You have entree into an amazing number of homes and partake, fleetingly, of an amazing number of lives. You become a confidante on short acquaintance. They reveal things to you, at times unaware, giving themselves away with gestures or inflections. You never comment, you listen and you weigh and you evaluate and you learn to become accurate in your judgments. Though they had said you were not to judge, that you were only to gather the facts, the evidence, you learn instinctively to be suspicious of the blatantly stated words. You seek, what is behind the words, and you find yourself taking nothing, nothing, at face value.
I shifted around, through the months, from the Policewomen’s Bureau to the various precincts and squads where they needed a policewoman for a particular assignment. I learned to look at the various boroughs, to define the neighborhoods, to get the feel of the generations that had created islands within the city—distinct cultures with separate standards.
I was assigned to accompany a Brooklyn detective one morning, on an 8 to 4, to interview a complainant relative to an alleged rape the previous evening. All crimes reported are recorded as “alleged” until the facts are clear and the truth of the matter is known. Things you had accepted at face value a few brief months ago widen out, expand, take different shapes and meanings; you begin to pick out the questions, you become convinced that every complaint is an “alleged” incident, and you arrive for the interview without any certainties and many doubts. If your attitude seems offensive, you are sorry and try to keep your voice even, your doubts covered, to be the good listener.
Detective Frank Warener was a short, stocky man with traces of a rough black beard and deep-set, small, warm brown eyes. He had a quick smile and a deep voice and a calm and easy manner. His stubby strong hands, with a dangerous signet ring, waved around over the steering wheel of his car as he drove us to the neighborhood in Brooklyn where the complainant lived. He was warm and friendly and of that category of policemen who make just one slight distinction when assigned to work with a woman: they watch the casual interjection of four-letter words, catch their tongue between their teeth and insert an innocuous expression in place of profanity. He talked about a case he had been on, not bragging, chuckling over an amusing sidelight. In short, in speaking to me, he was speaking to a fellow worker, without resentment and in common language. I had worked with women partners who were rougher in speech and men partners who were purposely crude, and I knew that Frank Warener and I were in communication and that he would lead the interrogation but I would be a party to it.
The house was a solid-looking brick with a flagstone patio, and was flanked on either side by similar but not quite identical houses. The street was tree-shaded. There was a kind of upper-middle-class solidity that seemed far removed from the comic implications generally associated with the borough’s name. This was a part of Brooklyn I had never seen before, nor even knew existed. It was a kind of isolated, insulated, faintly disdainful little section, fringed on all sides by old wooden structures with porches and sad, fading gentility. When Frank pushed the doorbell, we heard a four-note lilting tune, clear and full. Then a light filled the small triangle of stained glass, and we heard a muffled sound and saw the door open a few inches, stopped short by a chain from within.
“Yes,” the woman said, “who is it, please?”
Frank held his shield in the palm of his hand and raised it toward the voice.
“Detective Warener, and this is Policewoman Uhnak, ma’am. I called you about an hour ago.”
“Yes, yes, I see. Just a moment, please.” The door closed and there was a metallic clinking and then it opened again, wide. “Won’t you come in, please?”
She was a fairly tall woman and was wearing some kind of wrapper and furry pink slippers. She led us into the living room, an attractive, well-furnished room with pale walls and carpeting, closed from the daylight by heavy, expensive draperies. The woman nodded at us and held her hands toward the couch. We sank into the soft, downy cushions. The room had a very high ceiling, with four massive dark beams; there was a wide, high fireplace set in one wall, and a tremendous abstract painting over the fireplace dominated the room. It was blazing with great slashes of pure color: reds fired into yellows and blues with areas of white darting in and out toward the edges. It caught the eye immediately, and the woman, noticing me studying it, followed my eyes.
“It’s exciting, isn’t it?” she asked. “A young friend of mine, a young man named Miguel Hernandez, did it for me. It seems new every time I look at it.”
