“Maybe, that’s good. I don’t know. All I know is my grandson has some camera shoved up his ass. He’s three years old for Christ’s sake. What the fuck is this?”
When I didn’t answer, he went on. “She says she ain’t gonna let Vito see the boy without a supervisor. A fucking supervisor. And not his mother. She doesn’t trust his mother on account of their relationship. He’s gotta go down to welfare and get a fucking social worker and pay to see his own kid. If he doesn’t agree she’s gonna call child protective services and have him charged with child molesting.
“Child molesting. My son molesting my grandson. Can you believe this shit? I asked if I can see the little boy. She asks why. I say I want to talk to him a second, that’s all. She says she wants to be there. Okay, fine. She brings the little boy in. He’s cute. He’s got these big, dark eyes, in this little face. He looks like a little bird, you know what I mean? Very serious face. He’s watching me. He’s sitting on his mother’s lap, holding on to her with both hands. I try to catch his eye, get him to come over, sit in my lap, talk. He keeps turning his face away. She says he’s shy. I think fuck, she’s gonna make him a freaking mama’s boy just like she complains about Vito. So I take out a silver dollar I got in my pocket, that and a couple pieces of candy I brought just in case I want to talk to this kid. He looks at the mother and she says, go, it’s okay. So he comes over and sits on my lap. I give him the dollar, tell him if he’s a good boy he can keep it. I ask the mother to step outside, give me a little privacy with the boy. She don’t like that, so I tell her to go to the front window, tell me what she sees. She goes over to the window, comes back, pats the boy on the head and leaves. Smart woman.”
Left and Right chuckle with amusement at the memory.
“So I ask the kid some questions. His daddy, he ever stick anything in his butt? He ever touch his pee-pee? Why don’t he like to go over his dad’s house? Don’t he know that if he’s lying his old man could go to jail? Why would he want to do that?
“The kid just looks at me with those big eyes. He don’t say nothing. I give him a piece of candy. He takes it and puts it in his mouth but he still don’t say nothing. Now all this time, I’m very calm. He starts to cry. He wants his mommy. I tell him we ain’t done yet. He can’t see his mommy until we’re done. He’s gotta answer my questions first. The fucking kid starts to lose it. He gets down and goes to run to the door. I gotta grab him by the shirt. He’s crying, I pick him up in the air and I shake him until he shuts up. I tell him I’m his grandfather and when your grandfather asks you a question you answer him. He just started screaming for his mother and he wouldn’t shut up. The mother started screaming for the kid. This wasn’t getting anywhere. I wanted to smack them both. I gave the kid back to his mother and told her not to talk to anyone about this, that I’d fix the problem.
“The bitch, she overheard me tell the kid I’m his grandfather. She calls Vito and tells him, ‘You know that old man came by, your uncle, he’s your fucking father.’ Vito, he calls me, he says stay outta my life. You think you can just snap your fingers and make it all good. No thank you. I don’t need your fucking help. You didn’t have time for me, well now I ain’t got time for you.” He shook his head in disbelief. “So here we are.”
Here we are indeed. Just click my ruby slippers three times and I’m gone. “What do you want from me?”
He looked at me incredulously, as if I had just barked or honked like a goose. “Ain’t you been listening? I want to know what’s happening here. There is no way anybody is gonna molest my grandson, no way. But if Vito ain’t doin’ it then there’s no way he’s gonna have a fuckin’ social worker with him, watching him like he’s some kind of pervert.
“This is my family. My son wants to be with his son, he’s gonna be with his son. I gotta know the truth. What’s happening. Then I know what I gotta do. I gotta know now. If my son didn’t do it then he should be out in the park with his son right now, this minute, throwing him a ball, whatever they want to do. If he did do it, then it isn’t gonna happen again, ever. That’s what I want. I ain’t waitin’ two months for you to get around to me. I want the truth, and I want it now.”
“What if you can’t have that?” I asked, aware of a faint stirring of pleasure at his impotence.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if the truth can’t be known. Can’t be proven. What if there’s doubt about if anything really happened?”
