Compromising Positions

by Beverly Bird

  “Are you all right?” she managed to ask. “Really all right?”

  He frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I couldn’t find you.”

  It pleased him that she had been looking. That in a moment of horror, seeing that picture in the paper, she had tried to turn to him. Then he thought about where he had been, trying to get hold of his uncle. Wendell had stayed one step ahead of him all morning, moving from court to this meeting and that one, until Jesse had thought it was more important to find Angela.

  And then, of course, all hell had broken loose.

  “I just talked to Kennery,” he said after a moment. “I called in for messages and there were a ton from him. He said you’d...been in touch. He’s a little upset.” He paused. “Angela, I think this would be a real good time for that united front I spoke about yesterday.”

  “Thank you,” she choked. Her response surprised him. He’d expected an argument.

  “Shh.” He put her away from him a little. He saw tears clinging to her lashes and something shafted through him. He touched one with his fingertip and felt another shudder pass through her.

  “I know who’s doing this now,” she whispered. “I’ve figured it out.”

  Everything inside him went still, then his heart thumped. “Who?”

  She closed her eyes, swaying a little without his support. “You’re not going to believe me.”

  Someone passed by out in the hallway. Jesse left her abruptly to shut the door.

  When he came back, she was trembling again violently. “Try me,” he said.

  She kept her eyes closed. She drew in a deep breath, and it seemed to him that she was shoving the words out forcibly when everything inside her wanted to keep them buried. She couldn’t look at him.

  “Charlie Price.”

  Jesse felt shock knife through him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me right.”

  “Charlie Price? Why?”

  Her eyes were open now. She was looking at him bleakly. “You don’t believe me.”

  Something about the tone of her voice told him that that might well be the worst thing that had ever happened to her in her life.

  He caught her face in his hands, sliding his thumb up over her cheek to catch another tear. “I didn’t say that. I asked—like any good district attorney would ask—how and why you’ve come to this conclusion. You’re leaving a lot out here, angel. From where I’m standing, it looks like a huge jump.”

  She drew in another deep, shuddering breath—more at the endearment than anything else. But it gave her courage. She fought again to force the words out. “He raped me.”

  Jesse felt the room seem to go bright, then dark. He was that stunned. “It was Charlie? Charlie Price did that to you?”

  Angela looked at him pleadingly. And then his words sank in and made her go cold inside. “You knew,” she muttered hoarsely. “You knew that that was what happened between me and your uncle.” She wrenched away from him and backed up, staring at him. She felt sick. She’d been betrayed. She felt like a fool. “All this time you knew!” she cried.

  “No.” He thought it prudent not to mention right now that he had told Eric to look into the mystery. Eric hadn’t gotten back to him with anything yet anyway.

  “No? But you just said—”

  “I saw the paper.”

  For a moment, he thought she was going to pass out. Her eyes went unfocused. He closed the distance between them again and caught her shoulders.

  “The paper?” she returned weakly.

  “Didn’t you?” he asked carefully.

  “Of course. That was how I knew Charlie was running against you.” She shook her head fretfully. “I should have understood last night. Your father, your uncle... But I was nervous. I was...” She couldn’t finish. Nothing she had felt last night compared to this.

  Jesse’s heart thumped. She hadn’t seen it all, then. “No, Angela. Not that part.”

  His voice was soft and gentle, and it touched her physically. She dug her fingers into the front of his shirt and held on to him, dreading what he was going to say, knowing before he said it.

  “Where’s your newspaper?” he asked.

  “In the cab,” she whispered. “I left it in the cab.”

  “Okay. Come on. Let’s sit down.”

  She let him guide her to her office sofa—a cheap, vinyl thing as hard as a box of rocks. She crumpled onto it.

  “That picture was in there,” he said slowly. “The one that was taken the other night at the restaurant. Do you remember?”

  “Fill?” she murmured, looking at him, her eyes searching. “The one you said they’d only use if they needed fill?”

  “Well, fill apparently had nothing to do with it this time. It was the work of... whoever is doing this. They’re stirring the pot.”

  “Charlie?”

  He took a deep, careful breath. They’d discuss that in a moment. There was no easy way to tell her that her private hell was all over the city now.

  “It was in the paper this morning,” he said. “About you. And my uncle. About what happened. That’s why I came over here. That, and Kennery’s raving.”

  She gasped and her face drained of color.

  “That’s how I knew,” he said again.

  “They put in there that Charlie raped me?”

  Jesse shook his head. “No. The only names mentioned were yours, mine and my uncle’s.” And now, finally, he had cause to wonder about that.

  She startled him by jumping to her feet. If her face had blanched a moment before, now twin spots of hot color burned into her cheeks.

  “Of course.” She laughed crazily. Her hands curled into fists. Her gaze flew around the room, settling on nothing. “No,” she went on, “it wouldn’t say that Charlie was the one who did it. He wouldn’t want that to get out. He’s trying to intimidate me into keeping my mouth shut. Because now maybe, just maybe, someone might listen to me.” She spun to face him again. “He’s trying to discredit me so if I do bring it all up again now that he’s running for D.A., no one will believe me this time, either. They’ll think I’m a lunatic and a murderess out to avenge myself against your family after all these years.”

