False Witness (28 page)

Though I was standing in their immediate vicinity, just inside the railing that separates spectators from participants, I couldn’t see what was happening. There was a tightening circle around the Cohen family. Arnold Mulholland, back blocking them protectively, practically hid the small family behind the screen of his body.

“David, David, help him.
It’s Papa!”

Dr. David Cohen bolted, pursued by the two surprised arresting officers. He pushed and shoved his way into the tangle of bodies around his mother’s wheelchair and then I could see what was happening. We all could.

Samuel Cohen, thin as a weed, originally pale, had turned a light blue color. He was holding on, literally for dear life, to the handles of his wife’s wheelchair. As we watched, he pitched forward, falling against his wife and nearly knocking her to the floor, except that Arnold Mulholland caught her in his strong arms. Mr. Cohen was dead before he even settled silently in a small heap against the wheels of his wife’s chair.

Dr. Cohen was beside his father, trying to breathe for him, trying for a pulse, but he knew immediately it was a lost cause. Everyone pulled back momentarily and there was a split second of total stunned silence in the large room; suspended motion as we all posed like characters in a still photograph. Into the silence came a small, deadly, nightmare voice.

“You have destroyed my family. Damn you for all time, you have destroyed my family.”

The words were directed straight ahead because obviously Mrs. Cohen could not move her head. Her rigid neck muscles gave her the appearance of a kind of chin-up-no-matter-what dignity. She had spoken softly, almost in a chilling whisper, but her words penetrated my brain, the accusation taking on weight as I surveyed the damage.

There were not supposed to be photographers in the courtroom, but cameras began to click; fights flashed and word was relayed to those outside the courtroom who hadn’t yet violated its sanctity. There was a scuffle immediately outside the courtroom doors, which burst into the center court corridor as television cameramen pushed and shoved forward to record what was happening, without knowing, exactly,
what
was happening. There were arguments, threats, jostling, shoving among the professional media people and the court personnel and police officers who were trying to evict them. There were cries of favoritism: how come Glori Nichols was allowed in?
Glori Nichols?
Where the hell had she come from? Somehow, it seemed that she had been there all along, right in the center of things. She flashed me a smile, an “okay” signal with thumb and index finger forming a circle. What the hell?

The judge left his bench and came forward after instructing a court attendant to send for an ambulance. This had already been done and it was useless for the judge to try to clear the court; there weren’t enough personnel to deal with the situation.

It was a grim family vignette: the two sons knelt beside the fallen father, at the feet of the mother, pale and frozen in her wheelchair. The attorney and his assistants had stopped shielding the Cohen family from the illegal invasion of media people. It was too tragic a scene to be kept hidden.

When the emergency personnel arrived, there was something of a scuffle going on between the Cohen brothers. David was insisting that his brother be taken to the hospital in a separate car, not in the ambulance with his dead father.

He appealed to his attorney, Mulholland. “Please, have one of your people take Ben to the emergency room. For God’s sake, my brother is an epileptic,” he whispered. “He can’t take any more of this tension.”

The word bounced around the courtroom and all attention swung from the narrow, hardly sagging stretcher that bore the dead father to the gray-faced nuclear engineer brother, who was swept out of reach by two members of Arnold Mulholland’s entourage. A third assistant wheeled the mother out of the court.

And then, we all stood and looked at one another in the suddenly quiet courtroom. Dr. David Cohen hadn’t even been arraigned.

We all agreed that the process should be accomplished in the privacy of the judge’s chambers. Arnold Mulholland used the preceding circumstances as best he could: he asked that Dr. David Cohen be released on his own recognizance. That he be returned to the bosom of his suffering and bereft family immediately. No bail.

I shook off the terrible feeling of guilt, of accusation, of responsibility for everything that had happened in court and found that my voice portrayed a properly professional anger.

“Your Honor, that is unthinkable. This is a
tremendously
serious case. There have been
community implications.
This case is seen by some as a test of the fairness and equitability of the entire criminal justice system. The victim of this man’s attack is at this very moment recovering from a second surgical procedure as a direct result of the injuries he inflicted upon her.”

I asked for a hundred fifty thousand dollars bail. Mr. Mulholland brought the paneled walls down around me. His theatrical voice reverberated, his entire body seemed to swell and rise with indignation and outrage.

Bail was set at twenty-five thousand dollars and Dr. David Cohen was taken away for the hour it would take Arnold Mulholland to get the bail bond. He walked to the side of the judge’s office, his large, strong arm around David Cohen, assuring him that things would be tended to. I could hear David’s voice, broken, quavering. I could hear his words. My father. My mother. My brother.

My God.

