“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.”
FORTY-THREE
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?”
“You won’t be able to, Boss,” McKinney said. “It’s not just the locals. You’ll have reps from all the foreign press here as well. By mid-afternoon, you’ll have several hundred correspondents and photographers. It’s got to be the courthouse steps.”
Paul Battaglia crushed his cigar in the ashtray on his desk. “Tell Brenda to make sure there’s a podium out there. All the equipment I need. Get to work on my comments, Alex. And be sure not to steal any of my thunder for your bail app.”
“Of course not, Paul. You’ll have all the best lines.”