Summitt

Chapter Seventeen

When Selby returned home, Shana was in the study watching television, sitting cross-legged on the leather sofa. A bowl of popcorn was on the table beside her. Blazer was stretched in front of the fireplace.

“Can we turn the TV off for a while?”

“Sure, daddy.” Shana hurried in her bare feet to snap the set off.

Selby had phoned her after talking to Dorcas Brett. As Shana sat down again, Selby said, “I’m not blaming you, but it’s time we get things out in the open. Miss Brett filled me in on what you told her. I’ll start with two questions: when did you know it was Earl Thomson and why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“It wasn’t until I saw the picture in the paper, but I still wasn’t sure so I didn’t want to tell you or anybody.”

“And that’s why you phoned him?”

“Yes, I told Miss Brett, I had to hear his voice. Can’t you understand, daddy? I had to hear him talking. I called him from here, from my room, and hung up the minute he answered. Then I called him from a pay phone when Normie and I were out driving around. I pretended I had a wrong number that time. But seeing him at Longwood, I was sure.”

“It seems you’ve been doing a lot of pretending lately, Shana. That’s what we’ve got to get straightened out.”

He made himself a drink at the bar, a converted marble-topped table with carved legs. “You want a Coke or anything?”

“I’ll get myself a glass of milk. But Mrs. Cranston made some sandwiches for you. You want me to bring them in? They’re salamis on rye with tomatoes and pickles.”

“No, no, thanks, honey.” He watched her walk quickly through the front hallway, looking small and vulnerable in her bare feet. Her penny-loafers were lined up beside the old sofa...

Dorcas Brett hadn’t bothered to remove her raincoat at the diner, only opening the collar and pulling it back from her shoulders. She had explained over a cup of coffee and with an occasional glance at her watch that “... Burt Wilger and I knew something was odd about Shana’s reaction at Vinegar Hill. The garage, the look of it, obviously terrified her. Burt and I went back and checked the driveway. Some of the ruts had been packed with wooden slats and underbrush — what a driver would use if his tires were spinning in mud. The fire trucks and water had covered most of it, but we found enough to give us the picture. His car was stuck, and our guess was that he’d gone into the garage to get an axe and to try to find some wooden slats or pieces of kindling to jam under his tires. But guesses don’t meet probable cause requirements. The statute is explicit — probable cause may not be created after the fact, not by a successful search or seizure, nor by an arrest. But when Shana remembered what happened, and pointed to the garage and said, ‘The man who raped me went in there that night. I saw him,’ that gave us sufficient reason to go to Teague for the warrant.”

Buttoning the collar of her coat, she added, “It took twenty-four hours to process the prints and get the confirmation from Washington. When we called you late this afternoon, you were on your way to the Thomsons’. Excuse me now, but I’ve got to get back to the office...”

Shana put her glass of milk on the coffee table. Sitting on the sofa, she wrapped her arms about her knees, locked away in her own private thoughts.

Pulling his chair around to face her, Selby said, “I’d like to say this first, Shana. We’re still a family and that means telling each other the truth and trusting each other. I’m your father and I always will be. I said that before and I know it sounds obvious, but it’s important to emphasize because... well, you still don’t seem to understand what it means. It’s not whether I’m a good or bad father, wise and smart, or dumb and insensitive. But it’s my job to take care of you and help you when you need it. That’s the way I am. I taught you to use a compass, I taught you to swim, I raised hell with you for playing with matches in the hay barn, and I raised hell with those idiot grooms at Harvey Nelson’s farm for putting you up on a green hunter when you were still in pony class.”

“I fell off that hunter, daddy,” she corrected him quickly.

“What difference does that make?”

“Well, that’s what really happened. It was my fault because I kept begging them to let me ride that big chestnut.”

“Shana, please, let’s stick to the point. Whether you fell off or got thrown off isn’t the issue. You could have broken your neck. My job is to protect you from things like that until you can take care of yourself. Like that time when you were playing the jukebox. You insisted that was your own private experience and that I sort of intruded on it but—”

“I didn’t say that, daddy.”

“Let me finish, okay? That jukebox and the scene at Longwood this morning... honey, they belong to me too, because what happens to you happens to me... is my responsibility—”

“But when I found his picture under my door this morning...” Shana drew a trembling breath. “I knew you were going to try to go out there.”

“Well, dammit, aren’t you glad I did?”

“Why are you getting mad?”

“I’m sorry, Shana.”

“You want me to say I’m glad you helped me and Normie and shoved those bullies down — well, sure, I am, daddy. Except that turned it into a family fight—”

“Dammit, Shana, I’ll never stand by and let anybody put a hand on you against your will. Can’t you understand that?”

