She flipped through her contacts to find Tom Carbone’s number instead. She pressed the button before she could think any further, and left a message asking if he would meet her. Then she sat down on the bed and waited, listening to the faint noise of the paint cans being lifted and set down again, over and over, just outside the door.
Tuesday, December 8
I didn’t sleep at all last night. Instead, after Drunk Dave started snoring, I pulled The Clan of the Cave Bear gently from beneath his head and read it until, after bringing me a breakfast I didn’t eat, the guard came to tell me I had visitors.
It was Violet with a white woman lawyer, the daughter of the man Violet takes care of in Brooklyn. Her name is Ramona Frye: she’s about forty and what Grandee would have insisted I call “big-boned” instead of “fat.” She wore a white blouse with a black skirt, like an orchestra member. When she excused herself to use the bathroom an hour into our talk, Violet told me Ramona always wears black and white because she’s color-blind and doesn’t trust herself to match clothes. Because of this she’s seen as a bit of an oddball in New York legal circles, but Violet told me Ramona uses this to her advantage. “They think just because she’s a little quirky, she doesn’t know anything. But she does. Trust me.”
I have no choice but to trust her. Ramona’s willing to represent me pro bono, which I hate because it feels like charity. It is charity. But I don’t know any other lawyers, and I don’t have enough in my bank account to pay for one.
Ramona told me the arraignment was scheduled for ten o’clock in the town court. She sent Violet to my apartment to get some clothes so I wouldn’t have to appear in my GOT ART? tee-shirt and sweats. “We’ll know more about their case after this,” Ramona said, having scribbled some notes from what I could tell her: that they’d taken a ski mask and a sketch of the dead girl from my house, along with my journal. (I told her it was a commonplace book, not a journal, but when she asked what the difference was, I gave up and said it didn’t matter.) “Is there anything about her in there? The girl?” Ramona asked, and I had to answer yes, thinking she would ask me right then What? but she said that could wait till later.
I told her that the mask they found wasn’t mine. They planted it, I said.
“I believe you,” she said, but I couldn’t tell if this was true.
“I mean, if I had committed a crime in a mask, why would I hang onto it?”
“I know. I hear you.” She fiddled with her pen. “But they say they have a witness, maybe two of them.”
“Witnesses? Who say what?”
“That they saw you wearing a mask that day. At the pond.”
I stared at her. “That’s not possible.”
Ramona made a face I couldn’t read—disgust, maybe? If so, at what or whom? “I hate to say it, but let’s face it. You’re black. Living in a place that isn’t all that friendly to black people. Anything is possible.”
The heat that rose inside me as she spoke made sweat break out on my face and arms, even as I recognized that the room itself was cooler than it should have been. “Look,” I said, knowing I had to get it out of the way. “I was there. At the pond that day. But I wasn’t wearing a mask.”
Her eyes narrowed, and I tried not to read suspicion in them. Anticipating her next question, I saved her the trouble. “I went over to the house, and I heard Joy and Susanne arguing. Joy took off in her mother’s car, and Susanne asked me to go after her.”
Ramona held a finger up. “Don’t use phrases like ‘go after her.’”
“Okay.” I felt myself flush further.
“Why were you at the house in the first place?”
I hesitated before saying only that I had wanted to see Susanne.
“Were you sleeping with her?” Ramona did not look up as she asked me this but kept her eyes trained on the notepad in front of her.
My face growing warmer, I told her, “We had been. But it was over.” I watched her write the word—over—and was shocked at how much it stung.
“Okay, you can give me those details later—when it started, for how long. So you go to the house why? You were planning to do what, before you heard them arguing?”
Again, I paused before answering. I know you aren’t supposed to hide things from your lawyer. But I could almost hear her follow-up if I told the truth. Understand that I have to ask you this, okay? Were you sleeping with the daughter, too? and even though I could honestly have answered No, I did not even want to hear the question.
Besides, another perfectly reasonable response had presented itself to me in that moment. One that no one would be able to refute. Ramona was asking about my intentions, right? And no one could see into those except me.
“I wanted to show her the sketch I made of Joy. The one they found in my drawer, the one they think is evidence of something. Susanne had asked if I’d do a portrait.”
Ramona pursed her lips as she wrote it down. “So what happened after the girl took off? You and the mother have a conversation?”
I told her that Susanne had been worried about Joy, because she’d been arrested the previous week. I told her that Susanne wasn’t sure what was going on with her.
“She wasn’t sure she could trust her?”
“I think that’s fair to say. She thought Joy was in trouble, and she wasn’t sure how much. Or what kind.”
Another scribbled note. This time I couldn’t make out the words upside down, and I hoped she’d be able to decipher her own handwriting when it came time. “So what happened then?” Ramona continued. “You get in your own car and drive to this pond?”
I nodded. “Why didn’t the mother go with you?” she asked.
