Puppet Read Free

stopped struggling?”
    Again Caroline Fletcher nods. “I kind of went all weak, like I was giving in, and then, as soon as we got to the bedroom door, I pushed him out of the way, ran inside the room, and locked the door.”
    “And what did Derek Clemens do then?”
    “He was so mad. He started banging on the door, yelling that he was going to kill my ass.”
    “And how did you interpret that?”
    “That he was going to kill my ass,” Caroline Fletcher explains.
    Amanda stares directly at the jury. Surely, her eyes are saying, they can’t consider this outburst a serious death threat. She grabs her pencil, adds
bran flakes
to her makeshift list of groceries.
    “Go on, Miss Fletcher.”
    “Well, he was banging on the door and screaming, and so, of course, Tiffany woke up and started crying.”
    “Tiffany?”
    “Our daughter. She’s fifteen months old.”
    “Where was Tiffany during all this?”
    “In her crib. In the living room. That’s where we keep it. The apartment only has one bedroom, and Derek says he needs his privacy.”
    “So his yelling woke up the baby.”
    “His yelling woke up the whole damn building.”
    “Objection.”
    “Sustained.”
    “And then what?”
    “Well, I realized that if I didn’t open the door, he was just gonna break it down, so I told him I’d open the door, but only if he promised to calm down first. And he promised, and then it got real quiet, except for the babycrying, so I opened the door, and next thing I knew, he was all over me, punching me and ripping at my dress.”
    “Is this the dress?” The assistant district attorney maneuvers the distance from the witness stand to the prosecutor’s table in two quick strides, retrieving a shapeless, gray jersey dress that has obviously seen better days. He shows it to the witness before offering it up for the jury’s inspection.
    “Yes, sir. That’s it.”
    Amanda leans back in her chair, as if to indicate her lack of concern. She hopes the jury will be as unimpressed as she is by the two tiny rips to the bottom of the dress’s side seams, fissures that could just as easily have resulted from Caroline Fletcher pulling the dress down over her hips, as from Derek Clemens pulling it up.
    “What happened after he ripped your dress?”
    “He threw me down on the bed, on my stomach, and bit me.”
    The incriminating photographs appear, as if by magic, in the hands of the assistant district attorney. They are quickly introduced into evidence and distributed to the jury. Amanda watches the jurors as they examine the impressions of Derek Clemens’s teeth branded into the middle of Caroline Fletcher’s back, disgust flickering across their faces like flames from a campfire as they struggle to maintain the veneer of impartiality.
    As always, the jurors are a decidedly mixed lot—an old Jewish retiree squeezed between two middle-aged black women; a clean-shaven Hispanic man in a suit and tie next to a ponytailed young man in a T-shirt and jeans; a black woman with white hair behind a white woman with black hair; the heavyset, the lean, the eager, the blasé. Allwith one thing in common—the contempt in their eyes as they glance from the photographs to the defendant.
    “What happened after he bit you?”
    Caroline Fletcher hesitates, looks toward her feet. “He flipped me over on my back and had sex with me.”
    “He raped you?” the prosecutor asks, carefully rephrasing her answer.
    “Yes, sir. He raped me.”
    “He raped you,” Tyrone King repeats. “And then what?”
    “After he was finished, I called the salon to tell them I’d be late for work, and he grabbed the phone out of my hands and threw it at my head.”
    Resulting in the charge of assault with a deadly weapon, Amanda thinks, adding a legitimate question to her list of groceries.
You called the salon and not the police?
    “He threw the phone at your head,” the prosecutor repeats, in what is fast becoming a tiresome habit.
    “Yes, sir. It hit the