Trophy Widow

by Michael A. Kahn

  I’d called Brett Abrams that morning. Brett was a lawyer friend in Chicago who specialized in plaintiffs’ medical malpractice cases. I knew that Brett, like all medical malpractice lawyers, would have a copy of the Physicians’ Desk Reference on his desk. He checked the listings for me and reported that there was no entry for flunitrazepam.

  Perhaps, I’d mused after hanging up, there was no listing because the drug wasn’t lawful to prescribe in the United States. Before leaving for my lunch meeting, I’d asked my secretary, Jacki, to check with the medical school library at St. Louis University to see whether they had a reference book with any information on the drug. When I returned to the office after lunch, Jacki’s typed notes of her telephone conversation with one of the librarians were sitting on my desk.

  The librarian had found the information in a European equivalent of the PDR. According to Jacki’s notes, flunitrazepam was in the class of drugs used to treat anxiety, convulsions, muscle tension, and sleep disorders. Developed in the 1970s by Hoffman-La Roche, the drug was more popularly known by its trade name, Rohypnol.

  Rohypnol.

  I stared at the name.

  I said it aloud.

  It sounded awfully familiar.

  I read through the rest of her notes. The drug was legal in eighty-six countries in Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Low doses of Rohypnol could cause “drowsiness, dizziness, motor incoordination, memory loss, gastrointestinal upsets, headache, reduced blood pressure, visual disturbances, dry mouth, and hangover.” Higher doses could cause coma, respiratory depression, and even death.

  I leaned back in my chair and mulled it over. Flunitrazepam could be prescribed for sleeplessness or anxiety. That was not inconsistent with Angela’s history. Over the years, her physician had given her prescriptions for sleeping pills and for tranquilizers.

  I studied the notes. Legal in eighty-six countries. According to the investigative file, Angela had visited London, Rome, and Bermuda and had taken a Caribbean cruise during the four years before Michael Green’s murder. Maybe Rohypnol was legal in one of those countries.

  I turned toward the computer screen. My computer was hooked up to Nexis, a computer data bank of hundreds and hundreds of newspapers, periodicals, and specialized journals. It was worth a shot.

  I signed onto Nexis. At the search prompt, I typed in a single word: flunitrazepam. I stared at the word for a moment, my lips pursed. This was already a long shot. Better to do the search using its trademark. That might improve my chances of a hit, since newspapers and periodicals were far more likely to use a drug’s brand name. Who knew, or could remember, that the dentist numbed you with a shot of procaine hydrochloride, or that the generic name for the twenty-one Ortho-Novums I took each month was norethindrone/mestranol? After all, even Angela’s physician had used brand names during his police interview. He told them he had prescribed Nembutal and Valium, not pentobarbital sodium and diazepam.

  So I backspaced over flunitrazepam and typed in Rohypnol. Then I hit the transmit key and leaned back to wait. After fifteen seconds the screen flashed a message:

  Search interrupted—your current search request has located more than 1,000 documents. Would you care to modify your search request? Yes/No?:

  I frowned in surprise. There were more than a thousand newspaper and magazine articles in which the word Rohypnol appeared?

  I typed in yes and then modified the search to eliminate all articles shorter than one thousand words. It took two more search modifications to get the number under one hundred articles.

  By then I was very curious. I pressed the key to view the first document. A moment later, the screen filled with the opening paragraphs of an article that had appeared three years ago in the financial section of the Washington Post under the headline:

  COUNTERING ILL EFFECTS OF AN ABUSED DRUG;

  FIRM RAISES AWARENESS IN SEX-RELATED ATTACKS

  I leaned forward and started reading.