“I think she was afraid it would escalate things, if Joy saw her. If Joy knew her mother had followed her.” Again, not precisely the truth. I’d been the one to suggest that Susanne stay behind, thinking that because of my conversation with Joy at my apartment a couple of weeks earlier, I might have some sway over her that her mother did not. How presumptuous I had been! Yet it hadn’t come from a delusion of power; I think I wanted only to remind myself, and perhaps prove to Susanne, that I was still important to her life, whether she knew it or not.
“Only we’re not sure what ‘things’ we’re talking about—the things that might escalate,” Ramona said. “Right?”
“Well, not at the time. She was out on the ice with some girls—on the news it said they were girls from her class—and then they had a fight. An argument, I mean.”
“This girl was doing a lot of arguing,” Ramona murmured. “And you saw her out there, arguing with her friends?”
“I didn’t know they were her friends, but yes. I couldn’t hear it, but it looked tense.”
“So you do what?”
“I didn’t necessarily think she was in trouble. I figured it was just teenage stuff. You know, high school drama. So I went into the store—there’s a little store there, what the kids call the shack—and after a few minutes I came back out and went home.”
She interrupted her scribbling to ask, “Did anybody see you inside this shack?”
I told her that I’d stared a little too long at the cashier behind the counter, and it seemed to make him angry. I told her about my short conversation with the man I took to be the owner of the place. “I’ll talk to them,” she said. “Maybe they can be useful. Did you notice anyone else?”
Not that I remembered, I said.
“Did you call Joy’s mother at any point?”
This had not occurred to me, in all the ruminating I’d done since, about that day. “Oh. Yes. Yes! I called to let her know Joy was okay. They can check those records, can’t they? Won’t that help?” I tried not to let my voice get away from me, the way it wanted to.
Ramona made a hmm noise—ambiguous at best, I thought, but then maybe she was trying not to get her hopes up, too. “Yes, they can check the records. But it won’t prove anything other than the fact that you called her, and what time. It won’t prove what you
might have done after the call. It’s like what they could say about your notebook: a prosecutor could always argue you’d written certain things after the fact, to use precisely in a situation like this. As an alibi.”
Only then did it sink in exactly how much my accusers must hate me—that they could think I would murder a girl, then go to such cold-blooded, deliberate lengths to conceal the act.
“You have to do something,” I told her.
“I will.” Ramona didn’t elaborate what she would do, or how, and I forced myself not to ask, in case she couldn’t answer.
“Can you prove he planted the mask?” I asked.
“I don’t see how. Unless he confesses, or the other cop testifies. And I doubt he will. Even if he did see Armstrong plant it, cops tend to stick together. And after all, he’s the chief.” She looked back at her notes. “You and the other officer were in the living room when the chief entered the kitchen? So neither of you actually saw him open that particular drawer.”
“Right.” He got me, I thought, the same way I would if the chief had stood over me with a gun and fired into my belly.
Ramona, appearing to perceive my dismay, leaned forward and said, “Look. The mask is circumstantial. Assuming everything else they have is also circumstantial, then we have a better chance.”
I told her that everything else had to be circumstantial. Then I worried that the force of my tone might have put her off. More quietly I asked, “Nobody will be at the arraignment, will they? I mean, would Susanne—the parents—be there?”
Ramona hesitated. “They might.”
“Is it possible for me not to go, then? Can they do it in absentia?”
She rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse, and I sensed she was only making the gesture to buy time. “That would just make you look guilty. Especially if the family is there.”
She told me not to worry, but I barely heard the words. My relief when I entered the courtroom and didn’t see Susanne was so great that I forgot my fear. In the next moments the relief expanded when I saw that the judge was a black man. I sensed that Ramona felt the same, although of course I couldn’t be sure.
But then Gil Enright stood from the back row. “You sleep with my wife and then you kill my daughter?” The words were not shouted. I could barely make them out. Absurdly, I remembered what Susanne had told me once: Gil doesn’t swear, ever. He doesn’t raise his voice. Now he did not resist or say anything further when the uniformed guard took him gently by one arm and led him out. I felt more shaken than if he had run at me with a knife. But Ramona told me to pay attention to the proceedings. Worry about him later, she said.
Standing up for the other side, an assistant district attorney told the judge why the prosecutor believed there was reasonable cause to charge me with the second-degree murder of Joy Enright: I had recently been rejected by the victim’s mother, with whom I’d been having an affair. I’d been seen having an intense exchange with Susanne outside her house just before Joy went missing. On prior occasions, I had been observed by neighbors, sitting in a car outside her house with no reason to be there other than to stalk her. (Only twice, and not stalking! But by now I understood that they were allowed to get their licks in, say what they wanted to say.) Witnesses had seen me on the day of Joy’s disappearance, at the scene of her disappearance, wearing a ski mask. (Who is saying that? I wanted to shout. But I did my best to obey Ramona’s instructions and appear calm. I was taught to never show anger in front of white people, to the extent that when I’m with them, I sometimes don’t even realize I’m feeling it. But I knew it now.)
The prosecutor continued to say that my own journal provided evidence that the victim and the accused had a personal relationship. At the word “relationship,” the judge’s head snapped up from the notes he was taking, and the prosecutor must have noticed because he was quick to amend it to “I mean, they were acquainted,” and next to me I could feel Ramona wishing she’d followed up on this instead of leaving it for later.
