“Did you see him at the house?”
“Yes.”
“Were you ever at the house for a social visit?”
“Ah, we always met for a purpose.”
“For what purpose?”
“What I’d advertised for.”
“So you came to the house for sex?”
“Correct.”
“And you saw Robbie, a couple of times, you said.”
“We had a meal afterward a few times and he showed up.”
“Where had he been?” “A friend’s.”
“Who told you he’d been at a friend’s house?”
“Ah, I assumed it, I guess. She didn’t say.”
“Robbie showed up, you said? He was suddenly just there in the kitchen to eat the meal?”
“As I said, I didn’t think about him.”
Howard was silent on the way home that night. It is one thing to be in a car with someone who is quiet, and another to be with someone who is silent. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him look anything but grim. I made a few observations along the way. I wondered what it meant that Dirks hadn’t chosen to cross-examine “Grinder.” I thought Howard
might answer, but he got out of the car when we pulled into the driveway and walked into the house, shutting the door before I got there.
Mrs. Nancy Sheridan, Rafferty’s dream come true, appeared before us on Tuesday morning. She sat down, wiping her runny eye with her ironed white handkerchief. Theresa, who had been unable to come to the proceedings the week before, because of work, was sitting behind me, next to Howard. When she said later in the hall, that she had prayed for a witness like Mrs. Sheridan, Howard looked down and his mouth curved slowly into a smile.
Mrs. Sheridan was a good Catholic who had been bearing children since 1960 and had only recently, three years before, finished with the stillbirth of her eleventh baby. Her tailored maroon suit had been out-of-date for so long it had come back into fashion, and it still fit reasonably well. She wasn’t any taller than five feet and she had short, dull black hair. Robbie and his mother had lived next door to the Sheridans, in a rental house, for three months the previous spring. Mrs. Sheridan deplored the fact that Mr. Gillis, the landlord, always had undesirable people as tenants, and that he did not keep up with essential repairs. Rafferty did his best to hold her to the subject, but with a captive audience she couldn’t seem to help making asides about the ills of society.
There weren’t any boys in the neighborhood Robbie’s age and Mrs. Sheridan told us that for a while Robbie latched on to her eight-year-old son, Jack. After a few weeks, however, she had had to prohibit Jack from playing with Robbie because of the child’s foul language, the likes of which had never before reached her ears. “I’m not inclined to repeat any of those words,” she asserted, “even for the benefit of the court.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Rafferty assured her.
With Rafferty’s prodding Mrs. Sheridan related an incident that had taken place in May. She had gone looking for Jack at about 7:30 in the evening. She had called first, and then rung the dinner bell several times. He was ordinarily reliable, and she began to worry. Some of the older children had gone with Mr. Sheridan on a fishing trip and it was just going to be herself and Jack for dinner. It was a rare occasion to have one child at home, and she was going to take him out to Taco Bell for a treat. She walked down the block, down Main Street where they lived. She
turned the corner and followed the path to the subdivision where he sometimes went to play with school friends. There was a group of boys skateboarding in a driveway but he wasn’t among them. They said he hadn’t been around for an hour or so, that they thought he had gone home. She became very anxious. “We all know what the world is coming to,” she said, looking at the jury for confirmation. Although Jack was her tenth child, she didn’t feel that she was overprotective, due to her long experience. There had been recent rumors of a man in a green pickup truck harassing young girls. The year before a Walworth County boy had disappeared, plucked off the street, no trace. Even a seasoned mother worried.
I don’t think there was any one in the room, not Rafferty, not Susan Dirks, not Judge Peterson himself, who wanted to endanger their reputations by interrupting Mrs. Sheridan, or objecting to her statements, or telling her to hurry along.
On the evening of May 23 she stopped in front of the Mackessys, having decided she’d check at their house before she walked all the way over to the playground. She had told her son not to play with Robbie, but Jack was a kindhearted boy who might have responded if Robbie had been in need. It was not impossible, she thought, that Jack had gone into the house to assist him in some way.
“Wouldn’t Carol Mackessy have been on the premises,” Rafferty asked, “to put a Band-Aid on his knee or pour a glass of milk?”
