Lucky by Alice Sebold
"Since it is light on their side and dark here, they won't be able to see you," Lorenz said.
He explained that I should take my time. Could ask him to have them turn to the left or the right or to speak. He repeated that I should take my time. "When you are sure," he said, "I want you to walk over and place an X solidly in the corresponding box on the clipboard I have set up over there. Do you understand?"
"Yes," I said.
"Do you have any questions?" Gail asked.
"She said yes," Paquette said.
I felt like I had as a child. The adults were not getting along and it was up to me to be good girl enough to drain the tension from the room. That tension made my breath shallow and my heart race. I could tell Meggesto my symptoms of panic now. I was thoroughly intimidated. But I had said I was ready. It was wrong to turn back.
The room itself frightened me. I was unable to take my eyes from the one-way mirror. On television shows there was always an expanse of floor on the other side of the one-way mirror, and then a platform with a door off to the side where the suspects stepped into the room, filed up two or three stairs, and took their places. There was a reassuring distance between the victims and the suspects.
But the rooms I'd seen on cop shows were nothing like this one. The mirror took up a whole wall. On the other side of the wall was a space little wider than a man's shoulders, so that when they entered and turned, the front of their bodies would be almost flush against the mirror. I would share the same square foot of floor with the suspects; my rapist would be standing right in front of me.
Lorenz gave the order over a microphone and the light was switched on, on the other side of the mirror. Five black men in almost identical light blue shirts and dark blue pants walked in and assumed their places.
"You can move closer, Alice," Lorenz said.
"It's not one, two, or three," I said.
"You don't need to rush," Uebelhoer said. "Move closer and take a good look at each of them."
"I can have them turn to the left or right," Lorenz said. Paquette was quiet.
I did as instructed. I moved closer, even though, already, they appeared close enough to touch.
"Can you have them turn to the side?" I asked.
They were asked to turn to the left. Each of them, individually. When they faced front again, I drew back.
"Can they see me?" I asked.
"They can see a movement on the glass," Lorenz said, "but they can't see you, no. They know when someone's standing in front of them but they won t know who it is."
I took this at face value. I did not say, "Who else could it be?" There had been no one else with us in that tunnel. I stood in front of number one. He looked too young. I moved to two. He looked nothing like the suspect. Out of the corner of my eye I already knew the challenge came two men down, but I stood in front of three long enough to agree with my earlier assessment. He was too tall; his build was wrong. I stood in front of number four. He was not looking at me. While he looked toward the floor I saw his shoulders. Wide like my rapist's, and powerful. The shape of his head and neck--just like my rapist's. His build, his nose, his lips. I hugged my arms across my chest and stared.
"Alice, are you all right?" someone asked.
Paquette objected.
I felt I had done something wrong.
I moved on to number five. His build was right, his height. And he was looking at me, looking right at me, as if he knew I was there. Knew who I was. The expression in his eyes told me that if we were alone, if there were no wall between us, he would call me by name and then kill me. His eyes gripped on and controlled. I mustered all my energy and turned around.
"I'm ready," I said.
"Are you sure?" Lorenz said.
"She said she was ready," Paquette said.
I approached the clipboard while Lorenz held it for me. Everyone watched--Gail, Paquette, and Lorenz. I placed my X in the number-five box. I had marked the wrong one.
I was excused. I saw Tricia in the hall.
"How was it?"
"Number four and five looked like identical twins," I said, before the uniformed policeman assigned to me led me into the conference room nearby.
"Make sure she doesn't talk to anyone," Lorenz said, ducking his head in. His tone was a reprimand, now that I already had.
In the conference room I searched the eyes of the uniformed man for whether I had chosen the right one. But his face was impassive. I felt a wave of nausea hit me and paced the floor in between the conference table and a row of chairs against the wall. My throat was thick and clogged. I became convinced in those moments that I had chosen the wrong man. I told myself I had acted on impulse, not considered the two men and their postures long enough. I had been so intent on getting it over with that I hadn't been thorough. Ever since I'd been little my parents had accused me of this: not taking my time, acting rashly, jumping the gun.
The door opened and a downcast Lorenz walked in. I could see Gail out in the hallway. He closed the door.
"It was four, wasn't it?" I asked him.
Lorenz was big and burly, a sort of sitcom-father stereotype with a more gritty, Northeastern twist. I sensed immediately that I had disappointed him. He didn't need to say anything. I had chosen the wrong one. It was number four.
"You were in a hurry to get out of there," he said.
"It was four."
"I can't tell you anything," he said. "Uebelhoer wants an affidavit. She wants you to detail the lineup for her. Tell us exactly why you chose five."
"Where is she?" I was suddenly frantic. I felt myself collapsing inward. I had failed them all and this was the wrap-up. Uebelhoer would go on to other cases, better victims; she had no time to waste with a failure like me.
"The suspect has agreed to provide samples of his pubic hair," Lorenz said, and couldn't help but grin. "Counsel has elected to be present in the men's room for extraction."
"Why would he do that?" I asked.
"Because he has reason to believe that the hair found on your person the night of the incident may not match his."
