Final Jeopardy

by Linda Fairstein

  Laura was the first one to check in with me when she arrived. We caught up on what I had missed the previous Friday and she went over the day’s appointments with me. I usually liked to leave some open time on Monday morning because weekends often generated a disproportionate number of cases that needed emergency triage at the beginning of the week.

  “I had you set for a ten o’clock with a woman whose ex-boyfriend came back to the apartment to pick up some clothes, then smacked her around and raped her,” Laura began.

  “But she left a message canceling on my voice mail.

  Her name’s Shaniqua Simmons here’s the number. Call it yourself you’ll see why she’s not coming.“

  “Anybody need that space?”

  “Yeah. Jackie Manzi called from Special Victims. She’d like you to see a Hunter College student case came in yesterday morning and she doesn’t know whether to make an arrest. Wants you to decide and let her know.”

  “Fine. Call and tell her to get her witness down as soon as possible she can have Shaniqua’s spot.”

  “Rose Malone said to ignore her e-mail. Battaglia wants to take you, Rod, and Pat McKinney to lunch to brainstorm for some ideas on bringing down the arrest to arraignment time. She warned me that he also wants to see how you’re functioning under all this stress.”

  “Thank her for the warning.”

  “Then at two you have that interview with Ellen Goldman, the woman who’s doing the profile for USA Lawyer’s Digest.”

  “I really don’t have the patience to sit for that kind of thing today. I have too much to make up here.”

  “Well, I doubt you’ll be able to put her off much longer she’s very persistent. Plus the District Attorney thinks it’s good PR. for the office, so don’t fight it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I smiled and bowed my head in deference to Laura’s sound advice.

  “Anything else?”

  “An avalanche of calls some media, some friends you can go through them yourself. And one guy kept calling all day Friday. Wouldn’t leave his name or a message says he must talk with you about Isabella and will try you again today. You want to take it?”

  “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 yo
u 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.

  A buzz on the intercom interrupted the meeting.

  “Sorry to break in, Alex, but Chapman’s on the phone.”

  “I’m almost done, Laura. See where he is and tell him I’ll call him right back.”

  I had been working with Beverly for more than an hour and she seemed ready for a break. Her mouth was drawn taut with anxiety and her fingers tensely folded and unfolded the edges of the newspaper she had held on her lap since she walked into the room.

  “This is a good start, Beverly, but it’s only the first step. I’m going to have to interview everyone else who was with you at the bar, anyone who observed what you said and did, when you left, how you left. I’m going to have to talk to your roommates and to Steven’s. I’ll need to speak with the doctor you saw last night. I’m trying to find out why you said you ”think“ you were raped after all, if you’re not even sure, I don’t know how we can be.”

  “Well, I didn’t plan to report this to the police, Ms. Cooper. I just went to the doctor at Student Health Services to make sure I didn’t have any risk of infections or pregnancy, in case Steven had penetrated me, and she said maybe I had been raped. She’s the one who called the detectives.“

  Maybe? We’re going to start to prosecute people for felonies on the basis of drunken conjecture and the suggestion of roommates and doctors and significant others who weren’t anywhere near the scene of the ‘crime’? Neither Beverly nor her doctor knew whether or not a sexual act had been consummated.

  “One step at a time, Beverly. We’ll look into every aspect of this very carefully. In the meantime, just keep in touch with me and if you have any questions, leave a message with Laura and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” And I bit down on my lip to stop myself from giving politically incorrect advice about how foolish I thought she was to drink unknown quantities of unidentified substances in uncontrolled situations the way she did. Save that for another visit.

  I ushered her out and picked up the slip of paper with Mike’s home number on it.

  “Just thought you’d like to know that Wally Flanders called. He’s coming into town tomorrow ‘cause he wants our help. Nice enough to admit he has no experience with homicide. He’s got Burrell and Garelli agreeing to fly in here to be interviewed so we can do it together. Only downside is that it keeps the FBI in this, so Luther will be here, too we’re letting Wally declare it an interstate investigation, so the feds keep a piece of the pie. Anyway, we’ll do the work up at the squad. Also, LAPD got some shrinks’ names from Isabella’s house, so they’re trying to round them up, too. See if any of them look like whackos.”

  “Hey, they’re shrinks, aren’t they? Any of them fit our poetic ”Dr. C.,“ the initial on the manuscript you found?”

