Haunted Hearts (20 page)

Myers's demands for money intensified. Once, when she told him she couldn't go on, he pulled her out of the S&L office and slapped her face until a passerby told him to stop. In the condominium he would beat her, leaving bruises on her arms and neck, and she would try to explain them away to concerned co-workers, saying she had been playing touch football with her son and had fallen several times, or that she had been hit with a tennis ball. He balanced the beatings with apologies and promises that he would soon be able to pay all the money back, promises that he had deals under way.

She attempted suicide, swallowing massive quantities of prescribed tranquilizers and waking alone the next day, terribly sick and even more severely depressed.

By the end of the summer, Myers was spending almost all of his time in Florida, and Susan was being treated for symptoms of extreme stress, mixing tranquilizers with alcohol, drinking and crying alone in the Marlborough townhouse, wanting someone to rescue her and desperately afraid of spending years in prison, as Myers had promised she would if she were caught.

She endured two surprise audits of the S&L, telling herself each time that this was when she would be caught. But she and the computer programmer had both done their jobs well, and she received another Employee of the Month award, cited for the constant flow of compliments sent her way by customers.

One evening at the townhouse, she received a telephone call from a woman whose voice she didn't recognize.

“She told me she knew who I was,” Susan said to McGuire. “I was half-drunk, I was past caring who I was or who she was. She said she was Ross's former wife, his second wife, the one who had called Thomas. She said she knew what I was doing and that she wanted ten thousand dollars from me or she was going to the police.”

“How did she know about it?” McGuire asked.

“She had been seeing Ross again. I learned about it later. I learned so much later. Anyway, I told her to do it, do whatever the hell she wanted, because I didn't care anymore. You have to understand. I was cut off from my family, my friends, my children. I was constantly paralyzed with fear that I would be found out, and yet I was hoping I would be, if only to end this nightmare. If you have never been under the control of someone, maybe you can't understand. I was basically a little suburban housewife and mother who got herself involved with a psychopathic personality, somebody who knew how to push every button to encourage me, frighten me, intimidate me, manipulate me. Do you understand?”

McGuire said he was trying.

“You never will,” she said. “Not totally.” She smiled and set her empty coffee cup aside. “But I appreciate you trying.”

At times, Myers would surprise her with expensive gifts and promise to restore the fun and excitement they used to have. At other times, he humiliated her by boasting of the women he was seeing in Florida.

She began asking herself how she had gotten to this place, how the good student, the daughter of a deeply religious father, the girl who never told a lie and never stole a thing in her life, had permitted herself to become so beaten and helpless. She had only wanted to be liked, the way her customers and her co-workers at the S&L appeared to like her without knowing the hidden truths.

She dreaded returning to the condominium each evening, dreaded the telephone calls from Florida demanding more money, dreaded finding him sitting in the shadows to frighten her when she entered, telling her he was flying back to Florida on an afternoon plane the next day and he needed another twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars to take with him, sometimes cajoling her with gifts or flattery, other times threatening her and her children, or beating her.

She began stopping at a bar on lower Beacon Street after work, sipping a few drinks to build courage to continue home. Men would approach her and she would usually fend off their attempts at conversation and return the drinks they bought for her. But there were times when she was lonely and frightened.

“One day,” she said, “I heard someone refer to a man I had seen in there before. They said he was a cop, a detective. I thought, perhaps if I could make friends with someone like that, a police officer who would understand what I was going through, he might be able to help me. I was so afraid of being caught, afraid of the shame. I couldn't stand the idea of prison, of being locked away. So I made a point of smiling at him, and he came over and sat beside me. We talked a little, and he said I looked like a woman who needed help.”

McGuire's eyes locked onto hers. “When was this?”

“Three years ago last summer. He was nice to me, and he didn't ask questions, not at first. I liked him, I wanted to get him to like me. So I didn't tell him about Ross, not right away. We had to be careful, because he was married.”

“What was his name?”

