Marital Privilege

by Greg Sisk

  • • •

  Now as she stood in the kitchen of her home, she found every item on which her eyes rested reminded her of J.D. Pulling some more coffee cups out of the cabinet, for example, regressed her back to the day that J.D. had expressed his undying “love” for kitchen cabinets. This had been part of his awkward juvenile campaign to prevent the family from moving from Chicago.

  Like any young child, he had been afraid of change at first. At the local café in their Chicago neighborhood on that morning some four years ago when the decision to move to Minnesota had suddenly come together over breakfast, J.D. had listened quietly with increasingly wider eyes. But he had said nothing.

  When they got back to their apartment, he had suddenly turned to his parents and announced, “I don’t want to move. I really, really love our sofa.” Candace smiled and told him, “that’s okay, honey, we’ll take the sofa with us when we move.”

  J.D. then switched gears and said, “But I really, really love the kitchen table.” Candace gave the same reply, that they would take the kitchen table with them.

  The little boy paused for a moment and then tried again, “But I really, really love my bed.” Candace assured him that they would move his bed too.

  J.D. hesitated a little longer this time, got a thoughtful look on his face, and then asked in a calm voice: “Are we taking the kitchen cabinets with us?” “No,” Candace had said, “those are attached to the apartment.”

  “But I really, really LOVE the kitchen cabinets,” he pleaded.

  Candace had to admire the little guy’s clever efforts to find some fixed object to love that would conflict with any plan to move.

  But as months passed and plans for the move to Minnesota became concrete, J.D. had become increasingly comfortable, as children ordinarily will. When moving day came, he had fully reconciled himself.

  A few days before the move, as they had been talking about a new neighborhood in Minnesota, J.D. confidently asserted, “I’m good at making friends.” Candace thought to herself this was truly an example of belief confirming reality. If a person thinks he is good at making friends, well, then he probably is.

  On the day they moved into the new house, J.D. ran off playing with kids in the neighborhood before the moving truck had even arrived. He indeed had proven he was good at making friends.

  There was no doubt that Minnesota had been good to J.D.

  Minnesota had not been so good to Bill.

  • • •

  Candace had barely spoken to Bill in the past four days, although they had almost never been apart. That is, they had never been apart after he finally arrived at the hospital.

  She understood the police had insisted Bill remain behind to answer questions. She understood Bill then had to wait for a police escort to the hospital, because they were worried about the family’s safety.

  Still, she resented the fact that she had gone to the hospital alone.

  Other than the most basic of exchanges—was she in any pain, could he bring her anything to the hospital, what clothes should he have the police retrieve from the house—Candace and Bill had not spoken to each other in the eighty-some hours since the . . . the . . . the explosion.

  She didn’t even know how to label what had happened in the narrative in her own head. The “explosion”? Not descriptive enough. The “episode”? Too casual, like an “episode” of a television show. The “event”? Sounds like a code word or euphemism.

  Should she call it the “murder of her son”? It was that, wasn’t it?

  Was it also the “end of her family”? She didn’t want to think about it like that, but she found her stricken mind meandering toward that devastating summation.

  In fact, Candace was struggling not to think about anything at all, other than to keep the face of J.D. always before her. Just get through the morning. Now just get through the afternoon. And later just get through the evening. Then just get through another night without sleep.

  It was now Thursday afternoon, four days later. After his late arrival at the hospital, Bill had not left her side for more than a moment. He sat in the hospital room with her all night, as the doctors kept her overnight for observation. He drove her to the hotel, in her mini-van of course, which only served to remind her why he was not driving his treasured red coupe. And all through the following day, as they sat in the hotel room, fielded the constant stream of calls to their cell phones, and eventually fell asleep on the hotel room bed, Bill was always there.

  And still they had not said anything of substance.

  Now, as the house filled with people coming by to offer their condolences, she could sense that the interruptions of others and the return to their own home would prompt Bill to break the impasse.

  When she excused herself from friends and neighbors in the living room to go out to the kitchen, she anticipated Bill would follow her and say something.

  She could never have anticipated what he then did say.

  “We have been so lucky,” Bill said to her.

  In an instant, fury leaped within her. Her body became rigid. Her eyes flashed. Lucky? How could he be so heartless as to call this cruelty, this obscenity, fortunate?

  Before she could utter hot words of reproach, Bill continued: “Having J.D. come into our lives is the luckiest thing that could ever have happened. Even had I known he would be taken from us so soon, I would have regarded myself as the most blessed of fathers and would have treasured every minute with him without regret.”

  The flame of anger inside her died down as rapidly as it had risen.

  By the time she opened her mouth to respond, she could agree quietly: “Yes, we were lucky.”

  She leaned over and kissed Bill on the cheek. She smiled at him briefly before returning to the living room.

  • • •

  Even though she was not in a social mood, she could not help but be moved by the number of people who had come to the house. She’d known her father and her brothers and their families would be there.

  Many of her father’s long-time employees had dropped by as well.

  The few high school friends still living in the Twin Cities made an appearance.

