I could see the soda chugging down her throat. “What do you mean?”
“Yates phoned the cops and her husband and told them what she’d done. That’s why some people found it hard to believe her story. I believe it, by the way. Lenore didn’t phone anyone. Saunders testified that he found her rocking the baby, and she told him she’d heard something wrong in the baby’s cry a few days ago, and this time she heard a voice coming from the baby, telling her to kill the baby, so she knew the baby was possessed by a spirit and she had to shake it out of him, or he’d die.”
Donna Bergen’s recitation was dismissive, bored. In my mind I could hear Saunders, sitting across from me at The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, the grief in his voice real. “You didn’t believe him?”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t prove he was lying, but that’s what my gut said. Maybe it’s what she told him, and he believed it ’cause he had to if he wanted to keep her from going to prison.”
“Why would he lie to protect her?”
“Guilt, because he wasn’t there half the time to help her? Because he wasn’t there to protect the kid? Because his affair drove her to it? I believe he honestly felt sorry for her, and the jury believed it, too. I think that’s why he testified, to make Lenore look sympathetic—as her husband, he didn’t have to. And he was there every day, visiting her. Stayed as long as they let him. His mother, on the other hand. If looks could kill . . .”
The prosecutor drained the can, crushed it, and lobbed it into a trash can several feet from her desk, where it made a clunking sound. She seemed pleased. “Which brings me back to my dilemma. Say I bring up the affair, and the fact that Lenore knew about it. If the jury thinks the knowledge depressed Lenore, I’m feeding right into the hands of the defense counsel, Victor Chapman, who happens to be one of the shrewdest guys I’ve ever been up against.”
I recalled what Korwin had told me about the illness. “Because if she was depressed about the affair, that could lay a foundation for the postpartum depression?”
“Bingo.” She beamed her approval. “Same problem with Lenore being pregnant when Saunders married her. If I argued that she didn’t really want the baby, I’d be laying the ground for depression, and I knew Chapman and the defense shrink, Lawrence Korwin, were ready to step all over me.” She grimaced, as if reliving the pain. “We had our expert, but he was no match for Korwin. And Chapman made mincemeat out of him. ‘Is it possible . . . ? Is it possible . . . ?’ ” Bergen asked, mimicking a whine. “Saunders hired the best.”
“What was your psychiatrist’s evaluation?”
“That Lenore was fabricating. Everybody knows about postpartum psychosis. There are books on the subject, plenty of articles online. Oprah did a show on it. How hard is it to fake the symptoms? Hallucinations, paranoia, delusions. You don’t have to be Meryl Streep. And Lenore gave an Oscar-winning performance.”
I won’t say the idea hadn’t crossed my mind. She read books and books about her and watched the movie a hundred times. She wanted to get it just right. When you watched her perform, you would have sworn she was really blind. And Saunders had said Lenore had been a textbook case. I flashed to the books that had littered the carpet of Lenore’s apartment, told myself Lenore had probably bought them after Max had died, because if not, Donna Bergen would have known about them and used them against her.
“Our guy also stated that women with postpartum psychosis usually show symptoms within the first month after the baby is born,” Donna Bergen said. “And they usually, though not always, have some history of schizophrenia, manic depression, or bipolar disorder. Korwin blew him out of the water. He argued that depressed people don’t always know they’re depressed, so why would they go for treatment? He said she’d displayed symptoms of bipolar disorder. A need to be seductive, fear of abandonment, impulsiveness, a decreased need for sleep. Then he brought in Lenore’s sad childhood—the dad skipping, the foster homes, the constant abandonment, the tough times. The jury was ready to elect him president.”
I pictured the psychiatrist on the witness stand—charismatic, articulate, sincere. He was an authority on the subject and had believed Lenore, so why shouldn’t I? “You think Korwin lied?”
