Day - who knows? I've lost track! Crime, heartbreak and passion in the city

Okay, I've promised crime and heartbreak, and I've got them. But where to begin....
Let's start with the crime.

Remember that club near me called the Underground I mentioned in the last post? Well, I went there with my roommate and a couple of her friends Friday night. It was raining and we stayed in first and made margaritas and painted our nails, and then we decided to go out but didn't want to go far. So we walked over there after a couple of spots even closer proved dead . It was perfect. I've always had a thing for basement bars - so nook-ish and cozy. I started talking to some Austrians and a Brazilian and they invited me to go to a disco with them, but it never panned out. I talked to someone who had lived in Austin who bought me a drink and then got engrossed talking to someone else, who also bought me a drink. Before I knew it, my friends were leaving (I think they assumed I wanted to stay, but I didn't). So after about 20 minutes I walked home through the rain and when I got to my apartment a small party was going on with my roommate and the neighborhood kids. They all live with their parents and I'd gotten the feeling they were used to partying at our place, since they couldn't do it at their own places. Well, it wasn't my ideal scenario (these kids struck me as a bit rough), but I hung out for 10 minutes and then went to bed.

An hour or two later I was awakened by pounding on my door. "Open up, it's the police!" came the loud male voices. I told them to fuck off and go away, thinking it was the boys from the party trying to prank me. The pounding continued. I was hardly awake and wholly confused (and also somewhat frightened - would you have opened the door?) when I heard "Okay, we're going to kick the door in." Something clicked in my brain then, and then I heard my roommate yell, "Jenny it really is the police!" I shook my arms into my robe and opened the door and it was the police. Three of them, with guns, and very suspicious. After haranguing me about who else was in the room (no one, but they upturned the mattress to make sure), they told us to get dressed: we were going downtown.
(Well, actually were going to Precinct 24, 10 blocks away, but downtown sounds better).

I'm not sure if I knew what was going on at this point. I had been drinking and then sleeping and I don't think I'd seen the blood. But as the police escorted my two roommates and me out of the apartment, I saw it then. Blood - lots of it. Not so much pooled as splattered, like an abstract work by a painter who really liked red (and whose canvas, most unfortunately for us, was our apartment floor). And as we walked down the stairs it became more like a trail - drips and spots of it, as though the witch really had gotten Hansel and Gretel, and instead of breadcrumbs they'd left a trail of blood.

Someone had clearly been stabbed - and it hadn't been fatal. Even, I, whose experience with crime had been previously limited to Agatha Christie novels, could determine that.
I assumed it was some of the boys at the party. They were rough, they were drunk, I could envision them carrying knives - you put it together. I had been totally passed out and heard nothing until the police banged on my door.
It was a rude awakening - in many ways. Welcome to New York.

At the precinct, still half-asleep and starting to feel queasy, they took our statements one by one. "Us" is me, Jen and our other roommate Dave, who's a great guy but hardly around and has the good sense never to have associated with any of the neighborhood kids. Jen was still drunk (and had been when the whole thing happened - making her an unreliable witness. She doesn't remember clearly how it happened. We still don't know how it happened. She got knocked over in the shuffle.

After the statements came the waiting. And then more waiting. At 7am the juvenile delinquents showed up. Paint rollers were retrieved from cupboards - community service. I was tempted at one point to turn to the 12-year-old sitting next to me and mutter, in a low voice out of the side of my mouth, "So, kid, what YOU in for?" But I didn't, though it would have been oh-so cinematic. I stuck to my role as the proper girl who didn't belong in jail (or wherever we were). "For god's sake people, I went to STANFORD!!"

The juvies and their paint rollers left. We were waiting on the detectives, who didn't start work until the civilized hour of 8am. They get private offices, too. And they make people wait. So we did. Jen, still half-drunk, and feeling responsible, asked to go outside and then started to cry and hyperventilate. They separated us and I could hear her alternately crying and laughing around some corner as I squinted to read the New York Times on my iPhone from the cold metal bench in the juvie questioning room. Finally, as my battery power dipped precipitously, a nice cop brought me the Post - Thursday's edition. I didn't even mind the date. I read it cover to cover, sipping the Dunkin' Donuts coffee he had brought me (what, no doughnut?) and learned all about news anchor scandals and crime of all sorts and celebrity gossip. The Post is very sensational and I think I'm in love with it. It's shaped like a tabloid and written like one, too, only you do get snippets of real news here and there. Read the Post and the Times and you've got it all covered - high and low). After I finished Thursday, I read every poster in the room they'd put me in: the juvie questioning room. In a stack of books sat a yearbook from a nearby school. It's like having your favorite Chinese restaurant on speed dial. Is crime around here that bad?

