False Witness

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  “Yes, it was a pretty cheap shot, but all of a piece with the way this matter is being handled in the media. Wait, before I forget. ...” He stood motionless for a split second, nodded, lifted up a stack of papers and found the small note to himself, which he extended to me. “Glori Nichols, name ring a bell? About a month ago, she approached us through the public relations office. She’s a television producer. Does documentary things. She said along the lines of the Maysles brothers, does that mean anything to you?”

  “They’re very good. Maybe too good. They get in very close to their subjects. Live-in close. I remember something about a city hospital.”

  “Well, she spoke to me briefly a month ago, but at the time, it just seemed an intrusion. She called this morning, directly as a result of that clip of you last night, in fact.”

  “Oh? And ... ?”

  “Seems she’s been putting together a documentary featuring three women who are succeeding in occupations generally dominated by men. So far, she’s been filming a woman commercial pilot and a woman who is one of three top financial advisors in a Wall Street brokerage house. And ... she seems to feel you’d be a good third subject.”

  He took off his glasses and thoughtfully tapped them in the palm of his hand. There was something more on his mind; I knew Mr. Jameson Whitney Hale. I waited. He sighed. He motioned me into a leather wing chair, then leaned against the edge of his desk, his face close to mine.

  “Lynne. This is strictly confidential: file it and forget it. For now.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve been given a definite offer by the Republicans; they can almost guarantee conservative party backing. And strange as it may seem, they feel fairly certain they can count on a large portion of the liberal vote. That would pretty well tie it up in a neat package.”

  “U.S. Senate.”

  He sighed and smiled tightly. “U.S. Senate. And that leaves us with you. I think we should begin preliminary work to get you known. Your public work for the ERA and nonpartisan backing by various statewide women’s groups is all to the good, but what we’ve got to do is concentrate on this one small tight overpopulated island of Manhattan. This Nichols woman informs me that her documentary has the backing of a major network; it is tentatively scheduled for early fall airing. The timing could be extremely fortunate for you. You would by then be in place”—he leaned back and nodded to the chair behind his desk—“and your name could become at least familiar to the less sophisticated voter before he encounters it on the ballot in November. This could be the kind of publicity it would be impossible to purchase.

  “And if by some fortunate set of circumstances you can resolve this Sanderalee Dawson matter favorably with an arrest and an indictment during the filming of this documentary, why I think it would be a foregone conclusion that you’d be the first of your sex to sit on this chair: the first woman District Attorney of New York County.” He stepped back and with a sweep of his hand indicated the ornate, expensive antique chair.

  “I thought all this furniture was yours, Mr. Hale. You will take it with you when you resettle in Washington, won’t you?”

  He walked behind the desk chair and rested his large and competent-looking hands on the intricate carving. “This will be my gift to you, my dear.”

  We held that for a moment, he reaching for his dream and I for mine. Simultaneously, since we are both hardheaded realists, we exhaled and got on with the business of the day.

  I brought him up to date as far as our investigation was concerned. Just before I left his office, he reminded me to get in touch with this Ms. Glori Nichols.

  CHAPTER 9

  SANDERALEE DAWSON LAY DEEPLY comatose and the doctors would not commit themselves as to her condition should she regain consciousness. Her injuries were deep and severe. There was as yet no way of measuring or evaluating possible brain damage; her emotional wounds were speculative.