Nancy Sheridan shook her head and again wiped her face. She seemed not exactly to be crying, although there was a steady stream coming from her right eye. “She often left that poor boy at home by himself,” she said. “Jack would go over there and come back and tell me that Robbie was alone eating from a box of Froot Loops.” While Dirks was making a hearsay objection Mrs. Sheridan went right on talking. “It’s bad families that are spoiling it for everyone else. I found it impossible to believe that a mother would leave a kindergarten-aged child alone for more than ten minutes—”
“Sustained,” Judge Peterson said.
“He never looked me in the eye.” Mrs. Sheridan wasn’t hearing either the judge or Rafferty, both of whom were trying to get her to stop. “A
mother doesn’t raise ten children without knowing that that boy was afraid to look up and see that no one was there to love him.”
Mrs. Dirks made a number of objections during the testimony, and she asked that certain asides be struck from the record. Although Peterson granted her some small victories, he was clearly disposed toward the star witness, who Rafferty referred to in private as, “the mother of us all.” Mrs. Sheridan didn’t know precisely how often Robbie was left alone, but it seemed to be on a regular basis that he was at home when Mrs. Mackessy’s car was gone. As far as she could see, there was no baby-sitter watching out for the child. It was none of her business, she said, but it was hard not to notice him looking at her from his dining-room window. She’d wave, she said, but he wouldn’t wave back. She could feel him watching her so that sometimes, before she looked to see if he was there, she went and closed the curtains.
On the night in question, however, when she was out looking for Jack, she went up to the Mackessy’s door and was about to ring the bell. There was loud music coming from the back of the house and she thought it might be a party. “I was about to go,” she said, “because I knew my Jack wouldn’t have come over to the house under those circumstances, when Robbie appeared at the door. He was usually, a—well, angry-looking little guy. He seemed to want to take on the world, by himself, bless his heart. You could see all that’s tender in that child just hardening up.”
“What happened next?” Rafferty asked.
“I hadn’t ever spoken more than two words to the mother,” she said, in no relation to the question. “She probably didn’t think that someone such as myself had anything to offer.” She took a deep breath and felt her collar to make sure it was still in place. “Robbie said I should come in. He said, ‘You—you should come in.’ I said, no, no thank you, that I was looking for Jack. ‘You have to,’ he said. He insisted. He was stuttering and he was looking at me for once, with those great big eyes. I was surprised by his familiarity. It frightened me, because he looked—”
“How did he look, Mrs. Sheridan?”
“His eyes were huge, as I said. He was so pale. He was scared, Mr. Rafferty. His little body was quivering. I didn’t know what to think. I was afraid for a minute, for my Jack, afraid there’d been an accident. ‘What is
it, Robbie?’ I asked him. He said, ‘Come and look.’ ‘Is it Jack?’ He said no, he hadn’t seen Jack. I didn’t want to go inside that place but I followed him.”
“Where did he take you, Mrs. Sheridan?”
“He took me to the back of the house, to the den. The door was closed most of the way.” She bent her head, apparently unable to continue.
“What did you see, Mrs. Sheridan?”
“This is not easy for me, Mr. Rafferty.”
“I appreciate that.”
She gripped both armrests with her hands and sat straight. “I looked.”
“And what did you see?”
“It was dark, and the music was loud.”
“What could you make out?”
“There was something adult going on, something a child shouldn’t have seen. The music was so loud it made your heart beat hard.”
“What was happening in that room?”
“It was dark, like I said, but I could see her, Mrs. Mackessy, on the sofa, with one of her men. They were like animals, Mr. Rafferty. That’s what it looked like. She on all fours. He biting at her neck. Robbie had to scream at me, ‘My mama’s getting hurt.’ He took my hand and pulled me away, into the kitchen. He was crying, saying something about how it would happen to us too. The music stopped then, and that child barreled into me; he said I had to get out of the house. He as much as pushed me out the back door, Mr. Rafferty.”
“Did you see anyone besides Robbie on that evening?”
“No, I did not. I was extremely upset. I wanted to take the boy, but he closed the door. I ran from that house as fast as my legs could carry me. I ran straight upstairs in my own home and saw that my Jack was in his bedroom after all. I was so relieved. I should have called the police, I know that.”