  That police lieutenant, Ed Burton, who had come to see her in the hotel room over the past couple of days, and his partner, Melissa Garth, who had been outside her hospital room that first night, both stopped in to express their sorrow. They stayed only a few minutes.

  And many of her law professor colleagues and staff from the University of St. Thomas paid respects, along with more than a dozen of her students.

  It suddenly occurred to Candace she should be keeping track of who had come so she could send each person a handwritten thank-you note afterward. When the law school dean, Colleen Ordway, stepped over to greet her, Candace remarked that she was going to find a pen and paper to write down who had come so she would never forget their kindness. Dean Ordway told her she had already anticipated that need and had taken the initiative to put a pad of paper next to the front door as a memory book to be signed by each person as they came in the house.

  Colleen Ordway had been raised Irish Catholic in Boston, but people often assumed she was a native to Minnesota, frequently asking whether she was connected to the family that founded the Ordway Theater in Minneapolis. (Actually, the Ordway Musical Theater took its title from the middle-name of heiress Sally Irvine, its pioneering financier.) But Dean Ordway shared nothing with the theater other than the happenstance of the same name. As a woman who had reached a leadership pinnacle in the legal academy, Dean Ordway had been a mentor to Candace since she had arrived back in the Twin Cities. And she had become a great friend.

  When she later left the house with a group of other professors and staff members from the law school, Dean Ordway said nothing other than, “We’re all here for you. Not just today.
All the way through.” It was enough.

  The last person to leave the house was Father Cleve. He sat down on the couch beside Candace, touched her hand, and said, “It will be all right. Not today. But it will be all right.”

  “No,” she responded, not in hard words of resentment, but in hollow tones of sorrow. “It will not be all right. It will never be the same again.” She looked down at her hands folded in her lap.

  “It won’t ever be the same,” Father Cleve agreed. “But it will be all right.”

  He paused and waited for her to look back up at him. “The fracture in your heart will never fully heal, not until we all are joined together again at the Feast of the Lamb. We live in a broken world. And we all are wounded by that brokenness. But God gives us the grace to overcome those wounds.

  “As you know, Candace, every priest who has pastored a parish for more than a few years sees the loss of parents and the loss of children. The latter is always the hardest. But having seen parents grieve and being with them in their time of need, I can say this with confidence. As hard as it is to believe today,” he assured her, as he continued to touch her hand, “you will smile again. You will laugh again. You will always hold J.D. in your heart, and that part of your heart will always hurt a little. But you will also find joy in his memory. And you will again find joy in this life.”

  “Why, Father Cleve? Why?” asked Candace.

  “Ah,” Father Cleve answered. “That is the question all parents ask when a child is taken too soon. And I have to answer honestly by saying that I don’t know. I do know this,” he finished in a gentle voice. “Even before you shed your first tear of grief as as mother, He already had poured forth tears for you as your Father in Heaven. His heart was broken first. He knows who you are and where you are. He knows what it is to lose a Son.”

  Chapter 7

  [SIX DAYS AFTER THE TRAGEDY]

  As he walked through the door of the Eden Prairie Police Department at 8:30 a.m., Ed Burton glanced at the Minneapolis Star Tribune lying on a table. It had now been six days since the car bombing. The front page of the paper bore a large photo of Olin Pirkle pasted beneath yet another banner headline about the bombing.

  From this head-shot of Pirkle taken from his employee identification card at Insignia Construction, you’d think he was a morbidly obese man. His face was broad, his nose wide, his neck thick, and his jowls hung low. From talking with other Insignia Construction employees, Burton knew Pirkle was lean from the neck down. In fact, behind his back, other employees at Insignia had called Pirkle the “Living Bobblehead,” because his head appeared disproportionately large for his body. Burton hoped the mismatch between head and body was not preventing members of the public from identifying Pirkle as the man shown on the widely-circulated photo.

  Burton’s partner, Melissa Garth, was already at her desk.

  Ed called over and inquired, “So any public sightings of Pirkle today?”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied in a weary voice. “Dozens. Pirkle’s been seen everywhere from San Diego, California, to Portland, Maine—there’s even one reported sighting in London. And a surprising number of sightings of Pirkle in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

  “Accompanied by Elvis, no doubt. Anything credible?”

  “One recent sighting appears particularly credible. A ticket window worker at a bus terminal in Denver, Colorado, claims to have sold him a ticket. Denver police are checking it out to see if the ticket guy can remember where Pirkle was going . . . if it was Pirkle.

  “And, there is one old sighting that is extremely credible.”

  “Why would I care about an old sighting of Pirkle?” queried Burton.

  “Because the guy who sighted him was the manager of the U-Store-It down in Burnsville.”

  “Ah, that storage locker Pirkle’s roommate mentioned,” realized Burton.

  “Yes,” Garth replied. “The manager is there now. I’ve just typed up an application for a search warrant—we’ve certainly got enough from the other employees at Insignia to get a warrant to search for stolen goods. I’ve got a judge waiting in his chambers, and we can pick up the warrant on the way down to Burnsville.”

