Mitigating Circumstances

by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

  “Let’s go. Go get Dad. It won’t take long, and then we’ll come back and you can sleep. They’ll give you something to help you rest.” Lily followed her back into the house. She stopped in the kitchen and hugged Shana tightly.

  “Do you want to talk about what happened last night? I mean, is there anything you want to ask me? How do you feel?”

  “I dunno. I feel dirty and rotten and tired and scared. And I keep thinking he’s going to come back here and find us and do it again.”

  Next door someone was mowing the lawn; the noise was invasive not because it was loud, but because it was normal and they were not normal. In school, kids were clanging locker doors and laughing. Right about now at the courthouse, they were having recess and attorneys were rushing to grab a donut and a cup of coffee.

  “He’s not coming back. Please believe me. I know about this type of person. He’s afraid of being arrested. Right now he’s probably a hundred miles from here. And, honey, he doesn’t know where we live, not this house.”

  “In the movies, all the bad guys come back. Even when they think they’ve killed them, they get up.” Shana placed her finger in her mouth and started biting on a nail. Her father walked in and started to embrace her, but she pulled away, her back stiff, her arms rigid at her side.

  “I’ll back the Jeep out of the garage,” he said softly, visibly hurt by Shana’s aloofness, unable to comprehend how she felt.

  They drove in silence to the hospital. The female police officer was waiting in the lobby. She pulled Lily aside, explaining that unfortunately no female physician was on duty to perform the exam. She shrugged her shoulders and met Lily’s eyes woman to woman, knowing, compassionate. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we can’t wait any longer.”

  With the nurse present, Lily tried to prepare Shana for the exam, telling her more or less what had to be done. The child listened quietly, chin dropped, eyes up, staring without hearing, her body wracked by exhaustion. On the examining table, as the doctor attempted to perform the pelvic, she went wild with indignation, screaming and calling the doctor a “jerk nerd shit pig-head” and kicking the top of his head. Her face turned bright red, a vein stood out in her neck, and she locked her jaw, transforming her soft face. Finally they gave her a shot and she calmed enough to complete the exam. To Lily, it was as if Shana was forced to endure another rape. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she had to leave the room. It wasn’t difficult to understand why untold numbers of these crimes still weren’t reported to the authorities.

  They photographed them both. Shana had slight dis-colorations around her throat where his hands had been and other minor bruises on her buttocks. Drugged but awake, she had to roll over on the table, exposed, while Talkington photographed her. Lily leaned down by the table and placed her face next to her daughter’s. With her fingers she wiped away the tears from under her eyes, and stroked her hair. “I love you,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “It’s almost over.”

  Lily had nicks at the sides of her mouth, a grayish, darkening bruise on her right shoulder that only she knew was from the kick of the shotgun and not incurred during the rape. She had a substantial bruise on her wrists. She realized that if anything came to light, the photographs of her bruised shoulder would be used against her as evidence. There was nothing she could do. If they ever got that close to the truth, it would be over anyway. Just in case, she told them that she thought the injury happened when she was moving the furniture in Shana’s room.

  They treated the small cuts with antiseptic. They tested them both for sexually transmitted diseases and gave them both a shot of penicillin. On the issue of AIDS, they told Lily privately that they should be tested again in the future to be certain.

  In the examining room, the doctor found a chain of blisters starting on one side of Lily’s back and circling her upper torso. “How long have you had these?” he asked her. “Have you been having pains in your chest, around your ribs?”

  Lily didn’t know about the sores on her back, but the pains in her chest she had clearly felt. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Started a few weeks ago.”

  “You have herpes zoster. Shingles. It’s very painful. I’m surprised you didn’t visit your family physician before now.” He removed the rubber gloves and tossed them in the trash can.

  “I have herpes? How did I get herpes?” Lily asked, her voice high and shrill, her composure disintegrating.

  He smiled. “You don’t have genital herpes. First good news of the day, huh? This is a virus, usually caused from nerves, but it’s in the same family.”

  “Great,” Lily said. “Give me the medicine.”

