"Of course you chose the wrong one," she said. "He and his attorney worked to make sure you'd never have a chance."
"Gail," Lorenz warned.
"She has a right to know. She knows anyway," she said, looking at him. He thought I needed protection; she knew I craved the truth.
"The reason why it took so long, Alice, is because Madison had his friend come down and stand next to him. We had to send a car to the prison to get him here. They wouldn't go ahead until he showed."
"I don't understand," I said. "He's allowed to have his friend stand next to him?"
"It's the defendant's right," she said. "And it makes good sense on a certain level. If the others in the lineup don't appear to the suspect to look enough like him, he can choose someone to stand beside him."
"Can we say that?" I was beginning to see a window of explanation here. I might still have a chance.
"No," she said, "it goes against the defendant's rights. They really worked a number on you. He uses that friend, or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do. They're dead ringers."
I listened to everything she said. Uebelhoer had seen it all, but still was passionate enough to get mad.
"So the eyes?"
"His friend gives you a look that's scary. He can tell when you're standing in front of the mirror and he psyches you out. Meanwhile, the suspect looks down like he doesn't even know where or why he's there. Like he got lost on the way to the circus."
"And we can't use that in court?"
"No. I stated a formal objection before the lineup, so it would be included in the record, but that's just a formality. It's not admissible unless he lets prior knowledge slip."
The unfairness of this seemed unconscionable to me.
"Rights are weighted on the side of the defendant," Gail said. I hungered for more facts. In those moments, where I could easily have slipped away, facts were my life. "That's why the law uses words like 'reasonable doubt.' It's his attorney's job to provide that doubt. The lineup was a risk. We knew something like this could happen, but there was no photo in the mug books and he waived the prelim. We had no choice. We can't refuse a lineup."
"What about the hair?"
"If we're lucky, it will match all seventeen points available on a hair. But even hairs taken from the same head can vary on these points. Paquette decided the gamble was worth it. He's probably going with the story that you lost your virginity voluntarily that night and were sorry about it, that eventually you would have blamed any black man that ran into you on the street. He'll do his best to make you look bad. But we're not going to let that happen."
"What's next?"
"The grand jury," she said.
I was miserable. At two, the next big leg of this journey would begin and I had to be ready for it. I'm sure I spent that time trying to clear my mind of my failure that morning, trying not to let the picture of me that Madison's attorney was building invade my mind. I did not call my mother. I had no good news, though I did have Uebelhoer. I focused on the fact that she had been present for the pubic extraction.
At two I was brought into a waiting area outside the grand jury room. Gail was inside. We had not had time, as she had wished, to talk beforehand. She had been busy working on questions through lunch and although I was scheduled for two, there were other witnesses appearing before me. Tricia, with my assurances, had left following the lineup.
While I waited, I tried to think about an Italian test I had to take the next day. I got out a worksheet of sample sentences from my knapsack and stared at them. I had made some small talk about this course to the officer who'd picked me up that morning. I wished I'd had Tes s with me. I had a deep fear of alienating her and Toby by being a drain on them because of the rape, so I tried to be as assiduous in their classrooms as I was with anything concerning my case.
There was movement in the hallway. Gail was coming toward me. Quickly, she told me that she was going to ask me questions about the events of that night, that she would then lead up to my ability to identify the rapist and my identification of Officer Clapper at the same time. She wanted me to state clearly that I hadn't been sure between four and five and to say why. She told me to take as much time as I needed on each answer and not to feel hurried. "This will be easier than the preliminary hearing, Alice, just stay with me. I may seem colder to you in there than I am right now but, remember, we're in there to win an indictment and to a certain extent-well, the grand jury is made up of twenty-five civilians, and we're onstage."
She left me. A few minutes later I was led into the room. Again, I was unprepared for the room's effect on me. The witness stand was at the bottom of the room. Leading up and out from the stand were terraced levels on which swiveling orange chairs were permanently affixed. The levels spread out in a circular arc and grew larger as they ascended. There were enough seats for the twenty-five members of the jury and for the alternates who sat through all the cases but might never cast a vote.
The result of the room's design was that all eyes bore down on whoever was seated in the witness stand. There was no defense table or prosecutor's table.
Gail did as she had said she would. She used a courtroom manner. She made a lot of eye contact with the jurors, used hand gestures, and spent time enunciating key words or phrases she wanted them to note and remember. Her pattern of questioning also was meant to calm both me and the jurors. She had told me rape cases were hard for them. I saw proof of this soon enough.
When she asked me where he had touched me, and, in my answer, I had to say that he had put his fist in my vagina, many of the jurors looked down or immediately away from me. But the fact that troubled them most was what came next. Uebelhoer questioned me about bleeding: how much blood, why so much? She asked me if I had been a virgin. I said, "Yes."
They winced. They felt pity. Throughout the remaining questions some of the jurors, and not all of them women, fought back tears. I was aware my loss that night was my gain today. Having been a virgin made me look good, made the crime appear worse.
I did not want their pity. I wanted to win. But their reactions pushed me to think about what I was saying, not just tally it up as a pro or con in terms of the chances for a conviction. The tears of one particular man, in the second row, felled me. I cried a little then. The reality was that this, too, made me look good.
The sketch I drew the night of October 5 was entered into evidence and marked for identification. Uebelhoer asked pointed questions about whether I had been assisted in the sketch, whether the handwriting was mine, whether anyone had influenced it.
She moved on to the lineup. Now the questioning was more heated. Like a surgeon with a probe, she brought forth each nuance of the five minutes I'd spent inside that room. Finally she asked me if I was certain I had identified the right man.
I answered: No.
Then she asked me why I had chosen number five. I explained in detail his height and his build. I talked about the eyes.
Eventually it came time for the jurors to ask their questions:
Juror: "When you saw the police officer up on Marshall Street, why didn't you go to him then?"
Juror: "You picked him out of the lineup; are you absolutely sure that this was the one?"
Juror: "Alice, why were you coming through the park alone at night; do you usually go through by yourself?"
Juror: "Didn't anybody warn you not to go through the park at night?"
Juror: "Didn't you know that you are not supposed to go through the park after nine-thirty at night? Didn't you know that?"
Juror: "Could you have definitely eliminated number four? Did he ever look at you?"
I answered all of these questions patiently. The questions concerning the lineup I answered directly and truthfully. But the questions about what I had been doing in the park, or why I hadn't gone up to Officer Clapper, made me numb. They were not getting it, that's how it felt. But, as Gail had said, we were onstage.