Puppet (2 page)

The defendant smiles back at her, although thankfully, his lips remain closed. The jury will soon be seeing more than enough of Derek Clemens’s teeth.

At twenty-eight years old and a wiry five feet ten inches tall, Derek Clemens is the same age and height as the woman selected to represent him. Even their hair is the same shade of delicate blond, their eyes variations of the same cool blue, although hers are darker, more opaque, his paler, sliding toward pastel. In other, more pleasant circumstances, Amanda Travis and Derek Clemens might be mistaken for brother and sister, perhaps even fraternal twins.

Amanda shrugs off the unpleasant thought, grateful, as always, for being an only child. She swivels around in her chair, looks toward the long expanse of windows at the back of the courtroom. Beyond those windows is a typical February day in south Florida—the sky turquoise, the air warm, the beach beckoning. She fights the urge to
wander over to the windows, to lean her head against the tinted glass, and stare out past the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean beyond. Only in Palm Beach does one find an ocean view from a courtroom to rival the view from the penthouse suite of a top hotel.

Perversely, Amanda would rather be here, in Courtroom 5C of the Palm Beach County Court House, sitting beside some lowlife accused of assaulting his live-in girlfriend—five counts, no less, including sexual assault and uttering death threats—than sunbathing on the cool sand next to some underdressed, overnourished snowbird. More than a few minutes of lying on her back with the surf washing over her bare toes is enough to send Amanda Travis screaming for the hot pavement.

“I’d like to retrace the events of the morning of August sixteenth, Miss Fletcher,” the assistant district attorney is saying, the deep baritone of his voice drawing Amanda’s attention back to the front of the courtroom as easily as a lover’s seductive sigh.

Caroline Fletcher nods and continues playing with her overly bleached hair, her surgically amplified bosom straining against the buttons of her perversely conservative blue blouse. It helps the defendant’s case that the woman Derek Clemens is accused of assaulting looks like a stripper, although in fact, she works in a hairdressing salon. Amanda smiles with the knowledge this is less important than the image being projected. In law, as in so much of life, appearance counts far more than substance. It is, after all, the
appearance
of justice, and not justice itself, that must be seen to be done.

“August the sixteenth?” The young woman uses her tongue to push the gum she’s been surreptitiously chewing
throughout her testimony to the side of her mouth.

“The day of the attack,” the prosecutor reminds her, approaching the stand and hovering over his star witness. Tyrone King is almost six feet six inches tall with chocolate brown skin and a shiny bald head. When Amanda first joined the law firm of Beatty and Rowe just over a year ago, she heard rumors that the handsome assistant district attorney was a nephew of Martin Luther King’s, but when she asked him about it, he laughed and said he suspected all black men in the South named King were rumored to be related to the assassinated leader. “You’ve testified that the accused came home from work in a foul mood.”

“He was always in a foul mood.”

Amanda rises halfway out of her chair, voices her objection to the generalization. The objection is sustained. The witness tugs harder on her hair.

“How did this mood manifest itself?”

The witness looks confused.

“Did he raise his voice? Was he yelling?”

“His boss yelled at him, so he came home and yelled at me.”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

“What was he yelling about, Miss Fletcher?”

The witness rolls her eyes toward the high ceiling. “He said the place was a mess and that there was never anything to eat, and he was sick of working the midnight shift only to come home to a messy apartment and nothing for breakfast.”

“And what did you do?”

“I told him I didn’t have time to listen to his complaints, that I had to go to work. And then he said there
was no way I was going out and leaving him with the baby all day, that he needed his sleep, and I told him that I couldn’t very well take the baby with me to a hairdressing salon, and it just went on from there.”

“Can you tell us what happened exactly?”

The witness shrugs, her tongue pushing the gum in her mouth nervously from one cheek to the other. “I don’t know
exactly.”

“To the best of your recollection.”

“We started screaming at each other. He said I didn’t do nothing around the apartment, that I just sat around on my bony ass all day, and that if I wasn’t going to do any cooking or cleaning, then the least I could do was get down on my knees and give him a …” Caroline Fletcher stops, straightens her shoulders, and looks imploringly at the jury. “You know.”

“He demanded oral sex?”

The witness nods. “They’re never too tired for that.”

