Читать книгу THE COED MURDER CLUB - Ken Salter - Страница 10

CHAPTER 3

It was a hard slog that lasted nearly an hour to get Mindy’s father straightened out and a check up front for a thousand dollars to get me started. He claimed he had the right to know everything his daughter confided to me if he was going to pay the freight for the investigation. He yelled and swore each time I told him he played it my way or not at all. He wouldn’t listen to either me or his wife. I was glad Mindy wasn’t subjected to our contentious squabbling. Finally his wife, Greta, told him to shut up and wrote the check on their joint account.

I really felt like packing it in for the day. I sorely needed to finish Barney’s report, but that required patience and concentration. Mindy’s startling story and the nasty scene with her father had my blood up. I needed to get out of the office, and do something more active than dictating the conclusion of a report.

I handed off the retainer check to Juanita and asked her to set up an appointment with Barney so I could discuss some legal issues related to the attack on Mindy when I finished the report. Next, I called Detective Walker at the Berkeley Police Department to find out who had handled Mindy’s rape investigation. I hoped to cash in a chit owed to me by Walker and finagle access to the investigation file.

Walker wouldn’t cut me any slack. Since the investigation wasn’t a homicide, he said I’d have to deal with Detective Dean Sawyer who’d led the investigation. I called Sawyer and to my surprise, he agreed to discuss the case with me if I hustled over to his office on the double. He was due to go off duty soon, but he agreed to give me a heads up on the case.

Sawyer’s a big-boned, raw-looking guy with curly red hair and tons of freckles all over the exposed parts of his body. He stands about six-feet seven-inches and I remember when he played center for the Berkeley High basketball team. He was the only white guy on the starting five. He had a pretty good hook shot but he couldn’t jump. The best he could do was to try to tip a rebound to someone else. Since he knew that I’d played for Berkeley High, too, we’d talked basketball the few times we’d had occasion to chat about active cases.

His desk was piled high with reports that fought for space with a number of Styrofoam cups and containers waiting their turn to grace his overflowing wastepaper basket. Sawyer wouldn’t be winning any awards from the ecologists at the recycling center. He pulled his nose out of a report and stubbed out his cancer stick in an ashtray full of butts and ash and pointed to a sturdy prison-made oak chair facing his desk.

“I’m not surprised you’re working on the Rohnert girl’s case. The parents got real pissed off when I refused to authorize further investigation,” Sawyer said matter-of-factly.

“How much did you tell them about what really happened to their daughter?”

“I had to tell them that the case was too weak to prosecute even if we managed to I.D. the three guys she partied with. The father flew off the handle and threatened me and the investigating officer with lawsuits and sanctions from all the high powered politicos he knew if we didn’t convict the guys that screwed his little girl.”

“They get briefed by anyone else?”

“Yeah, they kept hassling Officer Mary Sandoval for info and accusing her of not doing her job. I finally told Mary to cut ’em off. If they wanted progress on the case, they had to go through me.”

“Mary Sandoval?”

“She was the officer assigned to the case.”

“I just spoke with the daughter. She’s real shook up; they told her she’s HIV positive and she’s sure it came from the guys who screwed her. Won’t that make a difference now? Couldn’t the case be reopened, especially if they knew they were HIV positive when they assaulted her?”

“I’m real sorry to hear she’s got the AIDS virus. It’s a public health matter to locate the guys, not a police matter. Even with that possible twist, there’s no way the D.A. is going to file a criminal complaint on the set of facts we learned. He’d be laughed out of Dodge and probably not be reelected. He’s not gonna risk losing his big salary on a losing case and the stupid antics of a good-time party girl. So, you’re trying to find the guys so the father can bring a civil suit, huh?”

“That’s one of the options. I’d like to get your take on the case. It seems to me that it could have gone either way – rape or seduction.”

“Yeah, I thought so, too, at first. But when I started to push her, her story didn’t hold up. She let herself get picked up and went along with everything right up to the time the guys fucked her.”

“I thought maybe you could make a case that they set her up – purposely plied her with liquor to get her drunk enough so she couldn’t effectively give her consent to sex or even resist. She told me she got sick and dizzy and passed out on the couch. When she came to, she was naked and all three of them were sexually assaulting her with their hands on all her private parts and she was too woozy and drunk to resist. She did say ‘No’ once; why isn’t that enough to support rape?”