“I’ve cross-examined experts who, for the right price, would argue that blue was pink and sound convincing. I’m not saying Korwin’s one of them. He’s tops in his field, has impeccable credentials. I think he saw what he wanted to see, and worked backward. If she had postpartum psychosis, she had to be manic or bipolar, right? So he found stuff in her past to support that belief. Doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s like writing a term paper. You start with the hypothesis and do research. You use what fits, you leave out what doesn’t.”
I could see what she meant. “And the jury believed him?”
“Absolutely. Without him, we would’ve stood a chance. The jury, by the way, was a dream come true for Lenore. Chapman knows how to pick ’em. Mostly males, who are suckers for a story like this. People without kids, people willing to believe that someone suffering from a chemical imbalance could hear voices that would tell her to kill her child. We had a few on our side, too. A parent of two small children. A woman who’d suffered from mental illness and didn’t believe it could cause someone to kill. Obviously we didn’t have enough.” The prosecutor sighed. “I caught Lenore in a couple of lies, but she squirmed out of them, kept saying she didn’t remember everything clearly. And the jury bought it. Korwin caught the lies, too. I saw him outside the courtroom during a recess right after she testified. He was one unhappy camper.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“What’s he gonna say? ‘Put me back on the stand, Ms. Bergen, I want to retract my testimony’?”
“What kind of lies?”
“It’s in the transcript. You can read it if you want. You want to hear irony? Santa Barbara’s the headquarters of Postpartum Support International and PEP. Postpartum Education for Parents. You’d think she would’ve gotten help if she’d wanted it. She claims she didn’t know about it, didn’t know she was depressed.”
“Maybe she didn’t.”
“You sound like Chapman.” The prosecutor made a sour face.
“So if she lied, why did the jury believe her?”
“I’ll tell you why.” She leaned toward me, her weight on her elbows. “They saw a new mom who had just moved to a new city, living away from her mother, married to a wealthy businessman who left her alone for days at a time so that he could make more money while she was alone with their colicky kid and cried all day and sank deeper into depression. Chapman made Saunders into the heavy. It was a brilliant job. If Saunders had been on trial, they would have locked him up and thrown away the key.”
“But they still found Lenore guilty.”
She shrugged. “They had no choice. There was a dead child, and Lenore killed him. California doesn’t have a diminished-capacity defense, and the defense didn’t go for an insanity plea, which they probably would’ve won. Hell, when she took the stand, I almost believed her.”
“Why didn’t they go for insanity?” That had puzzled me.
“They did at first. Chapman entered the plea. This was right after they arrested her, and she was just starting the meds. Then Lenore changed her mind. She insisted to Chapman that she wasn’t insane, that the jury would see how much she loved Max, that they would believe that she would never have done anything to harm him. I thought Chapman was going to have a coronary.” The prosecutor seemed pleased by the memory. “Chapman was hoping for manslaughter. I was hoping for second-degree murder, but the jury went with manslaughter. The judge granted probation, and she was in a hospital for six months. Her baby didn’t even live half that long.” Bergen’s scowl was ferocious.
The bitterness was back in her voice, and I wondered if it was directed at the judge. “Some people thought the judge was bought.”
“Bullshit. The judge believed Lenore’s story, just like everyone else.”
“Except you. So ma
ybe it’s true,” I ventured.
“Except me. Look, I’ve seen cases where the mother really did kill a child because she was mentally ill. Those are tragic for everyone concerned, and I’m the first one to say, get her in treatment. But I’ve seen enough of these so-called postpartum defenses, and unlike male D.A.’s and judges whose brain cells seem to shrivel up when they see a crying mom, I can see the bullshit when it’s there. And these malingerers make it look bad for every woman who really does have psychosis.” The prosecutor gave me a sharp, appraising look. “You have questions, too, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m trying to understand who Lenore was, what her relationship was with Saunders,” I said, but of course, it was only half the truth. What did I know about the hit-and-run victim with whom I’d spoken only minutes, the woman who was either wonderful or manipulative, goddess or demon? Or was she somewhere in between?
