Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

  “I was almost forty when I married,” Karen reflected. “I liked my husband but I wasn’t in love with him. He just happened to be the one who was there when I realized it would probably be my last chance. We had a pretty bad time of it, you know, a lot of conflicting expectations, but now—now I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

  Tess leaned forward and pressed Karen’s hand.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she promised.

  The doorbell at St. Francis Wood rang at eight o’clock that evening. Karen was in the kitchen with Amy and Jessica, finishing up the dinner dishes. She heard Ted open the door and then there was a flurry of muffled conversation before the door slammed shut. Drying her hands, Karen started out of the kitchen and bumped into Ted coming to get her.

  “There are some people who’d like to say a few words to you,” he said, unable to conceal the big grin on his face. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Ever since the press had descended on them, Ted had been her shield, letting no one but Tess, Lamar, and the Shaffers through the door. Curious, Karen took several steps past him and looked down the hall.

  “Hi, kiddo,” Mitch Rankin greeted her. He was still a bear of a man at fifty-nine. “If we’d known how popular this address was, we’d have come a lot sooner.”

  “Now don’t be upset with us, dear,” Ione urged, a gray Peter Pan at fifty-eight. “We just had to come.”

  “We figured you could use some friendly faces out here in West Hostile,” Demelza added. At sixty-nine, her once thick black hair was now thin and white and she kidded about how it had taken the ravages of colon cancer to trim her figure down to gaunt.

  “The truth is,” Jenna said, her arm linked in John’s, “we needed a vacation.” Jenna had kept her carrot-colored hair and her baby fat, even into her forties, and John looked even more like Sherlock Holmes now that his face was creased from half a century of living.

  “I think it’s nothing short of amazing that it never occurred to me to come to California before this,” Felicity declared, still straight as a stick at fifty-two, still the dancer.

  “We’re already camped out at Campton Place and we’re staying for the duration,” Mitch concluded, referring to one of San Francisco’s finest hotels. “And we won’t hear another word about it.”

  Ted came up behind Karen and squeezed her shoulders. “I think they mean it,” he whispered.

  The pillars of her shaky past, she thought, the stalwart Sullivan Street set, who had always been there to defend her, protect her and support her, were still lining up behind her without question, without judgment. Tears crowded her eyes.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she cried.

  “We have it all planned,” Ione told her as they settled themselves on the pale-green sofas that faced each other across the living room. “We’re going to court every day and do our best to remember everything that happens. That way, when you put together what each of us saw and heard, we’re bound to come up with a pretty complete picture.”

  “Not necessarily objective, mind you,” Demelza conceded, “but complete.”

  “Then, after court, you’ll all come here for dinner,” Karen announced, glancing at Ted for confirmation. “It won’t be too much work and it’ll giveme something to do.”

  “Amy and I will make sure it’s not too much for her,” Jessica put in. “She won’t let us go to court.”

  “Certainly not,” Karen retorted. “I won’t have you being hounded by the media any more than you already are.”

  The doorbell rang again at nine-fifteen.

  “Now, don’t say a word,” Nancy Yanow ordered, pushing her way past the tactless mob of reporters and shutting the door firmly in their faces. “So I’m a month early—you won’t even know I’m here. I can bunk in the sunporch or on the sofa or anywhere there’s a horizontal space, and I’m not leaving. If you think for a moment I’d go back out there, you’re crazy.”

  Karen hugged her sister-in-law and closest friend, who had grown even rounder with the passing of time.

  “As long as you brought your camera,” she said, “it won’t be a total loss.”

  “Of course I did.” Nancy grinned, her asymmetrical eyes twinkling. “You didn’t think I’d come all this way just for you, did you?”

  Ted disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a tray of glasses and two bottles of champagne.

  “I was saving this for after the verdict,” he said. “But I think we should drink it now.” He popped the corks and poured. When everyone had a glass, he raised his own. “To justice,” he said.

  “To justice,” everyone else echoed. “To convicting the bastard.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Karen murmured, taking a small sip. “To justice.”

  The clock ticked past midnight. There was little more the defense could do. They had spent a thousand hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to find the answer, but no answer had been found, and they had run out of time.

  The senator sat at his desk in a pool of lamplight, spinning a paper clip on the end of a pencil. Randy was slouched in a chair across from him. The campaign offices were dark and silent.

  “Feels like a funeral in here,” Robert observed wryly.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dig the grave just yet,” Randy said buoyantly.

  “I’m not.” The senator chuckled. “I just figured everyone else was.”

  “Not quite,” Mary Catherine said from the doorway. She was holding three glasses and a bottle of champagne.

  “What’s that for?” Robert asked.

  “Two months ago, if you’d asked me,” she replied, “I’d have said that not only the campaign but your whole political career was over. But I must have been reading from the wrong script because, despite this whole mess, here you are, with practically the whole country rallying behind you, one step away from the nomination. All that’s standing between you and the White House is an acquittal.”

