The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  “I suppose so,” Phyllis said. “I suppose so.”

  Litman was gloomy that night. He’d sent his own pathologist over to the ME’s office to examine Jennifer’s body, and his pathologist had confirmed what the district attorney’s office was claiming: There were other marks on the girl besides strangulation marks. When the phone rang and a reporter he knew told him she was thinking about writing a magazine article on the case, Litman couldn’t keep despondency out of his voice. “Getting this one off on manslaughter will be a triumph,” he said.

  Then he became gloomier still. “I might even lose,” he murmured. “I hate to lose.”

  In the morning there were funeral services for Jennifer. Eight hundred people attended. “Jennifer would enter a room and your heart would leap at the sight of her,” her uncle, Dan Levin, said in a heartfelt eulogy. “She was passionately alive and she had style. Her only flaw was that she was too innocent. She never had any idea that anyone could hurt you.” Then he exhorted the mourners to think of one of Jennifer’s many qualities—something that would not only remind them of her but help them to lead their own lives better—and treasure it. Some of her friends took Jennifer’s vitality as the quality they would treasure. Some took her humor. Some her warmth.

  Sasha Forsythe, a classmate from Baldwin, took Jennifer’s risk-taking. Jennifer had always been daring, Sasha remembered. But that wasn’t a bad thing. It was a sign of her courage. Something she herself had always wanted more of in order to lead her life well.

  The funeral was weird, Brock Pernice thought afterward. The weirdest event of his life.

  He had been supposed to read some of Jennifer’s poetry from the podium. But when he got up to the front of the crowded chapel, he realized that many of the people facing him had hardly known Jennifer, had just run into her at Dorrian’s a couple of times. They’re just here because they want to see and be seen, he thought resentfully. This funeral is just based on the Dorrian’s scene.

  After that he couldn’t speak. And he didn’t read the poetry.

  But he felt better after the burial. On the way back from the cemetery he went to a restaurant with Edwina and William and Alexandra LaGatta. They talked and laughed and felt very close. It reminded him of The Big Chill.

  Leilia Van Baker went to another restaurant with another group of friends, and there she kept thinking of how wonderful Jennifer had been and trying to make sense of what had happened to her. She didn’t feel guilty about having introduced Jennifer to Robert. Who could have anticipated the relationship would end this way? But why had it ended this way? What had really happened?

  “I don’t trust Robert’s story,” Leilia said to her friends. “Jennifer would never have had sex in the park. Fooled around, yes. No big deal. But nothing more. No, knowing Robert, something else must have happened.”

  “But what?” one of Leilia’s friends said.

  “I figure he wanted more. And she went, like no. And he went, What do you mean, no? And he was probably buzzed from alcohol. Or high on something. And he had this rage. Because he’d just been dumped by his girlfriend and here he was, getting nothing.”

  The scenario sounded right to her, and the more she talked about it the more Leilia felt rage building inside herself. That bastard, she seethed about Robert. He murdered one of the greatest friends I ever had. And one of these days I’m going to let him know that I know he’s a murderer.

  All over the city and its environs that Labor Day weekend, the death of Jennifer Levin was on people’s lips; and many people, men and women alike, seemed to be blaming the girl for her own death. “She was wild,” a guest at an East Hampton party told her friends. “My kids knew her, and you should hear the things they say about her.”

  “Believe it,” a man chimed in. “She was into S and M. That’s why she tied this guy up and tortured him.”

  A third guest was skeptical. “The guy says he was tied up. Does that mean it’s what actually happened.”

  “Sure it does,” the woman whose kids had known Jennifer said. “Who could make up a story like that?”

  “But she had bruises,” the skeptic pointed out. “Bruises all over her.”

  “Because they were having rough sex,” an authoritative fourth guest said. He was certain Robert’s story was true, certain that today’s young people were capable of any sort of depravity. “That’s what’s so astonishing about all this,” he went on, a hint of envy in his voice. “The way kids today are doing things we never even dreamed of doing when we were their age. And right out in the open. In the park!”