"But it will," I said. "He has to know that."
"His lawyer weighed the odds and decided to do it. It looks good if they volunteer. We need to take a statement. You sit tight."
He went to find paper and to attend to things I couldn't know. The uniform left me alone in the room. "You'll be safe in here," he said.
During that time I put two and two together: I had identified the wrong man. Directly afterward, Paquette had agreed to voluntary extraction of a pubic hair from his client. Uebelhoer had told me the defense was building a case based on misidentification. A panicked white girl saw a black man on the street. He spoke familiarly to her and in her mind she connected this to her rape. She was accusing the wrong man. The lineup went directly to this.
I sat down at the conference table. I brought it all together in my mind. Thought of what had just happened to me. I had been so afraid, I had chosen the man who scared me most, the one who had been looking at me. I felt I had just caught on--too late--to a trick.
Lorenz was going to be back any minute. I needed to rebuild my case.
When Lorenz returned, he smiled while telling me that Madison's pubic hair had to be plucked, not cut. He was trying to be jolly in front of me.
He took an affidavit. It noted that I had entered the room at 11:05 and left at 11:11.1 quickly gave my reasons for ruling out the men in positions one, two, and three. I compared four and five and noted they looked similar, with four's features being a bit "flatter and broader" than the suspect's. I said that four had been looking down the whole time and that I chose five because he was looking right at me. I added that I had felt rushed and defense counsel's refusal to allow a member of Rape Crisis in the lineup room had further intimidated me. I said that I never got a good look at four's eyes and said again that I chose five because he was looking at me.
The room was quiet for a moment, save the noise of Lorenz's hunt-and-pec
"Alice," he said, "it is now my duty to inform you that you failed to pick out the suspect." He did not tell me which one was the suspect. He couldn't. But I knew.
He noted that he had informed me of my failure, and I stated, for the record, that in my opinion the men in positions four and five were almost identical.
Uebelhoer came into the room. There were other people with her. Police and Tricia now. Uebelhoer was angry, but she smiled nonetheless.
"Well, we got the hair out of the bastard," she said.
"Officer Lorenz told me I chose the wrong one," I said.
"She thinks it was four," Lorenz said.
The two of them looked at each other for a moment. Gail turned to me.
"Of course you chose the wrong one," she said. "He and his attorney worked to make sure you'd never have a chance."
"Gail," Lorenz warned.
"She has a right to know. She knows anyway," she said, looking at him. He thought I needed protection; she knew I craved the truth.
"The reason why it took so long, Alice, is because Madison had his friend come down and stand next to him. We had to send a car to the prison to get him here. They wouldn't go ahead until he showed."
"I don't understand," I said. "He's allowed to have his friend stand next to him?"
"It's the defendant's right," she said. "And it makes good sense on a certain level. If the others in the lineup don't appear to the suspect to look enough like him, he can choose someone to stand beside him."
"Can we say that?" I was beginning to see a window of explanation here. I might still have a chance.
"No," she said, "it goes against the defendant's rights. They really worked a number on you. He uses that friend, or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do. They're dead ringers."
I listened to everything she said. Uebelhoer had seen it all, but still was passionate enough to get mad.
"So the eyes?"
"His friend gives you a look that's scary. He can tell when you're standing in front of the mirror and he psyches you out. Meanwhile, the suspect looks down like he doesn't even know where or why he's there. Like he got lost on the way to the circus."
"And we can't use that in court?"
"No. I stated a formal objection before the lineup, so it would be included in the record, but that's just a formality. It's not admissible unless he lets prior knowledge slip."
The unfairness of this seemed unconscionable to me.
"Rights are weighted on the side of the defendant," Gail said. I hungered for more facts. In those moments, where I could easily have slipped away, facts were my life. "That's why the law uses words like 'reasonable doubt.' It's his attorney's job to provide that doubt. The lineup was a risk. We knew something like this could happen, but there was no photo in the mug books and he waived the prelim. We had no choice. We can't refuse a lineup."
"What about the hair?"
"If we're lucky, it will match all seventeen points available on a hair. But even hairs taken from the same head can vary on these points. Paquette decided the gamble was worth it. He's probably going with the story that you lost your virginity voluntarily that night and were sorry about it, that eventually you would have blamed any black man that ran into you on the street. He'll do his best to make you look bad. But we're not going to let that happen."
"What's next?"
"The grand jury," she said.
I was miserable. At two, the next big leg of this journey would begin and I had to be ready for it. I'm sure I spent that time trying to clear my mind of my failure that morning, trying not to let the picture of me that Madison's attorney was building invade my mind. I did not call my mother. I had no good news, though I did have Uebelhoer. I focused on the fact that she had been present for the pubic extraction.
At two I was brought into a waiting area outside the grand jury room. Gail was inside. We had not had time, as she had wished, to talk beforehand. She had been busy working on questions through lunch and although I was scheduled for two, there were other witnesses appearing before me. Tricia, with my assurances, had left following the lineup.