  What a fickle world it was, Robert mused. Not that long ago, a politician had been crucified for a harmless little pec cadillo in Bimini, and now here he was—being forgiven. He wanted to believe it was because he was a more important person, but he knew it had more to do with the sorry state of the nation.

  “And if the voters believe you’re telling the truth,” the administrative assistant added, “why shouldn’t the jury?”

  “She’s got a point,” observed Randy. “Even though we couldn’t find a plausible reason for the woman to cry rape, it’s still all going to come down to her word against yours.”

  “That’s right,” Mary Catherine confirmed. “And you can bet the prosecution will have a pretty hard time trying to convince anyone that a man like you would have to use force.”

  “Then let’s drink to an acquittal,” Robert suggested.

  Mary Catherine poured the champagne and the three of them raised their glasses, the click of touching rims echoing through the silent suite of offices.

  “To the acquittal,” they toasted.

  Lamar Pope did some of his best thinking just before dawn. He rarely slept more than four hours a night anyway, and even then his restless dreams were filled with images of Darcy, his bright, beautiful little girl.

  He had never stopped blaming himself for her death. Because back then, being a cop was his life, all he thought about, all he needed. Being a father had come a distant second. Even after his wife died, leaving him alone with a twelve-year-old he hardly knew, it didn’t change anything. He always meant to spend more time with her, get to know her better, but somehow the weeks, months, years slipped by and he kept putting it off. Until it was too late.

  Then he learned about her after she was gone, from other people who had taken the time to know her and make a place for her in their lives.

  “She was an angel,” they said. “We were blessed to have known her.”

  “She loved you so much and was so proud of you,” they told him. “And she always knew you were there, looking out for her.”r />
  But he hadn’t been. Instead, he had been out looking for some sleazy stool pigeon the night she was raped and beaten to death.

  He spent the weeks after the funeral stumbling around in a drunken stupor, knowing that, if she had meant little to him when she was alive, she meant everything to him now that she was dead. Around the time he sobered up, the punk who had brutalized her walked.

  “The motherfucker has an airtight alibi,” the homicide detective who handled the case told him. “Of course we know it’s bogus, but we can’t break it.”

  Lamar nodded calmly. “Mind if I take a look at some of the files?”

  “Shit, no,” the detective said. “If it was my kid that had been offed like that, I’d sure want a peek.”

  The files told Lamar that the punk was a rich college kid, a football jock, and that his team had lost a crucial game the evening Darcy was murdered. The alibi had come from several of the punk’s teammates, who swore he had been with them the whole night.

  Lamar put the files away. Then he began to probe. It didn’t take him long to learn that the punk had been involved in three other incidents—one in El Paso, one in Lubbock, and one in Abilene—over the past two years. None of them had resulted in anything as compelling as a death, but each time the punk had been arrested and then released, either because the charges were mysteriously dropped or because he was provided with an airtight alibi by his friends.

  Darcy’s father began to watch and wait. He was in no hurry, he knew his opportunity would come. It took seven months, but sure enough, the punk made his last mistake.

  On a spring night, in the middle of final exams, the football jock took another high school girl for a ride into the desert west of Amarillo—another high school girl who was too drunk or too naive to know what he had in mind.

  Lamar heard her screaming as he braked to a stop behind the red Corvette. He was out of his car in less than three seconds, his gun already in his hand and aimed at the punk’s head. He never thought twice, he just pulled the trigger.

  The girl was too frightened and too grateful to wonder how Lamar happened to be there. She just clung to him and sobbed. He wrapped her in a blanket and drove her home. Then he went down to the station to report the killing.

  Once the girl told her story, he was exonerated of any wrongdoing. No one seemed to care why he was in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night. They were only grateful that he was. He even became a bit of a local hero.

  Amarillo had been good to Lamar for more than forty years. He could have stayed, but he left. Too many memories of too big a failure made him pack and go. He never remarried. He knew he had nothing to give a woman. And although it was clear to him that he could never be anything but a cop, he intended to be a different kind of cop.

  For the twenty years since Darcy’s death, Lamar had concentrated on putting puzzles together, special kinds of puzzles having to do with only one kind of crime, until there was no one better at it.

  Now, as the hands on his wristwatch inched toward six, he stared one last time at the scribbled notes in front of him. Page after page, hiding a hint here, offering him a clue there. He had crisscrossed the country three times in the past six weeks, digging, probing—doing what he did best. Finally, it had come down to two sheets of paper, one culled from a report filed by a deceased New York police investigator named Michael Haller, the other scribbled during a reluctant conversation with a Dr. Stanley Waschkowski from New Hampshire. Lamar placed the two sheets side by side on his kitchen table and sat there looking from one to the other.

  “I’ll be damned,” he muttered slowly.

  He knew the defense would never figure it out. After all, they were investigating Karen Doniger, not Robert Willmont. He was the only one who was investigating them both. He also knew there was nothing he could do about what he had discovered. And he was honest enough to admit that there was probably nothing he would do, even if he could. It was enough just to know he was right. And he was right. He knew it inside—by the little click he always felt when the missing piece of a puzzle finally fell into place.

  three

  The inner third-floor corridor at the Hall of Justice was packed. Media representatives from every corner of the country milled around with literally hundreds of curiosity seekers who had been disappointed by the space limitations in the Glass Courtroom.