  The three-man microsurgery team was headed by Dr. David Cohen, a tall, slender, low-key personality of surprising good humor. He was comfortable in front of the cameras and easily fielded the questions tossed at him by the medical reporters assigned by the news media. Dr. Cohen had come to international fame a few years ago while he was attending a medical conference in London. As a leading practitioner of the new microsurgery techniques, it was a lucky coincidence that he was nearby when one of the “royals” (one of the endless persons in line for the throne should an unimaginable catastrophe overtake and eliminate most of the immediate royal family of Great Britain) had an extremely unfortunate accident while attempting to saddle a rather jumpy polo pony. There were pictures of a grim-faced Dr. David Cohen being escorted into the ancient private wing of a large public hospital, which frequently housed an injured royal or two—they were such energetic people. There were rumors and wild stories of detached major limbs. There was even speculation in one of the more lurid journals of a nearly severed head. Within an hour after his arrival, a smiling, relaxed Dr. David Cohen emerged to face the mobs of journalists. He gracefully fended off specific questions with the well-received statement: “Surely you gentlemen know I am honor-bound not to discuss any injury incurred by a member of the royal family.” When told that the news had been leaked that it was a royal thumb that had been cleanly detached and successfully reattached, Dr. Cohen shrugged roguishly and gave a winning thumbs-up signal, which was flashed around the world. Without any violation of British ethics, he had confirmed what the journalists already knew and he had done it with style, dash and good taste.

  Dr. Cohen had trained most of the world’s specialists in the techniques he had perfected. He was consulted via long distance middle-of-the-night telephone hookups and occasionally was whisked away via private jet to supervise the reattachment of a disconnected limb in places ranging from Mexico to Saudi Arabia.

  “This surgery was not unique,” Dr. Cohen told the newspeople. “Fortunately for the patient, her hand was quickly and intelligently preserved, and the fact that there was a minimum time lapse between the severing and the restorative surgery is all to the good.”

  He introduced his colleagues: Dr. Adam Waverly, an overweight, verbose, oddly ugly man who was anxious to discuss his surgical experience in Vietnam, which was, in his words, “a marvelous field experience for any surgeon.”

  The third member of the team was Dr. Frank Esposito. He was young, good-looking, snappish, brisk and tense. He literally elbowed Dr. Waverly out of camera range as he shoved his way out of the news conference with a quick “No comment. Dr. Cohen and Dr. Waverly have covered all pertinent information.”

  Dr. Cohen ended the conference with his statement that he had no comment at this time relative to the work that would have to be done to repair the cosmetic damage inflicted on Sanderalee Dawson.

  “That is a separate matter for future consideration. Gentlemen, thank you.”

  Thumbs up and grin. He was as skilled and controlling as a movie star handling a media event.

  The New York Times ran a three-section “Man-in-the-News” feature article on the backgrounds of the doctors who worked on Sanderalee Dawson. They were instant media heroes and the correct answer to one of the questions in The New York Times weekly quiz was Esposito-Cohen-Waverly.

  For us, however, as in any homicide, the most immediate person we had to work on was the victim, Sanderalee Dawson. I decided on a “day-of-birth–day-of-death” background investigation. I spent about thirty minutes with A.D.A. Wesley Copeland, who was flying down to Greensboro, North Carolina, en route to Cullen, where Sanderalee had been born.

  Wesley Copeland had been born and raised in Atlanta; he spent three years in Korea, mustering out as one of a very few black Army captains. He moved to New York, passed the Civil Service exam for patrolman, put in his twenty years, retired with a first-grade detective’s pension, which—along with his Assistant District Attorney’s salary—comfortably took care of the remaining mortgage on his brownstone in Brooklyn.

  When Wesley Copeland applied fo
r a spot in my Squad, my first reaction was that he was overqualified. He had a bachelor’s and a master’s in Criminology from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a law degree from NYU. Most of his academic work had been done at night. He told me, quite frankly, that he wanted no more than two years’ experience and then planned to go into private practice. I considered that we were lucky to have him in the Squad: another best of the best.

  One of Wes’s finest qualities is his easy, Southern-soft manner of gathering information. He is a good listener and people tell him more than they intend. His background reports read like short stories: people take on flesh and style. He assured me he would feel at home in North Carolina.

  “I have the good sense,” he told me with a slow, wise smile, “not to arrive in Cullen in a long purple Cadillac. None of the folks, white nor black, would approve. I’m just passing through town and thought I’d look for a particular tombstone of an old granny I’d heard about all my life but never met. The old folks love to talk about long ago. They’ll know all about Sanderalee Dawson and her family.”