The seven women on the jury chuckle knowingly, as does Amanda, who hides her smile inside the palm of her hand and decides against objecting.

“What happened then?” the prosecutor asks.

“He started pulling me toward the bedroom. I kept telling him no, I didn’t have time, but he wasn’t listening. Then I remembered this movie I saw on TV where the girl, I think it was Jennifer Lopez, I can’t remember for sure, but anyway, this guy was attacking her, and she realized that the more she struggled, the more turned on he got, and the worse things got for her, so she stopped struggling, and that kind of threw him off guard, and she was able to escape. So I decided to try that.”

“You stopped struggling?”

Again Caroline Fletcher nods. “I kind of went all weak, like I was giving in, and then, as soon as we got to the bedroom door, I pushed him out of the way, ran inside the room, and locked the door.”

“And what did Derek Clemens do then?”

“He was so mad. He started banging on the door, yelling that he was going to kill my ass.”

“And how did you interpret that?”

“That he was going to kill my ass,” Caroline Fletcher explains.

Amanda stares directly at the jury. Surely, her eyes are saying, they can’t consider this outburst a serious death threat. She grabs her pencil, adds
bran flakes
to her makeshift list of groceries.

“Go on, Miss Fletcher.”

“Well, he was banging on the door and screaming, and so, of course, Tiffany woke up and started crying.”

“Tiffany?”

“Our daughter. She’s fifteen months old.”

“Where was Tiffany during all this?”

“In her crib. In the living room. That’s where we keep it. The apartment only has one bedroom, and Derek says he needs his privacy.”

“So his yelling woke up the baby.”

“His yelling woke up the whole damn building.”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

“And then what?”

“Well, I realized that if I didn’t open the door, he was just gonna break it down, so I told him I’d open the door, but only if he promised to calm down first. And he promised, and then it got real quiet, except for the baby
crying, so I opened the door, and next thing I knew, he was all over me, punching me and ripping at my dress.”

“Is this the dress?” The assistant district attorney maneuvers the distance from the witness stand to the prosecutor’s table in two quick strides, retrieving a shapeless, gray jersey dress that has obviously seen better days. He shows it to the witness before offering it up for the jury’s inspection.

“Yes, sir. That’s it.”

Amanda leans back in her chair, as if to indicate her lack of concern. She hopes the jury will be as unimpressed as she is by the two tiny rips to the bottom of the dress’s side seams, fissures that could just as easily have resulted from Caroline Fletcher pulling the dress down over her hips, as from Derek Clemens pulling it up.

“What happened after he ripped your dress?”

“He threw me down on the bed, on my stomach, and bit me.”

The incriminating photographs appear, as if by magic, in the hands of the assistant district attorney. They are quickly introduced into evidence and distributed to the jury. Amanda watches the jurors as they examine the impressions of Derek Clemens’s teeth branded into the middle of Caroline Fletcher’s back, disgust flickering across their faces like flames from a campfire as they struggle to maintain the veneer of impartiality.

As always, the jurors are a decidedly mixed lot—an old Jewish retiree squeezed between two middle-aged black women; a clean-shaven Hispanic man in a suit and tie next to a ponytailed young man in a T-shirt and jeans; a black woman with white hair behind a white woman with black hair; the heavyset, the lean, the eager, the blasé. All
with one thing in common—the contempt in their eyes as they glance from the photographs to the defendant.

“What happened after he bit you?”

Caroline Fletcher hesitates, looks toward her feet. “He flipped me over on my back and had sex with me.”

“He raped you?” the prosecutor asks, carefully rephrasing her answer.

“Yes, sir. He raped me.”

“He raped you,” Tyrone King repeats. “And then what?”

“After he was finished, I called the salon to tell them I’d be late for work, and he grabbed the phone out of my hands and threw it at my head.”

Resulting in the charge of assault with a deadly weapon, Amanda thinks, adding a legitimate question to her list of groceries.
You called the salon and not the police?

“He threw the phone at your head,” the prosecutor repeats, in what is fast becoming a tiresome habit.

“Yes, sir. It hit the side of my head, then fell to the floor and broke apart.”

“What happened next?”

“I changed my clothes and went to work. He ripped my dress,” she reminds the jury. “So I had to change.”

“And did you report what happened to the police?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When was that?”