“No.” He shook his head rejecting that possibility. “It either did or it didn’t happen. That’s all you gotta tell me. I gotta know for sure. I can’t be worrying the rest of my life, I made a mistake; that’s he’s sticking his fuckin’ cock up my grandson’s ass—you hear me? That ain’t gonna happen.” He got right in my face and jabbed home each word with the end of a finger, typing out his frustration on the keyboard of my chest.
I reached out and grabbed his wrist. “I get the point. Now you’re paying me a lot of money to help you with this problem. Do you want my expert opinion or do you just want to break my ribs?”
Our eyes met like two dogs over one bone. Neither of us looked away. I let go of his wrist and he sat back. “Okay, what’s your opinion?”
“When I asked you what you wanted, you said you wanted the truth. Suppose that isn’t possible? Suppose you will never know without a doubt what happened? Can you accept that? Can you live with being wrong, with not protecting your grandson or with ending your son’s relationship with his child for no good reason?”
“No, that’s not acceptable. Those prices are too high. I want the truth. If I know the truth, I know what to do and what I do will be right.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
“What do you mean you can’t help me? You’re supposed to be the best, you wrote the book, you know all there is about this shit. You’re a fucking doctor, for Christ’s sake.”
“But I’m not God. Maybe I do know all there is, but that’s a lot less than what we need to know. Even if I had an opinion about what happened, even if that was a result of all the research I know and all the skill I have, that would just be the best we can do right now, I could still be wrong. I can’t guarantee you the truth, nobody can. If you can’t accept that then I can’t help you.”
He shook his head like a buffalo beset by flies. “I don’t get it. Why is this so hard? Okay, I don’t know how to talk to little kids, but you do. That’s your job.”
I had to stifle the impulse to talk down to him, to rub his nose in his need, to hit him with fists of sarcasm, and remember that somewhere inside there was a confused parent trying to do the right thing for his kid, doing his best no matter how far it fell from being good enough.
It was also my best chance of seeing the outside of this car.
“This is why it’s so hard. First, you have no witness. Whatever is or isn’t happening, the only ones there are the boy and his father. He isn’t going to confess. He hasn’t. He denies it. Maybe it’s the truth, maybe it isn’t. What are you going to do? Torture it out of him? Even if he says he did it, you’ll never know if that was just to end the pain. You can torture people into saying what you want to hear but not into telling you the truth. Pain trumps truth, unless you’re a saint. There’s no physical evidence. They checked out his butt and didn’t find any fissures. But that doesn’t prove anything. There’s all kinds of abuse that doesn’t leave physical evidence. He could be masturbating the boy or fellating him, or having the child do him. The nightmares, the fears, wanting to sleep with his mother, not wanting to go with his father, that means nothing. You see that very often with kids of his age when parents separate, especially if there’s a lot of conflict. They don’t want to leave the mother if she’s been the primary caretaker, but after the transfer they have a good time with the dad. They return and they want to reestablish that closeness with the mother, they regress, they want to sleep with her. You don’t have to have sexual abuse to explain all of that. That’s one of the biggest problems. There�
��s no set of symptoms that separates sexual abuse from other phenomena and that always shows up with sexual abuse. Sexual abuse is a complex thing. Is the violent rape of a ten-year-old girl by a stranger the same as a father masturbating in front of his sleeping six-year-old son? No, but sexual abuse covers both things. Some kids are abused, there’s no physical evidence, they make no disclosures and no one notices anything wrong from the outside. That’s why this is so hard. Not only that—”
“What about him telling his mother that his daddy touches him?”
“So far, all we have is her word that he said that. Suppose I interview him and he says nothing. Does that mean she’s lying, or it didn’t happen, or just that I couldn’t get the information from him? Suppose he recants. He catches on that everybody’s upset, that he might never see his dad again, that he loves his dad, that he wants his dad so badly he’ll put up with that other stuff, that it isn’t so bad after all. It takes a lot for a kid to give up on a parent, usually it’s the other way around. Does that mean it didn’t happen? No. I’ve had cases where the victim was in one room recanting to me, while next door the parent was confessing to the police.
