Date Rape New York

by Janet McGiffin

  Grazia nodded.

  “You’re from Italy, I heard. Do you speak English?”

  Grazia repeated her educational history. The achievement sapped her dwindling energy.

  “That’s a relief. A lot of drug-facilitated clients come in here and don’t speak a word of English. Everything gets held up until we find a translator.” Cindy settled herself more comfortably. “First thing you need to know is that you can say no whenever you want—to the hospital procedures, to the questions. Taking charge of your body is your first step to recovery.”

  “I can say no to this detective?”

  Cindy turned to Cargill. “Why don’t you go have coffee while I find out what my client needs? Bring me a cup. I was up half the night. We’re short on trained volunteers this weekend so I’m doing double duty.”

  “Let her talk before she forgets it all,” pleaded Cargill. “You know how important the victim’s initial report is. When Janine starts with her exam, Miss Conti will forget, like most victims. We’ll lose the offender.”

  “We’re lucky you’re back, Cargill. But it sounds like my client wants you to get lost.”

  “This could be Nick at it again. Here’s our chance to get him,” the detective entreated. He added, softly, “I just came back, Cindy. Don’t make me go to my desk empty-handed.”

  Cindy gave him an even look, then turned to Grazia. “Detective Cargill needs to know if you remember anything that can help him find the man who did this to you.”

  Grazia wiped her damp forehead with trembling fingers. Was she really sitting on this hospital exam table with a counselor and a police detective looking at her so expectantly? Surely this awful thing had happened to someone else. That’s why she couldn’t remember. It hadn’t happened to her.

  The annoying police detective had what appeared to be sympathy in his blue eyes. Suspicion bubbled up. Italian policemen were not sympathetic to rape victims. They blamed them for letting it happen. She had seen this when she was working at the women’s shelter. She had witnessed plenty at the shelter but she had never seen a woman drugged for sex.

  “I woke up this morning and I hurt all over,” she started, avoiding the detective’s eyes and focusing on Cindy. “I always wear pajamas. But they were under my pillow, where Sophia always puts them.”

  “You were naked?” interjected Cargill.

  “Cool it, Cargill.” Cindy threw him an unfriendly glance.

  Grazia concentrated on putting events in the right order. “My legs were weak. I crawled into the bathroom. Lipstick and mascara were smeared on my face. Bruises were on my arms and my shoulders and my back. And I had had sex,” she added in a low voice.

  “You sure about the sex?” The detective sounded eager.

  Cindy’s head snapped around. “Not appropriate, Cargill. Go for coffee.”

  Detective Cargill looked at Grazia. “Miss Conti, men who drug women for sex do it again and again. It’s their game. I’ve had experience with drug-facilitated rape. That’s why I got assigned your case instead of a specialist from Special Victims Division. Help me catch the guy who did this, Miss. You’ll stop him from assaulting other women.”

  After the detective left, Grazia looked at Cindy. Her mind was whirling. “Oh Dio, what did I do to deserve this?”

  “You did nothing. This is not your fault,” Cindy replied gently. “The man who assaulted you is sick, psychologically.”

  Janine poked her head through the curtains. “You’re running out of time before your body expels the drug, Miss Conti. Have you decided whether to open the rape kit?”

  Grazia tried to calm her tumbling thoughts, like her yoga teacher kept trying to teach her. She searched for the place of inner peace that was easy to find at the meditation center but was nowhere to be found here.

  “Open the rape kit,” she said, numbly. The words came out by themselves.

  Chapter 4

  “Do you know someone in New York who can be with you today?” Cindy had scooted herself onto the exam table by Grazia’s feet and was attaching a form to a clipboard. “Relative? Boyfriend?” She flicked a glance at Grazia’s ringless fingers.

  Grazia leaned her head against the raised head of the exam table. The numbness had given way to bleakness, like being left standing on the platform while the train pulled away. “I don’t know anyone in New York.”

  “Someone you can call in Italy? A familiar voice can give a person strength. Your mother?”

