by Beth Harden
“Do you know Inmate Diaz?” asks Captain Wittman. I hesitate for a moment. Who doesn’t? There have to be twenty-five guys with the same name in here. “Jorge,” he clarifies. Of course, I know him as Chulo.
“Yes, sir!”
“Does he work for you, Counselor?”
“Not in a paid capacity. He is the school clerk and assists many of the teachers with tasks like moving desks or running papers down to the secretary to make copies.” I wonder if they are looking to reward him with a privileged job working in the Admin wing. These workers are hand-selected by the brass. “He volunteers with other small tasks,” I add.
“Trust me. It’s not out of the goodness of his heart,” says the Captain. “What has he done for you in particular, Counselor?” he asks. I can see that he has an incident report in front of him. These proceedings are being recorded. My heart picks up speed.
“Erase and wash down the blackboard. Open and close the windows after class. Roll the television cart in and out. Spray down the desks and things like that. He takes the initiative to make our jobs easier.”
“In this case, he’s made your job a little more difficult.”
My best instinct is to act like one would in court. Answer only in the affirmative or negative. Do not offer any unsolicited information. I have no idea what they are going to accuse me of.
“Has he ever given you anything?” he questions. I intend to answer no, but recall the offerings of food and the fan that arrived out of storage by surprise. And when I complained that the clock in the classroom was dead, he donated a little commissary time-keeper that I kept in the drawer. And I can’t overlook that motivational poster that popped up out of nowhere and was taped to the wall: Fail to Plan is a Plan to Fail.
“Yes, but nothing unapproved and all for use by the group.”
“Have you ever given him anything?”
“Nothing!” I answer emphatically. I am certain of that.
“Have you ever had physical contact with him?” he continues. Are they serious? Shit! There was that one hug that he sprung on me and I tolerated for a few perplexed seconds. My brain is whizzing now, trying to recall that room. Were there cameras in there? My health insurance and pension ride on this one.
“No.” I take a gamble. “Are you implying sexual contact?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then no, sir. Absolutely not.” I have turned down more than a few propositions from married officers. They know I am not a player. Prude? Maybe. Better-than-thou? Perhaps. Who knows what they think but my reputation should help me here.
“Let me explain why we’re here. Inmate Diaz claims that you lured him down to a remote area of the building and made advances towards him. He states he did not report this earlier because he was afraid of reprisal and that he would lose his job.”
“Bullshit all.” I say. “Sir.”
“And he claimed that you were showing favoritism towards him. Giving him things in exchange for certain favors.” I feel a spasm coming on in my brain. Adrenaline comes pumping through the pipeline. My hands clench into fists and a cold wave of mental retaliation takes over.
“I definitely did not. I believe my performance evaluations will prove my commitment to professionalism, sir,” I state.
‘So we did a shakedown of his cell and this is what we found,” he adds ceremoniously. He procures the evidence from the manila folder in front of him. There are two pen-and-ink note cards, one of a barn and one of a tabby cat and both drawn by me, brought in and taped to the blank wall of poster paper behind my desk. I hadn’t even noticed they were missing. The shift commander then produces a small squeeze bottle of Moonlit Path moisturizing lotion from Bath & Body Works, another accoutrement I kept in the desk drawer to combat the nasty dryness. Lost, I thought, now found.
“Yes, those are mine. He must have taken them from the classroom unbeknownst to me,” I say.
“These are what concern us most,” states the Captain. He produces copies of hand-written notes and slides them across for me to review. The penmanship is foreign to me.
“I didn’t write this for sure,” I insist.
“That’s not in question. Take your time and read them.” It’s like the mini Monarch notes on Fifty Shades. Lurid descriptions of sexual acts Chulo has fabricated and things he intends to do in positions I’m positive I could not master. These are clearly the private rantings of a man obsessed, a prisoner whose horniness has fomented into full-blown delusions. I sit back and exhale.
“Wow. I don’t know what to say. ..”
“I’ll say it for you,” says the man in charge. My brain has seized up and there is only the soft slushing of sluggish blood in my ears. “The guy’s a fucking dirtball. This is not the first time he’s tried to jam up one of our own. These maggots will do anything to bring us down.”
