The Lavender Hour

by Anne Leclaire

  NOW, ON the fourth day, I still felt numb as Gage ushered me into a conference room and closed the door. “How ya doing?” he asked. “You okay? Sorry about that mess outside. I'll get that straightened out.” He strutted around the room in that roosterlike way some short men possess. “It's the goddamned media. You better start praying for a high-profile murder in the statehouse or a natural disaster or a scandal with cocaine or call girls in the governor's office, get them off our back and on to the next dog and pony show.”

  Days before the trial, he warned me the media would be tough because it would draw attention to the case, and what we wanted was to slip under the radar. Without the media, everyone would be happy if the case just disappeared. (“To tell you the truth,” Gage said one night, “Nelson would like this case to dry up and go away. It's a no-win.”) But with press attention, everything had changed. “The case got sex appeal” was how Gage put it now. A handsome young man dying of cancer. A pretty young defendant (Gage's words). A grieving mother. A young daughter. And of course the hot-button issue of assisted suicide. Or manslaughter, depending on which paper you read. For Nelson, it had become a high-profile prosecution right before an election. “It's all about politics,” Gage said. “It's always about politics. Never forget that.”

  “So here's what's happening today,” he was saying. “The DA will start calling his witnesses. Most of them will be familiar to you.” He checked a paper. “The first one on Nelson's list is the State Police lieutenant who headed the investigation first,” he said. “Lieutenant Moody. You remember him?”

  I nodded. As if I could forget.

  There was a rap on the door.

  “Come,” Gage barked.

  A court officer poked his head in. “The judge is ready,” he said.

  Twenty-three

  UNTIL THE ARRAIGNMENT, I had never been inside a courtroom in my life. (I had never even had a parking ticket, a fact that failed to impress either the prosecutor or the people picketing outside in the parking lot.) But by the second day of the trial, I had come to know every detail of the courtroom. It smelled like all other public buildings of a certain age—old shellac, dust, dreariness—and held the same faded but stately grandeur. The furniture was heavy, and four chandeliers hung from the frescoed ceiling; there were oil portraits of men hanging on the butter yellow walls and a grandfather clock by the judge's bench. Floral print carpeting covered the floors. The only odd note was a large gold cod that hung suspended from the ceiling. “The official state fish,” Gage explained.

  Back on Tuesday, Judge Savage had laid out the ground rules. One pool camera for the media. Everyone was to remain seated during the proceedings, and there was to be no standing at the back of the room or on the spiral stairs that led to the balcony. If a spectator was unable to find a seat, he had to leave, an announcement that had resulted in a throng of people crowding the corridors each day before the doors were opened. By the time the court convened each morning, the room was packed, every seat taken, including those in the balcony. Faye was there. And Ben and Muriel and Gordon. The others in my hospice group had stayed away.

  This morning, the judge nodded to the bailiff, and the jury was ushered in. They were serious, stiff, and self-conscious. Several of the men wore jackets and neckties. At one time or another, each of them looked over at me with some curiosity. When one juror caught me looking at her, she averted her eyes, as if we had been caught doing something illegal. Mrs. Martha Anderson, mother of the deceased son, sat in the chair designated for the foreperson. Once they were settled in, the judge leaned her arms on the bench and peered out over the courtroom. She was easily the smallest person in the room—Gage told me that she sat on a stack of phone books—and if you passed her on the street, you might think she was a widow, someone who had never worked outside the home, but up there behind her bench, there was no doubt about her power. She turned to the DA.

  “Mr. Nelson, is the commonwealth ready to proceed?”

  “We are, Your Honor.”

  “You may call your first witness.”

  Nelson stood up. “The state calls Lieutenant Ralph Moody.”

  The bailiff left and moments later returned through a side door by the jury box with Moody, who was sworn in and seated. He was dressed in a navy suit, a little tight through the shoulders, and looked larger than I remembered.

  “Would you please state your name and spell your last name for the record?” Nelson said.

  “Lieutenant Ralph Moody, Moody.”

  “Where do you reside?”

  “Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts.”

  “Lieutenant Moody, what is your occupation?”

  “I am a State Police detective.”

  “For how long?”

  “Approximately fourteen years.”

  I kept my hands folded in my lap, and I could see the pulse throbbing against my inner wrist. I fixed my attention on the witness stand, but in my peripheral vision, I was aware of one of the reporters sketching my profile. My cheeks flushed. My mouth went dry, in spite of the Xanax I'd taken earlier without telling Gage.

  Speaking clearly and precisely and without referring to notes, Nelson led Moody through his opening testimony. Moody told the jury that the commonwealth gave the DA's office the authority to investigate any unattended death and that he was an officer in the detective bureau assigned to the district attorney's office. He explained that earlier in the summer, the DA's office had received a call from the Chatham Police asking them to investigate the unattended death of a man named Luke Ryder.