“Frank DeLisle.”

McGuire sat back in the booth.

“It lasted less than a month,” she said. DeLisle took her to New York one weekend. When she returned to the condominium Sunday evening, she found Myers in a drunken rage, demanding to know where she had been, and with whom. She refused to tell him. He told her he needed money the next morning, at least $30,000, and she said she couldn't do it anymore. He beat her on the back and on the thighs, where the bruises wouldn't show, until she agreed to get the money for him. Then he became gentle and tender, as he always did when she agreed to his demands. He apologized for the beating, and told her what a wonderful woman she was, and how much he had missed her.

The next day she totaled the funds she had taken from depositors and transferred into the training file. She broke into tears when the amount came to over $700,000.

Myers called in the morning, asking if she had transferred the money yet, and she told him again that she couldn't do it anymore. When he told her he was coming down to the S&L to
make
her do it, she called DeLisle and begged him to meet her at work as soon as possible. When he promised to be there within an hour, she alerted her manager that she was ill and might be going home early.

Myers arrived in a fury, hissing across the counter at her when she ignored him, trembling inside. Then DeLisle entered, flashed his badge, and stared at Myers with such hostility that he spun on his heel and left without a word.

“Frank wanted to know what was going on,” Susan said. “I asked him to take me somewhere, alone. I had things to tell him.”

In DeLisle's car she told him about the thefts. She gave him details on the training file, the threats Myers had made on her children, the beatings, and the manipulation. DeLisle listened in silence. He advised her not to go home that evening, suggesting she get a place to stay downtown. To her surprise, that was his only reaction. She wouldn't see him again until her trial, when he appeared as a prosecution witness, testifying against her, reading aloud from the notes he had made after she left his car.

She found a room in a tourist hotel, went to work the next morning, and was arrested for grand larceny by three detectives, who entered the S&L just before lunch.

They took her downtown for questioning. Bail was set at $500,000, a lawyer was assigned to handle her case, and she spent four months in jail awaiting trial.

“I kept reading about myself in the newspapers,” she said to McGuire.

“I remember it,” he said. “I remember hearing the story, and how nobody could believe that someone smart enough to fool the state banking authority could steal so much money and claim it wasn't for them. Just the newspaper reports, that's all I remember.”

“When the police went to look for Ross, the condominium was cleaned out. The jewelry and the furs he bought me were gone, and most of the furniture had been sold. He got rid of everything he could in exchange for whatever money he could get his hands on. He destroyed all the photographs of me and my children, so everything vanished except my memories. Then he hired a lawyer and told them that a friend of his was in trouble, meaning me. This friend, he told the lawyer, might try to implicate him. He and the lawyer went to the police together. The lawyer. . . .”

“Marv Rosen,” McGuire said. He shook his head. Frank DeLisle. Father Frank. DeLisle DeLovely, the good family man, the good cop who would not tolerate swearing in his presence, the guy everybody would go into the jungle with. Sleeping with Susan and then dumping her, dropping a tip when he discovered what she was up to, and then abandoning her. And Marv Rosen, defender of hopeless causes. No wonder he bragged that Myers hadn't stiffed him on any fees. Myers paid his legal fees with money Susan stole for him. Nobody stiffed Marv Rosen on fees, not ever.

“How did you know?” Susan asked. “About Rosen?”

“I've seen Myers's file. And I talked to Rosen yesterday.”

“About me?”

“No. Only about Myers.”

“Then you know what happened to Ross.”

“Rosen gave the Internal Revenue an income-tax-evasion conviction, and the DA's office dropped the larceny charge.”

“Because Ross's signature was not on any of the bank documents, it wasn't a strong case. He spent the money, but I was the one who took it.” She was toying with her fingers. “They tried us separately. Frank DeLisle was a prosecution witness against me.”

“Did your lawyer describe your relationship with DeLisle?”

