Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel (21 page)

“Oh, please tell him hello for me.”

I started to respond when I heard my front door open and shut. I looked into the dining room. Bob was gone. I couldn’t believe it. He had never walked out on me before and I’d never walked out on him, either.

“Mom, I can’t talk now. Good-bye.”

I started after Bob, hoping to catch him, but when I got to the door, he’d already started his car. I felt hurt. I’d told him the calls were important and he’d just gotten here. Was he really going to drive all the way back to Albany because of the phone calls?

I started out to stop him, but as I stepped over the threshold, I heard the kitchen phone ring. Bob started backing his car down the drive. The phone rang again and then a third time.

I hesitated and then hurried back inside to answer.

“Miss Fox,” a woman’s voice said, “please hold for the governor.”

24

I telephoned bob the next morning, but there was no answer at his apartment. I thought about driving to Albany to salvage our romantic weekend, but the director of the women’s shelter dropped by my house unexpectedly with the forms that I needed to apply for the LEAA grant. She warned me that the deadline was only days away and the application was massive. When she offered to help, I invited her in and we spent all of Saturday and most of Sunday completing the application. During breaks, I called Bob’s apartment, but he either wasn’t there or wasn’t answering.

The next few days were a whirlwind. The governor announced that he was appointing me to a special legislative task force and Whitaker held a press conference. He did all the talking but I was suddenly in demand as a speaker at various county women’s groups. The task force took whatever time I had after work. I did manage to finally speak to Bob and he apologized for leaving at the exact same moment that I was trying to apologize to him for being preoccupied with the phone calls. His final days of school and my career, we agreed, were making it rough on our relationship. But I knew everything would be fine once he chose a hospital for his residency and the attention that I was now drawing dissipated. We’d been together nearly nine years. We could certainly weather a few rough weeks of being apart.

Our task force drafted a new statute and the governor rammed it through the state legislature just before the November elections. My boss won handily with strong support from women voters.

Everyone assumed there would be a stampede of battered women charging their husbands with abuse now that we had given them the right to have their abusers arrested. But we didn’t even see a trickle at our office. Women didn’t seem to be asking us to pursue cases against their abusers.

It didn’t take me long to pinpoint why. Despite our new law, the forty-three police departments in Westchester County were still treating domestic violence as “family disputes.” Every cop wanted to be Dirty Harry, not a social worker with a badge. I worked with women’s groups to get the local American Civil Liberties Union to announce a civil rights lawsuit against the police in all forty-three departments unless they began enforcing the new law. I made sure that Will Harris at the
White Plains Daily
heard about the ACLU filing. His story, “Local Cops Face Possible Suit,” got everyone’s attention, especially after he quoted me saying, “I believe battered women should have every weapon at their disposal to guarantee justice is done. If that means suing the police, then they should do it.”

The police chiefs were furious but public pressure was on my side and they had no choice but to back down. I was learning how to work the system.

None of my fellow assistant D.A.s wanted to pursue domestic violence cases, either. Like the cops, they were interested in only “real criminals”—murderers, rapists, and burglars. I reminded them that Rudy Hitchins was a murderer and that domestic violence was a serious crime. A few agreed to prosecute cases against husbands who were beating their wives, but things were not happening fast enough, and now that Whitaker was safe for another four years, his interest in domestic violence was beginning to wane.

And then a miracle happened. Whitaker called me into his office and told me that Westchester County had been selected for an LEAA grant.

“Do you know what other counties got grants?” I asked.

“Philadelphia, Miami-Dade County, and Santa Barbara, California. That’s it. I want to hold a press conference this afternoon to announce that you will be creating and running our new Domestic Violence Unit.”

As soon as I got back to my desk, I called Bob’s apartment to share the news. But there was no answer. I called Mom instead. We not only had a new law on the books, but I now was going to get federal funds to give that law teeth. It was the beginning of a new dawn in women’s rights and I was excited to be playing a role in it.

25

I hit the ground running. Whitaker arranged for space in the annex across the street from the Westchester County Courthouse. I wanted abused women to feel welcome, so I designed our lobby to look like a living room, not a sterile, cold office. Steinberg nearly wet his pants when I added playpens. Many battered women who brought complaints to police or religious leaders were told by these men that they didn’t have any options but to stay in their relationships. I thought women would be more comfortable talking to women, so I hired Lucy, Eunice, and Anne Marie as domestic violence aides.