“Did you tell anyone about your experience?”
“That’s a very good question, Mr. Rafferty.” He didn’t flinch, didn’t as much as crack the slightest smile. “My husband was on a fishing trip and would not be home until the end of the week. I felt that I needed to discuss with him any action we would take. I did not feel that I should
take steps without my husband. I was aware that my neighbor entertained men, and they were often large, burly fellows. You can’t be sure if people are on drugs, can’t be sure of their condition. You can’t be certain about anything in these times. I was not prepared to call the police myself and possibly place my family in danger. I am not proud of my inaction, but I felt that I was safeguarding my own children. I know that Robbie trusted me and that by not calling for help I violated that trust. It’s something I live with.”
“When did you next see the Mackessys?”
“I saw Robbie out in the yard fifteen or twenty minutes after I left him. His mother called him in a few minutes later. To be frank I was upset enough so that I began to wonder if I’d been dreaming. As it turned out, the boy and his mother disappeared a few days later. I heard that they were evicted, but I don’t know. I came home from a meeting and their curtains were down, the car was gone. Everything looked empty. It was a tremendous relief to me. Someone on the block said they’d rented a house in the country. I decided that I would continue to pray for them, but that I would otherwise put them out of my mind.”
When Rafferty finally sat down, he shifted his eyes in my direction and raised his eyebrows for a fraction of a second. As Susan Dirks got up, Sherry, from wherever she was, home with her three dickenses or still in jail, shouted, “Oh boy, she in DEEPshit.” I wonder now when Susan Dirks knew that Mrs. Mackessy was either grossly deluded or lying. I wonder if she realized she would lose badly when the other boys’ charges were dropped, when even Myra Flint could not get them to say the same thing twice. Rafferty had said many times that mine was the sort of case that should never have come to trial. He placed the blame solely on Susan Dirks. I know very well the urge to protect your failings, a need so strong you make up a different world to inhabit. Mrs. Mackessy had had a need to think differently about her life. Perhaps there was enough force in her need that even Susan Dirks had been convinced.
Whatever Dirks’s true feelings at the time of the trial she gave Mrs. Sheridan her best shot. If the room was dark, how could she have seen anyone? How long did she look? Four seconds? Five seconds? How could she tell there were two people? “I know what I have seen,” Mrs. Sheridan said. She was not going to be undone. She had God on her side. She was
not going to let an infertile woman lawyer who was too big for her britches diminish an incident that had changed her own life, that had made her scrape up thirty dollars she couldn’t really spare to send to a senator she felt had the right beliefs. “Miss Dirks,” she said, “Mrs. Dirks, whatever you are. There were people in that room. They were hurting one another for, for reasons I am not going to attempt to understand. The life was scared out of that boy. There was evil in that house, and your insinuations, that I have somehow invented a story so beyond my ken, are sorely trying my patience.”
After Mrs. Sheridan’s testimony, Rafferty and I went into the holding room. Howard trudged off to find us some sweet rolls. Rafferty put his hands to his wide open mouth and wiggled his hips in a way that did not become him. “I’m gloating,” he said, “I’m gloating. I’ll pay for it someday, but I can’t help it right now. I can’t help it!”
“Stop,” I said.
“Look!” He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “When some maniac from Hollywood comes knocking at your door for your story, okay? And you sell it for a million-five, and you and Howard buy a ten-inch parcel in Montana, right next door to Tom Brokaw and Brooke Shields, okay, you with me?”
“Would you please stop,” I said, laughing uneasily at his bulging eyes and the spit that was foaming around his mouth.
“As—as part of the deal you have to insist that Mrs. Sheridan play her own part. Not even what’s-her-name, Streep, could get that accent down, you know how flat Mrs. Sheridan’s Wisconsin, Catholic vowels are, and with just that touch of whining in her voice. It’s so fabulous. And no amount of onion balled up in a hanky could make just one eye run so righteously.”
“Please,” I said again.
“I know, I know. But she is such a work of art, like the Virgin she was, appearing at Lourdes.”
“Be quiet,” I said.
“All right, okay. I hope Howard gets something sinful, something chocolate and very sticky, made with cream and butter and several eggs.”