“Suppose the kid does make a disclosure to me. I do a clean interview, no suggestions, no leading questions, I get a disclosure but not a lot of details, it’s a little inconsistent, the effect’s unremarkable. Not a great disclosure. Does that mean nothing happened? No. Kids are abused and may never give a ‘great’ account of what happened to them. You get the picture? This is a high wire act on a razor blade over a minefield. Very hard to keep your balance and anywhere you come down could blow up in your face.”
My host sat silent and slack, pummeled by something he couldn’t bully into submission.
“I’m not done yet. Let me throw a wrinkle into all this. Suppose I make a mistake, then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Suppose I tell you your son didn’t do anything. That’s my expert opinion. You tell the wife that he can have visits with his son. A year later they rush the boy to the hospital with a torn anus. What are you going to do?”
A smile appeared and disappeared, as enigmatic and unmistakable as the Mona Lisa’s. “I’d kill you, you fucked up like that.”
“Right. So the smart play for me is to tell you that your son did molest the boy. If I’m right, he doesn’t get a chance to do it again. If I’m wrong, how will you ever know? The boy is being protected from something that never happened. And it keeps on not happening. I don’t even need to do an evaluation. I just have to look out for myself and cover my tracks. You said it yourself. I’m the best there is at what I do. Who’s gonna catch me? I go through the motions. I build a case. The evidence could go either way. I say your son did it. Now you have to worry about whether that’s what I truly believe or what I want you to believe because it’s best for me. You can’t have certainty, it’s not there. Not for you, not for me, not for anyone.
“This is not me being too good for you. This is not about me or you. This is about the truth. The truth is the same for all of us, you, me, everybody. Nobody can get a leg up on this one. What you want, I can’t deliver. No one can.”
“So, what should I do, Doctor? What’s your expert opinion?”
“I think you have to accept that you may never know for sure what happened. That you can live with the possibility of being wrong. If you can, then an evaluation can be a useful thing to do.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then raise him yourself. That’s the only way to be certain.” Like an open parachute on the ground, I quickly packed up my frustration before it blew me away.
“Or maybe you decide it isn’t your problem. You don’t have to fix this. Just because someone presents it to you doesn’t mean you have to accept it. It’s not your problem until you accept it as one. You said your son didn’t want your help anyway.”
He looked at me like I was a talking ferret.
“My son is accused of diddling my grandson and I’m supposed to nod my head and say my, my isn’t that something. You all get back to me when you sort that out. It isn’t my problem. You’re in my prayers. That’s what’s wrong with you people. I hear this, it is my problem. I’m not gonna walk away from it. I’m gonna fix it. That’s what I do best, Doctor. I fix problems. That’s why people come to me. You think I’d be where I am today if I said well, that’s tough, wish I could help you with that. Come back next time with an easy one. Sorry doesn’t feed the bulldog, Doctor. Problems need fixin’. Tears and sympathy, that’s for women.”
He leaned back and reached into his pockets. “So, what do I do with you? You think you earned that seventy-two grand?”
I pushed the envelope toward him. “Absolutely not. Here, keep it. I don’t want any of it.”
“Really? You sell yourself short, Doc. Maybe you didn’t solve my problem, but you cleared up my thinking. That’s worth something. How long we been talking, Tommy?”
Left checked his watch. “About an hour Mr. G.”
“Okay, that’s what, four hundred? Yeah. Tommy get that out of the bag.”
Tommy reached in and counted off four one hundred dollar bills and handed them to me.
“That was for services rendered, Doctor. That means that all of this is privileged and confidential, am I right?”
The question itself was a pardon and a release. “Absolutely. Not a word of this to anyone.”
“Now, get out.”
No one moved, so I leaned over Tommy, grabbed the door handle, unlocked it and stumbled out into the afternoon’s fading light. I turned around and tempted fate. “Just for curiosity’s sake, what did you get out of all this?”
“Watching you twist and turn on my hook reminded me that when you bring a problem to me, you make a problem for me. And there’s a price for that, too.”
I closed the door and the limousine pulled away. Low and sleek, it turned the corner and disappeared.
I had my life back, just as I left it. Or so I thought.