  We spot-checked the people who immediately came to mind as potential murderers/assailants: her ex-husband was now in Australia with some film company, shooting a documentary about aborigines. One or two of the men from her show, with whom she’d been seen occasionally, seemed set with verifiable alibis.

  Among the people who established themselves as a “waiting entourage” at the hospital, some difficulty developed when three self-proclaimed PLO honor guards became involved in a pushing-shoving argument with some of the network people. One of the honor guards pulled a gravity knife and behaved in a “menacing way.” Another displayed a .357 Magnum revolver casually stuck into his waistband. The police waded in. Everyone was disarmed. The weapon carriers were carted off to the precinct. Cries of favoritism and Zionist plot rent the air. Dr. Regg Morris—he of the Ph.D. in Education—showed up with a small army of civil libertarians, white and black, and they caused a small commotion of their own. Some heroes of the Jewish Defense League showed up unbidden and began to chant and wave placards outside the precinct. When asked to leave, they refused. Once taken into custody, face to face with the PLO warriors, the precinct turned into the Golan Heights. Reinforcements of both persuasions—aroused Arabs and indignant Jews—showed up in masses of angry bodies. From the TV news tapes, it was hard to tell who was doing what to whom, but everyone denounced the fascist police.

  My staff was systematically working its way through a seemingly endless list of Sanderalee Dawson’s acquaintances and was trying to reconstruct, on a minute-by-minute time table, her movements on the night of the attack from the moment she was brought home by the studio chauffeur until she was found by Timothy Doyle and the two uniformed police officers.

  While she had been seen publicly with any number of men, both black and white, most of the dinners, disco appearances, theater dates and parties were all, in one way or another, job related. Since the dissolution of her marriage with the Frenchman, Sanderalee was not known to have been involved in any personal way with a white man. Being seen publicly with a white man was one thing; privately, it seemed, it was a thing of the past.

  The only man she had been linked with for nearly a year was Dr. Regg Morris, and he was hardly white.

  We showed a few catalogues of running shoes to our only eyewitness (from the knees down), but Timothy Doyle absolutely, stolidly rejected every picture shown to him: No, no, no, none of them resembled the special, dark blue, oddly “different” running shoes of the man with Sanderalee Dawson that night. Bobby Jones was to meet with both a heart specialist who had a book out about running and an orthopedist who dealt with the whole new category of “runner’s problems” to see what sort of shoe he might come up with.

  Meanwhile we dealt with the confessors: those perpetual full-moon characters who have some deep-seated need to describe in lurid detail the gory things they’d done to whatever victim hit the headlines. Three of them were shipped off to Bellevue very quickly. The fourth was more than a little scary. He brought in a carefully wrapped left foot in a serious state of decay—claimed he’d chopped it off some woman’s leg. Was it possibly Sanderalee Dawson’s? We turned him over to Chief Barrow’s people.

  Sanderalee Dawson’s nighttime slot was filled with endless discussions about what had happened to her, what was being done about it, who was behind it all. A roundtable discussion, being led by a pacifist intellectual black minister of somewhat tender years, was taken over by that instant media hero Dr. Regg Morris, he of the marvelous voice and flashing eye; he who had accompanied Sanderalee Dawson on her trip among the gallants of the PLO; he who loved her best and would have his revenge.

  “And it was nothing less than a Zionist attempt to silence Ms. Dawson,” he told us, speaking quickly, not pausing for breath, “and to so silence the freedom-loving peoples of the Third World and to wreak Israeli havoc and viciousness on the newly acclaimed spokeswoman of a people who have come to love her, to count on her, to recognize hers as a voice to the conscience of the world, and the perpetrators of this carefully calculated deed”—quickly, quickly, the man never seems to breathe—”have to know, have to know that force begets force, violence begets violence, destruction begets destruction, attack begets attack. The PLO is the military arm of that temporarily silenced voice of that purely beautiful black woman. Hold on there a minute, Reverend” (this to the hapless “leader” of the discussion group who was trying desperately to put in a word of his own), “you just hold on, you’ll get your chance to preach that old Zionist-implanted Christian propaganda: Turn the other cheek. Sanderalee Dawson don’t have no more cheek to turn, brother, and I surely ain’ turnin’ mine, no more, no way, baby.”

