Better Off Dead (3 page)

What had been forgotten in the ensuing
months-long media debate was that Helen Mclnnes had been undeniably
raped by someone. She had disappeared from sight, ceased to give
statements, and was never in court when her lawyer appeared to
answer preliminary motions pertaining to the civil trail.

No one had missed her. Including me. Until I
sat down across from her and stared at the welt around her
throat.

"A lot of people think you got a raw deal,"
I told her, remembering the flamboyant lawyer that David Brookhouse
had brought in from Atlanta to defend him against the rape charges.
The whole experience had turned into the proverbial media circus,
and as much as I hated to admit it, the down-home trial judge had
not been prepared for the maneuverings of a media-savvy defense
attorney. A lot of things had gone wrong at Helen Mclnnes's trial,
most of them unnoticed until David Brookhouse walked out a free
man, outraged at having had his reputation smeared. The district
attorney had chosen not to appeal: she had been slaughtered by a
worthier opponent and was anxious to put the experience behind her,
before the defeat infected all of her pending acquaintance rape
cases.

The prosecutor was probably not the only
person anxious to put the experience behind her. Only now it
appeared, from the threatening letters and phone calls, that
someone was not willing to let Helen Mclnnes forgive and
forget.

"I remember a lot about that trial," I told
her, when she did not respond. "A lot of women around here do. At
first he claimed you had staged the whole thing, didn't he?"

She nodded, then spoke so softly I could
hardly hear her words. "Until someone pointed out how unlikely it
was I'd been able to duct tape my eyes and mouth and then tie my
own hands tightly behind my back. Not to mention how lucky I was
someone walked past to save me." She stared down at the table top,
as if it were the surface of a pond and held some mystery beneath
its surface.

"Then he conceded you had been raped," I
said, "Right? But claimed it had not been him. He said you were
angry because you'd had an affair and he had dumped you and that's
why you were blaming him."

She nodded. "That's right." I could barely
hear her words. "I had to testify. I didn't want to." She looked
around the room. "Already I was having trouble going to new places.
Appearing in public. But there was no DNA. I had no choice."

I remembered that, too: the lack of DNA had
hurt the prosecutor's case severely. With DNA-typing relatively
new, it was still perceived as a magic bullet in the mind of
juries. The fact that a rapist might wear a condom—and that pond
water might wash away external evidence—did not occur to the twelve
good people who were accustomed to one-hour episodes of intrigue
that ended with the discovery of a crucial dab of DNA.

No one seriously disputed that Helen Mclnnes
had been raped—two broken ribs, severe contusions, the damage done
to her throat plus internal injuries that required reconstructive
surgery tended to put a damper on those doubts. But enough people
disagreed that David Brookhouse had done it to her to send him
packing, a free man now free to sue.

"It was the cross-examination that did it,"
I remembered.

She nodded. Her voice fell to a whisper. "I
told the prosecutor what would happen, that we'd had an affair. But
she said that I was being ridiculous, that courts weren't like that
anymore, that this was a new decade and women were protected from
becoming the accused."

"Except women with the bad luck to have
slept with their rapists before the rape," I said. "I guess she
forgot that part."

I live and work in a really modern, yet
still unspoiled, region of the South. And, like the song says, I
love calling North Carolina home. But a recent study by an
independent agency had found that close to seventy percent of all
sexual assault cases in N.C. result in acquittal. I don't know what
was going on in the minds of jurors around these here parts, but
something was rotten in this particular stretch of the Bible
Belt—and Helen Mclnnes had paid for it.

Helen was struggling to finish her story.
She wanted to get it over with. "I wasn't going to lie. We'd had an
affair. But I had been the one to end it, not him. And I had ended
it months before the attack. He seemed fine with it. That's why I
was so... shocked when I recognized his voice during the attack and
realized it was him."

"Is that why your marriage broke up?" I
asked. "Because of the affair?"