  “Angela,” he said slowly, “if I’m following you, then you’re saying he’s doing all this to discredit you in case you drag all this up during his campaign.”

  She nodded frantically.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” he said very carefully. “His case was thrown out of court, right? So effectively, he was never charged. He can always come back with that. It’s not worth...all this.” He waved a hand to indicate everything that had been happening.

  Angela’s eyes went wild. “How can you of all people say that? That doesn’t matter! Yesterday you were worried about how my turning in that splicer would affect your campaign and reputation!”

  He opened his mouth and closed it again. She had a point.

  She swerved suddenly for her desk and snatched up the piece of paper she had taken from Lisette’s neck. She thrust it at him. Jesse took it.

  “‘Keep your mouth shut. Next time it could be you,”’ he read aloud. It was typed. He turned it over. It wasn’t signed, of course, and there was nothing on the back. “Where did you get this?”

  “He left it on Lisette.”

  “He did what?”

  She was shaking badly. “He was in here. Last night. It’s just like before.”

  “Angela, look at me.”

  She stared at him, her eyes almost glassy now.

  “You’ve got to calm down. Our brains are all we have here. Our rational brains.”

  She flinched. “You think I’m being irrational?”

  “No. Not necessarily. But I’m not following you. You’re reaching out and saying things so fast I can’t make sense of them.”

  She took a deep breath and finally nodded. His voice was reasonable, she told herself.

  “Come back,” he said, motioning to the
sofa. “Sit down. Start from the beginning.”

  She made an involuntary movement, as though he had hit her. “You mean...with what he did to me?”

  “Okay.” It was as good a place to start as any, though he wasn’t at all sure he could stand hearing it. And that made him wonder, too, but not about Charlie Price.

  Angela came and sat stiffly beside him. “I met him at school.”

  “College?”

  She nodded tautly.

  “He went to Princeton?” Jesse asked, trying to draw her out.

  “Yes. M-me, too. On a scholarship.”

  “Okay.”

  Suddenly, she looked confused. “He’s older than I am, but we had a lot of the same classes.”

  “We graduated from high school together,” Jesse said thoughtfully. “He had lousy grades. I think he took a year off between high school and college.” And, if he remembered correctly, there had been rumors of wild parties and other such things. The elder Price had sent his son abroad later that year, ostensibly to sow his wild oats. Jesse wondered if it had also been to clean up some messes.

  But Charlie had allegedly raped Angela after that, after whatever those messes might have been. And if they had existed at all, they had been carefully buried.

  Then he realized what he’d just thought.

  Allegedly? He felt nausea swell in his stomach. How easy it was to fall into legal traps and lingo, even for him. Charlie Price had raped her. He accepted that. He believed her. But whether or not Charlie was doing this to them now... Jesse found he wasn’t quite able to swallow that. But he didn’t dare tell her so. Some instinct made him know that his belief in her was all she had to hold herself together with right now.

  The responsibility made his stomach burn even more. Not because he was uncomfortable with it, but because he couldn’t bear the thought of what might happen if he failed.

  “I skipped a year in high school,” she continued. Her hands were clasped rigidly together in her lap. Her voice was tight and controlled. “That could account for some of the time. And I know that he...there were a couple of classes he didn’t pass in his junior year. That was when he came to me for tutoring. That was how I met him. We worked together three nights a week. I got to know him fairly well.”

  “You dated?”

  Pure pain flashed over her face. “That was what your uncle called it.”

  “And what do you call it?” he asked evenly.

  She looked at him sharply. Not once, not ever, had anyone asked her that question, not even the old D.A. She’d told him of course. But to them the fine line between dating and tutoring hadn’t seemed pertinent. At least, no one had ever seemed interested.

  “Tutoring,” she spat now. “I never saw him outside the library until that...that last night. And that was here, in Philly. Not at school.”

  “Go on.”

  “He made me nervous. Toward the end of our junior year, I thought...it had started to seem like maybe he wanted more than tutoring. He was...he had started to make a lot of comments about my appearance.” She shuddered. “And my body. Finding reasons to touch me. I never particularly liked him. I would have stopped tutoring him, but I really needed the money. And he paid well. And every time I tried to suggest that he find someone else, he’d offer me more. The best I could do was always make sure that we met at the library. In public. But then he contacted me before we went back to school that fall. He had been taking summer courses. He had a final. He needed help studying for it. That was what he said.” She closed her eyes. “The money. I needed the money.”

  He squeezed her hand and knew grimly that Wendell would never have understood such a thing.

  “I told him I would meet him at the city library. At seven-thirty. At seven o’clock there was a knock on my door. It was him.”

  He saw her eyes go distant as she relived it. Something caught him around the throat. But he had known this wouldn’t be easy.

  “You lived at home?” he asked, his voice tight.