Suddenly the atmosphere in the room has switched to that of a pep rally. Camaraderie prevails.
“He was hoping to get you fired, but we have a supplemental report from a witness who on one occasion heard him talking about you in the blocks, bragging how he thought he’d got one over on you. His plan was to eventually pressure you to be a duck and bring things in for him. This same C.O. also testified that he has witnessed Diaz stalking you outside the classroom on several occasions and also overheard him attempting to get other staff to give up personal information about you. So, we put a profile on him and he’s being transferred to Southern. You won’t have to worry about working in the same facility with this creep ever again.”
“Thank you, Captain Wittman.” My relief is audible to everyone within earshot.
“All I need you to do is write up a narrative statement on what you told me and we’ll include it in our disciplinary report. We’re going to try and get him on Interfering with Safety and Security and a Contraband B. Advice though, Counselor. Next time you get the feeling that an inmate is getting unduly familiar with you, come to us right away.”
“I will. No doubt,” I say. I am supremely grateful. It’s us against them and us has come through for me. After I am dismissed, I immediately head down to the ticket block where Hastings is on a 5-and-2 post for the next month. He is parked in front of one of the huge standing fans that are meant to circulate air down into the muggy cells, but only serves to create a giant wind tunnel down the middle. I knock on the glass and then kick the door. The inmates are out on Tier Rec and the noise inside the housing block is overpowering. An alert inmate sees me and yells out to Hastings. He comes to the door at a sidewise angle, keeping one eye on the roaming prisoners. The residents of this unit are the bad boys who have gotten badder on the inside. He pops his Folger keys off the key clip on his belt and swings the door open a tight six inches.
“Everything go okay?” he asks.
“Yes, but for a few minutes there, I thought I was getting walked out.”
“I told you he was a piece of shit, but I’m glad we snagged him,” he replies.
“Thank you, friend” I say gratefully. “I owe you big time.” Hastings smiles grandly. This act of chivalry has undoubtedly earned him some good points.
“Then I’ll collect on that debt,” he says.
“Fine! What’ll it cost me?”
“I’m paying,” he replies. “You and me, drinks after work. Meet me out at my truck. I’ll drive.” He states his demands briskly as if he’s barking orders at the impatient inmates who are pushing up towards the officer’s station, but the slightest twitch of a coming smile and an effervescent sparkle in his eye are not lost on me. He snaps the door shut and herds the troops back away from the front of the block
It’s not until I’m back in the solitude of my office that I feel the anger of betrayal bubbling up. Fuck him! Fuck them! I am not going to open the door or entertain office hours today. For one man’s evil deed, the rest will now pay; just like when some high school jack-ass flooded the sinks in the lavatory and the whole class was sequestered in from recess because of his prank. But most of all, f
uck me! My instincts are the only really solid tool I have and apparently, they have failed me. I mean, I believed in Chulo. Some shallow part of my ego liked the idea that he saw me as someone special. That sliver of emotional attachment had almost cost me what I had worked so hard for over the past sixteen years. I am hugely disappointed in my failure to listen to veteran wisdom. Chulo’s tirade against Willis was what I thought it to be all along, a territorial act or a play for power. No one should be surprised by this. That’s how gang-bangers operate. Why did I attribute worth to a worm, knowing his panache at manipulation and extorting favors?
Trust and faith are interlinked; one cannot exist without the other. Because of Chulo’s betrayal, my faith in human nature has been diminished, but my trust in two particular men has grown by giant steps. I am happy to be right about Willis and my admiration for James as a true friend has been amped up another notch. The jumpiness in my gut is not related to my near dismissal. It is a peculiar girlish excitement about the prospect of sitting on a bar stool with a married man I know is in love with me.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 6: IN COGNITO
My parents were offended at first, particularly my mother to whom tradition and nomenclature and the passing of ancestral batons meant everything, even if the flimsy roll of paper being handed off was only an embellished pedigree. Lissa was my great-grandmother’s nickname extracted from the powerful and proud, Elizabeth, which in Hebrew means House of God, the name of queens and also the mother to John the Baptist. My father’s people, the Braums, had waded hip-deep in glacier snow through the peaks of the Pyrenees to get to safe haven on Italian soil. People of substance making separate Atlantic crossings in different generations but arriving quite by fate on the same soil in New Sweden, Maine. There I was anointed Elizabeth Cooke Braum and walked tall with the carriage of someone who was often reminded of the team she represented and what was riding on my performance in this life. A country’s banner, a kingdom’s flag. A name that was stripped from me by men with no honor.
