“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,” I said.
“Doesn’t sound like Fred Coffin shares your sense of fair play. He’s gone after you pretty hard in a press release we just got.”
“Well, it’s his investigation.”
“Meaning there’s something to find?” MacDonald sounded surprised.
“Meaning he’ll come up with it if it’s there or not. He’s climbing the ladder, Ted. People like that see everything as an advantage. If he finds me dirty, then he’s exposed a bad cop. He finds me clean, then he’s a saint who shows no favorites. The man’s in hog heaven.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“Still off the record?”
“Yeah.”
He’d never been known to break his word, but Richard Levay’s caution came back to mind. “I’m waiting to see what the charges are.”
Ted’s silence spoke of his disappointment.
“It’s not like I’m used to this role,” I explained. “I’ve always talked to you and Stan from the other side of the fence. I’m sorry.”
I hung up the phone, feeling even worse than before. There were no conversations left that weren’t shadowed by the cloud hanging over me. Regardless of the topic, it seemed, the sticking point remained the same-was I lying or not?
And I hadn’t even been formally charged yet.
Gail looked no better that night, coming home late as usual. This time, however, I noticed a skittishness that had been missing before. The sense of relief upon entering our home was absent. She didn’t take off her shoes at the door, or use me as a sounding board for the day’s frustrations. Instead of loitering in the kitchen where we spent much of our time together, she greeted me and continued upstairs, her coat still on, complaining of a headache and saying she was going to take a bath.
I left her on her own, listening from the darkened living room as she moved about upstairs. Later, after she’d been soaking for about ten minutes, I quietly went to join her, conscious of the house’s somber quiet. She’d lit only one light in the bedroom, and when I opened the bathroom door to the misty sweetness of soapy hot water, I found only a candle lit.
“What?” she asked, a streak of pallor in the dark tub at the far end of the room. “Just checking to see how you were.”
“I want to be alone.”
I closed the door and retreated to a rocking chair in the corner of the bedroom. I’d half expected the rejection-perhaps I’d even sought it out, to prove it was there, waiting to happen.
But with it, I felt an acute loneliness, which I now had to admit I’d also been anticipating. There comes a time in life, I’d discovered years ago, when emotional surprises all but peter out. It’s not that they stop happening, but when they do, they carry the dull resonance of familiarity. Now that the wedge between me and my life had reached the two of us, I saw that its progress had been as swift, sure, and predictable as when the Titanic had borne down on that iceberg.
I sat in that chair, as I was sure Gail was lying in the tub, awaiting the inevitable.
She came out eventually, silent and brittle, wrapped in a robe she held gathered at the throat. I wasn’t surprised when she slipped under the covers still encased in the robe.
“I take it today makes yesterday look good,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
She was staring at the twin peaks her feet made under the bedspread, her face tight and her brow furrowed. I said nothing more, but made no move to leave her in peace. Finally, she yielded. “Remember what I said about wondering when they’d fix the scaffold? Well, they have. Derby didn’t just strip me of all the cases you might’ve been involved in. He’s dumped me back into Juvenile, where I started. And I got the feeling that if any big cases come up there, someone else will handle those, too.”
“Seems a little harsh,” I commented.
Her face turned bitter. “He said it was for my own protection. The media and the public aren’t allowed in family court, so I’ll be able to keep functioning with only minimal distractions. What crap. The only thing he’s protecting is his own butt. He figures if he can bury me from the start, he won’t have to catch any more flak.”
“What’s there been so far?”
“The press has been leaning on him, questioning the integrity of the office. A couple of the low-rent lawyers around town went on record this morning about the same thing. You haven’t even been arraigned yet, and I’m off to Siberia. I didn’t think Derby would be such a politician.”
I remained silent, thinking of her change of tone from twenty-four hours earlier. The pendulum would swing back into balance, as always, but that realization did little to lessen the sting of what I was hearing.
“You should’ve seen the new guy. Wolf? You haven’t even met him. One week in juvie, and now he’s handling some of my cases. Preppie bastard-couldn’t keep the smirk off his face.”
She pressed her hand against her cheek and closed her eyes. I could hear the stifled tears in her voice. “I know you’re the victim here, Joe. I know all you’ve worked for is being threatened, and that I should be supportive and loving and all that shit. But to me, it’s like it’s all happening again-some big goddamn elephant coming out of the sky and landing on me like I was a bug, squashing you, me, everything we’ve got. It’s just too close for comfort. Not enough time’s gone by.”
She turned to face me, and in the dim light I could see the wetness on her cheeks. “It’s all coming back. The fears, the anger, the jitters. A photographer caught me in the street when I was leaving the courthouse this afternoon. I wasn’t expecting it. He jumped out, holding that damn camera, and it all came back-that sense of not being in control, of being a victim.”
She wiped away her tears, her eyes blazing. “It made me angry at you, Joe. Angry that you’re a victim, angry that you’ve made me one again, angry that you somehow pulled me into this world of dopers and child abusers and careless, stupid people who kill because they don’t have the brains to do otherwise. I used to sell houses to rich people, for God’s sake. The hypocrite ex-hippie who kidded herself by joining all the right tree-hugger boards. It was working so well I could’ve faked it forever.”
She pounded the bed several times with her fist, punctuating the next sentence one word at a time. “I’m tired of being raped.”
She rolled over, turning her back to me. I sat motionless for a long time, sorting through what she’d said, pretending to be calm when all my insides were in turmoil. My trust in the pendulum had been reduced by the simple fact that, sooner or later, people ended up saying things they couldn’t take back.
I knew what she was going through. The rape was fresh enough in both our memories. All her friends had been amazed at her ability to turn a catastrophe into a watershed, to use a trauma that destroyed many as a stimulus to return to law school, take the bar, and become a prosecutor. As friends, they’d taken comfort-even satisfaction-from her strength, using it for their own convenience to leave an unpleasant episode in their wakes. But I still shared her bed, and woke up to her nightmares, and lived in a house with as many locks and lights as a prison. I saw the subtle changes in how she walked down a street, how she stood in a crowded room, how she greeted previously unknown men with an inner wariness.
I knew the recovery for which she’d been justly applauded was still a fragile work in progress. What was destroying me now was that, while I’d been of help to her in the first event, I’d now become the cause of the worst setback I’d seen her suffer.
I stayed all night in the rocker, watching Gail toss and turn in fitful sleep, hoping against all odds that the few chips I had left in the game would turn our future around.
Chapter 11
Danny Freer and Bill Nathan came for me the next day. With very short haircuts, broad shoulders, and stiff manners, they were models of the law enforcement stereotype-from the military-style mustache on Freer’s upper lip to the superfluous sunglasses Nathan removed as I let them in.