“I can see that, honestly, I can, daddy. But you’re my father and that’s the only reason you believe me. Davey believes me because he’s my little brother, and Miss Brett believes me because she’s paid to, but I want it to be different, can’t you see that, daddy?”

“Miss Brett isn’t paid to believe anybody, Shana. Her job is to prosecute the defendants by presenting the facts to a jury.”

“I know that much.” In profile to him, his daughter’s forehead was smooth in the firelight, her blond hair layered in moving shadows. “I took civics and history. I knew how things are supposed to work, but there are two sides now, mine and his.” Her voice had become tense. “But it can’t be just a family thing with everybody feeling they’re right. I want his family and his friends to know the truth. I want to hear him admit it, I want them all to admit it. I don’t want people wondering why I was wearing such tight shorts, or what I was doing down on Fairlee Road when it was almost dark, and what I was looking for or waiting for—”

She swung around to stare at him then, the movement so coiled and tense that it startled Blazer, who raised his head and growled softly.

“Earl Thomson did this to me. Not because of me. Not with me. That’s what I want the judge and jury to tell the whole world.”

Selby said quietly, “All right, let’s settle down, Shana. Let’s see if we can’t try to understand each other. I don’t think you used good judgment going out to Longwood. Not just because you didn’t confide in me, but because it’s foolish to think a man who did what he did to you would admit it simply because you accused him of it.”

Shana slumped back in the sofa. “I guess you’re right, but yesterday it all seemed simple. When Miss Brett and I went back to Vinegar Hill she told me some people have memories that are so painful they’re afraid to remember them, that they can’t until they feel secure and safe enough to. Something like that happened to her in college, she got locked in the gym in Bryn Mawr one night and—”

“Yes, the swimming pool. Davey told me about that.”

“Well, anyway...” Shana leaned forward and moved a finger slowly around the edge of the milk glass. “We drove into the driveway, and stood looking at the garage. Miss Brett and Sergeant Wilger didn’t say anything, but I felt safe. Then I remembered. After it was all over that night...” Her voice became soft, flat. “He couldn’t get the car moving. The motor made that awful whining noise, like screaming. That’s why I was so scared when you were there. I remembered he went into the garage to get something. But” — she frowned — “it wasn’t clear...”

Her finger was still moving in slow circles around the glass. “It was like when I walked up Fairlee Road in the rain. There’s a vacant lot where people dump some old cars. I sat in one of those cars a long time that night but I didn’t remember anything about it till later. Things are still coming back in pieces.”

“Well, as rough as that is,” Selby said, “wouldn’t it be better if you’d come to me whenever something comes back to you?”

She laughed sharply. “God, daddy, how can anything be better? I’ve got to be examined by a psychiatrist during the trial. Not by a doctor like Dr. Kerr but someone who’s going to get into my head because of what he did to me...”

“Did Miss Brett tell you that?”

“Yes, and she said she can’t do anything about it because that’s the law. I’m the crazy loon who has to explain everything. Why don’t they make him talk to a psychiatrist? Make him explain why he wants to run people down with his car and everything? But he’d just lie his way out of it. Maybe in some crazy way he thinks he’s telling the truth... I’m still not sure where I was for three hours that night. I don’t know what’s the truth about that.”

She turned away quickly but he saw a flash of tears in her eyes. “Part of the truth is, I was ashamed to come home, because I didn’t want to see you and tell you about it. You said you taught me how to swim and everything. When I was afraid of the hoot owls when we first moved here, you took me out wrapped up in a blanket one night and there was one hooting in the old apple tree we were sitting under. You turned your flashlight on him. He was only about four inches tall and he had puffy little feathers around his eyes.”

Her voice was rising, beginning to break. “Don’t you think I liked doing things like that with you? Can’t you see why I didn’t want to come home and tell you I’d been raped? That he’d done things to me that I didn’t even know men wanted to do to girls? I just sat in that car listening to the rain and thinking that with mommy gone, I was all you had left. And that I could never be what you wanted me to be.”

“Please don’t say that,” Selby said. “Please don’t even think that, Shana. We’ve talked enough for now.”

She nodded gratefully. “I better put this milk away then,” she said. “I want to shampoo my hair and get my clothes ready. If you’re not going to walk Blazer, I’ll take him up to my room.”

Selby kissed her good night. She hugged him tightly and he drew her into his arms and gently rubbed her thin shoulders.

And then she pulled away from him and brushed her eyes and said, “Come on, Blazer.”