  She gave a quick shake of her head. Her curls danced. “No. I rented a small house on Front Street with two girlfriends. There were...problems at home. That was why I needed the money so badly. I was supporting myself. I actually worked for the M.E.’s office that summer as a receptionist—I guess that’s how they knew my name all these years later. But my salary wasn’t enough, not for everything. Rent, books...” She shrugged helplessly.

  “So he came to your house.” Jesse gently picked up the thread again.

  “It was the first time,” she whispered.

  Jesse felt an unseen force slam into him. “The first time? He raped you repeatedly?”

  Her gaze flew to him. “No! Oh, no. It was the first time that he...that he did what he wanted. The first time he took matters into his own hands. He was there just because he had decided to be. Because he wanted... I’d said the library, but he decided no and left me no choice.” She swallowed carefully. “I left school after that. For a semester. I filed charges.”

  “With Paul Coniglio?”

  She nodded stiffly. “Yes. He was the D.A. then. But someone else...one of his deputies actually tried the case.” She laughed shrilly. “A new guy. No trial experience. Tells you what Coniglio thought of my case. Anyway, it took the better part of three months for it to come to trial.”

  “In my uncle’s court.”

  She began trembling again. She wouldn’t look at him now.

  “Angela, if Wendell didn’t have the evidence—”

  “No!” she shouted, twisting around on the sofa to face him. “No. That’s only what he said. The truth was that Charlie made sure there was no evidence! And your uncle believed him because he wanted to.”

  “Why?” Jesse demanded angrily. “Why in the hell would Wendell do that?”

  “Because Charlie was as rich and powerful as you Hadleys are! Because you guys stick together!”

  Jesse flinched. Oh, yes, he understood now.

  “That’s not fair,” he said quietly.

  Panic and confusion crossed her face. She didn’t address his comment, but let it go.

  “Charlie spent those months before the trial driving me insane. Deliberately making it look like I was on the verge of a breakdown. Sort of like he’s doing now.” She told him wretchedly about the bathtub, about the basement. “I’d...I’d open the pantry, and he’d b-be standing there, grinning that grin. Surprise!” She threw her hands up in bitter parody. “At first, of course, he’d just pick the locks, jimmy the windows, be there waiting for me when I came home from somewhere. So we found a locksmith to make that impossible, and Charlie found a way in through the basement. We fixed that, and he came right in while we were home if we forgot to barricade ourselves in. So we stopped forgetting. It was like living under siege. We’d lock ourselves in, then we’d glance up to find him peering through the window at me. So we’d draw the blinds, but in a way that was even worse, because then we could never be sure if he was out there or not.”

  She took a steadying breath. “Every time he turned up,” she continued, “it wasn’t enough to just be there, to prove to me that he could enter my life, invade my privacy, at will. He would t-touch me. And I’d call the cops. Or my roommates would when they heard me scream. But we were three women, Jesse. There was nothing we could do to physically hold him there until the cops arrived. If he was outside, he’d be gone by the time they got there. We took pictures of him to prove he was there—those instant snapshots—and the cops acted like we were nuts. What did they prove? He was always smiling in them. Lock him in a room? Sure, we tried that, too. He crawled out through a window because of course there was no way we could lock the window from outside, and he was too smart to go into a room without one. I knocked him flat with a frying pan once, but I don’t think the police ever investigated if he was bruised or not. He was Charles Price’s son. In the absence of some cold, hard evidence, they just acted like I was some lunatic out to drag his name through the mud. The authorities just seemed to look
the other way. Like the word had already come down from the Commissioner or whatever. ‘This woman is nuts. Would Charlie Price do these things? Of course not. So just humor her.’”

  Rage flowed through Jesse’s blood until it almost literally colored his vision.

  “So by the time we got to court,” Angela went on, “there were thirty-two instances on record of my calling the cops. And not once in those thirty-two instances did the cops ever find their ‘proof’ that Charlie had been there. I think even the D.A. thought I was nuts. The defense attorney said that I was...mentally unbalanced.

  “We had photographs taken...of my...my bruises after he raped me, too, but they disappeared from the evidence room before the trial. Neighbors saw me open the door to him that night and heard me screaming later. But then they declined to testify, or they changed their stories.

  “The defense attorney said that all along I wanted more than just to tutor Charlie. He made...he made a big deal of the fact that I was at Princeton on a scholarship, while Charlie was rich and quite the man about campus.

  “He lied even more. He said that I had invited Charlie to my house that night. And when he got there, and realized that tutoring wasn’t what I had on my mind, he politely tried to extricate himself from the situation. The defense attorney said I cried rape because Charlie rejected me and I wanted revenge.”

  She looked at Jesse, her eyes pleading. They hurt him. “It wasn’t like that. But it was his word against mine. Your uncle believed him. And he chastised me for my behavior, for wasting the court’s time.”

  Jesse felt something both painful and amazed move inside him. He’d thought this morning that most women would have backed off from pressing charges—especially given who the defendant had been. He knew all too well how it happened, the sort of interrogations the victims were subjected to during depositions. The police would keep at it, off the record—the insinuations, the dirty intimations, the leering remarks—until the women’s eyes went from haunted—as Angela’s were now—to unsure to stricken. Until she started believing that she had done something wrong.