Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

Here, Karen paused. Her heart had begun to race and her breath was starting to come in little gasps.

  “Would you like to take a brief break before we get to this next part?” Tess invited.

  “No, that’s all right,” Karen replied, sucking air deep into her lungs. “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Karen said more firmly. “I’d rather keep going. I’d like to get through this before I lose my courage.”

  “All right,” Tess agreed. “Tell us what happened after he stopped the car.”

  “I got out and started walking around a bit, taking some deep breaths to settle my stomach, and then there he was, right behind me. I must have jumped a mile. I didn’t even realize he’d gotten out of the car.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He asked me if I was going to be sick. I told him if I could just walk around in the fresh air for a minute or two I’d be okay, at least until I got home.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. Then I started back toward the car. He was leaning against the hood. I told him I felt better and I thought it would be okay to go. I opened the car door but he said he was in no hurry and I should give it a little longer, just to make sure. He said his car was still new and I guess he didn’t want to take any chances. So I walked around the car a couple of times and then he came up very close behind me. He asked me if I was cold and he took off his jacket and started to put it around me, but I told him I wasn’t cold and I sort of moved away a little. But he said I was shivering and he wanted to be sure I stayed warm in case I was coming down with something, and he was right next to me, and when I tried to get away, he… he grabbed me.”

  Nancy felt Ted stiffen in the seat beside her. She slipped her arm through his and held on tight.

  Across the aisle, Elizabeth Willmont took a deep breath and thought about taking Adam to the beach.

  “Tell us what happened then,” Tess urged softly.

  Karen blinked back hot tears. “I tried to push him away, but he was too strong, and then he kissed me. He said he’d been wanting to do that all evening, and he could tell that I wanted him to. I told him he was wrong, that I was happily married, and that… I wasn’t interested in him in that way, and all I wanted to do was go home. I tried to pull away, but he just laughed and held me tighter. He said he knew a come-on when he saw it, that I’d been flirting with him all night, and just begging for it.”

  “Begging for it?”

  Karen nodded. “I told him he was crazy, but I guess that was the wrong thing to say because he sort of went wild. He slapped me so hard that I fell against the car. When I tried to get up, he started yelling that I’d be crazy about him by the time he finished with me, and then he … he dragged me off the road and threw me down on the ground.”

  Tess waited calmly while her witness fumbled around in her purse for a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

  “We can stop for a bit, if you need to,” she offered, but Karen shook her head. “All right, then, tell us what happened next.”

  In fits and starts, Karen described in agonizing detail how the defendant had torn aside her dress and stripped off her panties, and how he had then forced himself into her. As almost everyone in the courtroom squirmed uncomfortably, she told how he had laughed at her protests, and how she had managed to reach out and scratch him, and how he had reacted by hitting her again and pinning both her hands beneath her.

  In his seat two rows behind the defendant, Randy squirmed with the rest of the gallery and tried not to listen to the words that damned the California senator with every syllable. This woman, whom he had first admired through her work, and then liked for her dedication, and now wanted to despise because of her betrayal, was clearly having a devastating effect on the jury, on the entire court. Even the judge looked queasy, and the typically acerbic Janice Evans was silent beside him.

  Randy was a closet romantic who had waited until he was forty to fall in love. Raised to respect women, he knew in his soul there was no place for the kind of violence that Karen Doniger was describing. He had no illusions about the world being a perfect place, but he still had some illusions about the people he knew and had chosen to follow.

  Robert Willmont could be inconsiderate, Randy knew, and even downright nasty when the situation called for it, but that was a far cry from the vicious animal this woman was making him out to be. He wondered what silent forces had gotten to her with their evil message.

  He had offered to testify himself.

  “I’ve known the senator for fifteen years,” he told Hal Sutton. “No one has been closer to him. Let me tell the jury that he just couldn’t do the things they’re claiming.”

  “Have you spent every minute of every day of those fifteen years with him?” Sutton asked.

  “Well, certainly not every minute,” Randy had to admit.

  “Then you can’t help,” Sutton said kindly but firmly. “If we need character witnesses, we’ll go to one or two of his colleagues in the Senate, or a couple of his supporters on the Supreme Court, or the mayor or the governor or several of his more influential backers here in California. No offense, but I’m sure you understand.”

  Randy understood. But it didn’t help his anxiety as he squirmed in his seat and steeled his heart against the respectable middle-aged woman who seemed determined to cut his friend and mentor up into a messy pile of pieces.

  “I tried to fight him,” Karen was continuing, tears dripping slowly down her cheeks, “but he was just too strong. I was crying and choking and gasping for breath, and he kept telling me how much he knew I’d enjoy it, and how long he’d been waiting for this opportunity. But I’d only met him a few days before. And then, just as, well, just as he was, you know … concluding, he gave this strange kind of laugh and he said, ‘It was only a matter of time, Mariah, until you gave me what I wanted.’“

  Randy Neuburg’s head snapped up.

