False Witness

by Uhnak, Dorothy

“Lots of show business people—musicians, actors, whatever—drop by after work. It’s sort of an offbeat little place, not like Studio 54 or any of the flashy places where you go to be seen. Ah, here comes Henry. He’s one of the people we want to see.”

  Henry looked as though he’d blundered into the wrong section: he had the tense, dead-eyed look of the long-distance runner. His lips were parted to catch the elusive oxygen. His fists were clenched against the muscle aches and pains of the wonderful sport of running. He was in the right section. He slid into the booth opposite us and immediately stuffed a thick cigar in his mouth and nearly asphyxiated himself and everyone near him with the first offensive blast of smoke.

  “Ya mind?” he asked.

  I minded. Very much. He squashed the stogy into the ashtray and shoved it back into his jacket pocket. He was dressed exactly as Bobby and I were: another one of the three stooges; triplets. Cute.

  “Henry is co-owner of this section of the Jog-gon-Inn,” Bobby explained. “Lynne works in my office,” he told Henry by way of introduction. I kicked Jones in the shin, but with my old worn-out sneakers, I only hurt my own toes.

  Henry had signaled for three beers and he smiled with pleasure when they arrived. Then he popped something into his mouth—one or two somethings—and swallowed them down with beer. He leaned his head back, closed his eyes, smiled as he felt whatever it was take hold.

  “Ah. More like it. Friday nights, ya know. This is only the start. What, ten-thirty. I’ll be going until maybe three, four A.M.” He sat thinking that over for a moment; then, as if performing for our amazement and amusement, Henry’s hands worked under the table, out of our sight, and he ducked down and sniffed loudly, inhaling whatever he had sprinkled into his palm. He came up grinning and winking.

  “So far, I love him,” I told Bobby Jones.

  “Lissen, you want something?” Henry began to gesture, pantomime broadly just in case we missed his meaning. “Hey, lissen, Jones, she’s okay, isn’t she? I mean, you guys are off duty, like this is all off the record, right?”

  “She’s okay,” Bobby vouched for me.

  Henry then offered us a hit of whatever we might desire: first hit on him; freebie just to get us into the mood of the place.

  “No, no, we’re fine,” Bobby assured him and slurped some beer.

  “No, no, we’re terrific,” I assured him and wrapped my hands around the beer mug. I hate beer.

  Bobby led him finally to talk about Sanderalee Dawson.

  “Sandy comes in here sort of regular like. Not every night, ya understand, but she’s in and out. She knows everybody, it’s like a gang here, ya know, show types, crews, actors, technicians. No stars here, just working guys when it gets down to it.”

  “Does Sandy hang out with any particular group?”

  He shrugged at me. “She don’t stay very long, if you take my meaning.”

  “No. I don’t take your meaning. Tell me.”

  He checked eyes with Bobby Jones, then winked at me. “She comes for one thing or another, you know.”

  “No. You know. I’m a stranger here. Tell me.”

  “Hey, who is this girl, Bobby J? Policewoman or something? This is a friendly off-the-record just-for-information talk, right? You guys are not gonna come down on me or something?”

  “No way,” Bobby told him and signaled me to back off. I sipped the beer. Soapy water. Henry caught my expression.

  “Hey, look, babe, I got the message. I’m gonna get you white wine like you never tasted. My own special.” He got up, took away my mug of beer.

  “Is he going to sign my Pavarotti?”

  “No, ma’am. He’s going to tell us the off-hours activities of Sanderalee. Just lean back and let me lead him on, babe.”

  “You got it, babe.”

  The wine was very good and I sipped it slowly. I have a very low tolerance.

  I relaxed and Bobby relaxed and Henry confided. “Sandy’s been coming here a long time. We’ve been here two, nearly three years, and she’s been a regular. Even before she got so famous. See, she knows it’s low-key here, no creeps, no sightseers. And it’s close to home. So she stops by. Sometimes she leaves after just a look around. Sometimes she stays, smokes a little, snorts a little, whatever she wants. Sometimes she leaves with a friend.”

  “Any friend in particular?”

  Henry winked at me—a preliminary signal: a confidence is coming. “Sometimes old friends, sometimes new friends.”