  Under pressure, Judge Washington had agreed to a closed-circuit TV setup wired to an adjoining courtroom where the media overflow could follow the proceedings. The curiosity seekers were out of luck.

  Tess Escalante and her staff assistant, a plain, spare woman with a photographic memory named Anne Jenks, made their way through the crowd.

  “I knew this was going to be a circus,” the ADA yelled above the din. “But I never expected anything like this.”

  Lamar was waiting for them inside.

  “I’ve got something interesting for you,” he announced. “Unfortunately, it’s FYI only. You can’t use any of it.”

  “Show me,” Tess said.

  He pulled out a sheet of paper he had drafted less than an hour ago and handed it to her.

  “It seems our senator may not be the human saint that he and his PR people would like the world to believe.”

  “Where on earth did you get this?” she marveled as she scanned the page.

  “Don’t ask.”

  Tess smiled briefly. It was his standard response. She stared at his scrawled notes. She was the only ADA in the department who could decipher his handwriting.

  “His father paid off the one in college?”

  “Yes,” Lamar confirmed. “She agreed to talk to me, but only in private. She’s married now, with a family, and she won’t come forward.”

  “And this one?”

  “I had a hunch.” Actually, he had researched every sex or seemingly sex-related crime in the city of San Francisco for the past thirty years. “I was able to track down two of her old neighbors. They said he was a regular visitor, three or four nights a week. She used to tell everyone she and her Bobby were going to get married. The neighbors said they would have gone to the police when she died, but they were told it was a suicide. Besides, they didn’t believe for a moment that such a nice young man could have had anything to do with her death.”

  “What about this reporter who went to jail?”

  “She claims she was framed because she had secretly taken some pictures of them together. Of course, I’ve only got her word for it, but part of her story checks out—her apartment was broken into the week before she was arrested and nothing of any value was taken. I talked to the D.C. police, and they confirmed that it was an anonymous tip that led to her arrest on drug and prostitution charges.”

  “The old anonymous tipster.”

  “Yeah. She maintained that someone called and set up an interview for her in that particular hotel room, but she didn’t know who the caller was. That, plus a known dealer who had also gotten a mysterious phone call and two kilos of crack the police found under the sofa pillows, put her away.”

  The ADA chuckled. “I bet she’d just love to testify.”

  “Hell, yes, but it wouldn’t help us. She says he certainly liked sex but she never said he raped her, so there’s no rele vance. The relationship she says she had with him is hearsay, and she’s a convicted felon. He could deny everything and come out smelling like a rose. Not to mention that Sutton would cry foul before she ever opened her mouth.”

  Tess knew her investigator very well. “What have you got,” she asked, “that isn’t on here?”

  “Well, there was something about an assault when he was in law school,” Lamar replied casually, reflecting on those last two pieces of paper he had studied so late into the night. “But our boy flatly denied culpability and no charges were ever filed.”

  “Another payoff?”

  “Who knows?”

  “So, what do you think we’re dealing with here, an innocent bystander or a slimy bastard?”
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  Lamar looked around the almost full courtroom. “Rumor has it he’s been doing a certain TV journalist on and off for the past ten years. Left side, second row, aisle seat.”

  Tess glanced at the attractive brown-eyed blonde with the highly recognizable face and sighed. “We won’t get any help there, for sure.”

  “You’ll just have to rely on the strength of your case,” Lamar said, “and trust in the jury’s better instincts.”

  “I always do,” Tess agreed, slipping the sheet of paper into her briefcase. “Still, I wouldn’t have minded a slight edge. After all, it’s his town, his people, his whole damn country, and that doesn’t exactly put the odds in our favor.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you more,” Lamar said.

  “That’s okay,” she told him with a toss of her shiny black hair and a twinkle in her dark eye. “I’m at my best when I’m the underdog. It’s just that I’m even better when I have an ace up my sleeve.”

  Like some macabre wedding party, the family and friends of Robert Willmont gravitated to the left of the spectators’ gallery, unofficially designated as the defense side, while Karen Doniger’s supporters arranged themselves on the right.

  Janice Evans sat in the second row, directly behind Elizabeth Willmont and Amanda Drayton Willmont. In front of them, through the bulletproof glass partition, she could see Robert sitting quietly among his impressive entourage of attorneys and advisers.

  Her piece on his campaign, which was first yanked by the network and then hastily revised to reflect recent events, had aired a month ago.

  “Get on out there and do a follow-up,” her producer told her. “Your segment pulled a bigger share than the fucking Super Bowl. So, whichever way the trial goes, we’re bound to top our time slot.”

  “I’m sure he’ll appreciate all your care and concern,” Janice observed wryly.

  The producer shrugged carelessly. “To the extent that he’s salable, I care a whole lot.”

  “You know this is clearly a case of political sabotage,” the reporter insisted. “Forged letters are passé—sex is the weapon of the 1990s.”