Linda Fairstein: Likely To Die

Laura had also arrived shortly after ten and was given the same assignment for her computer files. They didn’t go as far back as our screening sheets but would be a faster check than the tedious exploration of those handwritten documents that Sarah and I had collected since we took over the unit-the most thorough record of sexual deviancy compiled anywhere in the world.

“Anything else I can help with this morning?” Sarah asked.

“No, thanks. I’ve got Margie Burrows coming down any minute. I’m going to reinterview one of her witnesses. She missed a few of the essential points first time around.”

Nothing unusual about that. Burrows had asked to be appointed to our unit and we had given her a couple of cases to work on, under our supervision, to check her skills. She had the requisite compassion and manner for working with rape victims-a trait some prosecutors come up short on-but hadn’t yet developed the critical eye to probe for inconsistencies. It was a delicate balance that some questioners like Sarah Brenner seemed to be born with and others would never be able to learn.

Sarah left as Margie announced herself to Laura. I invited her in and pulled up a third seat for the complaining witness, Clarita Salerios.

I had reviewed Margie’s notes, and knew that Salerios was a forty-seven-year-old woman who worked as a clerk in the shipping office of a large company. She was divorced, with grown children who lived in the Dominican Republic. Recently she had become severely depressed because of the death of her ex-husband, with whom she had tried to reconcile. One of her girlfriends had referred her to asantero -sixty-six-year-old Angel Cassano, who had been arrested for attempting to rape her several weeks earlier.

I introduced myself to Clarita and explained that although Margie had already interviewed her at length, there were some facts that remained unclear to me. Like, why asantero?

“Is no problem, Miss Alex. I tell you whatever you wanna know. I guess you call him a witch doctor.”

It would certainly hold my attention for a few hours and keep my mind from wandering back to Gemma Dogen. Of the thousands of matters I had worked on in the last ten years, none had involved a witch doctor.

Clarita explained that she had gone to the defendant several months ago to help her through her ex’s death. Angel-such an appropriate name for the job description-began by taking her to the cemetery where Señor Salerios was buried, in Queens, and performing some rituals there. Because he was partially blind, Clarita accepted Angel’s request to help escort him back to his apartment in the barrio. On the fourth or fifth trip, he invited her upstairs for an additional ritual.

By mid-February, Clarita and Angel skipped the cemetery visit and she went directly to his apartment. The ritual changed a bit. Angel suggested that the trusting woman take off all her clothes and lie on a blanket he placed on the floor in his room.

“Did you think that was strange, Clarita?”

“No problem, Miss Alex. Is mostly blind, the old guy.”

I nodded my understanding, remembering how many times I had urged cops and colleagues not to be judgmental of rape victims.

He put her in some kind of trance, she explained, and while she was meditating, he kneeled beside her and began to touch her.

“Where, exactly, did he do that, Clarita?”

“In my bagina.”

“I see. Go on.”

After a little while, she asked Angel to stop and he did.

“Wasn’t it unusual for asantero to do that?”

“I ask him why he do it. He tell me the spirits told him to do it to me.”

“Did you believe that, Clarita?”

She laughed. “Not no spirit of Nestor Salerios, I tell you that myself. I know that for sure. He used to beat me if another guy even looked at me, Miss Alex. He’s a jealous man, even if he dead now.”

I glanced down at the arrest report in the case, which the police officer had prepared when Cassano was apprehended. It noted that he had a strong odor of alcohol on his breath.

“Tell me, Clarita, what was Angel drinking that day, at the apartment?” Margie had made no mention of that fact, but that was probably because Clarita had neglected to bring it up.

“Let me think,” she said, looking up at the ceiling as though trying to decide what to tell me. “Rum. I pretty sure it was rum.”

“And did he make you drink it, too?”

“Yeah, he did. He tell me the spirits like it. But I just sip it a little bit. No much.”

Love Potion Number Nine. The only thing missing was the gypsy with the gold-capped tooth, but she’d probably be in it by Clarita’s next visit.

Clarita paid him for the session-I bit my tongue and didn’t ask if she tipped him for the extra ritual he’d thrown in at the end-and left.

The more surprising part of the story is that she called him again to go back two days later. Yes, she admitted, it had crossed her mind that perhaps what he wanted most was some kind of sexual relationship with her and perhaps he wasn’t such a holy man as she had thought. That’s the point in many of these stories at which I am reminded of those children’s puzzles that present a drawing of a neatly ordered room in which one object is inverted or out of place and the caption underneath reads, “What’s wrong with this picture?” In this instance, Clarita had already been sexually abused by Cassano, knew that what he had done was improper and inappropriate, and had been fortunate enough to extricate herself from his advances and walk away a few dollars poorer but without further molestation. Go back for more? Her loneliness, confusion, and vulnerability screamed out at me as they must have also signaled themselves to the blindsantero.

On her next visit, after some rum and a few invocations of the spirit, Clarita again fell into a trance, undressed, and lay on the floor. This time the spell was broken when Angel got on top of her body and tried to penetrate her vagina with his penis.

“I’ve got to stop you here and go back over a few things,” I interrupted. Things that aren’t in Margie’s notes.

“This ‘trance’ you describe, were you conscious? Were you awake and aware of what was going on?” I needed to make sure she had not passed out or been drugged or intoxicated.

“Oh, sure, Miss Alex. This time I keep all my eyes opened.”

“And this time, Clarita, did Angel begin by touching you with his fingers?”

“No, ma’am. I’m no stupid. I woulda got up and slapped him, he did that.”

“So the first thing that happened, he just laid himself down on top of you, to have sex?”

Again, Clarita sought the answer in the ceiling of my office. She looked back at me as she spoke. “Is right.”

Angel either had to have removed his pants, lowered them, or opened his zipper and exposed his penis before actually mounting her-but any of those actions would have given his target the time to save herself from his approach.

“Can you tell me exactly when it was that he took off his pants in order to have sex with you?”

“You’re right, Miss Alex,” Clarita said, pointing a finger in my general direction with a look of consternation on her face. “That’s a berry, berry important question, I think. When did the man take off his pants? I have to think about that some more before I could tell you.”

“We’ll come back to that. It’s okay. I know this is the part that’s hardest for you.” I eased her through the end of the story, where the defendant’s actions finally escalated from merely taking advantage of Clarita to criminal conduct. Once she decided she was not ready to receive the spirits, she pushed Cassano off her body and got to her feet. But when she ran for the door, still naked, the blind witch doctor followed with a machete that he picked up from the kitchen counter. With that, he forced her back into the room and demanded that she give him oral sex. She was only able to escape when she offered to go to the nearby liquor store to buy another bottle of rum and instead called 911 to summon the police.