I didn’t like the painting: there was something violent and furious about the slashes and stabs of color, something uncontrolled.
“It’s very interesting,” I said carefully.
Frank regarded the picture briefly, squinting, then cleared his throat. “Mrs. Crimmons, we’d like to ask you about what happened last night. I know you’ve spoken to the detectives already, but we’ve been assigned to the case, and we’d like to get the story firsthand.”
The woman was sitting in a chair covered with some, gold, shiny material. The wrapper she wore was iridescent and kept changing from red to green with each flicker of movement. She leaned back into the form of the chair and seemed to get smaller, to be holding herself tightly together, to seek some protection and some identity from the limits of the chair.
“Yes, yes,” she said, her voice now softer, thicker. “A terrible thing was done to me. A terrible thing.”
Instinctively, the words now were mine. “We understand that, Mrs. Crimmons. We know it’s very difficult for you, but we must ask you to tell us about it.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Crimmons. “I realize that. You’ve all been so nice, you police officers. Can I get you anything—coffee, a drink?”
She made vague, tentative gestures with her hands, apparently toward the kitchen, but she did not rise, and we both shook our heads. “Well, then, I shall tell you about it. I’m not a hysterical woman, but it isn’t pleasant, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”
We nodded our agreement.
“Well,” she began, “I live alone. As you can see,” her right arm swept the room, “I have this large house and, of course, I do have help. So even with this large house, there isn’t too much for me to do. Mr. Crimmons, my late husband, provided very nicely for me. He bought this house in my name six years ago, when we were married. He died last year, you know. Heart. I always told him he went at things too hard. I lost my first husband that way, and he was a young man, but you can’t tell men anything, can you?”
She smiled sadly and shrugged, as though at the foolishness of men. “And though I do have my friends, of course, it does get a bit tiresome, lonely even, and I have always tried to keep interested in things. I’m not a woman to play cards or things like that. I like creative things—to keep active. To keep—young.” She flashed a warm, broad smile. “Well, all this is beside the point, of course. I am greatly interested in art, and I learned of a very fine artist. Ricardo Domingo—you’ve heard of him? Well, at any rate, he is quite well known, and he lives just fifteen minutes from here. He was offering instruction, limited, of course, to those who met his specifications.” She laughed, disparaging her own admittance to this select group. “I did a little sketching in my youth—I fancied myself an artist in those days.” She sighed, a little weary, a little reminiscent. “But my first husband objected,” she spread her palms upward, “so of course I gave it up. When he died, I was alone and didn’t have funds to pick up my work again. Mr. Fredericks, God rest his soul, was a fine man, young and strong and very handsome, but not, well, not sensitive, if you know what I mean, and, poor boy, not a good provider. We lived on love, you might say.” Mrs. Crimmons smiled fondly. “So I had to go to work, not exactly what my dear mother and father had had in mind for their only daughter. But then, I had run away from Miss Lighten’s school to marry Mr. Fredericks, and I didn’t dare to return home. I was a proud girl, you see. Well, at any rate, I went to work in one of the finest ladies’ shops in Baltim
ore—that’s where Mr. Fredericks and I had been living, you know. And then, the manager of the store; Mr. Donaldson—he was such a large man and so strong, and seemed such a fine man—well, we became acquainted and he quite swept me off my feet, and we were married within three months. Can you imagine the terrible situation—a widow of not quite four months. But then, I was only seventeen and not used to being alone.”
I looked past Mrs. Crimmons to the painting again, tracing the dashes of red in and out of a maze of blues and yellows. I bit the corner of my lip hard, trying to revive myself from the warm, lilting quality of the woman’s interminable words.