“When police executed a search warrant for the mask,” the prosecutor concluded, “they also discovered a sketch of the victim. And although we have not been able to question him yet, we do not believe the defendant has an alibi for his whereabouts after he was identified at the location Joy Enright was last seen.”
I had driven straight back to my apartment after leaving the pond. Cass might have seen me from her window—she often moves the curtain to check out my comings and goings—but even if she could vouch that I’d been home directly after I admitted to being at the pond, I’d gone up to my attic to work and had no contact with anyone else for the rest of the day. There was no one to account for my actions, and according to what I learned from the news, the police couldn’t be sure exactly when Joy was killed.
After the prosecutor described his case, he asked that the judge order me to remain in custody. Then it was Ramona’s turn to make a case for bail; she cited my “pristine” record, with no prior arrests or any mental health issues; the fact that I had arranged for the care of my ailing grandmother in Rochester when I enrolled in graduate school; the fact that I owned her house now and planned to return to it when I received my degree; my current status as a student at the art college; and the fact that from what she’d just heard, the prosecutor had only a circumstantial case against her client. I made sure to meet the judge’s eyes as he contemplated the bail amount. It couldn’t hurt, right? Wouldn’t this judge be able to see something in my face that a white judge could not? I was both surprised and not surprised to identify this thought in myself as I stood before the bench, looking up at this man who’d earned the right to determine my fate. But he looked not back at me but down at his papers as he announced a bail amount of seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.
I made a sound, and Ramona lifted a hand—whether toward the judge or me, I couldn’t tell, nor could I read what the gesture meant. The bailiff led me out to the hallway and into a windowless room, and when Ramona came in she asked, “How much is the house in Rochester worth?” before she was even fully seated.
I said, “It’s my grandmother’s house, she raised me there, I’m not putting that up.”
She slapped a pen hard against her yellow pad. “It’s your house now, and your freedom is on the line,” she told me. “This is not the time to get all sentimental. How much?”
Chastened, I told her probably two thirty, two fifty at the most. “Is there anybody who can help you out with the rest?” she asked. “Anybody you know with discretionary funds?”
I began to shake my head, then stopped when I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in years. Ramona asked What? and I said, “My mother’s family has money. Or they did, anyway, when my father knew her.” I explained the circumstances of my birth: My parents had met at the Eastman School, where my mother was a piano student and my father the head piano tuner. Their relationship began with an argument over high C; she wanted him to keep refining the note, he told her it was perfect the way it was. A professor passing by in the hallway confirmed that my father was right, causing Linda to concede, and my father invited her out for coffee. Why? I asked when he told me the story, the night before sixth grade started and I couldn’t fall asleep out of nerves. Because I felt guilty, my father said. Why? I asked again, and when he only shrugged, I knew it was one of those things that had to do with her being white and him being black that he could never quite find words for. When Linda got pregnant, she wanted an abortion (although that was not how he put it; he said, “She did not want to bring the baby to term,” as if I might not realize that the baby was me), because they had no plans to marry, she was too young, and she wanted a music career. My father persuaded her that if she would just agree to carry out the pregnancy, he would take over from there; Linda could move back to Georgia and never have to hear from him again.
I abbreviated all of this in telling it to Ramona. “And you’ve never heard from her? Not even once?” She paused in her scribbling, and when I shook my head,
she persisted, “Do you have any idea where in Georgia she was from?”
“No. I mean, outside Atlanta somewhere.” The word “Atlanta” held a bitter taste for me; its airport was the origination of my father’s fatal flight.
But this was not what my lawyer was interested in. “All I know is her name,” I told Ramona.
“Which is?”
“Linda Martin. I’m named after her.”
I watched her eyes flicker and imagined she was trying to decide whether to reveal that she assumed I’d been named after Martin Luther King, as most people do. Instead she only groaned slightly and said, “Common. And she’s probably married now, so it will be harder to track her down.”
“Track her down?” I’d forgotten that the questions about my mother had been prompted by my need to find bail money. “I don’t want you to do that.” The idea of Ramona locating Linda—after all this time, and in so dire a circumstance—stirred the nausea that lies constantly in my stomach under the word “mother,” a silt base waiting to be kicked up.
“You mean you want to stay in jail? When there’s possibly a way out?”
I considered. “How long are we talking about?”
“Through an indictment and a trial. That could be a year or more, easy.”
“How would you find her?”
“I have some contacts down there. They’ll recommend an investigator.”
“And what would you tell her?” Ever since my father’s death, whenever I’d imagined my mother finally letting go of whatever it was that had kept her from finding out about me, I relished the notion of her coming to understand that her son was an accomplished, admired artist. She’d regret having given me up, having let so much of my life pass without knowing me. Never had I even entertained the vision of her learning instead that I’d been arrested, let alone for murder. The possibility that this might cause her to shudder with relief, realizing what she’d escaped, made my breath skip a beat.
How Will I Know You? Page 4