  “Sometimes white friends, sometimes black friends?”

  “In here, it’s all the same. No color. These people are show-biz.”

  “So she has gone off with white men?”

  “Oh, that whole hate-whitey is just for the camera. Believe me, Sandy don’t discriminate when it comes to men.”

  “Was she in here Tuesday night?”

  “The night of the attack? Jesus, that was terrible. Hard to believe, ya know, what that beast done to her. No. She didn’t come in Tuesday night.”

  “You seem positive about that. How come?”

  “I am positive,” he said. “We’re closed on Tuesdays.”

  End of that discussion.

  Bobby Jones already had a long list of the regulars and a shorter list of those known to be friends of Sanderalee Dawson. He had a few people working on the list, checking out the names.

  “Any particular place your customers go on Tuesday nights?”

  “I haven’t the vaguest,” Henry told me. “Wherever they go, they’re right back here Wednesday night in full force. They appreciate your old Jog-gon-Inn more than ever. Same thing on Monday nights ’cause we’re closed Sundays.”

  Bobby went through a long series of questions that he had obviously covered already in a prior conversation/interview with Henry. No, there was no one special involved with Sanderalee; no, none of his regular customers seemed to have “disappeared” since the crime against Sanderalee. Yes, everyone discussed it; yes, everyone was upset, horrified by it. No, no one had any ideas at all.

  “Well, I gotta go and spread my charms around. They expect it. Lissen, nice meeting you, little lady. Anything you want, you just ask Henry. Got it?”

  “Just ask Henry. I got it.”

  After he left, Bobby asked me, “Sure you don’t wanna snort, or pop or pill or smoke, babe?”

  “Sure you don’t wanna get yourself arrested, babe?”

  Bobby’s face lit up. “Ah, here’s the man we’re waiting for.” He signaled to a slim, dark-haired man who was standing uncertainly, with strands of crystal beads dangling over his shoulders.

  Alan Greco had a nice smile: gentle, sad, slightly quizzical. It went perfectly with his black liquid eyes and he looked directly at you when he spoke to you. He gave you his fullest attention; it was at once flattering and reassuring. He had a way of closing out the commotion and action taking place all around him. He created a small, private enclosure around himself and whomever he was speaking with. There was an instant, sympathetic rapport; a comfortable feeling; a feeling of familiarity.

  I resisted, just barely, asking him what Pavarotti was really like. We were here to learn about Sanderalee. From the photographs he had taken of her, Alan Greco seemed to have penetrated deeply into many of the facets of her personality.

  With Sanderalee Dawson, Alan Greco told us, working was more like playing. They communicated on a rare level; they were able to create a special, secret make-believe world just for the two of them. He was able to penetrate the stylized makeup, the high-fashion dead-flat expression. He was able to reach into the hidden fire, the deep, buried passion; to catch a thought as it surfaced and flashed from her eyes, touched her lips, was instantaneously registered by the position and tension of her body.

  “When was the last time you were together with Sanderalee?”

  “I haven’t seen her for nearly a year.” He shook his head, and there was a great sadness in his eyes now. “We had a falling out, I guess you’d call it. Sanderalee is a very ... basically
a very vulnerable woman. She has a large heart; she can be used very easily; she reacts emotionally, not intellectually. Which is not to attack her intelligence. She is very intelligent. But very easily led. We ... abandoned ... suspended our friendship over her trip to the Palestinian camps. She wanted me to come with her and photograph the whole thing. I told her I couldn’t. I had an assignment for Newsweek.”

  “Did you, or were you just putting her off?”

  “Both. I could have worked something out. But I tried to tell her to back off, to find out who was using her and why, to slow down, to inquire a little, not to just plunge in. But ... she was very taken with the man who arranged the whole thing, this Regg Morris. For the last year or so, he has just about controlled every move she’s made. It was all his idea, the PLO thing; the dancing with the guns overhead. My God, I’d never have taken those pictures. I considered them obscene. But you see, Sanderalee didn’t have the vaguest idea of what she was getting into.”

  “Alan, do you have any idea who might have done this to Sanderalee? Any idea at all?”

