Assault with a Deadly Lie Read online

  So I sat there, in a black hole, shrinking deeper and deeper into myself until Vanessa called around 4 a.m. from the jail to say that Stefan wasn’t being charged, and that she was bringing him home shortly. “We’ll discuss everything when I get there.”

  I took that to mean she didn’t want anyone overhearing what she said. And that was okay. I eked out a few words of thanks, hung up and waited. I had no idea where or how far away the jail was.

  Nothing made sense to me. It was as if some internal mechanism of gravity had failed and my thoughts drifted in every direction. No, it was much worse than that. I myself was drifting, as helpless as the astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey who’s been cut loose by Hal. I was surrounded by a void and would never be safe again.

  I’m not religious, I didn’t curse at God and ask how something so awful could happen to me and Stefan. But I couldn’t stop reflecting on how my life, our lives, had been almost uniformly positive for six straight years (except for one of Stefan’s students killing himself about a year ago). Stefan had written a best-selling memoir about his surprising conversion from Judaism to Catholicism; I was no longer at the bottom of the heap in my Department of English, American Studies, and Rhetoric (EAR); my elderly parents were healthy; and Sharon’s cancer continued to be in remission. We had a good solid life, a well-behaved dog—none of it was the stuff of drama, and I liked that. I enjoyed teaching my classes, working on inviting the yearly guest writer to SUM, taking car trips to Lake Michigan or into Canada. I had never imagined I could be happy anywhere else but New York City, yet here I was, contented, rooted, at home.

  And now all of that seemed burned to ash. I thought of one of Stefan’s favorite quotes from a Polish poet born Jewish, Antoni Slominski: “Behind the stage of our life, concealed in the wings, great factories of suffering are at work that will visit us one day.”

  I heard a car pull into the driveway and rushed to the front door to let them in. I gasped when Stefan emerged from Vanessa’s orange Nissan Murano. I had somehow forgotten that the police had dragged him off just as he was: barefoot and half-naked. Pale, shoulders drooping, he looked haggard and hollowed-out standing next to Vanessa, who was as elegant in her fitted suit and Louboutins as if she were headed to a cocktail party at the governor’s mansion. The contrast between them was devastating.

  As Stefan approached the threshold, and I reached out to hug him, he brushed past me and headed wearily to the stairs. Marco had come out of the kitchen and was wagging his tail sleepily as he watched Stefan’s progress.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Stefan said, voice on the edge of breaking, and there was a sharp note of warning in his voice. But how could I back off ?

  Vanessa grabbed my arm and said quietly, “Don’t. This is the worst time. I told him to take a couple of Valium and go to sleep. He needs oblivion more than anything else right now. Trust me. I’ve seen it before. Lots.”

  I relented, closed the door and led her into the kitchen, Marco following us. He sniffed her shoes and then went back to his little bed and was almost instantly asleep again. What a gift that was.

  Vanessa glanced around admiringly, taking in the antiqued glassdoored cabinets, the granite backsplashes, the appliance garages. She was keen-eyed and clearly adding it all up in her head. I didn’t mind, it didn’t feel intrusive or predatory, and I half expected her to ask a New York question about how much the house cost. Watching her, I was even more astonished that she looked fresh and energized after hours at the jail.

  “She loves this,” I thought, not exactly sure what “this” was. Vanessa reminded me of my cousin Sharon whose first career had been modeling—she had a similar sense of style and her posture was intimidatingly perfect.

  “May I?” she said, walking right over to the coffee pot. She helped herself to a cup as if we were old friends, or at least longtime neighbors. That also struck me as very New York, and I think I smiled. A New Zealand friend once told me that New Yorkers say, “Can I have a look at that?” and reach for whatever it is, while where she came from, you’d ask the question and wait as long as it took for you to get permission.

