Poison

by Galt Niederhoffer

  She lands at Nora’s doorstep several hours later.

  “Holy shit,” says Nora, opening the door.

  “Need help,” Cass says. “And a better lawyer.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It is Thursday, and Cass stands in the marble courtroom. A day has passed since she went to the cops. Two days since they returned from Bermuda. They are no longer in the family court but rather the Maine Superior Court, a combined criminal and family courtroom. Their goal, according to Matthew, is to report Ryan’s crime, present the existing evidence, and, once conveyed, to ensure that Cass has custody of Sam. Cass thinks back now to her first time in a courtroom. She is sobered by the setting, but bolstered by her survival. She has gotten her children to safety, endured incredible terror, and she has a small pile of incontrovertible evidence to show for her effort.

  The judge is a small woman, under five feet, her robes so big that she has to hoist them up when she walks. The courtroom, walled in paneled wood, feels like a collapsible chamber. This officious pomp and circumstance is meant to confer power, reason, justice. Cass recounts the reasons she finds herself in this situation: she is here to secure safety, her own and her children’s. Nora is standing at her side, supporting her with her friendship. Cass’s hands and fingers pulse as though to a rhythm. She struggles to breathe, to think, to stand. Her body is coursing with poison.

  “Please state your name for the court.”

  “Cassandra Connor,” she says. She swears to tell the truth, unadorned with falsehoods, the truth and nothing but the truth in all its tainted glory. Ryan stands mere feet away. He states his name also. Three new people are filing in. A small battalion of lawyers. Two people follow them—her mother and her neighbor. She stares at them in disbelief. Is this a hallucination? Comprehension comes in chunks. They cross to stand at Ryan’s side. None of them makes eye contact. This is an ambush.

  Several minutes pass before Cass understands what is happening, before her auditory nerve connects with her frontal cortex, before images convert to words and words accrue to comprehension. But before this conversion is complete, before she is capable of logic, she is being ushered into another side room.

  “I’m going to adjourn this court,” says the judge, “for an emergency psychiatric evaluation.”

  Testimony will be given, not before a judge but before a court psychologist.

  Cass is led into a small room with a door that locks behind her. The office of a bureaucrat. Desk piled with papers. Windows lathered with handprints and smudges.

  She offers the man a pile of papers to add to his towers.

  The man glances at the pages and then begins to ask her questions. “Who do you think are the enemies against you?”

  Cass clears her throat, but her throat is closing. She tries to imagine Nora’s advice. She must lay out her theory of the crime, not appear to espouse a conspiracy theory. She must draw on the lessons she has learned. Brevity, calmness.

  “I don’t believe I have enemies. Or that anyone is conspiring against me. Rather, I have reported a crime. Acts of violence committed by one person.” She pauses. “And the two people who aided and abetted the crime, the source and an accomplice.” She regrets it as soon as she says it.

  “Accomplice?” says the doctor. His eyebrows are raised in a small mountain of confusion.

  “One to provide false testimony. The other provided the substance. But technically both of them committed the crime also.”

  “The crime?”

  “Delivering the poison.” She regrets saying delivering. It sounds absurdly clinical like a child pretending to be a doctor, but it seemed a better choice than putting poison in my food, spraying the toxin in my home, sprinkling it on the floor, spraying it on the sheets and on my clothes so that I would ingest it through dermal absorption. Using his own hand, his own body to deliver the toxin. That would have been a mouthful.

  The man nods and scribbles on a pad of paper. One eye focuses on the page while the other roves across her. “False testimony?” he asks.

  “I believe their plan was for her to testify that I was suicidal. If they had succeeded.”

  “Succeeded,” he says.

  Cass pauses. She is reluctant to sound maudlin, so she makes the universal sign for death, pantomiming the slash of her neck, replete with sound effect, knife tearing muscle.

  “Were you suicidal?”

  “Of course not,” Cass says. “I was fighting for survival.”

  “Then why would she have said this?”

  “Because this crazy bitch was planted in my home expressly to give false testimony.” Another pause. “And to deliver the poison.”

  “Planted in your home?” he says. His eyebrows look like little seagulls.

  “Yes,” says Cass, “he had his girlfriend apply as a nanny, pretending to be a stranger.”

  “This is the ‘crazy bitch’?” he asks.

  Cass inhales. “Yes, sir. The one and only.”

  The man looks in Cass’s eyes for the first time since they began talking.

  “You believe this or you know this?”

  “I know this,” says Cass.

  “You know because you have proof?”

  “Yes,” she says. “There’s lots of proof. And I have something better.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Women’s intuition.”

  His lips purse into a smile that betrays an absence of pleasure. “I thought you said you hired her.”

  “Technically, yes,” says Cass. “He insisted I fire the previous person and then demanded I hire a replacement. This girl’s application appeared a day later.”

  The man nods in the way that Cass has come to identify as a nod of dismissal. It only spurs her forward.

  “His plan was to poison me. In which case, the accomplice would have testified that I was suicidal.” A pause. “False alibi corroboration.”