“Well,” Mrs. Crimmons continued, ignoring Frank’s raised hand, his attempt at interruption. Frank glanced at me, his eyes flickering, shrugging slightly. “Mr. Donaldson seemed such a fine man.” Her eyes narrowed as she studied her fingers for a moment. “Until after we were married, that is. Unfortunately, we cannot learn these things before marriage—not a decent woman, at any rate. He was a fine big man and all of that, but he had an infirmity, you might say, which, well ...” She stopped herself with a quick, sad smile at Frank. “We don’t have to go into all of that now. Suffice to say he was not a man. Oh outwardly, of course, big and hearty and robust. But on our wedding night ... Well, he was really a good man, you must understand, and I suppose he felt I might have helped him somehow with his ‘problem.’” She pronounced the word delicately. “But I was really quite naïve about those things. At any rate, Mr. Donaldson was really quite kind, and he gave me an annulment and very kindly provided for me. I came to New York, where I lived for many years, until I met dear Mr. Crimmons, God rest his soul, and when we were married ...”
I noticed a thin line of moisture on Frank’s forehead, and his eyes had a kind of glazed look. He nodded his head from time to time as Mrs. Crimmons spoke directly to him.
“When we were married, Mr. Crimmons absolutely insisted I continue with my art work—he was so very proud of me.” She laughed archly. “And I have dabbled now and again, but when he passed on—last year that was—I found that Mr. Domingo, a talented boy, a talented boy, was conducting courses. And practically in the neighborhood. Every Thursday evening from 7:30 to 10:30, and it seemed such a lovely opportunity.”
The complete silence came so suddenly and so unexpectedly that Frank took a deep breath and then, trying to exhale, began to choke. Mrs. Crimmons leaned forward, expectantly, and Frank, red-faced, his voice strangling, asked her: “And you went last night? To the art class?”
“Yes, yes, last night was Thursday and I attended the class. And you must understand ...”
Frank interrupted, almost desperately. “Where is Mr. Domingo located, Mrs. Crimmons?”
Mrs. Crimmons recited an address, which I jotted down, and before Frank could speak again, she had resumed. “And I worked on such a lovely drawing—a street scene from home. I’m from Georgia, you know. A lovely scene from my childhood which ...”
Frank’s eyes were popping and he shook his head and broke in. “Yes, of course, and what time did you leave Mr. Domingo’s?”
“Oh, yes, I am getting wordy, I’m so very sorry, Detective Warener. I left there about 10:30—the usual time.”
“And where did you go?”
“Where? Oh, of course. I generally take the bus home, but it was such a lovely night that ...”
“Last night?” I was thinking of the rainy windstorm of the previous evening.
Mrs. Crimmons laughed, a soft, long sound. “You must think me mad, but I simply dote on wind and rain. There’s something so refreshing, so cleansing. To me—forgive me—it was a lovely, wet, black night, and I decided to walk home, to feel the freshness on my face. I’d walked two blocks and turned down the avenue and was about halfway down the block. I was walking along, you understand, thinking about home—of that warm, dusty, yellow street with all that sunshine and ...”
“Yes?” Frank said.
Mrs. Crimmons blinked, smiled and awoke from the reverie. “Yes. Well, at any rate, I passed this car, and this young man was sitting behind the wheel, you know, on the driver’s side, and he poked his head out the window and called out something. I was startled, I hadn’t noticed him sitting there, and I turned and said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ He asked me the time, and I looked at my watch and told him it was twenty minutes to eleven. Yes, that’s exactly right, twenty minutes to eleven, and then he began asking me directions and ...”
“What directions did he ask you?”
Mrs. Crimmons shrugged a little impatiently at Frank. “My dear, I have no idea: some street, some street. I don’t quite remember. And then he got out of the car, while I was speaking ...”
“What were you saying?”
Mrs. Crimmons regarded me coldly and brushed away any response, continuing. “He came alongside of me, and then, forgive me if I tell all this rather quickly, then he was holding me around the throat and with a hand over my mouth he threw me into the car and came into the car beside me, and he said terrible things to me—that he had a knife and would cut my throat and other dreadful things and ...”
“Did you see a knife? Did he show you a knife?” Frank asked quietly.