East Chester was a Quaker town of twelve thousand, its business district lined with eighteenth-century red brick and white clapboard shops. A highschool and open-air theater bordered the southern end of the village. A shantytown with tar-paper roofs lay to the north on the Brandywine. The city’s parking mall ran the length of the commercial area, between City Hall and St. Christopher’s white, steepled church.

A uniformed guard in the lobby of the hall signed Selby into the building. He had called ahead and there was a pass for him. The corridor on the DA’s floor was dark except for a rectangle of light from the open door of her outer office.

Selby heard someone shouting, “You may know about those goddamn lawbooks of yours...” A string of profanity followed, and then the heavy, growling voice rose again. “But you got a lot to learn about team work. You don’t know shit about loyalty...”

As Selby walked into the reception room, Lieutenant Eberle came out of Dorcas Brett’s office, almost colliding with him.

“Watch it, for Christ’s sake.” The detective’s breath was sweet with mints and whiskey. Recognizing Selby, he looked him up and down, a grin touching his lips. “She’s all yours, pal. And you’re welcome to her.”

Selby turned his back on him and went into Brett’s office. She was opening a pack of cigarettes, picking nervously at the foil wrapping. She wore a denim suit with a yellow scarf. Her raincoat was over a chair.

“Captain Slocum called the Detective Division,” she said with an uneasy smile. “He wanted our notes on Earl Thomson, and that touched some macho nerves around here, as you probably just heard.”

“They probably heard it all the way down to the river.” Selby looked at her fumbling hands. “Would you like some help?”

She looked in surprise at the cigarettes. She said, “No, thanks. I’m not supposed to be smoking now anyway.”

Selby said, “I called because I had a talk with Shana. It occurred to me then I could use some help from you.”

When he told her his worries, Brett said, “As far as the psychiatrist is concerned, that’s a defense privilege, guaranteed by statute. On the other point, I agree. Shana’s probably not telling us everything, but I think she’s trying to.”

“I don’t want her hurt anymore, Miss Brett. I can’t save what’s been lost. But I can try to prevent her going through anything else. So I want to be sure you can nail Earl Thomson.”

She picked up the cigarettes, shrugged and dropped them back on her desk. “A conviction is a risky assumption in any trial. But we have three solid props — Shana’s identification of Earl Thomson, and the presence of Thomson’s fingerprints and car at Vinegar Hill. Plus the conclusively damaging fact that he denied he’d ever been there. He lied to Captain Slocum and Eberle about that, and we have the taped interrogations to prove it.”

“But you said a conviction is a risky assumption,” Selby reminded her. “What’s the problem? The fact that Shana phoned him afterward?”

“No, those calls are legally irrelevant. Her identification isn’t based on the sound of his voice. It’s based on his physical appearance.”

Selby said impatiently, “What is bothering you? The psychiatrist?”

“That’s part of it. But a cultural preconception about rape will also be working against us. If Shana had been murdered, or mugged and robbed, as ghastly as that sounds, we’d have fewer problems. But in a rape trial, the plaintiff can be humiliated and emotionally scarred, and I can’t promise I’ll be able to protect Shana from that.

“Allan Davic, for starters, will insist on the psychiatric examination. That’s his right under the judicially sanctioned notion that a young girl who accuses a man of rape may simply be fantasizing a wishful, biological urge. So it’s got to be proved she’s not a sexual hysteric. It’s this thinking that debases rape victims, particularly children. Their young age and ignorance of sexual terminology can be used to impeach their testimony. In rape trials the sexual habits of the victims can be hung out for speculation. If the female is ‘unchaste,’ in the legal term, unclean is the implication, that’s considered relevant. ‘What’s been used can’t be abused’ — as old common law has it. But Earl Thomson’s sexual activities can’t be hinted at, they’re cloaked in privilege. His kinks might influence the jury — the same jury that may be told the victim is unreliable because she had the carelessness, the stupidity or sheer bloody gall to lose her virginity. That’s the sexual bias available to the defense. In most felonies victims are presumed honest unless competent evidence proves they’re not. But in rape cases and reports of child molestation there’s an a priori suspicion of the injured party, which is why rape is probably the single most unreported major crime in the country. In spite of that,” she said, beginning to pace, “a reported rape takes place every ten minutes around the clock in the United States, and forty percent of those attacks are committed against girls like Shana, from ten to fifteen years old. And those figures represent just the literal definition of rape — penile-vaginal assault by force, committed on a female against her will. The stats don’t include oral or anal sodomy and God knows how many gang-rapes. The sad fact, Mr. Selby,” she said, returning to her desk for her cigarettes, “is that sexual aggression against young females is actually considered normal by many highly publicized psychologists and anthropologists, their point being, I guess, that such behavior isn’t pathological because it’s typical of many animals, particularly monkeys.” Moistening her lips, she said, “Forgive me, Mr. Selby, but I burn at the notion that the abused and raped child is left with the solace that the gravity of her condition has been overstated, that what’s good enough for young monkeys can’t be all that bad for her.”

