Guilt by Association (57 page)

Jessica had styled her stepmother’s hair back off her face, while Amy kept bringing up fresh pots of tea. Nancy had pressed her suit. And Natalie had fussed for over an hour, choosing just the right shade of stockings and appropriate pair of pumps.

“Nothing too spiky,” Nancy warned. “She should look conservative.”

“And nothing too bright,” Natalie agreed. “We wouldn’t want her to appear flashy.”

Everyone took a hand in her makeup, giving her a little more rouge and a little less mascara and then deciding on a soft-pink lipstick and pale eye-shadowing.

And all the while, Karen stood in front of the full-length mirror and wondered who the woman was who looked back at her. The swelling had gone down around the nose and lip, and the ugly bruises had all but faded, but the cheekbones seemed too prominent,
there was something disconcerting about her eyes, and the set of the jaw was new and unfamiliar.

Yesterday, when she had ventured out into the garden for a breath of fresh air, she discovered that a rude reporter had scaled the wall.

“So how does it feel to take down the greatest man in America?” he yelled at her.

Fortunately, Nancy was there to take a broom to him, sweeping him away like a speck of dirt, but Karen was left
wondering, for perhaps the thousandth time, if she were doing the right thing.

“… your right hand,” the bailiff had already begun. “Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give before this court is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“I do,” Karen said, her voice clear and firm.

“State your name.”

“Karen Doniger.”

“State your address.”

She gave the number of the house and the name of the street in St. Francis Wood.

“Be seated.”

The chair took her by surprise. It was deep and almost too comfortable for such a formal occasion. She was still settling herself into it when Tess stood up and walked toward her.

“Good morning, Mrs. Doniger,” the veteran ADA said with courtroom cordiality, tempered by an encouraging smile.

“Good morning,” Karen murmured, sitting up straight and folding her hands in her lap.

“To begin at the beginning, tell the court how you came to be working for the defendant’s political campaign.”

“One of the things I’ve done a lot of over the last ten years is move around the country,” Karen replied, remembering to look at the jury as often as possible, as Tess had coached her to do. “I’ve never been very political. I mean, I vote, but not for any particular party, only for a candidate if I like what he or she seems to stand for.”

“As many of us do,” Tess murmured.

“I was raised to believe that the United States was the greatest country on earth, but in some of the places I’ve lived, it would have been impossible not to see that something was going very wrong with the American Dream.”

“An opinion shared by many,” the ADA suggested. “Please continue.”

“It bothered me a lot, but I didn’t really know what I could do about it. After we moved to San Francisco, I became aware that Senator Willmont not only saw what was happening to
the country, but believed he knew exactly what to do about it. When he announced his candidacy, I thought—this is something I can do. I can work for someone who understands the problems and might even be able to solve them.”

“So you volunteered at the Willmont campaign headquarters?”

“Yes, two afternoons a week.”

“What did you do there?”

“In the beginning, I stuffed envelopes and ran the Xerox machine and made telephone calls, all the usual volunteer things.
But one day, they were rushed for a press release and no one seemed to know what to do, so I just took the material and sat down and wrote something. After that, they started asking me to write more releases and promotional kits, and I even wrote a position paper on hunger. In fact, that’s what I was doing when … when… well, that night.”

“Suppose you tell us, for the record, what it is that you do, and why the campaign staff would trust you to write so much of their material.”

“Well, I don’t really know if it was a big factor, but I’m the co-author of a number of pictorial books on America. My partner takes the photographs and I write the accompanying poetry. Some of the staff members had seen my books, so I guess they assumed I knew how to write.”

“Your last book,
Tapestry,
was highly acclaimed, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was,” Karen confirmed. “It was by far our most ambitious project.”

In the third row on the right side of the spectator section, Nancy smiled, and Ted, sitting beside her, squeezed her hand Demelza looked over her shoulder and winked.

Meanwhile, Tess had taken several steps back toward the prosecution table before she stopped and turned.

“Mrs. Doniger, how many times have you been married?”

“Once,” Karen replied.

“And how long have you been married to your husband?”

“It will be eleven years this November.”

“Have you ever, during that time, had an affair with another man?”

Even though Tess had prepared her for the question, Karen felt herself color. “I was thirty-nine years old when I got married,
Miss Escalante,” she said with dignity. “And, unbelievable as it may seem, I never had an affair with another man before my marriage and I have not had one since.”

“A thirty-nine-year-old virgin?” Janice Evans murmured. “I bet there’s one hell of a story in that.”

Beside her, Randy shifted uncomfortably.

“Now, let’s turn our attention to the night of April seventh,” Tess suggested. “Why were you at campaign headquarters so late on that particular evening?”

“I was working on a position paper, the one I mentioned before. The senator had decided to make hunger in America a campaign issue, and he wanted some material ready for a press reception the next day. My daughter was spending the evening with a school friend and my husband was going to be out for dinner, so I was able to stay until I was finished. The senator came in a few minutes before I was ready to leave.”

“Was anyone else there?”

“No. His administrative assistant was there earlier, but she had already gone. I was alone in the office when he arrived.”

“Tell us what happened.”

Karen carefully recounted the details that had led up to her accompanying the senator to the bar across the street.

“How long did you stay at the bar?”

“About two hours, I think. Long enough for each of us to have three Scotches and share a bucket of steamed clams.”

“What did you talk about?”

“We talked about my books, mostly. When we could.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the bar was pretty crowded and people wouldn’t leave him alone. They kept coming over to the table. But he seemed to take it all in stride, so I guessed it was like that wherever he went.”

“When you could talk, what besides your books did you talk about?”

“He talked about the campaign for a while, about how well it was going, and about how hard it was to have to be on the road so much, and how lonely it was, and how glad he’d be when it was all over.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t remember anything else, specifically.”

