonna break underneath me. I told them, “If I told you that I did do what you said I did,