A Season in Purgatory

by Dominick Dunne

  “What do you pray for, Ma?” asked Kitt.

  “Oh, just the souls in purgatory, darling,” Grace replied.

  “I always think of purgatory as being in jail, with all the prisoners waiting for parole,” said Kitt.

  “Oh, no, no, darling. Mother Vincent would be ashamed of you if she heard you say that. Purgatory is a place for contemplation of what is ahead, for atonement for what is behind, for purification, for expiation. It is a preparation for the sight of God.”

  Suddenly, without warning, Grace started to cry.

  “Ma, what is the matter?” said Kitt, concerned. “I’ve never seen you cry, ever. What happened?”

  “I don’t want to take the stand. I don’t want to take the stand. I don’t want to take the stand.” Her sobbing became out of control.

  “But Ma, they’re only going to ask you about Mrs. Utley’s call that night. What time she called, that sort of thing. And they’re going to ask you if Constant was in bed when you went to look for him. That’s all. There’s nothing else they can ask you.”

  “I know,” said Grace, blowing her nose.

  “Constant was there in bed, wasn’t he, Ma? You’ve always said he was. He was there, wasn’t he? Tell me, Ma, wasn’t he?”

  “On the night in question, Mrs. Bradley, did you receive a telephone call?” asked Bert Lupino.

  “Yes,” replied Grace. She spoke in a whisper, barely audible in the courtroom.

  “You will have to speak up, Mrs. Bradley,” said Judge Consalvi. “It is important that both the jury and the court stenographer hear your answers.”

  “Yes,” replied Grace, speaking in a louder voice. She looked straight ahead, not at the jury or at the lawyer questioning her.

  “Can you remember approximately the time of that call, Mrs. Bradley?” asked Bert Lupino.

  “It has been a great many years, you know. I believe it was two in the morning, or thereabout.”

  “Will you tell the court who called you at two in the morning, Mrs. Bradley.”

  “Mrs. Utley.”

  “Mrs. Utley, the mother of Winifred Utley?”

  “I know of no other Mrs. Utley,” said Grace.

  “Will you tell the court the nature of Mrs. Utley’s call, Mrs. Bradley.”

  “Mrs. Utley was looking for her daughter, Winifred. She had been to a dance at the club and had not returned home.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “She said that my son Constant had danced with Winifred at the club. She wanted to know if Winifred was at my house. I believe I told her she was not. She asked me if I would check to see if my son was at home.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “Yes. I went into Constant’s room.”

  “Who was in the room, Mrs. Bradley?”

  “Harrison Burns was in one bed. Constant was in the other. They were both asleep.”

  “You are sure that your son Constant was in the other bed?”

  “Oh, yes. I remember it distinctly. It is not the sort of thing a mother forgets.”

  That night Grace Bradley did not come down to dinner. Nor did she receive any of her children who came to her room to congratulate her on her appearance on the stand. At eight o’clock the doorbell rang at the house in Scarborough Hill. Bridey, knowing in advance who it was, answered the door and escorted the young priest up the stairway to Grace’s room.

  “Who was that?” asked Jerry in the dining room.

  “Father Ryan,” replied Maureen. “He’s Ma’s new favorite priest.”

  Valerie Sabbath’s cross-examination of me was withering, mocking, ruthless. She skirted perilously close to the allegation, propagated by Mary Pat, the Countess de Trafford, that I had once been in love with Constant, but the prosecutor called out, “May we approach the bench, Your Honor?” In a whispered session at the bench, out of earshot of jury and spectators, but recorded by the court reporter, Bert Lupino let it be known that if Valerie Sabbath proceeded with that line of questioning he would introduce into evidence my love affair with Kitt Chadwick, beginning at the Bee and Thistle Inn in Cranston, Maine, and ending in Grace Bradley’s drawing room at the house in Southampton, when Kitt was discovered on her knees in front of me by Maureen. Bert said he would call Maureen to the stand for verification.