  Grazia got a flash of her mother taking over the situation entirely. Attacking her computer with flaming red fingernails, she would mobilize an army to bring Grazia home immediately. She was a travel agent who specialized in adventure travel and often went on daredevil trips with her clients. “My mother will start screaming. Then she will have the Italian consul in New York down here demanding that you call a doctor in Naples before you do anything.”

  “Not your mother, then. Boyfriend?”

  A photo of Francisco appeared in her mind, the one on his office desk where he was posing with his ethereally beautiful daughter, Celestina, at her university graduation the previous year. Celestina was slim and glowing in her Alexander McQueen dress—the product of all that money could buy. Francisco wore his usual Pierre Cardin casual, tailored to fit his tennis-trim body.

  Grazia was filled with sadness. “My boyfriend is senior partner at my law firm,” she said. She fought back the tears by focusing her gaze on the ceiling. “Once, a lawyer from the Family Law division presented a case at Monday morning conference. His client was a woman who was claiming that a man she had met at a party had raped her when he brought her home. My boyfriend told the lawyer to drop the case. He said no judge would believe a slut who picked up men at parties.” Francisco’s use of the word “slut” had made Grazia’s blood run cold. At the time she had been sleeping with him.

  “Will your boyfriend call you a slut for being drugged and sexually assaulted?”

  “He will call me a whore. In his view, it’s always the woman’s fault.” Grazia moved her gaze to Cindy’s concerned face. “He will fire me immediately. An unclean woman could never be legal counsel at his law firm. He will have me disbarred for immoral conduct.”

  “That’s harsh condemnation. Could you be misjudging him?”

  Grazia shook her head. The motion made her nauseas. “My boyfriend is sixty—twenty-five years older than me. Italy is a macho culture and his generation is the most macho. He treats me as his possession. He buys me expensive clothes. He takes me to exclusive restaurants. For those men, wives and girlfriends must be unsullied. Not that Francisco values virgins,” she added, bitterly. “I’m divorced. His present wife was married before, and everyone knows about her previous lovers. But for Francisco, a previous marriage is one thing; rape is another.”

  “If you can’t tell him, do you still want him as your boyfriend?” asked Cindy.

  Grazia rubbed her aching head. “What does it matter? Two weeks ago, I told him our affair was over.” Then, she had felt strong and independent. Now, she felt weak and powerless.

  Janine was back with a sheaf of papers. She pointed to the signature line and handed Grazia a pen. “You are agreeing that Beth Israel Medical Center will open a rape kit, administer medical procedures to determine what happened to you, and perform any appropriate interventions after obtaining your informed consent. The hospital will hold the rape kit confidential until you ask to release it to the police. I’ll be back with a lab tech and a rape kit.” She took the signed document and ducked through the curtains just as Detective Cargill and Stanley returned with coffee for Cindy. Cargill’s face lit up when he spotted Grazia’s consent to open a rape kit on Janine’s clipboard.

  “Does that mean you want to open a police investigation?” he asked eagerly.

  Grazia looked at him. She went blank. She had forgotten about the police. All she could think of was that no one should know—not her mother, not Francisco. She would have to cope by herself. “No police,” she said. “No one
can find out what happened to me.”

  Detective Cargill didn’t move. “I understand,” he said. “What happened to you is so terrible that your first instinct is to run and hide and not tell anyone. But the man who did this will do it again and you can stop him. I’ve been after a certain guy for two years,” he continued intently. “He was one of three bartenders at a trendy bar near your hotel. They would take money from patrons and drug a woman’s drink, then the patrons would take the women off and sexually assault them. I got a conviction on two bartenders because patrons overheard them make the drugging arrangements. But Nick got away because no witness could point to him for certain. I don’t want this starting up again, Miss Conti. You may be the witness I’ve been waiting for. You’re a lawyer; lawyers have retentive memories. Maybe you went to a bar and you spotted a bartender doing something that, in retrospect, could have been him doping your drink. Lawyers are tough enough to hold up under cross-examination. I can finally make an arrest stick.”

  “He will do it again? He will find me and do it again?” she breathed, shocked.

  “It’s possible, Miss,” interjected Stanley. “Like I told you in the hotel, men who drug women for sex do it again and again. It’s a game.”