“I was working that angle at first, but it doesn’t hold water. She voluntarily took her clothes off to belly dance for the guys. According to her, the guys were already mostly undressed. What the hell does she think is going to happen? She’s twenty-two years old and she does a bump and grind number for three horny guys. They put money on the table and she delivered the goods. When it’s over, she’s pissed they fucked her up the ass. She’s got a hundred and sixty bucks in her purse and a sore butt. Her parents expect us to pound the pavement to find three guys that paid for her to play harem girl for them for a pile of twenties. Give me a break! The D.A. would never touch a case I brought to him if I’d referred this one. It would have brought ridicule to the whole department. We’ve got enough bad press as it is.”

Mindy hadn’t told me that she’d wound up with the money she’d won dancing. It certainly made her look like a tramp in Sawyer’s eyes. I could see the little old ladies on the jury going, “tsk, tsk, she was asking for it and even got paid like a prostitute.”

“Did she tell you that she asked them to stop touching her, but they wouldn’t?”

“Yeah, that’s what she said at first. But when I pressed her on the details, it didn’t hold up. She tells them to stop touching her but at the same time, she’s coming like a locomotive with the guys hands up her pussy and her ass. How the hell do you think I’m gonna sell that to the D.A.? Come on, R.C. Does that sound like earnest resistance or forceful compulsion to you? Even if little Miss Rohnert was the governor’s daughter, the D.A. couldn’t get a conviction. Berkeley would be on the map as the laughing stock capital of the nation. It’s all ready bad enough that some people call it ‘Berserkely.”’

I could see his point. He was anticipating how a clever defense lawyer would portray the case to the jury and the press. He’d have his client tell the jury how Mindy voluntarily drank with the guys to excess, then strutted her stuff doing the limbo and her belly dance and how much she liked the guys touching her all over. She’d admitted coming to orgasm twice before they entered her. He’d use her own words in the police reports to destroy her credibility on cross-examination.

“I’d like to review the police reports if it’s okay with you. Maybe I can get a lead on how to locate the guys.”

“Sure, be my guest.” He handed me the report he’d been reading when I arrived. “Just drop it off at the front desk when you’re through with it.”

I took the file down to an empty interrogation room to read while I waited for Officer Sandoval to finish her shift in a patrol car.

The police report contained interview summaries with Mindy, Ernie, the night watchman at her dorm, and the doctors and nurses who administered the rape kit the morning after the attack. Mindy’s statement corroborated most of what she’d told me but in less detail. She said she was surprised to find a wad of twenty dollar bills in her purse the next day when she reported the rape.

The night watchman stated that he’d been dozing when he heard loud rapping on the locked main door. He recognized Mindy who was being assisted by a young man. She stumbled into Ernie’s arms once he opened the door. She smelled of booze and appeared to be sick according to him. He described the guy as about six feet tall, dark featured, Mediterranean looking, maybe Greek or Italian ancestry with dark curly hair and wearing dark glasses.

According to Ernie, the guy sort of pushed her into his arms and said, “She got loaded at a friend’s party and I had to drive her home.” Once Ernie had hold of her, the guy split. Ernie helped her up to her room so she could sleep it off. That’s all he knew. Officer Sandoval asked whether she said anything about being assaulted. He said, “No, she was clearly drunk but she didn’t look messed up.” He added that it wasn’t uncommon for girls in the dorm to come home drunk from parties, so he didn’t think anything about it.

The medical reports confirmed that Mindy had anal intercourse with different men. She complained of soreness and diarrhea. The physician’s exam confirmed that she’d suffered abrasions and bleeding in her anus. There was no sperm in her vagina. She told them they had penetrated her there digitally.

The summary page was written by Detective Sawyer who recommended the case for rape was too weak to forward to the D.A. for prosecution based on the victim’s lack of earnest resistance and seeming consent to the sexual acts. Officer Sandoval had recommended further investigation to locate and interview the individuals who had taken advantage of her.

It was time for Officer Sandoval to come off duty, so I closed the file and dropped it off with the records clerk on the way to Officer Sandoval’s desk, one of four small prison-made oak desks crammed into an office designed to hold one large or possibly two small persons. There were no partitions or any effort to provide for privacy.

