Lucky (20 page)

"The reason why it took so long, Alice, is because Madison had his friend come down and stand next to him. We had to send a car to the prison to get him here. They wouldn't go ahead until he showed."

"I don't understand," I said. "He's allowed to have his friend stand next to him?"

"It's the defendant's right," she said. "And it makes good sense on a certain level. If the others in the lineup don't appear to the suspect to look enough like him, he can choose someone to stand beside him."

"Can we say that?" I was beginning to see a window of explanation here. I might still have a chance.

"No," she said, "it goes against the defendant's rights. They really worked a number on you. He uses that friend, or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do. They're dead ringers."

I listened to everything she said. Uebelhoer had seen it all, but still was passionate enough to get mad.

"So the eyes?"

"His friend gives you a look that's scary. He can tell when you're standing in front of the mirror and he psyches you out. Meanwhile, the suspect looks down like he doesn't even know where or why he's there. Like he got lost on the way to the circus."

"And we can't use that in court?"

"No. I stated a formal objection before the lineup, so it would be included in the record, but that's just a formality. It's not admissible unless he lets prior knowledge slip."

The unfairness of this seemed unconscionable to me.

"Rights are weighted on the side of the defendant," Gail said. I hungered for more facts.

In those moments, where I could easily have slipped away, facts were my life. "That's why the law uses words like 'reasonable doubt.' It's his attorney's job to provide that doubt. The lineup was a risk. We knew something like this could happen, but there was no photo in the mug books and he waived the prelim. We had no choice. We can't refuse a lineup."

"What about the hair?"

"If we're lucky, it will match all seventeen points available on a hair. But even hairs taken from the same head can vary on these points. Paquette decided the gamble was worth it.

He's probably going with the story that you lost your virginity voluntarily that night and were sorry about it, that eventually you would have blamed any black man that ran into you on the street. He'll do his best to make you look bad. But we're not going to let that happen."

"What's next?"

"The grand jury," she said.

I was miserable. At two, the next big leg of this journey would begin and I had to be ready for it. I'm sure I spent that time trying to clear my mind of my failure that morning, trying not to let the picture of me that Madison's attorney was building invade my mind. I did not call my mother. I had no good news, though I did have Uebelhoer. I focused on the fact that she had been present for the pubic extraction.

At two I was brought into a waiting area outside the grand jury room. Gail was inside.

We had not had time, as she had wished, to talk beforehand. She had been busy working on questions through lunch and although I was scheduled for two, there were other witnesses appearing before me. Tricia, with my assurances, had left following the lineup.

While I waited, I tried to think about an Italian test I had to take the next day. I got out a worksheet of sample sentences from my knapsack and stared at them. I had made some small talk about this course to the officer who'd picked me up that morning. I wished I'd had Tes s with me. I had a deep fear of alienating her and Toby by being a drain on them because of the rape, so I tried to be as assiduous in their classrooms as I was with anything concerning my case.

There was movement in the hallway. Gail was coming toward me. Quickly, she told me that she was going to ask me questions about the events of that night, that she would then lead up to my ability to identify the rapist and my identification of Officer Clapper at the same time. She wanted me to state clearly that I hadn't been sure between four and five and to say why. She told me to take as much time as I needed on each answer and not to feel hurried. "This will be easier than the preliminary hearing, Alice, just stay with me. I may seem colder to you in there than I am right now but, remember, we're in there to win an indictment and to a certain extent—well, the grand jury is made up of twenty-five civilians, and we're onstage."

She left me. A few minutes later I was led into the room. Again, I was unprepared for the room's effect on me. The witness stand was at the bottom of the room. Leading up and out from the stand were terraced levels on which swiveling orange chairs were permanently affixed. The levels spread out in a circular arc and grew larger as they ascended. There were enough seats for the twenty-five members of the jury and for the alternates who sat through all the cases but might never cast a vote.

The result of the room's design was that all eyes bore down on whoever was seated in the witness stand. There was no defense table or prosecutor's table.

Gail did as she had said she would. She used a courtroom manner. She made a lot of eye contact with the jurors, used hand gestures, and spent time enunciating key words or phrases she wanted them to note and remember. Her pattern of questioning also was meant to calm both me and the jurors. She had told me rape cases were hard for them. I saw proof of this soon enough.

When she asked me where he had touched me, and, in my answer, I had to say that he had put his fist in my vagina, many of the jurors looked down or immediately away from me. But the fact that troubled them most was what came next. Uebelhoer questioned me about bleeding: how much blood, why so much? She asked me if I had been a virgin. I said, "Yes."

They winced. They felt pity. Throughout the remaining questions some of the jurors, and not all of them women, fought back tears. I was aware my loss that night was my gain today. Having been a virgin made me look good, made the crime appear worse.

I did not want their pity. I wanted to win. But their reactions pushed me to think about what I was saying, not just tally it up as a pro or con in terms of the chances for a conviction. The tears of one particular man, in the second row, felled me. I cried a little then. The reality was that this, too, made me look good.

The sketch I drew the night of October 5 was entered into evidence and marked for identification. Uebelhoer asked pointed questions about whether I had been assisted in the sketch, whether the handwriting was mine, whether anyone had influenced it.

She moved on to the lineup. Now the questioning was more heated. Like a surgeon with a probe, she brought forth each nuance of the five minutes I'd spent inside that room.

Finally she asked me if I was certain I had identified the right man.

I answered: No.

Then she asked me why I had chosen number five. I explained in detail his height and his build. I talked about the eyes.

Eventually it came time for the jurors to ask their questions: Juror: "When you saw the police officer up on Marshall Street, why didn't you go to him then?"

Juror: "You picked him out of the lineup; are you absolutely sure that this was the one?"

