Cruel Doubt (25 page)

* * *

Osteen began the meeting in his customary smooth and polished fashion.

“Chris,” he said, “we have tried our best to look at all the things you've told us and find a way to accept them. But frankly, we're having a hard time. Now, we're going to go through these things in a methodical and orderly fashion, and this time, you're going to tell us the truth.”

Then Osteen explained that a previously scheduled court appearance would require his occasional absence from the interview, but that his son and Tom Brereton were well prepared to continue in his absence.

Osteen started by asking about the map. Chris said the only map he'd ever drawn was the one the SBI had asked him to back in March.

“Yeah,” Brereton said, “and you printed the word LAWSON on that map.”

“So what?” Chris responded.

“I'll tell you so what,” Brereton said, leaning forward. “Expert analysis of that printing shows it's
exactly the same
as the printing on the first map you drew. The one you gave to Upchurch and Henderson so they could go down to your house and kill your parents.”

“I never drew them any map.”

“Bullshit!”

“I didn't!”

“Chris,” Osteen said, speaking softly, “the printing on that map they found at the fire certainly looks like the printing you did in March.”

“I can't help what it looks like. I didn't draw any map for Henderson or Upchurch.”

“Maybe you drew a map for somebody else,” Osteen suggested.

Chris paused, as if in thought. “Well,” he said, “you know, I
could
have drawn a map, maybe—I mean, I don't remember this, but I suppose it's possible—for one of our D and D games. You know, mapping out a scenario. Or I could have drawn one for a friend of mine. I had this one friend, I remember, his name was Brian. He wanted to come down to Washington but he didn't know where we lived. You know, maybe I could have drawn a map for him.”

“And did you ever talk, to your friend Brian, or to anyone else, about the possibility of your parents being killed?” Osteen asked.

“No. No, never.”

“I don't mean seriously,” Osteen said. “I mean, just maybe as a joke.”

“No, no, I never would even joke about something like that. You know, that would be a really sick joke.”

Except for the fact that he hadn't bothered to shave, Chris was so small and skinny, and was wearing such little kid's clothes, that he looked as if he should have been at day camp, not in Bill Osteen's conference room with Tom Brereton glaring at him, separated from him only by the width of the conference table.

“Well, you know,” he said, “Upchurch made a couple of jokes about that. Really sick jokes. But I just ignored him. I wouldn't joke about something like that.”

“But you talked about your parents having money,” Osteen said.

“Well, I don't know. I'm not sure.”

“For Christ's sake,” Brereton interrupted, “don't deny
that
. Ten people have already told me that you did.”

“Oh, no, no. Look, I didn't even know about that. This whole thing about the inheritance. I didn't even know there
was
an inheritance. Nobody ever told me about that.”

“Bullshit!” Brereton said. “Your own mother has told me, and she's told Mr. Osteen here the same thing—that she explained very carefully to you that there was quite a large inheritance, and that a trust fund had been established, and that you and your sister would come into the money when the younger of you turned thirty-five.”

“No, no,” he said. “I didn't know anything about that. I only heard about the inheritance after all this had happened.”

“Well, Chris,” Osteen said, preparing to leave for the courthouse, “if you stick to that statement, you put me in the position of having to choose between you and your mother in regard to who's telling the truth. And I'll tell you frankly, for me that's not a hard choice.”

Once Osteen was out of the room, Brereton moved into a higher gear.

“Henderson says he drove your car. That's in his statement to the police. Why would he say that if it wasn't true?”

“Beats me,” Chris said.

“That's not good enough,” Brereton said.

“Look, I don't know why Henderson said that, all right?”

“He said it because it happens to be
true
,” Brereton said.

Chris sat silently, shaking his head.

“No other answer?” Brereton said.

Chris shook his head.

Brereton showed him pictures of the bat and knife. He denied ever having seen either before.

“You ever take Henderson to your house?” Brereton asked.

“No, never.

“How about Upchurch?”

“Nope. Well, not to my house. There was once, back in June, we were on our way to the beach, just decided to drive down there one night, and on the way back we stopped in Washington. We didn't stay at my house, though. We drove by, I showed him where it was, but we didn't stop.”

“So now you're admitting that Upchurch saw your house before?”

“Well, yeah, but I mean, so what? It was the middle of the night.”

“It was the middle of the night when Lieth was killed, too.”

Chris said nothing.

“And Upchurch, who's been by your house, has a map with your printing on it, showing him just where the house is, and the whole time he's gone your car is gone, too.”

“I never said my car was gone.”

“You don't have to. You gotta understand, Chris, I've been in this business more than twenty years. I've been bullshitted by a lot better bullshitters than you.

“This isn't bullshit,” Chris said. But he was beginning to look a little shakier. “It's just that my memory—look, I was taking a lot of drugs. There's some things I sometimes can't remember.”

“Like knowing about the inheritance?” Brereton said.

“Well . . . well, yeah, actually, that
is
a good example. I think I do remember something about that now. I think one time I might have said something to Vince, my roommate, about my grandparents leaving Lieth a lot of money. But I swear to God, he's the only person I ever told.”

* * *

By late morning, Osteen had returned from the courthouse. He continued the questioning about the money. “Chris,” he said, “how could you have told your roommate about the inheritance if your mother didn't tell
you
until after the fact?”

Chris shook his head. “I don't know. I guess that's what I mean about sometimes my memory is bad.”

“Your problem,” Brereton said, “isn't your own memory. It's other people's memories. And some of them are pretty damned good. I've got some statements here from a few of your friends at NC State. Let's take this Daniel Duyk, for instance. He says he told you that if your parents were dead, you'd have enough money so you could loan him some to start a restaurant.

