THE VIRTUOUS CON

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THE VIRTUOUS CON Page 36

by Maren Foster


  Hmmmm, if there is a problem and I don’t help then there won’t be any alimony. “Sure.”

  “Good. When will you come?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m out of town. After I get back.”

  “Great. Thank you.”

  “Okay.” What does he want? Is this some kind of trap? He has to be lying, right?

  “Okay, I have to go,” he said.

  “Alright.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  He hung up.

  Does he want to strike a deal with me? Maybe he wants to pay me to stop giving interviews. Maybe he thinks he can pay to make this whole thing go away. I just want this whole thing to be over. I want to move far away with Adam and try to forget that any of this ever happened.

  The Send

  Tuesday, April 10, 2018

  Chicago

  My morning flight to Chicago was annoyingly full, mostly businessmen and women. Even before take-off the guy next to me got out his laptop and switched on his overhead light. Clearly I wasn’t going to get a nap, so I asked the flight attendant for a cup of coffee and opened Vi’s diary.

  August 25, 1989

  Evanston, Illinois. I started to feel a little weird in the morning. By early afternoon I was having contractions. I went to the clinic and they sent me directly to the hospital. I didn’t feel very well and they said my heart rate was elevated. She came out feet first which I guess is a bit of a problem. I pushed as hard as I could and it hurt so badly that I just remember screaming and wanting it to be over. Nobody prepared me for how hard it was going to be. I kept telling myself that once it was over everything would be fine … life would go back to normal … ha, what is normal? Nothing will ever be normal again. I named her Alicia. It was my favorite of the names of the towns we passed on the drive up here from Louisiana. They brought her back to me and she laid peacefully on my chest for a long time, and then we were allowed to go home. I fell asleep on the couch with her in a bassinet next to me. Eventually I was woken up by her crying. I tried holding her in my arms, but she just cried, well, screamed really. I tried to feed her but she wouldn’t take and just kept on crying. I felt like she was the devil incarnate, trying to tell me that I had made a grave mistake, having a baby by myself. It might be a sign, but I have to make the best of it now, she is here and that is it.

  I got a car from the airport to Vi’s new address downtown. It was my first time staying at her condo. The stately gothic limestone and red brick mid-rise overlooked the Museum of Contemporary Art, and was just down the street from a quaint neighborhood park near the lakefront.

  I parked on the street and grabbed my small overnight bag. An older gentleman behind a desk buzzed me into an ornately decorated, oak paneled lobby.

  “Good morning, young lady,” he said.

  “Good morning. I’m staying with Vi Laurent. Number 1201.”

  “Oh yes. She mentioned you on her way out this morning. You’re her youngest daughter, right?”

  “Yes, I’m Wyn.”

  “Wyn! Nice to meet you Wyn,” he said with a warm smile.

  “Nice to meet you too.” I paused hoping he would offer his name, and he did.

  “Jeremiah,” he said.

  “Jeremiah,” I repeated. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Not staying for the weekend, Miss Wyn?”

  “No, not this time.”

  “Elevator’s on the left. Key is under the doormat.”

  “Thank you.”

  I hit the button for the 12th floor. The old gilded elevator had once been manually operated and still had relics from its prior life. A large bronze wheel no longer turned and the back of the automatic door had the old metal cage built into it. I walked down the cream colored hall, with its elegant crown molding, to the door labeled 1201. I found the key under the mat and let myself in.

  Vi’s condo was on the southwest corner of the building, surrounded by much taller modern high rises, but the four-story museum in the park across the street afforded her unit a nice view of the soaring skyscrapers of the downtown Loop. Her simple furniture from the Queen Anne fit in perfectly with the vintage interior. I put my bag on the couch and poked around in the fridge for a snack.

  Just before two, I ordered a car to the Daley Center. The driver stopped mid-block at the entrance on Clark Street. The Daley Center’s modern, rusty colored steel frame and clear glass looked dull and artless in contrast to Chicago’s City Hall, a beautiful 11-story classical revival, complete with monumental Corinthian granite columns, across the street. I got out, checked in at the front desk, and was directed to the fifteenth floor.

  “I have an appointment with Scott Weiss,” I told the receptionist.

  “Thank you. Please have a seat and I will let him know you’re here.”

  “Thanks.”

  I picked up a copy of Crain’s Chicago Business and unfolded the half-sized paper. Just as my mind began to wander a man in a navy blue business suit appeared in front of me.

  “Wynafreda Laurent?”

  “Yeah, call me Wyn,” I said, stood up, and took his hand.