  The man inhales sharply and jots this down also. “Are you suicidal?”

  “You asked me that already,” Cass says. “I’m here because I am fighting for safety. Safety for me and my children. Why would you take my report of a crime and simply turn the tables?”

  “You are accusing him,” he says. “I’m just trying to understand why you would make this accusation.”

  “My husband made a death threat. Then he kept his promise. I suggested what he would have used as an alibi had his murder attempt been successful. It seems to me I’m being penalized for understanding his crime. I’ve provided you with a motive, method, weapon, alibi, source, and accomplice.”

  “And what was his motive?”

  “Our son. Gaining sole custody of our son. The idea of losing or even sharing him was unbearable.” A pause. “The trigger was much more mundane. He was having an affair. I figured it out and confronted him about his girlfriend.” Another pause. “Oh, and this bitch wanted a baby. To start a family with my husband and move into my life. Ryan and I were joint tenants on the deed, which means that if I croaked, he automatically got the house.”

  Another nod, this one more certain.

  “Then it became more complicated. When he failed and I figured it out, he needed to shut me up. That was his secondary motive. Because I posed a real threat, not only to custody of our son but to his own freedom. You know what they say.”

  “What do they say?”

  “‘It’s the cover-up, not the crime.’”

  The man nods in a way that almost looks like consideration. “You mention an affair,” he says. “Were you jealous of this betrayal?”

  “It bothered me,” says Cass. “As it would any woman.”

  “Did it bother you enough,” he asks, “for you to consider retaliation?”

  “No,” she says. “I am not a vindictive person.” A pause. “Besides, I’m a journalist. You know what they say about the pen and the sword.”

  The man stares for several seconds, making a new assessment. “You’ve thought a lot about this,” says the man.

&nbs
p; Cass does not flinch. “When someone is trying to kill you, understanding is all-important.”

  “Your husband testifies that you have not been yourself lately. He says he has suggested numerous doctors, but you have refused his efforts. Why?”

  Cass catches her breath, forces oxygen into her blood flow. “Because I do not need it, and, of course, he knows this. What I need is safety for me and my children.” Cass continues, “I need medical attention for arsenic poisoning, not time in a shrink’s office. I am sound and competent. I have no mental illness. My husband’s description of me is false, a deliberate mischaracterization, a tactic designed to obscure his crime and destroy the credibility of his victim.”

  The man nods slowly and resumes scribbling. “Your neighbor testifies that you showed up at his house at three in the morning. That he offered you a glass of water. That you fell asleep on his living room floor, then left his house suddenly. That you appeared…” He flips through the papers. “Confused and disheveled.”

  Once again, Cass is seized by outrage. The bile of injustice rises from her gut. “I was heavily intoxicated against my will, drugged without my knowledge. When I realized this, I bolted. It is certainly possible that I looked ‘confused and disheveled.’ Forgive me if I did not have time for a manicure and a blowout.”

  The man looks up in the middle of his note-taking.

  “You seem very upset. It’s obvious you’re frightened. I see that you are convinced that several people are trying to harm you.”

  The weight is back. The weight of dread, often described as a sinking sensation. But now it is not dread alone, no margin of unknowing. Now there is only certainty, the knowledge that she has been outplayed by more powerful forces. She must try again to state the facts, the facts, unadorned by emotion. She ignores the tightening in her chest, a straitjacket cinching around her lungs, her throat, stifling her breathing. Cass is in binds. Her only hope now is to relax into the situation.

  “I know that my testimony is hard to believe and evidence is easy to misinterpret, but in this case, I am honestly reporting a crime as it was committed. Method, motive, and weapon. Alibi, source, and accomplice. Poison in my system. Poison in food prepared for me by my husband. Poison in the sheets, in my clothes, in the water. Poison designed for ingestion by mouth, absorption through the skin, and airborne inhalation. Poison used with intent to harm, deployed as a murder weapon. And the pattern of abuse that preceded homicidal ideation. I understand that poisoning is not an everyday occurrence, but this is not a conspiracy theory. This is an honest report of a crime of which I was both a victim and a witness. Legally speaking, the name for this is ‘conspiracy to commit murder.’

  “Please,” she says. “All I ask is that you attenuate his claims with the same skepticism you have applied to mine. Just because a man wears a nice suit does not mean he is blameless. Trust me that behind closed doors, Ryan Connor is a different person.”

  Cass returns to the courtroom less than an hour later to find a small crowd of people, people she once considered her loved ones, her mother, and her once-trusted neighbor, Aaron, testifying in a court of law against her in support of her attacker.

  “She has not been herself for a long time,” Ryan says with feigned compassion. “Terribly concerned about what she might do to herself and the children.”

  “Rapid deterioration,” says Aaron. “Obsessional fixation. Ongoing fears of pursuit. Claims of poison in the food. Drugs in the water.”

  “She called me from a tropical island, insisted I fly to meet them. Convinced her husband was poisoning her, that the children were in danger,” says her mother.

  “Paranoid delusions.”