She nodded. "I had to tell my husband in
advance what was going to happen if I got on the stand. So I warned
him the day before. He didn't know about the affair until then."
For the first time she looked me in the eye. "He went out later
that night to buy a pack of cigarettes and I haven't seen him
since."

And people wonder why I've never
remarried.

"That Atlanta lawyer got pretty rough with
you during the cross-examination," I said, remembering what a
Durham detective had told me: "shredded her," was how he put it.
"Annihilated her, destroyed her, made her sound like a vindictive
slut. Let's hope this shyster lawyer goes back to Atlanta soon." My
detective friend, like quite a few people on the force, was
inclined to believe that David Brookhouse had been guilty.

"How long was the affair with Brookhouse?" I
asked, curious to know what she had paid so heavy a price for.

"It only lasted a few months. But it was
long enough for me to..." She hesitated. "... to know that he was
the one who attacked me."

"What do you mean?"

She looked away. "It sounds crazy now, but I
was positive at the time."

"He did something while he was raping you
that made you think it was him? Something besides his voice?"

She nodded. "It was the way he... moved me
around." She flushed a deep red, still ashamed. "The way he would
roughly turn me over. He had... done that to me before." She
exhaled. "It was one reason I broke it off with him. He wanted to
try a lot of stuff I just wasn't into. That... and my husband. My
husband at the time."

"Did the rapist speak much?" I asked.

She nodded. "Yes. To call me... names.
Horrible things. I don't really want to repeat what he said."

"Fair enough. I don't really want to hear
them. But you did recognize his voice?"

She nodded. "He was trying to disguise it,
but I could tell it was him. And when he laughed, I knew it was
him. He has this sort of high-pitched laugh." She gnawed at her
lip. "It's hideous, really. The first time I heard it was when we
went to the movies and he laughed at this scene where a dog jumps
out the window. It was funny, but the way he laughed was horrible.
People turned to stare. It was so... cruel. And strange. It sounds
silly now. It's not silly, though. It's an awful sound. And the man
who raped me made the same sound."

"And you said all this in court?"

She nodded, "It didn't do any good. His
lawyer made me sound insane on cross-examination, like I was
hearing things all the time, like the rape had destroyed my mind."
She ran a hand through her hair. "Maybe it has."

I stared out the window at the beautifully
landscaped yard. "How long since you've been outside the
house?"

"Thirteen months and three days," she
answered promptly.

"And you've tried?"

She nodded. "When I go out onto the porch, I
can't breathe. It's not imaginary. It's real. I could barely get
back into the house last time I tried."

"When was that?"

"Monday morning." She stared at her
trembling hands. "I try every Monday morning. Hoping, I guess, that
the feeling has gone away."

I was impressed. She had courage. To have
withstood the trial and, now, to face her demons every week like
that, not to give up on trying to beat them—it took guts. I wanted
to help her. Maybe all she needed was a little help.

"What did your cleaning lady mean when she
talked about terrible phone calls and letters?"

She winced.

"You didn't save them?"

"No, I have them. I even kept some of the
phone messages on tape. It's just that... I can't."

"You don't have to look at the letters or
listen to the tapes," I told her. "But let me take a look. I want
to know if you're in any real danger."

Without a word she rose and led me into the
living room. It was furnished with a floral-patterned couch and
matching armchairs. A thick area rug and large pillows scattered
around the hearth added to the welcoming air. Yet the whole room
looked brand-new, as if no one ever sat in it.

There was a desk in one corner of the room.
Helen unlocked a side drawer filled with stuffed white envelopes,
the cheap kind sold in every 7-Eleven from here to Alaska. The
postmarks were all local and ranged in date from just after the
rape trial had ended to a few days ago. An old cigar box in the
bottom of the drawer held a collection of microcassettes as well as
a small tape recorder. I sat down and began to go through the
letters, opening up each one and reading the contents.

They looked so innocuous. No cut-out letters
pasted together. No torn magazine photos or psychopathic scrawls.
No weird symbols or satanic drawings. Each letter consisted of
nothing more than one simple paragraph, computer-printed in the
center of the page, using a universal typeface.