  “Scott Weiss. I’m an Investigator in the Trial Support Command.”

  “This is Emily,” he said. “She’s an assistant on the case.” A young woman shook my hand enthusiastically. They turned and I followed them to a small conference room with floor to ceiling windows.

  “Please take a seat,” he said.

  He put a thick file folder down on the table in front of him and pulled out a stack of papers. The police report with my victim statement sat on top. The young woman set up a laptop and began tapping away at the keyboard.

  “Wyn, I need to ask you a few questions so that we can determine what kind of case we have and whether we think it should go to trial,” he said.

  “Okay.” So they haven’t accepted the plea deal yet.

  “We need you to be completely truthful and forthcoming so that we can make the right decisions about how to proceed.”

  “I understand.”

  “Great.”

  We went through the same old set of questions that everyone asked: how had I come to be married to my rapist whose name I wasn’t able to remember the day after the assault? Why hadn’t I turned him in to the police when I figured out who he was? What was my motivation for marrying him and did I have any other evidence that proved that it was rape and not consensual sex, besides the grainy video and the DNA sample? Had I seen a therapist or told anyone about the rape in the days and months after it happened? Had the rape resulted in a pregnancy? Could I provide evidence of the pregnancy or its termination?

  I held it together and answered their questions the best I could without incriminating myself. As the investigator said pregnancy I broke down crying. I tried to suppress my tears at first, but I was so exhausted from the questioning that it was no use. I began to sob. The paralegal handed me a box of tissue.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as I struggled to pull tissues from the box.

  I nodded and blotted the tears running down my cheeks.

  I took a deep breath. “Do you think the case will go to trial?” I asked.

  “I’m not the prosecutor, just the investigator. The prosecutor will review our notes from this interview and will make a decision on whether to take the case to trial,” he said.

  “I heard that there may be a plea deal in the works.”

  “I’m not authorized to comment on any ongoing negotiations, Ma’am.”

  “Please,” I begged, wiping my eyes with the tissue. “I’m a nervous wreck waiting for a decision. I can’t take it anymore.”

  “There have been discussions,” he said quietly, as if he was being surveilled.

  “I can’t sleep at night thinking that he might get off easy.”

  “I can assure you Ma’am that we will do our best to bring him to justice.”

  “What about that Brock Turner guy? Do you think he got off easy?” I said.

  “This
is a very different case, Ma’am. There were witnesses to the crime in that case.”

  “And he still got off easy!”

  “This is an older case, which makes it more difficult to get a conviction from a jury in the first place. Add on top of that the fact that you were married to and living with your rapist for years before you posted videos of his alleged abuse online.” He shook his head in disbelief.

  “I don’t understand. There’s DNA evidence and a video,” I said.

  “Again, I’m not the prosecutor, but to be honest, the video is of low quality and the DNA evidence only proves that you had sexual intercourse.”

  After everything I’ve been through, justice is slipping away again.

  “He threatened me, yesterday. If you don’t lock him up permanently he’ll come after me. Please,” I begged.

  “Thank you for your time, Ms. Laurent,” he said.

  As I stood up to leave the door opened. A tall man in a dark grey business suit blocked the doorway.

  “Ms. Laurent, my name is Connor Donoghue, I’m the District Attorney assigned to your case.”

  “Great, great to meet you.”

  “I need you to stop talking to the media. You are only hurting your case. Help me help you by keeping your mouth shut,” he said.

  “Ah,” I stammered. “I did have a few questions for you.”

  “Thanks for your help, Ma’am,” he said and turned to leave.

  Are you kidding?

  “What are the terms of the plea deal?” I shouted after him, but he was already out the door and down the hallway.

  So much for protecting the victim!

  The young woman led me back down the hall.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Please take care.”

  “Thank you.”

  I decided to walk back to Vi’s condo to clear my head. It was a clear, windy, albeit unseasonably warm spring day and the sun bounced playfully off the waves in the main branch of the Chicago River. There won’t be any justice through the system. No one believes me. I was right to do everything I’ve done to this point. They’ll let him off easy. I can’t let that happen.

  Once back at Vi’s condo, I went straight to the fridge and grabbed her special French cognac from the freezer. I poured a double helping and flipped on the t.v., grabbing my laptop and external hard drive, which I now kept in my purse at all times. I uploaded all of the videos of Nate’s conquests to my file sharing account on the web and labeled it “Nathan Ellis”. I made it public, copied the link to the folder, and posted it on Facebook. I created a tweet with the caption, “Nathan Ellis is a monster and a serial rapist and there is video evidence to prove it. Nathan Ellis has done this before and will not stop until he is locked up for good. He is a threat to public safety.” I sat at the kitchen counter and watched the ‘likes’, ‘shares’, and ‘retweets’ begin to accumulate. A smile of pure satisfaction crossed my face.

