Aftershock

by Andrew Vachss

“I’m going to be here a couple of weeks or so. Maybe a little longer. Want to trade?”

  “You don’t mean—?”

  “Sure. I take yours, you take mine. When I’m ready to leave, I’ll come back and we’ll switch again.”

  Martin’s jaw dropped. It must have taken him a full minute just to get the keys to the Mini out of his pocket.

  T.D. took the keys, said, “Let’s roll, hoss,” to me.

  And that’s just what we did.

  “That was an incredibly fine thing for you to do,” I told him. “It’ll mean the world to Martin. Johnny, too.” And now I’ve truly settled my debt to them, thanks to you, is what I thought to myself.

  “I had an ulterior motive,” T.D. said. “I’ve never driven one of these, and I want to see if they can really make a front-driver as sharp as they claim.”

  I didn’t know if they had or not, but after he played with it for a little while, getting the feel of it down, I was back to playing navigator.

  And he was back to sliding the car through the turns. One was wild enough that I had to look through his side window to see the road ahead of us.

  “Yee-haw!” T.D. yelled, happy as a boozehound watching an “All You Can Drink” sign go up in the window of his favorite bar.

  He was still muttering about not being able to fully disable something or other when we slid into the driveway of our house.

  “There’s no decent hotel close by,” Dolly told T.D., “but two good friends of mine have a little cottage they use as a guesthouse, and they said you’re welcome to it for as long as you stay.”

  “Now, that’s a generous offer,” T.D. said.

  “Ah, you don’t know them. Nel and Sue are true partners. It goes so deep that you can’t even say one name without the other. For them, this is the most natural thing in the world, to help out a friend. Besides, I’ve told them enough so that they have their own reasons for helping MaryLou.”

  I guess that was true enough. I’d been there when Dolly had asked them. Right away, Nel started musing about long-term strategy. Sue went on about tiger traps—“you know, the kind with punji sticks”—near where Cameron’s gang used to hang out. I told her that they probably wouldn’t be using that spot anymore, and she just nodded.

  I didn’t ask her why she assumed I’d know what punji sticks were. In the Legion, we called those traps trous de loup, and feared them greatly. Not just the deep-anchored bamboo spikes, but what the enemy would smear on their tips. And, just like the land mines left behind from every war, some of those tiger traps were still where they were first built—still waiting for the wrong boots to walk those trails.

  “Can’t say no to that,” T.D. told her. “This guesthouse, it wouldn’t bother them if they heard a little banjo music late at night?”

  “Not a bit,” Dolly assured him.

  “You play banjo?” Debbie said, as if T.D. had just told her he won a Nobel Prize for Perfect Bachelor.

  “Only late at night,” he said. “When I have to think through a problem, I sometimes just sit back and do some picking. The sound relaxes me.”

  “Let’s go and get you settled, then,” I said. Quick, before Debbie got to tell him how she’d love to hear him play. I didn’t look at Dolly, but I could feel what she was going to say to me later.

  “You can’t stage interview times,” Debbie said. “One interview could last all day, another could be over in ten minutes.”

  The camera equipment I’d used on Danielle would be perfect, but we couldn’t use the same hotel—which was why Dolly had told T.D. there weren’t any decent ones around.

  That’s where Nel and Sue stepped in again, after T.D. drove over there. Dolly was in the front seat, me in the back—hard to call that little shelf a “seat”—but it wasn’t a long ride.

  They explained that their guesthouse had two floors, one for living—bedroom, full bath, library, kitchen—on the ground floor, and one upstairs, for working. That floor was already crammed full with computers, fax machine, printer, scanners, work tables, cork-boards. They said the downstairs library would be comfortable for just about anyone being interviewed, and they were right. It was certainly private, and easy to wire up like we needed.

  “I’d have to drill a couple of holes,” I told them.

  “I wouldn’t mind drilling a couple of holes in any of those scumbags,” Sue said. Her eyes said that wasn’t a joke. Nel nodded. Case closed.

