Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

1

I woke with a start, muscles tense, my eyes darting around the darkened, familiar room. There was no sound, nothing amiss, no obvious cause for alarm. I was alone, in bed, in my apartment-as usual.

I pushed back the covers and swung my feet to the floor, wincing slightly as the cold hit my body. It was early fall, not even foliage season, but the nights were already yielding to occasional temperature drops, warning shots from an approaching winter.

I pulled on my pants and a flannel shirt and went into the living room, awash in the colorless half-light from the street lamps below. It was a large room, book-lined, indifferently decorated, with a few pieces of comfortable furniture that would have been Salvation Army-bound a long time ago in a conventional home, but which my bachelor’s habits had retained for decades, icons to their owner’s flair for fashion.

I settled into a patched leather armchair by the dimly glowing bow window, wondering what had woken me up. It hadn’t been a dream; my pager hadn’t gone off, nor the phone. I cupped my chin in my hand and stared down at the vacant street.

Whatever it was, it had blown me out of my sleep like a grenade.

The twin beams from a pair of approaching headlights slid along the sides of the empty cars lining the street. I instinctively checked my watch-4:10 in the morning. The car slowed before my building and stopped, not bothering to park.

Tony Brandt-the police chief, my boss, and my best friend in the department-got out, glanced up at my dark windows, and crossed over toward the front door three flights below.

The same sense of alarm that had startled me awake rekindled with a jolt-more insidious, more real, and more frightening. Tony Brandt did not make predawn house calls.

I got up, tucking my shirt in, and returned to my bedroom for some socks and shoes, moving quickly, stimulated now by the sure knowledge that bad news, of a personal nature, was making its way up the staircase.

I met Tony on the landing, already buttoning my jacket. “What?”

He stopped on the stairs, his hand heavy on the railing. His eyes were sorrowful and his face drawn. Before he spoke, the dread inside me spilled over and caught fire. “It’s Gail. She’s been raped.”

I sat in his car, not focusing on the passing blur outside, my brain in a turmoil as we drove through the silent, empty town. “I was just with her a few hours ago.”

I paused, unable to think clearly, and repeated the same question I’d asked him right off, feeling like I was acting in a play I’d been a spectator to a dozen times before. “How is she?” The nagging sense that this time I was the one under the lights, my performance being scrutinized, added to my anxiety.

Tony had told me she was okay. He went into a little more detail now. “She was knocked around some, but nothing’s broken, at least on the outside.”

“Did we get who did it?”

He shook his head. “She was at home. She never got a look at him. I haven’t talked to her yet. Ron’s on call this week-the hospital phoned Dispatch, Dispatch phoned him. He got hold of me when he found out who it was.”

I rubbed my forehead and tried to appear calm, knowing he was debating how best to handle me. He was already looking at this as an investigation, and wondering if he should let me be a part of it. I had worked with rape victims and their friends and families before; I knew the toll it took on them. I could see his dilemma, and how imperative it was for me to win his confidence. I didn’t want to be excluded from the one case where I would bring both my heart and mind most forcefully to bear.

“You were at her house?” he murmured, cutting into my thoughts and harking back to the comment I’d made earlier.

“She fixed dinner.” And later we’d made love-quietly, tenderly-as two people who’d known each other intimately for many years. “She had a lot to do in the morning. I left so she’d get a good night’s sleep.” As I often had before.

He glanced over at me, but I left it at that. No predictably emotional self-recriminations for not having been at the right place at the right time. Not out loud; not under scrutiny.

We pulled into the hospital’s parking lot and walked up the ramp leading to the emergency room. Countless times, I’d come here to gather preliminary statements from victims of domestic violence, or assault, or vehicular mayhem, or rape. But never before feeling like this. To me, rape is murder without a corpse-it kills a piece of the spirit, leaving the victim alive to haunt us all with the violence of the crime. But while always sympathetic in the past, I’d never before had such a vested interest in the survival of that spirit.

Ron Klesczewski met us outside the nurses’ station. Rarely the most self-assured of men, he was among the most conscientious, and the expression on his face spoke clearly of his distress. “I’m real sorry, Joe.”

I nodded. “Thanks. Where is she?”

He pointed vaguely down the hallway. “They’re doing the rape kit on her now-room 4. Shouldn’t be too much longer.”

I started down the corridor. The tension in Ron’s voice climbed a notch. “You going in there?”

I hesitated. Had I been the one in need of a friendly face, Gail’s would’ve been the first I’d have wanted to see.

