False Witness
False Witness
Dorothy Uhnak
USA (1980)
Jacobi gets the call a few hours before dawn. Model-turned-television
celebrity Sanderalee Dawson lies on the kitchen floor of her sumptuous
Manhattan apartment, hanging on to life by a tenuous thread. The victim
of a savage assault, she stuns everyone when she survives and identifies
her attacker. So begins a case that leads law enforcement down a
twisting path of secrets, lies, and false leads. Lynne, bureau chief of
the district attorney’s office, is fueled by ambition and her vow to
bring a brutal killer to justice. But Chief Investigator Bobby Jones
isn’t sure they have the right man, and he hesitates to put his legal
career—and his affair with Lynne—at risk. The victim herself, as the
only witness to her rape, must go up against a monster who just might
get away with it.
A Novel
Dorothy Uhnak
This book is dedicated with deep affection and gratitude
...
to Tom O’Rourke, for a lifetime of friendship
to Jack O’Brian and Barry Farber for consistent kindness and generosity from the very beginning through the long years
Special thanks to my daughter, Tracy, not only for the hours of typing and deciphering, but more importantly for offering encouragement and strength when I faltered
and to Dr. Marvin J. “Chick” Schissel, as fine a raconteur as he is a dentist
Prologue
CRIME SCENE
A
S SHE LAY NEAR
death, Sanderalee Dawson was spared the pain of her terrible injuries by shock.
She swallowed the salty thin blood that filled her mouth. It was an instinctive attempt to keep the life force inside her, as was her attempt to breathe in small, short, careful gasps rather than in huge lung-filling expansions, which she might then be unable to exhale. There was a slow dull consciousness working, devoid of panic: if her attempts to breathe made a lot of noise, he might hear her, might still be nearby, would realize she was not yet dead, might return to hurt her again.
Having made the decision to survive, she experienced one quick electric shock of pain so total, so devastating that the cry caught in her throat, seemed about to strangle her. She was suffocating and it was not gentle or easy. It was terrifying and she fought against it.
She opened her eyes and gazed without understanding at the pendulum motion of the telephone receiver as it skimmed the floor, dangling from the end of the uncurled white rubberized cord.
There was a hand holding the receiver, the fingers locked in a rigid grasp. It was a severed hand and a thick trail of blood followed the back and forth swaying motion, in a bright red pattern on her white ceramic tile kitchen floor. It was hers.
THE VICTIM
CHAPTER 1
S
HE HAD BEEN LEFT
for dead. Had Sanderalee Dawson been, in fact, dead, a great many lives and reputations and careers and ambitions and relationships would now be quite different. Including mine. Especially mine.
When my phone rings in the middle of the night, I have a facility for becoming not only awake but instantly, totally, sharply alert. For some stupid, dark-based reason, I try to convince not only the caller but myself that I wasn’t asleep, I was just lying there in the darkness waiting for an emergency call.
As Bobby Jones attempted to control his obvious excitement, his voice expanded with the Nebraska flatness that four years in New York City had not totally obliterated. Where anyone else quickens, he slows down.
“Lynne, I’ve sent a patrol car to pick you up. It should be at your apartment within the next five minutes or so. I’m calling from Roosevelt Hospital. They might have to move her for special surgery and it looks very bad. She’s lost a lot of blood. I’m heading for her apartment and I’ll meet you there. Your driver knows where it is—that old Holcroft Hall building near Carnegie Hall.”
I don’t see the graveyard-shift doorman, Giorgio, very often. It is unusual for me to dash out of my building and into a New York City Police Department squad car at four in the morning. But Giorgio handled it with great aplomb: he arrived at the curb before I did and held the car door open, sweeping aside with a semi-bow as though it were your standard black limo. There wasn’t any traffic at all. We made the trip from lower Fifth, where I live, to 58th and Seventh Avenue in record time.
Bobby Jones appeared from the shadows and escorted me into the entrance area of the building, holding open the heavy iron-scrolled glass door, which led into a small cubicle that provided the doorman a good view out. The uniformed doorman was seated behind his battered wooden desk, his job taken over by a large, thuggish-looking detective who squinted with professional suspicion.
“This is Bureau Chief Lynne Jacobi, D.A.’s office,” Bobby informed the detective. The introductions seemed to stop on that one-sided note.
“And your name and command, officer?”
He sucked on a tooth while making up his mind. I’ve met his kind before. Many times.
“Detective Arthur Godley, Homicide. Godley. Not Godfrey.”
“Uh-huh. And this gentleman?”
The doorman was instantly on his feet. “I’m Timothy Doyle, ma’am,” he told me in a soft, aged, melodious brogue.
“Tim here was on duty the whole night, Miss Jacobi. He’s given me a statement, which is being typed up right now for him to sign.”
