Death Dance (4 page)

"I'm asking you to remand the defendant, your honor. I don't
think there's any amount of bail that's sufficient to ensure his return
to face the charges in this case."

I hadn't counted on standing in front of Harlan Moffett in the
arraignment part on a Saturday morning at eleven o'clock. He was too
senior to have drawn that duty, but the court officer told me he was
covering for a young judge who had taken ill during the night. The case
I had tried in front of him last year still haunted me, and it was a
sure sign of bad luck for me to be stuck under his thumb again with a
new matter.

"Alexandra," he said, chuckling at me, "don't give me a hard
time today, okay? Bad enough I had to give up my first golf date of the
season, now you're gonna go overboard on some cockamamie rape
allegation? Remand is for murderers. He's a doctor, this guy. Am I
right?"

Moffett smoothed the thinning gray hair that framed his lined
face. He was short, and liked to place his elbows on the bench before
him to pull himself up straighter and taller. He lifted the
yellow-backed felony complaint while Sengor's court-appointed lawyer,
Eric Ingels, answered, "Yes."

"Sengor Selim?"

"Selim Sengor," I said.

"Whatever. Thirty years old. Nice-looking boy. I got a
grand-daughter who can't get herself a steady guy to save her life.
What kind of name is Sengor? If he was Jewish, I might parole him to
her custody and take him home with me."

"You know what, judge? I'm going to step back to counsel
table. I'd like this entire application to go on the record."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Alexandra. Mr. Ingels, don't get on this
lady's bad side, I'm telling you right now," Moffett said, tapping his
fingers on the railing in front of him. He pushed up the sleeves of his
robe and started to play with his pinky ring. "Stay right here for a
minute, sweetheart, while we talk this out."

I didn't want this conversation to happen at a bench
conference any more than I wanted to be held in contempt by a judge who
had never made the effort to understand the nature of sexual assault
nor to address "lady lawyers" appropriately.

Eric Ingels had been catching cases for Legal Aid this morning
and had been tossed Sengor's matter when the papers were docketed by
the court clerk.

"Whaddaya got? I mean for real," Moffett said. "You got a
witness?"

"Two of them."

"What do they say?"

I repeated the stories that Jean and Cara had told.

"The doctor, he make any admissions to you?"

"He refused to talk to me when they brought him into the squad
this morning," I said.

"Aha! Maybe I should try the same tactic sometime. I'm the
judge—I can't even control my own courtroom when Alexandra
here gets a hard-on for some miscreant," the judge said, talking to
Ingels. He turned his attention back to me, drawing his handkerchief
from his pocket to wipe the remains of cream cheese off his chin. "So
how are you going to prove your case?"

"The toxicology will confirm that Sengor drugged the women."

"How long is that going to take?"

Nobody would even open the evidence collection kit until
Monday morning. "I should have preliminary results by Wednesday."

"Judge," Ingels said. "You can't possibly hold my client that
long on Ms. Cooper's speculation. He's a physician who—"

"Who has been in this country for three years, whose entire
family lives abroad—in Turkey—and who has the means
and opportunity to flee this city the minute you let him loose."

"You honestly think this guy is going to run home to the land
of black veils and burkas when he's got college kids knocking on his
door for a slumber party—coming all the way from over the
border— just asking to be shtupped?" Moffett asked.

My adversary laughed, so Moffett carried on. "Miss Cooper has
no sense of humor about these things. Imagine her on a date? First time
a guy makes a pass she probably whacks him across the face. No wonder
she's still single."

I turned and walked back to my position in the well of the
courtroom. The stenographer put down his magazine and poised his
fingers over the keyboard.

"For the record, your honor, I'm repeating my request for the
remand of this defendant."

"So how do you get a first-degree rape charge with no force,
missy?"

"Missy" me and "Sweetheart" me again, you moron, so it's
recorded in black and white and I'll whip these minutes right over to
the judiciary committee. Moffett had barely squeaked by them the last
time he was up for reappointment.

"Incapacity to consent, judge. The defendant rendered them
physically helpless by administering a drug without their knowledge."

