Neighborhood Watch (11 page)

Though I thought Linda Sue was brave to hold her ground, I was sorry she’d sat down next to me, afraid that some of the older people might think I was the one making these comments. Anyone could tell this wasn’t the place to say all this. Kim, from Korea was in the room, as was Eleanor, who worked with troubled black teenagers. These were complicated issues, not quite the same as taking a novelty approach to lawn-care chores. If Eleanor wasn’t bringing this up, why was Linda Sue?

The policewoman continued, “If the family checked out, we’d thank them for their time and tell them they’re free to go now.”

Oh, no,
I thought.
Please. Just say you’d apologize
.

“You wouldn’t worry about them suing you for traumatizing their kids?”

Marianne’s face reddened. “If you have problems with this group, Linda Sue, why don’t we talk about it afterward?”

“No, I like the group. It’s fine.” She looked around as if surprised that anyone might have taken her comments the wrong way.

“Good,” Marianne continued, her voice tight with the effort to control it. “Then our time is up. We’ll meet again in two weeks to nominate officers. Maybe we can take up Linda Sue’s questions then.”

Linda Sue stood up and lit a cigarette. “Fat chance,” she said, exhaling. I wondered if she’d seen Marianne’s needlepoint sampler that said, NO SMOKING, LUNGS AT WORK. “Maybe we should go to the porch,” I whispered.

Outside, Linda Sue shook out another cigarette. “Want one?”

The last time I smoked was early in college, hardly a time I remember with great nostalgia, but something compelled me to reach over and take a cigarette. Inhaling gave me a head rush. I felt dizzy and nauseated and drunk all at once. I leaned against the porch railing to steady myself. “Why do you say things like that? Get everyone riled up?”

Lind Sue smiled and caught my eye. I saw it then: She knew exactly the effect her words had and it was all an act—the cereal, the clothes, the way she pretended to care about nothing. “When you’re not married, you can do anything you want,” she said. “It’s fun. You should try it sometime. Pick someone and tell them what you really think.”

I looked up and saw Geoffrey watching us through the sliding-glass doors. I thought about doing what she’d just suggested, walking over to him and saying out loud,
I think about you more than I should. I imagine us doing strange things sometimes—buying vegetables together or riding an elevator
.
I know I shouldn’t but I do.
I watched him make a face through the glass door, his hands around his neck, as if to say,
I’m dying in here. Let me out.
I laughed and waved him over.
Good old Geoffrey won’t ostracize Linda Sue for speaking her mind,
I thought.
He’ll probably like her more.

“Hello, ladies,” he said, walking toward us, nodding. “I’m afraid the paranoia quotient is running a little high in there. I thought maybe I’d get some air before I go home and start pricing handguns.”

I laughed, too loud. An embarrassing bark. Linda Sue looked at me and shook her head.
Was it obvious?
I wondered.
Could everyone see?

“Time for me to go,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe and dropping it between the open slats of the deck. A minute later she was gone, leaving Geoffrey standing there, his hands in his pockets, and me wondering—for the first time—which one of us he’d come outside to talk to.

Later, Geoffrey and I walked home together and he told me that back in Florida people were much more obsessed with self-protection. “Down there, if you don’t have a gun in the house, people think you’re asking for trouble.” He often talked about the old days living in Florida as if it had all been part of a different era—wilder, crazier—where he’d gained his fame and all the problems that came with it. “It was great,” he said the one time I pressed the subject. “But it couldn’t last.” I assumed he meant his own overindulgence—too much drinking and sleeping with the wrong women. Corinne saved him from all that. She was a creature of habit who rose at five, worked until eleven, and taught a full day of classes afterward. But sometimes, I let myself wonder,
Would a marriage, embarked on to save him from his own worst impulses, last in the face of his reformation?

Once, I told him my marriage to Paul sometimes felt more like a friendship with lots of sex for baby-making purposes. He laughed and then stopped himself. “Yes,” he said. “Corinne and I are like that except she doesn’t want the babies.” It was the first time we’d mentioned the children neither one of us had. Though he didn’t say it directly, I thought I heard the disappointment in his voice, recognized the expression on his face.

