by Cathy Lamb
He stood there, staring down at me, and I met his gaze. I didn’t miss the way his eyes dropped for a second to my breasts yet again, the creep. He was gross. Skin crawly gross. It was a power thing with him, and it was likely he didn’t like women, particularly women who didn’t cater to him or who made him feel threatened in any teeny-tiny way.
“How long have you had this place? How long have you lived here on the island with your husband?” He looked at the third finger of my left hand.
“I feel like I’m being interviewed.” I didn’t smile.
“You’re not being interviewed. I need to know about the shop owners, about the people who live here, as I’m here to protect you.”
“We’re a mellow lot. There will not be much protecting to do.” I deliberately did not answer his question. “How is Chief Allroy doing?” I knew exactly how the chief was doing. He was staying with his daughter and son-in-law in Seattle. I had gone to school with his daughter, Packy, real name Patricia, and had talked to her this morning.
He garumphed. “He is making progress, but he will be out for a while to rehabilitate. His age being a factor.”
I laughed. The chief was only sixty-five. Give me a break. “Chief Allroy is in excellent shape. He runs five miles a day. He sails his boat. He chops wood.” I let my eyes drift to his gut, then back up. He saw it.
“I noticed you didn’t answer my questions,” he said.
“I noticed that I am not required to answer your questions,” I said.
His face tightened. He didn’t like that. He liked to be obeyed. “I’ve heard things about you.”
“I’ve heard things about you, too.”
He seemed surprised, displeased. Who was this woman talking back to him? Where was the fear? The respect? Where was the ego-stroking? I bet the women on the police force in Seattle couldn’t stand him.
“If you’ll excuse me?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. I smiled at the couple behind him, waiting to pay. They had a stack of books. “Welcome!” I said, putting their books on the counter right in front of the fleshy chief, who was then forced to move his heaving gut.
I could feel his eyes on me as I smiled and chatted with the couple. He wasn’t too bright, but he was bright enough to see that my demeanor changed when I wasn’t talking to him.
And there was San Orcanita’s new, temporary police chief: Angry. Passively aggressive. Jacked up on himself.
He was a threat to my mother and aunts, no doubt about it.
Chapter 18
Betsy Baturra
Multnomah County Courthouse
Portland, Oregon
1976
Betsy Baturra and Johnny Kandinsky’s trial began. Betsy and Johnny at the defense table, their four attorneys crowded around. Their attorneys were competent. They actually cared. They all seemed exhausted, rather pale.
The prosecutor, Alfred Morningside, made his opening statement. He was a prissy man, in a pin-striped custom tailored suit, a white kerchief in his pocket, his fingernails buffed. He painted Peter, Johnny’s father, to be a saint. He listed how Peter worked hard at his company where he sold used cars, how his wife had left him with two children for a lover and had had no contact with the family for over three years. “He was a dedicated family man, a single father, who loved his children, Johnny and Tilly. . . . ” He droned on and on, sanctimonious, arrogant.
Alfred pontificated about how Johnny and Betsy were at Johnny’s house and how Peter had been knifed in the chest “in cold blood,” for nothing other than “the money that Johnny would inherit.” Then Alfred, who had a second major in drama and loved how the courtroom had become his personal stage, said in a deep voice, “Betsy Baturra and Johnny Kandinsky planned and executed the murder of Peter Kandinsky.”
Shaylee Jefferson, Betsy’s attorney, stood to address the jury when Alfred was finally done droning on and on, loving all of the attention. Peter, born Pyotr, was not a saint, she said. He had made many enemies in Portland, he had been sued on multiple occasions by people to whom he sold a car that broke down the first day, if not right off the lot. He owed money to many people and had declared bankruptcy in Idaho, where he previously lived, and in Portland. He had been in an altercation at his car lot with a homeless man, whom he had beaten senseless but who had left the area, could not be found, so could not testify. Peter also was in a screaming match with a woman in the parking lot of a grocery store over a parking space and had rammed her car with his, totaling it.
