I expected to hear the governor’s voice. What I heard was Mom.
“I just made baklava. Want to join me for dessert?”
“Bob’s here. I’ve got to go.”
“Oh, please tell him hello for me.”
I started to respond when I heard my front door open and shut. I looked into the dining room. Bob was gone. I couldn’t believe it. He had never walked out on me before and I’d never walked out on him, either.
“Mom, I can’t talk now. Good-bye.”
I started after Bob, hoping to catch him, but when I got to the door, he’d already started his car. I felt hurt. I’d told him the calls were important and he’d just gotten here. Was he really going to drive all the way back to Albany because of the phone calls?
I started out to stop him, but as I stepped over the threshold, I heard the kitchen phone ring. Bob started backing his car down the drive. The phone rang again and then a third time.
I hesitated and then hurried back inside to answer.
“Miss Fox,” a woman’s voice said, “please hold for the governor.”
24
I telephoned bob the next morning, but there was no answer at his apartment. I thought about driving to Albany to salvage our romantic weekend, but the director of the women’s shelter dropped by my house unexpectedly with the forms that I needed to apply for the LEAA grant. She warned me that the deadline was only days away and the application was massive. When she offered to help, I invited her in and we spent all of Saturday and most of Sunday completing the application. During breaks, I called Bob’s apartment, but he either wasn’t there or wasn’t answering.
The next few days were a whirlwind. The governor announced that he was appointing me to a special legislative task force and Whitaker held a press conference. He did all the talking but I was suddenly in demand as a speaker at various county women’s groups. The task force took whatever time I had after work. I did manage to finally speak to Bob and he apologized for leaving at the exact same moment that I was trying to apologize to him for being preoccupied with the phone calls. His final days of school and my career, we agreed, were making it rough on our relationship. But I knew everything would be fine once he chose a hospital for his residency and the attention that I was now drawing dissipated. We’d been together nearly nine years. We could certainly weather a few rough weeks of being apart.
Our task force drafted a new statute and the governor rammed it through the state legislature just before the November elections. My boss won handily with strong support from women voters.
Everyone assumed there would be a stampede of battered women charging their husbands with abuse now that we had given them the right to have their abusers arrested. But we didn’t even see a trickle at our office. Women didn’t seem to be asking us to pursue cases against their abusers.
It didn’t take me long to pinpoint why. Despite our new law, the forty-three police departments in Westchester County were still treating domestic violence as “family disputes.” Every cop wanted to be Dirty Harry, not a social worker with a badge. I worked with women’s groups to get the local American Civil Liberties Union to announce a civil rights lawsuit against the police in all forty-three departments unless they began enforcing the new law. I made sure that Will Harris at the White Plains Daily heard about the ACLU filing. His story, “Local Cops Face Possible Suit,” got everyone’s attention, especially after he quoted me saying, “I believe battered women should have every weapon at their disposal to guarantee justice is done. If that means suing the police, then they should do it.”
The police chiefs were furious but public pressure was on my side and they had no choice but to back down. I was learning how to work the system.
None of my fellow assistant D.A.s wanted to pursue domestic violence cases, either. Like the cops, they were interested in only “real criminals”—murderers, rapists, and burglars. I reminded them that Rudy Hitchins was a murderer and that domestic violence was a serious crime. A few agreed to prosecute cases against husbands who were beating their wives, but things were not happening fast enough, and now that Whitaker was safe for another four years, his interest in domestic violence was beginning to wane.
And then a miracle happened. Whitaker called me into his office and told me that Westchester County had been selected for an LEAA grant.
“Do you know what other counties got grants?” I asked.
“Philadelphia, Miami-Dade County, and Santa Barbara, California. That’s it. I want to hold a press conference this afternoon to announce that you will be creating and running our new Domestic Violence Unit.”