  “Nah. I asked the same thing. Usual bunch of Schwartzes, Greenbergs, Bernsteins… You know, Cooper, beanies like you.”

  Beanies was Mike’s euphemism for yarmulkes, his slang for Jews. He was trying to get a rise out of me but it wouldn’t work today.

  “Any chance you can slip me in on any of the interviews?”

  “Not a prayer. Battaglia made it clear to the chief, just like he did to you, that you are not to play Dickless Tracy you are not an investigator on this case, you’re just a witness. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

  Rod was waiting at Laura’s desk when I got off the phone. He had waved Pat McKinney ahead to Battaglia’s office, and waited to escort me there on our way to lunch.

  Good friend that he is, he filled me in on the District Attorney’s latest plan to cut down the pre arraignment time of prisoners so that I could perform adequately at the meeting. He explained the setup of the new video systems that had been installed in the precincts so that prosecutors could do the preliminary case interviews with cops by remote, saving the time of the long ride down to the Criminal Courts Building and Central Booking.

  The four of us walked out of the office and around the back street to Forlini’s, where we had Battaglia’s regular booth. The place was packed with its regular assortment of assistant D.A.s, defense attorneys, judges, and neighborhood wise guys. If anyone was stupid enough to come in and hold the place up during any weekday lunch hour, we could organize all the personnel for a trial and jury and have a verdict without any of us leaving the dining room.

  We completed our conversation about the video link by the time we had finished our meals, then Battaglia engaged me in some chatter about new cases, just checking to see if my head was on straight. We strolled out after drinking our coffee and Paul made a point of lagging behind to walk with me.

  “Glad to see you’re okay, Alex. Is it for real?”

  “I think I’m fine, Paul. Isabella’s murder doesn’t seem to involve me at all, the police are in charge as you know and I’m back doing what I love to do. Thanks for your help-‘ He cut me off he hated to be brown-nosed and sucked up to and went on with talk about his plan to create a new welfare fraud unit. We took his private elevator back up to the eighth floor where Rod, Pat, and I left Battaglia and returned across the corridor to the Trial Division Executive Offices.

  There had been six calls while I was out to lunch. Jed rang twice, to confirm arrangements for the evening; two of my colleagues had asked for time to review new cases;

  Joan Stafford had called to make a dinner date for me to meet her new beau; and Friday’s male caller had tried to get through twice. I should have told Chapman about the caller and about my hang-ups at home when I returned his call. Dammit. Oh well, I can tell him tonight. Ellen Goldman presented herself at Laura’s desk at precisely two-fifteen. I stepped out to greet her and we both started the less-than-subt
le process of looking each other over to form our first impressions. I would read about hers in a very widely distributed legal journal, so I approached her with caution and some trepidation, knowing that her profile would be based on the interview, some observations in court during the week, and comments from colleagues and adversaries.

  She would be hoping for my trust and openness, and perhaps some anecdote or item of personal information to scoop her competition, so I was aware that she would lay n the charm and flattery in our first encounter. I assumed she was salivating to have this chance to talk with me, set up prior to Isabella’s death, in the midst of the turmoil in which I was embroiled.

  I guessed that Goldman was roughly my age, perhaps a year or two younger. She was much shorter than I, with dark, curly hair and an athletic build. Her khaki suit was serviceable for a business meeting but completely lacking in style. When she introduced herself there was the vague trace of an accent which I could not place but knew I would learn about in the hours we were to spend together. We shook hands and I brought her into my office, thanking her for the flowers she had left with my doorman the preceding week when I had canceled our first appointment because of the murder.

  “Let me start by describing my project, Miss Coop… may I call you Alex?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Good. Well, I’m Ellen. I’m a freelance writer, doing this piece, as you know, for USA Lawyer’s Digest. I’m very familiar with your work read all the pieces about you and your unit in the Times and all the women’s magazines.

  I’ve covered a variety of issues, but I concentrate mostly on law, lawyers, business that sort of thing. If it would help you to see the kind of stories I’ve done I can bring a few back tomorrow. I’m sure you’ve read some of them without knowing it’s my byline.“

  “That’s not necessary. I’m sure I have seen some of them.”

  It would have made more sense for me to have learned if she had an ax to grind or a point of view, but it was too late for that now and I supposed that the Public Relations Office had vetted her before granting the interview. I didn’t have time this week to read puff pieces about corporate rainmakers and their golden parachutes or women at midtown law firms making six times my salary but whining about breaking the glass ceiling.