No Regrets

than most applicants. He was so pleased with her that he invited her to his spacious, new condominium. He drove her there in his new gold Cadillac. His hospitality was so warm that Cheri was invited to share Pomarleau’s king-size bed.
    It was an odd invitation since Pomarleau was still married to his sixteen-year-old wife. He assured Cheri that it wasn’t for any sexual reason. But, even so, he refused to drive her to her own apartment and she had no way to get home. Pomarleau slept in the middle of the bed—with Cheri on one side and his wife on the other.
    Roger always had an excuse why Cheri should stay in his condo, and in no time at all Cheri realized that she was trapped. He told her that if she wanted to keep her job, she would have to live with him and his wife. Cheri’s enthusiasm for the scam run at the Exotica began to fade after a week or so. She didn’t want the job any longer, and she didn’t want to live with the Pomarleaus. There was no big money for her—Roger took it all. She had a boyfriend whom she never got to see. Roger kept filling her head with promises, but she didn’t feel it was necessary to be so devoted to her new career that she had to spend twenty-four hours a day either dancing or living in Roger’s condominium.
    Cheri Schak was a captive. Roger wouldn’t let her leave. And she couldn’t get away from him at work, or sneak out of his condo. Soon, he began to knock her around, and then he choked her.
    “I have ‘committed’ you to other people,” he told her obscurely. “If you leave, it might mean my life.”
    She wasn’t sure what he meant, but then he spelled it out: She would have to sleep with strangers whenever Roger ordered her to.
    Later, vice detectives differed somewhat in their opinion of Cheri’s situation—when they had encountered her in the Exotica, she seemed cheerful enough as she danced in the window in a nearly transparent blouse. Roger hadn’t been on the premises, or so it appeared. If that was true, she could have left whenever she wanted to. But then Roger Pomarleau often hid so that he could observe what was going on. Cheri never knew where he was, but she often felt as if she was being watched.
    Cheri hated the ménage à trois that Roger demanded with her and his wife. Sometime during the night of September 28, she made her move. Cheri rose from the bed she shared with Mr. and Mrs. Pomarleau and went to the kitchen. There, she found a butcher knife, and walked back to the dimly lit bedroom. According to Cheri, an argument followed.
    When the “argument” was over, Roger Pomarleau lay naked on his back on the plush carpet of his bedroom. He was dead, covered with blood from sixteen stab wounds. Two of them had punctured his heart. His young wife ran screaming to the neighbors for help. She also had sixteen stab wounds, but they were not to vital organs, and she eventually recovered.
    Cheri Schak suffered cuts to her hands and legs, butwas able to flag down a passing truck driver. She was about to leave the scene when a neighbor pulled her out of the truck cab and held her for police.
    Charged with second-degree murder and first-degree assault, Cheri’s story in court was bolstered by the testimony of a rather unlikely witness: the first Mrs. Pomarleau, who said that Roger had beaten her two or three times a week when she lived with him before their marriage. “He slapped me regularly when I lived with him in 1976,” she said. She testified that he had also abused her sexually and burned her with a curling iron.
    “I reported him to the police,” she told the jury. “And they charged him with rape and extortion, but Roger turned on the charm and promised he would go straight if I would marry him. I married him in Idaho that July, and as soon as I did, he forced me back to work as a dancer. I signed an affidavit saying that my reports to the police were false and that he never forced me to give him money, that all the sex was voluntary, and that he never burned me with the curling iron.”
    The ex-Mrs. Pomarleau testified that her first complaint to police had been true all along; she had suffered painful and humiliating attacks at her husband’s hands. Once he had persuaded her to drop her charges against him, she realized she had been duped into signing the affidavit just so that he could avoid prosecution.
    Roger Pomarleau’s sudden demise left a big hole in the operation of the Exotica, but the crew pulled themselves together and