False Allegations (32 page)

He was an evangelist, I knew that. I didn’t realize I’d become the congregation until I was down too deep.

And by the time I came out the other side, there was nothing to do but go with what I
really
knew.

“P
lease don’t do that,” Kite said.

“Do what?”

“Stare so deeply into my eyes— it’s not polite. I suffer from nystagmus, and your staring makes me uncomfortable.”

“Sorry,” I lied, sitting in that butterscotch armchair. “Anyway, it’s the real deal. It checks out every way there is.”

“You’re sure?” he asked softly. “There’s no mistake?”

“Unless there’s some more evidence lying around, I got it all,” I told him.

His eyes flared behind the pink glasses. “Do you believe there
might
be some?”

“Might
have
been,” I said. “But this Brother Jacob character won’t be stupid enough to hold on to it. I’m done digging— there’s no pay dirt left.”

“Is there anything else? Anything you haven’t turned over?” he asked, one long finger tapping a thick stack of documents on the little round table to his right.

“Just this,” I said, pulling a list of names and addresses out of my jacket pocket. “It’s not the coffin, but, with everything else, it’s damn sure another nail.”

I handed it over. He scanned the list, shaking his head. “I don’t see what this— “

“Third page, fourth name from the top,” I told him.

“‘Russell J. Swithenbrecht.’ A post office box in Erie, Pennsylvania. What does that have to do with— ?”

“That’s him,” I said. “Brother Jacob. He keeps the box under that name. Drives over about once a month. Only takes about an hour and a half, two hours tops. Always the same way. Drives there on a Friday night, stays over, hits the box Saturday morning— the branch is only open until noon. Then he drives back to Buffalo in time for his regular sessions on Saturday afternoon. Been doing it for years.”

“And that proves…?”

“What you have in your hands is a printout of a subscription list,” I said. “For a little magazine called
Unique Yearnings
.”

Kite’s eyebrows lifted into a question.

“Girl–lovers, they call themselves,” I told him. “Little girls.”

“We have found the truth,” Kite said, looking up directly into my eyes.

I could feel Heather standing behind me— feel the heat coming off her.

I
met Morales in Bryant Park, right behind the Public Library, a block from where the heart of Times Square would be if it had one.

“This guy I’m looking at for Kite. If you ever hear anything— “

“What you got so far?” the cop asked.

I
t took another six weeks to assemble the ingredients. Then Kite dropped the bomb. Jennifer Dalton sued Brother Jacob in New York County Supreme Court. For twenty–five million dollars. Her complaint alleged sexual abuse, statutory rape, sodomy, extortion, intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, battery, pastoral malpractice, and half a dozen other charges. The Psalmists were not named in the lawsuit— it was all Brother Jacob.

I caught it on the news, a thirty–second clip from a press conference called to announce the litigation. “Yes, we understand that these events occurred some time ago,” Kite was saying smoothly, looking implacable and immaculate in a dark–chocolate double–breasted suit. “And while it is too late for the criminal justice system to act, we believe it is time for New York to join other, more progressive jurisdictions in providing a civil remedy for a child driven into a psychiatric coma by the deliberate, predatory acts of a sexual abuser. We are prepared to prove that the perpetrator’s conduct was
calculated
to assault and impair the victim’s reality–testing. This was no accident. It has happened time and time again. It is happening as we speak, to children all over this country.”

The newspapers ran with it heavy, Kite piling on fact after fact, every detail displayed for the public, holding nothing back. They even broke out one of Kite’s quotes in a black–bordered box in the middle of the article: “The statute of limitations was designed to be a shield to protect the innocent from claims filed so late that the evidence had disappeared. But now it is being used as a sword, a sword to attack the weakest, most vulnerable members of our society. When it comes to child sexual abuse, the statute of limitations has no place in a civilized society. This case isn’t about the law. This case is about the truth.”

T
he lawyers for Brother Jacob kept saying they didn’t want to try their case in the press. But Kite kept up the assault, wondering out loud who was paying for Brother Jacob’s defense. Tabloid TV reporters surrounded the house in Buffalo, blanketing the neighborhood for the usual empty quotes. Brother Jacob moved to an undisclosed location. A spokesman for the Psalmists appeared on a talk radio show. When he said something about the suffering of Job, the board lit up with enraged callers demanding to know if
Jennifer’s
suffering meant anything. When the Psalmist spokesman tried to explain the church’s position, the radio host called him a dirtbag and kicked him off the show.

K
ite’s legal papers ran almost three hundred pages, counting exhibits. Photocopiers at the courthouse pumped around the clock. The document became a best–seller overnight, turning up at coffeehouses and society parties and college campuses. Some commentators wondered out loud if Brother Jacob could ever hope to get a fair trial. And their colleagues pounded back, wondering with even more vehemence if Jennifer Dalton would ever get justice.

J
ust as the fever broke, a new wave hit. Five more victims came forward. With their lawyers. Three different lawyers.

Two of the victims were in their thirties. One claimed to have reported the sexual abuse to the police twenty years ago. Even said she was interviewed by someone from the DA’s Office. But nothing happened.

The other three victims weren’t women. They were girls. One fifteen, one sixteen, the other just turning eighteen.

“The statute of limitations won’t protect him from
this
,” Kite crowed on TV.

M
ichelle was watching with me when they made Brother Jacob take the Perp Walk for the assembled cameras. He kept his head down, a coat over his wrists to hide the handcuffs, but he turned his face up just before he bent forward to get into the back seat of the police cruiser.

