Authors: David Ellis
I
WAS RAPED.
She had said it the first time a week after it happened, while her parents were away and she could steal off to the city again, this time under far more humbling circumstances. She didn’t know if she would say it. She hadn’t even said the word to herself. But she had done it, filed a report with the city police, to a very understanding detective named Jill.
It has been two weeks. Give us two weeks and come back, said Jill, who had agreed to respect Shelly’s privacy in the matter. She would not call Shelly at her home or contact her in any way.
So Shelly has taken her third trip to the city in a month. She thinks of the comforting words of Jill the Detective. And the other words, too. Shelly should be tested for “STDs,” she had advised. Syphillis. Gonnorhea. Herpes. AIDS. Take a pregnancy test, too.
Precautions, all of them. Probably nothing to worry about. Shelly hasn’t been able to schedule a visit to her doctor yet. She can’t imagine doing it.
She closes her eyes as she approaches the police station. She turns and walks away, then stops and looks back. Twenty minutes doing this, which is okay because she is early anyway, she doesn’t want to seem too eager, but that doesn’t make sense, either.
Will there be a line-up of suspects? She can’t identify her attacker. Tests performed? Maybe the man confessed!
Two women race by Shelly on roller blades. A vendor on the corner is arguing with a woman over the price of a hot dog. The sun has come over the buildings to rain rays down on the police station. Summer is in full bloom in the city, even if hasn’t officially started yet. She should appreciate the energy of the city’s north side, but what had passed for cosmopolitan and vigorous now seems cold and heartless.
She walks again past the rows of blue-and-white squad cars parked along the street. Two uniformed officers are standing by a car smoking cigarettes and looking with disinterest at Shelly. She draws a breath and returns to the police station. There is a different person at the front desk, an older woman with a saggy chin and bifocals resting in the middle of her nose.
The man who emerges from behind a door is large, old-looking for an officer, closer to her father’s age, dressed in a shirt with brown stripes and a plain tie. He has large, scaly hands with dirty fingernails and a stomach that hangs over his belt. His neck is thick and stubbly with whiskers. “Hello, Shelly,” he says. “I’m Officer Stockard.” He motions to the back room. “Let’s have a talk, okay?”
Where’s Jill? Shelly returns to the same conference room where she spoke with the female detective. Something doesn’t feel right. Something in the officer’s expression, his tone of voice, his curtness. There is a file folder resting before him and a fresh notepad. He looks down at the file and starts to speak, then catches himself and looks up. “How you holding up?”
“I’m okay.”
“Sorry to hear about what happened.”
“Thank you.”
“Shelly, we’ve looked into this thing. I’ve talked to a lot of people. We have some problems. Some—” He strokes his chin, then levels his eyes on her. “Some real inconsistencies.” He opens his file, which contains about a dozen sheets of paper. He seems annoyed. “We get a lot of these,” he explains. “A lot of people who say they were assaulted.”
Say
they were assaulted? Her stomach seizes.
He raises his hands, then places them together on the table. “Who’s Andrea, first of all?”
Shelly clears her throat.
“You told your friends your name was Andrea. Why did you do that?”
She shrugs. “I was just—I don’t know. I wanted to—” She draws her arms around herself.
“You wanted to be eighteen, too, I guess. Didn’t you tell your friends you were eighteen?”
She nods. Yes, she did that.
“You said you were a high school graduate, just moved here from out east?”
“I said that.” She wasn’t looking at him any longer, just staring into the desk.
“So you see what I’m starting with here? You lied about everything.”
“I—I guess I wanted to be different.”
“You wanted to pretend.”
Her eyes fill.
“They said you looked eighteen, too.” She doesn’t respond to that. “Have you talked with your friends? Ms.”—papers shuffle; he bends back a page and struggles with the name—“Patriannis, for example?”
Dina, he means.
“Or Ms. Winters?”
Dina’s friend. Mary.
“No,” she answers quietly.