  Vanessa sat down at the island, waved me to a bar stool across from her, and started. “Okay, here’s the deal. I know you didn’t ask me to get involved, but when I saw the gorillas show up across the street from me, I knew you needed help.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m from Brooklyn, okay? I’m not one of these Midwest nimrods. So I see two nice gay guys who teach at the university, love their puppy to death, never bother their neighbors—no way they’d be thugs. Believe me, I know thugs, I was married to one, and I’ve defended my share.”

  “You knew we were gay?”

  “Puh-leeze. Two guys, one house, gorgeous landscaping? What else would you be? But forget about you being drug dealers or terrorists. Not in this lifetime.”

  “Wait—is that what happened? They were really looking for drugs? Or bombs?” I couldn’t believe I was even asking questions like that in my own home. It was one more sign of how I had been scraped right out of my normal life like an oyster being shucked from its shell.

  “That was my first thought, but I knew right away whatever reason they were there had to be bullshit. I’ve seen your partner at Mass at St. Jude’s, and I can tell he’s a decent guy. I’m a pretty good judge of character, you have to be when you’re a defense attorney.”

  Stefan had never mentioned that Vanessa went to the Catholic church he’d joined after his conversion, but then we mostly spoke about the homilies more than the people there. I suppose that was natural; he’s a writer and words moved him in unique ways.

  “Would you have intervened if you knew we were guilty—of something?”

  “Hey! Everybody deserves a defense, even criminals. That’s the law until they change it. Okay, Nick—It’s Nick, right? Not Nicky or Nicolas? Okay, then. All of us defense attorneys have contacts on the force. We cultivate them, we have to. So here’s what little I’ve found out: The police got an anonymous tip that someone was being held hostage here, and guns were involved.”

  “Are you kidding me? Who would we hold hostage? A reviewer who trashed one of Stefan’s books? That’s insane! And we’ve never had a gun in our lives.” I didn’t add that back before my life had returned to normal, I’d felt so threatened on campus that I’d gone to a gun shop and considered buying one. I’d actually made two trips, but in the end couldn’t overcome my own queasiness about giving in to my fear.

  Vanessa shrugged. “A tip’s a tip. They take all of that seriously. They have to. And they have to justify their existence,” she added sourly. She pulled her rippling auburn curls up off the back of her neck and then let them drop.

  “What are you talking about?”

  She sipped her coffee and shrugged. “You must not read the news much. The country’s lousy with SWAT teams. They roll ’em out for everything from domestic disputes to serving an ordinary warrant. Every little Podunk town in America has one or wants one.”

  “But where do they get the money? I thought we were just barely out of a recession.”

  She finished her coffee and went to get herself some more. I liked the way she made herself at home here. I also liked that she was tough; that gave me courage, brought me out of myself enough to stop feeling so lost.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked, trying to imagine what you would eat at a time like this.

  “Coffee’s fine. Very smooth.”

  “It’s Dallmayr from Munich.” I loved how she pronounced the word as “cawfee.” My own New York accent had faded somewhat over the years, and so had Stefan’s, thanks to a few years of teaching in Massachusetts.

  Leaning back against the rounded granite counter edge, she said, “The Pentagon unloads tons of surplus material on local police forces, millions of dollars of stuff every year.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “The laws have been changing and nobody notices, nobody really cares. The military�
�s training cops, too, which is worse. Soldiers crush the enemy, cops are supposed to keep people safe. Those aren’t compatible missions. It means people like you—and me—we’re not citizens anymore. We’re the enemy. And it’s only gonna get worse because the more ex-soldiers go into the police, the more regular cops think they’re soldiers.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Vanessa set down her cup, and with a bit of asperity in her voice, said, “You were really lucky tonight. Yes, I said lucky. It’s bad enough so many ex-soldiers are cops now, but lots of cops think they’re soldiers already. And the cops in this town have a lousy reputation, let me tell you. Tampering with evidence, lying on police reports, corruption, violence. They’ve killed people’s dogs in raids just for fun, they destroy property, you name it. I’m telling you, if they could waterboard suspects, they’d do it. Cops from other nearby jurisdictions hate them, call them the Gestapo. You got off pretty easy. They could have battered down your door or even blown it open. They could have used flashbang grenades once they got inside.”