While I waited, I tried to think about an Italian test I had to take the next day. I got out a worksheet of sample sentences from my knapsack and stared at them. I had made some small talk about this course to the officer who'd picked me up that morning. I wished I'd had Tess with me. I had a deep fear of alienating her and Toby by being a drain on them because of the rape, so I tried to be as assiduous in their classrooms as I was with anything concerning my case.
There was movement in the hallway. Gail was coming toward me. Quickly, she told me that she was going to ask me questions about the events of that night, that she would then lead up to my ability to identify the rapist and my identification of Officer Clapper at the same time. She wanted me to state clearly that I hadn't been sure between four and five and to say why. She told me to take as much time as I needed on each answer and not to feel hurried. "This will be easier than the preliminary hearing, Alice, just stay with me. I may seem colder to you in there than I am right now but, remember, we're in there to win an indictment and to a certain extent--well, the grand jury is made up of twenty-five civilians, and we're onstage."
She left me. A few minutes later I was led into the room. Again, I was unprepared for the room's effect on me. The witness stand was at the bottom of the room. Leading up and out from the stand were terraced levels on which swiveling orange chairs were permanently affixed. The levels spread out in a circular arc and grew larger as they ascended. There were enough seats for the twenty-five members of the jury and for the alternates who sat through all the cases but might never cast a vote.
The result of the room's design was that all eyes bore down on whoever was seated in the witness stand. There was no defense table or prosecutor's table.
Gail did as she had said she would. She used a courtroom manner. She made a lot of eye contact with the jurors, used hand gestures, and spent time enunciating key words or phrases she wanted them to note and remember. Her pattern of questioning also was meant to calm both me and the jurors. She had told me rape cases were hard for them. I saw proof of this soon enough.
When she asked me where he had touched me, and, in my answer, I had to say that he had put his fist in my vagina, many of the jurors looked down or immediately away from me. But the fact that troubled them most was what came next. Uebelhoer questioned me about bleeding: how much blood, why so much? She asked me if I had been a virgin. I said, "Yes."
They winced. They felt pity. Throughout the remaining questions some of the jurors, and not all of them women, fought back tears. I was aware my loss that night was my gain today. Having been a virgin made me look good, made the crime appear worse.
I did not want their pity. I wanted to win. But their reactions pushed me to think about what I was saying, not just tally it up as a pro or con in terms of the chances for a conviction. The tears of one particular man, in the second row, felled me. I cried a little then. The reality was that this, too, made me look good.
The sketch I drew the night of October 5 was entered into evidence and marked for identification. Uebelhoer asked pointed questions about whether I had been assisted in the sketch, whether the handwriting was mine, whether anyone had influenced it.
She moved on to the lineup. Now the questioning was more heated. Like a surgeon with a probe, she brought forth each nuance of the five minutes I'd spent inside that room. Finally she asked me if I was certain I had identified the right man.
I answered: No.
Then she asked me why I had chosen number five. I explained in detail his height and his build. I talked about the eyes.
Eventually it came time for the jurors to ask their questions:
Juror: "When you saw the police officer up on Marshall Street, why didn't you go to him then?"
Juror: "You picked him out of the lineup; are you absolutely sure that this was the one?"
Juror: "Alice, why were y
Juror: "Didn t anybody warn you not to go through the park at night?"
Juror: "Didn't you know that you are not supposed to go through the park after nine-thirty at night? Didn't you know that?"
Juror: "Could you have definitely eliminated number four? Did he ever look at you?"
I answered all of these questions patiently. The questions concerning the lineup I answered directly and truthfully. But the questions about what I had been doing in the park, or why I hadn't gone up to Officer Clapper, made me numb. They were not getting it, that's how it felt. But, as Gail had said, we were onstage.
On television and in the movies, the lawyer often says to the victim before they take the stand, "Just tell the truth." What it was left up to me to figure out was that if you do that and nothing else, you lose. So I told them I was stupid, that I shouldn't have walked through the park. I said I intended to do something to warn girls at the university about the park. And I was so good, so willing to accept blame, that I hoped to be judged innocent by them.
That day it all got raw. If Madison stood next to his friend and played a game of eyes to psyche me out, then I would give it right back to him. I was authentic. I had been a virgin. He had broken my hymen in two places. The OB-GYN would testify to the fact. I was also a good girl, and I knew how to dress and what to say to accentuate that. That night following the grand jury testimony, I called Madison a "motherfucker" in the privacy of my dorm room while I pounded my pillow and bed with my fists. I swore the kind of bloodthirsty revenge no one thought possible coming from a nineteen-year-old coed. While still in court I thanked the jury. I drew on my resources: performing, placating, making my family smile. As I left that courtroom I felt I had put on the best show of my life. It was no longer hand to hand and I had a chance this time.
I went out to sit in the waiting area. Detective Lorenz was there. He wore a black patch over one of his eyes.
"What happened?" I asked. I was horrified.
"We chased a perp and he ran. Hit me in the eye with a mace. How'd you do in there?"
Okay, I guess."
"Listen," he said. He began to fumble out an apology. He said he was sorry if he hadn't seemed very nice back in May. "You get a lot of rape cases," he said. "Most of them never get this far. I'm pulling for you."