I waited and sipped my beer, I wondered about Mary Sandoval and why she’d decided to become a cop. It was an unusual occupation for a Latina woman. Most Latinos and blacks I knew wouldn’t dream of becoming a police officer; some detested the cops for sticking together like the mafia, planting drugs and guns on suspects they arrested, and lying in court under oath. Not all cops were “dirty.” I’d worked with some honest, hardworking police officers like Detective Walker, but the guys who lived and worked on the streets held mostly negative views of the police. Many had been stopped, frisked, hassled and even arrested just because of the color of their skin. Gel your hair and wear a zoot suit and you earned a rep as a defiant, bad dude. Wear dreadlocks and they pegged you as a ganja kingpin.
Even my Mexican secretary, Juanita, had few nice words for la policia. Mary and Juanita might share some cultural heritage and language, but they were as different as night and day. Juanita’s often broken English betrayed the failure of bilingual education attempts in the poorer barrios in Los Angeles. Mary looked like she could dance in the streets of Rio at Carnival time, yet she talked like a college preppie.
The place started filling up with lawyers and assistant D.A.’s who now dropped the facade that they role played for their clients that they were fighting for truth and justice in an adversary court system. With clients at home or in jail, they joshed each other and co-mingled openly. They were more boisterous than the cops who hunkered down over their boilermakers and kept their distance from the lawyers according to some unwritten ritual. Cops celebrating a shift change huddled together in small cliques separated by race. It was a sad testament to the so-called colorblind world they were supposed to prosecute and defend.
I spotted Mary as she came through the door and waved her over to my booth through the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke.
“Several lawyers paused in their tracks to watch Mary wiggle her ass as she walked her walk and crossed the room to join me. After the small stir of her passage in the male-dominated room, they ignored us. Mary ordered a white wine.
“You threw me for a loop back there. I just knew you had to be from internal affairs.” She’d applied some dark blue eye shadow and checked in her .38 Chief’s Special revolver. But for the uniform, she could pass for a coed on a date.
“They’ve been hassling you?” I asked.
“Yeah, how’d you guess?” She threw me a killer smile.
“Two hundred plus years worth of collective experience dealing with the Man. I’m still waiting for my forty acres and a mule,” I said lightheartedly.
She chuckled, “Yeah, and to think my mother’s people used to own this state.” She rolled her big, black eyes. “Bet you’re wondering what motivated me to put up with all this police bullshit, huh?”
“Not really,” I lied. “Lots of my folks work for the police, too. For some, it’s the steady paycheck and the power to pack and use a gun, but for most, it’s the sad recognition that predators like the ones you cornered today prey mostly on their own people. We’ve got the most to lose if we don’t keep the riffraff in our community in check.”
“That might explain the number of black officers on the force, but there’s only one black policewoman and she’s not having it any easier than me.”
“Let’s face it. Police departments are one of the last bastions of male supremacy for poor whites, blacks and Latinos. Just look at those guys over there.” I pointed to the groups of white and minority male police officers whispering over their drinks. “They might not drink or socialize with each other, but they’ll join forces in a jiffy to limit women in the force to handling domestic disputes and working as meter maids. They sure don’t want them riding shotgun in their patrol cars or responding to a shooting as a backup.”
Mary gave me a look of approval. I seemed to have passed whatever test she had in mind. “Do you really think it’s going to do any good to open up the Rohnert case at this late date?” she asked.
I shrugged. “That depends on how much help I get from you and whether I get some lucky breaks. I have a nasty feeling about the case. I think it was premeditated and cleverly orchestrated to entrap and disable Mindy’s ability to resist. The players were too smooth. I wondered whether you’d run across a similar M.O.?”
“Similar in what way?” Mary looked like she was tuning in on my wavelength.
“Guys playing at being Mr. Nice. Picking up girls and introducing them to their so-called friends, who act out nice guy roles until she let’s down her guard; then they jump her bones.”
“Jesus, that’s a pretty common scenario around a university town with all the frat houses, sororities and group living arrangements. The girls today are into binge drinking and partying. When they get shit-faced drunk, they’re easy pickings for a gang rape. I had a case recently where a woman student got loaded on beer at a frat house, then went upstairs with the jock who’d been filling her glass. She still doesn’t know how many frat brothers had her. She was too drunk to keep count and is pissed at me that I can’t nail the whole fraternity for rape.”
“Why can’t you stick it to them when they use liquor to break down a girl’s resistance? How can she consent to sex if she’s too drunk to know what she’s doing?”
“It’s a two way street. The guy claims he was too drunk to stint anyone. He alleges she got loaded, loose-hipped and horny and took them all on. He admits he and his buddy screwed her, but only after she was swinging her pussy in their face and daring them to get it up. I’ve got six guys confirming their version of the story with their attorney looking on and a now sober Miss Muffets, who admits she got shit-faced drunk and can’t remember the sequence of events clearly. She says she told them to stop. They swear on bibles she shoved it in their face and dared them to perform. Does that sound like a winning case to prosecute?”
“The guys’ stories sound too pat.”
“Yeah, they are. These young men know the rules of the game. If the woman says ‘No,’ they have to back off or it’s rape. If the woman keeps drinking to the point where she’ll willingly go upstairs to bed one of the frat brothers, then she’s fair game for a gangbang. She might start yelling her pretty head off when she realizes that they all mean to have her, but by then, it’s too late. Her protestations are muffled by the loud music and partying downstairs. In the end, they get what they want and it’s her lone word, reputation and version of what happened against them all if she’s willing to go public and face being labeled as a slut and an easy lay.”
What she said reminded me of the many conversations I’d overheard in gym locker rooms while playing ball in school and in the Navy. Guys did discuss the fine points of individual and group seduction: how “no” could be turned into maybe and then yes, and how to keep their stories straight after the fact.
“Do you think that’s the way it happened with Mindy Rohnert? That she led them to believe she would be a willing sex partner by stripping, dancing and continuing to drink with them?”
Mary paused before replying. “No, I think her case was different. Those guys pretended to be something they weren’t. The girls who go to frat parties know the object of the game is to get them drunk, then bed them. The girls know they are playing with fire. The fact that a woman initially corroborated that the guy she met in the library was an okay guy makes things different. Mindy reasonably thought her new friends cared about her as a person and she’d be safe with the guy. She was given no reason to suspect that she was the object of a planned sexual assault.”
“Since you felt that way, why was