  “You can’t be serious. This isn’t a war zone.”

  She paced back and forth across the kitchen. “Wake up! The whole world’s a war zone now, and that includes Michiganapolis. They coulda shot you and claimed you drew a gun on them.”

  “I told you, we don’t own any guns.”

  “So what? You’d be dead, and they’d never go to prison for doing it. Juries believe cops even over respectable citizens like you. Happens all the time. It happens every day.” She thought a minute as if consulting some inner chart. “Well, needless raids happen every day. Dozens of them. Welcome to reality. And did they take your laptops? Your tablets? Your smart phones? Because if they had, you would never get them back. They hate lawyers and make us beg to get evidence back when a case is closed—and it can take years, seriously. It’s like something out of Bleak House.”

  “You read Dickens?”

  She grinned ruefully. “Never got all the way through, but every lawyer knows that book by reputation.”

  I confessed that I’d never gotten all the way through it, either, and I’d been an English major. Then I returned to something she’d said before. “If they didn’t find a hostage and didn’t find guns, why did they take Stefan with them? Why did they keep him so long?”

  “Because they had a warrant. And a few hours is nothing. They could have kept him much longer, just because. The cops use tips from all kinds of crappy informants, even anonymous ones, and the judges don’t hold them back the way they should. Warrants are as easy to get as herpes.”

  I tried to answer that, and she cut me off: “I know what you’re thinking. You’re a citizen, you have rights, constitutional protections.” She cocked her head. “I wish that were really true, but everything’s contingent now. You’re only as free as they let you be. And you’re lucky you live here and not in New York. They send out SWAT teams randomly there just as a show of force, to scare the shit out of people. The cops in New York have more employees than the FBI and they have weapons that can shoot down a plane if they want to. They have goddamn drone submarines. They really are an army. They even have their own version of the CIA.”

  It made a horrible kind of sense for New York, which had been attacked twice, and in a country where even President Obama claimed the right to assassinate an American citizen anywhere in the world just on the suspicion of a connection to terrorism. But I didn’t want to believe Vanessa, even though I knew she couldn’t be making any of it up. If she was one of the best lawyers in Michiganapolis, she couldn’t have gotten that reputation by living in fantasy.

  As if reading my mind, she said, “By the way, you haven’t officially hired me to represent you on this case, but—”

  “Represent us? You saved us!”

  She grinned almost bashfully, revealing teeth worthy of a model.

  “Of course I want you to represent us,” I said. “So what’s next?”

  Then she looked very serious. “Well, your partner is going to need a lot of support now. Don’t push him, just listen when he’s ready to talk, and don’t be surprised by anything he says. Remember, you guys are privileged white professionals, eager to please, never been in legal trouble, am I right? Life is good to you compared to most other people. So getting treated like this will hit you harder than someone growing up expecting life to bake them a shit casserole.”

  I knew exactly what she meant, and could tell she was speaking from bitter experience—not her own, but her clients’.

  “And Nick, whatever you do, do not speak to the police, do not speak to anyone. They might send someone around, probing. Just refer them to me.”

  “Are you kidding? Why? What would they want?”

  “To cover up. This was all bullshit. They’ll want to keep it quiet if they can, or at least not look bad. And if they can find anything out about you somehow or get you to incriminate yourself about anything at all, bam! That makes the screw-up go away.”

  “Should we be worried about the phone?”

  She nodded. “Definitely. You can’t assume your phone isn’t being tapped now. But I tend to be over-cautious about things like that. Listen, you’ve got that cute little dog. If you have something you and Stefan want to talk about just between you concerning this case, why not take him for a walk, or go into your backyard. Talk outdoors, that’s always much safer.”