Selby said, “Miss Brett, I’m glad you’re on our side, but you’ve been angry since we first met. I had a feeling some of it was toward me—”

“You’re right,” she said, “I was angry when I met you and your daughter at Vinegar Hill. The whole damn scene had such an air of... biblical vengeance and righteousness about it. You brought her back to the place where she’d been raped and forced her to witness and relive all that terror again. You weren’t frightened by that place. You had some thoughts of revenge and reprisal going for you, pumping you up. But Shana, the abused female of the piece, had to stand there until her memories drove her into a screaming hysteria—”

“Hold it, goddammit.” Selby raised a hand. “You’re forgetting something. I was there trying to find out who raped Shana because nobody on the official payroll here seemed to give a good goddamn about that. There’s been a cover-up since it happened, and don’t bother telling me you don’t know that. As for biblical righteousness and the rest of it, the Bible is just as often in the eye of the beholder as anything else.”

“Well, if that’s true, I’m sorry but—”

“Let me finish, will you?”

“If I’ve been wrong I want the chance to say so.” And she meant it.

“Never mind, just hear me out. Shana may have lost a kind of trust she can’t recover. She’s known pain and loss before, her mother died recently. But that happened in a framework she could adapt to. This thing has turned her life upside down. That’s what she’s lost, that’s what’s gone.”

“Good... I just hope we can put my outburst at you behind us and get to work. We do have to trust each other, you realize.”

Selby said, “What about Captain Slocum and his people?”

“Sergeant Wilger was detailed to the DA’s section by Slocum,” Brett said, “even before we knew we were going to trial. But the Commonwealth is in charge of this prosecution, which means the captain reports to this office. If he doesn’t do his job we have the authority to suspend him.”

“Tell me, how did you happen to be assigned to this case?”

“It didn’t happen, Mr. Selby. I was in line for it. The other deputies are on trial duty and our staff back-up, Bill Corum, is out with a flare-up of diabetes.” She smiled tightly. “Is that what’s bothering you? That I might not be any good because I’m not wearing a beard and a jockstrap?”

“Come on, Miss Brett, I said I was glad we’re on the same side. But I can’t help wondering about other things.”

“Such as?”

“Mr. Davic ran a check on me, even before you served the warrant on Thomson. He’d learned my wife was dead, among other things.”

“What’s your question then?”

“How did he know in advance that Earl Thomson was involved? Or that a warrant might be served?”

“There’s an obvious answer to that. Which is that I told him. Is that what you think?”

“No, but I have to wonder about it.”

She shrugged and turned back to the windows. The lights glinted in her hair, which was damp from the rain. Something distracted her, because she moved closer to the slotted blinds, her eyes traveling along the parking mall. He noticed a tremor in her hand as she loosened her scarf.

“Well, if you’re wondering about Mr. Davic,” she said, “you must also be wondering about Lieutenant Eberle. Do you think we staged that scene in my outer office for your benefit? That we waited until we heard the elevator door close, heard your footsteps in the corridor and then went into an act to convince you I’m one of the good guys?”

“No, that didn’t occur to me,” Selby said truthfully.

“But you’re thinking about it now.”

Selby said, “It was the second scene tonight, wasn’t it?”

“What do you mean by that?”

Her phone rang. She crossed to her desk and lifted the receiver. “Dorcas Brett,” she said sharply, then, “all right, just a minute.” She lowered the phone to her side.

She looked suddenly tired, and angry again. “You meant Mr. Lorso reading me out. That was the other scene you imply might have been staged, right?”

He shrugged. “Miss Brett, I’m her father, I can’t take any more chances. I’m dependent on you, but I can’t afford to overlook anything. I’ve had one hell of a runaround since this started, as you know...”

Sighing wearily, she nodded at the phone. “Sergeant Wilger’s finished the paperwork at Magistrate Teague’s. He wants to know if you’d like him to pick you up in the morning. We’re due in court around eight-thirty.”

“Tell him no thanks, I guess we’ll meet you there.”

“Fine... then I’ll say good night, Mr. Selby.”

He had the feeling she wanted to add something to that, but he couldn’t be sure because her expression was masked by the overhead lights shadowing her eyes.