“Now?”
“Yes. Is she there?”
Gail’s voice, clear and wide awake, came on over an extension. “I’m here.”
“Can I come over?”
“Yes.”
The porch light was on at Susan’s house, and the front door swung back as I reached the top of the porch steps. Susan, her hair tangled, her dressing gown awry, her eyes still at half-mast, stepped back to let me in. “In the kitchen,” was all she said.
I knew where to go, down the dark hallway next to the staircase and through a swinging door at the rear. I’d been in the house before-aside from my recent visits-for the occasional politically correct cocktail party, where people like Tony and me usually killed time together, nursing fruit juice from paper cups, our backs to the wall.
The kitchen suited the house-painted wood trim, mottled linoleum, steel-tube furniture from thirty years earlier. It made me feel instantly more at ease. Gail was standing at the stove, her back to the door, fiddling with a tea kettle.
“Hi.” She turned and smiled but stayed put, indicating the reserve remaining from our last encounter.
“How’ve you been?”
“Better,” she answered. “Thanks.”
Susan came up behind me and cut straight to the point. “I was fine, too, until 2:45 a.m. What do you want? And what the hell happened in court yesterday? Or is that privileged?”
Even Gail gave her a weary look. “Sit, Susan. Give him a chance.”
I smiled at the strength in her voice-the underlying sense of humor. She was improving. I could see it for myself.
I pulled out a chair at the small breakfast table and sat down. “Between these walls, nothing is privileged. What happened yesterday is that the shit hit the fan. Tomorrow, unless Tom Kelly has lost his mind, he’s going to move for a mistrial-and get it.”
Susan slammed the table with her fist. “You stupid bastards-”
“We have the wrong guy.”
They both looked at me in stunned silence. “Gail, what did you smell when you were attacked?”
She froze and then managed a murmured, “What?”
I let her digest the question. Susan just stared at me. Gail wrinkled her forehead in thought. She finally admitted, “Nothing.”
“Bob Vogel smells like sewer. He smokes, he drinks, his teeth are half green, and he only showers when he’s caught in the rain. On the night of the rape, before he left work, one of his co-workers noticed his BO from several feet away. With all his clothes off, he would’ve stunk like raw garbage.”
Susan was at emotional raw ends, muttering angrily to herself, perhaps so wrapped up in the political ramifications of my news that my words were hard to focus on. “She had other things on her mind than body odor,” she protested. “She was afraid for her life.”
“I remember everything else,” Gail tentatively disagreed. “It’s not that I didn’t smell anything at all-I just don’t think there was anything unusual.”
I saw the intelligence in her eyes and knew I’d caught her attention.
“In one of our conversations, you told me the first indication you had that something was wrong was when you felt a weight on your chest-you were having difficulty breathing. You opened your mouth to speak, thinking I’d come back, and that’s when he grabbed your face and pushed it to one side. You said it was all a blur.”
“Right.”
“Which means your eyes were open.”
She shook her head, as if arguing with herself. “They must’ve been-but I didn’t see anything. It was too dark.”
“I’ve brought Megan Goss in on this to advise us-that’s strictly confidential, by the way. We just came from your place. We were standing in the doorway to your bedroom with the lights off, and I remembered there was a bright moon that night.”
“So there was light?” she asked doubtfully, the anger that might have flared a few days ago absent. She pressed her hand against her cheek and looked at the floor between us, thinking hard. “I just don’t remember, Joe. I thought it was pitch black.”
“That’s okay,” I said supportively. “That may be good news. Would you be willing to be hypnotized by Megan? To see if you can fill in the gaps? I read her your transcript, and she thought hypnosis might help you recall some of the missing details.”
“Joe, for Christ’s sake,” Susan blew up. “How many times are you going to jerk her around?”
“Susan,” Gail answered strongly. “Stop. I’m willing to do it-for my own reasons. He’s right-I can use this.”
The kettle began to whistle on the stove. Susan rose to tend to it, although Gail was right there and starting to move. “Leave it. I need something to do.”
Susan twisted the gas knob, paused as if considering what to do next, and then faced me angrily. “Why the hell wasn’t all this done before? Bringing Megan in and asking Gail about the smell? I mean, that sounds pretty basic to me. And what about all the evidence against Vogel? Did you people just make that up?” Her voice rose with emotion. “You come waltzing in here in the middle of the night, full of bright new ideas, casually announcing that you jailed the wrong guy. Do you have any idea what harm you’ve caused?”
“It’s crossed my mind.”
She was in no mood for irony. She glared at me, speechless for a moment. “It crossed your mind? Fuck you, Joe Gunther. You see this as some goddamn game-catch the bad guy, put him in jail. Make a little mistake? No big deal. Go after somebody else. What about all the women who worked so hard to guarantee that, for once, justice would be served. They believed you when you said Vogel was the guy-they let out a collective sigh of relief. And then, in workshops and encounter groups all over this town, they fought their fears that some deal might be cut to set him free, or that Dunn would procrastinate until after the election and piss the case away, or that Judge Waterston would give another rapist a pat on the ass for a job well done. They prayed that for once things would be done right. And now you have the balls to say, ‘Oh, sorry-back to square one.’ Christ, Joe, it was Gail who was raped-couldn’t you have done a slightly better job for her sake?”
My face burning, I rose stiffly to my feet, the anger so caught in my throat I had to focus on my breathing. Bob Vogel had been no mere threat to me-the son of a bitch had tried to kill me. But I was still willing to stick my neck out, risking the enmity of my colleagues, the public, and the best friend I had, because it was the right thing to do.
I knew Susan’s outburst stemmed from exhaustion and despair. Those efforts to heighten a society’s conscience and change its attitudes had been her own, expended at great emotional cost. But while I understood rationally that no words from me were going to change that, it still took all my self-restraint not to burn the bridges between us and reciprocate with some of her own verbal abuse.
Instead, only barely aware of my own movements, I headed for the door in a stifled blind rage. Gail followed me down the hallway to the main entrance.
I opened the front door and let the cold night air wash across my face. Gail stood beside me quietly, shivering slightly, waiting for me to regain my composure. I was grateful to her for not making excuses for her friend-for trusting me to understand that, despite its appearance, Susan’s outburst hadn’t been a personal attack.
I finally took a deep breath and asked in a near-normal voice, “How do you feel about this? Are you angry, too?”
“I would’ve been a few days ago, but Bob Vogel doesn’t matter as much anymore. I matter, and you matter, and putting this behind us matters, and that’s what I want to work toward. I’m trying to get away from the blame and the fear… and the anger.”
I gave her the bear hug I’d been saving from the beginning of all this, her words a confirmation that we were both on the mend.
Megan Goss’s office was located at the rear of one of a long row of nineteenth-century red-brick buildings that stand along the east side of Brattleboro’s Main Street like bluff, Dickensian representatives of a bygone industrial era. In most cases, however, it is more facade than reality, the implications of high-ceilinged, wood-paneled, airy rooms giving way to a jumble of businesses, offices, and apartments. Some of these had been remodeled into modern, boxlike conformity, and others left dark, poorly ventilated, and reeking of despair. It cannot be said of Brattleboro that its urban poor were forced out of downtown-they are as much a part of the geography as the high-profile stores facing the sidewalks.