A week later, I was sitting on my patio, drinking a cup of coffee and eating a bagel. The sun was bright overhead, the air crisp and cool. Winter and spring had a truce. I was skimming the newspaper. There it was, midway down page A8:
Vito and Carla Battista were found shot to death in a parking lot outside Ms. Battista’s lawyer’s office, where the estranged couple had just left a meeting. Police believe the murders were a botched carjacking. The couple’s only child, Salvatore, age 3, is in the care of his grandfather, reputed mob boss, Salvatore Giannini.
The State versus Adam Shelley
FORENSIC EVALUATION
This is the report of the evaluation conducted by the forensic team of the behavioral sciences division at Goldstadt Medical Center on Adam Shelley (DOB 10/31/92).
Social History
Adam’s mother was Mary W. Shelley, age 19 and a college freshman. She sought genetic screening of a possible pregnancy and was informed that unusual chromosomal defects were identified. She then filed for an abortion under the rape exemption. Her request was denied because the rape was not reported within the 7-day state guidelines for the exemption to be valid. An assault report had been filed with local police but there was no mention of a rape. Subsequent to the rejection of her request she apparently sought out an illegal abortionist in the city of Charlotte. She was arrested for fetal endangerment as part of the “sting” operation of the Department of Health and Welfare, which had established “apparently” illegal abortion shops across the state. A Sanctity Of Life motion was filed by the Fetal Defense League and Miss Shelley was committed to the Jesse Helms Memorial Reproduction Center for the duration of her pregnancy.
While in the center Miss Shelley suffered serious head trauma from either a fall or a possible suicide attempt. She was placed under the care of Dr. Henry Frankenstein of the neonatal intensive care unit. Although she was brain-dead, Dr. Frankenstein was able to sustain Miss Shelley as a viable carrier for the fetus. In fact it
was during this case that Dr. Frankenstein developed many of the techniques now used in the induced coma treatment for chronic miscarriage, prematurely, and pre-partum agitation in committed patients.
Subsequent to the birth of her child, Miss Shelley was maintained on life support systems and then transferred to the Raleigh-Durham Neurovegetative Center where she is still a resident. No father was ever named.
The child was named Adam Shelley by his legal guardians, the State Department of Social Services Child Protection Unit. He was raised in the pediatrics unit of the Helms Center until the age of seven. This was occasioned by the severity of his medical needs. (See findings under Physical/Medical Information.)
At age seven he was placed in long-term foster care with the DeLacey family in Winston-Salem. This was felt to be an appropriate placement, as the father was blind and the family already had a disabled daughter, Agatha, in addition to a son, Felix. The placement seemed to go well and there was discussion of legal adoption by the DeLacey family. Unfortunately an incident occurred with a young friend of Agatha’s. The child, Marian Ludwigsdottir, was two years younger than Adam. One afternoon she came to visit the children, who were under the care of Mrs. DeLacey. She called them all in for a snack and, when Marian did not come in, she went out and found her dead in the family’s above-ground swimming pool. The death was formally ruled accidental and no evidence linked Adam with the death, but the DeLaceys asked that he be returned to the care of the State.
At age nine, Adam was placed outside the Helms Center for a second time. This placement was with the Sweet Love of Jesus Youth Home run by the television ministry of Billy Ray Washburn. Adam was there for almost two years. During that time he made several suicide attempts, including one near-fatal laceration through the large vein in his eyestalk. There was some consideration that this was an expression of guilt over the death of the Ludwigsdottir girl; however, Adam never expressed any knowledge of her death.
Unfortunately this home was raided by the police in the summer of 2005 when it was discovered that certain of the children were being selected out by the staff and housed in a separate building for use as sex partners by Reverend Washburn and members of his ministry board of directors. There was no evidence uncovered that Adam Shelley was abused in this fashion. However, there were unconfirmed reports from other children that Adam was physically abused by a staff member named Fritz Harmann, and that videotapes of his abuse were shown to stimulate some of the men before they molested other children. No copies of the videotapes were ever found. What cannot be disputed is that at the time of the raid by the State Police the body of Fritz Harmann was found hanging in his room, dead of a broken neck. It is also a fact that Adam Shelley was a resident of this special ward.
Mary, Mary, Shut the Door Page 21
