Guilt by Association (63 page)

“What did he say to that?”

“He laughed. He said I could do whatever I wanted but he would deny everything, and who did I think the police would
believe—a respected United States senator or a nobody sex-pot who thought she could sleep her way to the top? Then he started to leave, but right at the door he stopped and came back. He said, on second thought, he didn’t want there to be any hard feelings between us, and then he sat down on my sofa and wrote out a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“The defendant wrote you a check for a quarter of a million dollars?”

“Objection!” Sutton called. “Witness is testifying to material not in evidence.”

“Sustained.”

Tess walked over to the prosecution table and picked up a sheet of paper. “Your Honor, at this time, I would like to introduce People’s exhibit seventy-six, a Xerox copy of a bank draft, number 8038, drawn on account 331-020-665, dated June 20, 1984,
in the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, written to Margaret Holden and signed by the defendant.”

“Objection!” Sutton cried. “Best evidence, Your Honor. There’s no proof that any such check ever existed. This Xerox could be a forgery, or it could be an altered version of a check relating to an entirely different matter.”

“This is
not
best evidence,” Tess agreed. “We would much prefer that the senator provide us with the original.”

There was a hurried conversation between defendant and attorney.

The Silver Fox sighed. “I’m sorry, Your Honor. It seems that, like most honest, hard-working people, the Senator does not keep personal records for longer than the seven years required by the IRS. Whatever checks he may have written in 1984 have been destroyed.”

“Then I ask the court to accept this photocopy in lieu of the original,” Tess countered.

“Approach,” Washington barked, covering his microphone. “I assume you have precedents, Miss Escalante?” he asked.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Okay, into chambers.”

The judge suspended proceedings with a bang of his gavel. A well-armed Anne Jenks followed Tess and the defense contingent out of the courtroom. Ten minutes later, when they reappeared, Tess had a slight smile on her face and Hal Sutton was trying to conceal a scowl.

“I’m going to overrule the objection,” Judge Washington declared for the record, as his bowel complained. “Subject to controverting testimony or presentation of the original check, the photocopy will be entered into evidence.”

“Exception!” Sutton snapped.

“Noted,” Washington snapped back. “You may continue, Miss Escalante.”

“Where did this copy come from, Mrs. Smith?” Tess asked as the trial continued.

“I made it,” the witness replied. “When the senator gave it to me, he said it would be good only if I left Washington immediately and never said a word to anyone about what happened. He said if I didn’t, he would see to it that I never worked in Washington again, and that my family would be ruined, too. He said he had the resources and the power to do that.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m ashamed to say I took the check. I was scared to death. After all, he was a big important man, and I figured he was probably right. Who was going to take my word over his after I’d let him drive me home and then let him into my apartment late at night?
All he would have to say was that I consented. How could I prove I didn’t? But I wanted to have something, just in case he changed his mind and tried to hurt my family anyway. So, right after he left, I went to an all-night store where they had a Xerox machine, and I made the copy. Then I went to the hospital.”

“Your Honor, at this time, I would like to introduce into evidence People’s exhibit seventy-seven, a copy of Margaret Holden’s hospital record on the night of June 20, 1984.”

Sutton took a perfunctory look at the document and shrugged. “No objection.”

“What injuries, if any, did you suffer that night, Mrs. Smith?” the ADA asked.

“I had a black eye, a fractured cheekbone, multiple bruises and two crushed ribs.”

In the gallery, Mary Catherine silently began to cry.

“Your Honor, the hospital record just entered into evidence will show that Margaret Holden did indeed suffer, and was treated for, those injuries on the night of June 20, 1984.” Tess turned back to the witness. “Did you talk to the police?”

“Yes. The hospital said they had to call them. But I was so scared that I told the officer I didn’t get a good look at the man who raped me.”

“And then you left Washington?”

“Yes. The very next day. I went home to Utah. I didn’t call anyone before I left. I didn’t even go back to the office to clean out my desk. I was so embarrassed. I knew how I looked. I didn’t know how to explain.”