“Maybe you’re angry because you don’t like to lose,” I added, uncomfortable having the ball in my court.
She laughed. “Hell, no, I don’t like to lose. Does anyone? But that’s not why I’m pissed. I’m pissed because Lenore Saunders got away with murder. And I don’t mean murder two.”
Now I was confused. “So you do think she murdered her child to get back at her husband?”
She snapped off the tab on the remaining can and perched herself on the front of her desk. “There was this moment at the sentencing. Korwin was explaining that the therapy and medication were working, that Lenore was doing so well. He didn’t sound as convincing to me, and I think Lenore was worried. She was watching him intently, and I was watching her.” The prosecutor took a sip of the soda, drawing out the moment.
I inched forward on my chair, curious to hear what she was about to say, dreading it at the same time because I wasn’t ready to give up the Lenore I’d been carrying around in my mind from the first time I met her.
“Then the judge pronounced the sentence,” Donna Bergen said. “Probation, et cetera. And Lenore put her head halfway down for maybe a second or two, and her eyes kind of slid to the side.” She simulated the movements. “That’s when I saw it.” She paused. “The smile.”
thirty-four
That was it? I waited, certain that she had something more, but she sat there on her desk, watching for my reaction.
“Of course she was smiling,” I said, annoyed. “She was happy. Why wouldn’t she be?” Bergen had set me up for a Sixth Sense shocker and had given me Ishtar.
She wagged her finger at me. “This wasn’t an ‘I’m so happy I’m not going to jail’ smile. That I expected. This was ‘Gotcha.’ ‘Gotcha, you smart-ass prosecutor. Gotcha, ye suckers of the jury. Gotcha, judge. Gotcha, shrinks. I mean Korwin, too, not just our guy.” She aimed an imaginary gun at imaginary targets around the room. “Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. A second later the waterworks were there. The good Lenore was back.”
The woman had a problem, I decided. Maybe it was all that caffeine. “Don’t you think you’re reading a great deal into a smile?”
“You had to see it,” she insisted. “After the sentencing, Saunders came over and hugged her. I thought he looked relieved but kind of uncomfortable, but she was drinking him in like she’d been in the desert and this was the first water she’d seen in days. Then she put her arms around his neck and laid her head against his chest like she was his little girl. There were reporters and TV people, but they didn’t exist for her. He was the only person in the world. And I realized then that he’d been the only person in the world who had ever mattered. Not the baby. She didn’t give a shit about the baby.”
I could have said a lot of things. That of course, Lenore was relieved to be free, that there was nothing unnatural about concentrating on her husband, from whom she’d been separated, or ignoring the media that had ripped into her so badly. I just sat there, visualizing what Donna Bergen had described, sorting out other things I’d learned about Lenore, wondering if she could be right.
“She played us all the way.” A vein pulsed in the prosecutor’s cheek. “After I left the courthouse, I got to thinking. Why did she change her plea? Why didn’t she plead not guilty because of insanity? She was hearing voices, right? She thought her kid had an alien force inside him.”
I thought for a moment. “The result would have been the same, wouldn’t it? Whether she was acquitted on an insanity plea or placed on probation by the judge, she would have ended up in a hospital.”
“With an insanity plea, she was looking at a year in a locked facility, minimum. Probably longer. She gets well too soon, the docs would be suspicious. And before being released, she’d have to go before a medical review panel. A much tougher process, I can tell you. With probation it was six to nine months with Korwin, and she’s out. Plus, with the insanity plea, she would’ve been interviewed by more shrinks. And that was something she didn’t want to do.”
“But she took a serious risk,” I pointed out. “She could have ended up spending years in prison.”
“She knew she had a winning team. She had Chapman. She had Korwin. She’d convinced them, and she would convince the jury. She gambled and she won.”
“She tried to kill herself twice,” I said. “Doesn’t that say anything?”
