She was in the kitchen making afternoon coffee when she heard the knock on the door. She wiped her hands and went to answer it.

Next door, police detective Cornelius “Connie” Powers was sitting on the cool granite stoop of his flat, reading the afternoon paper. He looked over and saw the woman take something from her purse, step back and hold her hand aloft.

Connie had spent his life as a cop, seeing things that were just wrong. He knew. He walked to the wrought iron fence between the houses and then stepped over and rushed to the porch. She was holding a small glass bottle in her hand. He grabbed her wrist just as my mother opened the door. The bottle fell to the porch and burned a long scar in the wood.

Who was this woman? Why was she trying to scar my mother’s beautiful face? Was she arrested? I suppose. “Some crazy lady,” everyone said, and said no more. Everyone involved is dead. Let it go.

But this isn’t about her or the family secret. It’s about a cop, a detective who sat on that stoop for years without incident. But there he was when he was needed. Some years later, another member of the St. Louis Police Department, my late brother Jim, was kicking a soccer ball in the street with some of his buddies, when he saw Connie’s youngest boy climbing out of the second floor window.

Without a thought, he jumped two fences and made it just in time as my friend Alan, then only a year old, fell from the window. Jim made the catch. “Where are they when you need one?” is a song often sung. But there was one there for my mother that day, and another for Alan.

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I myself spent two years as a police clerk and switchboard operator on the St. Louis Police Department right after high school. I saw the dark side of cops and the light. I saw rules broken and lives saved. I still remember the facts and the good and gory details, because I typed them up.

In those days, cops, good ones and bad ones, walked beats alone in rain and snow, cold and heat, trying doors, standing watch on street corners. I was their gatekeeper. I knew their secrets, the cool back rooms at their favorite bars, the warm rooms of their girlfriends and their telephone numbers.

Today, as I write this, my niece Lisa Pisciotta is on the job in St. Louis. We’re all proud of her record as she nears retirement, and she doesn’t need kind words from me.

But here in Waterville, some words of support seem to be needed. Lately there has been a flood of daily words from a group of well-meaning civilians who are pushing pencils and juggling numbers, trying to find a suitable habitat for those men and women in blue who keep the tigers from our gates.

There is talk of “making this over” or “making do” or “this or that place will be suitable,” as if those who serve and protect are just annoying out-of-town relatives who are visiting.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper, some say, just to knock down a couple of walls, repaint a room and change a faucet or lamp and hope the glue sticks for a couple more years before we have to do it all over again? This isn’t a new dog shelter we’re considering. This is a police station.

The times have grown darker. If the night should come when a couple of thugs looking to stoke up on your medications should kick down your back door, it won’t be the mayor or a city councilor who comes in the front door to stand between you and the darkness. It will be, if they can get out of their “new” quarters, trained and armed police officers with only one thought, to protect you and your family. There’s a word I’m looking for. Oh yes. Respect. Let’s give them a building, one designed just for them, one that reflects that respect.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.

 


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