“As God is my witness,” she said, “I didn’t take no money out.”
I asked the same question about six different ways, then took the withdrawal slip from Ryan and put it in front of Blanca Robles.
She refused to look at it and threw back her head in defiance of my questioning.
Peaser was craning his neck to try to eyeball the slip of paper.
“April third,” I said. “Nine-oh-six
A.M.
, Blanca. You withdrew eleven thousand, five hundred dollars.”
“That wasn’t me,” she said.
“In another hour, I’ll have a photograph that was taken when you were talking to the teller. That might jog your memory.”
If looks could kill, I’d be a dead woman.
Blanca let go of the handle of the purse that she was clutching on her lap with both hands and jabbed a finger on the table. “As God is my witness—”
It seemed to me that the greater the need to lie, the more she invoked the Lord’s name.
“When was the last time you paid your income taxes, Blanca?”
“Excuse me, I didn’t finish explaining to you about the money.”
“Tell me about your taxes first, Blanca.” I wanted to keep the pressure on, jumping from subject to subject to keep her off guard.
“Last year. I think it was last year, or maybe the year before. Maybe I forgot last year.”
I turned to Ryan and asked for another folder. We didn’t have any written report from the IRS yet, so this morning I had borrowed a file from one of the prosecutors who’d just convicted a swindler in a bribery case.
The array of numbers on the page was dizzying. I held it close to me, on the table, and Blanca leaned over in an effort to see what it was.
“What’s that? That’s not my taxes,” she said.
Ryan jumped in. “No, ma’am. It’s a government form that lists returns from everyone named Robles in New York State. You’re not anywhere on here.”
“Show me and I’ll tell you.”
“I’d prefer that you tell me first,” I said, “and then I’ll show you.”
“Tell you what?”
“When you paid your income taxes last? Why you aren’t on this list?”
Blanca’s nostrils flared and her eyes widened. She pointed at Ryan and raised her voice. “You’re lying. That’s not what those papers say.”
Ryan stood his ground. “It certainly is.”
“I don’t have to talk to you, ’cause you a liar.”
Mercer spoke for the first time, in his deep, ever-calm voice. “What is it, Blanca? Are you the only one who’s allowed to lie? Is that it?”
Her head swiveled toward Mercer. “I get confused. I don’t lie.”
“From the first time I met you, Blanca, I believed in you. You know that, don’t you?”
“You supposed to, Detective. It’s your job to believe me.”
“No, Blanca. That’s not what I’m supposed to do. My job is to find out the truth.”
“She told you the truth about what the defendant did to her,” Peaser said.
“One more interruption, Mr. Peaser, and you can wait in my office,” I said.
“Pat,” Peaser said, hoisting his palm in my direction. “Can you talk some sense into this woman?”
“Alex is right, Byron. We’re long past the time for games.”
“What did you tell your boyfriend, Blanca, when you called him in prison? What did you say to Hector?” I asked.
“I can’t remember,” she said, both hands firmly attached to the handle of her purse.
“Did you assure him that you were all right?”
“I did.” She gave me a sideways glance, as if to see why I had tempered my tone.
“Did you tell him you were taking your attacker to court?”
“I did.”
“Did you tell him anything about the man? About Baby Mo?”
“When I called my friend—Hector’s not my boyfriend, you know.”
“I see. He just gave you half a million to watch over while he’s in prison?”
“Yeah. Because he can’t trust nobody else. He’s my friend.”
“I see. So did you tell him anything about Baby Mo?”
“Why should I? I didn’t know who the guy was. I didn’t know nothing about him.”
“Not even on Monday, after it was all over the newspapers and television that the man who attacked you was famous? That he was wealthy?”
“That didn’t mean nothing to me.”
“But did you discuss it with your boyfriend?”
“No. I didn’t tell him nothing about that.”
“Ryan?” I said. “Would you play that portion of the tape?”
Ryan Blackmer had the microcassette he had taken to Queens in the middle of the night. It was primed to a particular point in the conversation between Blanca and her incarcerated lover.