“You kept your silence for eight years,” Tess observed. “Why are you breaking it now?”

“Out of guilt, I think,” Margaret Holden Smith replied. “And because he can’t hurt me anymore. When Sergeant Pope found me,
I’d been following the story in the news, and all the time I was thinking, if I’d been stronger back then, if I’d stood up to him instead of taking his dirty money and running away with my tail between my legs like a kicked dog, maybe Karen Doniger wouldn’t have had to go through what she did.”

“Objection!” Sutton exclaimed.

“Sustained. Confine your answers to only those facts in evidence, Mrs. Smith,” Washington advised.

“I have no more questions, Your Honor,” Tess said.

Tears were running down the witness’s cheeks. “It wasn’t fair, Miss Escalante—all I ever wanted, my whole life, was to be a part of the process and work in Washington. I was good at my job. I was learning. I could have gone places. It wasn’t fair that he was allowed to take that away from me.”

“No,” Tess agreed. “It wasn’t.”

* * *

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” Sutton snapped later that evening.

“I didn’t think it was that important,” Robert said.

“Not that important?”

“It was her word against mine—how was I supposed to know the cunt would make a copy of the check?”

“Is what she said true? Did you rape her?”

“Of course not,” Robert dismissed the idea. “Why would I have to rape anyone? So maybe I got a little rough with her, but that’s all. She’d been coming on to me for months, with her tight clothes and her holier-than-thou attitude. She wanted me to take her home that night. She was clearly giving me the message. So I gave her what she wanted. I only wrote the check because it was my first term in the Senate and I didn’t want any problems.”

“You should have been honest with me, Robert,” his attorney declared, massaging his temples. “Then maybe I could have prevented this. At the very least, I could have moved to exclude past behavior.”

“We couldn’t do that,” the senator reminded him. “We needed to be able to discredit Doniger, remember?”

“Except that it didn’t quite work out that way, did it?” Sutton retorted. “Instead, Escalante set a trap and we walked right into it, like a pair of first-year associates.”

“The bitch,” Robert mumbled. “So now what do we do?”

“We can argue irrelevance, we can try to discredit, we can attempt to paint this Margaret Smith as the whore of Capitol Hill,
we can move to exclude, but I don’t know. I’m very much afraid the prosecution has established perjury.”

“Okay, maybe I made a mistake,” Robert admitted. “Maybe I should have told you about Maggie. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so cavalier on the stand when Escalante pressed me about the infidelity issue. But what happened back then has nothing to do with this case. I didn’t rape Karen Doniger, Hal. Believe me, she asked for it.”

“That may be,” the Silver Fox said, “but I’m no longer sure I can convince the jury of that.”

Sutton spent most of Monday trying to undo some of the damage that Maggie Holden Smith had done. He called for a mistrial.
Judge Washington denied. He tried to have the witness’s entire testimony stricken. Again, Washington denied. He tried to discredit her story. He harped on her refusal to identify her assailant to the police. He suggested that the senator might have had cause to interpret her actions as provocative. He even went so far as to speculate that she had asked the senator to drive her home that night, instead of the other way around, and perhaps even invited him into her apartment in an attempt to further her career. Then he sought to intimate that she had set the whole thing up as a blackmail scheme. Finally, he dredged up a handwriting expert who was willing to testify that it was possible the Xeroxed check was a forgery.

It wasn’t clear whether his effort had any significant impact on the jury, but the media, which had since April been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the senator, were suddenly scrambling like cockroaches in a bright light.

C
losing arguments were presented on Tuesday. Sutton argued eloquently and vigorously that his client was simply the innocent victim of political sabotage. It didn’t seem to matter that he had been unable to prove this theory with direct evidence and sworn testimony, and he played on the socio-economic climate of San Francisco to hammer his point home.