  Grazia was flooded by a sense of her total vulnerability. The danger was palpable. “What can I do!” she babbled. “He’s out there and I’m all by myself! I don’t know what he looks like so I can’t protect myself!”

  “You can let me open an investigation,” Cargill replied, quietly.

  Grazia’s mind whirled. The women’s shelter loomed from the past. Every experience she had passed with the police there told her not to do this. But she needed protection. “Find him, Detective. Otherwise. . .” Her voice trailed off, unable to express the horror of living with the fear of being attacked again.

  Detective Cargill pulled out his notebook. “Let’s start with last night. Any man you remember could be a suspect. I’ll get their DNA, run a match to the DNA that the medical examiner finds in your room and what Janine got off you. If there’s a match, I make an arrest.”

  “Hold on, Cargill.” Cindy was gripping Grazia’s arm to keep her from sliding off the exam table. “She’s not up to this just yet.”

  Detective Cargill ignored her. “You say you woke up in your bed at the Hotel Fiorella and you were naked. That means the incident happened in your room. That means a man was in your room. Do you have any idea who he could be, or how he got there?”

  Shock cleared Grazia’s muddled head. “I don’t bring men to my hotel rooms!” she blurted, horrified. Meeting Francisco in their favorite hotels was different.

  “Miss Conti, what do you think happened?” Stanley interjected, quietly.

  Grazia searched desperately for an explanation. “I was attacked on the street.”

  Stanley shook his head. “Then you walked to your hotel, kicked your shopping bags around, and took off all your clothes? You couldn’t do that in your present condition and it would have been impossible last night. I’ve seen women under the influence of date-rape drugs and they could hardly walk. Besides, if you were attacked on the street, somebody would have called nine-one-one. The Hotel Fiorella is near the East Village and people are out at all hours. New Yorkers call nine-one-one at the drop of a hat. Or the hotel desk clerk would have seen you come in looking like you had been mugged. He would have called nine-one-one and notified hotel security.”

  “No, Miss Conti,” concluded Detective Cargill. “The strongest indication now is that you brought a man to your room, and probably a man you knew.”

  “I am a corporate lawyer, Detective Cargill.” Grazia struggled to keep her voice calm. “I own my apartment. I visit my mother and grandmother every Sunday. What you are describing doesn’t happen to me.”

  “Unfortunately, Miss, it does, if you go to bars by yourself and you don’t keep a hand over your glass. Statistically, eighty percent of women who are raped knew their attacker. You’ve been here a week, Miss. You go out to eat; you must have met a few guys by now, a good-looking girl—woman—like you.”

  Grazia couldn’t hear any more. She put her hands over her ears. “I came to New York to see museums and go shopping. Everyone said New York was wonderful, that I would have a good time. Now some man made me have sex, and I don’t remember his face! I hate New York! I want to go home! But I can’t, because people will find out what happened. Oh, Dio, what can I do!” She broke into sobs.

  “Enough questions, Cargill,” said Cindy, sharply. “Interview over.”

  Grazia took a deep breath. She lifted her head. “Wait,” she said. The bleak feeling had returned. “I need him to find this man. What do you want to know, Detective?”

  “Do you remember where you went last night? You hadn’t been drugged yet so you should remember.”

  Grazia lifted her hands. “I can’t. Ask Manuel, the evening desk clerk. He tells me where to go in New York. He’s from Italy and we speak Italian.”

  Cargill threw a glance at Stanley. “Was it the Brazilian Bar, Miss Conti? Off Irving Place on Eighteenth Street which is ten minutes from the Fiorella on foot. Expensive tapas, loud Latin jazz.”

  “The Brazilian Bar! That’s it! Manuel gave me directions!” Grazia fumbled through her Gucci handbag and pulled out the journal with the Monet painting on the cover that she had bought at the Metropolitan Museum the first day she was in New York. She had immediately begun recording every moment of her splendid freedom. She was free of the rules of Italian culture, free of the tiresome Sunday dinners with her mother and grandmother, free of the leers and personal comments of Italian men as she walked down a sidewalk. She opened the soft green and blue cover with the Monet painting and flipped through the pages.

