Evil Eye

by Joyce Carol Oates

  They were arresting him! Hadn’t come to the Delta Sigma house to break the terrible news of his parents’ deaths but were callously arresting him.

  The Delt-Sigs were looking on as Bart was half-led, half-carried out to the PD cruiser—all the guys, astonished. What the fuck? What is this? What’re they doing to Bart? And out on the front walk gaping like he’s a freak show asshole, Theta Pis from next door, and two girls—gorgeous girls—from the Chi Omega house, Oh Christ!—all gaping at him.

  That night, 10 p.m. DeMarco Pizza delivery van rolls up, doorbell rings and it’s eight large pizzas for the Delt-Sigs—this is all that Bart had gotten around to ordering but a nice surprise for his frat brothers, after this nightmare day that has left them stunned—“freaked”—and there’s local TV news footage of the shabby exterior of the Delt-Sig house and guys on the front stoop shouting obscenities and giving reporters the finger—not such a great image for the fraternity.

  Deekman, Davis. His dad’s golf-club friend who was the kind of lawyer Bart needed: criminal defense.

  Not that Dad had ever been a really close friend of Deekman, he’d complained that Deekman cheated at golf when he could get away with it. But Davis Deekman was the only name Bart knew, and Deekman would know him.

  As it turned out, Deekman was a terrific choice.

  One of the first things Deekman did was arrange for Bart’s Explorer to be driven back to East Rensselaer, for safekeeping.

  And he’d tried to get Bart out of the crummy detention facility, tried to arrange for bail, but even an exorbitant bail was denied for Bart Hansen was considered a flight risk.

  It was like a terrible joke, Bart would protest to friends. He’s devastated his parents have been murdered and all the cops and the judge can think of is—he’s a fucking flight risk.

  Swiftly too much was happening. Great stretches of Bart’s life so F U C K I N G B O R I N G it was like he’d been crawling on hands and knees through the Sahara Desert in slow-motion but now suddenly, when he’s weak, and emotionally fragile, everything is speeded-up like—like the world is on crystal meth and he’s the only sane one.

  His mind goes blank. Starts to think of the situation he’s in and the terrible fact that his parents are dead. . . . The realization hits him in the gut like he’s been kicked, his insides are churning with a need to use the toilet, fast—nobody gives a damn how sick he is, how clammy-cold his skin is—that he’s having a full-fledged panic attack and could die.

  One good thing: he’d decided better not look for his father’s wallet in the bedroom, remove bills and credit cards like the Visa Platinum the way a burglar would. For now the cops would’ve discovered Laurence Hansen’s credit cards in Bart’s possession and how’d Bart explain that?

  Relatives come to see him in the Rensselaer County Detention Center where he’s in “isolation” and he tells them that it is not true—it is a lie—that his mother identified him as the assailant: “That is just not possible. I was not there!” He has no idea who killed his parents—that is, his father—he guesses it had to have been a break-in, a “home invasion”—like that one in Connecticut a couple of years ago—and his father had defied the intruders, and was killed for his courage. And his mother . . .

  Well, the fact is—Bart has to keep reminding himself—his mother is alive. Bart’s mother is not dead like his father but in a coma.

  The relatives are praying for Louisa. Neighbors, friends. All are praying for Louisa Hansen to recover from her terrible injuries.

  Bart, too. Of course, Bart is praying, too. Tearful Bart asks to be allowed to visit his mother in the Rensselaer hospital but his request is denied.

  Bart tells anyone who will listen that he knows nothing about the ax attack. He’d been at the frat house in Syracuse all that night—his frat brothers will vouch for him. In fact, he’d been in Syracuse for all of that week. He’d talked with his parents only a few days before and there had been “no sign” of anything wrong, he was sure.

  His dad had enemies, he believed. Business enemies. And the house on Juniper Drive is “kind of a ‘conspicuous consumption’ house”—(he’d gotten this fancy term from his S.U. economics prof)—somebody’d be led to think whoever lived there had money.

