Redemption (25 page)

Silence then, and finally, the nurse said, “It will do your soul good, my dear.”

Silence again. Grace Norman closed her eyes. A door opened, and a priest entered the room. The nurse went to him and they whispered together. Then the nurse said to Grace Norman, “The priest is here, my dear. He will hear your confession as soon as we are finished.”

“We're finished.”

She motioned to the priest, who said, “No, my child, you should tell these men what they must hear.”

“I confessed, Father.”

“No, you will confess to me when we are alone. The weight of a murder lies on Elizabeth Hopper. You must lift that weight …”

Grace Norman's eyes filled with tears. Hull asked quickly, “When did you leave Boston, Ms. Norman?”

“Two days before it happened. I stayed at a hotel near the Battery, and I called him from a street phone.”

“Who did you call?”

“Billy.”

“You called him Billy?”

“Yes. Everyone else called him Sedge. I hated that name. He promised to buy me the biggest diamond engagement ring I had ever seen. He promised to marry me. Then he told me he had AIDS. I learned I was HIV positive, and he said that marriage made no sense anymore. Then I decided to come to New York.”

“Where did you get the gun?”

“I bought it from the bellhop at the hotel. I gave him five hundred dollars for it. I told Billy I had to see him, and he told me to come to the Omnibus Building at ten o'clock that evening. He opened the door for me, and we went up to his office—” She could hardly get the words out now.

“Is it enough?” the priest asked.

“A bit more,” Hull said. “What happened then?”

“We argued. He said it wasn't true that he had AIDS. He called me a whore. I took out the gun and told him to write out a check for a hundred thousand dollars, and I—I shot him before he could sign it. I couldn't have cashed it anyway, without letting the world know I killed him. Now leave me alone.”

“You wore gloves?”

“Yes, kid gloves. I know about fingerprints.”

“And how was the check made out?”

“Oh, God, leave me alone. Cash, cash. He never signed it. He took it to hell with him. I looked for a sheet of paper, and then I snapped open the fax and ripped out a long sheet—” She was gasping now.

“Enough,” the priest said. “For God's sake, enough.”

The nurse held her up, and Hull handed her the pen, and she signed his notes. Then they left her alone with the priest.

Hull and Gillespie then went back to the station house where they had Hull's notes notarized. Gillespie signed as present witness, and then made photocopies. Hull was back in New York at Precinct One by five
A.M.

Sarah told most of this to Liz and me after a visit she made to Precinct One, from her notes and from a copy of the confession that they gave her. The story had already appeared in the morning
Times
, and after I read it to Liz, she wept for a while, very quietly, curled in a corner of the couch. Then for the next hour, she was silent. I half expected her to ask me whether I had ever believed that she had killed Hopper and I wondered how I could answer that question. But she never did ask me—not then, not ever.

After that hour or so of silence, Liz said, “That poor woman. May God forgive her.”

This was a woman who had slept with Liz's husband under her own roof, but I knew her well enough by now to swallow any response I might have made; instead, I mentioned that while it was cold outside, it was a beautiful day, and why didn't we take a long walk? Liz agreed, and we put on our coats and walked downtown on Riverside Drive. We never spoke about Grace Norman again.

A few days later, the District Attorney telephoned me and asked me to join him for lunch at the Harvard Club. I begged off the luncheon but agreed to stop by at his office.

“It's time for an apology,” I explained to Liz.

“Don't be too hard on him, Ike. He did what he had to do.”

I shrugged and made no promises. Liz was Liz. As I had said to Charlie Brown, the obligation was upon me, not upon her.

The District Attorney welcomed me into his office, and I didn't refuse his handshake. That is something you only do with people you hate. I didn't hate him. I looked upon him newly because he had long since become a stranger to me. I had known him for more than thirty years, and he was a stranger to me.

“Ike,” he said, “sit down. Smoke your pipe if you wish to. We have a lot to talk about.”

“Do we?”

“I think so. I'm glad this case was cleared up, better for both of us. We're old friends, Ike. Rudge is writing a letter of apology, but I felt we had to see each other and talk.”

“Old friends.” A thought ran through my mind,
there is no love greater than that of he who lays down his life for a friend
. “What is there to apologize for? You had the evidence, enough for a grand jury, and you had an indictment. That's the law.”

“Yes, I was sure you would understand that I had no alternative.”

“Ah, that begs the question, doesn't it? You took a good and pure woman—a woman so filled with grace and compassion that she turned a sour old man into a human being—and you sentenced her to death.”

“Ike! Come on, you're a lawyer. You know I had no alternative.”

“No alternative? You could have dropped the indictment. Your evidence was lousy. You could have demanded that the cops check the airlines. You could have checked out the hotels. You could have questioned Elizabeth about Hopper's girlfriends and sent a detective to Boston—that's only the beginning of what you could have done. But you did none of it! You had a few lousy bits of circumstantial evidence, and you pronounced a death sentence. You had an election coming up—”

He interrupted me with a growl. “Ike, you're talking nonsense, and you damn well know it!”

“No, I'm talking proof and evidence. I'm talking law. And furthermore, don't talk to me as a friend. We're not friends. We never were.” And with that, I walked out of his office, slamming the door behind me.

When Liz greeted me at the apartment, I stepped back to look at her and grinned. She was wearing a pale blue dress that we had bought together in Paris a few months ago, and to my eyes she was the loveliest woman I had ever seen.

“You're smiling,” she said. “I'm glad it went well. It did, didn't it?”

“Oh yes, my dear, it went well.”

“I was so afraid you'd be angry and lose your temper. But you never lose your temper. It's one of the things I love about you.”

I winced visibly and stared at her.

“What is it, Ike?” she asked, alarmed by my reaction.

I shook my head. “No—absolutely not. You've never lied to me; and if this thing—you and me, Liz and Ike—is going to work, I'm never going to lie to you. It did not go well. I told him that we were not friends, when he pleaded that we were. I said he was a lousy, worthless bastard, but not in those words, and I stormed out of his office, slamming the door behind me. So that's how it went, and you might as well know the truth.”

She took a long moment before she said, “Thank you, Ike—I mean for the truth. As for the rest of it—” She shrugged and smiled. “I would have done the same thing if I had the nerve and your gift of unprintable words.”

“It's totally over,” I said. “Let's go somewhere for lunch and celebrate.”

“I'd like that,” Liz agreed.

A Biography of Howard Fast

Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's
The Iron Heel
, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel,
Two Valleys
(1933). His next novels, including
Conceived in Liberty
(1939) and
Citizen Tom Paine
(1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in
The American
(1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write
Spartacus
(1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release
Spartacus
. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including
Silas Timberman
(1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

Fast's career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also,
Spartacus
was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of
Spartacus
inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast's books, and in 1961 he published
April Morning
, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography
Being Red
(1990) and the
New York Times
bestseller
The Immigrants
(1977).

Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side's Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. “They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage,” Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he “fell in love with the area” and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.