  “Is it a case?” I asked, thinking back to something she had said moments before.

  “I hope not. But it might be. Like I said, I don’t trust the cops in this town, they’ve got a really bad reputation. And one more thing, if you’re social media junkies, and you’re constantly letting people know where you are, like on Facebook or wherever, stop it right now.”

  I told Vanessa that wasn’t an issue, and I walked her to the door, unsure how to express my gratitude, but that melted away when she said before stepping outside, “If they got a tip targeting you, that means somebody really hates one or both of you guys. My advice? Start thinking about who it might be, because this could happen again.”

  3

  I didn’t go upstairs to try and sleep because I was afraid of waking Stefan, and he needed sleep more than I did.

  But honestly, I also didn’t want to see him in his current state, awake or asleep. My strong, athletic partner was handsomer in middle age than he’d ever been before, and I wasn’t prepared to witness his collapse. Not when I was so shattered myself. It was too shocking, too mortifying. Call it selfish, but I needed to protect myself any way I could right then, and just being around him would have unraveled me.

  That made me feel even worse, even more isolated. How had I become a person who could even think like this?

  After reluctantly turning out most of the lights, I slipped off my shoes and sacked out on one of the twin overstuffed couches in our living room whose décor seemed utterly beside the point. We’d been so proud of this room that trumpeted comfort and conviviality, but it struck me now as an utterly false invitation. This was a Potemkin Village, masking what life was really like.

  I had found some melatonin in the downstairs bathroom and taken a few, but they didn’t seem to be having any impact at all. I wasn’t a romantic, yet I thought of Byron’s sad lines that night: “in my heart / There is a vigil, and these eyes but close / To look within.” I kept seeing the APCs pull up, the black uniforms, the guns, and pictured myself being dragged from the house and hurled onto the grass. Oddly, I didn’t feel sore, not even in my shoulders. Maybe I was still in a state of shock and my body’s messages were scrambled.

  Vanessa had said it could have been worse, and I agreed, but for completely different reasons. The black-clad thugs had come at night, and hopefully at least some of our neighbors had slept through the storm. By day, it would have been much worse, since there were a number of nosy retirees on our street and stay-at-home mothers with young children. But all that was cold comfort. Whatever the echoes in our neighborhood, the raid was seared into my m
emory—and God knows what Stefan would be experiencing when he woke up. That is, if he was sleeping at all. I did not want to check. One more sign of my cowardice.

  The evening’s grotesque events continued to parade past me over and over as grimly as Richard III’s murder victims haunting him before his final battle. Even with Marco curled up next to me, nestled into my armpit as he often did at night upstairs in bed, I felt completely at sea. How was I supposed to live the rest of my life after this cataclysm, how was I even supposed to get through tomorrow? I hadn’t been the one taken off to jail, and yet I felt as trapped as if it had been me.

  Police had polluted my home, treated me and Stefan like criminals or worse, insulted me, degraded us both. I could never recover the man I’d been minutes before it all happened: blithely unaware that disaster was about to tear apart my assumptions that life was solid and safe. I’d grown up in New York City but had never been mugged, never even seen a crime, and I confess that despite having encountered murder in Michiganapolis, the past six years of peace had been more than a balm, they were a narcotic. Thanks to Stefan’s amazing memoir and my getting tenure, we had more money than we could have hoped for. And that was even with Stefan tithing a portion of his royalties to the church he had joined.

  But what did money matter?

  Marco stirred against me, the underside of his muzzle very warm, and it was as if someone had nudged me and asked, “Are you kidding?” He was right. Money meant we could pay Vanessa whatever it would take to clear our names if we had to. The law had been turned against us tonight in one way—who knew what could happen next? Money meant we weren’t completely defenseless—or so I hoped.

  Marco sighed in his sleep and rolled over on his back, looking adorable. Where had he hidden himself during the raid? I wish I could have had the sense (or courage?) to join him.