  “And did you respond to that call?”

  “I did.”

  “Please tell the jury what you did.”

  “I went to the deceased's home on Sea Harbor Lane in West Chatham.”

  “And what did you discover about the deceased?”

  “I learned that the deceased, Luke Ryder, had been dying of cancer.”

  “So what was your reaction to being called in to investigate?”

  “I would say I was somewhat surprised.”

  “Did the Chatham Police give any further explanation as to why they had called you?”

  “Yes. According to the officer, a member of the deceased's immediate family was convinced he had been given an overdose of morphine.”

  “Did the officer tell you who that was?”

  “Yes. The deceased's daughter.”

  “And what did you do then?”

  “I, along with State Police detective Peter Sakolosky, carried out a preliminary investigation.”

  “Please tell the jury what that involved.”

  “We called in Crime Scene Services. We videotaped the scene and took photos.”

  In response to Nelson's questions, Lieutenant Moody walked the jury through his procedure, explaining how the investigators had looked at the medications, written down the prescription strength, counted the pills. “We called the doctor who prescribed them, then bagged them as evidence. There was a morphine drip by the patient's bed, and we took that, too. We also checked and bagged the trash. We took down the names of anyone who had seen the deceased or been inside the house within the last twenty-four hours.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  “Syringe, any meds not prescribed, any signs of a discarded package or empty vials or IV bags.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Yes, sir. We found a single plastic bag in the garbage by the deceased's bed.”

  “What did you do with that?”

  “We bagged it and brought it to the station.”

  “And what did you do next?”

  “We interviewed several people who had seen the deceased prior to his death.”

  “And was the defendant one of the people you interviewed?”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “Do you see the defendant in the courtroom today?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  “Would you point her out and describe her for the court?”

  Moody raised
an arm and pointed at me. “She is the redhead in the tan suit sitting next to the defense attorney.”

  “May the record indicate that Lieutenant Moody has identified the defendant, Jessica Long?”

  “Yes, it may,” Savage said.

  The swooshing of my heart pounded in my ears like surf, and I grew light-headed. I swallowed and silently intoned a litany. Don't faint. Don't faint. Don't faint. That moment, with Moody singling me out, I knew terror, deep and pure and nothing like the anxiety I had until then thought was fear. This—this icy clutch of dread—was true fear.

  “And what, if any, was the defendant's relationship to the deceased?”

  “She was his hospice volunteer.”

  “Now, during your initial interview with the defendant,” Nelson continued, “did you ask the defendant if Luke Ryder had ever discussed the possibility of suicide?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said he never had.”

  “So, at this point, what were you thinking?”

  “I had an open mind, but in the initial inquiry, we found nothing to substantiate the relative's accusation.”

  “But you kept the investigation open?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is that?”

  “We continued to receive calls from the deceased's family. Particularly from his daughter.”

  Nelson looked down at his notes. “And that would be Miss Paige Ryder?”

  “Yes, sir. She continued to insist that her father's death was not due to normal causes. She insisted that the police request an autopsy.”

  “And did you?”

  “We told her that, as part of the investigation, we had sent urine and blood to the state crime lab and had requested a full toxicology report. We also sent the bottles of medications and the plastic bag we retrieved from the scene.”

  “And what else did you do while waiting for the report?”

  “We pursued other avenues. We checked with the deceased's insurance company to see if there was an insurance angle, someone who would profit from his death.”

  “And what was the result of that line of inquiry?”

  “We learned that the deceased did have a life insurance policy but that, during his illness, he had borrowed against it.”

  “And what else did you do?”

  “We conducted background checks on everyone who was on our list.”

  “And did this check reveal anything of further interest?”

  “No.”

  “And eventually you received the report back from the state lab.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did the results disclose?”

  “The toxicology report revealed that, at the time of death, there was a massive amount of narcotics in the system of the deceased, specifically Seconal. The cause of death was determined to be acute narcotic intoxication.”

  Nelson stopped the questioning to have the lab report marked and entered as evidence; several of the jurors looked over at me.

  “Did you receive anything else from the state lab pertaining to this case?”

  “Yes. We also received a report that the defendant's fingerprints were on both the medicine vials and the plastic bag we recovered from the scene. The bag also contained traces of Seconal.”

  Moody again stopped his questioning to enter the lab result as evidence. He took his time, waiting until after the clerk had completed the paperwork to resume questioning, and I saw how this gave the jury time to sit with the information about my fingerprints. Finally he turned back to Moody.

  “And at this time, because of the lab results, what did you do?”

  “We focused our investigation on the defendant.”

  “Did you have occasion to interview her a second time?”

  “I did.”