But our roles weren’t reversed, and I realized with the chill of experience that in all probability, and despite the duration and intensity of our friendship, she would yearn for comfort from those of her own sex.

Standing there, my hand almost on the doorknob, I felt swelling up inside me the same combination of anger, sorrow, and frustration that I’d suppressed in Tony’s car. But again I was stuck, my colleagues discreetly watching me from a distance. For the second time since learning of the assault, I struggled to reverse my own emotional tide.

A gray-haired nurse opened the door to room 4 barely wide enough to slip out. I caught her eye as she was about to pass me with what looked like a urine sample in her hand.

“Will you be going back in there soon?”

She answered cautiously, a hint of suspicion in her voice. “Yes.”

“I’m Joe Gunther. Gail Zigman is a friend of mine. Would you tell her I’m here, that if she wants me, I’m available?”

Her face cleared and she smiled at me. “Sure.”

I returned to where Ron was filling Tony in on the details. Brandt held his hand up as I approached, interrupting him. “Better start from the top, so Joe can hear it all.”

Ron nodded, but I could sense his uneasiness. Rape was something we usually discussed in self-consciously clinical terms, occasionally lapsing into morbid humor to hide our own discomfort. Now, none of that applied. My relationship with Gail was no secret, and she’d been accepted as one of the department’s extended family.

Ron’s voice was conspicuously flat. “It happened two hours ago, about 2:13, according to her clock radio. She caught sight of the time just before he put a pillowcase over her head.”

I knew that radio well. At 11:16 last night, I’d been prompted by its oversized green numbers to leave Gail’s warm side, put my clothes back on, and go home. She’d laced her arms around my neck as I’d leaned down to kiss her goodnight, and I’d taken advantage of the gesture to give her breast a last caress.

“What was the very first thing she remembers about the attack?” I asked.

“That’s almost it. He must’ve been real quiet, or she was sleeping like a log, ’cause the first thing she knew, he was on top of her, pulling the pillowcase off the pillow to bag her. Her arms were already tied down.”

That surprised me. “How?”

“He fixed lengths of rope to the bed frame and then rigged slipknots around each of her wrists. Not tight enough to wake her up, I guess, but enough to lock her up when she tried to get free.”

I frowned. Gail was a sound sleeper. There’d been times I’d gotten into bed next to her and the first she’d known about it was waking up in the morning. But she’d been unusually tired on those occasions, unlike last night.

Ron was still talking. “He tied her legs down the same way after he threatened her with a knife and warned her not to put up a fight.”

I rubbed my eyes with my fingertips, trying to visualize a generic victim instead of Gail. I noticed the nurse I’d spoken to earlier going back into the examination room.

Brandt interrupted for a moment. “Did he use the knife?”

Klesczewski glanced at me nervously. “He nicked her a couple of times to prove he had it. Pinpricks, really. They aren’t bad, Joe.”

I felt my heartbeat beginning to pick up speed, not wishing to ask where those pinpricks had been placed, and suspecting the worst.

“On the phone, you mentioned she had some bruises,” Brandt said. “How’d she get them?”

The door down the hallway opened again and the nurse gestured to me. With a sense of relief, I walked away from Ron’s descriptions. At some point, I’d get all the details and look at them critically, professionally, and categorize them as Brandt was doing. A rapist rarely attacks just once, and he rarely changes style from assault to assault. If we matched his MO to others already on file, we could probably identify him.

But right now I wasn’t interested.

Pleasantly, even supportively, the nurse blocked my way to the door, placing her hand gently on my arm. “Joe, Gail asked me to thank you but said she wasn’t up to a visit just now. It’s been quite an experience.”

I glanced beyond her, so wanting to just push her aside and barge in. In my gut, despite my earlier rational analysis, I couldn’t help feeling a simple hug would be of some help-especially in this sterile setting.

But I nodded instead, unhappily aware of who that hug was meant to soothe the most. “Okay.”

She steered me gently farther down the hall, toward another examination room. “We were wondering if you could help us out a little. We need a blood sample from you for the kit.”

I nodded again. My semen would still be in Gail and would have to be differentiated from that of her attacker. All part of the protocol-the gathering of evidence. It made me think of what Gail was going through now, giving urine and blood samples, having her thighs swabbed with moistened Q-tips, her pubic hair combed out with a fine-toothed comb, her wounds photographed-everything documented and confined in dozens of small and large aseptically clean white envelopes.