"Your honor," Eric Ingels said, "there's no evidence that my
client gave these witnesses any drugs. Half the young women in America
are on some sort of antianxiety medications."

"Yeah, Alexandra. How do I know your girls didn't pop the
pills themselves? Just because they don't remember taking them doesn't
mean anything. Maybe they were too drunk to recall it."

"Neither of these young women was on any sort of medication,
prescription or recreational. They did not voluntarily ingest the
Xanax. That's what makes this a crime. They weren't drinking heavily
and they weren't drunk. Even the defendant admitted—"

"To you?"

"No, judge. We did a consent recording with one of the
victims."

"I thought he didn't admit anything." The cheap garnet-colored
stone in Moffett's ring looked like a giant wart on his gnarled finger
as he waved it in my direction.

"Not to me. But he acknowledged to one of my witnesses that he
knew she had not been drinking much alcohol."

"This drug, what does it do to them? It's an aphrodisiac?" The
judge was smiling now, twisting the ring round and around his finger.
"They should have tried to stay awake."

I had gotten up early to do my homework. "It's a central
nervous system depressant."

"So is alcohol, your honor," Ingels said.

"That's the point, if I may continue. My victims were sipping
bourbon, which is in itself a central nervous system depressant.
Sen-gor slipped—"

"
Doctor
Sengor, Ms. Cooper."

"I don't care if he's a doctor or an Indian chief, he's
charged with several counts of the most serious felony on the books
short of murder," I said.

"Prematurely."..

"May I be heard, your honor?"

"Sure," Moffett said, flapping the wing of his black robe at
Eric Ingels. "Let her do her thing. I know Alexandra. Once she puts her
hand on her hip like that and loses that Colgate smile she marched in
here with, she's not happy till I hear her out."

"The instructions for the pills that we believe were used last
night caution that because they're for extended release, they are
explicitly
not
to be crushed or chewed. That's
why the defendant took a vial full of Xanax—"

"How many pills are you claiming he used?"

"I don't know, your honor. The container was empty, and it
holds twelve capsules when completely full. The lab will be able to
give me an estimate of the quantity after they've examined the blood
and urine samples of both women."

"Go on."

"The combination of the two powerful depressants causes
immediate sedation, possible unconsciousness, often leads to
respiratory cessation, which—"

"What's that?" Moffett asked.

"Death, judge. An overdose like this mixed with a combination
of alcoholic beverages could actually have killed these women."

"Your honor, you can't expect me to stand here and let Ms.
Cooper go overboard with her imagination, can you? Nobody's dead."

Moffett was digging back forty years, trying to remember how
to cross-examine a witness. He seemed more interested in the
consummation of the sexual acts than in the involuntary drugging.
"These girls, they don't remember the sex?"

"There's an amnesiac effect from this type of sedative. Even
if they had been conscious for any portion of the encounter, they
wouldn't be able to remember it. I'm going to submit the literature
packaged with the drug as part of the court record."

"Yeah, Alexandra. How's a guy supposed to know they'd pass
out?" Moffett held the handkerchief over his nose and honked into it
before stuffing it back in his pocket and picking up his red pen.

"Judge, Sengor is a resident in psychiatry. His area of
specialty is pharmacology. He knows the property of sedatives and
that's exactly why Xanax was his drug of choice."

Moffett looked over at the defense table and shook his head.
"I wouldn't expect a medical doctor to have to—"

"Cardinal rule of drug-facilitated rape, your honor. Expect
the unexpected. It's for guys who might never resort to force to act
oat their twisted fantasies. They let the drugs subdue the victims for
them."

I went on, hoping that Moffett would stop doodling on his
legal pad and listen to me. "There are four parts of this puzzle, and
Sengor had every one of them in place to accomplish his goal."

The judge looked at the defendant and held up a finger for
each piece of the modus operandi as I ticked them off for him.