  “I can give you some cream, but there’s no cure. It will probably get worse before it gets better. You’ll get even more blisters. But it will go away. It’s not serious.” He was young, younger than Lily. He touched her shoulder. “I’ll give you some tranquilizers and, of course, something for your daughter. District attorney,” he said. “Stressful job.”

  She didn’t answer and he left. There were a lot more stressful things than being a D. A., like being raped…like killing someone. She sat on the table, her shoulders slumped, the hospital gown open in the back, her feet dangling off the edge like a small child’s, her hair stringy and matted. She lifted an arm and sniffed her armpit. She felt filthy and disgusting, inhuman.

  Then she got dressed. As she pulled on her jeans, she thought that any minute they would come in and tell her the blood work had shown she had cancer. Wasn’t that what life was all about, a test of how much a person could endure? In the school of life, before this had happened, she had seen herself as passing. Maybe she wasn’t in the top half of the class, maybe not the perfect mother. And others faced far worse adversity, achieved more, but she had persevered. She had used her average intelligence, with the force of hard work and drive; had endured through law school with a baby and husband. She had continued in an empty, unfulfilling marriage for the sake of her child, remaining faithful in the face of continued accusations. In her career, she was relentlessly dedicated and carried the full weight of her responsibilities. But she had failed to endure all. Turning her back on her beliefs, she had met violence with violence. Many of the men and women she had sent to prison had been abused and victimized. She was one of them now.

  In the hall, she handed Talkington Shana’s gown from the night before. “My robes at the house,” she said. “I’ll give it to the crime-scene unit.”

  On the short ride home, Shana’s lids were drooping and her head nodding, but she was still irate. “You didn’t tell me they were gonna do that to me. Stick some metal thing inside of me with everyone watching, even that dog-face police officer. And they took pictures of me naked.” She started screaming. “You made them do this. I hate you. I hate everyone. I hate the world.”

  John stared at the road and drove. He was speechless.

  “It’s okay to be angry, Shana,” Lily said. “It might even be good for you to be angry and let your feelings out. You can say anything you want to me.”

  She turned, leaning over the front seat, close to Shana in the back. “Here,” she said, “pull my hair. Pull it as hard as you can. I can take it. Yank it. Go on, Shana.”

  Shana grabbed a handful of Lily’s hair and jerked it hard, causing Lily’s head to pull forward. She almost toppled over into the backseat. Lily didn’t wince. Shana let go and fell back with a slap against the seat, fighting the drugs to stay awake. “Pretty funny, Mom,” she said without smiling. “Did they do the same things to you?”

  “Yes, just about, and I didn’t like it any more than you did.”

  A slight smile barely moved the edges of Shana’s pale mouth, but enough to be visible. “Want to pull my hair, Mom?” she said.

  Lily responded, “No, thanks, little lady.” She reached for her daughter’s hand and smiled at her. “You might kick the hell out of me like you did that doctor.”

  Their hands laced together tightly and their
eyes met. A ray of sunshine shot between their bodies. Lily saw the minute dust particles dancing and falling around their hands. She was still leaning over the seat awkwardly, and the motion of the car was pulling them apart, each one resisting, lingering. By moving her fingers, Shana rearranged their hands so they were palm to palm. She stretched her fingers until they were perfectly aligned with her mother’s. She maintained the contact, pushing her palm slightly into Lily’s, spreading her fingers and taking Lily’s along. In this small gesture was a moment of beauty and utmost tenderness, that rare occasion when two human beings truly comprehend each other’s pain and experience the purest form of emotion: compassion.

  CHAPTER 12

  Detective Sergeant Bruce Cunningham opened the door to his unmarked unit and tossed in a case file and his tape recorder. He caught a glimpse of his scuffed black shoes and gave thought to stopping by the barber shop for a shine. What he really needed was a new pair of shoes, but with three kids and a wife who no longer worked, a shine would have to do. Still attractive at forty-two, he was tall, tan, and masculine, but the suit that had once strained to contain his bulging biceps now hid an abundance of soft flesh. His bushy mustache was a darker shade of blond than his thick hair, and he had a bad habit of letting it grow until it almost covered his up.