  What was Robert feeling? It was difficult to know. He was tucked away on Rikers Island, where he saw only his parents and a few priests and, abiding by Litman’s instructions, was giving no interviews to the press.

  But on the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, while the grand jury was still considering whether to indict him, and if so for what, a young New York Post reporter named David Colby managed to trick him into breaking his silence. Pretending to be a close friend and not a journalist, the preppie-looking Colby gained admission to his presence and asked him how he was.

  “I’m really strung out,” Robert said. “I’m dazed and confused about everything. And I can’t believe Jennifer isn’t alive.”

  The room was empty, but through a high-up window guards and doctors sat peering down at the two young men. “I liked Jennifer,” Robert went on. “I liked her very much.”

  “Tell me your side of the story,” Colby suggested. “I’ll get it into the paper.”

  “I’m completely innocent,” Robert said. “It was a total accident.”

  Colby believed him. He sounded so sincere, so trustworthy. But he also sounded disconsolate, depressed. During their forty-five-minute interview he rarely raised his voice above a low monotone.

  “Tell me about your life here,” Colby pressed him.

  “It isn’t so bad,” Robert said. “The guards treat me okay. And I get to shoot baskets. And to lay on my bunk and think about my future.”

  PART III

  The People

  V.

  Robert

  Chambers

  8.

  HOPES AND PRAYERS

  On September 10, two weeks after Jennifer died, Robert was indicted on two different counts of murder. One was intentional murder. The other was murder committed “under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life.”

  Manhattan’s district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, was pleased by the indictment. But two days later the man who had won it, Steve Saracco, was asked to step down from the Chambers case. There could be problems at the trial if he stayed on, Saracco’s supervisor told him. “Litman might make a motion to have you removed. Because of some of the things you said on the videotape.”

  Saracco was ticked off. He’d expressed himself strongly on videotapes often before, and not once had he had to be removed from a case as a result of doing so. Besides, Litman might not make the motion his supervisor was talking about. “Let’s give it a couple of weeks,” Saracco suggested. “See what Litman’s going to do.”

  But his supervisor just shook his head. “Linda Fairstein’s taking over.”

  Saracco wasn’t surprised. All afternoon he’d been hearing rumors that the thirty-nine-year-old Fairstein, head of the office’s Sex Crimes Unit, might be getting Chambers. People were saying she’d been lobbying for the case—she and the man she was dating, Justin Feldman. Feldman, who was nearly thirty years older than the chief of the Sex Crimes Unit, was not only a prominent lawyer but a close friend of both the mayor and the district attorney.

  “Strictly a business decision,” Saracco’s supervisor told him. “Politics has nothing to do with it.”

  Linda Fairstein was exceedingly happy to get Chambers. For one thing, she’d never yet tried a homicide. For another, Chambers promised to be a high publicity case, and she enjoyed being in the limelight.

  The press, in its turn, enjoyed putting her there. She was glamorous
, a tall, statuesque woman who dressed stylishly, had thick, flowing blond hair, and wore four-inch heels to court. She was also witty and more open than many of her colleagues—an ADA who liked to joke with reporters and who was willing to tell her side of a story not just with cold facts but with color and anecdote.

  She had been in the DA’s office since the early 1970s. In those days there had been an unofficial quota of one female assistant DA per year, and the man who had hired her, then District Attorney Frank Hogan, had tried to discourage her from applying, saying the job was “too tawdry” for a woman. In those days when a female assistant tried a case, the men in the office used to run down to watch her as if they wanted nothing more than to see her fall flat on her face, and Fairstein had had to struggle to get any sort of trial work. But she hadn’t let the chauvinism that plagued the office back then get her down. She kept on plugging and eventually made her mark: prosecuted some thirty rape cases and lost only two. Earned a reputation for having an almost uncanny ability to communicate to juries the sufferings of victims. Lived down the day a supervisor had reprimanded her for crying over a case, telling her, “Why don’t you just go throw up like a man.” Won the respect of the police. On a wall in her office hung her proud proof: a plaque from the men of Midtown North. The plaque cited her legal boldness and displayed two halved walnut shells, the symbolic embodiment of what the cops were honoring her for: “A Pair of Balls.”