“The one man who can make a difference,” he declared, “the one man with the vision to change this country for the better—that man cannot be allowed to survive. Why not? Because he’s the only real threat to the superwealthy who, thanks to twelve long years of incompetent government, have gotten America right where they want it—with the poor getting poorer, and the rich getting richer. One man stands in their way. Robert Drayton Willmont. A rich man who refuses to play their self-serving little games.
And how better to rid themselves of this very real threat than to have a woman cry rape!”

In the gallery, Amanda Drayton Willmont nodded.

Mitch grinned. “It’s a downright conspiracy.”

“Cry rape today, ladies and gentlemen,” Sutton exhorted, “and the whole world stops to listen. The images it conjures
up are lurid and loathsome. A woman entices a man into a compromising situation and then claims he took advantage of her.
How does he defend himself without sounding like even more of a heel than he would had he actually done the deed?”

“He’s a heel, all right,” Jenna murmured.

Elizabeth Willmont sat beside her mother-in-law. She had swallowed a handful of pills during the noon recess and now she was twelve years old again, basking in the glory of a Denver summer.

“There are people walking among us who just could not let this man become President of the United State,” Sutton said, looking directly at each juror. “They are people who will stop at nothing to preserve what they have, at the expense of the rest of us. And they found a way to destroy him, didn’t they? They found a middle-aged ex-groupie who would agree to cry rape.”

The attorney paced back and forth for a moment.

“Could it have happened the way Karen Doniger said it did?” he wondered aloud. “It could have. After all, she had to concoct a believable story, or there would have been no case. But couldn’t it just as well have happened exactly the way the defendant said it did? Couldn’t he have been drawn innocently into the middle of an insidious plot? Of course he could have.”

Sutton nodded sagely.

“And that’s why they didn’t stop there. No, they couldn’t risk that you might be smart enough to see through their little scheme. Not when, despite their dirty trick, the candidate was still out there piling up victory after victory in the primaries,
with the nomination almost in hand. They realized that one woman might not be enough to do the foul deed. So what did they do? They went out and found themselves another woman—a disgruntled ex-employee who harbored a grudge against her former employer,
who waved a piece of Xerox paper around that was conveniently eight years old and about as legitimate as the forger who probably wrote it, and they convinced
her
to cry rape, too.”

The Silver Fox wagged his head as though it were all just too overwhelming.

“Can Robert Drayton Willmont survive
two
pawns bent on destroying him? Are they going to win, after all? Is our country destined to have four more years of disastrous leadership? Will we have to stand by and watch while America is bled dry by the greedy until there’s nothing left to save?
If you convict this man of a crime he did not commit, that’s exactly what will happen. They will win and the country will lose.”

Sutton peered intently at each of the jurors in turn. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said solemnly, “it’s up to you.”

“Amen,” the defendant’s mother breathed.

Demelza scowled.

With one deep sigh that seemed to bear all the weight of the world, the Silver Fox reclaimed his seat, just as Tess Escalante rose from hers in rebuttal.

“Sinister cliques? Insidious plots? Scare tactics?” she cried scornfully. “I think the defense attorney should have been a mystery writer. The key to a good mystery is the ability of the author to misdirect the reader. Boy, have we just been misdirected.”

“Amen,” Demelza said.

The defendant’s mother scowled.

“To hear the defense tell it,” Tess continued, “Robert Willmont is a bona fide saint, sent to us to save the world, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who just happened to invite Karen Doniger out for a drink. Who just happened to show up in the parking garage four minutes after she did. Who just happened to insist on taking her home. Who just happened to drive his car to a remote area of Golden Gate Park. Who just happened to have sex with her, break her nose, split her lip and blacken her eye.”

The ADA shook her head in disgust.

“Never mind that the defense was unable to provide one shred of evidence that Karen Doniger was manipulated by any political motives. They want you to take their word for it anyway, on faith. Well, let’s separate the facts from all that fiction, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s make sure we have it per
fectly clear. Robert Drayton Willmont is a rapist—and the worst kind of rapist, too. The kind who builds trust and then betrays.
The kind who not only forces himself sexually upon defenseless women, but who likes to beat up on them, as well.”