“Sure.”
“And Alan Glanton called already. He’s opening in the Bodega rape case this morning. Judge Callahan told him he’s much more likely to rule favorably on the prosecution’s objections during the trial if you give Alan the same ”equipment“ you Used so successfully in the Boynton trial. Can he stop by and pick them up before he goes to court?”
I laughed and walked over to the last filing cabinet along the wall, which held all of my personal belongings. Shoes with varying size heel heights, pantyhose in a wide variety of shades to guard against daily snags and runs, makeup and perfume for unanticipated evening invitations. And my way to Judge Callahan’s heart: packages of Stick-Ups, the air freshener, deodorizers in different scents, which adhere to wood surfaces. Philip Boynton, a serial rapist I tried last spring, refused to shower from the day he was arrested till the trial. His stench was so overwhelming that none of the court officers wanted to work Callahan’s part. I brought the Stick-Ups to court every day and we covered the underside of the defendant’s chair and counsel table with spearmint, peppermint, and evergreen to make life bearable for the personnel. Bodegaman was in the same category so I gave Laura my secret stash to pass along to Alan.
When Laura left I sat down to return calls, and started with the message from Shaniqua Simmons. It was common for domestic abuse victims to cancel appointments after making an initial police report, but it always concerned me in case they had been threatened or re victimized because of the meeting with a prosecutor. Her phone rang twice, then kicked into an answering machine which played a recording.
“Hi, this is Shaniqua,” in her sultriest voice.
“Me and Nelson can’t come to the phone right now, ‘cause we got some makin’ up to do.” The background music, quite appropriately, was written by the immortal Marvin Gaye, advising Shaniqua that this was the time for sex-u-al healing.
I tried to look at the bright side. It did give me an extra hour to get Manzi’s victim an interview without any delay.
There was plenty of work to busy myself with until the Hunterstudent arrived shortly after eleven o’clock. Laura buzzed me on the intercom: “Beverly Vaughan is here she’s the witness in Jackie Manzi’s case.”
“Fine. Please start me a screening sheet and I’ll be out to get her in a minute.”
Laura handed me a screening sheet, which“ was the printed form we used to record all the data about each case interview, including the pedigree information about the victim, which was how I usually began the conversation.
I introduced myself to Ms. Vaughan and explained the process we would be going through.
“I’ve got a lot of questions I need to ask you, but before I begin, is there anything you want to ask me?”
“Yes, Ms. Cooper. I want to know why Steven wasn’t arrested last night. The police know exactly who he is they even talked to him last night. I want to know why he isn’t in jail.”
“As I understand it, Beverly, there are some questions you weren’t able to answer for Detective Manzi, some things you didn’t remember about Saturday evening. You told them you ”thought“ you had been raped, but you weren’t sure…”
“Well, I don’t exactly remember everything that happened, but I know I was violated.”
“Steven tells a very different story than you do. And before we lock somebody up for first-degree rape you can be damn sure we’re going to explore every detail of the events and try to reconstruct them. If it’s clear he committed a crime, Steven will be arrested and charged.
“The best thing you can do is relax, try and answer all my questions as candidly as possible, and understand that I need to know every bit as much about you as Steven knows everything that he will tell his lawyer about your encounter on Saturday.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Beverly, that your case is different than a case where a man climbs through a window or stalks a woman from a subway station and attacks someone he’s never seen before. It may be every bit as serious, but it’s different.
In those situations, they’re only together for as long as it takes to accomplish the rape -but the attacker doesn’t know anything about his victim, she hasn’t confided in him, she hasn’t trusted him like someone on a date with a friend does. Understand?“
“Sure. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t raped.”
“No. But it means that Steven knows a lot more about you than I know, information he can try to use against you. I can’t just limit my questions to the point in the evening that you went to his room, I’ve got to start with what brought you together in the first place, what you told him about yourself, whether there was any foreplay during the evening, whether there was any conversation about sex.
And first of all I need to know why your memory of the events is so unclear is it because of the trauma, or is it the amount of alcohol?“
“Oh God. This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”
“No, Beverly, it’s not going to be easy. There’s too much at stake for both you and Steven, and now is the time to get the answers not six months from now, at a trial. I’ll just begin with the background information I need try and relax.”
I walked the young woman through the personal material the sheet called for: date of birth, permanent address, roommates, status at school, medical history, means of support. Like most of the witnesses who had preceded her in that seat, this overweight nineteen-year-old was nervous and uncomfortable, barely able to meet my eye when she responded to questions. She was a sophomore at Hunter College this fall and living in an apartment with two other students the first time she was away from her parents’ home. She explained that she didn’t want them to know what happened because she was sure they would make her move back to Queens or drop out of school. I assured her that our meeting was confidential.
“Why don’t you tell me how and when you first met Steven.”
“Who, me?”
“Yes, Beverly.”
She explained how she saw him at a school mixer a couple of weeks earlier, talking with a guy she knew from her sociology class, and she had gone out drinking with them after the mixer.
“What did you have to drink that first night?”
“Who, me?”
“Yeah.”
Beverly struggled to remember what combination of rum and sodas she had the first time she and Steven sat at a bar for four hours, drinking and talking about their classes, their interests, and their mutual friends. She had called him several times during the last few weeks but he had never returned the messages. He seemed to be interested in one of her roommates, and yes, Beverly admitted that she had a bit of a crush on Steven.
We finally got the events up to last Saturday night, when she ran into Steven at Zoo Bar on the Upper West Side.
“What were you drinking, Beverly?”
“Who, me?”
Three ‘who, me?s’ were my limit.
“We’re sitting in a small room with the door closed. We’re sitting face to face with each other, in two armchairs, barely a foot apart. I’m staring directly at you, and there’s nobody else around. Of course I mean you.” I was beginning to lose patience with Beverly, whose resort to ’who, me?“ was an effort to stall and think of whether or not to give a candid or complete answer to the particular question I was asking.
I got tough with her and she stopped wasting my time. Out poured the rest of the story in a far more direct manner. She told me that Zoo Bar is famous for serving drinks in fishbowls. One fishbowl containing an unidentifiable mixture of alcoholic beverages is served with eight straws, to be shared by a group of drinking friends. Beverly remembered splitting the first one with just her two roommates and ordering a second one, which she consumed most of by herself. She remembered flirting with Steven, while he was unsuccessfully flirting with her roommate. She remembered little else: when she left Zoo Bar, how she traveled to Steven’s apartment, who else was with them, how she wound up in his bed, and how her clothes came to be on the couch in his living room. But she could assure me that she would never have slept with him if indeed she had slept with him had she been sober. Somewhere in that story I was supposed to find the crime.