Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

Karen looked up, her throat sore from responding to the steady stream of well-wishers.

  “Too-much,” she wheezed.

  “I guess what they say is true—you can’t keep a woman quiet for long.”

  “Fuh-ny,” Karen said.

  “Here,” he said, bending over her. “Let me teach you how to talk through that tube in your throat.” When he had shown her how to place her fingers over the little air hole, he sat down in one of the striped chairs. “So,” he asked, “what do you have to say to me, after all this time?”

  There had been a measure of protection in her silence, an excuse for not having to participate, not having to communicate. Karen had gotten used to the idea of listening and observing, used to hiding behind the simplicity of one blink or two. She thought about all the questions everyone would now want to ask and the explanations she would be expected to give.

  “I want to go back to blinking,” she said.

  Sergeant Tug McCluskey arrived the next day accompanied by a thin man with a pinched face, horn-rimmed glasses and a dark-blue suit.

  “I don’t expect you’d have any way of remembering me,” Tug said kindly, “but I was there. I mean, I was one of the ones who … who found you.”

  Karen nodded as best she could. The burly policeman had small blue eyes, a prominent nose, and a weathered face, and the jacket of his uniform pulled a little too tightly across his girth.

  The other man cleared his throat. “I’m Michael Haller,” he said. “Investigator for the district attorney’s office.”

  Karen shifted her attention. Almost skeletally thin, the investigator’s dark suit hung poorly on him, reminding her of a hastily assembled scarecrow. His starched white collar was at least two sizes too big and he had the smallest hands Karen had ever seen on a man. His thick horn-rimmed glasses kept sliding down his nose, and every few seconds he would reach up with his right pinky finger and push them back.

  “Now that you’re able to talk,” he was saying in a brisk impersonal voice, “I’d like you to tell us what happened.”

  Karen looked at him in dismay. She had spent a lot of time thinking about what she would say to her family and her friends, framing the words carefully, but she never realized she would have to talk to the police.

  “Is this really necessary?” she replied, pressing her fingers over the tracheotomy tube as Waschkowski had taught her to do.

  “I’m afraid so,” Haller replied, fishing a pad and pen from his jacket pocket. “You see, the way it works is, Sergeant Mc-Cluskey here files a report, and then my office investigates.”

  “I see,” Karen conceded. “What is it you need to know?”

  “Do you remember the events of the night in question?”

  “Yes,” she replied, thinking how pompous he sounded.

  “Why don’t you tell us about it?”

  She looked from one to the other, wondering whether she could suddenly develop amnesia, but she didn’t suppose they would go away until they’d gotten what they’d come for, so she took a deep breath.

  “His name was Bob.”

  “He told you his name?”

  “Yes. At the party.”

  The two men exchanged glances.

  “Maybe you should start at the beginning,” the policeman suggested.

  Karen shut her eyes as images she didn’t want to see flooded her mind, images she didn’t want to share with these strangers. It took almost an hour for the whole story to come out, in bits and pieces and tears. By the time Haller ran out of questions, Karen’s mind was numb, her throat ached, her sheets were damp with perspiration, and her pillow was soaked with tears.

  “Why did he do such an awful thing?” she rasped. “Why?”

  Tug sighed. “There doesn’t always have to be a reason,” he admitted. “There are a lot of psychos wandering around.”

  “He didn’t seem like a psycho.”

  “Some of them don’t, until something sets them off.”

  “I can’t promise that we’ll get this guy,” Haller said, returning his pad and pen to his pocket. “These kinds of cases are difficult at best, and we don’t have very much to work with.”

  “But don’t you worry about that right now,” Tug told her. “You just concentrate on getting well, and leave the rest to us.”

  The scarecrow was already halfway out the door.

  Karen blinked, but the significance was lost on the two officers. She watched silently as they left. Maybe it was the way they probed for every tiny detail, almost like voyeurs, going over and over the same ground, but it was as though they had raped her all over again—coldly and callously violating the fragile sense of self she needed so desperately to protect.

  She took a small measure of comfort in knowing that, after this, telling her parents and her friends and Peter would be easy.

  “Don’t you think you were a little hard on her?” Tug asked as he walked with Haller down the front steps of the hospital.

  “It’s how you get at the truth,” the investigator said with a shrug.

  “So, what do you think?”

  The investigator shook his head in disgust and sighed. “It’ll never get to court,” he said.

  “You don’t think you can find him?”

  “Oh, I’ll probably find him, if I look hard enough, if his name really is Bob, if he really does go to Harvard. But what’s the point?”

  “Jesus, Haller,” Tug protested. “He shouldn’t get away with what he did to that girl.”

  “Come on, Sergeant, don’t go getting soft this late in the game. She knew him, for God’s sake. They were partying, they were drinking. She went for a walk with him. At two o’clock in the morning. For all I know, she could have been a willing partner and things just got a little out of hand.”

  “You didn’t see her the way I did, dumped under those bushes,” the veteran policeman replied. “I don’t think you can call that a little out of hand.”