As soon as I got back to my desk, I called Bob’s apartment to share the news. But there was no answer. I called Mom instead. We not only had a new law on the books, but I now was going to get federal funds to give that law teeth. It was the beginning of a new dawn in women’s rights and I was excited to be playing a role in it.
25
I hit the ground running. Whitaker arranged for space in the annex across the street from the Westchester County Courthouse. I wanted abused women to feel welcome, so I designed our lobby to look like a living room, not a sterile, cold office. Steinberg nearly wet his pants when I added playpens. Many battered women who brought complaints to police or religious leaders were told by these men that they didn’t have any options but to stay in their relationships. I thought women would be more comfortable talking to women, so I hired Lucy, Eunice, and Anne Marie as domestic violence aides.
Through the courthouse grapevine, I heard the cops and male assistant D.A.s refer to us as the “Tit Patrol” and “Panty Brigade.” Paul Pisani was taking great delight in ridiculing us, especially me. I didn’t let the other cynics bother me, but I was angry about “Mr. Invincible.” The more I heard about him, the more I hated him. I knew he was personally responsible for causing two marriages to break up. He seemed to enjoy using his charm to seduce married female employees whom he then dumped after they had blurted out to their husbands that they’d fallen for someone new. It takes two to tango, but he seemed to delight in targeting emotionally vulnerable women, bedding them, and then tossing them aside like used tissues.
With the threat of an ACLU civil rights suit hanging over their heads, the police begrudgingly began making arrests when a battered wife complained and Harris wrote a sensational story about the upswing in domestic violence prosecutions. He was unabashed in his support for our new unit, and soon we were being inundated with women from Scarsdale to Bedford asking for help. Finally, the dam had burst! When it came to abuse, social status and fat wallets didn’t count.
While Lucy, Eunice, and Anne Marie did a fantastic job interviewing women, when they confronted the abusers, the men either ignored them or worse. These men didn’t believe anyone had a right to tell them how to treat their wives. I learned quickly that most of our new clients didn’t want their husbands in jail. They just wanted them to stop hitting them. We came up with a ploy. When a battered woman came in, we warned her husband that he would be arrested and charged with a crime if he didn’t agree to counseling sessions. I had stationery printed with DOMESTIC VIOLENCE UNIT, WESTCHESTER DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE emblazoned across the top in bold, impressive letters, in English and Spanish. Whenever a woman came to our office, we issued her a letter on our stationery that declared: “This woman and her children are under the protection of the Domestic Violence Unit of Westchester County …” We told our clients that they needed to show the letters to their husbands and also the police if they were called. Actually, the letters had no legal clout. Only a judge could issue an order of protection. The letters scared some abusers and infuriated others, but they also helped identify true victims to the police. We were slowly making our criminal justice system respond.
Judges were another problem. Time and again, I’d walk into a courtroom and a judge would bark at me, “Why don’t you get a real case, Miss Fox?” Or they’d throw the case out with an admonishment to stop wasting the court’
s time. One judge told a married woman with a black eye and a swollen jaw that she didn’t belong in his courtroom. “You need to go to family court,” he said. I had to remind him that a battered woman had additional rights under the new law. Even when we got a case to trial, jurors would openly ask during jury selection, “What did she do to make him so mad that he beat her?”
I also discovered that many of our clients were flawed. They had poor self-esteem, and many had drug and alcohol problems. When a badly bruised Janet Cummings arrived in our office and told us that the police had refused to arrest her husband, I got angry. I called the White Plains police officer who’d responded to the call and demanded to know why he hadn’t done anything.
“Her husband beat her within an inch of her life,” I said.
“You know, she’s a drunk,” the officer responded. “She falls down a lot.”
“Come off it! What kind of fall leaves welts and bruises under your arms or on the backs of your legs? What kind of a fall leaves choke marks around a woman’s neck?”