He had been, at best, a neglectful father. He had beaten Johnny and Tilly. He had beaten his wife, Gabriella, though she had been too afraid to go to the police, according to Johnny.
Betsy grabbed a knife to defend Johnny, his father hitting Johnny in the face twice, Shaylee said. “She thought he was going to kill Johnny.”
Johnny’s attorney, Orlando Mendelbaum, said that Johnny would admit to killing his father with the knife in self-defense. “He thought he was going to die.”
Yes, both Johnny and Betsy said they killed Peter Kandinsky with the knife from the kitchen.
Different stories, so which one would the jury believe? But would it matter? They were both charged with murder—who held the knife, well, that wasn’t legally relevant if they both planned it together. . . .
The trial ground on. Experts came and went. Police officers, detectives, forensics, the state medical examiner, etc.
Johnny took the stand first and was questioned by Alfred, the prissy prosecutor. “Where did you meet Betsy Baturra . . . How long have you dated . . . Are you in love . . . What did you do together. . . When did your father meet her? Did your father like her? Why or why not? Did she like him?”
“My father didn’t like Betsy because he doesn’t like any women.”
“What about your mother?”
“He hated my mother because she wanted to leave him. My mother did not run off with her lover. She did not have a lover. You lied about that. She wanted to take Tilly and me and move away from my father, back to Mexico. My father couldn’t accept that. My mother was beautiful, and she was his possession.” Then Johnny took a breath, his hands in fists, his jaw tight. “I believe my father killed my mother.”
That brought the entire courtroom to a screeching halt. For a moment, no one moved, then it was chaos. Only Betsy wasn’t surprised. Johnny had told her a few months after they started dating that he thought his father killed his mother two years ago, when they were in Idaho, that he hadn’t been able to figure it out when he was fifteen, that he couldn’t believe it, he was too scared to believe it, but he knew the truth now. What Betsy didn’t know was that Johnny was going to bring it up at trial.
Alfred was stunned down to his perfectly folded white handkerchief. This had not been revealed to him! He had been told by one of Peter’s partners in the used car business that Peter’s wife had left the family, run off with her lover!
Even Betsy and Johnny’s attorneys looked stunned. They had not heard that part.
The judge pounded his gavel.
“Move to strike!” the prosecuting attorney yelled, his dainty hands moving through the air like axes. He loved that he got to make a dramatic gesture! “Move to strike!”
“It’s relevant to the case,” Orlando stood and said. “Johnny and Betsy were defending themselves, obviously, from a man with a violent past—”
“You have no proof that your father killed your mother,” the prosecutor breathed, his face red as he pointed at Johnny, making sure his perfect profile was to the press. Hopefully they’d take a photo! “None.”
“How do you know?” Johnny said. “How do you know?”
Chaos again.
The jury was excused and then the judge told the attorneys to approach. Phrases like “not relevant” and “this never came up before” and “We have had no time to address this, research this . . . you can’t allow this, it’s new evidence, not vetted . . . Johnny’s making it all up . . . playing the jury . . . this is a lie . . . it goes to the threat
that Johnny felt in the house, that Betsy knew of . . . it goes to the character of the man who was killed . . . it’s abuse . . . it’s a pattern . . . it gives weight to his self-defense . . . Are you serious?”
The judge allowed Johnny to speak after the jury came back in. “My mother, Gabriella Cortez Kandinsky, was abused for years. My mother’s family was from Mexico. They worked in the fields. Her father died when she was six. He got pneumonia and no hospital would admit him because he was illegal. They gave him cough syrup and sent him home.
“When my mother was nineteen, her mother died. She was attacked by the owner of a farm. He wasn’t even arrested. My mother met my father shortly after that, picking berries on one of his neighbor’s farms. She was soon pregnant. I have no idea if she was willing to have sex with my father or not. My mother told me later that my father told her that he would tell the authorities that she was illegal and he would allow her to be shipped back to Mexico without us if she didn’t obey him. She would never see us again. I remember”—he choked on his words—“I remember her begging him not to do that, on her knees.