  Still, she didn’t feel very ballsy the afternoon Morgenthau told her she could have Chambers. Start right away, he’d said. The Levin family is coming in shortly for their first meeting.

  Fairstein panicked. Couldn’t she have time to prepare? No—and an hour or two later the family arrived. There were so many of them. Jennifer’s mother, father, stepmother, sister, and brother-in-law. It made Fairstein nervous just seeing them pile into her tiny cluttered office. But she made room, found them chairs, and began talking to them. “I want you to know that your daughter didn’t just die,” she said. “She fought for her life. There’s evidence all over her body.”

  She’d meant to make them feel better. But they looked at her with such drawn and desperate faces that she feared she had said the wrong thing and for a moment was sorry she’d taken the case. After all, it was living victims that she was used to. She knew how to comfort them, and giving comfort was something she valued. Perhaps it had to do with her father’s having been a doctor, and her mother a nurse. Whatever the reason, she was a nurturer. That’s why she often took calls from her rape-victim clients on weekends or even in the middle of the night, when memories of their traumas kept them from sleeping. Giving comfort to the Levins was going to be a more complicated matter.

  In her crowded office, her desk piled high with papers, her aged file cabinets looming like metal monsters waiting to be fed with fat files, she couldn’t figure out what to say to make the family feel better. Other worries began to haunt her, too. She suspected the family had already been told this was her first homicide case, and that they doubted her abilities. She suspected, besides, that Jennifer’s father was a controlling person—he was doing most of the talking for the family—and that he mightn’t relinquish control to her, let her make the decisions. Her worries made her lose her usual poise, and she found herself playing with her hair, gesticulating wildly with her hands, and talking a blue streak.

  But despite the blue streak, she didn’t tell the Levins everything she knew. She didn’t tell them, when they complained that the press was making Jennifer sound wild, that if the case came to trial there might be much worse in store for them. There’d be time enough for that later. And she didn’t tell them all the police had already discovered about Jennifer’s activities on the night she was killed. She got the feeling they didn’t want to know. But she did mention warningly that Jack Litman was a formidable opponent.

  She knew him well. He’d been the brightest light in the Homicide Bureau when she’d first joined the DA’s office, and he’d once asked to have her second-seat him at a celebrated murder trial involving a cop who’d killed a prostitute. She’d been flattered, and even though the old boss had scotched the arrangement, saying a female prosecutor had no business handling a prostitute’s death, she and Litman had become buddies. They’d had a lot in common, not the least of which was the fact that the man Fairstein was seeing at the time—André Surmain, the former owner of the restaurant Lutèce—was, like Litman’s wife, French. The four of them had found pleasure in one another’s company and shared any number of Lupercalian dinners together. But even when the French connection was over, once Fairstein had broken up with Surmain and starting dating Feldman, she and Litman had remained good friends.

  The friendship with Litman would have to go, Fairstein decided shortly after the Levins left. When Litman tried a case, he left no stone unturned. And if he was going to turn up stones and search beneath them to expose all he could of Jennifer’s past, she wanted no part of him. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the drawn-faced family that had sat opposite her become any more stunned and miserable than they already were.

  John Cotter met with Jennifer’s grandfather, Arnold Domenitz, that week. Newsday had run the first column to state unequivocally that Robert’s story was just that. A story. And the columnist, Pulitzer prize-winner Murray Kempton, had even indicted the police for leaking Robert’s story to the press. They’d done it, Kempton had suggested in his usual eloquent style, because they were male chauvinists, “entrapped in our too-common assumption that these days no girl is virtuous.” Jennifer’s grandfather had felt grateful to Newsday after Kempton’s column and allowed one of the paper’s reporters to interview him. Cotter had been overjoyed. Newsday was new on the Manhattan press scene. It was fighting for readers, battling the two other tabloids in an out-and-out newpaper war. And with the Domenitz interview, the paper had gotten a leg up. Now, if he could persuade Domenitz to go on talking, Newsday might keep climbing.