My first view of Officer Sandoval was from the back. She was bending over her desk in a way that accentuated the curves of her buttocks and legs poured into tight-fitting police issue tan slacks. She’d plaited her thick mane of coal black hair into a tight, glossy braid which bobbed back and forth as she jabbered excitedly in Spanish into a phone. From the little I understood of her rapid fire account from studying Spanish in high school, she had been involved in catching or chasing a suspect.

I tapped gently on the office door. She started, turned quickly and she threw me a puzzled look.

I could hear staccato gibberish coming out of the receiver in her hand which she now held at arm’s length like a hot potato. She resolved her confusion about which conversation to pursue by spitting more Spanish into the phone, then hanging it up.

Her face was broad, strong-featured and strikingly chiseled. She reminded me of some of the women I’d seen in Central America – high cheek bones, large oval shaped black eyes that peered out intently from behind long, curly lashes. Only her nose betrayed a mixed-race Latina. She was about five-feet six-inches tall and looked to be in her late twenties. She wore no makeup. Her full and pleasing figure stretched her uniform in all the right places.

“Can I help you?” she asked. Her cheeks remained flushed with excitement from whatever she had been recounting on the phone.

“Hi, I’m R.C. Bean, a private investigator hired by the Rohnert family to find the men who assaulted their daughter. I just finished reading the file on Mindy Rohnert. Detective Sawyer said you’d fill me in on the rest of the details.” I hoped Sawyer hadn’t bothered to apprise her of my talk with him and that my lie would hold up.

“Uh-huh. The girl who got raped by three guys we couldn’t find.” She was looking at the phone she’d hung up.

Her mind was somewhere else. Time for a different tack. “I couldn’t help overhearing you on the phone. Sounds like something exciting happened.”

“God, yes! Phil and I – the guy I patrol with – got a call from a Telegraph Avenue merchant that a couple of punks grabbed this coed off the street and forced her into a car. We were just around the corner. Wow, what a charge! We chased them toward Ashby and cornered them on Russell when their car didn’t clear the street barricade. One perp raised a gun and I yelled for him to drop it. I had my safety off and was just starting to squeeze off a round when he dropped it and hollered ‘Don’t shoot.’ I managed to jerk my gun up and just missed blowing a hole in his head. Jesus, Mary, it was so damned close. I’ve never fired at someone before. I nearly killed the bastard. We got the girl out before they could head into the hills to rape and possibly kill her. Whew! I’m still shaking inside.”

She was really pumped up. “Reminds me of some close calls I had in the Navy. Let me buy you a drink. We can trade war stories and then you can tell me why Mindy’s case got relegated to the back burner.”

“I really need to write up a report of the incident for internal affairs and clarify why I fired my gun. But, I’m still pretty wound up. My adrenaline is still at the scene.” She paused to give me a funny look. “You really serious about trying to find those three rapists?”

“Yeah, she just got the word that the guys who boffed her were HIV positive. I’m hired to find them and bring them to justice if I can. I need all the help I can get.”

“Hey, I’m sorry for her. I didn’t know.” She let out a sigh. “Sorry for the offhand reception. When I first saw you, I thought you were a guy from internal affairs who was snooping on my phone call to my mother. Are you serious about that drink? I think I could really use one.”

“You got it.”

“Give me a couple of minutes. I have to clean up my desk. Okay?”

“I’ll wait for you at Rudy’s. Take your time.”

She flashed me a smile that could melt a hard-hearted guy in a black hat. I made my way to Rudy’s Bar near the courthouse; it’s the local hangout for lawyers and cops. I picked up a draft Anchor Steam beer from the bar and slid into a booth in the far corner of the room with a view of the door. I didn’t want to get surprised by Sawyer for using his name in my little white lie.

