Blameless (21 page)

“What?” Valerie demanded. “What?”

Stunned, Diana simply handed the paper over to Valerie.

Valerie quickly scanned the report. “I don’t get it.”

Diana pointed to the recommendation, her finger shaking slightly. “James couldn’t have killed himself,” she said, unable to believe she was actually speaking the words she heard coming from her mouth. “Or at least not the way that we thought,” she added.

“He couldn’t have?” Valerie frowned and read the paragraph again.

The clock ticked in the corner, horns honked from the street, voices called to one another in the corridor on the other side of the door, and Valerie held the poor copy up to the light. But Diana was alone. She was separate, apart. It was as if the noises and movements of the living were happening on another plane while she existed within this unearthly fog of incredulity. A fog that muted sound, light, time. A fog that buffered her from this overwhelming new reality.

“His right big toe was paralyzed,” Valerie said, her voice slow and incredulous, as if hearing the words spoken out loud would lend them meaning.

Diana was back on the landing of James’s apartment building on Anderson Street, looking down the narrow hallway at the still form that lay on the stretcher, at the two feet that dangled from the edge of the sheet. The left foot was covered with James’s paint-splattered sneaker. The right one was bare.
There’s powder burns on his foot
, the policeman had said.
My guess is he pulled the trigger with his toe
.

“His right toe was paralyzed,” Valerie said again. Then a huge grin split her face, and she actually let out a whoop. “You’re off the hook—he couldn’t have committed suicide!”

Diana listened to the high whine of an approaching police siren drop as it raced passed the building, rushing to its emergency. She said nothing.

Valerie’s smile disappeared into her more customary severe expression. Her eyes locked onto Diana’s. “But if Hutchins didn’t commit suicide …”

Diana nodded grimly.

“Then,” Valerie said slowly, “he must have been murdered.”

17

T
HEN HE MUST HAVE BEEN MURDERED
. V
ALERIE’S
words seared like a neon stamp into Diana’s brain.
Then he must have been murdered
. Through her protective haze, Diana could feel a fragment of dread in the center of her soul, an apprehension that she feared would soon grow and overpower her.

Valerie leaned forward in her chair. She raised her eyebrows slightly, but she said nothing.

Neither did Diana.
Then he must have been murdered
.

Finally, Valerie placed her hands on the table, fingers splayed, and began to push herself from her chair. “I’ll go call Engdahl,” she said.

Diana’s hand flashed forward. She grabbed Valerie’s wrist before she could stand. “Do you have to?”

Without taking her eyes from Diana’s, Valerie sat back down in her chair. “Why shouldn’t I?”

Diana released Valerie’s hand and looked down at her own. She shook her head. Valerie said nothing, and Diana could almost feel the force of the challenge in Valerie’s reticence. Although Diana didn’t raise her head, she mumbled, “They’re going to say that I did it.”

Valerie was silent for yet another moment. When she finally spoke, her words were slow and deliberate. “Why do you think that?”

“For all the reasons I was responsible for his suicide,” Diana said, still looking at her hands. “But now it’s even more compelling.” She slowly raised her eyes and looked at Valerie. “I’ve got plenty of motive: five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of it. And …” she paused as the potential horror of the situation struck her. “And I don’t think I’ve got an alibi for that afternoon.”

“Don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions here?”

“But what about my journal?” Diana asked. “What if the police decide I did it to get rid of a difficult patient—or because James and I were having some kind of lovers’ quarrel?”

“You’re really stretching, Diana,” Valerie said, smiling and shaking her head. “And if it came to it—which it won’t—the rules of evidence are different in criminal law.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that although your journal might have been admissible in a civil suit, it would never be allowed in evidence in a criminal proceeding. Criminal law is much more advantageous to the defendant. And anyway—”

“But don’t you see how this looks?” Diana interrupted. “I’ve got motive and opportunity.”

“I can’t believe this.” Valerie threw her hands in the air in mock despair. “You’ve just gotten the best news you could ever get and you’re talking like some character from ‘Murder, She Wrote’.” She shook her head. “You remind me of my Grandma Rae—always looking for the cloud in the silver lining.”