  And then, the fatal blow: “Though it is painful to admit, my daughter is mentally ill. I do not believe Cass’s claim that she has been poisoned. However, I fear she is capable of putting poison in her food to frame her husband. I believe she is so enraged by her husband’s infidelities—or her imagined fears about them—that she could do something in retaliation. And so, while I give no credence to her claim that she has been poisoned, I fear that she may put poison in the food in order to frame her husband. Obviously, this reckless act would cause great harm to Cass and her children.”

  This statement is made not by Ryan’s lawyer but by Cass’s mother. Women, it seems, are among the worst misogynists.

  The court devolves into mayhem.

  “Danger to herself.”

  “Danger to others.”

  “Danger to her children.”

  “The court must take drastic measures.”

  One by one, they incant the legal criteria for forced incarceration.

  The paneled walls are closing in. Her chest, her lungs are in a vise now.

  “Your Honor,” says Ryan’s lawyer, “we have one last piece of information. The petitioner and the grandmother have obtained a Mental Hygiene Warrant. This compels the Portland Police Department to arrest the defendant and bring her to a mental hospital for immediate evaluation.”

  “Your Honor,” says Matthew, “this is an outrage. A breach of due process. This warrant was obtained on false premises and is now being used as a coercive document. Not one of these claims has been supported. Not one of these witnesses has been cross-examined! You cannot make a decision based on hearsay without a hearing or trial.”

  Cass grasps Nora’s arm as she digests this announcement. Ryan has deployed the ultimate legal weapon. A Mental Hygiene Warrant allows the cops to cart her to a mental hospital in a state of forced incarceration. The defendant can be locked away for up to seventy-two hours, held indefinitely at the doctors’ discretion. Under Ryan’s direction and with his careful guidance, they have subverted the constitutional rights to due process (the Fifth Amendment) and protection from forced detainment (Fourth Amendment), walking into the Maine Superior Court, applying for—and obtaining—an arrest warrant, punishing Cass for reporting Ryan’s crime with her own sentence. In the absence of the defendant, the absence of a trial, the absence of a doctor, they filled out a page-long questionnaire and gained the right to lock her up by checking the boxes:

  Delusions?

  Yes.

  Aggression?

  Yes.

  Danger to herself?

  Yes.

  Danger to others?

  Yes.

  Inappropriate clothing for the weather?

  Yes.

  Do you think this person should be committed?

  Yes.

  That’s all it takes.

  No trial. No jury. Just conviction.

  Ryan has not said a word regarding the accusations against him, neither a claim nor denial. He has avoided the crime of perjury by placing all these false claims in the mouths of others.

  Cass sits in static shock as this nightmare unfolds before her. She has honestly reported a crime only to be falsely accused of another. She summons the energy to speak. She is weak as she addresses the judge. Her voice and fingers tremble.

  “Your Honor, there is clear evidence of a crime in the testimony and exhibits I have submitted. It is crucial that you take me at my word, that you trust the evidence, that you charge the perpetrator of the crime for the safety of me and my children.

  “I know that poisoning is very rare, outside of spy capers and novels, but just because something is hard to believe does not mean it didn’t happen. Just because a crime occurred in the dark does not mean it cannot be proven.

  “Your Honor, I am a mother. You are being asked to separate children from a mother. This is taking place without a trial, without cross-examination, without charges other than hearsay from my attacker, hearsay from people with motive to lie. People who planned a bogus story together. Planned to confirm one another’s story. False alibi corroboration. I came to the court today for one reason: to seek protection. Protection for me and my children. My ex was arrested for a crime and began a counteroffensive. His strategy is designed to do two things: one, to obscure his crime, and two, to discredit his witness. It
is cruel and unusual that his false claims would allow him not only to evade charges, but compound to new horrors. I implore the court to see through this act for the sake of safety and justice. He is not the first man to obscure his crime by attacking his victim. And I am not the first victim who refuses to be silenced.”

  A moment passes in the court with lawyers yelling from every corner. Finally, the baffled judge raps her gavel and brings the court to order.

  “Though this woman appears to be normal by all objective criteria, the testimony of those who know her best reveal a different person, a woman undergoing a rapid deterioration, a woman with a serious delusion. It is the opinion of these witnesses that this woman could be a danger to herself and her children. As a result, this court will err on the side of caution. I hereby order all three children to be removed from the mother. The older children will be placed in the custody of their grandmother. The youngest child will remain with his father.”

  Trauma supplies certain safeguards for a brutalized person. Shock delays comprehension, parses it out like a drug on a drip for gradual digestion. Had someone told Cass a year before that any of this was possible, she would not have believed it. Had she been assigned to write the piece, she would not have taken the assignment. She would not have believed it possible. She would not have believed that her own husband would try to harm her. She would not have believed her own family would turn against her, that a man who attempted murder would be supported, championed, that she would be impugned while he evaded charges, that he would be treated as an innocent and she would be charged with “mental illness.” That she, not he, would be sentenced, and this sentence would be cruel and unusual torture.

  * * *

  She stumbles out of the courthouse, huddled over Nora’s shoulder. An alarm sounds as she leaves.