  He glanced at his watch. It was almost five o’clock and he’d have to fight the rush-hour traffic all the way downtown to the morgue to look at today’s stiff. The day shift had done a cursory workup at the scene and then dumped the entire case on his desk without so much as a word. This wasn’t the way it worked in Omaha, where he’d been a cop for seventeen years before relocating to a position with the Oxnard P.D. five years ago. In Omaha, things were different. People were friendly and honest—basic hardworking midwestern folks. Cops were cops. They weren’t thieves or killers or brutal, out-of-control animals. They were good guys. Nothing more, nothing less. Everyone in the department worked toward the same goals and assisted each other whenever they could. Here in Oxnard, he’d seen officers spend longer trying to kiss off a case to another officer than it would take to simply handle the fucking thing themselves. That was the kind of mentality he was surrounded by here in California. But it went much further than that. Being lazy and incompetent he could adjust to—he didn’t like it, but he could accept it. What he’d seen in the past two months, though, was just more than he could stomach.

  He stood there and stared out over the parking lot, flicking the stiff hairs of his mustache with one hand. Suddenly he slammed the car door shut and returned to the building. His anger built step by step as he made his way down the narrow hallway to the Internal Affairs Division. The two men sitting at their desks jumped and almost reached for their weapons when Cunningham came barreling through the door. “You incompetent motherfuckers,” he yelled. “I gave you that case cold and you still botched it. These guys are as dirty as the Omaha stockyards.”

  Detective Stanley Haddock leaned back in his chair and laughed. Then the smile fell from his narrow face, and he flopped forward and fixed the big detective with a steely gaze. “Get out of our office, Cunningham. We have work to do.”

  “Work? You call how you handled that case work? Fucking disaster is what it was. Fucking national disaster. And the people of this city pay your salaries. If I were you guys, I wouldn’t show my face in public after this fiasco.”

  The other detective came from behind his desk and took Cunninghams arm, physically pulling him out of the office into the hall as Cunningham kept glancing back at the other man over his shoulder. Whereas Haddock’s face looked as though it had been carved out of stone, Rutherford’s was as round as a beach ball. “Look,” he said, his voice low and tense, “we did what we were told to do. Get the picture? These were veteran cops with years on the force. This came down from the top.”

  “Thieves and killers,” Cunningham said, his face still flushed with anger, “not cops. Don’t put me in the same category with them. It’s bad enough I have to admit I work for the same department.” He reached into his jacket for his cigarettes. After offering one to the other man, he stuck one in his mouth, but didn’t light it, letting it dangle there as he spoke. “First, we got these animals in L.A. beating some guy to a bloody pulp on videotape for the whole world to see, and now we have our own guys blowing dope dealers away and pocketing the drug money.”

  “There’s no proof. Your report was all speculation.”

  “Proof,” he said, lighting his cigarette and inhaling the smoke, bracing himself against the wall. “The man had five bullet holes in him and the gun they say he pulled on them—well, forensics says the damn thing is so old, the firing pin fell out when they tried to test-fire it at the range. That gun was a plant and you know it.”

  The other man shook his head from side to side and dropped his eyes to the ground. “Let it go, Bruce.”

  “Look, Rutherford, this guy, this dealer, he owned three brand-spanking-new nine-millimeter Rugers. We have the sales receipts in the file. Why would a dealer carry an old rusted .38 to a twenty-grand crack buy when he owned an arsenal of the finest weapons? You answer that one, I’ll let it go.”

  The story’s as classic as they get: Franks and Silver made the connection and the mark solicited the buy. He was supposed to show with the cash at the designated time and place. Instead he appeared with a gun and tried to take them out and steal the dope. Classic drug deal gone sour. Case closed.”

  Cunningham stared at the other man and then barked, “Answer my question.”