“Do you still own a gun?” I asked at the bottom of his driveway. He had his hands in his pockets, and I wondered if he was as nervous as I was, standing in the dark.

“Yes,” he said. “But don’t tell Corinne. She thinks I sold it before we left.”

It was one of many secrets we shared, sure that neither one of us would judge what the other was saying. And I didn’t. I went home that night and lay awake in bed beside my sleeping husband, replaying each look, every moment, without once thinking it was wrong that he secretly kept a gun his wife didn’t know about.

L
inda Sue wasn’t killed with a gun. She died from blunt-force injury to the back of the head. Not one blow, but three. We heard this as one of many rumors that were flying around the morning we woke up to the sight of police cars pulling up and parking haphazardly on our street. At first we assumed she’d died of natural causes. When blood was mentioned, and “evidence collection” by one of the police officers standing outside, we assumed that she’d died in some terrible fall down the stairs.
An accident, an accident,
we all told one another. But an hour later it was confirmed: There was evidence of head injury and foul play. Blood spatter on the wall ruled out any chance of accidental death.

By the afternoon we’d gathered at Helen’s house and learned, from her brother-in-law who worked as a detective downtown, that Linda Sue had been hit with something large and metal that was found in the house and—we all gasped at this—was cleaned and left behind. Helen filled in more details. “Sometimes these guys try to make a murder scene look like a robbery that’s gone wrong. They steal stuff they don’t even care about.” We sat in her living room, cups of coffee in our hands. “But this guy—nothing. He didn’t even take a twenty-dollar bill lying on the coffee table.”

It was forty-eight hours before we learned what the murder weapon was, and each of us was struck dumb by the irony: She was killed by one of the dead bolts we’d all ordered from Marianne’s police officer at that first Neighborhood Watch meeting. All except Linda Sue, for whom Marianne negotiated a free one, saying, when she delivered it to Linda Sue, that she meant no harm and wanted only for everyone to feel equally safe.

As we heard more and tried to make sense of it all, the cleaning of the weapon became the greatest source of mystery and ultimately, Franklin admitted, the reason my defense never gained traction. Even if the jury had believed that a person could remain in a somnambulant state long enough to cross a street, enter an unlocked house, surprise its occupant and kill her, how did that same person clean up so thoroughly and stay asleep? On the weapon itself, lab testing showed residues of dish soap and bleach, even scratch marks where a steel-wool pad had been used to scrub the hinges. But whoever took such care cleaning it had failed to dislodge the hair and skin residue from the joint. Testing easily confirmed both the damage it had done and the attempt to cover it. Though Franklin could point to cases of assault committed by a sleepwalking assailant, none had gotten busy afterward with a bucket and sponge.

The prosecutors, given only the burden of proving that I was conscious while committing the crime I’d already confessed to, never addressed other peculiarities in the evidence and Franklin never pressed the matter. For instance, my fingerprints were found throughout the house, but not on the front doorknob. Back then we weren’t trying to prove the argument Jeremy had made, that I was never there that night, that my fingerprints were from a visit I’d made to Linda Sue during the day. Jeremy showed me a map with
X
’s marking the places my prints were found: on the book beside her bed, on an unwashed glass around the sink where I must have poured myself water. “Do you remember doing that?” Jeremy asked at one of our earliest meetings.

“Jeremy”—I leaned forward in my chair—“it was twelve years ago. No, I don’t remember if I poured myself water.”

“But it’s possible. You touched a glass. You touched the sink.”

“I must have,” I said.

“Right, exactly.” He nodded so emphatically his glasses slipped down his nose.

If the murder weapon struck others as ironic, no one’s ever made a joke about it. If I’d gotten a chance to talk to Geoffrey alone after my arrest, it would have been the first thing I’d have done to cut the tension.
Looks like Marianne’s locks were a big help. Good thing she got the extra one for Linda Sue.
That was one irony to the murder weapon; the other was the fact that all of us had one. “Were there identifying characteristics? Serial numbers?” I asked, the same day we learned what weapon was used.