  He clasped his hands together and shook his head, then looked up. “Sanderalee is a very simple and, at the same time, very complex woman. She grew up feeling ugly and skinny and outcast. Undernourished, underloved, with those unbelievable green eyes. She was tormented for all the very things that have created her beauty. Her environment was totally hostile to her, in particular.”

  This was very much in line with the information Wes Copeland had given me: Sanderalee’s very differentness as a child, all that had made her a famous beauty later, caused her a childhood of torment.

  “What you’re trying to say, but are reluctant to say, is that Sanderalee needs the reassurance of many men. Even now.”

  He nodded and sighed. “Of many men.”

  “Strangers and friends alike?” Bobby Jones asked.

  He nodded. “She has been known to be totally indiscreet. Sooner or later, she was almost ... fated to meet the wrong man. Apparently, she ran into him last Tuesday night. Unfortunate choice of words: ran into him.”

  “Is that how she picked up men, Alan? Through running?”

  “One of the ways. I cautioned her. I told her it was as dangerous as, say, hitchhiking. She didn’t listen. And I haven’t seen her in nearly a year. And now she is so wounded. I only hope she is not destroyed. Listen ... you’ll see her, won’t you?”

  “Yes, Alan. You want us to give her your love?”

  “Oh yes, Lynne. Oh yes. Tell her ... just tell her that. She’ll know. And please, let me know how I can help. Maybe, when she’s able to talk. She’d talk to me. I know she would.”

  “Yes. I think you’re right. All right. When the time comes, we’ll tell her you’re waiting.” I put the softcover book on the table and Alan Greco looked down, then up at me, surprised. His smile was modest, almost embarrassed. He signed his name and thanked me for asking.

  I didn’t have to ask him what Pavarotti was really like. It was all there: in Alan Greco’s photographs.

  CHAPTER 12

  WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG at five the next morning, I leaned over Bobby and became instantly alert.

  “Lynne. Sanderalee is beginning to talk. It’s very hard to understand and she’s not making sense, but I thought you’d want to be here.”

  There was a controlled undertone of excitement in Lucy Capella’s voice. That in itself was highly significant. Lucy Capella does not show emotion very often.

  She is from the Bronx and it is rumored that her father was connected: a common rumor attaching to anyone with an Italian name. I was more interested in her own personal connections during her job interview. Lucy was a dropout nun who had gone into a religious order at age eighteen to escape a domineering father and an unsympathetic stepmother. Her own mother had jumped in front of a subway train at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue at age twenty-two as her solution to a miserable four-year-old marriage. Lucy’s memory of the incident was hazy: a passerby had snatched the three-year-old Lucy from her mother’s grasp, pulling her to safety. She remembers nothing more of the moment. Her retreat into the religious life was to avoid a forced marriage to a thirty-eight-year-old business associate of her father’s.

  The order she joined was actively involved in education and, once Lucy’s intelligence was discovered, she was sent for a degree at Marymount. After teaching for a number of years, she was allowed to attend Fordham Law School. By the time she earned her law degree, her order was wearing street clothes, discussing priesthood for women, supporting publicly controversial causes. Since she was moving more and more “into the world,” it was a natural progression for her to make a final break. Lucy spent a year or so in a transition community of former nuns and priests who had made similar decisions. Through consciousness-raising sessions Lucy perceived herself as a victim of male domination and she moved into an activist role. She wanted to use the law to avenge herself, her twenty-two-year-old mother, and other women for the wrongs inflicted on them by a sexist society.

  That was what she told me in our initial interview. She also convinced me that her passion was tempered by judgment, self-control and a love of pure justice.

  At thirty-three, she had the shining brightness of a clever twelve-year-old girl. She was small, compact, with a softness of voice and a gentle, quizzical manner that were sometimes mistaken by the defense for timidity or ineptitude. In actuality, she was a steely avenging angel in full pursuit when a case aroused her sense of justice, and she left behind her in many a courtroom an unexpectedly convicted defendant and a stunned, defeated defense attorney who had totally underestimated her.