  “So maybe she teased him, led him on a bit and then, when it was too late, changed her mind and went virginal on him, and he lost his temper. That kind of thing happens all the time, you know. Women say no when they mean yes, and yes when they mean no, and who knows what they really want?”

  “I don’t think so.” Tug shook his head. “I think it happened exactly the way she said it did.”

  “You may be right, Sergeant,” Haller said with another shrug, “and I’ll follow through on the investigation because that’s what I get paid to do, and because maybe I feel a little sorry for her, too, all beat up like that. But take my word for it, the DA won’t prosecute. You know as well as I do these cases are tough enough to prove even when there are half a dozen eyewitnesses, a ton of physical evidence, and we’re dealing with a known offender. But a guy from Harvard Law School? Jesus, he could represent himself and still make mincemeat out of that girl.”

  “He shouldn’t walk,” Tug insisted.

  “Maybe not,” Haller agreed, pushing his glasses up his nose and reaching for his car keys. “But in the end, it’ll be her word against his.”

  “If it was one of my granddaughters lying there, looking like that, I’d rip the balls off the bastard.”

  Haller sighed again. “If she were my granddaughter,” he said, “I’d tell her to go home and forget it—and be more careful the next time.”

  seven

  By Saturday afternoon, Karen had forgiven the policemen. She reasoned they probably didn’t realize they were being offensive. More likely, it was their way of being polite, deliberately trying not to show any emotion as she plodded through her grim recitation.

  Still, there was the feeling that they hadn’t believed her that kept nagging at her, that they thought her in some way responsible for what Bob had done. But of course that was absurd—she had tried everything she could to stop him. Karen decided that it was only because the policemen were strangers and knew nothing about her values or her upbringing that they had cross-examined her in such a harsh way.

  She sipp
ed the last of her afternoon shake as she waited for her parents to arrive, knowing that, even though she would have to tell her grim story again, this time she would be talking to the people who knew her best and loved her and would, above all, understand.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Beverly cooed shortly before four o’clock.

  The black was gone. Her mother was wearing a bright-red suit with a cropped jacket and a flattering A-line skirt that Karen had never seen before, and she had been to the beauty parlor. Her hair was perfectly coiffed and her nails gleamed with red polish.

  “How’s my girl?” Leo asked, looking rather drab beside his flamboyant wife as he took the seat farthest from his daughter.

  “Better,” Karen told him. It wouldn’t matter if it were true or not; she knew it was what he needed to hear.

  “That’s good.” He nodded, satisfied.

  Leo Kern was the kind of man who found it easier not to see ugliness in the world around him. He spent his days in a sterile stainless-steel cocoon, where defects could be fixed, as if by magic, decay could be drilled out of existence, and discoloration could be polished to gleaming purity. He left his wife to deal with the harsh realities of raising a family, and Karen sometimes felt he was more involved with the lives of his patients than with the lives of his daughters.

  “What is that you’re doing with your fingers?” her mother asked.

  “Closing the hole,” Karen told her. “So I can talk.”

  “And is that what you’ve been doing since Thursday—talking up a storm?”

  “I guess,” Karen answered. “The police came to see me.”

  “The police?” Beverly echoed sharply. “What for?”

  “They’re investigating what happened.”

  Her parents exchanged a glance that was too quick for Karen to catch.

  “What did you tell them?” Beverly asked.

  “I told them everything I could remember.”

  Beverly settled herself in her chair. “Well then, I guess maybe you’d better tell us, too.”

  Karen took a moment to search for the right words, the right phrases that would convey the facts of that night to her parents without the horror. The last thing she wanted was to upset them unnecessarily.

  “You went to Jill’s party,” Beverly prompted.

  “Yes,” Karen said. “I went to Jill’s party. And right after I got there, I met a friend of a friend of Andy’s former roommate, named Bob, from Harvard Law School. I don’t know what his last name is—he never told me, but he seemed very nice and he was attentive, and we sort of spent the evening together.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Beverly commented.

  “That part wasn’t,” Karen agreed with an uncustomary hint of bitterness in her voice. “When the party was over, Bob offered to help me get a cab to Aunt Edna’s. It was pretty late, after two o’clock, and I thought that would be all right. We waited and waited but we couldn’t find a cab, so then he suggested that we walk across the park.”

  “A nice young man from Harvard Law School offered to escort you across Central Park at two o’clock in the morning?” Beverly summarized.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I guess that explains how you got there, although God knows why you would go into such a dangerous place in the middle of the night, even if you were with a friend of a friend of Andy’s former roommate.”

  “It was cold,” Karen told her. “Walking seemed like a better idea than standing around.”

  “So, you were in the park. Then what happened?”

  Karen took a deep breath. “He attacked me.”

  “Who attacked you?” Beverly asked, looking blank.

  “Bob did. He made a pass. I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t let me go.”

  Beverly stared at her daughter with a combination of dismay and disbelief. “You were, you were… damaged”—she couldn’t even bring herself to say the right word—”by a Harvard Law student?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was someone you knew?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” Beverly cried.