“He’s got the look,” Michelle hissed. “You can smell it right through the TV set.”

I knew what she meant. They didn’t all look alike, that was their camouflage. But they all had the same look when captured— that icy predator’s glare promising no cage will ever change them.

“C
op call,” Mama said.

“How’d you know it was a cop?” I asked her.

“He say. Say, ‘Tell Burke it’s his friend on the force.’ Okay?”

“Yeah. He leave a number?”

“No number. Say he call back. Tonight. Late. You wait here, okay?”

“Sure,” I said, looking at my watch. It wasn’t even nine.

When Max rolled in, he signed he wanted to play cards, but…

I understood what he was telling me. His taste for gin was gone forever— he could never recapture the magic of that last time, and he knew it. But we still had a few hours, so I figured it was a good time to teach him to play casino. Mama didn’t know how to play either, but by the time Morales finally called, she was already giving Max bogus advice. And I was about a hundred bucks ahead.

“L
ook for a bitch on the stroll over on Lex in the twenties,” Morales’ harsh voice came over the phone. “She’s wearing a long white coat, got a pair of black hot pants under it, you can’t miss her. Name’s Roselita. She got the key to a locker at Port Authority. Tell her your name’s Mr. Jones, slip her a yard, the key’s yours. Use it tonight— it’s only good for twenty–four hours.”

“You sure she’ll be there? If she scores a trick— “

“She’ll be out there walking, don’t worry about it. Bitch owes me a favor.”

“What if her pimp— ?”

“She ain’t
got
no motherfucking pimp. That’s the favor.”

S
he was where Morales said she’d be, a tall slender woman with a Gypsy’s long black hair, and white plastic dangle earrings, slowly strolling the block but not calling out to any of the pussy–cruising cars that slithered by. When I tapped the horn, she swivel–hipped over to the Plymouth and leaned inside the passenger window, pulling the long white coat apart to show me her slim, flashy legs and small, high breasts bouncing free under a flimsy red tank top while shielding the display from everyone behind her— a real pro move. One look at her face and I could see she’d had plenty of time to learn, the harsh tracks of the Life showed right through the stage makeup. You didn’t need the VACANCY sign in her eyes to know her body was for rent.

“Wha’s yo’ name, hombre?”

“They call me Mr. Jones,” I said, holding the hundred–dollar bill splayed between the fingers of my right hand.

“Hokay,” she said, not even the trace of a smile on her greasy red lips. She fished a locker key from the pocket of the white coat and we traded.

L
ater that night, Max took my back as I opened the locker at Port Authority. Inside was a chunky package wrapped in enough layers of plastic filament tape to take a strong man with a box cutter half an hour to open it.

Back at my office, I unwrapped it carefully, taking my time, half watching some old movie about gangsters with Pansy.

Once I saw what it was, I could see I’d need another kind of key to unlock it. I used the cellular to tap the Mole.

T
hat was it then. There was a lot of media buzz about the cases, but it went the way it always does, especially when the first judge assigned refused to allow cameras in the court. Kite objected, saying the people had a right to know. The judge just shrugged that off— a veteran of twenty years on the bench, he knew the value of a lawyer’s speech. And that it wasn’t “the people” who got him his job.

Besides, a serial killer was tying up prostitutes in Times Square hotel rooms and then making sure they took a long time to die. Media triage. And none of Brother Jacob’s victims were all that sexy–looking anyway.

Besides, the Governor was busy explaining why the newly passed death penalty hadn’t stopped a freak from sodomizing a little girl to death in a housing project stairwell, covering her tiny face with his hand to stop her from screaming, doing it so tightly that she stopped breathing.

Even vultures prefer fresh corpses.

T
hen one cold, rainy Monday, Jennifer Dalton brought Brother Jacob back from the dead. The cellular buzzed. I picked it up, not saying anything. “You near a TV set?” the Prof’s voice asked.

“Yeah,” I said, watching Pansy watch me.

“Turn it on, bro. You not gonna believe this.”

He cut the connection. I flicked on the set, rotating the channel knob until I found her.

“I lied,” she told the freeze–faced reporter from one of those garbage–picking TV newsmagazine shows. The reporter kept nodding unctuously as
Exclusive! Exclusive! Exclusive!
trailed across the bottom of the picture.

“I made it all up,” she said, crying into her cupped hands. “At least, I
think
I did. But I don’t
know
. And now I know that’s wrong. I can’t go on with it any longer.”

She kept talking as the screen cut to silent shots of newspaper headlines of the lawsuit. As the camera panned away, I could see a woman seated next to her, patting Jennifer’s forearm. The other woman was dressed in a conservative business suit. The screen caption identified her as “Doreen Z. Landover, Feminist Lawyer.”

Jennifer told the reporter the same story she told me. Except that, this time, Brother Jacob hadn’t done anything to her. Oh, she’d had a schoolgirl crush on him, but he’d never taken advantage of it. She told the reporter about her broken engagement, about how she got so depressed she didn’t want to live. Said she was drinking heavily, drifting. When she went into counseling, the therapist kept pressing her, she said. “He kept asking me about sexual abuse. In my family. He said that
had
to be the reason for all my troubles. It would explain everything, that’s what he said. But I knew…my family had never…and that’s when I told him about Brother Jacob.”

“Do you mean about the alleged sexual abuse?” the reporter asked, smarmy–voiced.

“No. Not at first. I just told him…what had really happened. But he kept
after
me. And I was so…sad and depressed. After a while, it seemed to all make sense to me. And now I’ve ruined a man’s life. I’m so ashamed…”