“All right, what happened after you left the bar?”

“We went back to the parking garage and got into his car and he started to drive me home. The most direct way to get to my house is to go through the park. That’s exactly what we were doing when I got sick.”

“You got sick?”

“Yes. I don’t know whether it was the Scotch or the clams or what, but all of a sudden I got sick to my stomach and I asked him to stop the car for a moment.”

“Did he?”

“Well, he said he couldn’t do anything on the crossover, but he’d stop the first chance he had. I thought he meant after we left the park, but, when we got to the traffic light, which is less than a block before you come out of the park, he suddenly turned left onto Martin Luther King Drive. I said I had to get out and walk a bit, but he said that if I was going to be sick I should have privacy, so he turned up the little road to Stow Lake and stopped there.”

Here, Karen paused. Her heart had begun to race and her breath was starting to come in little gasps.

“Would you like to take a brief break before we get to this next part?” Tess invited.

“No, that’s all right,” Karen replied, sucking air deep into her lungs. “I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Karen said more firmly. “I’d rather keep going. I’d like to get through this before I lose my courage.”

“All right,” Tess agreed. “Tell us what happened after he stopped the car.”

“I got out and started walking around a bit, taking some deep breaths to settle my stomach, and then there he was,
right behind me. I must have jumped a mile. I didn’t even realize he’d gotten out of the car.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He asked me if I was going to be sick. I told him if I could just walk around in the fresh air for a minute or two I’d be okay, at least until I got home.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. Then I started back toward the car. He was leaning against the hood. I told him I felt better and I thought it would be okay to go. I opened the car door but he said he was in no hurry and I should give it a little longer, just to make sure.
He said his car was still new and I guess he didn’t want to take any chances. So I walked around the car a couple of times and then he came up very close behind me. He asked me if I was cold and he took off his jacket and started to put it around me, but I told him I wasn’t cold and I sort of moved away a little. But he said I was shivering and he wanted to be sure I stayed warm in case I was coming down with something, and he was right next to me, and when I tried to get away, he… he grabbed me.”

Nancy felt Ted stiffen in the seat beside her. She slipped her arm through his and held on tight.

Across the aisle, Elizabeth Willmont took a deep breath and thought about taking Adam to the beach.

“Tell us what happened then,” Tess urged softly.

Karen blinked back hot tears. “I tried to push him away, but he was too strong, and then he kissed me. He said he’d been wanting to do that all evening, and he could tell that I wanted him to. I told him he was wrong, that I was happily married, and that…
I wasn’t interested in him in that way, and all I wanted to do was go home. I tried to pull away, but he just laughed and held me tighter. He said he knew a come-on when he saw it, that I’d been flirting with him all night, and just begging for it.”

“Begging for it?”

Karen nodded. “I told him he was crazy, but I guess that was the wrong thing to say because he sort of went wild. He slapped me so hard that I fell against the car. When I tried to
get up, he started yelling that I’d be crazy about him by the time he finished with me, and then he … he dragged me off the road and threw me down on the ground.”

Tess waited calmly while her witness fumbled around in her purse for a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

“We can stop for a bit, if you need to,” she offered, but Karen shook her head. “All right, then, tell us what happened next.”

In fits and starts, Karen described in agonizing detail how the defendant had torn aside her dress and stripped off her panties,
and how he had then forced himself into her. As almost everyone in the courtroom squirmed uncomfortably, she told how he had laughed at her protests, and how she had managed to reach out and scratch him, and how he had reacted by hitting her again and pinning both her hands beneath her.

In his seat two rows behind the defendant, Randy squirmed with the rest of the gallery and tried not to listen to the words that damned the California senator with every syllable. This woman, whom he had first admired through her work, and then liked for her dedication, and now wanted to despise because of her betrayal, was clearly having a devastating effect on the jury,
on the entire court. Even the judge looked queasy, and the typically acerbic Janice Evans was silent beside him.

Randy was a closet romantic who had waited until he was forty to fall in love. Raised to respect women, he knew in his soul there was no place for the kind of violence that Karen Doniger was describing. He had no illusions about the world being a perfect place, but he still had some illusions about the people he knew and had chosen to follow.

Robert Willmont could be inconsiderate, Randy knew, and even downright nasty when the situation called for it, but that was a far cry from the vicious animal this woman was making him out to be. He wondered what silent forces had gotten to her with their evil message.

He had offered to testify himself.

“I’ve known the senator for fifteen years,” he told Hal
Sutton. “No one has been closer to him. Let me tell the jury that he just couldn’t do the things they’re claiming.”

“Have you spent every minute of every day of those fifteen years with him?” Sutton asked.

“Well, certainly not
every
minute,” Randy had to admit.

“Then you can’t help,” Sutton said kindly but firmly. “If we need character witnesses, we’ll go to one or two of his colleagues in the Senate, or a couple of his supporters on the Supreme Court, or the mayor or the governor or several of his more influential backers here in California. No offense, but I’m sure you understand.”

Randy understood. But it didn’t help his anxiety as he squirmed in his seat and steeled his heart against the respectable middle-aged woman who seemed determined to cut his friend and mentor up into a messy pile of pieces.

“I tried to fight him,” Karen was continuing, tears dripping slowly down her cheeks, “but he was just too strong. I was crying and choking and gasping for breath, and he kept telling me how much he knew I’d enjoy it, and how long he’d been waiting for this opportunity. But I’d only met him a few days before. And then, just as, well, just as he was, you know … concluding,
he gave this strange kind of laugh and he said, ‘It was only a matter of time, Mariah, until you gave me what I wanted.’“

Randy Neuburg’s head snapped up.

“He called you Mariah?” Tess queried. “Not Susie or Sally, or even Elizabeth, but Mariah?”