She shook her head. “The prosecuting attorney said he would ask for a lighter sentence if it never came up. They wouldn't sacrifice a good police officer's career for such an indiscretion. That's what they called it. Instead of ten years, he would only ask for five. My lawyer said it was a good deal. They wanted to protect the reputation of a good cop, and they would take five years off my sentence to do it.”

“Didn't anybody believe you?”

“Not really. I had a court-appointed lawyer, a young kid, really. They had my confession. I never told anyone that I was being beaten, I was too embarrassed. So the prosecution claimed I really
had
fallen or been hit with a tennis ball. Those are the excuses I had used. They said no one had beaten me. They said I had bought all these nice clothes and jewelry for myself, and that I had given money to Ross because I was afraid of losing him to other women. He testified against me, told them I had boasted about coming from a wealthy family in Connecticut, and that's where he believed the money had come from. My God he lied, he lied so much, he destroyed me there. My lawyer . . . he tried but he couldn't do very much. I had a good pre-sentence report and the judge agreed to the five years, just five years, that's all, my lawyer kept saying, telling me I'd probably be out in two but I kept thinking five years, five years, five years . . .

“After my trial, they brought me to the court as a prosecution witness against Ross,” she said in a dull flat voice. “His lawyer, Mr. Rosen, tore me apart there on the stand, calling me all kinds of names, asking me what date I had done this, and why I had done that on another day, and of course I couldn't remember. In those last few months I had been like a robot. He showed pictures of me wearing fur coats and jewelry Ross had bought me. He said I had bought them with the money I stole, and asked where they were, and when I told him I didn't know, he said I had destroyed them because they were evidence that I was the criminal. I knew Ross had sold I everything to pay Rosen's legal fees, but I had no proof. They had vanished. I couldn't afford to hire anyone to trace them.”

“Myers got off easy,” McGuire said.

She nodded. “Ross got one year in minimum security. He sent me a letter once, telling me he was spending his days playing ping pong and basketball. I was in a federal prison . . .”

“Cedar Hill?” McGuire knew the place, a gray stone fortress on the edge of the Berkshires, with the oldest wing set aside for women prisoners.

“Yes.” She swallowed. “This morning in jail, it all came back again, the humiliation, the loneliness, all of it. The prison psychiatrist kept telling me to adjust, but how could I ever adjust to that? While I was in Cedar Hill, I received a letter telling me my husband had obtained full custody of my children. At my trial, they didn't believe my testimony about Ross making me do those things, using my children the way he did. The lawyer who acted for my husband submitted the transcripts from my trial, and he used them to take my children from me.”

“Orin Flanigan,” McGuire said. Things were beginning to fit.

“Yes.”

“And you couldn't locate your husband or children when you came out of jail, so you went to Orin Flanigan.”

“He wouldn't talk to me at first. He said it was client privilege, a conflict of interest, and so on. But one day when I was pleading with him, nearly hysterical, his wife came in and saw me. It was after office hours, everyone else had gone home. I left, and I guess Orin's wife wanted to know what was going on. The next day Orin left a message at the halfway house, inviting me to come and meet with him. He told me I reminded his wife of their daughter, and we began to talk. He began to believe me. He searched court records, he talked to people, he sympathized with me . . .”

“Did he tell you where your husband and children were?”

She shook her head. “Orin said he was bound by law to reveal nothing about them without my husband's consent. All he said was that Thomas had moved west. He said he would try to find a way, a legal way, to put me in touch with them. But I think he was mostly angry at Ross Myers. He kept saying, ‘These are the things that make the law such an ass at times,' meaning the way Ross was treated, compared with me.” She looked up at McGuire. “I really think Orin loved me,” she said. “Maybe like he loved his own daughter. He knew Ross had cheated the system, and he said it was unfair, that somebody should make him pay somehow. He wanted to see that Myers paid one way or the other, or to make sure that he didn't ruin the lives of other women. Then he told me about you. He said you were somebody who might be able to find Ross and do something, and maybe find Thomas and my children too.”