“They were gesture suicides, according to our shrink. Korwin, of course, didn’t agree. Lenore didn’t take enough Haldol to kill herself, and the wrist wounds weren’t deep. I think she did it to convince Saunders how distraught she was. And it played well with the jury.”
“Did you tell anyone about this?”
Donna Bergen laughed. “That I didn’t like her smile? That she was madly in love with her husband? They’d tell me I needed to see a shrink. No point, anyway. With double jeopardy, I couldn’t get at her. I did tell Korwin. I congratulated him on getting taken in by her and suggested he get her spayed. He got all hot under the collar, threatened to sue me.” The prosecutor spun the empty can on her desk. “She did it because she thought the kid was in the way. The mother knew, too. I could see it in her face.”
“Mrs. Saunders?”
“Mrs. Rowan. She visited Lenore one time in jail for maybe ten minutes. On the opening day of the trial she had this look on her face like she’d peeked under a rock and found something nasty. She didn’t show again until the sentencing. Didn’t testify for her daughter. Chapman told me she wasn’t feeling well, but I think he ordered her to stay away unless she could pretend she believed Lenore and could put on a better face for the jury. I guess she couldn’t. I guess a mother’s love goes just so far.”
From what I’d learned in Twentynine Palms, Betty’s love for Lenore wouldn’t have sold too many Hallmark cards. I’d been puzzled all along by her allegiance to Saunders over her daughter—if Saunders had believed that Lenore had suffered from postpartum psychosis when she’d killed Max, why couldn’t Betty?
“From everything you’ve told me about Lenore, we could be talking about a psychopath,” Irene Gurstner said.
Irene is five years older than I am. She’s a congregant in my shul and the psychologist who helped me after Aggie died. She has become a friend. I was impatient to talk to her as soon as I returned from Santa Barbara, but traffic had been heavy, and I didn’t get home until after five, not a great time to bother a mother of two small children. I was also eager to read the trial transcripts Bergen had loaned me, but there were four volumes, and between my trips to Twentynine Palms and Santa Barbara, I was behind in entering Crime Sheet data. So I worked at my computer until seven, at which point I couldn’t wait any longer and phoned Irene.
“Psychopath’s such a scary word,” I said now.
“You can use sociopath if you prefer. Whatever you call it, planning to kill your own child is scary.”
“If it’s true. I don’t know that she did.”
“I don’t either. I’m just going by what you’ve told me, Molly. The father skipped. The mother was in and out of her life in her formative years, and when she was around, sh
e was cold and verbally abusive. Lenore was in a series of foster homes when she was young. Makes it hard to form the normal attachments crucial to a child’s early development. Add the fact that she was molested, and you have a history that would fit with that of a psychopath. Was there other physical abuse?”
“I don’t know. The mother was very strict and, according to Lenore’s best friend, she was rough on her. They didn’t have much money. That’s why she pushed Lenore to marry rich.”
“Talk about learned behavior.” Irene sighed. “Lenore’s mother hooks up with some rich guy and gets pregnant. He marries her and skips when the baby’s an infant. The mother pushes the daughter to marry rich. She finally does, and gets the guy the same way, by getting pregnant.”
Like mother, like daughter, I thought.
“But the daughter wants to do it better, not like Mom, who went from guy to guy and ended up with nothing,” Irene said. “Lenore wants Daddy to stay. In her head, she’s remembering all those times the mother told her Daddy wouldn’t have skipped if she’d been a good girl, if she hadn’t cried, if she hadn’t kept them up nights.”
“Basically, if she hadn’t existed,” I said. “So you think Lenore intended from the start to kill her baby?”
Donna Bergen’s theory. I thought about the hospital birth card for Baby Boy Saunders that I’d found among the playbills in the lavender hatbox, souvenirs from Lenore’s starring roles. A sad memento, or another playbill from her most challenging performance?
“This is just a hypothesis, Molly,” Irene warned. “I never met this woman. I could be way off base.”
Blues in the Night Page 22
