A Season in Purgatory

by Dominick Dunne

  The new police chief, Homer Dundee, had come to Scarborough Hill after Captain Riordan’s retirement. He resented Captain Riordan’s involvement. He said that he was quite capable of handling the case himself. He said that he did not want any interference from Captain Riordan. Captain Riordan left. Thereafter I met him only in private, or with Luanne Utley.

  Homer Dundee asked me if I knew why Winifred’s chin, nose, and forehead were marked with cuts unrelated to the blows on her head from the bat. I said that I assumed the cuts were made by Constant when he tried to drag her by the hair across the path before he came to get me to help him lift her. Homer Dundee nodded.

  “Are there any people who might be able to corroborate any of what you have told me?” he asked.

  “There is a cook in the family called Bridey. I don’t know her last name. She has been with the family since the children were small. She is devoted to Mrs. Bradley,” I said.

  “What about her?”

  “She woke up that night, when Constant and I returned to the house and were getting out of our clothes in the kitchen. Her room was off the kitchen. She called out to us. It was two in the morning.”

  Homer Dundee wrote down her name. “Anyone else?”

  “There was a maid called Colleen. It is a different Colleen from the Colleen who works for the family now.”

  “What about her?”

  “The next day I overheard her tell Bridey that she had heard Constant and me talking outside the house in the night. Her room was on the top floor, and she said our voices traveled up there. Bridey told her to forget what she heard.”

  “Do you know her last name?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “There is a real-estate broker in New York called Eloise Brazen. She is listed in the book. She lives on Park Avenue. At the time she was having an affair with Gerald Bradley. Constant called his father at her apartment that night to tell him something terrible had happened and to come home at once. I know for a fact, from someone she knew who has since died, that she remembers the night.”

  “What happened to the bat?” he asked, suddenly. “The other part of the bat?”

  I told him Constant placed the bat in a garbage bag. I told him about taking off our shirts and trousers and undershorts and shoes. I told him about Johnny Fuselli driving off with the bag in the back of Bridey’s car. I told him what Johnny told me before he drowned.

  Following my visit with Kitt, news of my intentions traveled fast. My wife was harassed by anonymous telephone calls. When I say my wife, I am still referring to Claire, from whom I am separated but not divorced. Initially the calls were relatively harmless. “You will not get into the club you have applied for,” said the voice. She had in fact applied for membership in a small beach club in Black Point, where there were many children for our boys to play with. Or, “Your children will not get into the school in which you are trying to enter them.” The school was no more than a playschool. The point of the calls was for her to use her influence on me to not go forward with the trial. Claire is a strong woman, not easily frightened. Once, she engaged her tormentor in conversation. She said later to me, “I think I know who that is.” I, of course, thought it might be Jerry, or even Des. But Claire felt quite sure it was Freddy Tierney, the husband of Maureen Bradley, whom she had known years ago in Palm Beach, before he married into the Bradley family. Once she confronted him. “Is this you, Freddy Tierney? You asshole,” she said. The caller hung up. The calls stopped. Freddy had apparently been indoctrinated into the Bradley machine, but flunked his first assignment. Like poor drowned Johnny Fuselli, his heart probably wasn’t in it. Recently, the calls have started again, but with a different voice. They are hideously vulgar anonymous hate calls. Claire has stopped answering her telephone, letting the machine pick up on the first ring and taking the call only if she recognizes the caller. Twice she has been fooled, but she taped those calls and turned the tapes over to the police. The calls have stopped.

  * * *

  Stories were circulated that Gerald was making a remarkable recovery. It was not true. He had aged greatly since his stroke. Visitors to the house, mostly priests and close family friends, who complimented him on his remarkable recovery, reported later that he had a tendency to fall asleep, that he was forgetful of recent happenings but remembered remote events with clarity, and that he cried frequently and was given to bouts of irritability. A paralysis had set in. The left side of his face was distorted, and he was unable to speak intelligibly. He made sounds that he thought made sense but made sense to no one else. When those closest to him failed to understand his orders and desires, he became enraged. Only Sis Malloy was able to interpret his sounds. “Make sure Sis is in the room,” a family member would say, warning the others of his possible wrath.

