Read Online Entombed by Linda Fairstein - Free Book Online Page A

more detail, but in these
bare bones presentations, this would do the trick.
    "Can you tell us what
you did on the evening of March eighth?"
    "Certainly." I could
see that her hands were trembling slightly as she kept them clasped on
the table in front of her. "I was at the Garden that evening. There was
a special event, a basketball game with professional athletes who were
raising money for charity. I had to stay at my office until the event
ended, shortly after midnight."
    "Did you leave the
Garden alone?"
    "No, no, I didn't. My
boss had a car service waiting to take him home. It picked us up on
Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue." She pressed her fingers
tightly together. "He was tired and wanted to get home to his apartment
on Park Avenue, so he asked me if it was okay to drop me at the corner
of Park and Seventy-sixth Street. It was about one A.M."
    I could have started
my questions at the front door of her building, but wanted this jury to
hear that this victim, unlike several of the others targeted by the
rapist, had not been walking from a neighborhood bar or coming from a
party.
    "I lived between First
and Second back then, so I just walked east on Seventy-sixth Street."
    "Did you talk to
anyone on the way?"
    "No. I didn't see a
soul."
    "What happened next?"
    "My building's a
brownstone. I climbed the six steps with my key in my hand. I stopped
to unlock the door, and just as I opened it I felt this body on my
back-suddenly, out of nowhere."
    She paused to compose
herself. "His left arm was around my neck and he was holding a really
sharp object-I couldn't see it but I could feel it sticking into my
neck. That was in his right hand. I-I froze. He was talking the whole
time, really softly. 'Don't scream and you won't get hurt. I don't want
to cut you. I just want your money.' He kept pushing me inside until he
could close the door behind us."
    Jurors were slinking
down in their seats, all of them staring in Darra's direction. They
were fidgeting as they watched her try to calm herself. This would be
the hard part, I had warned her. Looking twenty-three strangers in the
eye and telling them the story of the most intimate assault one human
could commit upon another.
    "What did he do next,
Darra?"
    "I handed him my
pocketbook and he told me to keep walking. He pushed again, this time
toward the staircase, and told me to go upstairs." She stopped. "I
wouldn't move."
    "Did he say anything
else?"
    "Yes," she answered,
nodding her head. "'Go upstairs or I'll kill you.'"
    She stopped to take a
breath and most of the jurors seemed to hold theirs.
    "He dug the knife into
my neck then. I, um, we went up slowly, 'cause he wouldn't take his arm
away from my throat, and when we got to the landing at the top he
handed me back my bag and told me to take out my wallet so he could
count my money."
    "What did you do?"
    Darra looked away from
me and the jurors, toward the clock on the wall. "I was stupid enough
to believe that's what he wanted."
    "Did you open your
wallet?"
    "Sorry. Yes, I did."
Darra's head was down. "He slammed me into the wall and crushed my face
against it while he went through my wallet. He wasn't looking for
money-he never took a thing from me. He wanted my ID to see which
apartment I lived in, 2D- it was right on my license. He said it out
loud."
    I waited for her to go
on.
    "Then he dragged me by
my hair, still with the knife to my throat, up another flight and right
to my apartment door. He made me open the door."
    She was trying to talk
even as the words got wrapped up in her tears. She was reliving the
events and getting to the worst moment.
    "Take a deep breath,
Darra. Would you like to step outside?"
    "I want to get this
over with, Ms. Cooper," she said, shaking her head. "He made me open
the door. I tried to beg him not to but he smacked my ear with the
handle of the knife. He closed the door behind us and told me to get on
the bed, and that's when he saw my fiancé."
    "Where was your
fiancé?"
    "We had