The Kills

"Murder.
You should have charged the defendant with murder."

"He
didn't kill anyone, Your Honor." Not yet. Not that I could prove.

"Juries
like murder, Ms. Cooper. You should know that better than I do." Harlan
Moffett read the indictment a second time as court officers herded sixty
prospective jurors into the small courtroom. "Give these amateurs a dead
body, a medical examiner who can tell them the knife wound in the back wasn't
self-inflicted, a perp who was somewhere near the island of Manhattan when the
crime occurred, and I guarantee you a conviction. This stuff you keep bringing
me?"

Moffett
underscored each of the charges with his red fountain pen. Next to the block
letters of the defendant's name in the document's heading,
People of the State of New York Against Andrew
Tripping,
he sketched the stick figure of a man hanging from the
crosspiece of a gallows.

My adversary
had been pleased when the case was sent out to Moffett for trial earlier in the
afternoon. As tough as the old-timer was on homicide cases, he had been
appointed to the bench thirty years ago, when the laws made it virtually
impossible to take rape cases before a jury. No witness to the attack, no
corroborating evidence, then there could be no prosecution. He clearly liked it
better that way.

We both
stood on the raised platform directly in front of Moffett, answering his
questions about the matter for which we were about to select a panel. I was
trying to divine my prospects as I watched the notations he was making on the
face of the indictment I had handed up to him.

"You're
right, Judge." Peter Robelon smiled as Moffett scribbled out the image of
the doomed man on the gallows. "Alex has the classic 'he said-she said'
situation here. She's got no physical evidence, no forensics."

"Would
you mind keeping your voice down, Peter?" I couldn't direct the judge to
lower his volume, but maybe he'd get my point. Robelon knew the acoustics in
the room as well as I did, and was keenly aware that the twelve people being
seated in the box could overhear him as the three of us talked about the facts
and issues in the case.

"Speak
up, Alexandra." Moffett cupped his hand to his ear.

"Would
you mind if we had this conversation in your robing room?" My subtlety had
escaped the judge.

"Alex
is afraid the jurors are going to hear what she's about to tell them anyway as
soon as she makes her opening statement. Smoke and mirrors, Your Honor. That's
all she's got."

Moffett
stood up and walked down the three steps, motioning both of us to follow him
out the door, held open by the chief clerk, into the small office adjacent to
the courtroom.

The room
was bare, except for an old wooden desk and four chairs. The only decoration,
next to the telephone mounted on the wall, were the names and numbers of every
pizza, sandwich, and fast food joint in a five-block radius, scrawled on the
peeling gray paint over the years by court officers who had ordered meals for
deliberating jurors.

Moffett
closed the window that looked down from the fifteenth floor above Centre Street
in Lower Manhattan. Police sirens, from patrol cars streaking north out of
headquarters, competed with our conversation.

"You
know why juries like homicides so much? It's easy for them." The wide
sleeves of his black robes flapped about as the judge waved his arms in the
air. "A corpse, a weapon, an unnatural death. They know that a terrible
crime occurred. You've just got to put the perp in the ballpark and they send
him up the river for you."

I opened
my mouth to address him. He pointed a finger in my direction and kept going.
"
You
spend most of every
damn rape trial just trying to prove there was even a crime committed."

Moffett
wasn't wrong. The hardest thing about these cases was convincing a jury that a
felony had actually taken place. People usually kill one another for reasons.
Not good reasons, but things that twelve of their peers can grab on to and
accept as the precipitating cause. Greed. Rage. Jealousy. Infidelity. All the
deadly sins and then some. Prosecutors don't have to supply a motive, but most
of the time one makes itself visible and we offer it up for their
consideration.

Sex
crimes are different. Nobody can fathom why someone forces an act of
intercourse on an unwilling partner. Psychologists ruminate about power and
control and anger, but they haven't stood in front of a jury box dozens of
times, as I have, trying to make ordinary citizens understand crimes that seem
to have no motives at all.

Explain
why the clean-cut nineteen-year-old sitting opposite them in the well of the
courtroom broke into a stranger's apartment to steal property but became
aroused at the sight of a fifty-eight-year-old housewife watching television,
so he held a knife to her throat and committed a sexual act. Explain why the
supervising janitor of a Midtown office building would corner a cleaning woman
in a broom closet on the night shift, when the hallway was dark and deserted, pushing
her to her knees and demanding oral sex.

"May
I tell you what I've got, Judge?"

"In
a minute." Moffett waved me off with the back of his hand, rays of the
late-afternoon sunlight glancing off the garnet-colored stone in his pinky
ring. "Peter, let me hear about your client."

"Andrew
Tripping. Forty-two years old. No record-"

"Well,
that's not exactly true, Peter."

"Nothing
you can use at trial, is there, Alex? Now how about letting me finish without
interrupting?"

I placed
my legal pad on the desk and started to list all the facts I knew that would
flush out the picture Tripping's lawyer was about to paint.

