Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

And then she pulled away from him and brushed her eyes and said, “Come on, Blazer.”

East Chester was a Quaker town of twelve thousand, its business district lined with eighteenth-century red brick and white clapboard shops. A highschool and open-air theater bordered the southern end of the village. A shantytown with tar-paper roofs lay to the north on the Brandywine. The city’s parking mall ran the length of the commercial area, between City Hall and St. Christopher’s white, steepled church.

A uniformed guard in the lobby of the hall signed Selby into the building. He had called ahead and there was a pass for him. The corridor on the DA’s floor was dark except for a rectangle of light from the open door of her outer office.

Selby heard someone shouting, “You may know about those goddamn lawbooks of yours...” A string of profanity followed, and then the heavy, growling voice rose again. “But you got a lot to learn about team work. You don’t know shit about loyalty...”

As Selby walked into the reception room, Lieutenant Eberle came out of Dorcas Brett’s office, almost colliding with him.

“Watch it, for Christ’s sake.” The detective’s breath was sweet with mints and whiskey. Recognizing Selby, he looked him up and down, a grin touching his lips. “She’s all yours, pal. And you’re welcome to her.”

Selby turned his back on him and went into Brett’s office. She was opening a pack of cigarettes, picking nervously at the foil wrapping. She wore a denim suit with a yellow scarf. Her raincoat was over a chair.

“Captain Slocum called the Detective Division,” she said with an uneasy smile. “He wanted our notes on Earl Thomson, and that touched some macho nerves around here, as you probably just heard.”

“They probably heard it all the way down to the river.” Selby looked at her fumbling hands. “Would you like some help?”

She looked in surprise at the cigarettes. She said, “No, thanks. I’m not supposed to be smoking now anyway.”

Selby said, “I called because I had a talk with Shana. It occurred to me then I could use some help from you.”

When he told her his worries, Brett said, “As far as the psychiatrist is concerned, that’s a defense privilege, guaranteed by statute. On the other point, I agree. Shana’s probably not telling us everything, but I think she’s trying to.”

“I don’t want her hurt anymore, Miss Brett. I can’t save what’s been lost. But I can try to prevent her going through anything else. So I want to be sure you can nail Earl Thomson.”

She picked up the cigarettes, shrugged and dropped them back on her desk. “A conviction is a risky assumption in any trial. But we have three solid props — Shana’s identification of Earl Thomson, and the presence of Thomson’s fingerprints and car at Vinegar Hill. Plus the conclusively damaging fact that he denied he’d ever been there. He lied to Captain Slocum and Eberle about that, and we have the taped interrogations to prove it.”

“But you said a conviction is a risky assumption,” Selby reminded her. “What’s the problem? The fact that Shana phoned him afterward?”

“No, those calls are legally irrelevant. Her identification isn’t based on the sound of his voice. It’s based on his physical appearance.”

Selby said impatiently, “What is bothering you? The psychiatrist?”

“That’s part of it. But a cultural preconception about rape will also be working against us. If Shana had been murdered, or mugged and robbed, as ghastly as that sounds, we’d have fewer problems. But in a rape trial, the plaintiff can be humiliated and emotionally scarred, and I can’t promise I’ll be able to protect Shana from that.

“Allan Davic, for starters, will insist on the psychiatric examination. That’s his right under the judicially sanctioned notion that a young girl who accuses a man of rape may simply be fantasizing a wishful, biological urge. So it’s got to be proved she’s not a sexual hysteric. It’s this thinking that debases rape victims, particularly children. Their young age and ignorance of sexual terminology can be used to impeach their testimony. In rape trials the sexual habits of the victims can be hung out for speculation. If the female is ‘unchaste,’ in the legal term, unclean is the implication, that’s considered relevant. ‘What’s been used can’t be abused’ — as old common law has it. But Earl Thomson’s sexual activities can’t be hinted at, they’re cloaked in privilege. His kinks might influence the jury — the same jury that may be told the victim is unreliable because she had the carelessness, the stupidity or sheer bloody gall to lose her virginity. That’s the sexual bias available to the defense. In most felonies victims are presumed honest unless competent evidence proves they’re not. But in rape cases and reports of child molestation there’s an a priori suspicion of the injured party, which is why rape is probably the single most unreported major crime in the country. In spite of that,” she said, beginning to pace, “a reported rape takes place every ten minutes around the clock in the United States, and forty percent of those attacks are committed against girls like Shana, from ten to fifteen years old. And those figures represent just the literal definition of rape — penile-vaginal assault by force, committed on a female against her will. The stats don’t include oral or anal sodomy and God knows how many gang-rapes. The sad fact, Mr. Selby,” she said, returning to her desk for her cigarettes, “is that sexual aggression against young females is actually considered normal by many highly publicized psychologists and anthropologists, their point being, I guess, that such behavior isn’t pathological because it’s typical of many animals, particularly monkeys. ” Moistening her lips, she said, “Forgive me, Mr. Selby, but I burn at the notion that the abused and raped child is left with the solace that the gravity of her condition has been overstated, that what’s good enough for young monkeys can’t be all that bad for her.”

Selby said, “Miss Brett, I’m glad you’re on our side, but you’ve been angry since we first met. I had a feeling some of it was toward me—”

“You’re right,” she said, “I was angry when I met you and your daughter at Vinegar Hill. The whole damn scene had such an air of... biblical vengeance and righteousness about it. You brought her back to the place where she’d been raped and forced her to witness and relive all that terror again. You weren’t frightened by that place. You had some thoughts of revenge and reprisal going for you, pumping you up. But Shana, the abused female of the piece, had to stand there until her memories drove her into a screaming hysteria—”

“ Hold it, goddammit.” Selby raised a hand. “You’re forgetting something. I was there trying to find out who raped Shana because nobody on the official payroll here seemed to give a good goddamn about that. There’s been a cover-up since it happened, and don’t bother telling me you don’t know that. As for biblical righteousness and the rest of it, the Bible is just as often in the eye of the beholder as anything else.”

“Well, if that’s true, I’m sorry but—”

“Let me finish, will you?”

“If I’ve been wrong I want the chance to say so.” And she meant it.

“Never mind, just hear me out. Shana may have lost a kind of trust she can’t recover. She’s known pain and loss before, her mother died recently. But that happened in a framework she could adapt to. This thing has turned her life upside down. That’s what she’s lost, that’s what’s gone.”