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The Quiet Lady or Little Hector's Nightmare CHAPTER SEVEN

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Burge continues his report:
    I have gotten into just about everybody's business, everyone who was close to Xhaxahka before he left New York for Las Vegas.
   I found out why the child welfare department got involved with Alicia to begin with. I have to tell you, and I'm an old school Chicago cop. Even I'm a bit surprised, even shocked, over how that whole operation works.
   Mary Riley is a 75 year old African American woman who lives in the apartment below Alicia's. She lives alone in a two bedroom apartment in a public housing project because she raised three children in that apartment and the bureaucracy has not got around to moving her into a smaller place. I don't know too much about her children because she never speaks about them so I never hear anything about them. All I know is that they no longer live with her, they never visit her and as far as I can tell she doesn't visit them. Mrs. Riley is known to her neighbors as "The Quiet Lady" because she constantly knocks on their doors telling them that they are making too much noise. She also makes complaints to the housing management office. Everyone in the building believes that she is the anonymous snitch responsible for several BCW cases. 
   Mrs. Riley's late husband died at home in his sleep from causes that are unknown to me. What I know is that he did not leave her with very much. Mrs. Riley fills her days as the only active member of the Pleasant Avenue Houses Tenant Association and she functions as the only member of her Building Safety Watch. She sets herself up with an old elementary school desk and chair in the building's ground floor lobby. She's also the female leader of the local Republican Party club. Perhaps this and not bureaucratic inertia explains why she remains in a two bedroom apartment and pays practically no rent. 
   You know it's amazing how my cases seem to curve into each other. 
   Mrs. Riley is a frequent user of New York's anonymous child abuse / neglect hotline. You might say she's responsible for the fact that Hector had been removed from his mother Alicia's care. In a sense, unbelievably, in spite of the trauma he had gone through Hector had won a goodluck trifecta himself relatively speaking.
   Hector only spent one night in foster care because the caseworker who nominally had removed him did so under duress from his manager and police officers who commandeered the case.

Weixel's manager had been pressing his unit supervisor to produce more removals because the unit had the lowest rate of emergency removals in the office. And so the rules were bent and Hector was removed. Mrs. Riley had called the child abuse hotline and anonymously told them that Alicia had left Hector alone while she was performing as an actress for a pornographic film company. She also told the hotline that Alicia abused marijuana. The caseworker up in Albany who accepted the allegations had embellished that a little bit, throwing in imaginary and unspecified harm that had been done to Hector as a result of this drug abuse.

 
   Alicia's case was the duo's last stop of the morning. Before they entered the building Weixel's's partner Emanzibori called their supervisor, Lisa Gomez, to check in and let her know that they were finishing up. Gomez took note of the fact that this particular team had not removed any children over the past month or so. She told them to call for police escort, wait for the police to arrive and told Baum "there are drug allegations. This is a removal."
 
Eugene Weixel had been sent out that night with two case visits. He and his partner found that little Hector had no marks or bruises on his body except for a scraped shin that was caused by a spill while roller skating. This was verified because both he and his mother made the same mutually corroborating statement while interviewed separately. There was plenty of food in the house. The house was tidy. There were no roaches.
Two members of the shadowy Law Enforcement Group (LEG), Patrolmen Leon Leoni and Oswald Tarrion showed up in a squad car a few minutes later. The four proceeded to the apartment. 
  
Tarrion knocked on the door. What they found inside was Hector asleep in his bed, a clean apartment, and plenty of food in the refrigerator and cupboard. 
  
Unfortunately Hector had a bruise on his left shin, which Hector (interviewed by Weixel in the bathroom while Alicia was in the kitchen) said was the result of him falling while roller skating. Weixel and the two LEG cops brought Andrea into the kitchen for some private confidential questioning while Emanzibori stayed in little Hector's room with him. Hector started to cry and wail inconsolably.
   In the kitchen where the tumult in Hector's room could be clearly heard Patrolman Leoni asked Alicia if he had not seen her in the movies. Alicia confessed to being a pornographic movie actress. She denied ever leaving Hector alone and volunteered that he had bruised his shin the day before after falling while he was roller skating. The boy had been roughhousing with some of his friends in the playground in front of the building. Alicia had been sitting on the bench  with some of the other mothers in the building. When the little pile up had occurred they had all jumped up and ran towards the children. None of the kids seemed to be really hurt. Some iodine and a bandage would suffice. In fact Hector was laughing at the time. 
   Alicia confessed to smoking marijuana occasionally on movie sets. At this point Tarrion got on his walkie-talkie and called for backup saying that he was on a child abuse case and that a child had to be taken into custody immediately and that BCW was on hand.
  Soon  Police Sergeant Peter Taylor showed up with two squad cars, five more patrolmen and a drug-sniffing dog. 
   The dog started going nuts in the building lobby and he had to be pushed and pulled into the elevator and dragged into Andrea's apartment where he found nothing.
   Weixel called the office again. Gomez insisted that Hector be removed. When Andrea caught the gist of this she started screaming and hollering "you cannot take my baby you can't take my baby."
   
Sergeant Piper told Alicia to  shut up unless she wanted to get locked up.
  
 Emanzibori brought Hector into the kitchen. The residents of Alicia's floor and the lobby floor had been awakened by the drug dog's barking. Quite a few of them were out in the hallways.
  
 It was quite a spectacle. Alicia in handcuffs, Hector being restrained and dragged along by Emanzibori and Weixel, the drug sniffer barking, and the loud wailing of a five year old and his mother.
   
That very morning an exhausted grubby Weixel appeared in New York County Family Court along with Tarion and Alicia, (who had been released at the precinct on a Desk Appearance Ticket) in front of Judge Jessica Schwartz. This worked in Hector's favor as did the assignment of Henrietta Chang as Hector's Law Guardian. Judge Schwartz was not in the mood to be bulldozed and neither was Chang. Weixel was a most cooperative witness, (for the defense) him being resentful that the case had been taken out of his hands while remaining in his name - an unlawful unnecessary emergency child removal.
   Hector and Alicia were released. Judge Jessica said  "I perceive issues. What I do not perceive is a child in imminent danger in urgent need the protection of the state."
   So Alicia got herself a straight job at the diner, stayed away from weed,  made sure that Hector made it to kindergarten everyday, did not allow the boy to roller skate or rough house with his friends and she stayed away from The Quiet Lady, who she suspected was the originating source of this problem. 
 
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