  “She couldn’t have been more blunt,” T.D. said. We were all watching the tape of Debbie interviewing Victim No. 1—that’s how the tapes were going to be labeled, so we could refer to each girl in the presence of others without giving up any information. “But she’s so angry that it might look like something else to a jury.”

  “You really think so?” Dolly said, clearly disappointed.

  T.D. just nodded.

  I was disappointed myself. When No. 1 said she only wished she could have been there when Cameron cashed in, I thought that was just as good as when Franklin said he’d tell a lie to help MaryLou. So I asked T.D. what the difference was.

  “Franklin was saying he loves MaryLou enough to lie for her. That underscores the honesty of his other answers, just like you thought. But this girl’s coming from the opposite direction: she hates that punk so much that she’d like to watch him die. I believe her. So would a jury. But they might carry that too far, and come up with a ‘she’d lie to get MaryLou off, too’ scenario. So that doesn’t support her earlier testimony; it poisons it.”

  We all looked at each other. And we all saw the same thing.

  Victim No. 4 was the pick of the litter. On paper, she was odds-on to be the runt. Raped by Tiger Ko Khai when she was twelve. Last year, she’d been raped again.

  Not by the gang—to them, she was as appealing as a used condom. The perpetrator of the second rape was her mother’s boyfriend. Apparently, she’d fought. Hard. Not only did the hospital records find what they called “significant bruising consistent with a prolonged fight or calculated beating,” but she had the top of every index for “rape victim.” And the aspirated DNA nailed the boyfriend cold. He didn’t even know that his DNA had been data-banked years ago, the second time he’d gone to prison.

  “ ‘Why should I testify now?’ That’s what I told them. Those little slime.”

  “The police?” Debbie had asked. Her voice was as gentle as a caress, as comforting as a blanket to a baby.

  “No. I mean those two ‘girls’ from the DA’s Office. You could see it was freaking them out. Not me getting raped—them seeing such a sure winner slip out of their greasy hands. You know what else I told them? I said, ‘You wouldn’t prosecute Jerry Milhouse, so how come you’re so hot to trot now?’ ”

  “What did they say to that?”

  “Oh, they said that was a different administration. If they’d been working for the DA then, they would have prosecuted him.”

  “But you didn’t believe them?”

  “I stopped believing anyone when Jerry and his friends tied me over that sawhorse thing they have.”

  Debbie made a sound I hadn’t heard before. Soft sympathy and red rage, blended together in something you couldn’t swallow except as a whole.

  “They—those DAs, I mean—they made the same mistake most people do. Just because I’m fat and ugly doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Until it … happened, I was an honor student. I don’t go to school now, but I still read, and I still learn. Over the Internet.

  “That’s how it started. Thinking back, I can see it so clear. My mother’s boyfriend, he said he used to be a teacher before he gave it up to concentrate on his writing. My mother told him I’d been gang-banged.”

  I never heard her say “Mom” once in the two hundred and twelve minutes of tape.

  “And he was so understanding about it. Said he could home-school me so I never had to go back there again.

  “I swallowed that hook. So did my mother. By then, she was swallowing everything that came out of his mouth. All
he did was play on his computer. His ‘writing.’ My mother grabbed all the overtime she could, to pay for his toys.

  “I guess he figured I was supposed to be one of those. After he raped me, he dared me to go to the cops. ‘They didn’t believe you the first time, you fat slob. They’re sure as hell not going to believe you this time, either.’

  “I didn’t go to the cops. He was probably right about what he said. But I hurt so much I called my friend—I’m not going to say her name—and she drove me to the hospital. That’s when it all started.”

  “The DAs tried to pressure you—?”

  “—into pressing charges. You better believe it. They were the ones who told me about his criminal record. He was a teacher. And he went to prison for burglary, but those DAs told me the other DAs, the ones who came before them, let him plead to burglary even though he got caught in the bedroom of a girl. The burglary was more time in prison than what he would have got for attempted rape, and they weren’t sure they could convict him of the rape—he never actually touched the girl; she was still sleeping when her dad heard a noise and ran downstairs and grabbed him. So they made this deal. They got a conviction, and he didn’t get to be a registered sex offender.

