Archer Mayor - Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

I woke with a start, muscles tense, my eyes darting around the darkened, familiar room. There was no sound, nothing amiss, no obvious cause for alarm. I was alone, in bed, in my apartment-as usual.

I pushed back the covers and swung my feet to the floor, wincing slightly as the cold hit my body. It was early fall, not even foliage season, but the nights were already yielding to occasional temperature drops, warning shots from an approaching winter.

I pulled on my pants and a flannel shirt and went into the living room, awash in the colorless half-light from the street lamps below. It was a large room, book-lined, indifferently decorated, with a few pieces of comfortable furniture that would have been Salvation Army-bound a long time ago in a conventional home, but which my bachelor’s habits had retained for decades, icons to their owner’s flair for fashion.

I settled into a patched leather armchair by the dimly glowing bow window, wondering what had woken me up. It hadn’t been a dream; my pager hadn’t gone off, nor the phone. I cupped my chin in my hand and stared down at the vacant street.

Whatever it was, it had blown me out of my sleep like a grenade.

The twin beams from a pair of approaching headlights slid along the sides of the empty cars lining the street. I instinctively checked my watch-4:10 in the morning. The car slowed before my building and stopped, not bothering to park.

Tony Brandt-the police chief, my boss, and my best friend in the department-got out, glanced up at my dark windows, and crossed over toward the front door three flights below.

The same sense of alarm that had startled me awake rekindled with a jolt-more insidious, more real, and more frightening. Tony Brandt did not make predawn house calls.

I got up, tucking my shirt in, and returned to my bedroom for some socks and shoes, moving quickly, stimulated now by the sure knowledge that bad news, of a personal nature, was making its way up the staircase.

I met Tony on the landing, already buttoning my jacket. “What?”

He stopped on the stairs, his hand heavy on the railing. His eyes were sorrowful and his face drawn. Before he spoke, the dread inside me spilled over and caught fire. “It’s Gail. She’s been raped.”

I sat in his car, not focusing on the passing blur outside, my brain in a turmoil as we drove through the silent, empty town. “I was just with her a few hours ago.”

I paused, unable to think clearly, and repeated the same question I’d asked him right off, feeling like I was acting in a play I’d been a spectator to a dozen times before. “How is she?” The nagging sense that this time I was the one under the lights, my performance being scrutinized, added to my anxiety.

Tony had told me she was okay. He went into a little more detail now. “She was knocked around some, but nothing’s broken, at least on the outside.”

“Did we get who did it?”

He shook his head. “She was at home. She never got a look at him. I haven’t talked to her yet. Ron’s on call this week-the hospital phoned Dispatch, Dispatch phoned him. He got hold of me when he found out who it was.”

I rubbed my forehead and tried to appear calm, knowing he was debating how best to handle me. He was already looking at this as an investigation, and wondering if he should let me be a part of it. I had worked with rape victims and their friends and families before; I knew the toll it took on them. I could see his dilemma, and how imperative it was for me to win his confidence. I didn’t want to be excluded from the one case where I would bring both my heart and mind most forcefully to bear.

“You were at her house?” he murmured, cutting into my thoughts and harking back to the comment I’d made earlier.

“She fixed dinner.” And later we’d made love-quietly, tenderly-as two people who’d known each other intimately for many years. “She had a lot to do in the morning. I left so she’d get a good night’s sleep.” As I often had before.

He glanced over at me, but I left it at that. No predictably emotional self-recriminations for not having been at the right place at the right time. Not out loud; not under scrutiny.

We pulled into the hospital’s parking lot and walked up the ramp leading to the emergency room. Countless times, I’d come here to gather preliminary statements from victims of domestic violence, or assault, or vehicular mayhem, or rape. But never before feeling like this. To me, rape is murder without a corpse-it kills a piece of the spirit, leaving the victim alive to haunt us all with the violence of the crime. But while always sympathetic in the past, I’d never before had such a vested interest in the survival of that spirit.

Ron Klesczewski met us outside the nurses’ station. Rarely the most self-assured of men, he was among the most conscientious, and the expression on his face spoke clearly of his distress. “I’m real sorry, Joe.”

I nodded. “Thanks. Where is she?”

He pointed vaguely down the hallway. “They’re doing the rape kit on her now-room 4. Shouldn’t be too much longer.”

I started down the corridor. The tension in Ron’s voice climbed a notch. “You going in there?”

I hesitated. Had I been the one in need of a friendly face, Gail’s would’ve been the first I’d have wanted to see.

But our roles weren’t reversed, and I realized with the chill of experience that in all probability, and despite the duration and intensity of our friendship, she would yearn for comfort from those of her own sex.

Standing there, my hand almost on the doorknob, I felt swelling up inside me the same combination of anger, sorrow, and frustration that I’d suppressed in Tony’s car. But again I was stuck, my colleagues discreetly watching me from a distance. For the second time since learning of the assault, I struggled to reverse my own emotional tide.

A gray-haired nurse opened the door to room 4 barely wide enough to slip out. I caught her eye as she was about to pass me with what looked like a urine sample in her hand.

“Will you be going back in there soon?”

She answered cautiously, a hint of suspicion in her voice. “Yes.”

“I’m Joe Gunther. Gail Zigman is a friend of mine. Would you tell her I’m here, that if she wants me, I’m available?”

Her face cleared and she smiled at me. “Sure.”

I returned to where Ron was filling Tony in on the details. Brandt held his hand up as I approached, interrupting him. “Better start from the top, so Joe can hear it all.”

Ron nodded, but I could sense his uneasiness. Rape was something we usually discussed in self-consciously clinical terms, occasionally lapsing into morbid humor to hide our own discomfort. Now, none of that applied. My relationship with Gail was no secret, and she’d been accepted as one of the department’s extended family.

Ron’s voice was conspicuously flat. “It happened two hours ago, about 2:13, according to her clock radio. She caught sight of the time just before he put a pillowcase over her head.”

I knew that radio well. At 11:16 last night, I’d been prompted by its oversized green numbers to leave Gail’s warm side, put my clothes back on, and go home. She’d laced her arms around my neck as I’d leaned down to kiss her goodnight, and I’d taken advantage of the gesture to give her breast a last caress.

“What was the very first thing she remembers about the attack?” I asked.

“That’s almost it. He must’ve been real quiet, or she was sleeping like a log, ’cause the first thing she knew, he was on top of her, pulling the pillowcase off the pillow to bag her. Her arms were already tied down.”