“She’s not going to sue you, Irene. She’s dead.”
“God, you’re terrible!” She laughed uneasily. “She may have started out intending to succeed where her mother failed. We all think we’re going to do better than our parents. She wants security, doesn’t want to be abandoned again. So when she suspects her husband of fooling around, she can see the end of the story: She’ll have the baby, he’ll leave her. The baby will be left without a father, and she’ll be without a husband. And without money.”
Lenore had waited a long time for Robbie. She would’ve done anything to hold on to him. “So she kills the baby.”
“Because she thinks she’ll get to keep Daddy. But, surprise: Daddy leaves anyway.”
“So she tries again,” I said. “She gets pregnant, thinking Robbie will dump the fiancée like he did last time, and marry her. But this time the charm doesn’t work. What if it had?” I wondered aloud.
“I don’t know,” Irene said. “Psychopaths don’t just turn into normal people overnight.”
The prosecutor had phrased it in starker terms: “Lucky for the fetus Lenore died, or eventually she would’ve killed it, too.”
“If it’s true, is she sick or is she evil, Irene?”
“Now you’re getting into murky waters. When people do bad things, is it because they’re evil or because they’re disturbed as a result of their upbringing or genetics or something else? Most psychologists will agree that a psychopath is evil, but even psychopathy generally comes from abuse.”
“And if a person’s born a psychopath?”
“Then it’s genetic, isn’t it?”
I was frustrated and told her so.
“I told you, there’s no clear answer. Maybe the Torah has a clearer perspective. Ask a rabbi.”
Twenty-four hours ago I would have asked Zack, but I wasn’t really interested in talking to him about this, or anything. Still, I wondered who Lisa was, and where he was taking her tonight. I never learn. . . .
“Would she feel remorse?” I asked. “Would she try to kill herself?”
“A psychopath doesn’t feel guilt or depression, Molly, so why would she kill herself? Psychopaths have no conscience. They’re manipulative and use people to serve their own needs and goals. They usually have above-average intelligence, too, so that would fit Lenore. And they’re incredibly charming. You could live next door to one and have no clue.”
“Or be her best friend.”
“As long as she needs you.”
I thought about Cathy Johnson, Lenore’s best friend until Lenore dropped out of her life. I wondered what purpose Nina had served. Someone to adore her? Someone to believe her lies? If it’s true, I kept reminding myself. If it’s true . . .
“The prosecution psychiatrist thinks Lenore’s two suicide attempts were gesture suicides,” I said. “Is it plausible that she’d fake another suicide to manipulate Robbie and make him feel guilty so that he’d marry her?”
“It’s plausible. Whether she did it, I don’t know.”
“Dr. Korwin, Lenore’s shrink, thought the suicide attempts were genuine. But that was before she testified. The prosecutor thinks Korwin realized she’d fooled him, but how is it that Korwin didn’t see through her right away?”
“We’re not infallible, Molly. We don’t have X-ray vision. No psychological Geiger counter. Sorry.”
“So why did she call me, Irene? Why did she tell me she was afraid?”
“If she’s a psychopath, she’s manipulative, remember? Maybe she wanted to authenticate the suicide attempt with you because you’re a reporter. Maybe she wanted you to call her mother or alert the nurses. It’s also quite possible she really was afraid she was in danger, and she figured no one else would believe her. Enter you.”
I didn’t like thinking Lenore had fooled me. But I’d seen her in her hospital bed, a victim of a hit-and-run driver. Injured, weak, trembling with vulnerability and anguish. Naturally, she’d aroused my sympathy. Had she been acting then, too?
“If she’s a psychopath,” I asked, “do you think anything she said to me was real?”
“Other than her name, I wouldn’t count on it.”
I finally had some answers about Lenore, but they weren’t the answers I’d wanted. I still didn’t know whether she’d faked a suicide attempt too well, or whether she’d been murdered. And I still wasn’t any closer to figuring out who had killed Betty Rowan.
thirty-five
Isaac had sat on the porch in wait for Ernie the postal carrier, so my mail was intact—bills and a reminder that I was due for my annual eye exam.
