"No, Amby Merrion's your choice. Bachelor like he is, he's got lots of time. Besides, he's pals with Hilliard. These're Hilliard's buildings, right? Way he tells it, anyway, he's the guy that got the money. So put his sidekick on the panel. Pretty soon the chief 11 start to drive him 'round the bend, like he does everybody else who has to listen to him, and then Amby'll go to Hilliard and say: "Hey, for the luv va Christ, help me out here a little bit, willya? Get me some more State dough for Canterbury make yourself look good and at the same time, help me make the chief shut up." And Hilliard'll do it for him, contradict alia mean things that his wife's sayin' about him, 'cause he still wants to look good, 'case he decides to run again."
Chief Paradisio grounded his views of police station design, as he did his many other views, on his painstakingly careful and extensive study of human nature. "Basically what I am is a professional scientist. My field is the continuing study of human nature," he would say. "All law enforcement officers are engaged in such studies. Or we ought to be at least: it's the essence of our work." Because he habitually delivered his observations and findings in detail and at length whenever he believed that he had been invited to state and then defend any given premise 'and has such stamina," Dan Hilliard said, 'guy's a one-man filibuster; he can stay awake for days' he generally prevailed against all who initially opposed any premise he happened to advance.
"It's a universal tendency," Chief Paradisio said, 'to want to get away." He was describing without having been asked how people reacted when placed under arrest, believing he saw the inquiry implied in a statement made by someone else at an early meeting of the Building Committee.
"I think it was, Diane, Diane Fox who was to blame," Merrion told Hilliard over drinks at Henry's Grist Mill two or three nights later.
Diane's practice as a Licensed Social Worker counseling troubled young people in Hampton Pond was established and thriving. She was on the building committee as an ex-officio member of the board of selectmen, having been elected to serve out the unexpired three-year portion of her late husband's term after Walter's sudden death at the age of forty-two. He had had a heart attack while jogging.
"I got to the library and went into the trustees' room," where the police station building committee had agreed to meet, 'and I was hanging up my coat. The rest of them the chief, Diane, Maurice Belding and Gerry Porter they'd already gotten there ahead of me, and so they all were sitting down, and Diane, while they're waiting for me to join them at the table just by way of no harm sort of threw it out that she'd been afraid she was going to be late because the cat'd gotten out. And she'd thought at least 'til she found it sleeping on the hood, her car, which I guess was nice and warm, this being a cold night, because she'd just gotten home to feed the cat and let it out, expecting it'd come right back in; that was the reason she'd stopped off there that it'd run away.
"And that was what set Sal off about how come people run away. I pity people who have to deal with him every day. The guy is unbelievable."
The chief said the desire to run away was the reason behind his desire for an internal receiving area for prisoners in the new police station.
"It's just a normal human thing, I guess," the chief said, 'that when someone has you restrained; you're under his cojatrol; he's bigger, stronger, younger'n you are, most likely, and he's armed, to boot; plus there may be more'n one of him so that you're outnumbered too, and all of them're authorized to use deadly force, on you; well, it's naturally upsetting. You're probably not used to this, in all likelihood, and so it would be perfectly natural then that you would feel confined. Being as you are. And since you have been brought up in this country of ours here, as most of us have been, you have always had the notion that you are well, what else? free And you are used to that. So now this guy in uniform, or maybe it's two guys, or one or two guys in plainclothes, could be that as well, whatever, but what you know is that they're cops, he has you in custody, and you are not free to go. And why would this be, then? Well, unless someone made a mistake which we don't make a habit of doing and I want to assure everybody here of that right now on that point normally it's going to be because you did something.
