Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel (25 page)

She began to cry.

“Take your time,” O’Brien said.

She looked up from the chair at me. “My father told me, ‘I could have killed myself in there. I could’ve blown off my head. But you didn’t do nothing. You don’t care about me. You didn’t care about your mother, neither. You only care about yourself.’”

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “My father took off his belt and he hit me across my back. It stung and I screamed. He said a good daughter would have come into the bathroom to check on him. A good daughter would have tried to stop him. But I didn’t care about him. I didn’t try to stop him. I wasn’t a good daughter. He said that’s why he hit me. That’s why he was going to beat me. He whipped me again with his belt and I fell on the floor on my stomach and tried to protect my head with my hands because he just kept hitting me with his belt. It hurt so much. I kept thinking, ‘Why is he doing this? It can’t be happening.’ I was screaming and that made him even madder. He yelled, ‘You want something to cry about? I’ll give you something to cry about!’ He hit me so many times that my back began bleeding and I was begging him to stop, but he just kept hitting me.”

The only sound in the room except for her voice was the noise of Anne Marie’s pen on her notepad.

“My father told me to go into his bathroom and take a shower because my back was bleeding. He said I was a dirty, rotten whore who didn’t care about anyone. I ran into the bathroom, and while the water was running, I cried and cried because I knew he couldn’t hear me. I stayed in there as long as I could. I didn’t know what else to do. Then I thought maybe the cocaine had worn off and maybe he’d fallen asleep and maybe I could get back to my room if I was real quiet. I dried off but I couldn’t put my pajamas on because they were bloody. I looked in the mirror and my back was covered with bruises and welts. I wrapped myself in two towels and opened the door. But he was waiting for me on the bed and he told me to come over to the bed. That’s when it happened.”

I said, “That’s when he raped you?”

She nodded.

“I just looked at the ceiling. I didn’t make noise because he told me that I could not cry, that I had no right to cry, but I was crying inside.”

“How many times did he sexually assault you that night?”

She held up three fingers. “When he was done, he told me I was sleeping in his bed from now on. He said, ‘Your stepmother slept here so now you have to sleep here.’ The next day he told me to put on my stepmother’s clothes. He told me I wasn’t going back to school ever again. He told me I was the family’s new mother and I had to take care of the younger kids. When he left for work at the jewelry store, he told me to clean the house and get dinner ready for him when he came home. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t know where to go and I didn’t want to leave my little brothers and sister behind. He said he would kill me or them if I said anything. That night, after I put the other kids to bed he took me into the bedroom and he told me to take cocaine with him. I didn’t want to so he began hitting me with his belt. When he got tired of hitting me, he made me take the cocaine in my nose and he put cocaine on his penis. He said it would make him like Superman. Then he raped me again two times that night. It was awful. I wanted to die. I wanted him to kill me.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“No, I kept thinking someone would realize something was wrong. I kept thinking someone would stop him. My father made me dress in my stepmother’s evening clothes and he took me out at night. He’d take me to bars and tell people I was his girlfriend. No one said anything, even people who knew I was his daughter. They laughed and said it was great that he was spending time with me. Then I got pregnant.”

“Your father got you pregnant?”

“Yes. When he found out, he was so mad. He beat me with the belt. I think he was trying to kill the baby. But it didn’t work so he took me to one of those clinics. He went with me and paid to have it done.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Three months ago. He went with me when they did it. Not long after that, he met a woman. His new girlfriend. She was a lingerie model. He told me I could go back to my room after she moved in with us. He told me that if I ever said anything about what he’d done to me, he would kill me and kill my brothers and sister.”

I said to O’Brien, “Detective, I’d like you to step outside for a moment.” As soon as he did, I said, “I want you to show me your back, where he whipped you with his belt.”

Carmen stood up and took off her shirt, unsnapped her bra, and turned around.

Anne Marie let out a gasp.

The teen’s back was a road map of raised scar tissue, hundreds of linear slash marks.

“Thank you. You can put your shirt back on.”

Seeing Carmen’s scars substantiated her story. But we would need to do much more investigation to justify charges of forcible rape, sodomy, unlawful imprisonment, incest, and child endangerment—all potential counts that I was mulling over.

“Carmen, do you understand that if we file criminal charges against your father, you’ll have to testify against him in a courtroom?”

“Yes, Detective O’Brien already told me.”

“Are you going to be able to look him directly in the eyes and tell twelve jurors the same story that you just told us?”

“I think so.”

I didn’t want to frighten her, but I also knew a defense attorney was going to be relentless when she testified.

“You can’t think so. You have to
know
so.”

For the first time since she’d entered my office, I saw fire in her big brown eyes.

“Yes, I will tell them.”

Addressing Anne Marie, I said, “Take Carmen into your office and get color photos of the scars.” I turned to Carmen and asked, “Are you hungry?” It was nearly noon.

“Yes. I didn’t have any breakfast.”