I had listened to my phone messages earlier, when I’d returned from Santa Barbara. Mindy, wanting to know if her client had been helpful and reminding me to be careful. Saunders, sounding pleasant this time, and wanting to discuss something. Maybe he wanted to pay me to keep quiet or find out how much I knew.
I’d been hoping to hear from Darren Porter. It was after eight, so either he wasn’t home yet or he hadn’t checked his mailbox. Or he didn’t want to talk to me.
I tried finishing the Crime Sheet, but kept thinking about Lenore, reviewing what she’d said to me. Nobody believes me. I thought I’d have a second chance. What if Donna Bergen was wrong? She’d based her conjecture on a smile and an embrace and a look on a mother’s face, and I’d been quick to agree. Twelve jurors and a judge had believed Lenore. Maybe Bergen was smarting from losing.
And then I wondered if I was hoping to disprove her because if what she said was true, then I wasn’t such a good judge of character after all.
Zena Lopost looked nervous when she opened the door, probably worrying that my visit meant she’d be finding another dead body. She was wearing the same housecoat as the other night, the same sandals, but her hair was in a top bun and she had on lipstick.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I told her. “I just had a few questions.”
She welcomed me into her green-and-white kitchen, which smelled of apple pie and cinnamon. She offered me a slice, which I declined, but I did accept a glass of iced tea.
“They’re saying on the news that Betty was murdered,” Zena said. “So I guess the police are sure. She’s had a rough few years, and to die like this . . .” She shook her head.
“I imagine she was devastated when her grandson died.”
“She looked like a ghost. She went up to Santa Barbara for the first day of the trial, but it was too much for her.” Zena slid a piece of pie onto a plate and set it in front of her. “You’re sure?” she asked me.
I told her I was. “Did she blame Lenore?”
“She didn’t say, and of course I didn’t ask. Well, except for when it first happened. I’d heard about it on the news, and I didn’t see her that next day. I was kind of worried, so I went over there to see if she was okay. Of course, she wasn’t. I told her I didn’t come to pry, just to make sure she was all right, but I guess she had to talk to someone. She told me Lenore had killed her baby, and how could she, Betty, not have seen Lenore was in trouble, and everybody was going to think she’d raised a baby killer.”
It was amazing but not surprising, I thought, how even in those first hours Betty Rowan’s concern had been focused on herself.
“I tried to give her comfort,” Zena said. “I told her that everything is God’s plan, that she’d done the best she could for Lenore. Betty had told me what she’d been through with Lenore. It isn’t easy, being a single mom, having no help from anyone.”
I bit my tongue and drank my tea.
“And I do think Lenore wanted to be a good mother,” Zena said. “I saw her just before she and her husband moved to Santa Barbara, about a month before she had the baby. I think I mentioned that the other night.”
She probably had. I didn’t remember. “Lenore was visiting her mother?”
“Actually, I saw her at the Beverly Hills Library, over on Rexford? I took my grandson there—he needed a book for a school project on dinosaurs.” Zena smiled. “Anyway,
I saw Lenore sitting at one of the tables, reading, with a stack of books next to her. I don’t think she recognized me at first when I said hello. She seemed kind of embarrassed about it when I told her who I was. Her face was red.”
I had that prickling feeling, like the one I get when I’m watching a movie and the bad guy’s about to jump the good guy. “What was she reading?”
“Oh, some of those books on motherhood. The top one had something to do with the baby blues, but they used that medical term.”
My mouth was suddenly dry. “Postpartum depression?”
“That’s the one,” Zena said, nodding. “All the gals read so much now before they have their babies. My daughter-in-law practically owned a library on the subject by the time her first was born. I didn’t read one book when I was pregnant, but I think I did all right with my three.” She smiled again and ate a spoonful of the pie.