  Valerie Sabbath asked for a recess. As it was late in the afternoon, Judge Consalvi decided to break for the day. The participants in Constant’s defense then repaired to the Bradley house in Scarborough Hill to consult on the matter.

  Jerry was called. Maureen was called. Des was called. Sandro was consulted by telephone in Washington.

  “If this comes out in the newspapers, that Kitt had an affair with Harrison, it will kill Ma,” said Maureen. “Kitt’s still her baby, you know. And Ma’s been acting very strange as it is.”

  “Besides, it’ll blow the whole family image we’ve managed to build up here,” said Jerry. “Nobody ever told me Kitt was giving him a blowjob right in Ma’s house, for Christ’s sake.”

  “How can we go into that with Father Bill sitting in the courtroom?” said Maureen. “He’s come all the way from Southampton to give support to Ma.”

  The matter was dropped.

  “Mr. Burns, were you a classmate of Constant Bradley at the Milford School?” asked Valerie Sabbath.

  “Yes.”

  “Were not your parents murdered in your fifth-form year at Milford?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they left no money. Is that correct?”

  “They left very little money.”

  “Did not Constant Bradley’s parents take you in?”

  “They were kind to me.”

  “Were you not a frequent visitor at the Bradley estate in Scarborough Hill?”

  “I was.”

  “Were you not given a room in the Bradley mansion that you used so often it became known as Harrison’s room?”

  “If that is so, I was unaware of it. I remember it always being called Agnes’s room.”

  “Did Mr. Bradley pay your tuition for your sixth-form, or senior, year at Milford?”

  “As part of a business deal, he did. I wrote a paper for Constant that helped get him reinstated—”

  “Just answer the question yes or no. Did Mr. Bradley pay your tuition for your senior year at Milford?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Burns, after graduation from Milford, did you not enjoy a year of travel on the Continent, flying in business class and staying at first-rate hotels?”

  “I studied in Europe for a year, yes,” I said.

  “You accepted this yearlong holiday?”

  “I do not think of it as a holiday.”

  “This was a gift, was it not, from Mr. Gerald Bradley to you, an orphan with no money?”

  “It was not a gift. It was a payment for a service rendered.”

  “You allowed yourself to be paid for, did you not?”

  “I remained silent about what I knew.”

  “You became used to taking money from Gerald Bradley, didn’t you? It is my understanding that your tuition at Brown University was paid by a trust set up for you by the Bradley family. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was, was there not, a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to an arrest? A fifty-thousand-dollar reward offered by Mrs. Luanne Utley, the mother of Winifred Utley, whom you visited on the night of May ninth, 1990?”

  “I think if you examine the facts, you will see that I did not take the reward money. It was donated to the National Victims Center, but not through me, through Mrs. Utley. I did not wish to come near that money,” I said.

  The reporters in the pressroom had taken a dislike to Bert Lupino. They found him dull in the courtroom. They preferred the theatrics of Valerie Sabbath. She always gave them something to write about.

  “Lupino may not be the worst prosecutor I have ever seen in a courtroom, but he’s close,” said Gus Bailey, the troublesome reporter from the Scarboroug
h Hill Times, who had followed the case from the day after the murder in 1973 and was once thought to have been silenced by Gerald Bradley. “I don’t care if he was named prosecutor of the year last year. Valerie’s making Harrison look like a chump, and Lupino’s not coming to his aid.”

  “He has his list of questions to ask each witness written on a lined yellow pad. He never veers from it. While the witness is answering him, his attention is focused on his pad for his next question. There is no opportunity for spontaneity,” said the reporter from the Miami Herald.

  “Lupino has no sense of drama. He doesn’t know how to build a story,” said the reporter from the Detroit Free Press.

  “If I were a believer in conspiracies, I would think that he is in the employ of the Bradleys,” said the reporter from the Hartford Courant.