I got Cummings to press criminal charges against her husband, but when I tried to get her into a shelter, the director said Cummings wasn’t welcome because she was, indeed, an alcoholic. No one wanted her. On the day her case was called in court, she was nowhere to be found. She finally arrived, intoxicated, two hours late. The furious judge dismissed the case and admonished me for wasting his time.
I was angry at Cummings until I realized that she drank because she was miserable. Her husband threatened to strangle and burn her. But she was too emotionally crippled to save herself and I didn’t have the resources to help her.
Each case taught me more. Each case helped me sharpen my skills.
We’d been open about a month when Maya Lopez, a petite, soft-spoken woman in her early thirties with faint bruises, came to see us. She said her husband, Juan, often came home drunk and beat her. She endured his brutality until he started hitting their ten-year-old son. The morning she asked for help, she had put their son on a flight to Puerto Rico to live with his grandmother and then took a bus to our office.
“Juan is going to kill me for sending our son away.”
“We can move you into a women’s shelter where you’ll be safe,” I told her. “I’ll have him arrested, but you’ll have to swear out a complaint and agree to testify against him.”
A horrified look filled Maya’s face. “No, no, no, he will kill me if I do that.”
“We can get an order of protection from a judge. You can’t let this man brutalize you and your son.”
Despite my pleadings, Maya was simply too scared. Juan had her under a controlling spell. I felt frustrated. I couldn’t help her if she didn’t want to help herself. Before she left, I wrote my home number on the back of a business card and gave it to her.
“Your husband has no reason to stop unless you get the police involved.”
After she was gone, I tried to focus on my work, but I was worried about her. I didn’t want a repeat of the Hitchins/Mary Margaret tragedy, so I called the police in Yonkers where Maya lived with Juan. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to develop a relationship with the Yonkers police chief and he wasn’t around, so I spoke to one of his deputies.
“There’s a woman in Yonkers, her name is Maya Lopez, and she’s the victim of domestic violence. Her husband beats her and I’m worried that he is going to seriously hurt her. She put their son on a flight to Puerto Rico this morning because the husband began beating him as well.”
“She swear out a complaint with your office?” he asked.
“We’re working on that. I’m calling to see if you could you have one of your officers swing by their apartment to check on her.”
“We don’t have enough manpower to do that. Especially not for a domestic. I don’t know how things are in White Plains, but in Yonkers, we can’t babysit every woman who gets backhanded by her husband.”
“Listen,” I said in an irked voice, “I’m not talking about someone being slapped. This guy may kill her.”
“Well, if you’re that damn worried, maybe you should drive down here and check on her yourself,” he said, hanging up.
I was restless all night. The next morning, Anne Marie hurried into my office. “It’s Maya,” she announced. “You won’t believe what he’s done to her!”
“Is she okay?” I asked, shooting up from my desk.
“She’s in our lobby. I’ll bring her into your office.”
Maya appeared with two black eyes and swollen lips. I was angry, but not horrified. I had seen much worse.
“Juan was angry because I sent our son away. He said I had no right to take his son. I showed him your card and told him he couldn’t treat me like a dog.”
“Good for you!”
She shook her head and said, “No, it was not good for me.”
Anne Marie said, “Maya, show Miss Fox what he did to you.”
There was more? I thought.
Maya pulled up her blouse, revealing a large strip of bloody gauze across her abdomen. She gingerly removed it. Just under her bra, her husband had carved his name—JUAN—with a paring knife. The red cuts were ugly jagged lines.
“Anne Marie’s taking you to a doctor right now,” I said. “And you’re going to a shelter. I’m having Juan arrested.”
“No, no. I shouldn’t have sent our boy away.”
“Bullshit! Maya, your husband beats you. He cut his name into your skin. We need you to go into a safe house before he harms you again. I’m getting him arrested.”
“But he’ll lose his job. How will we pay our bills?”
“I’ll get you help. This man doesn’t love you. Someone who loves you doesn’t cut his name into your flesh.”