Elizabeth Braum became the poor victim on life support, you know, the one with brain damage. I was an overnight sensation, the infamous poster-child that parents of future co-eds held up as an example of what could go wrong, hoping to scare sense into their wayward daughters. My name was found encrypted into newspaper articles and editorials from 1986 through 1989, or more recently, in quick search engine result if someone Googled ‘sodomy,’ ‘wilding’, or ‘campus crime.’ It was even the lead-off line in a rough-draft obituary penned on the back of the admitting paperwork by a grieving mother and planned as a feature in the Portland Herald; one that was never run as it turned out, but saved instead as proof of a divine miracle.
That girl was buried. Six weeks after arriving at Beth Israel Hospital, Elizabeth Cooke Braum was officially put to rest and effectively disappeared from public record. The cops didn’t discourage it. In fact, the Detective who had become a facet in our daily lives applauded the idea. The unidentified third suspect could still be looking for his victim. She was, after all, the single witness and the only one who could put a name to his mug shot. On April 28, 1988, Elise Abrams was born, a greater miracle than Mary’s immaculate birth in a barn. This young woman was conceived solely by me and took her first step, albeit on a pair of forearm crutches and with a gait belt, out of Boston City Hall at twenty-three years of age.
Like most of the people I would later come to know, I had my first alias. It took some getting used to. Each time I introduced myself, I had the instant urge to add an apology for not using my real name and an immediate impulse to clarify that the shoulder-length, blunt-cropped hair with its deep opaque shade of brunette was not my chosen style or natural color. But the fear of discovery is a powerful motivator, and the will to stay alive was soon overshadowed and outplayed by my will to win.
The first step was to re-learn the game.
#
My parents disapproved of the idea from the beginning, but I insisted on it. It was after all the story of my life and near-death. My name was all over it and in it, for God’s sakes. If everyone else and their cousin knew the details, then why shouldn’t I? While the clarity of my thinking was still under serious medical scrutiny, no proxy or power-of-attorney had been appointed to take my place in the driver’s seat so their protests fell flat. So my mother finally acquiesced and agreed to meet Detective Hughes at my Beth Israel bedside. She came for moral support, but really was not braced to offer much since she couldn’t bear to look at or listen to anything contained in the confidential document. She stood near the linen supply cart and anxiously picked at her fingernails.
“Relax, Mel,” I said. “I’ve seen worse on Hill Street Blues.”
“Honey, it’s not like you to show disrespect. I’m your parent,” she said cautiously. I gave her the skeptical look an interrogator gives to his suspect under question. Yes, she certainly looked like my mother, but you never can be too sure. She didn’t feel like one.
“I’m sorry,” I replied, feeling remotely responsible but having nothing to give her but a rote answer. She seemed to soften a bit then and dropped her tense shoulders an inch.
“Why don’t you go on down to the cafeteria and get yourself some coffee? I’ll be here with your daughter if she has any questions,” said the cop who had escorted her to my room. Mel looked at him for one brief second and seemed pleased with his suggestion. She lifted her handbag from the back of the door knob and bowed out. Once she was gone, the policeman pulled a two-page document from his binder, placed it in my good hand and took a seat near the window.
“Take your time,” he said.
The police report read like a screenplay to a cop and crook thriller. It was dated and signed into permanent record by a Detective Hughes. Apparently, the homicide investigator was patched on the radio scanner by the city paramedics who had just relinquished any hope of resuscitation and were putting away the defibrillator. The crime scene was fresh, a ripe harvesting ground for forensics. The facts were many.
