The luncheon recess interrupted the narrative's drama once again. Neither Paige nor I felt like eating. She noshed on a sandwich and I played with a salad, knowing how likely I was to develop a crushing headache by midafternoon with the combination of the stress level escalating during the proceedings and my failure to eat.
Back on the stand, Paige took us through the rest of the bizarre evening. Eventually, at some point after midnight, Andrew allowed Dulles to change into pajamas and go to sleep on the narrow cot that had been placed in the alcove off the kitchen.
Then, Vallis said, Andrew spent more than two hours telling her about the terrible pressures of raising the boy alone.
"It must have been two o'clock in the morning," she went on. "Andrew stood up in front of me. 'You're going to come inside,' he said. 'I want you to come in and take off your clothes.'"
"What did you do?"
"'No,' I said to him." Vallis tried to stay composed as she looked at me, instead of at the jurors. "'Don't do this, Andrew.' That's what I said."
"Did Andrew respond?"
"Yes. He said, 'Don't make me hurt you. Don't make me hurt my son.'"
"What did you do, Paige?" I asked.
"I had no choice. I, I-"
"Objection, Your Honor. The jury will decide that," Robelon said, smirking at the panel.
"Sustained."
"I went into the bedroom and did exactly what Andrew Tripping told me to do," Paige said, finally getting angry with Robelon. "I was afraid he'd kill his son, and I was afraid he would do something to hurt me."
"From the time that Dulles went to sleep, did Andrew ever mention his gun again?"
Vallis answered softly. "No."
"Did you ever see a gun in the apartment?"
"No."
"Did you see any other weapons?"
"Lots of them. Odd things, hanging on his walls and on table-tops. Machetes and swords and arcane-looking things with blades. I wouldn't even know what to call some of them."
"Did he threaten you with any of them?"
"No. Not explicitly."
Robelon and I would both try to use this fact to our advantage. He would argue that Tripping had the means to scare his companion into submission, if he had needed to threaten her into sex. I would say that a sign of her credibility was that despite the presence of so many sharp objects, she had never exaggerated the kinds of threats that the defendant made.
Paige Vallis went on to describe the sexual assault, which occurred for the next hour in Tripping's stark bedroom. Not a word was exchanged between them after he demanded that she undress and get onto the bed. He moved and positioned her as he desired, subjecting her to a variety of sexual acts that I made her detail for the jurors. She cried, she told them, from the moment she crossed the threshold into the room until her tormentor fell asleep beside her.
"What time was that?"
"Four o'clock in the morning, roughly."
"Did you leave then?"
"No. I just lay still in the bed until I could see daylight through the crack in the blinds. I got up and dressed myself. Quietly, very quietly. I awakened Dulles and helped him to put his clothes on. That's when I saw even more bruises, on his forearms and thighs. Andrew must have heard-"
"Objection."
"There was a noise in Andrew's bedroom, so I hurried the boy along. When the two of us got to the front door, Andrew was in the hallway near the living room. I told him I was walking Dulles to school, and that I had written my home phone number on the telephone pad in case I could help in the future."
"What did he say?"
"He asked again if I was going to the police, and started to walk towards us. I turned to face him, putting the boy behind me, nearer the stairwell that led to the building's exit."
"Did you answer him?" I asked.
"Yes, I did. I told him not to worry, not to come any closer, either. 'I can't go to the police,' is what I said to Andrew Tripping. 'I killed a man last year.'"
12
We take our witnesses as we find them, as I had told the jury in my opening statement. Now they would hear for themselves what had happened to Paige Vallis several months before she met Andrew Tripping.
"Is that statement you made to the defendant about killing a man true?"
Paige was strangely calmer now, as she told the story. "Yes, it is." She shifted her body in the chair and faced them squarely. "I mean, not on purpose. Shortly after last Thanksgiving, my father died. He was almost eighty-eight years old and passed away in his sleep.
"He had lived alone, in a small house in Virginia, since he retired more than twenty years ago. I was the only child-he had married late, and never really wanted a large family because of all the moving around his professional life entailed."
Robelon was on his feet, objecting again. "Your Honor, this would be a lovely retrospective for the Biography Channel," he said snidely, drawing a few smiles from the jury box, "but I think that all we need to know is that Ms. Vallis killed a man. Period."
"May we approach?" I asked.
Moffett waved my witness off the stand and away from the bench, while we conferenced the issue. "Where are you going with this, Alexandra?"
"If Peter doesn't intend to cross-examine my witness about how and why she-uh, she got into the situation she did, I'll leave it alone. But if he plans to ask a single question about the man's death, I'm going to bring out the facts on my direct. Ms. Vallis has got nothing to hide."
"How about it, Pete?"
"I've got a couple of questions for her, sure. But I'd rather give them up and move this along."
"You're telling me you're not going to touch the subject in summation, either?" I asked. I knew that when Robelon heard all the facts, he would be eager to remind the jury that Vallis had once defended herself when she was in mortal danger. He would say she was just as capable of defending herself against Tripping. I wanted to compare and contrast the circumstances, acknowledging-as she did-that it was the boy's life, not her own safety, that had concerned her on the night of March 6.
"I won't concede that."
Moffett was ready to think like Solomon and split the baby. "Alex, what are you trying to bring out here? That Ms. Vallis killed a man in self-defense? She have a weapon?"
"She didn't, Your Honor. There was an intruder-he's the one who had a knife. He held it to her throat and they struggled over it, and when they fell to the floor, he landed on the knife."
"Okay. So I'll allow you to ask that much. Skip over 'This is your life, Ms. Vallis.' You," Moffett said, addressing Peter Robelon. "I'm gonna limit you, too. Nothing beyond the scope of Cooper's direct, then short and sweet in summation."
That meant Moffett was reading the jury as already being in Robelon's favor. He was trying not to prolong my agony.
Paige recounted the short version of the event. I took her back to the night of the crime, letting her tell the panel that Tripping allowed her to walk out with his son after hearing that statement. I would later argue that the reason the defendant stayed in the apartment, the reason he didn't flee before the police arrived, is that he believed what Paige Vallis told him and thought she would not go to the police.
"What did you do when you left the apartment?"
"I got out on the sidewalk with Dulles. I needed to explain to him what I was going to do. I wanted him to understand that he wouldn't get hurt any more if I told the police, to know that he was entitled to be safe in his home. The first thing I did was take him to a coffee shop. I bought him breakfast-I don't think-excuse me, sir. He didn't look as though he'd had a real meal in months-and talked to him for almost an hour. Then, on our way out, I found the first uniformed policeman around, and asked him to drive us to the station house."
I could anticipate Robelon's cross now. So, Ms. Vallis, I expected him to say to her, after you were raped- beforeyou went to the police, before you talked to a doctor-you had two eggs over easy with a side order of bacon? Or were they scrambled? Did you back up your coffee with a mimosa or a Bloody Mary?