  “He called you Mariah?” Tess queried. “Not Susie or Sally, or even Elizabeth, but Mariah?”

  “Yes.” Karen nodded. “I’m certain. It was Mariah.”

  Janice Evans turned to the senator’s aide and chuckled. “Has Bobby been fantasizing about the human iceberg?”

  But Randy wasn’t amused. He gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles whitened and a hard knot formed in his stomach. Two rows in front of him, separated from him by a bulletproof wall, Robert Willmont didn’t move a muscle.

  “Do you know anyone named Mariah, Mrs. Doniger?”

  “I believe the senator has an adviser by that name, but I’ve never met her.”

  “An adviser… I see.” Tess nodded. “All right. Let’s pick up right after he called you Mariah.”

  “Well, he kept saying how I’d probably never had it so good before,” Karen said in a choked voice. “And then he— he said he knew exactly what I wanted next.”

  “Did you know what he meant?” Tess asked.

  “I didn’t at first,” the witness gulped. “But then I did.”

  Under the ADA’s guidance, Karen tremulously recounted how the senator had pushed himself into her mouth.

  “He said that was the way he liked it best. And he said … he said he was sure I’d like it just as much as he did.”

  On the right side of the gallery, Ted Doniger groaned.

  On the left side of the gallery, Elizabeth Willmont barely concealed a gasp.

  “What happened then?” Tess asked.

  “I gagged,” Karen replied. “And I guess I must have bitten him or something, because he yelled and pulled away. Then he said he’d teach me to play games like that, and he punched me in the face with his fist. The next thing I remember clearly, a man in a jogging suit was putting his jacket over me.”

  “Thank you,” Tess said. “Well done,” she whispered.

  The ADA walked over to the prosecution table and leaned on it for a moment with her back to Karen. Then suddenly she straightened up and whirled around.

  “Mrs. Doni
ger, did you at any time during that evening, in the garage, at the bar, or in the car, give the defendant any indication that you wanted to have sex with him?”

  “No, I did not,” Karen declared. “You see, I didn’t want to have sex with him, so why would I have given him any reason to think that I did?”

  “You did not consent?”

  “No, Miss Escalante, I did not consent.” The response was quick and emphatic.

  “You did nothing at all that could possibly have been construed that way?”

  “Nothing. Unless having a drink with him and agreeing to let him drive me home means I gave him some kind of implicit permission to do what he did to me.” Karen looked up at the judge and then over at the jury and finally turned her eyes on Tess. “Did it?”

  The seasoned ADA considered her witness for a moment. The question had come as a surprise, but it was perfect.

  “No,” she replied. “I don’t believe it did.” Then she, too, took a deliberate moment to look around, at the jury, at the gallery, at the defendant. “And I would hope that there is no one in this courtroom who does.”

  “You did just fine,” Ione said during lunch at Campton Place. “You answered every question as well as you could, and it was obvious, at least to everyone in the gallery, that you were telling the truth.”

  The moment Judge Washington called the noon break, two deputies had escorted Karen and her entourage out a rear door where Ted had a limousine waiting. They chose the dining room at Campton Place because it was quiet and exclusive and there was no better food to be found in the city. But Karen just picked at her plate.

  “Truth is a very elastic thing,” she murmured, “that can be stretched to mean whatever people need it to mean.”

  “I was watching the jury,” Demelza said. “They were just as appalled as the rest of us.”

  “I was watching the defendant,” Jenna said. “He sat there through the whole thing like he was made of stone.”

  “What did you think of Karen Doniger’s testimony, Senator?” a reporter called as Robert and his party made their way down the front steps of the Hall of Justice.

  “It was quite emotional,” the senator replied calmly, holding his wife’s hand, “quite theatrical, quite calculated, quite inaccurate.”

  “Do you have any idea why she’s trying to smear you?” someone sympathetic to the candidate inquired.

  “She certainly hasn’t confided in me, if that’s what you’re asking,” Robert said. “But I think it’s very sad when a woman is as unhappy, as frustrated, and as desperate as she must ob viously be to have involved herself in such an outrageous and malicious lie.”

  “She sounded awfully convincing.”

  “Not to me.”

  “What about the jury—do you think they believed her?”

  Robert flashed one of his brilliant smiles. “I think the jury is smarter than that, don’t you?”

  “Will your attorney be able to discredit her?”

  “For what I’m paying him,” the senator said, chuckling, “I sincerely hope so.”

  But it was a different story, fifteen minutes later, in the Sutton Wells conference room on Front Street.

  “She buried me, damn it,” Robert cried, “and I had to sit there and listen to her do it.”

  It was a last-minute strategy session with Sutton and his associates to make sure they were prepared for the afternoon’s cross-examination. The candidate insisted on being present at all such meetings.

  “I won’t lie to you,” Sutton conceded. “She was a very compelling witness for the prosecution.”

  “Compelling? It was an Oscar-winning performance. Can you trip her up?”

  Sutton shrugged. “I’ll certainly try. There are a few soft spots in her story that I think we can expose.”

