Laura Lippman: The Last Place

It was all she could do not to mouth the word rapist at him.

Tyner tugged on her braid, reminding her to stand for the judge.

“All rise.”

Judge Dennis Halsey was young for a judge and just missed being handsome. He had all his hair-why was she noticing men’s hair more and more?-but there was a squareness about the head and body suggestive of a robot or Frankenstein’s monster. Still, he was an up-and-comer, well respected. Short of a disastrous misstep, he would continue to rise ever higher in the state’s judicial system, perhaps one day wearing the red robes of Maryland’s highest court.

“Baltimore County circuit court is now in session.”

And Halsey’s career to date had been anything but disastrous. He had presided over the very date-rape trial that had provided Tess with her knowledge of roofies. The case had dozens of hot buttons-the defendant was white and upper class, his victims black, and everyone involved had blown blood alcohol levels well past the state’s new legal standard of.08. Truth be told, they had blown past the old one of.10 as well.

Yet Judge Halsey had kept the defense attorney in check, protecting the victims as much as possible, never letting it be forgotten who was on trial. Three juries had returned with three verdicts of rape in the first degree, and Halsey had sentenced the predatory premed to the harshest penalty possible.

So it should have been Tess’s lucky day when her case ended up in his courtroom. Instead, it was just another fiasco, like everything else that had happened since that early spring night.

The first bit of bad luck was Mickey’s allergic reaction to the chemicals in Nair.

“Oh, yeah,” Tess had told Tyner, when Baltimore County police finally allowed him to see her. “You’re supposed to do a scratch test with that stuff.”

“A scratch test?”

“In the bend of your elbow. But no one ever does. Jesus, he broke out? What a wimp.”

“He suffered burns, Tess. He had to be hospitalized.”

And that was only the beginning of her mistakes. The second one had been showing Mickey Pechter her license. The police were at her door before noon the next day, with a search warrant for her weapon, described as “a chemical defoliant in a pressurized can and/or spray bottle.”

They didn’t find it, of course, but they did find the bottle of roofies. That would be mistake number three, keeping the roofies, which Pechter claimed were hers. After all, the drugs were in his system. Tyner had gotten the evidence excluded, pointing out that it was not reasonable to believe that a can of Nair would be in a woman’s jacket pocket. Still, the roofies convinced the prosecutor, a sanctimonious preppie, that Mickey Pechter was a victim. The state’s attorney and the detectives thought the drugs established her intent, that the assault had been planned in advance. No, really, she kept telling them, I just wanted to find out his name. So I could do something really classy like- um-blackmail him!

In Baltimore City, its courtrooms clogged with homicides and all the collateral damage of the nation’s failed war on drugs, Tess’s misadventure in vengeance would have been treated like the ill-conceived prank it was. But here the prosecutor was happy to take her on. Tess was charged with felony assault, and the prosecutor wanted to pile a rape charge on her as well, but the evidence wouldn’t support it. Fortunately, the case stayed below the media’s radar, but only because all the men involved felt sorry for Mickey Pechter.

However, Judge Halsey was fascinated. “I am interested in the violence that flows between men and women,” he had told Tyner and Tess at their first plea-bargain meeting. “It is a two-way street, despite what most people think. Physiologically, women are more likely to be victims, yes. But if they are strong enough-if they are, if you will, emancipated-will they turn on men, use violence as men have used it? Was your client really acting out of the need to protect teenage girls from an on-line stalker, or was something deeper provoked? There is so much anger, so much hostility, between men and women. I see it in my courtroom every day, and I find it unfathomable. The war between the sexes is far from over.”

Tess would have been happy to tell him why she did what she did. But she had been slightly hamstrung by her impromptu decision, when the county cops first crossed her threshold, to say she acted alone. Not even Tyner knew Whitney had been present. Her muddled reasoning was that she was protecting Mercy, whose name she had never revealed, so she needed to protect Whitney as well. As a result, Judge Halsey looked down from the bench and saw some Super-woman, capable of drugging a man, dragging him through a parking lot, and then depilating his body and skull.

Yet Halsey wasn’t so caught up in the sociological implications of the case that he couldn’t notice inconsistencies in the evidence.

“The police find it odd that Mickey Pechter had so few abrasions,” he had said at one point, when he and Tyner had discussed the terms of her PBJ in the judge’s chambers.

“Abrasions?” Tess had echoed.

“Clearly, you had to drag him. But it seems more likely that you would have dragged him by his legs, not under his arms. Yet his shins are scraped as if someone had him by the armpits.”

“What does Mr. Pechter say?”

“He says he doesn’t remember anything.”

“Hmmmm,” Tess had murmured, but volunteered nothing more. Most liars are too emphatic, too definite. They talk too much. She knew this about liars because she had met more than her share. She knew this about liars because she was a good one when she needed to be.

In the end, her incomplete version had triumphed, more or less, because Mickey Pechter was such an unappetizing victim. He had crashed his computer’s hard drive, thinking it would destroy the evidence. But Tyner had paid Tess’s friend Dorie Starnes dearly to recover every incriminating message, every keystroke: the instructions on how to get a fake ID, the gentle pressure to come by public transportation so he might drive her home. Only the roofies and his intent were left to he-said/she-said uncertainty. Suddenly, everyone-the cops, the prosecutor, Mickey Pechter himself-just wanted the case off the docket.

Everyone except Judge Halsey. “Vigilantism must not be condoned in a civilized society,” he had told Tyner, when the lawyer petitioned the judge to drop the charges. “Whatever his intent, whatever your client’s intent, the fact is she hurt him, and there must be an acknowledgment of this. A fine and some sort of community service, I think.”

Tyner, who had convinced Tess they should avoid a trial at all costs, agreed. “As long as it’s PBJ and her record is expunged in six months, I don’t have a problem with that.”

Six months, Tess thought, sitting in the courtroom. It was April 22 now, and the courthouse grounds were riotous with daffodils and tulips. The air was soft, and the breeze carried the wonderful greenish smell of fresh-mown lawns and just-spread mulch. In six months, the flower beds would be barren. It would be cool again, the days growing shorter, the rowing season drawing to an end. It seemed like a long time in some ways, but it was really the blink of an eye. Six months and all this would vanish, as if it never happened.

Her case was being called. Time for blind justice to hoist her scales.

Halsey placed his hands over the microphone in front of him. “The victim wants to enter an impact statement into the court record.”

“But there’s not going to be a record,” Tyner said.

“Not once she fulfills the terms of her probation,” the judge agreed. “But what’s the harm in letting Mr. Pechter read his statement?”