I looked down into the nurse’s warm hazel eyes, nestled in a fine webbing of sympathetic wrinkles. “Sure. Lead the way.”

She sat me down in a small room and had me roll up my sleeve, quickly and efficiently wrapping a tourniquet around my upper arm. Her voice was clear and bright, much younger than her appearance. “I’m new in town. One of the other nurses was telling me you’re the chief of detectives in Brattleboro.”

“That’s right.” She shook my right hand. “Elizabeth Pace. Pleased to meet you. I’m sorry about the circumstances.”

I understood she was trying to lighten me up a bit, perhaps help me over the rejection I’d received at Gail’s door. Her effort made me bite back my gloominess, although I refused to play along completely. “How’s she doing?”

Elizabeth Pace hesitated, pretending to be judging a vein the size of a small child’s finger-something she could have stuck with her eyes closed. “You’ve probably dealt with rape victims before.”

“Yes.”

She swabbed the spot with alcohol, making the vein glisten. “I came from Boston. We had a lot of them there. We ended up cataloguing them, among ourselves, from the off-the-wall hysterics to the dead-eyed catatonics. You probably do the same kind of thing in your work.”

She lanced the vein with a needle attached to a Vacutainer hub and quickly slid a vacuum tube in. A small squirt of blood quickly filled the tube. “Given that sliding scale-and the assumption that all those women are in some form of shock-I’d say your friend is taking it pretty well. She came here right away, told us to call the police and her friend Susan Raffner, who then contacted Women for Women. She’s been helpful and cooperative from the start.”

Raffner was the head of Women for Women, a high-profile crisis and counseling center that often worked with us on rape cases, and of which Gail was a founder and a board member. The two of them had been friends and allies through many a political battle.

Pace withdrew both the tube and the needle, released the tourniquet, and placed a cotton ball against the puncture wound. “Bend your arm to keep that in place a few minutes.”

She sat back and appraised me for a couple of seconds. “You’ve known her a long time?”

I appreciated her professional directness. This was obviously a woman of considerable experience in dealing with people, and she was paying me the courtesy of being honest.

“A lot of years,” I admitted.

“In my book, that makes you both victims, except nobody’s going to spend much time on you. Part of that’s as it should be-her needs are greater. But if you two are going to get on with things, you better not forget that you took a shot here, too. Get some help-it’ll benefit both of you, especially over the next few months. It’s not going to be easy-you’re going to be asked to put your feelings at the back of the bus.”

She grinned at me suddenly. “But you knew all that, right?”

“I’ve had a taste of it already.”

We stood up and she ushered me to the door, patting my back like a supportive parent, although we were probably close to the same age. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Treat her gently, okay? She’s a strong woman, but right now she’s got invisible Fragile signs stamped all over her.”

I shook her hand again. “Thanks. And welcome to town.”

I went back down the hallway, still passing Gail’s door with regret but feeling a little less isolated.

The lobby outside the nurse’s station had been abruptly transformed from a bland, overlit, near-empty patch of linoleum to a tension-filled convention of mutually distrustful people, clumps of whom were clustered in separate corners. In descending order of numbers, there were a half-dozen patrol officers, reinforced by several sleepy-looking off-duty people; three sharp-eyed representatives of Women for Women, including Susan Raffner; a growing number of curious hospital personnel; and three people whose presence there caused my heart to sink-Ted McDonald, from WBRT, the local radio station, and a reporter/photographer team from the Brattleboro Reformer.

I found Ron Klesczewski surrounded by blue uniforms, giving out orders to seal off Gail’s house and property and to start some fast preliminary street inquiries in the hope of glimpsing at least one ripple in the town’s social swampland before alibis and plausible denials smoothed the surface back over.

Tony Brandt, wearing his political hat, was standing with Raffner in the center of the room, speaking earnestly and quietly and occasionally glancing over to make sure the three media people were staying-as requested-temporarily out of earshot.

I waited for Ron to finish with one of the patrolmen and tilted my head in the direction of the reporters. “How’d they find out so fast?” He shrugged. “Don’t know, but considering the crowd, I’m not surprised.”

“They know it was Gail?”

He didn’t answer directly. “She’s a pretty big name in town; a lot of people know where she lives. We’ve had to use the radio to get our people out to her place, and both the Reformer and BRT have scanners.”

I nodded. He put his hand on my arm and added, “They’re usually pretty good about keeping the lid on names.”

I saw that Tony and Susan Raffner were parting company, so I joined him as the Women for Women contingent headed up the hall toward Gail’s room. “Trouble?”