"Graduated
from Yale. Went into the Marine Corps. Did some work for the CIA for about ten
years. Now he's a consultant."

"Your
guy and everyone else who's not employed. Everybody who hasn't got a job's a
consultant. What field?"

"Security.
Governmental affairs. Terrorism. Spent a lot of time in the Middle East, Asia
before that. Can't give you too many details."

"Can't
or won't? You'll tell me, but then you'll have to kill me?" Moffett was
the only one to laugh at his own jokes. He slid the yellow-backed felony
complaint out of the court file and flipped it over. "Made two hundred
fifty thousand bail? Must know something-or somebody."

Peter
smiled at me as he answered. "Our friend, Ms. Cooper, was a bit excessive
in her request at the arraignment. I got it cut in half in criminal court. He
spent a week on Rikers before I got him out."

"Sure
doesn't look like a rapist."

"What
is it, Judge? The blazer, rep tie, and wire-rimmed glasses? Or just that he's
the first white guy you've had in the dock all year?" There was no point
in losing my temper yet. The jury would be looking at Tripping the same way the
judge was. People heard the word "rape" and expected to see a
Neanderthal, club in hand, peering out from behind a tree in Central Park.

I had
Moffett's attention now. "Who's the girl?"

"Thirty-six-year-old
woman. Paige Vallis. She works at an investment banking firm."

"She
knows the guy? This one of those date things?"

"Ms.
Vallis had met Tripping twice before. Yes, he had invited her out to dinner the
evening this happened."

"Alcohol
involved?"

"Yes,
sir."

Moffett
looked at the complaint again, comparing the place of occurrence with the defendant's
home address. Now his primitive doodles were a wine bottle and a couple of
glasses. "Then she went back to his place, I guess."

It
wouldn't have surprised me if he had said what he was undoubtedly thinking at
that moment: What did she expect to happen if she went home with him at
midnight, after a candlelit dinner and a bottle of wine? I had countered that
logic in court more times than I could remember. Moffett didn't speak the
words. He just scowled and shook his head back and forth slowly.

"She
got injuries?"

"No,
sir." The overwhelming percentage of sexual assault victims presented
themselves to emergency rooms with no external signs of physical injury. Any
rookie prosecutor could get a conviction when the victim was battered and
bruised.

"DNA?"

Peter
Robelon spoke over me as I nodded my head. "So what, Judge? My client
admits that he and Ms. Vallis made love. Alex doesn't even need to waste the
court's time with her serology expert. I'll stipulate to the findings."

Nothing
new about Tripping's defense. Consent. The two spent a rapturous night
together, he would argue, and for some reason that Peter would raise at trial,
Paige Vallis ran to the nearest cop on the beat the next morning to charge her
lover with rape. Surely it couldn't be for the pleasure of the experience she
was about to undergo in a public forum, when I called her to the witness stand.

"Did
Judge Hayes talk plea with you two?"

The case
had been pending since the indictment was filed back in March. "I haven't
made any offer to the defense."

"You
got rocks in your head, Alexandra? Nothing better to do with your time?"
Moffett cocked one eye and stared over his reading glasses at me.

"I'd
like to explain the circumstances, Your Honor. There's a child involved."

"She's
got a kid? What does that have to do with anything?"

"He's
the one with a kid. A son. That's what the endangering count refers to."

"The
father did something sexual to his own kid? Now that's-"

"No,
no, Judge. There's been some physical abuse and strange behavior-"

"Stop
characterizing this to prejudice the court, Alex. She's on thin ice, Your
Honor."

"The
boy was a witness to much of what happened leading up to the crime itself. In a
sense, he was the weapon the defendant used to compel Ms. Vallis to submit to
him. If Peter will stop interrupting me, I can lay it out for you."

Moffett
scanned the indictment again, reading the language about endangering the
welfare of a child. He looked up at Robelon. "How about it, Peter? Your
guy willing to take the misdemeanor and save us all a lot of aggravation?"

"No
way. The prosecution doesn't have the kid. She's never even talked to him. He's
not going to testify against his father."

"Is
that true, Alexandra?" Moffett was up and pacing now, anxious to get back
in the courtroom before the prospective jurors got too restless.

"Can
we just slow this down a bit, Peter?" I asked. "That's one of the
things I'd like to discuss with you before we charge ahead, Judge."

"What's
to discuss?"

"I'd
like you to sign an order directing production of the child, so that I can
interview him before I open to the jury."

"Why?
Where is he?"

"I
don't know, Your Honor. ACW took him away from Mr. Tripping at the time of the
arrest. They've never allowed me to meet with him." The Agency for Child
Welfare had relocated Tripping's ten-year-old son to a foster home outside the
city when I filed the indictment.

"Judge,"
Peter said, picking up on Moffett's obvious annoyance with my case, "see
what I mean? She hasn't even laid eyes on the boy."

"Why
isn't the kid with his mother?"

Peter and
I spoke at the same time. "She's dead."