  At the grandfather’s office—Domenitz was an insurance agent with New York Life—Cotter urged Domenitz to keep the lines of communication open. “Tell your story,” he said. “If you do, you can beat this guy Litman. Because public sympathy will be with you. But otherwise, Litman will wipe the floor with you.”

  Domenitz said he didn’t want to give Newsday another interview. He’d been advised by a lawyer to stop talking to the press. Some lawyer, Cotter thought, who didn’t know the way things worked.

  He was disappointed. Levin-Chambers was the biggest, juiciest story to have hit New York in years. In fact, he couldn’t remember a bigger one. The story had been on the front page of the tabloids day after day, and had even appeared twice on the front page of the one paper that generally didn’t treat murder up front—the New York Times.

  Why had Robert strangled Jennifer? Even after she’d been working on the case for several days, the motive eluded Linda Fairstein. But the motive might reveal itself later, she thought. For the present what she needed to do was become an expert on strangulation, even the kind that was supposed to enhance sexual pleasure, for it was possible that Litman might decide to abandon Robert’s accident story and claim instead that Jennifer’s strangulation had been part of the couple’s sex play.

  Fairstein had first learned about erotic strangulation from some of her rape victims. He put me to sleep, they’d say. At first she’d thought the victims meant that the men had drugged them. But she’d come to understand that they meant that their partners had used on them what forensic specialists called “the carotid sleeper”—applied pressure to their carotid arteries just as they were on the verge of orgasm. The pressure, which caused dizziness and even blackouts, was supposed to induce a sexual climax that went beyond the natural euphoria and feeling of blacking out that accompanies orgasm.

  The practice had grown more widespread in recent years. And it could kill. It had killed a Manhattan homosexual whose partner had insisted he’d been begged to try the sleeper. It had killed a Westchester boy who had strangled hi
mself during masturbation.

  By her second weekend on the case, Fairstein had digested all the technical material on the carotid sleeper that was available at the New York Academy of Medicine. But she was curious to see what young people like Robert and Jennifer might have known about it. After dinner in a restaurant with Feldman, she went with him to a popular bookstore and began combing the shelves.

  She saw nothing and realized she’d have to ask the clerk. Embarrassment flooded her. She couldn’t speak up. Not even with all her years of handling the most sordid and hideous sex crimes. She stopped silent in her tracks.

  Feldman came to her rescue. “Do you have anything on sexual strangulation?” he murmured to the clerk.

  The clerk shook his head and glanced at Fairstein worriedly.

  “You get a choice. You can use the regular wheel or the ‘P’ wheel,” Judge George Roberts said on the day that Litman and Fairstein came to have their trial judge selected. Roberts was no great believer in the wheels, which contained the names of available judges and, working on the same principle as a lottery drum, ensured that justice was selected at random. Roberts didn’t like the system, because not all judges were suited to all cases. Some trials were simple. Others were long and complex. To pull a judge’s name out of a hat—or in this case a wheel—could throw the courts into utter confusion, could put a judicial monkey at the controls of a legal moon shot.

  Of course, the court’s administrators had recognized this, too. That’s why there were two wheels. The regular wheel, which had the names of geniuses and lamebrains alike, and the “P” wheel, named for the fact that the judges in it were skilled at handling protracted trials. Lawyers with complex cases were urged to use the “P” wheel.

  Roberts proposed to Litman that he use it. But Litman shook his head. The judges in the “P” wheel were formidable. Hammers who socked defendants with stiff sentences. Stones who were inured to courtroom razzle-dazzle. “The regular wheel,” he said.