I
T HAD BEEN A
highly emotional day, a “triumphant-but” kind of day, a totally exhausting kind of day. I decided I was entitled to leave early, to go home, take a hot bath, have a nice quiet dinner and ... Where the hell was Bobby Jones?

“No calls, please, at all” had been my instructions to my staff.

“Ms. Jacobi, I know you said no calls, but I really think you should take this one. A photographer ...”

“No way. I’m gone. Left. Unavailable. Out of town ...”

“Name of Alan Greco?”

“Alan Greco?”

“I may be wrong, Ms. Jacobi,” the young man told me as though this remote possibility had just occurred to him, “but I do sense that you’d better take this call from Alan Greco. I don’t think it has anything to do with a request for special press privilege.”

“What makes you say that, Jeffrey?”

“Mr. Greco said it was a matter of life or death.”

“That would make one consider. All right. Close the door on your way out, and no other calls from anyone at all.”

I was feeling high-exhausted; playful; exhilarated. Alan Greco’s voice was a thin and shaky whisper in my ear and his first words totally destroyed my sense of well-being.

“Lynne, what happened? I don’t understand. What went wrong?”

“Alan? What are you talking about?
I
don’t understand.”

“Lynne, how in God’s name could you have proceeded before the Grand Jury? How could you have gone after the indictments the way you did? Why didn’t you stop it?”

We arranged to meet in fifteen minutes in a booth way in the back of one of the last remaining old-time luncheonettes in the area.

Alan was seated facing me as I approached and from the look on his face, before he had a chance to say one single word to me, I sensed disaster.

“B
EFORE YOU READ THE
statement I prepared after my meeting with Sanderalee,” Alan Greco said, “there are a few things I want you to know. And to understand.” His hand trembled as he wiped his forehead. His voice was heavy with sadness and emotion.

“Sanderalee. Oh God. We see her, you and I, the whole damn world sees her as a beautiful, exotic, stunning woman; a mysterious, elegant, thrillingly special original. Breathlessly beautiful and interesting and exotic. But her history, her life is so terrible. Her formative years were so ... Let me tell you that
never, never, not for one single moment in her life
has Sanderalee believed in her own beauty. She’s been so scarred by a childhood of being told she was an ugly duckling; a long-legged, skinny, bony freak; a wrong-color child with a witch’s green eyes; a sort of monster to be laughed at and avoided, to be jeered at from a distance.” He reacted to my expression; he took my hand and pressed it for emphasis. “It’s all true, Lynne. During a photo session, she once broke down over something I said. I told her she was beautiful, and she burst into tears—wept hysterically. I held her until she felt able to confide in me. She told me about her childhood. A nightmare! The town freak; school scapegoat. So all of her successes—all the years since she was discovered sitting at a typewriter in that Harlem storefront insurance office and was taken in hand by her French filmmaker, from that day until this, no matter what triumphs she’s had—none of these things has ever wiped out the ugly girl just beneath the surface, the girl who one day everyone is going to recognize, and laugh at, and destroy ...”

“All of this, Lynne, is by way of explanation of why Sanderalee got herself into this mess in the first place. She’s never felt that she deserved the success that came to her. She’s always felt, beneath the surface, that she’s an ugly fraud. And so, she’s gone out periodically, masochistically, picking up the kind of brutes who would treat her like the ugly fraud, the faker she feels herself to be. She’s actively sought the sadist who will punish her, hurt her, treat her as she feels, deep inside, she deserves to be hurt.”

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly and nodded. I’m a prosecutor. Human failings, even human craziness, doesn’t surprise me. “Okay, Alan. I understand. In other words, she’s been looking for her murderer for most of her life. And this time, she’s almost found him. What have you got for me to read? My God, this looks like an official police report.” I flipped through the stapled pages.

He shrugged it off. “Lynne, I’ve been a photo-journalist and a writer as well as a fashion photographer. If I didn’t know the proper way to prepare a report for information, I’d be in a great deal of trouble. The minute I got home, off the top of my head, I typed up, as close to verbatim as possible, what Sanderalee had told me.”

I stared at the pages, wished there were more light, hoped they wouldn’t be as bad as I expected them to be, and read.

STATEMENT OF SANDERALEE DAWSON TO ALAN GRECO ON MONDAY, MARCH 26, 1979: re events of Tuesday night, March 6, 1979

I jogged up to Columbus Circle that night and started up along Central Park West but changed my mind. It was too cold, too windy. I turned back and headed for the Jog-gon-Inn. I forgot that it was Tuesday and the place was closed.

He was outside, looking in the window. This man. We spoke a little. He said he’d forgotten the place was closed too. He looked familiar, but it was dark and he was bundled up. But he looked like some guy I’d seen at the Jog-gon-Inn before. There were so many men. So many. I wasn’t sure. And it didn’t really matter.