Mrs. Crimmons made a sharp clicking noise with her tongue and drew herself taller in the chair. “I didn’t ask him to show me a weapon. I certainly believed he had a knife and that he was entirely capable of using it.”
“Yes,” Frank said softly. “And this was at twenty minutes to eleven?”
“Yes, and I was terrified, absolutely terrified, you cannot imagine my horror. I believed he was quite capable of murdering me. He drove the car away around streets and down avenues and I don’t know where-all, and then he pulled into some big open place, behind some big buildings—they looked like factories or something. He must have known exactly where he was going because he drove directly there, you see, and then he pulled me from the car and forced me into the back seat. Then he came into the back seat, and then he did a terrible thing, as you understand.”
“Yes,” I said. “And then what happened?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Crimmons, “he was some kind of animal, I guess. I don’t understand at all, I really don’t. I guess you people know about animals like this, but I ... well, I’m at a loss. It seemed forever that we were there, and he gave me a cigarette and I was praying he would let me go, but he didn’t. He kept me there and after we smoked, well, he attacked me again and then again. It was like a nightmare. I couldn’t believe it was happening.”
“And then what happened?” Frank asked quickly in the pause.
“Well, then he told me to go into the front seat again, and then he drove around for a while and stopped in front of this perfectly dreadful tavern, and he took me inside and he ordered some drinks and ...”
Frank and I looked at each other, and I asked the question. “Were there other people in the tavern?”
Mrs. Crimmons studied a speck of light shining on the arm of her golden chair. Her voice seemed to have changed: not anger, but more than annoyance edging out the soft, gentle quality. “There were people there, yes, but not exactly the sort of people one would appeal to. Several rough-looking men, a few dreadful women. You know the type.”
I kept my face very still, consciously controlling my expression, for I know my features are very mobile, very revealing. I avoided Frank’s face with great effort, for I knew he had turned toward me.
“And then,” she continued, “we each had some drinks. I don’t know how many, it was all so unreal, and then we went back to the car and he pushed me out after a while, and I fell on the sidewalk. I don’t know how long I was there, and then that car—that officer’s car—came and stopped, and I was terrified until they told me they were detectives. They took me to the police station and wanted me to go to the hospital, but I told them that I just wanted to go home—not see any doctor. It was just too terribly humiliating. They were very pleasant, and one of the nicest young officers took me home. I told him I felt that I wo
uld be better able to discuss it today and, as you see, I am rather calm about it now. But still, it was such a terrible thing.”
Frank glanced at his notebook. “That was at 3 A.M. that the officers found you?”
“Yes, I suppose that’s correct if that’s what you have written in your book.”
Frank ignored the reproach. “From twenty minutes to eleven till 3 A.M.—nearly four and a half hours.”
Mrs. Crimmons moved slowly in her chair, digging her body in deeper. “I suppose so—it seemed like forever to me.”
“Yes, and during all that time I imagine you had some conversation with him?”
Her eyes swung toward me, but her head still faced toward Frank. “Conversation? Well, of course, I pleaded with him, I begged him to let me go, if you consider that conversation.”
“And what did he say? I mean, besides the threats. After the attack, what did he talk about?” My voice was flat and expressionless.
Mrs. Crimmons lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out quickly. She narrowed her eyes through the smoke. “What do you suppose he talked about?” she asked harshly. “What do people generally talk about in the back seat of a car parked in a dark alley?”
Frank’s voice was polite and reasonable. “Did he say anything about himself? Anything that might give us some indication as to what he does, where he lives, his occupation?”
She blew the smoke from her lips in quick little puffs. “I will tell you this: times have changed.” She waved the smoke from her face in agitated little pushes. “Young men do not behave the way they did when I was a young girl. They talk abruptly; everything is quick and to the point. When I was a girl,” Mrs. Crimmons said, comparing her rape to her previous experiences, “when I was a girl, a man made love kindly, with patience and consideration. With a sense of slow and steady and wonderful achievement. The young men of today are animals: cruel and self-seeking and abrupt and selfish.”
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