Through the courthouse grapevine, I heard the cops and male assistant D.A.s refer to us as the “Tit Patrol” and “Panty Brigade.” Paul Pisani was taking great delight in ridiculing us, especially me. I didn’t let the other cynics bother me, but I was angry about “Mr. Invincible.” The more I heard about him, the more I hated him. I knew he was personally responsible for causing two marriages to break up. He seemed to enjoy using his charm to seduce married female employees whom he then dumped after they had blurted out to their husbands that they’d fallen for someone new. It takes two to tango, but he seemed to delight in targeting emotionally vulnerable women, bedding them, and then tossing them aside like used tissues.

With the threat of an ACLU civil rights suit hanging over their heads, the police begrudgingly began making arrests when a battered wife complained and Harris wrote a sensational story about the upswing in domestic violence prosecutions. He was unabashed in his support for our new unit, and soon we were being inundated with women from Scarsdale to Bedford asking for help. Finally, the dam had burst! When it came to abuse, social status and fat wallets didn’t count.

While Lucy, Eunice, and Anne Marie did a fantastic job interviewing women, when they confronted the abusers, the men either ignored them or worse. These men didn’t believe anyone had a right to tell them how to treat their wives. I learned quickly that most of our new clients didn’t want their husbands in jail. They just wanted them to stop hitting them. We came up with a ploy. When a battered woman came in, we warned her husband that he would be arrested and charged with a crime if he didn’t agree to counseling sessions. I had stationery printed with
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE UNIT, WESTCHESTER DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE
emblazoned across the top in bold, impressive letters, in English and Spanish. Whenever a woman came to our office, we issued her a letter on our stationery that declared: “This woman and her children are under the protection of the Domestic Violence Unit of Westchester County …” We told our clients that they needed to show the letters to their husbands and also the police if they were called. Actually, the letters had no legal clout. Only a judge could issue an order of protection. The letters scared some abusers and infuriated others, but they also helped identify true victims to the police. We were slowly making our criminal justice system respond.

Judges were another problem. Time and again, I’d walk into a courtroom and a judge would bark at me, “Why don’t you get a real case, Miss Fox?” Or they’d throw the case out with an admonishment to stop wasting the court’s time. One judge told a married woman with a black eye and a swollen jaw that she didn’t belong in his courtroom. “You need to go to family court,” he said. I had to remind him that a battered woman had additional rights under the new law. Even when we got a case to trial, jurors would openly ask during jury selection, “What did she do to make him so mad that he beat her?”

I also discovered that many of our clients were flawed. They had poor self-esteem, and many had drug and alcohol problems. When a badly bruised Janet Cummings arrived in our office and told us that the police had refused to arrest her husband, I got angry. I called the White Plains police officer who’d responded to the call and demanded to know why he hadn’t done anything.

“Her husband beat her within an inch of her life,” I said.

“You know, she’s a drunk,” the officer responded. “She falls down a lot.”

“Come off it! What kind of fall leaves welts and bruises under your arms or on the backs of your legs? What kind of a fall leaves choke marks around a woman’s neck?”

I got Cummings to press criminal charges against her husband, but when I tried to get her into a shelter, the director said Cummings wasn’t welcome because she was, indeed, an alcoholic. No one wanted her. On the day her case was called in court, she was nowhere to be found. She finally arrived, intoxicated, two hours late. The furious judge dismissed the case and admonished me for wasting his time.

I was angry at Cummings until I realized that she drank because she was miserable. Her husband threatened to strangle and burn her. But she was too emotionally crippled to save herself and I didn’t have the resources to help her.

Each case taught me more. Each case helped me sharpen my skills.

We’d been open about a month when Maya Lopez, a petite, soft-spoken woman in her early thirties with faint bruises, came to see us. She said her husband, Juan, often came home drunk and beat her. She endured his brutality until he started hitting their ten-year-old son. The morning she asked for help, she had put their son on a flight to Puerto Rico to live with his grandmother and then took a bus to our office.