There were no preliminaries at all. None. I wasn’t looking for a love affair and neither was he. I asked if he wanted to come back to my apartment and he said yes. It was as simple as that.

I asked him to come up to my apartment for sex. Just that. For straight sex. He came too damn fast. Just bim-bam-boom and out I asked him what the hell that was supposed to be.

[
THERE WAS NO RAPE.
]

I felt rotten that night. So uptight, so tense. Mean, so damn mean was how I felt. Mean and rotten and I said things to him. To get him a little stirred up. A little aggressive. I wanted that. A little excitement. You know. I said a few things to him. Jerk-off artist, that kind of thing. He hit me across the mouth and there was the most terrible look in his eyes. I told him to forget it. Get out and forget the whole thing. But I was still excited. Still tense, still ready and I went down on him because I wanted to; because I wanted to.

[
THERE WAS NO INVOLUNTARY SODOMY.
]

And then, afterward, there was still this terrible tension in the room. Instead of relaxing, this man seemed, I don’t know how to explain it. He was super-cold; looking at me as though I was something—I can’t explain it. As though I was some kind of “thing.” He threw my sweater and running pants at me. I was glad to put them on. It made me feel less vulnerable. I was getting really afraid of him. He stood next to me and told me to say all those things to him again. All those put-down things I’d said to him. I had said rotten things to him. He really scared me. He was holding me by the shoulders and his fingers dug in and he kept staring at me and whispering: go on, say it again, say what you said before.

And then he said,
“I’ve killed women for less than what you’ve said. Do you know that? I’ve killed women for less than that.”

I thought it was some sort of a put-on. I thought he hadn’t gotten off completely. That he was playing a game. He insisted I say all those awful things to him again. You know—to taunt him. I was scared to say those things again, but more scared not to.

Then he began to hurt me. Really hurt me. He hit me with the side of his hand, the edge of his hand. It was like being hit with a steel bar. I heard cracking, breaking. My God, he was breaking my face. I could feel the blood in my mouth, I swallowed blood. I tried to pull away from him but he was too strong. I tried to kick, to do something. I reached for anything, I picked up my little silver unicorn statuette and jabbed at him, right in the face. He pulled his hands from me and I tried to slip away, but he had me pinned against the bar with his body. He touched his cheek and he looked at his fingers.

All the blood from me didn’t bother him. What he’d done to me was all right. But when he saw his own blood, my God, he seemed to go crazy. I knew he was going to kill me. I knew it. I knew it.

I slipped away from him and ran into the kitchen. I wanted to pick up the house phone because I knew Timothy Doyle would see it flashing. Somehow, I don’t remember how, I don’t remember how, I had the meat cleaver in my hand. I don’t remember this clearly but one minute I had the cleaver and then I didn’t and then I had the receiver in my hand and he tried to grab it away from me and I don’t remember too much after that.

I remember the pain. I remember lying there and wondering how all that blood got there. And I remember that he was back in the kitchen and standing over me, then he kneeled down and his voice was very quiet and he said what I already told them he said. Something like how
“this has nothing to do with me; I have no control over any of this.”
Whatever that statement was I gave to Lucy was true, was what he said. And then I just wasn’t there, I guess he left me for dead.

I woke up once and thought that it was very peculiar; that my hand was still holding the telephone receiver. Over there. In all that blood. Then I blacked out and I was in the hospital.

I woke up once and when I opened my eyes, he was right there, leaning over me, looking down at me. I thought for a second that I was still on the kitchen floor, that he had come back to kill me; but somehow I knew I wasn’t in the kitchen, I was in the hospital. Each time I saw him, standing over me, looking down at me, each time I saw him it reinforced my first impression: that this man, obviously a doctor, I knew that by now, this man was the same man who did this to me.

I really thought it was him.
Dr. Cohen. The man who did this to me. And so I told Regg Morris. And Regg told me to keep very quiet until he checked this all out.

Then, later, Regg Morris told me who David Cohen was. I began to feel very uncertain. I told Regg that I wasn’t so sure anymore. Not really positive. That there had been another man, a couple of times, a year or so ago, that I’d met at the Jog-gon-Inn. That this other man resembled David Cohen. That when we first met outside the Jog-gon-Inn, that’s who I thought the guy was. Now, I don’t know.

I told Regg I thought maybe David Cohen just looked like the other guy. That maybe it
was
the other guy who actually beat me like this; did these awful things to me.

Regg told me to forget the other guy. He said it would be my fault if we let David Cohen get away with this crime. I was so tired, so confused ... so I agreed. It was easier. And maybe Regg was right. ...

But I’m not sure it was David Cohen who did these things to me.

It might have been the other man. The one who
looks
like David Cohen.