  “That was so funny, that part. My stupid mother, she checked him out on the Internet. That was his idea. He told her to check the Sex Offender Registry. He said that’s what any good mom would do if she was going to let a man move in with her and her kids.

  “She really trusted him after that. But, anyway, you know what I told those DAs?”

  “What?” Debbie asked, not even trying to calm the girl down, just letting her go with whatever she was feeling.

  “I told them it isn’t only morons like my mother who can use the Internet. So I’d be glad to press charges against her boyfriend … if they prosecuted Panther Wornic and those others for what they did to me. See, I knew they could do that. The statute of limitations doesn’t even start to run until I turn eighteen. That’s the law. That’s what I looked up!”

  “And …?”

  “And they wouldn’t do it! They gave me a million lame excuses, but the bottom line was they weren’t going to do it. They even tried to tell me that my getting raped before my mother’s boyfriend did it was going to make my case—the one against Jerry Milhouse, I mean—harder to prove.”

  “That’s just—”

  “—a lie. I know. Either they believed me or they didn’t, I said. And if they believed me about Jerry Milhouse, they had to prosecute those others, no matter how ‘hard’ it would be.”

  “And they never budged?”

  “Why do you think I live in that group home now? That was their worst threat: if I didn’t press charges against my mother’s boyfriend, well, then, they’d just have to send me back there, wouldn’t they? They’re even dirtier than he is,” she said, more sad than angry, as if resigned to a world where the sun would never shine. “I knew if I was sent back ‘home’ it was as good as telling that filthy animal he could do whatever he wanted to me.”

  “Did you have a lawyer?”

  “Me? Why would I have a lawyer?”

  “I … don’t know. It just seems as if you should have had one.”

  “Oh, I had this ‘advocacy center.’ They were, like, partners with the DA. They told me all the great counseling I could get if I would only press charges. Against my mother’s boyfriend. When it came to anyone else, they really didn’t see the point.”

  “You’re right,” Debbie said firmly.

  “About what?”

  “About all these agencies that were supposed to be on your side. They were even more foul than your mother’s boyfriend. So what did you do?”

  “I ran away. I found somebody who wanted me. A pimp. He hurt me sometimes. But sometimes he didn’t. I guess I lived for those times.

  “Then I got caught. I guess I don’t look old enough—or maybe pretty enough—to be flagging down cars in Portland. They sent me all the way back here, and the judge sentenced me to the group home.”

  “Did you run away again?”

  “I thought about it,” the girl said, a little surprise in her voice that Debbie would know. “But I didn’t do it. I kind of like it there now. I have friends. And the staff is pretty nice.”

  “And that’s when you started a program?”

  “To lose weight? That’s right. I’m already twenty-five down. Only another fifty to go and I’ll be able to stand looking at my body in a mirror. My face, there’s nothing anyone can do about that.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “Who?” the girl said, shocked.

  “You.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “If you have the strength, if you have the will to lose … seventy-five pounds! If you have that, I promise your face will change, too. All by itself.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re pretty. That’s something you’re born with.”

  “You think I’m pretty?”

  “Oh, come on! You’re old enough to be my mother, but you’re really cute.”

  “When I was your age, I thought I was so ugly my face could break a mirror.”

  “Stop it!” the girl said. But Debbie had managed to tease a little giggle out of her.

  “It’s the truth,” Debbie said. “My counselor helped me understand that the mirror was a reflection of my feelings. I was seeing what I saw, not what other people did. And when I lost that weight, I looked in the mirror and, like magic, I liked what I saw. Because my counselor taught me to respect what I’d achieved—losing that weight.”

  “Hold up!” the girl said. “You’re telling me you were fat?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you thought you were ugly, and no man would ever want you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you went into counseling?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’re a cute little psychologist?”