While I waited and sipped my beer, I wondered about Mary Sandoval and why she’d decided to become a cop. It was an unusual occupation for a Latina woman. Most Latinos and blacks I knew wouldn’t dream of becoming a police officer; some detested the cops for sticking together like the mafia, planting drugs and guns on suspects they arrested, and lying in court under oath. Not all cops were “dirty.” I’d worked with some honest, hardworking police officers like Detective Walker, but the guys who lived and worked on the streets held mostly negative views of the police. Many had been stopped, frisked, hassled and even arrested just because of the color of their skin. Gel your hair and wear a zoot suit and you earned a rep as a defiant, bad dude. Wear dreadlocks and they pegged you as a ganja kingpin.

Even my Mexican secretary, Juanita, had few nice words for la policia. Mary and Juanita might share some cultural heritage and language, but they were as different as night and day. Juanita’s often broken English betrayed the failure of bilingual education attempts in the poorer barrios in Los Angeles. Mary looked like she could dance in the streets of Rio at Carnival time, yet she talked like a college preppie.

The place started filling up with lawyers and assistant D.A.’s who now dropped the facade that they role played for their clients that they were fighting for truth and justice in an adversary court system. With clients at home or in jail, they joshed each other and co-mingled openly. They were more boisterous than the cops who hunkered down over their boilermakers and kept their distance from the lawyers according to some unwritten ritual. Cops celebrating a shift change huddled together in small cliques separated by race. It was a sad testament to the so-called colorblind world they were supposed to prosecute and defend.

I spotted Mary as she came through the door and waved her over to my booth through the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke.

“Several lawyers paused in their tracks to watch Mary wiggle her ass as she walked her walk and crossed the room to join me. After the small stir of her passage in the male-dominated room, they ignored us. Mary ordered a white wine.

“You threw me for a loop back there. I just knew you had to be from internal affairs.” She’d applied some dark blue eye shadow and checked in her .38 Chief’s Special revolver. But for the uniform, she could pass for a coed on a date.

“They’ve been hassling you?” I asked.

“Yeah, how’d you guess?” She threw me a killer smile.

“Two hundred plus years worth of collective experience dealing with the Man. I’m still waiting for my forty acres and a mule,” I said lightheartedly.

She chuckled, “Yeah, and to think my mother’s people used to own this state.” She rolled her big, black eyes. “Bet you’re wondering what motivated me to put up with all this police bullshit, huh?”

“Not really,” I lied. “Lots of my folks work for the police, too. For some, it’s the steady paycheck and the power to pack and use a gun, but for most, it’s the sad recognition that predators like the ones you cornered today prey mostly on their own people. We’ve got the most to lose if we don’t keep the riffraff in our community in check.”

“That might explain the number of black officers on the force, but there’s only one black policewoman and she’s not having it any easier than me.”

“Let’s face it. Police departments are one of the last bastions of male supremacy for poor whites, blacks and Latinos. Just look at those guys over there.” I pointed to the groups of white and minority male police officers whispering over their drinks. “They might not drink or socialize with each other, but they’ll join forces in a jiffy to limit women in the force to handling domestic disputes and working as meter maids. They sure don’t want them riding shotgun in their patrol cars or responding to a shooting as a backup.”

Mary gave me a look of approval. I seemed to have passed whatever test she had in mind. “Do you really think it’s going to do any good to open up the Rohnert case at this late date?” she asked.

I shrugged. “That depends on how much help I get from you and whether I get some lucky breaks. I have a nasty feeling about the case. I think it was premeditated and cleverly orchestrated to entrap and disable Mindy’s ability to resist. The players were too smooth. I wondered whether you’d run across a similar M.O.?”

“Similar in what way?” Mary looked like she was tuning in on my wavelength.

“Guys playing at being Mr. Nice. Picking up girls and introducing them to their so-called friends, who act out nice guy roles until she let’s down her guard; then they jump her bones.”

“Jesus, that’s a pretty common scenario around a university town with all the frat houses, sororities and group living arrangements. The girls today are into binge drinking and partying. When they get shit-faced drunk, they’re easy pickings for a gang rape. I had a case recently where a woman student got loaded on beer at a frat house, then went upstairs with the jock who’d been filling her glass. She still doesn’t know how many frat brothers had her. She was too drunk to keep count and is pissed at me that I can’t nail the whole fraternity for rape.”

“Why can’t you stick it to them when they use liquor to break down a girl’s resistance? How can she consent to sex if she’s too drunk to know what she’s doing?”