Juror: "Alice, why were you coming through the park alone at night; do you usually go through by yourself?"

Juror: "Didn't anybody warn you not to go through the park at night?"

Juror: "Didn't you know that you are not supposed to go through the park after nine-thirty at night? Didn't you know that?"

Juror: "Could you have definitely eliminated number four? Did he ever look at you?"

I answered all of these questions patiently. The questions concerning the lineup I answered directly and truthfully. But the questions about what I had been doing in the park, or why I hadn't gone up to Officer Clapper, made me numb. They were not getting it, that's how it felt. But, as Gail had said, we were onstage.

On television and in the movies, the lawyer often says to the victim before they take the stand, "Just tell the truth." What it was left up to me to figure out was that if you do that and nothing else, you lose. So I told them I was stupid, that I shouldn't have walked through the park. I said I intended to do something to warn girls at the university about the park. And I was so good, so willing to accept blame, that I hoped to be judged innocent by them.

That day it all got raw. If Madison stood next to his friend and played a game of eyes to psyche me out, then I would give it right back to him. I was authentic. I had been a virgin. He had broken my hymen in two places. The OB-GYN would testify to the fact. I was also a good girl, and I knew how to dress and what to say to accentuate that. That night following the grand jury testimony, I called Madison a "motherfucker" in the privacy of my dorm room while I pounded my pillow and bed with my fists. I swore the kind of bloodthirsty revenge no one thought possible coming from a nineteen-year-old coed. While still in court I thanked the jury. I drew on my resources: performing, placating, making my family smile. As I left that courtroom I felt I had put on the best show of my life. It was no longer hand to hand and I had a chance this time.

I went out to sit in the waiting area. Detective Lorenz was there. He wore a black patch over one of his eyes.

"What happened?" I asked. I was horrified.

"We chased a perp and he ran. Hit me in the eye with a mace. How'd you do in there?"

"Okay, I guess."

"Listen," he said. He began to fumble out an apology. He said he was sorry if he hadn't seemed very nice back in May. "You get a lot of rape cases," he said. "Most of them never get this far. I'm pulling for you."

I assured him that he had always been wonderful to me, that the police had all been wonderful. I meant every word of it.

Fifteen years later, when doing research for this book, I would find sentences he had written in the original paperwork.

May 8, 1981: "It is this writer's opinion, after interview of the victim, that this case, as presented by the victim, is not completely factual."

After interviewing Ken Childs later that same day he wrote: "Childs describes their relationship as 'casual.' It is still this writer's opinion that there were extenuating circumstances to this incident, as reported by victim, and [it] is suggested that this case be referred to the inactive file."

But after meeting with Uebelhoer on October 13, 1981: "It should be noted that when this writer first interviewed the victim at approx. 0800 on May 8th 1981, she appeared to be disoriented about the facts of the incident and disconcerted as she kept dozing off. This writer now realizes that the victim had been through a tremendous ordeal with no sleep for approximately 24 hours which would account for her behavior at the time … "

For Lorenz, virgins were not a part of his world. He was skeptical of many things I said.

Later, when the serology reports proved that what I had said was not a lie, that I had been a virgin, and that I was telling the truth, he could not respect me enough. I think he felt responsible, somehow. It was, after all, in his world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.

Maria Flores, from Tess's workshop, fell from a window. That was how the
Daily
Orange,
Syracuse's campus paper, reported it. They used her name and said it was an accident.

As the students filed into the English department conference room for workshop, only one or two of us had seen the item in the paper. I hadn't. Apparently, the paper said Flores, though badly injured in the accident, had miraculously survived. She was in the hospital.

Tess was late. When she came in, the room hushed. She sat down at the head of the table and tried to start class. She was clearly upset.

"Did you hear about Maria?" one of the students asked.

Tess hung her head. "Yes," she said. "It's horrible."

"Is she okay?"

"I just spoke to her," she said. "I'm going to see her at the hospital. It's always so difficult.

This poetry business."

We didn't quite understand. What did Maria's accident have to do with poetry?

"It was in the paper," a student volunteered.

Tess looked at him sharply. "They used her name?"

"What is it, Tess?" someone asked.

Our question was answered the following day, when an almost identical article described it as an attempted suicide. The only other difference was that this time the paper left out her name. It didn't take a genius to put two and two together.

Tess had told me it would mean quite a bit to Maria if I went to visit her in the hospital.

"That was a powerful poem you wrote," she added, but didn't say what else she knew.

I went. But before I did, Maria made another unsuccessful attempt. She tried to kill herself by cutting an electrical cord near her bed, unfurling the wires inside, and scoring them over and over against her wrists. She'd done this while partially paralyzed on her left side. But a nurse had walked in on her, and now her arms were strapped to the bed.

She was in Grouse Irving Memorial Hospital. A nurse led me into the room. Standing beside Maria's bed were her father and her brothers. I waved to Maria and then shook the men's hands. I said my name and that I was in her poetry class. None of them was very responsive. I attributed this to shock, and to what might have seemed the strange phenomenon of this woman visiting who appeared to have some connection with her that they, her father and brothers, didn't. They left the room.

"Thank you for coming," she said in a whisper. She wanted to hold my hand.

The two of us didn't really know each other, had just shared Tess's class, and, until recently, I had harbored a bit of resentment toward the fact that she'd walked out on my workshop.

"Can you sit?" she asked.

"Yes."

I did.

"It was your poem," she said now. "It brought it all back."

I sat there as she whispered to me her own facts. The man and the boys who had just left the room had raped her for a period of years when she was growing up.

"At a certain point it stopped," she said. "My brothers grew old enough to know what they were doing was wrong."