  As Garth and Burton started toward the door, Chief Anders Colter came out of his office, motioned toward them, and said, “You’d better come in and see this.” Colter pointed back to the television in his office.

  On the screen were several men standing behind a podium, one of whom was speaking into a microphone. The caption running at the bottom of the television screen identified the man speaking as Minnesota United States Attorney Robby Sherburne.

  Sherburne was in mid-sentence as the three went into Chief Anders’s office to watch: “. . . no different than the Oklahoma City truck bombing a quarter-century ago, and I promise you the end result here will be the same: the death penalty for whoever committed this heinous act and stole the life of that young boy.”

  The men standing behind Sherburne didn’t applaud but most appeared to nod in agreement. Burton recognized Alex Kramer of the ATF among them. Kramer wasn’t nodding. Burton thought he looked irritated.

  A puzzled look came over Garth’s face as she turned to Colter and Burton, “I thought Minnesota didn’t have the death penalty.”

  Colter replied, “Minnesota doesn’t. But this is a federal case, since it involved explosives, and some federal criminal statutes do have a death penalty. It just isn’t used very often. And especially not in Minnesota. There hasn’t been an execution in Minnesota, under either state or federal law, in more than a century.

  “My bet is Sherburne is trying to make a name for himself, set the stage to run for governor next year,” offered Chief Colter. “If a Democrat like Sherburne gets credit for the execution of a child-killer, it’ll cut the knees out from under any Republican opponent on the crime issue.”

  “What bothers me,” said Burton, “is that Sherburne’s calling for the death penalty when we haven’t arrested anyone, haven’t even clearly identified a suspect. I wish the political prosecutors would give us in law enforcement a little more time to do real police work before deciding to hang someone for this.”

  Colter chuckled and remarked, “Sherburne reminds me of the Queen of Hearts demanding the head of the Knave of Hearts before the end of his trial for stealing the queen’s tarts. Remember the queen’s line in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’”

  “Sherburne’s worse than the Queen of Hearts,” drolled Burton. “He’s not just putting the sentence before the trial. He’s pronouncing sentence before an arrest. We’ve only started on this investigation. The Queen of Hearts at least had a clear suspect in the Knave of Hearts. Sherburne doesn’t even know who he is trying to have executed!”

  Shaking his head, Burton walked with Garth out to their police car. After stopping by a local magistrate’s office to get the search warrant, they proceeded to Burnsville, about twenty miles south of Eden Prairie.

  As they drove the short distance, Burton placed a call to Alex Kramer. When Kramer picked up, Burton bypassed any formalities to say: “What the hell was that?”

  “You were watching?” asked Kramer, sounding chagrined. “I promise you I had no idea Sherburne was going to say something like that. I had briefed him on the progress of the investigation and expected him to give the typical non-responses to the press about how we were doing everything possible, we appreciate help from the public, etc. I never imagined he’d put the death penalty on the table before we’ve even arrested anyone.

  “In any event, he would still need sign off from Main Justice in Washington, D.C., to do that.” Kramer sighed and added, “But Sherburne can probably get that D.C. approval in a case like this. And now that he’s announced it, the Attorney General would look weak if he tried to pull Sherburne back. That was probably part of Sherburne’s calculation in speaking to
the press today.”

  “Well, I’m glad to know you weren’t a part of that, as I don’t want to be a part of it either,” interjected Bill.

  “Sherburne is a consummate politico,” Kramer acknowledged. “We all know that. But usually he has the sense to stay out of the way and let those who know what they’re doing do the actual work. He then takes the public credit. But he sees this episode as his shining moment in the sun, his way to make a name for himself. And he doesn’t want to waste any time. I guess this confirms the rumors he’s planning to run for governor next year.

  “Anyway,” Kramer finished. “Let me worry about that for now. Just keep doing your job. I’ll try to keep Sherburne from making that job any harder.”

  • • •

  Burton and Garth arrived at the U-Store-It on the outskirts of Burnsville, where they met the manager in the office at the front of the facility.

  Satisfied by the warrant, the manager led them to a large garage-style storage unit the paperwork said belonged to Olin Pirkle. The manager brought a set of bolt cutters he kept in the office to cut off locks when clients failed to pay rent on their storage units. After removing the lock and rolling up the metal door on the storage unit, the manager stepped back.

  Most of the storage unit was filled with old furniture and what looked to be boxes of books and papers. But in one back corner, stacked from floor to ceiling, were crates of floor tiles, copper plumbing pipes, bundles of electrical wire, and roofing materials.

  “Well, it sure looks like Pirkle is guilty,” remarked Garth.

  “Yes,” agreed Burton. “Guilty of theft. I don’t see anything that suggests he is guilty of murder.”

  Burton and Garth sorted briefly through the storage locker, finding no evidence of any explosives.

  “Maybe he stole only two sticks of TNT—the very two sticks he used to make the bomb he attached to Klein’s car,” suggested Garth.