  Rensselaer County prosecutors were suggesting that the ax attack had been perpetrated for motives of money: the son, deeply in debt, having forged his father’s signature on a $28,000 check the previous December to pay for a new SUV, and in arrears with his fraternity, was counting on life-insurance money coming to him, as well as his parents’ estate—estimated at approximately three million dollars.

  Three million! Bart had had the idea that his parents were worth a lot more than that—ten million at least. The way the old man hinted and boasted.

  What about the property in Bolton Landing? Bart’s father’s family had owned it for, like, generations—a sprawling old Adirondack lodge on three acres overlooking Lake George. Wasn’t that worth a couple million dollars, at least?

  The life-insurance policies weren’t great but OK: two hundred thousand on Laurence’s life, sixty thousand on Louisa’s life. You had to figure the mother’s life was worth less because she didn’t have an income like the father.

  Bart finds it difficult to comprehend, he isn’t going to receive this money. He is his parents’ beneficiary but only if both are deceased; the situation being what it is, and Louisa still alive, she is Laurence’s beneficiary and twenty-year-old Bart doesn’t get a dime.

  Rensselaer County prosecutors had confiscated both the Hansens’ personal computers as well as Bart’s personal computer and were concocting a narrative of vengeful, calculating, murderous son on the spurious evidence of e-mail communications between parents and son over a period of eighteen months, the forged check for the down payment on the Explorer, e-mail exchanges with the Sigma Nu Corporation, and reported conversations with friends of the defendant.

  In the face of this mounting suspicion, as the media described it, Deekman was cool and efficient. He didn’t waste words and didn’t allow his client to waste words either. Often when Bart began to speak to him in a loud aggrieved voice he lifted a hand to signal No more. (Their meetings were held in an allegedly soundproof room at the detention center. But anyone who believed that the prosecution wasn’t spying on them, Deekman said, didn’t need a lawyer but a psychiatrist.)

  When Bart started to explain to him another time how he’d been at the Delt-Sig house all that night when his parents were killed Deekman lifted his hand saying curtly Understood.

  Yet, despite Deekman’s efforts, they’d indicted Bart Hansen. The Rensselaer prosecutors who seemed to have no one to vent their spite upon, no object or target for their vituperation except the bereft son of murdered parents—(that is, one murdered parent and the other comatose)—triumphed in the courthouse and in the local media.

  rensselaer youth, 20, indicted in murder of father

  attempted murder of mother

  mother identifies son before lapsing into coma

  In all of upstate New York TV news and newspapers—and online—it was repeated again and again—again—that the severely injured mother had managed to identify her son before lapsing into a coma; and the issue was, would such an accusation be allowed in a trial, if there was a trial? If the mother did not wake from the coma, to repeat her statement in court, or—if the mother died . . .

  Deekman was adamant: if there was a trial it could not be held in Rensselaer County or anywhere near. Nowhere in this part of New York State where the media have shamelessly exploited his client’s personal tragedy.

  In the Rensselaer hospital, Louisa Hansen remains in a comatose state, on life-support machines.

  In the Rensselaer County detention facility, Bart Hansen remains in custody awaiting trial, kept apart from other inmates.

  In Bart’s lower gut there is
a ceaseless churning of anxiety, misery. Gas pains like knife stabs coming one-two-three so he practically faints sometimes. Yet, he has not lost weight in this terrible environment—he has actually gained weight around his middle, flabby-doughy flesh the hue of Wonder Bread. Made to walk around—“exercise”—in what passes for a gym in the dank interior of the facility—he becomes quickly short of breath.

  Why Bart is kept isolated from other inmates in the detention center he isn’t certain. Not just the color of his skin—there are a few other white men in the facility he has noticed, or what you’d describe as “white.”

  Mostly dark-skinned men and boys staring at him as he’s led past their cells to his own at the far end of a corridor. Lucky they can’t get close to him, all they can do is bare their teeth at him Hey white boy. Yo fuckin fag you kill you momma asshole?

  Even the guards are disdainful of Bart Hansen. White guys, dark-skinned. Never call him by any name except you or maybe, if he’s slow to move, You, Ha’sen.