Ryan put the small recorder on the table and hit the play button. Blanca’s voice was unmistakable. Although I couldn’t make out a single word of the Mayan dialect, we listened to that segment of the tape three times.
“What were you talking about there?”
“You don’t know my language, any of you. I was saying how upset I was, okay? I was very upset that day.”
“Ms. Robles,” Ryan said. “I found an interpreter last night. Someone from your country who understands your language. A man who told me every word of this conversation.”
Blanca slammed her handbag on the table. “See? You’re telling lies again. You’re not allowed to do that.”
Ryan fast-forwarded the tape. The next speaker gave his name, address, and date of birth, and the village he came from in Guatemala. He summarized the conversation that Blanca had earlier in the week.
The back-and-forth between the accuser and her boyfriend sounded flat and unemotional. The part that interested us most was translated by Ryan’s witness. “Don’t worry. This guy,” Blanca had said on the call, referring to MGD, “he has a lot of money. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
Ryan flipped off the recorder.
“Is that a fair description of what you said?” I asked.
“It’s not fair.”
“What she means is,” Mercer said, “is that what you told your boyfriend?”
“I don’t remember. I said that to you before.”
“But these are your words, Blanca,” he said. “It’s your voice.”
She had no comeback for that, no one else to blame. She didn’t respond.
I leaned back and let Mercer take over the questioning. “All these things, Blanca—your application for asylum, your taxes, your bank accounts, your relationship with Hector—they don’t have anything to do with Mr. Gil-Darsin.”
“I know that. I’m not stupid.”
“But if you can look me in the eye and lie about those things, Blanca—those things that don’t really matter today—how can I trust you to tell me the truth about every little detail that
does
matter.”
“Like what, Mr. Mercer? Like what do you want?”
Mercer took his time, slowly and clearly going back to the moments immediately after the attack—crucial points in time that the jury would have to be made to understand.
“First, Blanca, you told me you ran out in the hallway and waited for Mr. Gil-Darsin to leave the room.”
“I said that. I know I said that.”
“But then you changed it to tell us you went next door to number twenty-eight-oh-eight. That you opened that door with the key card, so you could go in to clean that room up.”
“Yeah, that one is true.”
“So even though you’d been raped, you were going to continue working and make up the adjacent room, like you were fine?”
Blanca looked to Peaser and back at Mercer. “No. No, no. I just went back to get my cleaning supplies. I couldn’t work. Too upset.”
“Do you remember telling me that you went to that room to get back to work?”
“Okay, so I was going to go to work there, but then I decided to go back to number twenty-eight-oh-six. To go back to twenty-eight-oh-six and change the linens, like they sent me to do originally. I didn’t want to go near the bed, like I told you the other day,” she said, looking to Mercer for approval—as though she remembered that it might have compromised any finding of DNA. “But I had to get the towels from the bathroom. That’s part of my job.”
“So you went into the bathrooms?” Mercer asked.
“Only one of them. The big one with the shower and all. Not the powder room,” Blanca said. “I never went into that. Nobody used that one.”
“Did you remove any of the towels?”
“That’s why I went there, Detective. To clean it up.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. I sat up straight and my spine stiffened. I didn’t want to look at Mercer or Pat, but from the movements each made, I was sure they’d caught the latest change.
“I’m sorry,” Mercer said. “You went back into the room where Gil-Darsin attacked you?”
“Yes,” Blanca said firmly, standing her ground like she was sure it was the right decision.
“And at that time, you went into the bathroom, too. And you took the towels out of the bathroom with you?”
So that if there was any trace evidence linked to Blanca Robles anywhere in that bathroom, it would no longer be possible for us to know whether she had actually had the opportunity to clean herself up in the moments after the alleged assault—which she had denied all along—or on this later visit to clean up the room.
“Have you told anyone that fact before right this very minute?”
“What fact?” Blanca asked.
“That you entered the bathroom of suite twenty-eight-oh-six after Mr. Gil-Darsin left the room?” Mercer said. “That you removed potential items of evidence from that suite?”
“Why do I have to tell people? It’s my job, to send things to the laundry. It has nothing to do with this man assaulting me.”