“Mr. Doyle,
I’d like to talk to you after I come back from upstairs. I could use a cup of strong wake-up tea and I have a feeling you could brew just the thing.”
Timothy Doyle’s face lit up and he nodded enthusiastically. He was an Irishman from another era: one of the proud-humble, tough-gentle, devoted-independent, reliable-to-the-death immigrants who considered being “in service” an honorable and respectable profession.
Bobby Jones handled the old-fashioned elevator as though he’d been doing it all his life. He brought the rumbling old car flat even with the eighth-floor hallway and held it steady with one hand on the control as he pulled at the folding gate.
I walked directly into Detective Arthur Godley’s twin brother, or his clone.
“Sorry, lady,” he growled. “Unless you live on this floor you can’t come up here. This is a sealed-off crime-research area.”
Neither Bobby nor I had to go through the identifications again. Chief of Detectives Jim Barrow swept from the open door of Sanderalee Dawson’s apartment. I was enclosed momentarily in his embrace: a hard, smothering hug followed by a quick cheek kiss of friendship and I thought, fleetingly, of what the reaction of my young female staff members would have been. Oh God, that kind of chauvinistic crap. And you
allow
it! They have yet to discern what you allow and go with and what you put a sharp stop to. Barrow and I are equals. We work together on occasion and we have worked together very successfully through the years as each of us has risen through the ranks of our respective organizations. His division of the New York City Police Department prepares cases for consideration for my division of the New York County District Attorney’s Office. My people, in effect, evaluate and pass judgment on the work done by his people. We are the ones who have to go before the jury and present, in an orderly and convincing fashion, what they have come up with. There have been times when we’ve disagreed. There have been bitter and unpleasant moments. There have been times when Jim Barrow and I would gladly have paced off against each other, turned and fired. Except, of course, as an advocate of strict gun control, I do not carry.
I accept the friendly embrace from my professional equals. At times, a good hug can be very reassuring. I am nearly forty years old and I have been doing battle for many, many years without too many compromises along the way. My young female associates haven’t been in the war long enough to learn that there are necessary times of truce.
The small square entrance foyer to Sanderalee’s apartment was dark and cavelike with shiny dark brown ceramic tile flooring, darker brown walls, small dull wall lights. By comparison, the huge living room was a blaze of light caused not merely by the lamps and raw bulbs set up by the investigators but by the decor: soft pale monochromatic beige sweep of couch leading to a subtly blending series of velvet chairs in just slightly darker shades, all set on wall-to-wall very thick, pale, mushroomy carpet in the identical hue of the walls and ceiling. Beautiful wooden accent pieces: a desk, a small antique armoire lit from within to display a precise arrangement of exquisite collector’s items—porcelains, paperweights, small silvery treasures.
The room was out of a magazine. Every item decorator perfect. Everything calculated to set off the main occupant. Sanderalee Dawson would serve as the centerpiece. The recessed spotlights would glance off and enhance her warm beige honey-gold complexion. Even in the confusion caused by the police technicians and photographers, one could see that the professional set designer had selected with great calculation every painting on the walls, every art book and flower arrangement. There was nothing impulsive or spontaneous. The only color selected for the room came from a wonderful collection of pillows; all sizes, all shapes, all designs.
The discordant, unanticipated color, dominating all the overturned furniture and tossed-about lamps, was the darkening brownish-red thickly shimmering blood. Sanderalee’s life force was sprayed and splattered and pooled all over the room in a way that would have reduced her decorator to suicide. There could be no cleaning up. There would have to be a complete cleaning out.
Jim Barrow’s heavy arm wrapped around me as he guided a path carefully around the forensic people who gathered, collected, photographed, measured, traced, paced, calculated, guessed, estimated, noted and gossiped. It was all routine to them, although rarely are they called upon to perform their rites in such a lush setting. From time to time, one or another hummed or whistled or stopped work to glance admiringly at the floor-to-ceiling collection of photographs of Sanderalee Dawson along one wall. The blank and beautiful face of the professional high-fashion model watched them without expression: a haughty dark beauty, mysterious, remote, slightly threatening in the distance created by the turn of her chin. And then, the surge of life and spirit caught by an excellent photographer who had created a playful mood: a let’s have some fun with this damn thing babe, show us what ya got Sanderalee, yeah Sanderalee yeah yeah yeah. A series of quick click-click-click living shots. And then, a new Sanderalee Dawson: important lady. First black woman hostess of her own important 11:15 to midnight, five nights a week, live talk show. Important lady: beauty now merging with a keen intelligence, an in-charge, don’t try to kid me, sucker, expression. The photographer had captured the essence of this phase of Sanderalee’s personality. I’d been on her show a few times; I’d watched her on and off. Some of these photographs revealed some deep essence of the woman beyond what a snap-click-gotcha could find. I noted his name: Alan Greco.