  Alone, Bart watches TV. Crummy small-screen TV and no cable. His jaws clench, his back teeth grind. He is incredulous! Can’t believe his frat-brothers testified against him at the grand jury hearing.

  The “identification” of Bart his mother allegedly made, prominently featured in all media accounts of the ax attack, Bart scarcely considers at all. First, he can’t and won’t believe it for he knows that his mother adores him and though she might be pissed with him sometimes, she’d never wish to seriously harm him; the cop must’ve tricked her into nodding her head or the cop made it all up—none of it had happened. Deekman is fighting to exclude the “so-called identification” from evidence to be presented at the trial; particularly, he is adamant that the “hearsay evidence” provided by the medics at the scene will be excluded.

  All this while—weeks, months!—briefs are being filed. Petitions to the court. Deekman is demanding a change of venue. Bart’s relatives have ceased to visit him. His dad’s older brother, his aunt Sheila who’s a high school teacher in Elmira—they’d seemed sympathetic with Bart at the start, now less so. The Delt-Sigs he’d been closest to have never come to visit him—not once.

  The soberng fact is—except for his mother nobody gives a damn whether Bart Hansen lives or dies.

  If he’d had a girlfriend. A loyal girlfriend to have faith in him and visit him in detention; to come to his trial and sit conspicuously behind him, for the gawkers to see—that would impress the jury.

  Sometimes, a juror will fall in love with a defendant. Bart seems to recall that that happened with Ted Bundy the notorious serial killer, when he was defending himself in a Florida courtroom, and maybe with Robert Chambers, the “preppy” murderer in New York City.

  His father’s life-insurance policy will pay $200,000 to Louisa Hansen, not to Bart; for Bart is not the “surviving” son and can make no claim so long as his mother is alive. And his father’s “estate”—whatever that includes—continues to belong to his mother, so long as she is alive. Bart asks Deekman could he take out a loan against the life insurance and/or the estate he will inherit—(he assumes he will inherit, he has not actually seen his parents’ wills)—and Deekman counsels him no, this is probably not a good idea for Bart must keep in mind that he has had a “negative” press and people are “prejudiced” against him, that’s the problem.

  One of the problems.

  Innocent till proven guilty—that was a laugh.

  Bart is thinking: he will go on TV talk shows, when this fiasco is ended. He will plead his case to the American public and see who they believe!

  Here was good news: the judge granted the defense a change of venue for the trial, to Niagara County in western New York State, due to the “extensive and protracted” publicity accruing to the case in the Rensselaer-Albany area.

  This was a triumph for Deekman. And it was a triumph for Deekman that the statements of two medics who’d claimed to have “witnessed” Louisa Hansen identify her son as her assailant at the crime scene would not be admissible in court.

  Deekman said, not a chance the prosecution can convince a jury, all they have is circumstantial evidence not physical evidence.

  Physical evidence meant fingerprints for instance.

  Physical evidence meant bloodstains on clothing known to be Bart Hansen’s clothing not merely the Hansens’ bloodstains on clothing retrieved from a reeking Dumpster at a rest stop at exit 19, New York Thruway (east) that were “so generic” they could belong to anyone.

  The assailant’s clothing, evidently. This was indisputable. But that the clothing was Bart Hansen’s was not so easy to confirm, as Deekman would brilliantly argue.

  Months later at the trial—in Niagara County, in western New York State—the bloodstained clothing would be a hotly contested issue. No prosecution witness could claim that the bloodstained clothes were definitely Bart Hansen’s—or maybe just looked like clothes Bart wore.

  Kind of, like, a heavy-metal influence—except Bart didn’t have tattoos or piercings.

  As, at the trial, when the Delt-Sigs took the witness stand to testify—in suits, dress shirts, and ties, clean-shaven and abashed, unable to bring themselves to look at their frat brother Bart Hansen quivering with indignation at the defense table—it would turn out that, closely questioned by Davis Deekman, not one of the frat boys could absolutely claim that Bart Hansen hadn’t been in the fraternity house through the night of April 11, only that they hadn’t seen him between the hours of 1 a.m. and approximately 8:30 a.m.