  Although Grace rarely came face-to-face with Gerald, she tended to his needs through her daily contact with Sis Malloy and Miss Toomey, the head nurse.

  Every day Sis read the newspapers to him, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She had become expert in reading the stock-market quotations, and sometimes took telephone calls from Gerald’s traders, passing on the information to him and calling back with his reply. His skills at making money had not left him. It was the happiest time of day for Gerald. She bought every tabloid paper and read him every detail of the scandal involving his son that was riveting the country.

  “What is he saying, Sis? I cannot understand him,” said Jerry impatiently.

  “He said that Constant must not be handcuffed, under any circumstances,” said Sis.

  “Yes, of course,” said Jerry. “He will turn himself in, and we will post bail immediately. The bail is set for a million.”

  In the meantime, Bradley family life went on as if there was not a dark cloud overhead. The public pose was to treat the charge of murder as no more than an inconvenience, a mad person’s revenge which would soon be straightened out in a court of law, at which time they could go about the business of their lives again. It was a family trait never to mention their scandals or adversities. Agnes’s madness, Jerry’s crippling accident, Des’s marriage to a maid, and Gerald’s mistresses were things never mentioned. In the face of the terrible publicity, the Bradley public relations apparatus was constantly at work. Sandro gave a rousing and widely praised speech in the Senate, opposing a presidential nomination for an appointment to the Supreme Court. Maureen gave birth to twins, her eighth and ninth children. Grace’s seventy-second birthday was celebrated with great fanfare, and a new white rose was named in her honor, the Grace Bradley rose. Constant was photographed wheeling his father to the garden. I knew Gerald was unwell, but I was unprepared for the sight of him. The man I had seen only eleven months earlier in Southampton had diminished in size. Slack-jawed, unheeding, he sat in his wheelchair, playing his part in the family playlet, watching Constant dig the hole to plant the rose bush. Earlier on that same Sunday, Maureen’s fifth child, Eugenie, made her First Communion. The entire family attended, except for Gerald.

  “It will be a wonderful look for Constant, holding little Eugenie’s hand, with her in her veil and her lovely white dress that Ma bought her in Paris,” said Maureen. “After all, he is her godfather.”

  “But he’s not her godfather,” said Freddy Tierney. “My brother Tom is.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Freddy. Who the hell is going to know? And some godfather your brother is, by the way. He hasn’t remembered Eugenie’s birthday for the last three years.”

  Freddy, cowed, retreated. “He does have cancer, darling.”

  “Even so.”

  In private, tales of Kitt’s drinking circulated. People who loved her said, “What a shame.” Publicly, she traveled to Paris to visit her sister Mary Pat, the Countess de Trafford.

  The book that Gerald had wanted me to write in Constant’s name, the chronicle of a great American Catholic family, was written in short order, and anonymously, by a Mrs. Goldberg, who had written books
for a former cabinet member’s wife, a famous hairdresser’s ex-wife, a former president’s daughter, and a film star, all in their names. She wanted no glory and was content to remain discreetly in the background while Constant took bows as the author. She was paid, I was told by Claire, who always knew the publishing news, a half million dollars up front. Speed was of the essence in her assignment. If the book made the best-sellers list, she was to receive another quarter of a million dollars. Called simply Family, Constant Bradley’s book proved to be amazingly popular. Denials were issued by the publisher of a rumor that Bradley representatives around the country purchased thousands of copies of the book from the key bookstores that reported their sales figures to the compilers of best-sellers lists. There was an elaborate publicity campaign, with television appearances on every chat show of consequence by Constant, as the author of the family memoir, and even, on occasion, by Grace, as the mother of the author. On television, Grace, who had always been in the background of the family, proved to be an immensely popular figure, beloved by the audiences.