Well, apparently it is. It was bad for us. The detectives finally showed up and I gave my spiel, but the apartment was a CRIME SCENE and we couldn't leave. They called for a search warrant. And then we waited. And waited. And waited. And waited.
We got word - the victim was alive. He was fine, already out of the hospital. But he wouldn't say who did it. He wanted to "handle it himself." What a fucker - that meant my roommate was still under suspicion.

The cop brought me today's post and I read it, and all its crime, and its gossip - cover to cover. I developed a fondness for the police blotter and hoped maybe this incident would at least get us mention in there (it didn't).
And even after I'd finished Saturday's paper we waited. Finally a reprieve: could I come upstairs to identify subject.
Sure I could (anything but sit in the juvie room).

Only I couldn't. Not one face. Mug shots, bleary and blurry, are a terrible likeness. And I'm bad with faces anyway. I once shared a coffee shop table with Fiona Apple for 30 minutes and didn't realize it was she until she got up to leave. Catch me on the street out of context and it will take me a second to place you.

Jen was up there, too, and we waited some more. And more. I was starving. Coffee on an empty stomach had made me queasy. But we weren't allowed out of the precinct, and had no change for the vending machine. "Well, you could have something delivered," a nice cadet said. Out came his sheaf of takeout menus and we settled on Chinese. I wanted soup, Jen got the lunch special. They put us in another room while we waited, maybe to tape record our conversation, but probably just because Jen is chatty (even in the aftermath of crime), and I think she was distracting them from work.

Finally the food arrived. We ate it in the lunch room with the Mets game on (our roommate had been let out early to attend that very game. No fair). The warranted continued to not go through.
We ate. It was suddenly 5 pm and all of "our" cops, the ones being (mostly) nice to us and worrying about our welfare, started to leave. It had been six hours since the request (and 11 hours since we'd arrived there) and still no warrant. "Can't we just give you permission to search?" we sputtered. No answer. They moved us downstairs, to the chairs with built-in desks that reminded me of school. One by one, our cops left.

Probably about two hours later, as our throats grew so parched we begged for water and somebody went out and got us bottles. And after I became so bored and frustrated and started to think we might never get to leave and that we'd spend Saturday night her rather than going to parties, that I teetered on the brink of throwing a fit, or maybe going crazy and stabbing someone (ha ha), the warrant came through. About 40 minutes or maybe two hours later (time had little meaning at this point) the cops returned. We were at last free to go.

I hadn't breathed outside air in hours. Saturday had been a sunny day and Sunday it was set to rain, and we'd missed the whole thing. But we caught a few last daylight moments, walking home past the housing projects teeming with the energy that precedes Saturday night. Despite my bedraggled, dressed-in-the-dark appearance, a distant night's mascara smudged beneath my eyes, I was elated. If my legs hadn't been asleep from sitting so long, I might have sprung rather than stepped.
We rushed home, I hopped over the blood in the hallway and the blood outside the bathroom door and cleansed myself of all of it in the shower. Then I dressed and blow-dried and rushed out the door into my old life, my rightful life, the one of a girl who goes to parties and makes charming conversation with cute English boys, not one who is detained in police precincts for 14 hours and eyed suspiciously all day.

I left my roommate to clean up the blood. I think that makes me a bad person. But I blamed her, partly. I knew of course it wasn't her fault, but I felt she had poor judgment to let the kids have their party here. And I had to get out. Had to. Or I really might have gone crazy and stabbed someone. And if that happened, they probably wouldn't have been as obliging as they were down at the precinct.

We still don't know exactly what happened, but here's what the three of us have pieced together: we think the stabbing took place in our hallway, or in the hallway just outside our door, as my roommate was kicking everybody out for the night. We think that the victim knew our door was unlocked and ran back into our kitchen for a knife. That would explain the blood on the refrigerator and the silverware drawer. And for some reason he spent a lot of time standing just inside our door bleeding. Thanks a lot, guy. I don't feel bad for him so much as violated that he turned our home into a crime scene and put us all in such an awful situation. I feel like I served his jail time down at the precinct. I'm pissed as hell at the perpetrator and the victim. Maybe if he had been wounded worse I could summon up some sympathy. But probably not.