  “Why do you think the prosecution quit so soon?”

  “I think it was just a clever maneuver to turn our haste back on us,” Sutton replied. “Escalante was trying to send a message to the jury that her case was so strong, she didn’t need to waste time with character witnesses.”

  “Is it?” Robert inquired bluntly.

  “Let’s just say it’s not time to worry yet,” Sutton assured him. “Don’t forget that we have a few compelling things on our side. We have your reputation, which, until this little… lapse, has been spotless. We have the Drayton name, which carries enormous weight in this city. And we have the total lack of motive for you to risk your whole career in such a frivolous way. In the final analysis, it won’t be evidence or expert witnesses, but credibility, that will decide this case, and I think it’s fairly accurate to say that your credibility in this community is rock solid.”

  “Mrs. Doniger,” the Silver Fox inquired as the afternoon session began, “you said that, on the night in question, you worked late at campaign headquarters to finish a project that the senator needed for the following day; is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Karen replied after a three-second pause. Tess had coached her to wait that long before answering, in case the ADA wished to object.

  “Were you expecting the senator to return that evening?”

  “No, not necessarily.”

  “Were you perhaps taking longer on the project than you might have because you were hoping he would return?”

  “No.”

  “Whose idea was it that your daughter spend the evening with a friend?”

  “Hers.”

  “Whose idea was it that your husband have dinner out after his meeting?”

  “I guess it was mine, but that was only because—”

  “So, would it be fair to say,” Sutton interrupted her smoothly, “that you were prepared, as early as that morning, and before you knew anything at all about the position paper, to stay late at campaign headquarters?”

  “No.”

  “He’s twisting it all around,” Jenna complained. “He’s trying to make it look like she was planning to get raped.”

  “That’s his job,” Mitch told her.

  “The man is just about to earn his fee,” Mary Catherine murmured.

  “Returning to your earlier testimony,” Sutton went on, “you said you were motivated to join the senator’s campaign because you believed he might be the only man who could help solve America’s problems; is that correct?”

  “More or less.”

  “Was there any other reason?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, let me rephrase my question. Did you consider the senator handsome?”

  “I suppose he’s handsome.”

  “Did you find him charming?”

  “Yes, he appeared to be charming.”

  “Were you curious about the senator personally, what the man behind the politics was really all about?”

  “On some level.”

  “You were attracted to him, then?”

  “Professionally, perhaps. Not personally.”

  “Didn’t you ever fantasize about what he might be like when he, say, took off his clothes?”

  “No.”

  “Or what it might be like to have sex with him?”

  “No.”

  “So, according to your testimony, the senator was handsome, he was charming, you were curious about him, you thought enough of him to spend two days a week working for his election—but you weren’t the least attracted to him?”

  “No.”

  “The man’s a genius,” Janice Evans observed.

  “Why doesn’t the prosecutor object?” Felicity cried.

  “To what?” Demelza sighed. “He has every right to try to discredit her.”

  “Let’s move on now to the parking garage,” the Silver Fox proposed. “You claim you couldn’t get your car started; is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you were about to look under the hood when the senator came along?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you thought he might have followed you?”

  “Yes.”
<
br />   “Were you hoping he would follow you?”

  “No.”

  “Where was his car parked?”

  “Several spaces away from mine.”

  “Then is it possible that he was simply going to his own car when he saw you in trouble and offered to help?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “When you couldn’t get your car started and the senator graciously offered to take you home, why did you agree?”

  “Because he was insistent and I didn’t want to appear discourteous.”

  “But if you hadn’t wanted to go with him, you could have refused and taken a taxi, couldn’t you?”

  “As I said, I didn’t want to appear discourteous.”

  “Whose idea was it to go to the bar across the street?”

  “To go to a bar was his idea. To go to the one across the street was mine.”

  “Do you frequently go to bars with men and drink three Scotches in the course of a two-hour conversation?”

  “No.”

  “But you did on this particular occasion?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the next day, after you accused my client of raping you, when your husband had a towing company come to collect your car—what did they find wrong with it?”

  “There was a loose wire.”

  “Not a dead battery?”

  “No.”

  “Not a faulty starter?”

  “No.”

  “Just a loose wire that anyone could have reached under the hood and pulled free—anyone, that is, who might have wanted an excuse to be in the garage when the senator came for his car?”

  “I know absolutely nothing about cars, Mr. Sutton,” Karen declared. “I have no idea how the wire came loose.”

  “All right, let’s go back to your quite extraordinary statement that you had never had an affair with a man before your marriage. That was your testimony, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “A remarkable thing in the 1970s, Mrs. Doniger. You’re to be commended. You were practicing safe sex before anyone knew there was a deadly reason to do so, weren’t you?”

  The gallery tittered.

  “Objection, Your Honor,” Tess said in disgust. “Mr. Sutton’s attempt at humor demeans this proceeding.”

  “I agree,” the judge snapped, smacking his gavel sharply at the gallery and scowling at the defense attorney.