“But—”

“But nothing.” Valerie stabbed a fingernail at the neurological report. “This completely exonerates you in James Hutchins’s death, and Engdahl will be forced to drop all the charges.” She chortled happily. “There’s no basis for either wrongful death or malpractice—and this undermines the hell out of the sexual abuse aspect.”

“What does this have to do with sexual abuse?” Diana asked, although she felt hopeful for the first time. “Why should Jill let that go?”

“I’d guess she’d be too embarrassed not to.”

“You think the press will drop it too?”

Valerie looked thoughtful for a moment. “You know what I think?”

Diana shook her head.

“I think that the same media that has had such fun crucifying you is now going to do a one-eighty.” She nodded as if heartily agreeing with her own words. “Yes, I wouldn’t doubt it at all. Not at all.” Valerie began to chuckle. “Don’t you see—the sniffers are going to feel
guilty
. They’ve backed the wrong side, and we’ll make sure that it’s thrown in their faces!”

Diana leaned forward. “We will?”

“I have a few friends in the press,” Valerie said slyly. “And we’ve got a hell of a defamation of character suit against the
Inquirer
to add to the right-to-privacy violation.”

Diana’s smile was half-bitter, half-amused. “Spoken like a true lawyer.”

Valerie stood. “The truth is, no matter what you might want, as an officer of the court, I’m under a legal obligation to report this information.” She lifted the neurological report and let it drift slowly back to the table. “Not to mention that it’s part of the official court record.”

“But its importance would probably be overlooked.”

Ignoring Diana’s comment, Valerie picked the report up again. “I’d just love to take this over to Engdahl myself,” she said, waving it in the air. Then she looked at the clock. “No time—I’ve got to be in court in an hour. I’ll have to be satisfied hearing his voice and imagining what splattered ego looks like all over his face.” She pulled open the heavy door and left the room.

Diana remained at the large table, papers scattered all over its marble surface, listening to the happy clicking of Valerie’s heels on the hardwood floor.

The weekend following Diana’s discovery passed in a whirlwind of chaotic emotion. One moment she soared from her public vindication, and the next she plummeted from the suspicion and innuendo. She was buffeted and bloodied by the storm of media conjecture. S
EX
D
OC
I
NNOCENT
, the
Inquirer
headline screamed in a double-edged exoneration the morning after the suit was dismissed. H
UTCHINS
M
URDER
I
NVESTIGATION
O
PENED
, declared the
Globe
.

Valerie had been right in her prediction that Jill would drop all the charges. With the evidence that James couldn’t have committed suicide, it was clear that the wrongful death and malpractice suits were moot, and apparently Engdahl felt that without Diana’s journal, even his sexual abuse case was too weak to prosecute.

Unfortunately, Valerie’s prophecy of the press’s one-eighty wasn’t quite so accurate. Although the
Globe
ran an editorial exploring the role of the media in her persecution, comparing it to the media’s mishandling of the Carol Dimaiti Stuart fiasco—when Boston police had harassed and arrested a black man for the murder of a white pregnant woman, only to discover that her husband was guilty—much of the coverage was negative. With the lurid fascination of a bypasser at a highway accident scene, Diana followed the talk shows and tabloids as they debated the various possibilities of who might be charged with murder—she, Jill, or even Ethan, who became a suspect when the press got hold of two police reports of Ethan and James fighting in a Cambridge bar. Still, most people seemed to think it would be Diana who would be charged. Diana had wished for an end to the agony of the civil suit; now she understood the full meaning of the old saying: “Be careful what you wish for.”

Despite the suspicion about her, which Diana felt like a binding cocoon, friends and colleagues called to congratulate her, and Ticknor asked her to complete the semester. Her sister-in-law Martha actually apologized for worrying about Paul instead of Diana, and her mother was exuberant, claiming to have never doubted for a moment that Diana would be cleared. On Sunday afternoon, when she stopped for gas, the attendant told her he had known all along that it wasn’t her fault. Although Craig didn’t get his Central Artery project back, his colleagues restored him to full-member status in their water-cooler conversations. And he began singing in the shower again.

