Rabid (72 page)

Dante caught the door and jumped after her, but she zigzagged through the crowd and ducked into a ladies room.

When Dante’s arms had wrapped around her last night, when the priest’s naked body had form-fit to hers, she had thought he wanted to fuck her, but he hadn’t tried, and she had lain awake, waiting for him to roll over and for his hands and mouth to hold her down, but he hadn’t, and she didn’t know what to do now.

~~~~~

After lunch, Leila reaffirmed that she was still under oath and Heath Sheldon cross-examined her, reaffirming the scenario she had volunteered at the end of the prosecution’s examination.

Dante sat behind Beverly Sloan, his head hanging in his hands, while Beverly Sloan silently fiddled with her Rosary beads. Behind them, spectators scribbled notes, and the three black cameras flanked by blazing light trees swiveled and alternately rested on Leila, the attorneys, Beverly, or the Judge.

Leila had hidden in the ladies’ room the whole lunch break, not even venturing outside for a cigarette. Nicotine-hungry worms scurried through her mind while Sheldon phrased his questions so precisely that she only had to say “yes” or “no.”

Leila was good at not answering too much. The oral defense of the PhD candidacy exam will beat the tendency to expound right out of a person. Anything you say is the basis for another question, so the trick is to answer but say as little as possible. Leila had done her comps in her second year.

Dante sat behind Beverly Sloan, his head resting on his arms. The note he had slipped to Heath Sheldon during the prosecution’s disastrous examination read,
Be careful. You resemble someone who hurt her. Don’t get too physically close. And she’s exhausted.

Heath frowned and scribbled back,
You didn’t threaten her, did you?
Bribe her? Change her testimony in any way?

Dante shook his head, and Heath blew a long, relieved breath into the middle of the courtroom.

While he questioned Leila, he lounged against the defense table, as far away from her as he could get and still be near the jury, and he noted every time she touched her temple or massaged her neck.

She
was
exhausted.

If that priest had commanded her to lie, if he had exercised undue authority over her and she was committing perjury, Heath should stop her testimony because he must not suborn perjury, even though Leila’s testimony was very good for his client.

Very, very good.

But Heath didn’t know what had happened. Could have been anything. Probably was nothing. Probably nothing
illegal
.

He asked, “Why did you leave Conroy Sloan alone in that apartment, if you thought he was suicidal?”

Leila said, “Conroy Sloan was becoming more and more unreasonable. I feared he might attack me again. After Beverly Sloan arrived, I thought that he wouldn’t commit suicide with her there. I guess he hurt her arm while they were wrestling for the knife, before he stabbed himself.”

Heath gaped but snapped his mouth closed. He waited for the Georgies to object to the blatant speculation, but they didn’t.

His knees weakened. God loved him.

Bev twisted the Rosary beads into a noose. Leila had said that Conroy wanted to marry her. That horrible Peggy had said the same thing. Conroy wouldn’t have lied like that. Maybe he was sick. Maybe it was that terrible virus.

Dante listened to Leila’s contralto voice answer the lawyer’s questions. Knowing that he had ripped those memories out of her head last night and now this lawyer was scalpeling precise answers out of her hours later sickened him. She wasn’t even weeping.

He should be, but his eyes burned hot and dry.

Last night, when her mouth had touched the skin on his shoulder, when she had tried to pull the sheet off of him, his body had cried to leap at her and bury himself in her. Leila was a bundle of nerves he had scraped raw, and she had responded to his body that way because that was how she, powerless Leila, responded to priests and to all men because, in her own words, she
might as well get fucked.

Dante’s chest and his lungs were crushed by cardiac tamponade because his heart bled.

Heath Sheldon tossed off his last few questions just out of curiosity while he was circumnavigating the defense table, while he had Leila Faris on the stand and under oath. “Other than yourself and Peggy Strum, do you know if there were any other women with whom Conroy Sloan was carrying on sexual affairs?”

Leila said, “Yes.”

Heath stopped, wondering if the jury and his client needed to know yet more. “Would you tell us their names and how you know about them?”

Leila said, “I saw Conroy and Dr. Valerie Lindh together at meetings. When I asked him about it on the night he died, he admitted a long-term, intermittent affair with her. There was also another woman named Mary, whom he mentioned a few times, but I don’t know her last name.”

Bev turned in her seat to whisper something like
Isn’t that odd?
to Mary, but Mary was staring at Leila with horrified eyes and glanced back to Bev, startled. The embroidery project slid off her lap and fell on the dusty courthouse floor.

Bev whispered, “Not you, too?”

Mary whispered, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. It was an accident, several accidents. But I stopped. I’m so sorry.”

Bev squeezed her Rosary beads. “You could have told me.”

“With everything else? It was easier to bear the guilt than to do that to you. I’m
so sorry
.”

Dante listened to the women whispering. If Sloan were here, Dante would punch him in the face. Wrath was leading Dante around again, but Sloan deserved some wrath.

Heath Sheldon watched his client Bev whispering to her pale friend
Mary
and shook his head. He didn’t need to
smear
Conroy Sloan. The guy was a slimeball, and when a lawyer thinks someone is a slimeball, that’s some serious slime.

He should add
Mary
to his witness list.

Heath asked Leila, “Did Conroy also propose to Peggy Strum?”

Judge Leonine Washington glanced at the prosecution table, but they were furtively whispering to each other, probably blaming each other for the fiasco, and so they missed this obvious objection to Leila’s speculating or hearsay about Conroy’s actions.

So be it.

Leila said, “I think it’s entirely possible that he proposed to Peggy, and Valerie, and anyone else, and that he was lying to all of us, maybe just to get a reaction.” 

Heath’s chest tightened like a heart attack. He knew he was asking her to try on the glove. “Do you think Conroy Sloan was leaving his wife?”

The girl inhaled, gathering herself. “I think he had profound emotional problems, likely precipitated by my actions and worsened by an infection with a neurotropic, psychotropic virus that he released into the lab. I think he may have told Beverly Sloan that he was leaving her so that she would beg him to stay. I think he told the other women that he wanted to marry them so they would want him.”

“Do you know how he got the bruises on his body, besides the one on his left eye, which you testified that you gave him?”

Leila nodded. “He punched the wall, so that’s the bruised knuckles. He also grabbed my arm on a previous occasion and I twisted his arm behind his back. And rough sex, of course.”

Heath could hardly breathe.

He embodied every genius courtroom lawyer all the way back to Daniel Webster’s litigation with the Devil.

He wanted to leap onto the defense table and shout his questions with his fists raised in the air.

He spun a felt-tip pen on the table lazily on the table next to his briefcase and asked, “Do ya think he might have stabbed himself?”

Heath, Leila, and Judge Washington waited three nerve-wracking, fingernail-scratching, teeth-grinding seconds for the objection on the grounds of speculation, but the Georgies were still whispering to each other, oblivious.

Leonine rolled her big brown eyes and Heath repressed the spring-loading in his calves that wanted to bounce around the courtroom. “Leila?”

Leila knew she could count on this lawyer to ask the ballsy question, especially since the demoralized prosecution attorneys had slacked off their responsibility. “Conroy Sloan was a medical doctor, and he was arrogant and probably sick with a fatal, dementing viral disease, which he might have known about and which might have affected his judgment. He probably thought he could miss all his vital organs with such a tiny knife and that everyone would rush to his bedside, and everyone would forgive him all his indiscretions. Suicide attempts, especially with less lethal means like a small knife, are usually cries for attention. He may have been actually suicidal. I’d just told him that I wouldn’t marry him and that I would destroy his career if he didn’t leave me alone.”

Leila took a deep breath. “Any of those could have been the reason that he stabbed himself.”