  The pill is small, white and tasteless when dissolved in liquid. It is manufactured by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche Ltd. for treating severe insomnia.The prescription sleeping aid is sold and marketed in 80 countries around the world, including many in Europe and Asia, and is a strong revenue producer for the company, though the drug manufacturer has never sought approval to sell it in the United States.Yet it is in this country where the pharmaceutical, known as Rohypnol, has been branded a “date rape drug” by police and has engendered calls for stricter penalties for those who possess it.Rohypnol has been called the date rape drug because of a rise in sexual assaults that police suspect have been committed after the illegally imported drug was slipped into a victim’s drink. The drug so incapacitates those who ingest it that they cannot resist sexual assault and they often don’t remember much of the attack later, police say.

  I reread the last paragraph.

  Now, of course, I knew why the word Rohypnol sounded familiar. The date rape drug.

  I leaned forward and read on.

  The article focused on the struggle between those fighting to maintain the status quo and those seeking to get the drug reclassified from Schedule 4 to Schedule 1 on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s controlled substances list. Schedule 1 drugs include crack cocaine and heroin. According to the article, the legislative compromise had been to stiffen the criminal penalties for the use of any controlled substance in a sexual assault. But the director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center discounted the value of that approach.

  “A drug like Rohypnol can cause amnesia,” she explained. “That means that women will not be able to provide the information the police need to prosecute a sexual assault case. You’ll never get to the point of using the enhanced penalties.”

  I paged slowly through the other articles. Rohypnol had started coming into the U.S. about three years before Michael Green’s death, much of it smuggled up through Mexico. It had a variety of street names, the most popular being “roofies.” Other street names included Roachies, Ropes, La Rocha, Rib Roche, R-2, and Mexican Valium.

  Rohypnol’s use in sexual assaults had earned it a creepier set of nicknames, including the Forget Pill, Trip-and-Fall, and Mind Erasers. In a case in Broward County, a convicted rapist boasted of using Rohypnol to rape more than twenty women. In Miami, where the drug comes in from Latin America through courier services and passengers on commercial airplanes, the poison control center had logged more than two hundred confirmed “roofie” rapes, with hundreds more suspected. A story in the Legal Times described why Rohypnol was the weapon of choice for rapists:

  Rohypnol tablets dissolve easily and quickly. They are odorless, colorless and tasteless. The victim often blacks out, so she cannot piece together enough details to put a rapist away. “You’ve got a drug that makes your partner less capable of resisting and unable to remember afterwards,” says Mary Hibbard, a drug policy expert at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It really is the perfect crime.”

  I stared at that last line, feeling a chill run down my spine.

  I skimmed the rest of the articles, trying to figure out why, with all this publicity, Angela Green’s defense attorney had said nothing about the blood analysis at trial. Nexis had organized the articles in descending chronological order—the most recent first, oldest last. That chronology held at least a partial answer. The media coverage had markedly escalated during the past five years. Indeed, the only articles that mentioned the drug during the three years before Michael Green’s death were financial or business profiles on Hoffman-La Roche Ltd. in which the name Rohypnol would pop up on a list of the pharmaceutical company’s more successful drugs, along with Valium and a heart-attack medicine called Activase.

  All of which might explain why the presence of flunitrazepam had not sent up a red flag in the medical examiner’s office when they got the results of the blood tests on the broken glass.

&nbs
p; But that was then. This was now.

  ***

  My mother didn’t kill him,” Sonya said bluntly. “She was framed.”

  “Who framed her?”

  She took a sip of her wine and shrugged. “Probably that blond bimbo.”

  We were in the bar at Harry’s Restaurant on Market Street—Sonya Green and me. She’d been reluctant to meet, even after I explained that I was representing her mother in the Son of Sam case. After some cajoling, I finally got her to agree to give me thirty minutes after work. I’d suggested Harry’s, which was near A. G. Edwards and Sons, where she worked as an analyst in the underwriting department.