“Anne Marie, get Carmen something to eat, too.”

“Maybe I could get something to take back to Hector, my brother. He and I are living with my mom’s best friend.”

“Anne Marie will do it.”

O’Brien returned as soon as Carmen and Anne Marie left.

“What kind of sick son of a bitch does this to his own daughter?” I asked. “What can you tell me about Carlos Gonzales?”

O’Brien removed the toothpick from between his lips and said, “Carlos is a real piece of work. The Feds got a drug case against him in Manhattan. He’s never been busted before and his arrest came as a real surprise to the Hispanic community.”

O’Brien said Carlos had come to America from Bogotá, Colombia, when he was a small child and had become a naturalized citizen. Through hard work, he’d learned the jewelry business and had eventually opened a high-end outlet in Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood. He’d married his first wife, Rosita, and they’d settled in White Plains, where she gave birth to Carmen. Two years later, she’d died while having their second child, Hector. Carlos, meanwhile, soon emerged as a powerful political figure in Westchester County’s Spanish-speaking communities. He attended church each Sunday, donated to Latino charities, and was president of the local Hispanic business council. He donated money from his store to buy sporting equipment for a local youth center. His second wife, Benita Archuleta, was from a respected Manhattan family, which owned more than a dozen profitable bodegas. She bore him two more children, Angel and Adolpho. According to a police report, Benita had committed suicide a few days before Christmas two years ago. Carlos’s newest love interest was Maria Hildago. She’d moved into the family house in White Plains about two weeks before the FBI arrested Carlos on charges that he was distributing drugs through his jewelry business.

I said, “So in public, he’s an upstanding, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps immigrant success story and Hispanic leader. In private, he’s distributing drugs, using cocaine, and beating and raping his own daughter.”

“That’s Carlos. He thinks he’s slick.”

“Where are the kids?”

“Carmen and Hector moved in with Yolanda Torres, in New Rochelle. Yolanda was their mother—Rosita’s—best friend. Angel and Adolpho are living with their grandmother.”

“Anything else I should know? What about the suicide—the stepmother?”

“You mean Carlos’s second wife, Benita. The medical examiner listed it as a suicide, but it was odd.”

“Why’s that?”

“Benita had a clean-cut reputation, came from a good family, and was popular. Then she OD’d right before Christmas on cocaine. According to the report, all the kids were in the house the night it happened, including Carmen.”

“Maybe she had secrets just like Carlos.”

28

It’s hard for defense attorneys to counter physical evidence. The scars on Carmen’s back proved she had been beaten. She’d also had an abortion—something I needed to confirm. Just the same, a good defense attorney would try to create reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds. Who had delivered those blows? Who had gotten her pregnant?

The truth? That didn’t matter—not to a defense attorney. It was someone else’s problem. When you were hired as a defense lawyer, the goal was acquittal, not truth. Ask a defense attorney how he slept at night and you always got the same answer. If the state did its job, then the guilty would be deservingly punished. There wouldn’t be any reasonable doubt. Jurors would know instantly who was guilty and who wasn’t. It wasn’t up to the defense to determine who had committed a murder. That was the state’s job. The defense was responsible for making certain the innocent were not railroaded.

It all sounded noble. But it rarely was. Most defense attorneys knew their clients were guilty as hell. But that didn’t stop them from cooking up stories and blaming others for crimes that they knew their clients had committed.

I wanted to corroborate Carmen’s story, so while O’Brien and Anne Marie began interviewing neighbors, relatives, and the other Gonzales children, I hopped on a train into Manhattan. Normally, I would have had a police officer drive me, but I didn’t want to call attention to myself because of where I was going.

Carmen had said her father had taken her to a women’s clinic on East 60th Street for an abortion. Obviously, I could subpoena the doctor who worked there, but I thought he might talk more freely to me if I showed up in person. I also had Carmen sign a legal release authorizing me to read her medical charts.

It was a three-block walk from the subway station to the concrete high-rise that housed the women’s clinic. As I neared the address, I spotted a couple accosting a teenage girl and an older woman. They appeared to be a mother and daughter.

“Don’t kill your baby!” a middle-aged man in a worn dark suit hollered at the teen. The equally middle-aged woman with him tried to force pamphlets into their hands. The antiabortion activists kept maneuvering themselves in front of the pair, momentarily blocking their path.

“Leave us alone!” the mother finally yelled. “This is none of your business.” Grabbing her daughter’s hand, she pulled the terrified teen into the building.

The activists noticed me and pounced, like hawks swooping down on an unsuspecting prey.

“Give up your baby for adoption,” the man pleaded. “Don’t murder your child.”

The woman thrust a pamphlet toward me. The cover had a color photograph of a fetus discarded in a trash can under the words: “HUMAN GARBAGE.”

“We can take you to a safe place where people can help you with your baby,” the woman said. “They can find someone to adopt your child. You don’t have to commit murder.”