“He gets jealous. But that’s because he does love me. Maybe you can talk to him first. Tell him to stop. Please, just talk to him first.”
It was the same rationalization I’d heard from Mary Margaret and a dozen other abused women. I told Anne Marie to take Maya to the emergency room and then to a Yonkers women’s shelter. The moment they were gone, I called the police. As I was dialing, I heard the sounds of a commotion coming from our lobby. I dashed out to see what was wrong and nearly collided with a huge Hispanic man who weighed at least 285 pounds and stood well over six feet tall.
“You the bitch who gave my wife this card?” he yelled, holding up the business card that I’d given Maya the day before.
“Juan Lopez?” I asked.
The fact that I didn’t appear intimidated surprised him.
“Stay away from my wife,” he said, poking a finger at my nose. “You’ve got no right to interfere between me and her. This is family!”
“Sir, I have every right to interfere when you beat your wife and cut your name into her abdomen. I can put you in jail right now for what you did to her, and if you ever touch her again, I’ll—”
Juan cut me off. “Look,” he hollered. He dropped both of his massive arms to his side and grabbed his untucked shirt, which he raised with his hands, exposing his fat belly. The word “MAYA” was carved into his skin.
“You don’t know nothing. I cut us because we love each other. This shit is family, not you.”
Lowering his shirt, he said, “No one tells me what I can and can’t do when it comes to my wife and kid. Stay the fuck out of my family’s business.”
“Mr. Lopez, I’m calling the police!”
He looked at me with menacing eyes and said, “You ain’t taking Maya from me. She’s mine!” He headed toward the exit as I raced back to my office phone.
One of our workers called the Yonkers shelter where Anne Marie was taking Maya.
“Maya’s not here,” the shelter’s director said. “She left a few minutes after Anne Marie dropped her off. She was too scared to stay.”
No one knew where Maya had gone, but I suspected it was back to be with her abusive husband. That was the last place she should go.
I telephoned O’Brien. “Please call someone yo
u know at the Yonkers P.D.,” I pleaded. “I want Juan arrested, but they aren’t taking me seriously.”
A half hour later, O’Brien called back. A Yonkers policeman had stopped at the apartment that the Lopezes rented but no one had answered.
It was late when I got home that night, and Wilbur made it clear when I brought him inside the kitchen that he didn’t like waiting for his dinner. I generally fixed something for both of us at the same time. If you think dogs can be persistent beggars, you’ve never had a pot-bellied pig at your feet.
I was putting the final touches on my pasta salad and Wilbur’s bowl of apples and pig pellets when I heard the sound of breaking glass and car tires squealing. I stopped what I was doing and quietly moved to the front of the house. Nothing seemed amiss until I noticed slivers of glass sprinkled across my hardwood floor beneath my front window. I walked closer for a better look, and what I saw made me instantly drop to the floor.
There was a bullet hole in the front window about the size of my pinkie. Someone had shot into my house, and for all that I knew, the car I’d heard squealing away had left the shooter lurking outside.
Keeping low, I pulled the drapes and duck-walked to a light switch. I turned off the light in the room, making it completely dark. Rising next to a window, I peeked outside. I didn’t see anything suspicious.
Suddenly, I remembered I hadn’t locked my front door, so I immediately crawled to it and threw the dead bolt. That’s when I remembered that I’d brought in Wilbur through the back door and not dead bolted it, either. Wilbur looked up from his bowl as I rushed past him in the kitchen. For the first time since I’d gotten him, I thought about how a Doberman might have been a better choice.
I didn’t own a handgun. I didn’t even have a baseball bat in the house. The only weapon close was a knife. Wilbur gave me a nervous glance and grunted when I grabbed it.
I dialed the police and waited with the knife in my hand while Wilbur happily gobbled his dinner. A uniformed officer arrived within minutes, followed by O’Brien. The detective looked at the bullet hole in the window and followed the trajectory to my dining room wall where the slug was embedded.
Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel Page 13