  “If I were writing this as a novel, that’s the way I would write it,” said Gus Bailey. “But it’s not a novel, and Bert Lupino is not in the employ of the Bradleys. I just think he’s out of his element. I think he’s intimidated by Valerie Sabbath. Did you hear her call him Shorty in the corridor this morning? I don’t think you can put a person three years out of law school up against a million-dollar defense attorney and expect him to win. I never understand why district attorneys make the same mistake over and over again.”

  “Tell Miss Sabbath to say the Bradley house, not the Bradley mansion, Jerry, when she talks about the night of the murder,” said Maureen. “ ‘Mansion’ has a bad sound to it. It makes us sound too rich. The jury won’t like that. And tell her not to say ‘the Bradley estate.’ ”

  “I am trying very hard, Jerry, to restrain myself and not say ‘Fuck off’ to your sister. Will you kindly tell her not to tell me what words not to use. When you hire me, for my measly million-dollar fee, you do things my way. If I prefer to say ‘estate’ and ‘mansion,’ estate and mansion are the words I am going to say. I am the one who has to talk straight talk to the jury, not your sister. The jury would refer to your house as a mansion, and your place in Scarborough Hill as an estate, and I am more interested in their reaction to my words than your sister’s reaction to my words. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, you’re right, Valerie,” said Jerry. “It’s just that Maureen gets a little—”

  “Oh, you don’t have to tell me how Maureen gets,” said Valerie.

  “Well, excuse me,” said Maureen, when Jerry repeated what Valerie Sabbath had said.

  In cases such as this, there is often the man off the highway to blame it all on. The vagrant, the transient, the drifter. Do you remember the prowler on the roof of the Grenvilles’ house on the night Ann Grenville shot and killed her husband? They are conveniences of the rich. They are expendable people. Blame them. They are no one.

  “Did you see Constant Bradley raise the bat and strike Winifred Utley?” asked Valerie Sabbath.

  “No,” I replied.

  “You did not see him strike Miss Utley?”

  “No. I did not realize immediately what had happened. I thought there had been an accident of some sort. I thought she might have fainted or had a heart attack or something. It was not until I touched her and felt the blood that I realized she had been struck.”

  “You did not see him strike Miss Utley?”

  “No.”

  “It would have been possible, then, for a vagrant off Interstate Ninety-five to have killed Miss Utley, would it not?”

  “I do not believe so.”

  “It would have been possible for Constant Bradley to have found Winifred Utley already struck down when he went to the path at the edge of the Bradley estate for his rendezvous with Miss Utley, would it not?”

  “I do not believe so.”

  “I would like to read to you from your statements made to Captain Riordan at the time you were questioned at police headquarters in Scarborough Hill on May first, 1973.” Valerie Sabbath turned around to the defense table and picked up a copy of a police report. She put on her glasses and placed the pages on a podium in front of her. “Captain Riordan: At any time after you went to bed did you get up from your bed and go outside? Harrison Burns: No, sir. Captain Riordan: Did Constant Bradley ever leave the room you were sharing that night to go outside after you returned from The Country Club? Harrison Burns: No, sir.”

  Valerie Sabbath removed her glasses and turned back to me on the stand. “Now you are telling the court, Mr. Burns, that you were awakened at two o’clock in the morning by Mrs. Grace Bradley, the mother of Constant Bradley, who asked you to go downstairs and look for her son, and while downstairs you heard a tap on the window and were asked to go outside by Constant Bradley. Will you explain the discrepancy in your two versions of the story?”

  “That is what I had been instructed to say by Gerald Bradley and his son Jerry. I was rehearsed in the afternoon,” I said.

  “And you are telling the court that it was in your nature to do anything someone else told you to do. Is that correct, Mr. Burns?”

  “I was sedated with Valium at the time,” I said.

  “Ah, you were sedated with Valium at the time? Your story gets better and better, Mr. Burns,” said Valerie.

  “Dr. Desmond Bradley came to my room late that afternoon and gave me Valium to calm me down before the police arrived. Later he gave me another Valium before dinner, which was when the police arrived at the house.”