  “Please tell the jury about this interview.”

  “Well, I asked her again if the deceased had ever mentioned taking his own life, and she said he never had.”

  “And what did you do next?”

  “We procured a search warrant and searched the defendant's home.”

  “And what, if anything, did you find?”

  I knew what was coming. Moody was about to present the evidence that convinced the grand jury to sign the bill of indictment. Don't worry about it, Gage told me back when we'd learned that I was to be indicted. “The grand jury rubber-stamps cases for the DA's office.” He told me that their threshold for signing a bill was extremely low, lower even than reasonable doubt, that Nelson's case was completely circumstantial. Still, I worried how this jury would react to Moody's answer.

  “We found several things of interest in the defendant's home: a man's shirt, later identified by the deceased's mother as belonging to him, and a small oil painting that was reported missing from the deceased's home.”

  Again I felt the weight of the jurors' eyes. My pulse throbbed against my wrist, at my throat, echoed in my ears.

  “Was there anything else?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What else?”

  “In a drawer in an upstairs room, we found an envelope bearing the deceased's name and containing a lock of hair, which later DNA testing confirmed belonged to the deceased.”

  There was noise in the room, as if everyone had dragged a shoe across the floor at once. I swallowed.

  “You found a lock of the deceased's hair in the defendant's home?”

  Gage was on his feet. “Asked and answered.”

  “Move along, Mr. Nelson,” Judge Savage said.

  “After you found these articles, did you have a conversation with the defendant?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Please recall that conversation for the jury.”

  “I asked her how these articles came to be in her possession, and she said the deceased had given them to her.”

  “Let me understand,” Nelson said. “The defendant, a hospice volunteer, maintained the deceased gave her a lock of his hair, one of his shirts, and a painting?” Disbelief dripped from his voice.

  “That is what she said, yes.”

  They have nothing, Gage had said again and again about the DA's case. Some fingerprints on a vial that everyone and his brother had touched. A shirt, a lock of hair, a painting. A plastic bag. I didn't dare even one glance at the jury box.

  “I want to enter into evidence Exhibits 3,4, and 5,”Nelson said. He carried Luke's shirt and the painting and the glassine envelope to the clerk, who attached stickers to each; then he brought them to the witness stand.

  “Are these the items you recovered from the defendant's home?”

  Moody inspected each of the items. “Yes, they are.”

  The jurors stared at the envelope containing Luke's hair, as if it alone held the answers to the question of my guilt or innocence.

  “And while executing the search warrant, did you discover anything else pertinent to the case?”

  Moody nodded. “We found a notebook belonging to the defendant.”

  Nelson returned to his table, picked up my sketchbook, and handed it to Moody. “Is this the notebook you are referring to?”

  Moody opened the book, leafed through the pages. “Yes, it is.”

  Nelson again went through the procedure of having the book admitted as evidence.

  “Was there anything about the book in particular?”

  “There was.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Drawings of the deceased. Dozens of drawings the defendant had made of him.”

  Nelson retrieved the sketchbook and received permission from the judge to show it to the jury. Looking back later, I would see that that was the moment, three days into the trial, when Luke stopped being the deceased to the jury and became a man.

  Nelson addressed his witness.

  “Did you have further conversation with the defendant at that time?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “One more question, Lieutenant Moody. In the course
of your investigation, were you able to ascertain who was the last person to see Luke Ryder before his death?”

  “We were.”

  “And who was that?”

  “The defendant. Jessica Long.”

  “Thank you.” Nelson turned away. “No further questions.”

  I still couldn't look at the jury, afraid of what I might see on their faces. My hands ached. Across each palm, I'd inscribed livid half-moons with my fingernails.

  Judge Savage addressed Gage.

  “Does the defense wish to cross-examine the witness?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Gage stood up. “Lieutenant Moody, the deceased was dying of pancreatic cancer, was he not?”

  “I'm not a doctor.”

  “But you talked to his doctor several times during the course of your investigation, did you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you learn?”

  “The patient had cancer, yes.”

  “And Mr. Ryder had been on pain medication for several months and recently the dosage had been increased, and at the time of his death, he was on a morphine drip, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir, I believe so.”

  “Believe so? Or know so?”

  “Yes, sir, that is what the medical records revealed.”

  “So one might reasonably assume he would have massive amounts of painkiller in his system?”

  Moody shrugged. “He would have some, yes.”

  “In your investigation, did you learn that Luke Ryder was under hospice care?”

  “Yes.”

  “To qualify for hospice, a person has to have a doctor's statement they have six months or less to live, is that correct?”

  “I believe so.”

  “How long had hospice been involved?”

  “Since April.”

  “So it is safe to assume that the deceased was, in fact, dying?”

  “Like I said, I'm not a doctor.”