“Your friends aren’t too happy with you, Shelly. They said they never would have taken a fifteen-year-old to that party. They’re mad. I don’t blame them.”
Shelly loses control of her emotions. She weeps quietly, covers her face with her hands.
“Is there anything else you lied about, Shelly?”
She shakes her head no.
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you, Shelly. But if we take a case like this to trial—assuming we could ever find out who is responsible—that person would have a very smart lawyer who would ask you some very hard questions. You know what I’m talking about?”
She manages to say yes.
“He’ll say you lied, over and over again, to your friends, to your parents. He’ll say you looked like an adult. He’ll say you
can’t identify who did this to you. He’ll say you’re lying under oath. He’ll say you’re committing perjury. You know what perjury is?”
She nods.
“You can get in trouble if you lie about it. I want to make sure you don’t get in trouble.”
A moment passes. Shelly grinds her teeth and fights hard not to sob. She will cry but will do so alone.
“Listen to me, Shelly. Sometimes—girls your age.” He leans forward and struggles a moment. “You make decisions and then you regret them. You want to take things back. So you think about them differently. A week later, things you did—they look different. You want them to be different. So you decide they
were
different. You make up a story—”
“I didn’t make it up.” The firmness of her tone surprises even Shelly.
“No one’s going to believe a liar, Shelly.”
She looks at the officer again, her emotions raw. “You think I made this up?”
“Oh, listen.” He breaks eye contact. “It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what we can prove. Rape—rape is a difficult thing to prove.” He opens his hands. “Look. Did you ever say no? Did you ever say stop?”
Her breathing uneven, tears pouring down her cheeks and into her mouth, she says, “I’m not sure if I said it or thought it.”
“Was he supposed to read your mind?” He slashes his hand like a knife onto the table. “Listen. You lied to your friends. You lied to your parents. You claimed to be eighteen. You looked like you were eighteen. You had sex with some guy, you don’t know who, and you never told him you didn’t want to.” He shrugs. “Even if I ever find the guy, what am I supposed to do with that?”
I had passed out, she wants to say. He got on top of me. I couldn’t stop him. She wants to defend herself but this officer already knows these facts. He already knows these things and it doesn’t matter.
She is cold in the warm room. Shivering, uncomfortable. She looks at the single bulb over the table where they sit. She looks at the officer’s scaly hands.
The officer speaks gently. “I never said I didn’t believe you, Shelly. But we have a large case load, and prosecutors do too. No one is going to prosecute this case. And if they did, you could be damaged a lot worse than you already have been. And your parents will know.”
She wants to leave. She wants to run from this station, from this city.
A sheet of paper appears before her. “If you want me to keep investigating, you have to put that in writing and sign it. If you want me to stop investigating, you have to put that in writing, too. It’s up to you.”
“I wanna go home,” she mumbles.
He slides a pen next to the sheet of paper. “I’m sorry about this, Shelly. I wish we could erase what happened. But you put yourself into an adult situation, and you have to think like an adult. You have to decide.”
S
HELLY STOOD AT
the window and pressed her face against the glass. The sun shone brightly on the street below, on the pedestrians moving along the sidewalks. It was a little early for most people to be heading home for the day. Gentry Street was a main thoroughfare for the commuters, as the train station was just to the west and south, at the edge of the commercial district.
The alley where the shooting took place was in Shelly’s view to the north, across the street. As it was perpendicular to the street, she could not see all the way through the alley to the street over to the east—Donnelly Street. She estimated that she could see about fifteen feet down the alley before the view was obscured.
“There,” she said into the cell phone as she saw her private investigator, Joel Lightner, come into view in the alley. Joel stopped in his tracks and looked up in the general direction of where Shelly was standing, in the nineteenth-floor office.
Shelly turned to the woman next to her, Monica Stoddard. “Do you see him?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay, Joel. Thanks. Come on up.” Shelly closed the cell phone. “He’ll just be a minute,” she said to the woman.
“What are you guys doing?”