  She had volunteered to spend the midnight-to-eight shift at the bedside of Sanderalee Dawson. The assignment couldn’t have been in better hands. Lucy Capella would remain alert, listening, watchful, expectant, ready and able to discern the slightest change in breathing pattern, bodily position or atmosphere within the room.

  Lucy still dressed like a parochial schoolgirl. She greeted us in a plaid skirt, Peter Pan–collared white shirt, open navy blue cardigan sweater. On more than one occasion when she had ventured from the room for a five-minute break, she had been scolded by some nurse or administrator: Little girl, where are you going?

  “She seemed restless earlier this evening, Lynne. It’s logged in the case book at about six P.M. The police officer on duty heard some strange noises and she caught what sounded like ‘Help me.’ Then nothing at all, until a half hour ago, when I called you. She’s quiet now, but I thought you’d want to come over.”

  The room was dreary-dark, restful, soundless except for Sanderalee’s raspy breathing and an occasional echoing sound from down the hall. The hospital still hadn’t come alive with the morning staff. Bobby stood quietly to one side, reading the hourly reports. I leaned over the bed and tried to see Sanderalee Dawson.

  It was difficult to find the human being beneath the wrappings and trappings that were being used to preserve and restore her. Her reattached left hand, positioned on a pillow, was held firmly in place by a semi-cast halfway up her arm and clean white gauze down to the last joints. The fingers, swollen and shapeless, curled toward the palm and were motionless.

  Sanderalee Dawson was located somewhere beneath all the swelling and distortion. Her jaws were wired shut into place so that the broken bones could knit properly. Her nose had been broken. Each breath seemed to cause her great effort and was accompanied by a whistling, wheezing sound. Her mouth was ripped naked down below the gum line. The lower teeth, thus exposed, seemed too long for a human being. Some of them were broken off and jagged. A dental problem to be dealt with later, along with the plastic surgery to create a new lower lip. There was a long way to go for Sanderalee.

  “Has a doctor been in to see her since you’ve been here? Does anyone know that she’s starting to come out of it?”

  “Since I’ve been on duty, no doctor. The night nurse checks, but she just pops in and out every so often. I read the chart through. Earlier in the even
ing, Dr. Cohen and Dr. Waverly, the microsurgeons, stopped by to check her hand. The police officer told me that Sanderalee seemed aware of them. She started to moan, to cry out. Sounded like ‘Help me.’ The doctors noted her condition on the chart and said it was a good sign: that little by little she’d be coming out of it from now on.”

  Sanderalee began moaning and Lucy leaned close to the bed and spoke softly and rhythmically. “It’s all right, Sanderalee. We’re here with you. You’re not alone. We won’t leave you. And Lynne is here too.” Lucy motioned for me to go around to the other side of the bed. I did, and reached out for Sanderalee’s right hand and applied a slight pressure. Her head rolled toward me.

  “It’s Lynne Jacobi, Sanderalee. From the District Attorney’s office. I’ve been on your show a few times. Lynne.” I got a sudden flash. “Your birthday twin, Sanderalee. April twenty-fourth Taurus. I’m here to help my astrological twin.”

  Lucy stared at me, puzzled, but there was a definite returning pressure from Sanderalee’s hand in mine and I leaned closer to her face.

  The only living aspect of her was her eyes: they burned and stared from behind swollen lids, making contact, registering an awareness. She was awake; she was listening; waiting.

  “Sanderalee, I saw Alan Greco this evening.”

  Her hand tightened and relaxed: she understood what I told her.

  “Alan sends you his love. He loves you very much and wants you to know he’s just waiting for when you want him to come.”

  Slight pressure from her hand. Her eyes closed, then snapped open. She groaned and seemed suddenly terrified. Her hand struggled from mine. Lucy looked up sharply.

  “Bobby, please wait outside,” she said. Bobby, who had approached the bed, glanced at me, then back to Lucy, shrugged and left the room. Lucy whispered softly to me, “No men. They seem to frighten her. Even when the doctors come, she seems agitated.”

  I nodded. “Sanderalee? Do you know who I am? Lynne Jacobi, from the District Attorney’s office.” I took her hand again and felt the pressure. She was hearing me; understanding; but to what extent, I couldn’t say.