Free Rape by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

wallop of infatuation, the most powerful emotion you’d ever experienced in your life.
    Dromoor frowned at your words. He’d chosen his own with such care.
    Dromoor left his cell phone number neatly written on a piece of paper. To pass on to Teena. Beneath the number these words:

The Female Prosecutor
    G ODDAMN HE ’ D ENTERED HER dreams. So shameful.
    She could not control it! Could not control the case! The most highly publicized criminal trial in years in Niagara Falls and Harriet Diebenkorn’s opportunity at long-delayed last to prove herself to her skeptical male elders and she was publicly humiliated at the hearing, bushwacked. Never saw it coming. No more than the rape victim had seen it coming.
    Kirkpatrick, Jay. He was Diebenkorn’s new nemesis. She was a woman who swerved from obsession to obsession and most of them male but none of them quite like Jay Kirkpatrick that bastard. Obsessed with Kirkpatrick. No wonder the man’s reputation! She’d been only vaguely aware now she was well aware. Rising to his feet and with an air of courteous and even gentlemanly regret riddling the state’s case with reasonable doubt as the most finished-appearing wood might be riddled from within by termites. Bastard never raised his voice. He was one to provoke others to raise their voices. He was not a handsome man, his skin was actually rather coarse and his pitiless eyes close-set on either side of his beak of a nose, and yet he exuded the air of a handsomeman, suave and self-assured. Kirkpatrick had a cowboy swagger, though he wore custom-made pinstripe suits and muted Italian ties. His vanity was highly polished black leather shoe boots with pointed toes and inch-high heels. You expected Kirkpatrick, scoring another of his devastating points in court, to execute a staccato dance step with those heels.
    â€œJay Kirkpatrick.” You had to smile, shake your head over him.
    Kirkpatrick had made his reputation in the Buffalo area in 1989. Brilliantly defended the twenty-one-year-old druggie son of a wealthy Buffalo manufacturer who had shot and killed his father. The plea was not guilty for reason of self-defense. Though the father had been unarmed, near-naked, climbing up dripping wet from his swimming pool in the leafy affluent suburb of Amherst, and the son had fired six bullets into his body from a distance of eight feet. Yet Kirkpatrick had convinced a credulous jury that the son had been in “immediate, overwhelming” fear of his life.
    Yes. You had to smile. Kirkpatrick was a sly one.
    Diebenkorn hated it, Kirkpatrick had entered her dreams. Probably as powerfully, Diebenkorn was prone to think, as that dog-pack of loser punks had entered the dreams of pathetic broken Martine Maguire.
    The first time Diebenkorn came to the house on Baltic Avenue to speak with the gang-rape victim, Teena Maguire would not see her. Sick with a headache, Teena had been in bed all the previous day. Too exhausted to lift her head fromthe pillow. Teena’s grim-faced mother, Agnes Kevecki, grudgingly allowed Diebenkorn to enter her house, asking her to wipe her feet on the doormat first. As Diebenkorn uttered her prepared breathy speech I must see her. I am a deputy prosecutor with the county district attorney’s office and I insist upon seeing Martine Maguire the older woman said bluntly it was so, her daughter Martine was not a well woman any longer. “Not in her body, and not in her mind. Not just those animals but you people at the courthouse have destroyed her.”
    The Diebenkorn woman, as your grandmother would refer to her afterward, leaned forward breathing through her mouth so humid you could almost see it in the air like steam: “Mrs. Kevecki! What a thing to say! The county attorney’s office is committed to seeking justice for your daughter and granddaughter, we intend through the law to make restitution to them for the suffering they have experienced! But we must have