  As to the E-ZPass “evidence”—and the claim of a Juniper Drive neighbor that he’d seen Bart’s Explorer in the driveway of the Hansens’ house at about the time of the attack—Deekman offered an explanation that was, if not entirely plausible, yet not entirely implausible: that another individual, unknown to Bart Hansen, or perhaps known to him, had taken the Explorer while he was sleeping in the frat house, driven three hours and twenty minutes to East Rensselaer to break into the Hansens’ house, having heard that Bart Hansen’s family was well-to-do, and committed the terrible crimes—all while Bart was sleeping oblivious.

  This may be one of the most ingeniously planned and staged crimes of our time—it may be revealed, my client is as much a victim as his parents!

  Then, the most astonishing reversal: Louisa Hansen, the prosecution’s leading witness, had changed her mind about accusing her son.

  Far from identifying Bart as the individual who’d killed her husband and had tried to kill her, Mrs. Hansen was now claiming that she remembered nothing of the assault; and that she could not have said what police officers were claiming she’d said—That is ridiculous. I never saw his face.

  The badly injured and mutilated woman had regained consciousness after nearly twenty days in a comatose state but for some time afterward her condition was so grave, her ability to comprehend and to communicate so limited, no one from the Rensselaer County prosecutor’s office was allowed to meet with her.

  During these weeks Mrs. Hansen underwent a number of surgeries—neuro, ophthalmologic, dental, cosmetic; she had surgery to repair a near-severed tendon in her left leg, and she had gastrointestinal procedures to correct inflammations and abscesses in her large colon. She was fed intravenously. She began to regain some of the weight she’d so drastically lost and gradually, with the purposeful air of one struggling to haul herself out of a murky sea, she began to regain a fuller consciousness, and a memory.

  Five months after the ax attack it began to be rumored in courthouse circles and in the media that the murderer’s mother was changing her statement; the following week, a gloating Davis Deekman called a press conference to announce that Louisa Hansen was “not only repudiating her accusation of her son” but would be the defense’s “leading witness” in the upcoming trial.

  Crude tabloid headlines trumpeted this reversal, a terrible blow to the prosecution: bart’s mom c
laims: “my son is not a murderer.”

  And, brain-injured mom-victim claims: “not my son!”

  Louisa Hansen was insisting now that she could not remember anything of the assault, or almost anything; she could remember nothing of what followed when the Rensselaer police officer allegedly questioned her in the bedroom. She had a “vague, confused” memory of being lifted onto a stretcher, and being strapped down and carried away. She may have had a “blurred” memory of a siren, an ambulance ride, a hospital. But she did not remember seeing her husband—her husband’s body. And definitely, she did not remember seeing her son in her bedroom, with an ax.

  To refute the prosecution’s initial claim that Louisa Hansen could have identified her son as the assailant, given her physical injuries at the time, Deekman had enlisted a battery of expert witnesses to present to the court—a neurologist, a neuroscientist whose specialty was vision, a psychiatrist, a cognitive psychologist, even a family therapist whom Louisa had seen intermittently in Rensselaer: for how could so severely traumatized an individual, her skull smashed and scalp bleeding profusely, one eye hanging from its socket, lacerations and deep wounds on many parts of her body, obviously in shock, and, seven hours after the attack, weak from loss of blood, possibly have comprehended any question put to her, let alone answered it accurately? Now, Louisa Hansen herself would be refuting the prosecution’s claim: the testimony by the police officer who’d allegedly asked her if “her son” had hurt her and her husband. Without the medics’ testimonies to bolster his, the police officer did not appear so convincing, cross-examined by Davis Deekman. For he, too, would have been “shaken and distracted” by so horrific a crime scene and could not possibly remember all that had passed between him and the injured woman.

  Initially, Louisa Hansen had said that she was sure that Bart had nothing to do with the attack: she would know if he had—she was his mother after all. She would know.

  Then, as she regained strength, and her voice, Louisa began to insist that she had not ever identified her son as her assailant: that this was an “outright lie.”