  The headline in the New York Post the following day said HE’S A LIAR. Dr. Desmond Bradley, brother of former gubernatorial candidate Constant Bradley, emphatically denied having given Valium to Harrison Burns before he was interviewed by police in connection with the murder of Winifred Utley in 1973. “This man would do anything, say anything,” said Dr. Bradley. “I am shocked by his statement.”

  On the Friday of that week, the two oldest of Maureen’s children, Gregory and Sarah, seventeen and sixteen years old, were in the courtroom. Gregory had been excused from Milford to attend the trial, and Sarah had been excused from the Sacred Heart Convent. Maureen felt that it was important to show the next generation of Bradleys to the jury, the courtroom, the crowds outside, and the media. It was expected that it would be a day of technical experts, not of any real dramatic importance, and the better-known members of the family had decided to stay at home. However, the father-in-law of the medical examiner who had performed the autopsy on Winifred Utley had died the night before, and the medical examiner had therefore telephoned in his regrets for not being able to keep his scheduled appearance, as he had to leave immediately for Pittsburgh. The soil expert who had examined the dirt stains on the back of Winifred’s pink party dress was also unexpectedly indisposed, having suffered an attack of food poisoning after dining the evening before on sushi at a Japanese restaurant. And so Constant Bradley was suddenly and unexpectedly called to the stand. There was great excitement in the courtroom and pressroom. Reporters raced to the telephones.

  “Your Honor, I would like to call Constant Bradley as a witness, but I want to make sure the state cannot open the door on cross-examination and enter evidence that the court has ruled as inadmissible,” said Valerie Sabbath. She was referring to the testimony of Maud Firth and Weegie Somerset.

  “Granted,” said Judge Consalvi.

  Gregory Tierney was dissatisfied with his seat. He wanted to be in a better spot to watch his uncle on the stand.

  “I know you’re disappointed with your seat, but don’t take it out on me,” said Sarah to her brother.

  “We should be there in those seats,” said Gregory, pointing to two seats in the front row of the spectator section. In those seats sat a young man with a woman who might have been his mother.

  “Ask them if they’ll change with you,” said Sarah.

  Gregory stood and walked over to where the couple was seated. “I wonder if you’d mind trading seats with us,” said Gregory to them. He spoke in an overly gracious manner, sure the couple would rise.

  “Yes, we would mind,” answered the young man.

&nb
sp; Rebuffed, Gregory returned to his seat and glared at the couple. The couple paid no attention to him. Then Gregory rose, passed the couple, and went to the rear of the courtroom, where he complained to the bailiff that the couple had the seats he felt he should have. “Would you please ask them to move,” said Gregory.

  “Hey, fella, it’s first come, first served in Judge Consalvi’s courtroom. There’s no reserved seats here. If they got there first, the seats are theirs.”

  “But we are members of the Bradley family,” said Gregory.

  “It don’t matter who yuz are in Judge Consalvi’s courtroom,” said the bailiff.

  Undaunted, Gregory approached the couple again. “My sister and I would like to sit here while Constant Bradley is on the stand,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, we’re not moving,” said the woman.

  “You don’t understand. We’re family,” said Gregory.

  “No, you don’t understand. I’m family, too,” said the young man.

  “He is my uncle,” insisted Gregory.

  “He’s my uncle, too,” said the young man.

  “How is he your uncle?”

  “My mother was a maid in your grandmother’s house. She married your uncle Des. You might like to tell your family that Rosleen Shea Bradley is here with her son, Desi.”

  * * *

  “We’re always meeting at soft-drink machines,” said Charlotte. “I still haven’t figured out which way George Washington is supposed to face.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. I put the bill in for her. The can of soda dropped out. I took it, opened it, and handed it to her.

  “How’s Gerald?” I asked.

  “Just managing to keep his head below water,” she said.

  I laughed, and she joined in, but I could see that she was near to tears.

  “I haven’t laughed in a year,” she said. She looked up and down the corridor. “Tell me something, Harrison. I have to know. Did he do it?”