“My father wouldn’t let my mother work, would hardly ever let her leave the house. He called her fat. He called her a whore all the time. He called her a Mexican slut. He would beat her face until it swelled. I have no memory of my father ever being kind to my mother, and then, one day, she disappears. I think he killed her. We left Idaho for Oregon the day after he told us she left with a lover. Like I already said, my mother had no lover.”
The noise in the courtroom raised again to a deafening level, and the judge pounded his gavel.
“This is all a lie,” Alfred yelled, making sure he looked authoritative. “It’s all a lie. This is something concocted by Johnny, egged on by Betsy, to bolster their ridiculous self-defense theory. He’s made this up. There is no evidence that Gabriella was killed by Peter Kandinsky. None. No police reports. No witness. No photos. No body. Nothing.”
“Objection!” Orlando shouted.
The judge said, “I’ll allow it.”
The trial went on, Johnny brave and composed on the stand.
The prosecuting attorney was agitated. Angry. Who was this teenager to make a fool of him? He was Alfred Morningside! A style icon some said. A top-notch prosecutor, destined for amazing things. Plus, his shoes! Always buffed for court. “What happened after Betsy murdered your father?”
“Betsy did not murder my father.” Johnny paused and stared right at the jury. “I did.”
Betsy shook her head at him as her eyes welled with tears.
“No!” Alfred shouted at him, his pin-striped suit straining. “You didn’t. Betsy did. You stood by and let it happen. You planned it together.”
“No,” Johnny said. “I killed him. My prints are on the knife.”
The prosecutor seethed. “That’s because you lived at the house. The knife came from the kitchen. Her prints are on the knife, too. Betsy herself even told the police that she did it.” For effect the prosecutor turned and pointed a finger at Betsy. Oh, how he loved to point! “That she was the guilty one.”
“I told the police I did it,” Johnny said. “She lied to protect me, but I’m telling the truth.”
Chaos again.
“Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, sweating, his perfectly coiffed hair coming loose from his hair gel, “Johnny did not wield the knife, Betsy did. He’s trying to put doubt in the jurors’ minds. He’s deliberately trying to turn all evidence over to cause confusion and a mistrial, which will serve his agenda. He’s trying to get them both off! This is an attack on the court and our system of government and justice itself and the United States of America and our Constitution!” he pontificated, wielding his pointer finger in the air like a pinwheel.
The judge told him to sit down now and yelled for “order in the court!”
Amidst the raised voices and the astonishment from everyone in the courtroom, Johnny winked, ever so slightly, at his beloved Betsy. She saw it through the tears streaming from her eyes.
* * *
Betsy was on the stand the next day. She was grilled and drilled by the prosecutor.
“What happened the day that Peter Kaminsky was killed?” Alfred was wearing a different pin-striped suit and had a crisply ironed purple handkerchief in his pocket. He had practiced in front of his mirror again the night before to polish his image and was satisfied with his performance. Drama classes had truly helped him over the years. Maybe he should have been on the stage as a Broadway actor? But no. He liked to win, at all costs.
“I ran to Johnny’s house after work.” She twisted her hands in her lap, in the same blue suit as the day before.
“Why?” said the prosecutor, but he knew. He’d seen the police reports.
“Because I . . .” Betsy stopped, swallowed hard. She knew no one would believe her, but she had to say it. “Because I knew that Peter was going to kill Johnny.”
“How did you know that?” He raised his ever-so-slightly plucked eyebrows at her.
“Because I had . . .” She blinked rapidly. “A premonition.”
“A what?” The prosecutor pretended surprise, as if he couldn’t believe that such a stupid thing had come out of her mouth.
Betsy had already told the police about the premonition the night that Peter died, the night she stabbed him. She was eighteen. She was scared and traumatized, so she simply told the truth. She didn’t want to kill anyone, ever. She did it to save Johnny, she told them.