  Although Sonya was heavier than her mother and had a complexion closer to her father’s, she’d inherited her mother’s broad facial features. Unlike her mother, though, there was a slightly unkempt quality to Sonya. There were makeup smudges on the collar of her blouse, which was not well pressed. Her straightened hair was a little tousled, her lipstick and eyeliner just a tad off line. I felt a pang in my heart. Although I was probably doing a little projecting, Sonya seemed a big little girl to me, one who still needed a mommy to help her get fixed up, to make sure the blouses were cleaned and ironed and that her the eyeliner was on straight. Unfortunately, the state of Missouri had snatched her mommy and locked her up two hundred miles from home.

  How unfair life must have seemed to Sonya. She’d been just a few weeks from graduation at Northwestern when her father was murdered and her mother arrested and charged with the crime. During the same month her classmates celebrated in Evanston with their parents, Sonya was back in St. Louis burying one and visiting the other in jail. For the first two years after graduation, she lived with her grandmother—Angela’s mother. She now lived alone in a condominium in Clayton.

  “Why Samantha Cummings?” I asked. “Where’s the motive?”

  “Motive?” Sonya gave me a scornful look. “Money, of course. Look at the lawsuit. If her kid wins, she’ll be wealthy.”

  I shook my head. “The lawsuit is an afterthought—something dreamed up by a lawyer. If she was really after your father’s money, the simplest way to get it was to marry him. If she was a gold digger, her best strategy was to keep him alive until the wedding. If he died before that, she’d have no claim to anything—she wouldn’t be the wife, she wouldn’t be the widow, she wouldn’t even be the longtime live-in girlfriend who could try to portray herself as the common-law wife. Look at her situation today. In the eyes of the law, she’s a nobody. She can’t even be a plaintiff in the Son of Sam case. No, if she were looking for money, the last thing she’d want is for your father to die before the wedding.”

  “I don’t care,” Sonya said, her voice laced with anger. “Some things aren’t logical. I’m telling you that whore was behind the murder. I may not know why—at least not yet—but I know what I know, and I know there’s some connection between her and whoever killed him.”

  I backed off the topic. We talked more generally about her mother’s predicament. Sonya visited her every month and they corresponded frequently. She’d been much closer to her mother than her father while growing up. The opposite had been true for her older brother, Michael junior.

  “Mike’s been brainwashed,” she said, snorting in disgust.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He turned completely against Mom. He hasn’t talked to her since the trial. Can you believe that? His own mother.” She shook her head. “But he was turning against her even before my father was killed. Did you know he was planning to go to that awful wedding? I couldn’t believe it when I found out. I told him I wouldn’t stoop to be in the same room with that whore. He got mad at me, said our father was entitled to happiness, too, said she was a sweet girl. Let me tell you something.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I sometimes think Mike might have had the hots for that whore himself back then. He used to visit her whenever he came to St. Louis. Even after the murder. I bet he still talks to her once in a while.”

  “I’m going to see him tomorrow afternoon.”

  She looked surprised. “Really? Is he coming down here?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got meetings in Chicago. On this case, in fact. Your brother agreed to meet me in the afternoon before I fly back to St. Louis.”

  “Then you’re going to see what I’m telling you. When it comes to my father, Mike’s a total believer. Like one of those Moonies.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Funny how things change.” She sighed. “When we were growing up, Mike was the rebel and I was Daddy’s girl, little Miss Perfect. When Mike was in high school, he and my father used to scream at each other all the time. He actually hit my father out in our backyard one afternoon. Hit his own father. In the face. Have you ever? My father grounded him for a month and took away his car. They didn’t speak for more than a year. But now, to hear Mike talk, you’d think he’d been raised by an angel of God.” She paused, frowning. “Strange how some things turn out.”

  Chapter Seven

  Maria Fallaci stared at me, incredulous. “And the punch line is?”

  We were in her law office, which was on the fourth floor of an older high-rise along LaSalle Street in Chicago’s Loop.

  “No punch line.” I shrugged. “I’m just saying there were traces of Rohypnol in her blood.”