  “I’m not a psychologist; I’m a clinical social worker. And I guess I’m not all that big. But the other is a judgment. Some might agree; some not.”

  “I agree.”

  “Then make the same deal with yourself,” Debbie urged her. “And I’ll make you another promise: If you’re the one who helps MaryLou get found not guilty of killing that filthy rapist, you’ll be a lot more than ‘cute,’ you’ll be a warrior. A true warrior for justice. And that’s what you’ll see in the mirror!”

  “You’re really good,” T.D. told Debbie. “That is one angry young girl, just like our Number One. But this is anger she can use. It doesn’t have to eat her insides out; it can make her into Wonder Woman. Beautiful!”

  “Can we all have something to eat before we look at another one?” Dolly said. To save her girlfriend from passing out.

  If T.D. knew the effect his praise had on Debbie, he kept it off his face.

  But not completely off. Especially if you were looking for it.

  I kept thinking of Danielle as an old Perry Mason episode, something like “The Case of the Disgusting Diva.” But I never let her get even a whiff of that—I made sure Patrice Laveque’s personal assistant stayed in contact with her.

  But someone like Danielle never trusts anyone. She even tested Miss Rontempe’s accent by firing off a whole paragraph of memorized questions in her schoolbook French. Fortunately, Dolly not only knew how to sound like a haughty bitch, she hadn’t forgotten the language she’d had to learn when she served overseas. So all that foul little creature got back was:

  “Arrêtez, s’il vous plaît. Je vais parler très lentement, comme ça vous allez peut-être enfin me comprendre. Listen! Your silly little attempt to speak my native tongue offends me. When you have mastered French as I have English, do try again, if you wish. In the meantime, understand that I do not appreciate your childish games, especially when Mr. Laveque’s schedule is very demanding, which makes him very demanding of me. You are not getting the usual ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ are you? You are being kept in the loop, ar
e you not?”

  Dolly hung up in the middle of Danielle’s frightened attempt to assure herself that she hadn’t made an enemy, especially when that enemy was a bridge she had to cross to get to everything she wanted in the world.

  There’s probably no one word that describes that place, only what being there meant: no standing in line to get into the hottest restaurants; the mere mention of her name replacing the need for reservations. Always being able to order off the menu. And things. All kinds of things, from fine jewelry to big houses to a staff of servants. Danielle knew she wouldn’t need more than a couple of years in L.A. before she landed the only fish she was trolling for: a nice, fat koi.

  So, when it came time to see if she could be any more use to us than the tape we already had, plus Franklin’s testimony, T.D. stepped in. “I wonder if any of you’d mind me taking a shot at that one?”

  I sure didn’t. Neither did Dolly. And Debbie took the opportunity to say something you could tell had been nagging at her for years:

  “I not only don’t mind, I wish you would. Let’s face it, my profession isn’t self-respecting. It’s polluted from the top down. The schools of social work start the prejudgment process, and it doesn’t stop until the holy plateau is reached. Any ‘doctor’ is axiomatically more insightful, more intelligent, more … valuable than all the M.S.W.’s in the world, combined.”

  T.D. nodded encouragement. Dolly squeezed my hand. Meaning: Don’t interrupt this!

  “Look at social work,” Debbie said. “What’s the missing demographic?”

  “White males,” T.D. said instantly.

  “Working-class, heterosexual white males,” Debbie came back with.

  “True” is all T.D. said.

  “This isn’t about ‘role modeling’ or any such nonsense,” Debbie said, speaking to Dolly and me, as if she and T.D. had already passed that point in their understanding. “When they talk about working with ‘at-risk’ youth, that’s code for ‘minority poor.’ But poor whites, whoever heard of such a thing?

  “How are women going to interact with young men who are just beginning to understand that there’s nothing for them in the future except the feeling of superiority you get from some ‘white pride’ group? Never mind black males, who come with their own set of issues and expectations. Everything starts with the premise that it’s all ‘women’s work.’ ”