“A premonition?”
“Objection, Your Honor,” Betsy’s attorney, Shaylee, stood. “She doesn’t mean a real premonition, she means that she had a bad feeling. Only that. She and Johnny shared everything. Johnny shared his fear of his father, the abuse, that they’d been fighting, so Betsy simply thought that things were going badly at Johnny’s house, as we all get bad feelings sometimes.”
“Overruled.”
“What do you mean a premonition?” Alfred pressed on, as if Shaylee had not spoken and tried to diminish his argument. “You mean, you can see into the future?”
The whole court room held their breath.
Betsy was scared now. She knew she looked like a loon. Mentally unstable. A freak. “Yes. I knew that Peter was going to kill Johnny, that he was going to turn and grab a gun from the gun cabinet.”
“So you killed him because you had a premonition Peter was going to shoot Johnny?” Up went those perfectly plucked eyebrows again, in disbelief.
“Yes.” She squirmed. The police had already talked about it in front of the jury, reading from their reports about that night and their conversations with Betsy. They had read her her rights, but Betsy didn’t understand what was at stake. Her own attorneys had been appalled when they heard what she’d said to the police and had gone out that night to a bar for a couple of straight shots.
“Johnny accused his father of killing his mother. They were fighting about that. Peter was threatening Johnny because he was afraid Johnny would go to the police, then he punched him in the face twice and Johnny fell back.”
“Did you see the gun?”
“No.”
“Peter Kandinsky never pulled out a gun?”
“No. But he was going to.”
“So you stabbed him because you knew he was going to grab a gun because you can see the future like a gypsy? Are you magic?”
“No, I—”
“Objection!” Shaylee shouted.
“Do you have a crystal ball?”
“Objection!” Shaylee shouted again, louder.
Johnny stood up, agitated. “No, that’s not what happened. I killed my father. My father had just punched me in the face, twice, as he had done many times before. I thought he was going to kill me. Betsy is innocent. She did nothing, it was me, I stabbed him.”
The cacophony in the court room was deafening.
* * *
Johnny and Betsy’s defense attorneys put up a vigorous fight. They said it was self-defense, that Johnny thought his l
ife was threatened, Betsy thought his life was threatened, the physical altercation between Johnny and Peter was enough proof, the past abuse another indicator of Johnny’s well-founded fear of imminent death. But as there was no weapon pointed at Johnny and Betsy at the time that Peter was killed, no gun on the floor, no bullets, no gunpowder, no police reports of past abuse, no police reports of a murdered mother, it did not hold up well.
Alfred said, again, in closing, that Betsy and Johnny were after his father’s money. He said Johnny had been traumatized by his mother’s disappearance when she left to be with her lover, that he had tried to falsely blame his father for killing her so he could get away with murder in this very courtroom.
“He’s lying to save himself, save Betsy. He’s making up stories. He’s trying to confuse you. He doesn’t realize how smart you are, jury members, that you’ll see through this evil charade.” Alfred pointed at Johnny and Betsy once again. It would make him click his heels together if that photo were on the front cover of the paper tomorrow! He was having a superb hair day, too. “Don’t be fools!”
Betsy was painted as the manipulative, sly, sneaky young woman who tried to make it look like self-defense when it clearly wasn’t. Betsy’s premonitions made everything worse. The jury believed her to be delusional, or a liar, or a delusional liar. No one could see the future. Ridiculous. What a pathetic excuse. Plus, they believed that it was Betsy who held the knife.
The only witness?
Tilly Kandinsky. Johnny’s little sister. But she was only seven when it happened, and she was still not speaking. She was in foster care. She was traumatized. She was now an orphan.
The jury was out for five days.
In the end, they voted to convict Betsy and Johnny of first-degree murder.
When Betsy and Johnny were pulled out of the courtroom after the jury verdict, he shouted at her, “I love you, Betsy,” and she said back, in a whisper, which is all she could say through her constricted throat. “I love you, too.”