“Did you tell Betty that you’d seen Lenore?”
“Well, I told Betty I saw Lenore, but I didn’t mention the books, not at the time. I didn’t want to worry her. Lenore looked happy, so I didn’t think . . .” Zena sighed and put down the spoon. “I did tell Betty later, after it happened. I thought it would be a comfort to her to know Lenore wanted to be a good mother, that she really tried. Looking back, I don’t know if I did the right thing, telling Betty. But I never, ever thought Lenore was ill.”
She was defensive now, the color in her face high, and she was clearly sorry she’d told me.
“I mean, it’s wonderful to be prepared, but sometimes you can scare yourself silly, don’t you think? There are so many things that can go wrong, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you.”
thirty-six
There’s a Yiddish proverb that says there’s no such thing as a bad mother or a good death. Now I wasn’t sure it was true. I told myself it was ridiculous to feel betrayed by a woman who had, after all, not asked me to write about her or spend an entire week trying to figure out whether she’d killed herself or had been murdered.
And this wasn’t about my feelings. This was about a dead child. I had driven home on autopilot and was sitting in my parked car, overwhelmed with sadness for poor little Max Saunders, shaken to death not by a mother too ill to know what she was doing, but by someone who had planned that death before he’d taken his first breath. He’d have been dead either way, but it made a huge difference.
I’ve seen my sisters and sister-in-law pregnant. I’ve placed my hand on a swollen belly, felt the fetus’s quickening, the later months’ rumbling movements. A knee, an elbow, an arm.
A miracle. And that’s before the baby was born.
What had Lenore felt when the baby had moved inside her? What had she felt the first time she’d held him, seen his first gassy smile? Was there an instant in which she’d reconsidered? At what point had she decided to do it? How had she chosen the day?
I couldn’t bear thinking about Lenore another minute. I stepped out of the car into the dark night, locked it, and was on the porch, my house key in my hand, when I heard footsteps behind me.
I whirled around, my heart in my throat, keys poised to strike. It was Zack.
“You scared me half to death!” I said, breathing hard and pressing my hand against my chest.
“I’m sorry. I wanted to talk to you, Molly.”
“There are phones.”
“In person. I came straight from shul. I don’t like the way last night ended.”
I didn’t like it either. I was about to say, “Is that why you called Lisa?” but I wasn’t in the mood for verbal jousting. “I drove to your office last night with cheesecake from Maison Gourmet, to apologize for being late and ruining the evening. I heard you on the phone, making a date.” God, this was so high school.
“If you’d stayed, I would have told you the woman I was arranging to meet is my married cousin.”
I was glad it was dark. “I didn’t know you had a cousin.”
“I’m thirty years old, Molly. I stopped playing games a long time ago.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry. I obviously jumped to conclusions. I seem to be doing that.”
“You still don’t trust me, do you?”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“And the next time?”
He was right, of course. “I’ve had a rough day, Zack. I’m exhausted. Can we talk about this another time?”
“I’d really like to talk now, Molly.”
The night was still warm, so we sat on the glider on the porch, the jasmine Isaac had let me plant in the earthenware pot scenting the air. I thought Zack would start, but he was waiting for me.
“It’s not just you,” I told him, my eyes on the sliver of moon, because even now talking about this was hard. “Ron cheated on me. That’s why we divorced. It’s not something I talk about, and I’m only telling you so you’ll understand.”
“That must have been terribly painful,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s definitely not something I want to go through again.”
“I’m not Ron, Molly.”
“I know that.”
“I’m not the guy who dumped you twelve years ago. But I can’t keep trying to prove myself to you.”
“I know that, too.” I pushed my toe against the brick floor and set the glider in motion.
“I thought we really had something going when I was here Sunday.”
“We did,” I agreed.
“Then why would you think I’d throw it away?”
“I don’t know. I was late. You were upset.”