“A couple of days later. He started hitting me again, and I told him if he didn’t stop, I’d go to the police, and he didn’t stop, so I did.”

“What did you tell the police?”

Caroline Fletcher looks confused. “Well, what the officer already told you.” She is alluding to Sergeant Dan
Peterson, the previous witness, a man so nearsighted his face virtually vanished inside his notes for most of his testimony.

“You told him about the rape?”

“I told him that me and Derek had been fighting, that Derek was always slapping me around and stuff, and then he took some pictures.”

Tyrone King lifts long, elegant fingers into the air, signaling for his witness to pause while he locates several more photographs and shows them to Caroline Fletcher. “Are these the pictures the police officer took?”

Caroline winces as she looks over the various pictures. A nice touch, Amanda thinks, wondering if she’s been coached.
Don’t be afraid to show some emotion
, she can almost hear Tyrone King whisper in his seductive baritone.
It’s crucial that you appear sympathetic to the jury.

Amanda looks toward her lap, tries picturing the photographs through the jury’s eyes. Not too damning really. A few scratches on the woman’s cheek that could easily be the result of her daughter’s groping fingers, a slight red mark on her chin, a fading purple blotch on her upper right arm, either of which could have come from almost anything. Hardly the stuff of a major assault. Nothing to directly implicate her client.

“And that’s when I told him about Derek biting me,” Caroline continues, unprompted. “And so he took pictures of my back, and then he asked me if Derek had sexually assaulted me, and I said I wasn’t sure.”

“You weren’t sure?”

“Well, we’ve been together for three years. We have a baby. I wasn’t sure about my rights until Sergeant Peterson told me.”

“And that’s when you decided to press charges against Derek Clemens?”

“Yes, sir. So I pressed charges, and the police drove me back to my apartment, and they arrested Derek.”

A phone rings, disturbing the natural rhythms of the room. A tune emerges.
Camptown ladies sing dis song—Doo-dah! Doo-dah.
And then again.
Camptown ladies sing dis song …

Amanda glances toward her purse on the floor by her feet. Surely she hasn’t left her phone on, she hopes, reaching inside her purse, as do several women on the jury. The Hispanic man reaches for his jacket pocket. The prosecuting attorney looks accusingly at the woman who is his second chair, but she shakes her head and widens her eyes, as if to say, Not me.

Camptown ladies sing dis song—Doo-dah! doo-dah.

“Oh, my God,” the witness suddenly exclaims, the color disappearing from her already pale face as she grabs her enormous canvas bag from the floor beside her and rummages around inside it, the tune growing louder, more insistent.

Camptown ladies sing dis song …

“I’m so sorry,” she apologizes to the judge, who peers at her disapprovingly over the top of a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses as she switches her portable phone off and flings it back in her purse. “I told people not to call me,” she offers by way of explanation.

“Kindly leave your phone at home this afternoon,” the judge says curtly, taking the opportunity to break for lunch. “And your gum,” he adds, before telling everyone to be back at two o’clock.

“So where we going for lunch?” Derek Clemens asks
casually, his arm brushing against Amanda’s as they rise to their feet.

“I don’t do lunch.” Amanda gathers her papers into her briefcase. “I suggest you grab a bite in the cafeteria.” Instantly she regrets her choice of words. “I’ll meet you back here in an hour.”

“Where you going?” she hears him ask, but she is already halfway down the center aisle of the courtroom, the ocean roaring in the distance as she steps into the hallway and runs toward the bank of elevators to her right. One opens just as she approaches, which she takes as a good omen, and she checks her watch as she steps inside. If she moves fast enough, she can just make it to the club for the start of her spinning class.

She checks her phone for messages as she runs south along Olive toward Clematis. There are three. Two are from Janet Berg, who lives in the apartment directly below hers, and with whose husband Amanda had a brief, and unnoteworthy, fling several months earlier. Is it possible Janet found out about the affair? Amanda quickly erases both messages, then listens to the third, which is mercifully from her secretary, Kelly Jamieson. Amanda inherited the relentlessly perky young woman with spiky red hair from her predecessor at Beatty and Rowe, a woman who’d apparently grown disillusioned with being a grossly overworked and woefully underpaid associate in the busiest criminal legal firm in town and left to become the trophy wife of an aging lothario.