  “Why what?”

  “Why would the young man behave like that? What did you do?”

  “What do you mean, what did I do?” Karen replied. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Well, there must be something you’re not telling us,” Beverly said flatly. “Nice young men from Harvard don’t go around taking advantage of innocent girls for no reason.”

  “Well, this one did,” Karen retorted.

  “Oh my God,” her mother muttered, springing up, almost knocking over her chair.

  “What’s the matter?” Karen asked.

  Beverly looked to Leo for support, but Leo was looking at the crease in his trousers with a very pained expression on his face.

  “I thought we were talking about some maniac. I thought some very sick stranger grabbed you off the street, and you couldn’t defend yourself.”

  “I couldn’t defend myself,” Karen insisted. “He was too strong.”

  “I just don’t understand you at all,” Beverly snapped. “You keep telling us you’re madly in love with Peter Bauer. So why on earth would you take up with someone else like that?”

  “I didn’t take up with him,” Karen protested, tears filling her eyes, forgetting for the moment that Peter Bauer had never fit into her mother’s narrow category of acceptable suitors. “He said he was taking me to Aunt Edna’s. That’s all. I believed him.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t lead him on in some way, or give him any reason to expect that you might be receptive to his advances?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t lean up against him, say, in a manner that he might have misconstrued?”

  Karen remembered Bob pulling her inside his coat when she complained of the cold, but that had been his idea, not hers.

  “It wasn’t like that,” she cried, the tears now flowing freely down her cheeks. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Oh, darling,” Beverly said hastily, grabbing a tissue and dabbing at her daughter’s eyes. “Now don’t get yourself into a tizzy. Nobody said you meant to do anything wrong. It’s just that sometimes we don’t realize how our actions might appear to another person. The way we smile, perhaps, or the way we stand or the way we say things. It’s so easy to be misinterpreted.”

  “I was just having a good time,” Karen sobbed.

  “Of course you were.” Her mother relented. “Just like anyone else at a party would. You had no way of knowing that this Bob person would take it so seriously.”

  “No,” Karen mumbled. This wasn’t going at all the way she had thought it would. First the police, and now her parents. She was suddenly very confused.

  “I don’t mean to distress you,” her mother added, “but your father and I just can’t understand how you could have gotten yourself into such a situation, how you could have been so, so … careless.”

  Leo had yet to say a word.

  “Neither do I,” Karen sobbed, letting go of the tube to cover her face with her hands.

  After a moment, Beverly sat back down in her chair, crossed her legs at the ankles and clasped her hands together in her lap.

  “Yes, well, I think we have a pretty clear idea of what took place and we’re not going to dwell on it any longer,” she said firmly. “You’ll soon be well again, and I think it’s time that we consider this … unfortunate incident over and done, and get on with the rest of our lives.”

  Over and done, Karen thought wistfully. Could it really be over and done with a snap of her mother’s fingers?

  “Do you think so?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do,” her mother affirmed. “I can tell how terribly upset talking about the whole thing is making you, and I don’t see any reason to put you through the painful ordeal of repeating this story again. After all, it’s none of anyone’s business.”

  “The police know,” Karen reminded her. “I told them everything.
They’re going to find Bob and arrest him and make him pay for what he did.”

  “Your father will take care of that,” Beverly said smoothly. “The last thing we’re going to do is let anyone drag you into some sordid courtroom and smear your name all over the newspapers.”

  “But I’ll have to testify,” said Karen. “I want to. I want to see him convicted and put in jail.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” her mother declared. “You’re not going to have anything more to do with this whole unpleasant mess. From now on, we’ll simply tell anyone who asks that you were taken to the hospital because… because of an accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “Yes.” Beverly declared. She studied a speck of lint on her red jacket. “Actually, that’s pretty much what we’ve been telling people anyway.”

  Karen looked from her mother to her father and back to her mother again. “You told people I had an accident?”

  “We weren’t very specific about anything, of course. After all, we didn’t really know anything. We just sort of intimated that it was an accident. There wasn’t any reason to go into the gruesome details.”

  “What kind of accident did I have?”

  Beverly hesitated a moment. “I think we’ll make it an automobile accident,” she decided. “That’s the most logical choice, isn’t it? I mean, considering how damaged you were, we can’t very well say you fell out of a tree, now can we?”

  Karen’s head suddenly began to hurt. “But that’s a lie,” she said.

  “Well, if it is, it’s only to save you, save us, from a lot of humiliating gossip.” Beverly’s full lower lip began to quiver. “Isn’t it enough that we have to know what went on, does the rest of Great Neck have to know, too? We’re respected members of the community. There’s never been a hint of scandal in our family. Think what it would do to your father’s practice if this ever came out.”

  “Now, Mother.” Leo spoke up for the first time.

  “And think of your sister,” Beverly went on, as though he hadn’t. “If you go around broadcasting all the ugly facts, people might start asking what you had in mind when you went strolling in Central Park in the middle of the night with a young man you hardly knew.”