Diana nodded and smiled and graciously accepted everyone’s good wishes, as well as Ticknor’s offer. But despite what looked from the outside to be a change in fortune, Diana was wary of too much celebration. For until she knew she wasn’t a murder suspect, it all meant nothing.

The police came first thing Monday morning, when she fortunately had no patients scheduled. And when the bell rang, Diana knew from the insistent pressure who would be waiting on the other side of the door. Her feet were heavy on the stairs.

Two unsmiling men dressed in street clothes stood on the stoop. They flashed their badges simultaneously, almost as if they had been choreographed, and asked to come in. She ushered them up to the great room, offered them coffee and went down to the kitchen to call Valerie.

Although Valerie didn’t do criminal work, she had promised Diana that she would sit with her through this first interview to determine if a criminal lawyer was necessary. Valerie said she would be there within the hour. “Don’t say a word,” she directed Diana. “Not a single word.” Diana was stunned by Valerie’s final instruction: “If they want to take you down to the station, call me back and I’ll meet you there.”

After canceling her ten and eleven o’clock patients, Diana dragged herself back upstairs, straining to appear as normal and calm as she could, trying to assure herself that there was little chance they would arrest her. “My lawyer says she can’t be here for at least an hour. Would you prefer to wait, or to come back later?”

They preferred to wait, and Diana spent what turned into an extremely uncomfortable hour and a half, repeating that she did not want to say anything without her attorney present. Neither man ever smiled, or registered any emotion whatsoever, as they patiently asked question after unanswered question. Although this was clearly getting them nowhere, neither appeared the least bit perturbed.

When Valerie finally arrived, the police obtained little more information than they had gleaned from Diana’s nonanswers. “My client often works alone,” Valerie said in response to their request for verification of Diana’s whereabouts on the afternoon of the murder. “It’s the nature of her profession,” she added, her voice haughty and more than a little condescending. “She often sets her machine to screen her calls so that she can pursue her scientific investigations without interruption.” Valerie smiled and looked over at Diana for confirmation.

Diana nodded, unable to speak. She was sure Valerie was going to anger the detectives with her arrogance, and that the two men would soon jump up, snap handcuffs on her wrists, and drag her off to jail.

But they did no such thing. Instead they wrote down everything Valerie said. Finally, once again in unison, they flipped their notebooks shut and stood up. One even smiled as he told Diana to call and leave a number where she could be reached if she was going to be away from home for more than a day.

“Nothing,” Valerie said as she flew out the door, already late for her next meeting. “Jack-shit,” she called over her shoulder cheerfully. “They’ve got jack-shit.” She promised to phone Diana later in the afternoon.

Diana spent the remainder of the morning trying to work on her research project, but ended up spending most of her time pacing through the house. Murder. She was a suspect in a murder investigation. She could really be arrested. She could go to prison. For life. It was small consolation that Massachusetts had no death penalty.

She had been to prison once, during a field trip for a criminology course she had taken in graduate school. A “correctional facility,” they had called it. But no matter what name they used, it was still a prison: a haphazard arrangement of concrete and cinderblock buildings completely encircled by a double row of tall barricades topped by spiral loops of barbed wire. Lookout towers stood like castle turrets at the four corners. A large German shepherd had come up and nuzzled her hand while they were waiting for the group to assemble. As she bent to pet the animal, its trainer told her the dog had once ripped a man’s leg to the bone.

But the inside of the prison was the worst. Claustrophobic, windowless cells originally planned for one inmate were crammed with two or three, sometimes four, cots. The mattresses were thin and worn and a single toilet stood along the back wall of each cell—most often, the toilet had no seat. Two stories of cells lined a large open “rec room” where a few picnic tables and pieces of broken exercise equipment sat amid a wide expanse of green linoleum. It smelled of Lysol.

From the one-way window of the guardpost high above the rec room, they had watched the prisoners loitering around the tables in their ill-fitting uniforms. Their shirts and pants were of a coarse, scratchy-looking fabric dyed white, gray, orange, or red. “Middlesex Correctional Facility” was stenciled in large black letters on their backs. The sheriff giving the tour explained that the brighter the color, the more serious the crime. “Murderers and rapists wear red.”