A twenty-two year old female bound to a bedpost with ligatures so tight they had collapsed any blood flow coming through the radial artery. So tight, the EMT’s were unable to cut the knotting without the risk of cutting flesh. The victim’s hands were cyanotic; no, worse, a deep, deadened purple and stiffened in severe contracture until the Jaws of Life squad brought in a power hand saw to remove the wooden post and release the tension of the angle. The first blow to the head had opened a superficial laceration, which in the reproduced photo, had donated a generous amount of what looked like acrylic paint spots across the hardwood floor. A random pattern like a puppy that had sliced its paw on a tin can lid and padded about haplessly. The subsequent and repeated trauma to the skull had done the real damage. There were thick distortions to the cranial plates marked by both indented dips and displaced swelling. Subdural hematomas, the fatal variety. Two slashes at crucial junctures by made a shallow sharp: one at the base of the neck just above the left collarbone and a clean slice from lip to ear. When he left her for dead, the perpetrator had neglected to support her head; an act not all that surprising when the intent is to kill. Her body had sagged forward and her head slumped to the right causing an extensive pooling of blood in the orbital socket on one side, In a humane twist of fate, however, it had also opened the airway that was already clogging with fluid, mucus and aggravated tissues and constricted the flow of blood from the near-nick of the internal jugular..
In his notes, the detective stated that he was puzzled. He thought he was coming to identify a body, but when he entered the second floor of the Westerville Victorian, he found a swarm of emergency responders huddled around the girl. The blood pool was indicative of a victim who had bled out. Sexual assault was the assumption but it was hard to tell. Her negligee had been cut and spliced in the haste of examination and her lower abdomen was now cloaked in a blanket. But a once-pretty co-ed? Chances were high. Detective Hughes identified himself and asked the paramedics to step back so they
would not disturb the evidence. He was waved to the side as one EMT quickly slid in place on the left side of the victim’s chest and relieved his partner who was pumping heavily with persistent compressions. After a final thirty count, Paramedic #1 tipped his ear to her lips and looked down the sunken line of her sternum. Victim Doe had regained a pulse. A flurry of bagging, bracing, pumping and shouting ensued as the ambulance crew slid a spine board underneath her and ran her out the door. The bloodied body was on its way to Beth Israel’s trauma unit. At that point, the narrative became sparse and concluded with a dire projection. Detective Hughes did not expect this young woman to survive the night. Likely, the inevitable pronouncement would only be delayed by a few hours of heroics. The offenses were recorded: home invasion, robbery, aggravated assault, unlawful restraint, and was it murder? Detective Hughes had decided to reserve that final charge until daybreak shed some more light on the prognosis. Then the investigator set about doing what law enforcement does best. He searched the premises, connected the dots, dusted for prints, ran some rap sheets, and looked for a motive. It was clear to anyone who had every read true crime stories that his next step was to go pick out the perpetrator from the spooling mass of maggots that seemed to be reproducing at warp speed down on the corner of Temple and Church.
Case number 88-6121759-GA was signed and filed at 11:32 pm on March 17, 1988 at precisely the same moment its doomed protagonist began her slow climb up Jacob’s ladder. Thankfully, before she reached the gate of heaven, she was turned back by the angels and ushered out on an escalator ride back down to earth.
#
At the time of the Braum crime, Detective Hughes had over twelve years on the force, five of them already logged in on the major crime squad unit. The inability of the prosecution to put together a case with irrefutable evidence had not deterred his faith in ultimate justice. His instinct was to go forward with a trial and allow the emotional aspect of this case to sway the jurors. A jury box full of a dozen parents would be hard-pressed to keep objectivity at the forefront when the brutal photographs of someone’s battered daughter were the first and last things they would see. As many time as Hughes had looked through them, the degree of impact never lessened. The graphic images were permanent like etching plates bitten with acid. Even those marginal souls with half a heart or a middling size brain, the cohort of curb dwellers whose lives were colored by daily violence would blink and turn indifferent to such vicious cruelty. Hughes spent days scouring the neighborhoods and hitting up informants to get someone to turn over something he could use, but the punks in the hood weren’t talking.