  By the time Vi came home I was on my second cognac and beginning to feel quite tipsy.

  “How’d it go today, Freddie?” she asked.

  “Not as well as I hoped.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, the prosecutor basically told me to shut up and mind my own business. He wouldn’t even talk to me about the plea agreement when I asked.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he only came in for a minute at the end, but I asked about it and he refused to talk to me.”

  “You know, there’s a thing called the Crime Victim’s Rights Act. It guarantees a crime victim the right to talk to and be consulted by the State’s attorney for the case, and to be informed in a timely manner of any plea bargain or deferred prosecution agreement. You might talk to that lawyer of yours about what happened today.”

  “Thanks, I will.” Doesn’t really matter now. I’ve made my next move already and if I’m right, the D.A. will be forced to do a lot more than talk to me.

  She gave me a hug and then set about making dinner.

  “Oh, hey, are you here tomorrow night as well?” Vi asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Great. I invited Ali over for dinner. Thought it’d be nice for you two to catch-up.”

  “Yeah, of course. Thanks.”

  The Send

  Wednesday, April 11, 2018

  Chicago

  The next day I met up with an old friend for lunch and did a little sightseeing downtown.

  Vi and Ali walked in together around dinner time.

  “Ali! How are you?” I said.

  “Thanks for letting me know you were gonna be in town,” she said.

  “Sorry, I thought you were mad at me when you didn’t text after you stayed over a few months ago.”

  “Vi told me what happened. I’m really, really sorry. He’s a really bad guy. Even worse than I thought.” Ali said as she helped Vi prep dinner.

  “Thanks, he is,” I said. Not even an ‘I told you so’ from her?

  “Since when is there a t.v. in the kitchen?” I asked. Vi had always had a strict limit on t.v. time, and the kitchen and dining room were her most sacred spaces when we were growing up.

  Vi shrugged.

  “I think she gets lonely while she cooks now, since we are both gone,” Ali whispered to me.

  The local news came on. The newscaster struck a somber tone, “Breaking news tonight. A Greenwich man who was arrested for drunk driving has been charged with criminal sexual assault, a Class 1 Felony in the State of Illinois. A spokeswoman for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office says that Nathan Ellis, originally of Westport, Connecticut was a match to DNA evidence collected in a rape case in 2012. The State’s Attorney held a news conference this afternoon asking any other women, who believe they were raped by Nathan Ellis, to come forward.”

  The frame cut to a woman in a business suit in front of a white wall with a seal framed by the words “Cook County, Illinois”.

  “We believe that Nathan Ellis may have raped other women and we are asking any woman who believes that she may have been his victim to contact my office and report the incident.”

  A reporter yelled out, “Do you believe that Nathan Ellis is a serial rapist?”

  “We have evidence that supports that theory.”

  She’s talking about the videos that I uploaded yesterday! It worked! I nodded, smiling.

  “Oh my God,” Ali said.

  “This is fabulous,” I said. “The more victims that come forward, the more likely he is to be ruined forever.”

  Ali was silent as the newscaster moved on to the next story.

  “He tried to rape me too. In your house. While you were sleeping upstairs,” Ali said.

  “What?” What the fuck? Is she kidding?

  “That night I stayed over, in January, when I was in town for business.”

  “Oh my God. What happened?”

  “I was lying in bed in your guest room, catching up on some emails after you went to bed. He came in and locked the door behind him. He smelled like booze. I asked him what was up, thinking at first that he was just confused and in the wrong place. Then I saw the belt in his hand and the smirk on his face and I knew something was wrong.”

  She shook her head and paused. I waited for her to continue.

  “He got on top of me and grabbed my hands, but he was just drunk enough that his movements were clumsy, so I was able to push him off me. He fell onto the floor and I grabbed the belt and used it to fasten his arms behind him. I told him that if he ever hurt you or me I would kill him, and then I left.”

  “Oh my God. I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “He’s a monster.”

  “I know.”

  “Why did you marry him?”

  “I couldn’t let it go.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe you did that.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” she said.

  “I never meant for him to hurt anyone else.”

  “Then why didn’t you tu
rn him in immediately?”

  Here come the usual questions.

  I shook my head. “It wouldn’t have mattered. I guess I thought I could satisfy him. I meant to control him but I was naïve. Obviously, I couldn’t. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

 

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