“No, Betsy.” Marianne rolled her eyes. “Most people don’t worry about their
locks
being stolen.”

How many people had already installed their heavy-duty lock system by the night of Linda Sue’s murder? One? None? Anyone could have brought their lock over, intending to do harm with it. All of us were potential perpetrators.

When I pointed this out after we’d learned what the murder weapon was—before I found the nightgown and realized I was the one we were all looking for—Marianne shook her head. “Oh, Betsy, honestly. You read too much. This wasn’t someone we
know.
This was a crazy person who got to us before we could get decent locks installed.”

Ultimately I made it easy for the police, handing over my nightgown and, eight hours later, my confession, too. “It was me,” I told them. “It must have been me. Who else could have done it?” I’m not sure what I was thinking. I vaguely sensed that my future had been erased and nothing much mattered anymore, so what difference did it make? The morning after I made the confession, I woke up in jail knowing I’d made a terrible mistake. I called my lawyer and said I needed to change my story. I assumed it would take a few days to clear the mistake up.

“You’re
recanting
your confession,” Franklin said, at our first face-to-face meeting. He had snow-white hair and the only handlebar mustache I’d ever seen on a living person. “You’re saying you
didn’t
do it?”

“That’s right. I didn’t do it.”

“Why did you confess, then?”

“I was in a dark mood. I can’t really explain.”

He folded his hands over his knee. “You’ll have to do better than that. Recanting a confession is a bitch, I’ll tell you right now. You need solid evidence of physical or psychological coercion. Do you have any bruises or cuts right now?” I shook my head. “Any physical intimidation used on you last night?”

“No.” They’d played mind games all night, offering to bring me dinner from a sandwich shop, asking my preference and then returning with a broken granola bar, saying it was the best they could do. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast nine hours earlier. I was starving, but too proud to eat it on the spot. Instead, I opened it under the table and ate it in furtive bites. After another hour, I gave them my confession because I honestly wasn’t sure what had happened and I thought it was possible. I also thought doing so might get me a sandwich.

Franklin was right. Recanting a confession is nearly impossible if you weren’t inebriated, a minor, or cognitively disabled when you made it. And there were other problems working against me: The blood didn’t follow a clear-cut or obvious pattern. There was a pool of it around Linda Sue’s body, and the wall opposite was heavily spattered, but there was no visible blood sprayed in between. Also, no trace spatters on the ceiling or on the wall, which—we were told—would have been expected if an ordinary beating had taken place. One theory was that she was already lying on the ground when she was hit, suggesting that there was an accidental fall and her aggressor might have been someone who was “not physically superior or capable of overpowering her.”

There was also this detail that every reporter loved to endlessly repeat: The perpetrator, either before or after the crime (both unimaginable), stopped and fixed a turkey and cheese sandwich. With no sign of it in the contents of Linda Sue’s stomach, it had to have been her killer who left his mayo knife on the counter, along with a torn half sandwich—no bite marks, no saliva, no DNA—as if he had made it not to eat but to drive the investigators crazy.

And one more thing: a spiral notebook found beside Linda Sue’s bed, folded open to a list that read
Dr.’s appt., Library books, Betsy T.
The prosecution argued that my name on this list must have meant that Linda Sue was awake, writing, when I arrived. The evidence suggests there was no struggle in the bedroom where her few possessions remained undisturbed, her bed comforter neatly folded back, as if she had gotten up to go to the bathroom. There was also no sign of a struggle on the second floor. No telltale handprints clutching at the banister, no fingerprints or blood on the walls at the top of the stairs. Franklin pointed out the illogic. When someone lying in bed sees an unexpected person walk into her bedroom, is her first impulse to write the name down? Absurd, he argued, though no one could think of another reason.

Over the years, I’ve thought a great deal about this list—all the more mysterious if you consider that Linda Sue had no library card. I’ve wondered if they ever analyzed the handwriting, if it might not have been Linda Sue’s to-do list but
Geoffrey’s,
left in her bedroom, along with the nine ghastly semen stains found on her sheets, proof that she cared as little about laundry as she did about her yard. But if it
was
Geoffrey’s list, why was my name on it?