~~~~~

In the jury box, Tom Agosin was disgusted by the slutty witness and the tomcatting dead doctor. There was nothing to redeem this case, except perhaps the long-suffering widow at the defense table. After word had gotten around Tom’s Baptist church that he was on the jury, his pastor had approached him.

“There’s been a big shakeup over at that Catholic Church, Perpetual Help,” his young pastor Reverend Annabel Hanraets had said, shaking her head. Her curly, blonde hair bobbed. “Two priests disappeared. I don’t mean reassigned. They
disappeared
. Brother Samual was a friend of mine. First, one new priest came, stayed a few weeks, and then he and Sam’s assistant pastor Brother Nicolai left one day. Sam was shook up after Brother Nicolai disappeared.

“Then a new priest arrived at the parish, an Italian guy, an honest-to-God Roman Monsignor, a Jesuit, and Sam was scared of him, wouldn’t talk about him and actually spilled his coffee when I asked. Then Sam sent an email that he had been recalled to Rome and left the next day. We used to discuss theology through email and at coffeehouses, and he hasn’t emailed. It’s like he fell off the face of the Earth.”

Tom Agosin had watched the priest sitting behind Bev with a mixture of superstition and horror ever since, because he was pretty sure that the red piping on the cassock that the man had worn one day last week meant that this guy was indeed the Roman Monsignor who made other priests fall off the face of the Earth.

Gina Salerio had also seen Monsignor Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi sitting behind Beverly Sloan, and she knew exactly who he was. The Monsignor had given Gina communion both times she had been to church in the last six months, and he was counseling her friend’s son, John, though her friend wouldn’t say why John needed counseling, just that Monsignor Petrocchi-Bianchi was a good man and a good priest, and she said it with desperate conviction, often.

Weeks later, in the jury room during deliberations, Tom Agosin asked Gina if she knew anything about the Monsignor and told her what his pastor had said, and Gina told him what she knew. They didn’t know why the good Monsignor was sitting behind Beverly Sloan or what was going on at the church, but they agreed it was something important.

Tom was less convinced that it was benign. In his experience growing up in New Jersey, Italians plus people disappearing meant very bad things that you didn’t talk about.

~~~~~

Heath Sheldon finally admitted that he had no more questions for this witness.

Bev sniffled beside him, so he grabbed a wad of dry tissues out of his briefcase and handed them to her.