“We need to know how far you could see into the alley. Joel is going to measure the distance from where you could see him
to the sidewalk. That gives us an idea of how far into the alley everyone was.”
Monica Stoddard nodded absently, looked off toward the window. From the look on her face, Shelly guessed what she was thinking—that they were planning a cross-examination of this woman who had witnessed the shooting of Officer Ray Miroballi.
“It’s just standard,” Shelly said. “We weren’t there, so we need to know everything we can.”
“Well, I saw what I saw.” The woman shook her head as if to empty it of those thoughts. “I didn’t exactly enjoy seeing it, but I saw it.”
Shelly nodded and gestured toward the drawings in the corner of the room. Monica Stoddard, age thirty-three, was an architect with a small development company. The sketches Shelly saw were plans for construction of what appeared to be residential housing.
“You know the cemetery up north?” asked Ms. Stoddard. “We’re buying half the block north of it, on Kesseller. You know the area?”
“I live in that area. About five blocks north, by the lake.”
“Oh, sure.” The woman smiled. She was taller than the average woman, gangly, in fact, with the look of a former athlete. Or maybe Shelly was taking that from the plaque on her wall, which showed that she was a Division III pole vaulter in college. Shelly couldn’t even imagine leaping so high in the air with an elastic pole. “We’re looking at a lot of projects up there.”
“I’m sure.” Shelly had watched with a sense of dread as the neighborhoods around her had slowly gentrified, as old rental units had been bought up, knocked down, and replaced with expensive condominiums or single-family homes with price tags that were in the high six figures. She certainly had nothing against white people, who predominantly purchased these homes, but she mourned the loss of character to the neighborhoods as the yuppies invaded northward. Small Korean grocers were replaced with state-of-the-art, Internet-ready coffeehouses. Small Mexican diners moved out in favor of fast-food establishments.
And this was to say nothing of the fact that her rent continued to rise every year.
Joel Lightner appeared in the doorway and knocked. He introduced himself to Monica Stoddard and set down his briefcase. “Nineteen feet,” he told Shelly.
They all sat and discussed architecture for a moment. Shelly sensed that this woman was intelligent enough not to be snowed by flattery, and principled enough not to be persuaded about her account of the scene. Yet there was nothing wrong with putting the woman at ease, and there was no easier way to do so than by talking about her. Joel, more than Shelly, seemed to have a knack for the game. He spent much of his life retrieving information from people under circumstances that ranged from adversarial to shady to something other than friendly, at best. Joel skillfully segued into the facts at hand, and Shelly noticed that the woman was speaking to Joel, not her.
“I was walking by the window,” said Ms. Stoddard. “The lights were flashing. It catches the eye.”
“Sure.” Joel flipped open a notepad. “You mind? I’m no good relying on my memory.”
“That’s fine. So I looked down and I saw a boy running.”
“How would you describe him?”
She shrugged. “I saw a boy in a coat and a cap. And holding a gym bag. He was running down the street. There was a cop chasing after him. The kid had a pretty good lead. He was fast.” She looked at the window. “He went into the alley and ran out of my sight. The cop turned into the alley and stopped, where I could see him. Just a few steps, I guess. He was talking to him, it seemed like.” She tucked her hair behind her ear as she concentrated. “I mean, I couldn’t hear them, but it seemed like he was talking to him. Then it seemed like he moved closer.” She looked at Joel, then at Shelly. “It wasn’t well lit. I could only see so much.”
“No, that’s fine,” said Joel. “Can you tell us what happened next?”
“What happened next was—the reason you’re here.” She held on to that memory for a moment. Most people in their lives never saw such a thing up close. At least this woman had been spared the noise, Shelly thought, the sickening sound of a flying object
penetrating the skull. Well, who was
she
to talk? She had never seen such a thing, either. What she did know, from years of karate, was the sound of fighting—the sound of fist to skin, foot to skull—and it was nothing like the
pow
s and
ka-blam
s on television.