Free Applaud the Hollow Ghost by David J. Walker Page A

aspirins before I settled in to read the police reports.
    The first thing that caught my attention was the catalogue of “evidence” taken from Lammy’s apartment. What had sounded in the media like a substantial cache of pornographic materials turned out to be a couple of Playboys and a Hustler. Not on everyone’s list of recommended reading, certainly, but not reliable indicia of a maniacal rapist, either.
    The report said that Steve Connolly called the police because he’d found Trish in Rosa’s arms, crying uncontrollably, when he got home. Rosa told the officers she hadn’t been feeling well, and came home early from church bingo. She was surprised to find Trish at home without Steve being there, because the child was to wait at her cousin’s for Steve to pick her up. Trish started to cry and Rosa saw bruises around her mouth and cheeks, but Trish wouldn’t tell her what happened. Ten or fifteen minutes later, when Steve came in, Trish still wouldn’t say anything except that someone had tried to hurt her.
    Most interesting, though, were the reports of the interviews of Trish Connolly. If various things she said weren’t flat-out inconsistent, that was because—or so it seemed to me, at least—her interrogators took pains to avoid that.
    She was only a child, of course, and traumatized, and one would expect she’d have had some difficulty expressing what happened. But all she told the beat officers who arrived first was that someone hit her and pushed her down and did “bad things,” and she didn’t know who it was or where it happened. Then she just cried and wouldn’t say anything else.
    It was an hour later, to a female police officer at the district station with a court reporter present, that Trish said she was at her cousin’s and her father was late so she walked home through the alley. Someone grabbed her from behind, she said, and he dragged her somewhere. He pulled her pants down, she said, but she couldn’t see who he was, because it was dark. When asked why she kept saying “he” if she couldn’t see him, at first she didn’t know. Later she said “it seemed like a man,” and still later said she could see enough to know it was a man. She said the man pushed her down on the floor, but when asked what floor she said she didn’t mean “floor,” but “ground.” Why weren’t her clothes and hair all soaked from slush and snow when she got home? She didn’t know. Did he pull her inside someplace, like a garage? “No, nothing happened in the garage.” Where, then? She just didn’t know, but nothing happened in the garage. All told, she repeated that same phrase, “nothing happened in the garage,” three times, before finally saying she hadn’t been in any garage.
    They terminated the court-reported statement, and took her back to the alley, starting from her house and retracing her steps back to her cousin’s, looking for where it happened. The first backyard without a garage was Lammy’s. “Maybe that’s the place,” she’d said, when they pointed out the enclosed porches. While they were there, Lammy came outside and stood there, watching. Was that the man? She didn’t know, but it might have been him. Lammy had his coat on and Trish said yes, the man had a coat on, and it could have been a coat like that one.
    At that point Lammy became the only suspect the cops were interested in.
    Trish was taken to the hospital and examined in the emergency room, and later interviewed again, this third time by a female state’s attorney, again with a court reporter present. She was asked what she meant when she said the man did “bad things.” She said she meant he hit her. The state’s attorney reminded her that earlier she said the man hit her and pulled down her pants and did bad things. That’s when Trish said that he