'Well, it's not very considerate,' I said, 'but I don't think I'd call it rape.'
'Funny. Anyway, they drove around for a while and then they went back to her house and they wanted to have sex with her, and she said nothing doing, what kind of a girl do you think I am, blah blah blah, and finally she agreed that she'd fuck one of them, the one she'd been more or less partnered with, and the other one would wait in the living room. Except he didn't, he walked in while they were getting it on and watched, which did little to cool his ardor, as you might have figured.'
'And?'
'And afterward he said please please please, and she said no no no, and finally she gave him a blow-job because that was the only way to get rid of him.'
'She told you this?'
'In more ladylike terms, but yeah, that's what happened. Then she brushed her teeth and called the cops.'
'And reported it as rape?'
'Well, I'd be willing to call it that. It escalated from please please please to Get me off or I'll kick your teeth down your throat, so I'd say that qualifies as rape.'
'Oh, sure, if it was that forceful.'
'But it doesn't sound like our guys.'
'No, not at all.'
'I got their numbers just in case you want to follow up on them, and I told them we'd call if the producer decided to pursue it, that the whole project was kind of iffy just now. Was that right?'
'Definitely.'
'So I didn't come up with anything helpful, but it's encouraging that I got three calls, don't you think?
And there'll probably be more tomorrow.'
There was one call Thursday, and it had seemed promising early on. A woman in her early thirties taking graduate courses at St. John's University, abducted at knifepoint by three men as she was unlocking her parked car in one of the campus parking lots. They piled into the car with her and drove to Cunningham Park, where they had oral and vaginal sex with her, menaced her throughout with one or more knives, threatened various forms of mutilation, and did in fact cut her on one arm, although the wound may have been inflicted accidentally. When they were done with her they left her there and escaped in her car, which had still not been recovered almost seven months after the incident.
'But it can't be them,' Elaine said, 'because the guys were black.
The ones on Atlantic Avenue were white, weren't they?'
'Yeah, that's one thing everybody agrees on.'
'Well, these men were black. I kept, you know, returning to that point, and she must have thought I was racist or something, or that I suspected her of being a racist, or I don't know what. Because why should I keep pounding away at the color of the rapists? But of course it was all-important from my point of view, because it means that she's out of the picture for our purposes. Unless sometime between now and last August they figured out how to change color.'
'If they worked that out,' I said, 'it'd be worth a lot more than four hundred thousand to them.'
'Nice. Anyway, I felt like an idiot, but I took her name and number and said we'd call her if we got a green light on the project. You want to hear something funny? She said whether it leads to anything or not she's glad she called, because it did her good to talk about it. She talked about it a lot right after it happened and she had some counseling but she hasn't talked about it lately, and it helped.'
'That must have made you feel good.'
'It did, because up to then I'd been feeling guilty for putting her through it under false pretenses. She said I was very easy to talk to.'
'Well, that comes as no surprise to this reporter.'
'She thought I was a counselor. I think she was leading up to asking if she could come in once a week for therapy. I told her I was an assistant to a producer, and that you needed pretty much the same skills.'
THAT same day, I finally managed to get hold of Detective John Kelly of Brooklyn Homicide. He remembered that Leila Alvarez case and said it was a terrible thing. She'd been a pretty girl and, according to everyone who knew her, a nice kid and a serious student.
I said I was doing a piece on bodies abandoned in unusual locations, and I asked if there had been anything unusual about the condition of the body when it was found. He said there'd been some mutilation
and I asked if he could give me a little more detail and he said he thought he'd better not. Partly because they were keeping certain aspects of the case confidential, and partly to spare the feelings of the girl's family.
'I'm sure you can understand,' he said.
I tried a couple of other approaches and kept running up against the same wall. I thanked him and I was going to hang up, but something made me ask him if he'd ever worked out of the Seven-eight. He asked why I wanted to know.
'Because I knew a John Kelly who did,' I said, 'except I don't see how you could be the same man, because he would have to be well past retirement age by now.'
'That was my dad,' he said. 'You say your name's Scudder? What were you, a reporter?'
'No, I was on the job myself. I was at the Seven-eight for a while, and then I was at the Six in Manhattan when I made detective.'