  New York–born, raised by an English-teacher mother and an attorney father, Columbia Teachers College–educated, he can “get down home” with the best of them when it serves his purpose.

  The horrified producers—mostly Jewish by birth or by association—were aghast at what passions they had loosed. The next night they tried for a learned discussion among psychologists and psychiatrists, to probe the sort of mentality that could perform so gross and dreadful an attack on a woman like Sanderalee Dawson. The wrong guests were placed together in a semicircle. The women ended up calling their male colleagues chauvinist pigs. The males maintained their smugly superior attitude and deferred to the biggest mouth among them, who declared: “All you women could go back for a little therapy to examine the reasons for your blatant hatred of men. Remember: ‘Lesbians are made, not born.’ ”

  The next night, the producers decided to run an old movie. But their ratings had never been higher and they were getting unbelievable press coverage. There was a gold mine under their feet if they could only decide how to get the stuff out.

  Two letter bombs were received at the office of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. One elderly black woman clerk lost the tips of the fingers on her right hand and her eyes were injured when her glasses shattered. The second bomb was a dud.

  A large box of honey candy was delivered to the New York home of the United States representative from the United Arab Republic. A telephoned warning from the “Never Again Committee of Ten” sent the bomb-squad detectives, wearing lead vests, into the mansion, and mobs of veiled women and dark-eyed children into the streets. But the bomb went off with a whimper rather than a bang.

  The evening television news shows at both six and eleven picked up and featured every incident that could possibly be connected, in any way, to the attack on Sanderalee Dawson. There were endless, earnest speculations, theories, opinions, outrages, pleas for calmness from religious leaders of all persuasions; sometimes veiled hints of more trouble to come. There were satellite pickups by the major networks throughout the world: our overseas friends and allies had a marvelous time questioning the fate of those citizens of the United States who had had the courage to voice and publicly champion unpopular political causes. The word “conspiracy”
raced through the air.

  I called the hospital and checked with Lucy Capella. Status quo: Sanderalee Dawson was in a deep, meticulously monitored coma. Neither better nor worse; life signs were steady. She was in the Intensive Care Unit with a police officer on duty at her bedside twenty-four hours a day. Listening for the slightest word. We’d even settle for a sound at this point.

  There were private-duty nurses in attendance in relays, around the clock, in addition to all the regular hospital staff.

  There was a uniformed police officer assigned around the clock in the small medical office immediately adjoining the ICU. There was a uniformed police officer assigned to patrol the hallway of the fifth floor, where the ICU was located. His job was to stop, question and identify any person or persons who were in the area without a legitimate reason. He was responsible for stairwells and elevators, corridors and rooms in the vicinity.

  Hospital personnel maintained a scrupulous checklist of who went in or out of the ICU. Only those medical personnel previously checked and cleared by hospital authorities and the police were permitted in. There were no other patients in the ICU at this time, although it was understood that should an emergency occur and all other facilities be filled, after a careful screening, the room could be shared. Under rigid guidelines.

  Both Jim Barrow and I—as well as the Police Commissioner and the Mayor of the City of New York—were totally committed to the premise that no one, absolutely no one who was not authorized was going to have an opportunity to “get at” Sanderalee Dawson. One of my people arrested a well-known hotshot columnist who had paid fifty dollars for a mop and bucket and had bulled his way into the room backward, humming sweetly and mopping broadly. He was just a little clumsy and got his feet tangled up in his dirty pail of water and he went down in a heavy heap, right on top of his camera, which flashed, just once, in his own startled face. But he had gotten enough of a glimpse to wing a column on “The Inside of the ICU: Sanderalee Dawson, Kept Alive by Tubes.”