“And as you may know, Upchurch's lawyer let me interview Upchurch in jail. He didn't say much I believed, but about the money he told me the same goddamned thing. You were planning to have it all.”

“Well, maybe they heard it from Vince,” Chris said. “I told Vince, I think, about the Camel City Dry Cleaners. And Vince is from Winston. He'd know that would be worth a lot of money.”

“I don't give a fuck about Vince,” Brereton said. “I'm talking about what
Daniel
says
you
told
him
. Like, if your parents were dead, you'd have a lot of money and you could buy a big house with a long driveway and a fast car, and you could go there and take drugs and play Dungeons and Dragons, and someday you were going to write a book—a fiction book, you told him. One good book that would make you even more money.”

Chris's discomfort was becoming increasingly obvious.

“Look, look, I was drinking a lot of beer. I was smoking a lot of pot. I was dropping acid. I might have said some of these things. Like I told you, my memory's bad.”

“Chris,” Bill Osteen said, “think carefully now. I'm asking you one more time: Did you
ever
leave anyone with the impression—and this is not to say that you wanted to see anything happen—but did you ever give anyone the impression that you would be better off financially if Lieth and Bonnie were dead?”

He didn't answer the question. Instead, he said, “It's
possible
that I printed that word.
Lawson
. It's possible I printed that on the map. I think it may have been James who drew the map. Upchurch. I think he drew it for a new D and D scenario we were just starting, and I could have printed the word on it then.”

“So it's ‘possible,'” Brereton said. “And, ah, when was it ‘possible' you could have done this?”

“Oh, I don't know. About eight or nine days before.”

“About eight or nine days before what?”

“You know, before what—before what happened.”

“Listen, you silly little son of a bitch!” Brereton shouted. “I'm not swallowing this bullshit! I want to know what the fuck was going on. You might be able to fool a nice guy like Mr. Osteen, but I'm not a nice guy, and you're not, fooling me at all.”

Chris looked scared.

“Upchurch used that map,” Brereton said, “to get to your house to kill your stepfather and try to kill your mother, so you could inherit a million bucks.”

“No!” Chris said. “He was only supposed to steal a few things.”

* * *

The room fell silent.

“All right, look, I'll tell you the truth,” Chris said. “I did draw the map. And I gave it to them. And I also loaned them my car. James had said if he could get into the house he could steal a bunch of stuff and take it to a pawnshop and then we'd all have more money for drugs. There was some stuff I told him about. The TV, the VCR, a radar detector, the stereo. And probably some cash in my mother's pocketbook. But it was
downstairs!
The only things I told him about were downstairs. He was never even supposed to go up the stairs. He wasn't supposed to hurt anybody. Something must have got out of control. I don't know what happened because I've never talked to either one of them since.”

* * *

Bill Osteen had to make another quick appearance in court. It was almost one
P
.
M
. by the time he returned.

“So you drew them a map,” he said, “so they could go down to your house and steal some things. You understand, Chris, this is a major difference from any story you've ever told before.”

“We just wanted money,” Chris said. “So we could do more drugs and keep playing the game.”

And it was then—with that reference to Dungeons & Dragons, which Chris habitually referred to simply as “the game”—that Tom Brereton jumped up from his chair. He pounded the conference table with one fist and stuck his other hand about three inches from Chris's nose.

“Look, kid,” he shouted, “this is real life! This ain't no more fuckin' game!”

And Chris looked up at Brereton and said, to everyone's surprise, “Okay, I did it. I planned it. That's what you want to hear. Now you've heard it.”

* * *

While Osteen and Brereton and Bill Junior stared at him in utter silence, Chris Pritchard cried for about thirty seconds.

Still in his first year of private law practice, Bill Osteen, Jr., found himself suddenly peering over the edge of a deep abyss, at something very dark and formless far below.

“It was so
foreign
,” he said later. “The whole thing was so absolutely foreign to everything in my whole experience of life. I remember feeling so terribly sad, thinking about how much Bonnie loved Chris, and how much faith she had in him, how convinced she'd been that he'd had nothing to do with this at all.”

Quickly regaining his composure, Chris lit a cigarette, got to his feet, and in his sandals and T-shirt and short pants, began to pace the length of the conference room.

“I didn't plan on telling you this,” he said. “I didn't plan to tell anybody, ever. And I don't know why I'm telling you now.”

But then he sat down again and told them the details.

* * *

When he was finished, they had him wait in an outer office while they had a private talk.

“Where I come from,” Brereton said, “this is when you put the cuffs on him and take him away. But we're working
for
the little bastard, not against him.”

“And I'm afraid,” Osteen said, “that our real work is just beginning. We still have to defend him at trial.”

“How the fuck can we do that?” Brereton said. “What if the son of a bitch is found innocent?”

“I don't know.” Osteen said. “He's a mess. But no matter what he's told us, he still stands a chance of being acquitted. In fact, it's our job to get him acquitted. But what happens if he goes free? What happens to him, knowing that he's gotten away with murder, and that we know it? And what happens to Bonnie?”

The thought occurred to Bill Osteen that Chris had just confessed to trying once to kill his mother to get her money. How could they be sure he wouldn't try again?

“Jesus Christ, I don't think I can handle this,” Brereton said. “That kid walks, and I've gotta spend the rest of my life down on my knees, prayin' he don't hurt anybody ever again.”

“We're going to be down on our knees before that,” Osteen said. “Knowing what we know, how do we let him go home to Bonnie tonight? There's no telling what he might do. And she's even given him a gun.”

“For his own protection,” Brereton said.

“Here's what I think,” Osteen said. “For his own protection and for Bonnie's, I don't think we can let him go home. I think we've got to get him straight to a psychiatrist. I don't know if he'll kill Bonnie, but I'm afraid there's a doggone good chance he'll kill himself.”