  “We aren’t exactly concerned with designer guns here, are we? The next thing I’m going to be hearing from you is that a gun makes some suspect’s sports jacket pull, so he couldn’t possibly have been carrying it and is therefore innocent as a babe in the woods. Give us a break, guy. Let it go. Just consider it one less crack dealer we have to worry about.”

  “Sure,” Cunningham said, disgusted, then added, “Gosh, Rutherford, with a few sub-machine guns, we could go out there and clean up the whole city in a matter of hours. What a novel concept.” He dropped his cigarette on the floor, grinding it into the linoleum with his heel. Then he pushed himself off the wall and adjusted his tie. “Keep up the good work. If I ever need any cash, I know how to get it.” He turned and started lumbering down the hall.

  “Hey, Bruce,” the other man called to him, “I heard you finally got a conviction on the Owen homicide. Fine work you did there, guy.”

  He didn’t look back but continued down the hall and out of the building. His anger subsided. The mere mention of the Owen case had a calming effect on him and made the fact that two of his fellow officers were no better than perps off the street a little easier to swallow. There were still some good days on the job, when he felt he was actually making a dent in this disgusting cesspool of a world, doing what good guys are supposed to do—put the bad guys away.

  The Owen case had been a feather in his cap, no doubt about it. It was a landmark case, one he’d been working on for over three years. Poor old Ethel Owen, he thought, back in the parking lot again headed to his car. They’d never found her body after all these years, but he’d managed to stockpile enough evidence to get a conviction for second-degree murder just a few days before. First homicide in Ventura County to go down without a body, and he was the man who’d made it happen. That makes a guy feel proud, he said to himself, reaching the door to his unit.

  He got behind the wheel and then leaned out and looked at the sky, thinking it might actually rain. He missed the seasons, got sick of the sameness, and was terrified of earthquakes. If a plane flew overhead or a large semi passed and caused so much as a slight shake or rattle, his enormous frame was in the nearest doorway in seconds. He had seen more bodies than you could shake a fist at, stared down the barrel of a dozen or more guns, but he hated the earth moving beneath him. Everyone teased him about it, including his wife and kids. His wife, Sharon, insisted that it wasn’t the earthquakes that made him dream of leaving and returning to Omaha.
It was the gangs, the violence, the senselessness of it all. At night sometimes, when his wife and kids were asleep, Cunningham would sit at the dining room table for hours poring over their finances, trying to figure a way out, a way back, wishing he’d never left to begin with, asking himself if it had been worth it. Then he’d get up the next morning and have to stand over a tiny body on the street, the victim of another insane drive-by shooting, and wonder if one of these days, God forbid, he’d roll up and find one of his own kids spread out on the sidewalk, shot dead while they were merely walking to school.

  He pulled out of the parking lot and headed to the morgue, his mind returning to the Owen case. He’d known Ethel Owens slick young boyfriend had killed her from day one. They’d found physical evidence of a homicide at her home: blood and obvious signs of a struggle. The boyfriend had caught a flight out of the country as soon as he’d cleaned out old Ethel’s bank accounts and sold her brand-new Cadillac, forging her name on the pink slip. When the jury had delivered a guilty verdict, Cunningham had walked out in the sunshine and could have sworn he saw Ethel’s face smiling down at him. Maybe he stayed because of people like Ethel, he thought now, pulling into the parking lot of the morgue.

  Once inside, he flashed his badge, asked to see the Hernandez case, and followed the skinny, effeminate lab attendant to one of the tiled autopsy rooms. The attendant checked the name and number on the man’s toe, attached like a price tag in a discount department store, and then left Cunningham, prancing to a corner of the room to work on a chart.

  Pulling down the white sheet, he noted that the victim fit the description of about eighty percent of the homicides in Oxnard and about fifty percent of the suspects: Hispanic, early to late twenties, five-nine, one hundred fifty pounds, criminal history. Cunningham looked over his shoulder and made certain the attendant’s back was turned. He then removed a small jar of camphor from his coat pocket and dabbed a little in both nostrils. He didn’t mind looking at dead people; he just hated to smell them.