  “If you could see this son of mine and his wife Charlotte and his adorable little children go to Mass every Sunday, you would know what a family man he is. I have always said that the family that prays together stays together,” said Grace on “Oprah.”

  “That’s a very lovely sentiment, Mrs. Bradley,” said Oprah, who led the studio audience in applauding Grace. Grace smiled and waved at the audience and at the camera.

  Then Oprah became serious and turned to Constant.

  “Congressman Bradley, you yourself at this moment are going through a personal crisis in being charged with the killing of a young girl nearly twenty years ago in Scarborough Hill, Connecticut.”

  “Of course, this is a false accusation, Oprah, which will shortly be proved in a court of law. There are certain limitations put on me at this moment as to what I can and cannot say. I’m sure you will understand that.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I will not ask you anything specific about the case itself. What I am interested in is how do you account for what has happened, for the state of affairs in which you find yourself?”

  “The whole thing’s perfectly ridiculous,” interjected Grace.

  Constant spoke very seriously. “I believe there has been pressure in the community of Scarborough Hill, where, as you know, the Bradley family lived for many years, to solve this tragic crime that has been on the books there for nearly two decades due, probably, to inefficient police work at the time. The body of poor Winifred Utley, who, by the way, I had only met once or twice in my life, was indeed found close by the property of my parents’ house. And, as I am probably the most visible, the most highly profiled, of all the people who saw Winifred Utley on the last night of her life, at a dance, who better for the new chief of police, who is apparently anxious to make a name for himself, to point his finger at than me?”

  “He was in bed that night, Oprah,” said Grace. “The mother of the girl called me at two in the morning, looking for Winifred, and I went into his room, and there he was, sleeping like a baby.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Bradley,” said Oprah. She turned back to Constant. “The person who has brought the accusation against you, Mr. Burns, I believe, Harrison Burns, is, or was, rather, a great friend of yours, was he not?”

  “That is what is so surprising. That is what none of us in our family understands,” said Constant.

  “We were so good to that boy,” said Grace. “We took him in. He became practically a member of our family after his own parents were murdered.” She whispered the last word and nodded her head at the same time, as if it were a significant factor.

  “The Bradleys are fighting the case on TV, Your Honor. They have access to every talk show program. They are pretending to push Constant Bradley’s book, but they are using the air time to fight their case and prejudge the legal process,” said Bert Lupino, the prosecutor, in court two days later.

  Judge Edda Consalvi pulled at her dyed black hair. She reached over and poured herself a glass of water from a thermos. “What is it you are asking, Mr. Lupino?”

  “What I am requesting is a gag order put on all parties so that the case may not be won or lost by the media before the trial starts,” said Bert Lupino.

  “Request granted,” said Judge Consalvi.

  The district attorney said about Bert Lupino, “He is our star. We have great faith in Bert. Last year he was named prosecutor of the year. He has nearly a hundred percent track record for convictions.”

  It was true, but the convictions were for drug and robbery cases. He had never handled a murder case. I did not feel altogether safe in his hands. There was a shrillness about him when he became excited. His father was a dentist, and he flossed his teeth incessantly during our private sessions.

  “Please stop doing that,” I said, finally. “Please, please, it’s driving me crazy watching you do that.”

  “Hey, hey, calm down, Harrison,” he said.

  From the day before Constant’s arrest, a search was on for the best defense lawyer in the land. Gerald, through Sis Malloy, who was his interpreter, wanted the lawyer who had won an acquittal “for that guy who tried to kill his wife in Newport, the one who’s in the coma.” Constant had reservations. “I don’t want a lawyer whose name is in the papers all the time, Pa,” he said. Others in the same category were interviewed. It was Sims Lord who came up with the name of Valerie Sabbath.