The first letter read: “Nothing will ever
erase the fact that you liked it. I felt you responding beneath me.
I could feel your excitement. I am counting the days until we can
do it again.”

The second one read: “I saw you today on
Ninth Street buying a book. I never knew you liked art history.
Your hair was up and you wore a white sweater buttoned to the neck.
Why are you hiding your scar? That scar is a symbol of our
love.”

The next one was worse: “Your days of hoping
are over. Soon I will visit you again. Maybe at your home this
time. I followed you there. Apple trees are lovely, aren't they? I
would like to take you beneath the apple tree, maybe tie you to the
trunk first for old time's sake. Prop you up the way you like it.
Give you what you want once again. Before I take what is mine.”

The rest of the letters grew progressively
more threatening. He was watching her, that much was clear. No
wonder she never left her house.

"Helen," I called out into the quiet. No one
answered.

I found her perched on a counter in the
kitchen, a cup of coffee in hand. She was staring out the window,
watching two squirrels chase each other up the trunk of a beech
tree.

"Helen?" I said again. She turned to me.
"Did you tell the police about these letters?" Her eyes flickered.
"Why would I?" she asked. I couldn't blame her. It hadn't done much
good the last time she went to the cops.

I returned to the living room and listened
to a few of the tapes. They were worse than the letters. The voice
was muffled, sometimes altered with a whisper or phony accent,
even, at times, disguised by an electronic device. He kept the
messages short but sweet: "That pink nightgown looks delicious on
you." "Would you like wrist scars to match your neck?" "Thinking of
you. And the rock." Oh, yes—the rock. The rock where she had been
repeatedly raped.

I'd heard and read enough. Whoever was
sending these threats knew Helen and knew what would frighten her.
He was fucking with her head big time—and that's what made me think
it was David Brookhouse. I would need help protecting her.

"Where's the telephone?" I asked Helen when
I found her in a small interior room, staring at a painting of
spring flowers.

"By the door," she whispered.

"Which door?" I asked, then stopped as I
spotted a wall telephone mounted near the door that led to the
hallway. An odd place to have a phone, I thought.

I walked into the next room for privacy and
saw another telephone, this one also mounted near the hall door. I
continued on my search, the realization hitting me. She had a
telephone in the kitchen, the drawing room, near the front door and
in both downstairs bedrooms. There was even a telephone mounted in
the bathroom, next to the toilet.

That struck me as saddest of all.

So many telephones for a woman unable to ask
for help. Yet it was her only stand against evil, her only attempt
to protect herself. Unable to bring herself to do anything else,
she had invited the outside in for one day to install useless
telephones everywhere. Just in case of what? I wondered who she was
planning to call to save her if she no longer trusted the
police.

I used the phone in the bathroom to call
Bobby D.

"What's shaking?" I asked him.

"Nothing's shaking," he answered sourly.
"We're all too busy swimming." I heard a sloshing in the
background.

"What was that?" I asked.

"My leg. The office is going under. I feel
like I'm on the fucking Titanic."

"Still can't find Rosy?" I said, asking
after the landlord.

"We're never gonna find that dame again.
It's women and children first." He stopped to take a bite of
something, I knew, as food was never far from Bobby's reach.
"What's up?" he asked, mouth full.

"Clear the decks," I told him. "I need
you."

"Oh, baby. Your place or mine?" He said this
halfheartedly, his auto-pilot lascivious instincts kicking in. In
truth, Bobby was too scared to ever really proposition me. He liked
his women older—and a lot more grateful than I was likely to
be.

"Neither. I'll let you know where to meet me
later today."

I hung up and went to find the woman who,
whether she liked it or not, was my newest client. "Helen?" I
called out loudly. She was still in front of the painting. "Why
don't you call the police now? Before something happens? What will
all these telephones do for you if he..." I hesitated. "... if he
gets inside?"