  “Which means what? That I should have argued to the jury that he drugged her and fucked her, and when he came out of the shower she rose like some zombie from The Night of the Living Dead and cut off his cock? Come on, Rachel. I’m a defense lawyer, not a horror-flick producer.” She paused, trying to get herself under control. “Look, I’m sure you’re a fine civil lawyer, and I’m sure you’ll give Angela a fine defense in this Son of Sam case. But defending a lawsuit over money is totally different from defending a capital murder case.”

  “I know,” I said, trying a conciliatory smile, ignoring her not-so-subtle put-down. I’d only make it worse by acting confrontational. I’d come up here assuming that she would react defensively to anything she could interpret as second-guessing her representation of Angela Green. And I didn’t blame her. She’d lost one of the most famous trials of the decade and, in the process, had been subjected to plenty of armchair lawyering from the likes of Geraldo Rivera, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Gerry Spence, Marcia Clark, and the rest of the cable-TV courtroom mavens. And I’m sure she’d done it to herself as well—during and after the trial.

  “Maria, I didn’t come up here to critique your trial tactics, and I certainly didn’t come here to make you angry. If I did, I’m sorry.”

  Her nostrils flared and she nodded. “Don’t worry,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “I’m a big girl.”

  She ran her fingers through her long black hair, which was streaked with gray. As she did, she turned toward the window, her profile accenting her strong Italian nose. Now in her early forties, Maria Fallaci was still the “smoldering Sicilian beauty” that Esquire had labeled her four years ago in the short profile the magazine ran in its annual “Women We Love” issue. What made her appearance there even more memorable was the Annie Leibovitz portrait that accompanied the copy. Instead of the usual defense-lawyer shot—glaring from the courthouse steps with arms crossed over chest or posed in front of the jury box with a forefinger pointing ominously—Maria was in a silky nightgown reclining on her four-poster bed. In the background, slightly out of focus, was her live-in lover, a young ballerina named Annette.

  Like most of the cast in Angela’s criminal trial, Maria first became a celebrity and then became an author. Her book, Battered Justice, was scheduled for release in November. I’d read somewhere that the book promotion included a twenty-city tour with readings at several women’s prisons. Only last week Liz Smith reported that Spike Lee had signed on to film the book-and-prison tour for an HBO documentary. And thus, Maria became a defendant in the Son of Sam case.
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br />   The meeting of defense counsel would start at ten o’clock this morning. I’d flown up early to meet with Maria in the hopes that she’d help quell my doubts about Angela’s conviction. That seemed less and less likely.

  I said, “I’m sure that the Angela Green I met earlier this week is a lot different than the Angela Green you represented back then.” I paused. “It’s just that…” My voice trailed away.

  “That she seems incapable of murder?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s the way it is in most domestic violence cases.” She stood and walked to the window. Staring down at the El train rumbling past, she said, “I’ve defended husbands and I’ve defended wives in everything from spousal abuse to murder. Very few of them seem the type.” She turned toward me. “It’s as if there’s a secret chemical reaction going on inside the relationship, something toxic that’s hidden from the rest of us. Sometimes it turns one of them into a temporary monster.”

  “But not always.”

  She studied me. “Not always. But in Angela’s case there was plenty of evidence pointing toward a temporary monster.”

  In deciding how to defend the murder charge, Maria had had to make a difficult choice between the traditional route of trying to plant reasonable doubt in the jurors’ minds and the more unusual route of finding a theme that could turn the case into a trial about something other than the crime charged. Most of the media pundits had assumed long before she rose in court to deliver her opening statement that Maria would choose that second option. After all, the evidence against Angela had seemed overwhelming, with or without the trace of Rohypnol in her blood. But in predicting the second option, the media assumed that the theme would be race. They assumed that Maria would play the “race” card, focusing on the black-white angle. A “reverse O.J.,” as Geraldo labeled it—scorned jealous black woman kills the white man she’s about to lose to a white woman.