"He's a physician, with the knowledge of the properties of a
CNS depressant and its effect when combined with alcohol. Couple that
with the ability to write prescriptions for sedatives, and that gives
him the means to commit the crimes—his weapon of choice. Next
he needs the setting in which he controls the environment. What better
than his own home? Third, he had to have the opportunity, which usually
requires gaining the trust of his victims, and he'd had the first three
nights of their visit to do that. Finally, Sengor had to have a plan to
avoid arrest. The victims generally sleep off the effects of the drugs,
and here, they would have gotten on a bus to go home to Canada, no
wiser for the occurrence of the crime."

Eric Ingels was on his feet. "C'mon, judge. There was no
'plan' to do this. These women wound up in a hospital, right down the
street from Dr. Sengor's home. What kind of lamebrain scheme to escape
detection is that? Only a complete idiot or a man who'd never had
intercourse could think that a woman might wake up and not realize
she'd been… been… well, been—"

Moffett laughed out loud in agreement with Ingels. Even Sengor
was smiling, perhaps sensing an ally in judicial robes. "Yeah. Been
had. That's what you mean, isn't it? What do you say to that, Alex?"

"I'd say this is all completely inappropriate for a bail
application, your honor. Do I need expert testimony here, to explain to
both of you that one of the advantages of sedating someone with a
muscle relaxant is that it makes it possible to consummate a sexual act
without the victim's awareness? And many of these cases occur without
transmission of seminal fluid?"

Moffett looked down at the papers and then glanced at Eric
Ingels, probably hoping my adversary would interrupt me.

I went on. "The crime of rape is accomplished, as I'm sure
your honor recalls, by penetration of the victim, however slight.
There's no legal requirement that he ejaculate in each of these women."

Moffett knew he was out of his element. The colloquy was too
graphic for his old-fashioned courtroom style. "Save that talk,
Alexandra. Eric says the hospital these girls went to is near his home.
You heard him. What kind of scheme is that?"

"A pretty foolproof one, if my victims had used the bus
tickets they told Sengor they had for yesterday afternoon. Do you know
how many victims of drug-facilitated rape ever get to a hospital in
time to be tested?" I asked. "Less than ten percent. It's almost
impossible to prove these crimes because some of the drugs work their
way out of the system so quickly that by the time the victims sleep off
the effects of the sedatives and feel well enough to get themselves
medical attention, nobody even knows what toxicological tests to
perform."

"What you're telling me, missy, is that this healthy male
specimen," Moffett said, an elbow resting on the ridge of the bench in
front of him, his forefinger wagging at Selim Sengor, "would rather
make love to somebody who doesn't even know what the heck is going on.
Now why would anyone want to do that?"

"It's deviant behavior, your honor. Obviously." Don't try to
compare it to your own sexual experience, I was tempted to tell him.
Don't try for a minute to think outside the box. He looked even more
puzzled as he licked the tip of his finger and used it to smooth down
the wisps of hair that were flipping up behind his ears. "We'll have
experts to explain the psychology of it at trial. I'm just dealing with
the strength of my case for the purpose of this arraignment."

Moffett's ruling about whether or not to detain Sengor would
be grounded on two major points: the likelihood that he would return to
stand trial rather than be a risk to flee the jurisdiction, and the
probability of my obtaining a conviction when the case went to a jury
many months down the road.

"So, let me understand this, hon. You got two women who were
shacking up at Dr. Selim's place, drinking liquor with him, who wake up
with a hangover and miss their bus ride home. You maybe have some
seminal fluid—"

"And both women tell me they hadn't had intercourse in more
than a month."

"The only thing you haven't got is any evidence that the drugs
were even in their cocktails, no less slipped there by the doctor,"
Moffett said.

Eric Ingels had very little left to do, with Moffett so
obviously in his corner. A physician didn't fit the stereotypical
profile of a rapist, and a man whose arousal came from sedating women
for the purpose of subjecting them to sexual assault was an even bigger
stretch for this jurist's small mind.

"It seems to me, judge," Ingels said, "that until Ms. Cooper
gets her lab results, you have absolutely no reason at all to detain my
client. He's got strong roots in this community. It's where he lives,
it's where he works. He's got no history of criminal
conduct—a perfectly clean record."