  “Here it is. ‘Walk down Nineteenth Street past Menno House. Go left on Irving Place, then left on Eighteenth Street. Ask for Nick the bartender.’”

  Detective Cargill slapped his notebook on his palm. “This Manuel, he could be working with Nick, sending potential victims his way! Nick, your time has come! I’ll get Manuel too!”

  “Hold on!” cautioned Stanley. “Manuel is a sterling employee. He’s not steering victims to Nick; he doesn’t fit the typical drug-facilitator profile.”

  “Men who drug women for sex have a profile?” asked Grazia, dazed at the overload of information.

  “Typical drug-facilitator offenders are real planners,” explained Cargill. “They carefully organize how to drug their victims and where to assault them. It’s a crime of calculation. These aren’t impulsive men. They get away with it so often because they plan and they cover their tracks.”

  Grazia felt sick. “This happens only in New York, right? Or the US?”

  “No, Miss. It happens everywhere,” replied Cargill. “In New York we have laws against it and we try to enforce them. It isn’t easy to catch these guys, though. Like I say, they’re tricky. Let’s get back to last night. So you got to the bar; maybe you talked to Nick?”

  Cindy cut in. “No leading questions, Cargill. She’s chock-full of drugs and impressionable. Maybe she never went to the Brazilian Bar. Or maybe she went somewhere after the Brazilian Bar. Don’t put words in her mouth or her testimony won’t hold up in court, if you ever get there.”

  “Cindy, sweetheart, it’s got to be the Brazilian Bar,” protested Cargill. “You remember the drug-facilitated cases from there two years ago. Victims were lined up in your office.”

  “Cindy’s right, Cargill,” frowned Stanley. “Don’t plant names in Miss Conti’s head.”

  “Then why did Manuel tell her to ask for Nick?” Cargill held up his hands at Stanley’s protest. “Okay, but if Manuel works night shift, he must have seen Miss Conti come back, so he saw the man with her. How can I reach Manuel?”

  “You can’t,” muttered Stanley, uncomfortably. “Manuel hopped a flight to Italy before his shift ended this morning. He told Edmondo his mother was in the hospital.”

  Cargill raised his eyebrows. “Hopped a plan
e, did he? Who’s Edmondo?”

  “Edmondo Potenza. Night security officer.”

  Detective Cargill looked at the ceiling, thinking aloud. “Manuel sends her to Nick. Nick drugs her. He flags down a cab and sends her to the Hotel Fiorella. Manuel takes her to her room and assaults her. Then he runs for a plane.”

  “Hold it,” snapped Stanley. “You want to bust Nick so bad you’re making up groundless scenarios. Manuel is married with three children. He’s a loyal employee—worked his way up from kitchen staff, took night classes in hotel management. He told me last week his mother was sick.”

  “His fingerprints and his DNA profile are in your hotel employee files, right? I want the file.”

  “Sure. But Manuel wouldn’t . . . ”

  Cargill fixed him with a stern eye and pressed forward with more questions. “Don’t you have hotel protocol about reception clerks notifying a security officer if a guest has been assaulted? Shouldn’t Manuel have called a doctor if Miss Conti came back looking mugged?”

  Stanley nodded reluctantly. “Yes, he should have notified Edmondo, who would have spoken to Miss Conti. And he should have notified the on-call nurse.”

  “What if she came into the hotel with a non-guest and went up in the elevator with him?”

  “Manuel would have called Edmondo.”

  “Manuel did none of these things. Now he’s disappeared. Until I find him, and until I determine if Miss Conti came back to the hotel with a non-registered guest, I need the names of other staff who might have accompanied her to her room.”

  “Only Edmondo would do that.”

  “Give me Edmondo’s employee file as well as Manuel’s. Who else was on night duty?”

  “I’ll check the roster.” Stanley’s voice was tense.

  Cargill turned to Grazia. “I’ll get the medical examiner to run a match between the DNA that the hotel has on file for Manuel and Edmondo and any fingerprints and DNA that the medical examiner’s team finds in your room and what Janine puts into the rape kit. We may identify your assailant right off the bat.”