“Couples argue,” he said. “They get irritated with each other. That doesn’t mean they’re over.”
“History,” I said. “I’m not interested in getting hurt again.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. “I can’t promise that you won’t be hurt, Molly, just like you can’t promise that I won’t be.”
“I know.”
“I’m a rabbi of a shul. I’ll be meeting with women who are seventy-five and women in their twenties, and sometimes I won’t be able to tell you who I’m meeting, or why. I need to know that you trust me.”
“It’s like a learned response,” I told him. “It’s hard to unlearn. But I’m willing to try.”
From the way he was looking at me, I knew that if he weren’t a rabbi, he would have leaned over right then and kissed me, and I would have let him. It’s just as well. Sometimes a kiss will let you believe that it’s a promise sealed, instead of hope. Sometimes it can confuse or, like Ron’s kisses, lie.
We rocked on the glider for a few minutes, the silence easier between us.
“You mentioned that you had a rough night,” Zack said.
Bubbie G says a heavy heart talks a lot. I don’t know how long I talked, but I told him every detail about Lenore and her mother that I’d learned during the past few days, told him how devastated I was. He listened without interrupting, and I felt a little better after unburdening myself, though not at peace.
“I’d like nothing better than to find out I’m wrong,” I said. “And it’s not as though I have hard evidence.”
“But you believe she killed her child intentionally.”
“I don’t want to. I can’t understand how someone could intentionally kill any child, Zack, especially her own. But then, I can’t understand a person who has no conscience, who’ll do anything to get what he wants.”
“The Torah talks about people like that,” Zack said. “Pharaoh, for one. He ordered his people to drown all male babies born to Israelite women. And there’s the woman who came to King Solomon with another woman. Her baby had died, and she’d switched it with the woman’s live child, but claimed that the other woman had done the switching. Solomon announces he’s going to cut the baby in half, and the real mother cries, ‘Let the other woman keep the baby,’ because, of course, she can’t bear to have him harmed. So the true mother is revealed.”
I nodded. Everybody knew the story. I’d studied it s
everal times in high school.
“The commentaries discuss the syntax each woman uses,” Zack continued. “One woman says, ‘Her son is dead, mine is alive.’ The other says, ‘My son is alive, hers is dead.’ The order reveals that the first woman was lying, that what was most important to her wasn’t the fact that her son was alive, but that the other woman’s baby was dead.”
“But the other woman focused on the fact that her baby was alive. I get it.” I wondered whether something in Lenore’s testimony would reveal what she’d been thinking.
“I was always puzzled by the woman who lied,” Zack said. “Why didn’t she do what the real mother did—pretend to care by telling Solomon she was willing to give up her baby? The commentaries ask the same question.”
“And?”
“According to some, the two women were mother-in-law and daughter-in-law living in one house, both newly widowed, and it was the daughter-in-law’s baby that had died. Some say she switched babies because she wanted the inheritance that would come to her through the live child. Others say because her husband died childless, she was obligated to perpetuate his name through her dead husband’s brother—the mother-in-law’s newborn son. And she would have to wait years until the brother reached his majority and could release her, through a ritual, so that she would be free to marry.”
“So she was stuck,” I said.
“Right.”
I frowned. “But that isn’t fair.”
“Only according to our understanding, which is limited. We can’t presume to understand God’s laws, Molly, or understand His plan. The point is, this woman didn’t want the baby because she loved it. She wasn’t grief-stricken about her own child’s death. She switched her dead child with her mother-in-law’s live baby because he would set her free. And that’s why she didn’t care if Solomon killed the child. She had no interest in suckling and raising a child that wasn’t hers. The child was an impediment to her happiness. He wasn’t a human being. He was a thing.”
“Just like little Max Saunders,” I said. “But there’s a big difference. That baby lived, Zack. Max died. An innocent two-month-old died. I don’t understand that either.” Or Aggie Lasher, I thought, but didn’t say.
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