  “Valerie Sabbath will fight to the death for her clients,” Sims Lord told the male members of the Bradley family. “She is best known for having saved nine people from death row.”

  “Good heavens,” said Sandro, who was always cautious, both at home and in the Senate. “Won’t that make it appear that we think Constant is guilty if we have a lawyer with that sort of track record? Saving nine people from death row. It has a wrong kind of sound to it. Does anyone agree with me?”

  “I think we should listen to what Sims has to say, Sandro,” said Jerry.

  “We all know Constant’s innocent, Sandro,” said Des, “but we’re still facing a murder trial.”

  “Go on, Sims,” said Constant.

  “All that I’m saying is that when there is a murder rap, Valerie Sabbath is the best that money can buy. She is considered one of the most merciless cross-examiners in the legal business. She has a remarkable ability to degrade and confuse prosecution witnesses. Remarkable. I’ve sat in on some of her cases. I’ve watched firsthand. She loves to intimidate. She loves to humiliate. She thrives on it. She knows when she has you. She can twist and turn a witness’s memory.”

  Jerry liked the sound of her. He passed on to his father the recommendation of Sims Lord. Gerald listened and nodded his head.

  “She’s not quite a lady, Pa,” said Jerry. “She’s a toughie.”

  Gerald nodded.

  “We could never take her to the club for dinner. She’s loud. She uses four-letter words. And she’d hate all those people as much as they’d hate her.”

  Gerald listened. He beckoned to Sis Malloy and mumbled something in her ear.

  “What’s he saying, Sis?” asked Jerry.

  “He wants to know how much she’s going to cost.”

  “A million.”

  Gerald mumbled again.

  “He says, ‘Hire her.’ ”

  “The prosecution’s going to try to establish a pattern of behavior, Pa. They’ve subpoenaed both Weegie Somerset and Maud Firth. Just keep your fingers crossed about Wanda Symanski. No one knows about her yet. Valerie says they don’t have a chance. What Valerie actually said is, ‘They don’t have a fucking chance.’ That’s the way she talks, Pa.”

  Gerald chuckled.

  “Valerie says they’ll never be able to bring those girls to the stand,” said Jerry. “She’s an authority on patterns of behavior. Sims said she once had a case where a mother was on trial for killing her child. She was able to keep the jury from finding out that the same mother had killed another child seven years earl
ier by convincing the judge that one case had nothing to do with the other. What, Pa? What’s he saying, Sis?”

  “He said don’t let that story about the mother with the two dead kids leak out to the papers.”

  “Have you been able to get any information on the judge?” asked Jerry.

  “She lives with her mother, and her father wears a rug,” said Eddie Bargetta. Eddie had taken Johnny Fuselli’s place.

  “Oh, Christ, how I miss Johnny Fuselli,” said Jerry. “Look, I don’t give a shit if her father wears a rug. I want to know about her. Is she married?”

  “No.”

  “Ever been?”

  “No.”

  “Where’d she go to high school, college, law school? That’s the kind of thing I want to know.”

  “She was a scholarship girl, all the way through Sacred Heart Convent and college.”

  “Sacred Heart? Now, that’s interesting, Eddie. That’s very interesting.”

  The day of the arraignment was a warm, wet autumn day that alternated between a descending mist and a heavy, slanting rain. I had not come in my own car to the courthouse in Stamford. A member of the prosecutor’s office had driven me in order to fill me in on new information before I got to the courthouse.

  Valerie Sabbath sat at the defense table chatting amiably with Constant, their heads close together, smiling, laughing. Then she leaned forward and straightened his tie. In a photograph published the following day, they looked like guests at a lunch party rather than a defense attorney and a client at an arraignment for a murder trial. When Maureen, through Jerry, questioned the propriety of such frivolity in the courtroom, Valerie replied, looking directly at Maureen, whose question she knew it was, “If you don’t show the jury that you love your client, that you believe in your client, the jury will never buy it that your client should go free.”