“It’s a two way street. The guy claims he was too drunk to stint anyone. He alleges she got loaded, loose-hipped and horny and took them all on. He admits he and his buddy screwed her, but only after she was swinging her pussy in their face and daring them to get it up. I’ve got six guys confirming their version of the story with their attorney looking on and a now sober Miss Muffets, who admits she got shit-faced drunk and can’t remember the sequence of events clearly. She says she told them to stop. They swear on bibles she shoved it in their face and dared them to perform. Does that sound like a winning case to prosecute?”

“The guys’ stories sound too pat.”

“Yeah, they are. These young men know the rules of the game. If the woman says ‘No,’ they have to back off or it’s rape. If the woman keeps drinking to the point where she’ll willingly go upstairs to bed one of the frat brothers, then she’s fair game for a gangbang. She might start yelling her pretty head off when she realizes that they all mean to have her, but by then, it’s too late. Her protestations are muffled by the loud music and partying downstairs. In the end, they get what they want and it’s her lone word, reputation and version of what happened against them all if she’s willing to go public and face being labeled as a slut and an easy lay.”

What she said reminded me of the many conversations I’d overheard in gym locker rooms while playing ball in school and in the Navy. Guys did discuss the fine points of individual and group seduction: how “no” could be turned into maybe and then yes, and how to keep their stories straight after the fact.

“Do you think that’s the way it happened with Mindy Rohnert? That she led them to believe she would be a willing sex partner by stripping, dancing and continuing to drink with them?”

Mary paused before replying. “No, I think her case was different. Those guys pretended to be something they weren’t. The girls who go to frat parties know the object of the game is to get them drunk, then bed them. The girls know they are playing with fire. The fact that a woman initially corroborated that the guy she met in the library was an okay guy makes things different. Mindy reasonably thought her new friends cared about her as a person and she’d be safe with the guy. She was given no reason to suspect that she was the object of a planned sexual assault.”

“Since you felt that way, why was the case not pursued?”

“Sawyer was convinced it was too weak. We have a lot of cases that are difficult to prove. I wanted to find the guys and interrogate them; see how well their stories held up. He nixed my request. You’ve read the file; you know the rest. I was told to close the file and work on other assault cases.”

Mary locked her dark eyes on mine to say, “So what else is new?” I nodded my assent. “Any ideas where to start to find those guys?”

Mary suddenly fixed her eyes on me with renewed intensity. “You were bullshitting me about Sawyer authorizing me to discuss the case with you, weren’t you?” she said accusingly.

“Absolutely. He brushed me off like so much lint on a black suit. I was afraid you wouldn’t give me the time of day unless I fudged his authority. I need your help,” I said, meeting her glare head on.

“Yeah, I bet you do, but I don’t like being lied to or used.”

I nodded my agreement and took a big swig of my beer to lubricate my now dry throat so I wouldn’t squeak. Mary was laying the ground rules for whatever our relationship in this matter might be. I didn’t want to get more than one foot stuck in my mouth at a time if I could help it.

“I apologize. I saw in the report that you got shot down for wanting to find Mindy’s attackers. I wanted to talk to you before Sawyer ordered you not to talk to me …”

“And you thought I’d just buy your line like another dumb woman police officer, right?” she said, interrupting my attempt to placate her.

“No, I know any police woman with staying power on the force has to be hardboiled and tough. You are a lot nicer than I expected.”

Mary gazed at me intently. “You realize you could get me into trouble if I cooperate with you, don’t you?”

“Sure. But I’ll make it worth your while. I’m gonna find the guys who suckered Mindy and dig up what you need to get a conviction. At least one of those guys has AIDS and he’s gonna keep wrecking young ladies’ lives if we don’t take him out of action.”

“I’ll help you on condition you report everything you find on those creeps to me and only me. Is it a deal?” Mary’s face had softened, but her piercing eyes held me pinned.

I extended my hand. Her grasp was firm. She filled me in on her thoughts about how to proceed with the investigation while we finished another round of drinks. She was convinced the guys had some kind of tenuous connection to the Psychology Department at the university and so did I. It was a logical place to start in any case. Mary agreed to run a computer check on aspects of Mindy’s assault that might show up in related cases. We exchanged our private phone numbers and agreed to keep in touch.