“And that’s what you did with the towels? Sent them to the laundry?”
“Yeah. All the washcloths and towels. They went down to the basement with the linens from the other rooms.”
Six days after the alleged attack and countless interviews later, and a critical new fact had just emerged. If Gil-Darsin were to claim at the trial that after their consensual encounter, Blanca had used the bathroom to clean herself up, there would be no way to refute the argument.
“Did you tell that to the grand jury on Wednesday?” Mercer asked.
“Ms. Ellen didn’t ask me that. None of you did.”
“Let me understand this, Blanca,” Mercer said. “When you went back to number twenty-eight-oh-six this second time, did you let yourself in?”
“With my card, yes. My key card.”
“Was Gil-Darsin still there?” Mercer asked.
“No,” Blanca said, with a wave of her hand. “He was in a big hurry. He left fast.”
She had flip-flopped again on this fact. At first she told police she had concealed herself in the hallway to make sure he had left. Then, two days ago she put herself back in the room from which she could not have known about MGD’s departure, and just now, she told us that she removed property from the crime scene.
She had just given Lem Howell an opening in her story—and in the police crime scene work—wide enough for the defense to drive through in a Mack truck.
Mercer continued with a list of questions about both times that Blanca was in room 2806. Some of the answers were different than they had been on previous days—a problem for the case and a larger problem for the accuser herself.
Pat McKinney stood up and signaled to me. “Can we talk in your office, Alex?”
“Sure.”
I let Ryan take my place at the table while Mercer’s quietly effective cross-examination moved ahead. I stepped in front of Ellen Gunsher, who had the same stupefied look on her face that she usually did—this time for good reason.
McKinney and I walked down the hallway, past Laura, and sat around my desk.
“What do we do, Alex?” he asked. “I have to say, I have a whole new respect for what the lawyers in your unit deal with every day. There’s nothing like these cases.”
Pat McKinney had rarely complimented my staff before, and it might be a long time before he did it again. The fifty prosecutors who handled sex crimes, domestic violence, and child abuse dealt with the most sensitive issues imaginable in the life of the accuser. Every report teetered on becoming “high-profile”—because of the crime or the victim or the location or the vagaries of the press.
“Thanks, Pat. I don’t think Blanca leaves us any choice about what to do.”
“Let’s go tell Battaglia. You’ll appear in front of Donnelly and suggest releasing MGD on his own recognizance?”
“Okay.”
“You can take the pressure better than Ellen,” McKinney said. “You’ve made big mistakes before.”
“This isn’t anyone’s mistake, Pat. Blanca Robles has done this to herself.”
Paul Battaglia’s mantra had always been to do the right thing. He drilled it into his assistants from the moment they came on board.
“Well get ready to suck it up, Alex. Someone’s got to take the heat for this one.”
Battaglia was stone-faced when McKinney and I gave him the news. “How fast do you have to move on this?”
“I called Lem Howell, and my paralegal is processing the papers so that Gil-Darsin can be produced from the Tombs,” I said.
“They didn’t ship him back to Rikers yesterday?”
“No. He’s still next door. Lem wanted time for him to have a visit with his wife today, so we’re lucky he’s still close by.”
A quick walk across the Bridge of Sighs, from the short-term detention center attached to the courthouse, would bring Baby Mo back to get the news of his release.
“Stall it till Monday,” Battaglia said. “It’ll give me time to write something.”
“I won’t delay it, Paul.”
When I first came to the office more than a decade ago, a colleague of mine had failed to file a dismissal on a grand jury vote reached late on a Friday afternoon. The seventeen-year-old defendant had been falsely accused by a rival gang member of participation in a robbery. That weekend, taunted by fellow inmates about his first arrest and his fierce denials, he tied two towels together and hung himself in his cell.
“What will I say?”
“I can script something if you’d like,” I said.
“How much time do we have?” Battaglia asked, looking at his watch to confirm that it was now 11:30
A.M.
“The judge wants us there at four. The press pool has asked for cameras in the courtroom, and they need time to set up.”
“Can I make my remarks in here, as usual?”