He smiled thinly. “No-just staking out turf. I basically told her we would pull out all the stops-like we always do-and she basically told me we better do a hell of a lot better than that. All very polite.” He glanced over to where the reporters were looking increasingly impatient. “Maybe I’ll have better luck with them.”

He left me to watch Raffner and her colleagues knock on the door to Gail’s room and walk in. I hesitated a moment, groping for a reasonable excuse for what I was about to do-Gail had said she wasn’t up to seeing visitors, albeit a while ago; she obviously was receiving people now, and her door had been left open.

For the third time that night, fueled by flimsy logic and pent-up emotions, I walked down that corridor, unsure of my motivations-or of what I expected to see.

At first, loitering in the doorway, I didn’t see anything except the backs of the three women I’d followed, lined up in a tight semicircle around a chair in the far corner of the room. Then one of them bent forward to receive the hug I’d been longing to give, and over her shoulder I saw Gail’s face-pale, swollen, her eyes shut tight with longing, a dark bruise beginning to take hold of her left cheekbone. Her bare arms encircled the neck of her friend, and I clearly saw the red welts the rapist’s bonds had left around both her wrists. The sight left me rooted in place, without a word to say.

Her eyes opened then, and she took me in for a long couple of seconds before murmuring, “Joe.”

Gail’s visitors turned to face me, their expressions stern, even vaguely hostile, their usual professional demeanor transformed by the emotional toll of having to tend to one of their own.

I stayed put, thoroughly daunted by the anger I felt radiating toward me. Gail motioned to me to come nearer, and as I did, two of the women flanking her draped protective hands on her shoulders. It was not how I’d envisioned our encounter, and it triggered a small but resentful response deep inside me-toward the man who had done this to my best friend, toward the women around her who obviously lumped me with him, and toward Gail herself, for not allowing us this moment alone.

Fully revealed by the others who’d moved aside, Gail sat in an oversized, green hospital gown, her arms and legs pale and skinny by contrast, looking as frail as a lame child. Her swollen face, crowned by a tangle of disheveled dark hair, made her head look enormous atop a thin, almost shrunken body. The effect was so startling I instinctively crouched before her and reached to hold her hands in my own, my throat tight with emotion.

That twin gesture caught her by surprise and made her jump and grip the arms of her chair. I dropped my hands immediately, embarrassed that my own professional training had been so easily overridden.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, painfully aware of the others all around, looking down at me. “How are you doing?”

She smiled faintly. “I’ve been better.”

“I wish I’d been there,” I added without thinking. There was a predictable but silent stirring at this traditional male cliché, but Gail embraced its intent.

She nodded and said, “I do, too.”

I found myself groping for something to add, something other than what was crowding the front of my brain and which would do her no good at all-about how we would catch the guy and take him to the cleaners; that I wouldn’t sleep till we had; that I wished we could turn the clock back a few hours.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked instead.

“Catch the guy,” Susan Raffner answered immediately.

I didn’t take my eyes off Gail’s. “Would you like to stay at my place? I could bunk out on the couch, or at the office.”

Gail shook her head. “No, that’s okay.”

Susan Raffner’s voice was softer and she touched my shoulder. “I’ll put her up at my house for a while-lots of room. Lots of people, too, when she wants the company.”

I conceded the point and felt slightly foolish about my suggestion. “Thanks, Susan.”

I paused a moment, trying to find the right words, knowing I’d done poorly enough already. Gail was looking at her hands in her lap-an obvious sign I’d overstayed a welcome I’d never received in the first place. Fighting the desire to at least touch her hair, I rose and stepped back.

“Well, I’ll get out of here. Let me know if I can do anything to help.” I looked around. “Any of you-day or night.”

Raffner nodded her thanks. Gail didn’t move.

I took another step toward the door. “They’ll have to come back and ask you more questions-probably later today.”

Gail’s head shot up. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “You’re not going to be on this case?” Her voice was incredulous, rich with betrayal.

I opened my empty hands to her, burning with anger that I couldn’t immediately grant her one request. “I can’t say. They may not let me.”

Her eyes blazed at me. “I want you on it, Joe.”

I pursed my lips and nodded. “Okay. I’ll make it work somehow.”

She looked at me a moment longer, her expression softening, becoming distant again-mourning the loss of something precious and irreplaceable. She went back to studying her hands.

I moved to the door, at once eager and reluctant to leave. I paused there and glanced back at her, at her friends beginning to close around her once more.

“I love you, Gail.”

There was no response.