The Whole Truth (6 page)

Natalie fastened a pink barrette in her hair. She never went anywhere without wearing a barrette. And she grabbed her favorite bracelet—a row of tiny, linked, plastic hearts—although she couldn't fasten it around her wrist without somebody to help her do it.

Evidently, she did not put on shoes. None were missing later. Not her summer thongs for the beach, nor her pink plastic cutout sandals for the swimming pool, nor her tennies or her white leather dress-up shoes. Natalie wasn't supposed to go barefoot outside, but this time it appears that she did.

"I took it for granted," Susan says, "that Tony locked the back door. He always did. I never even thought about it."

Tony, who was sleeping, didn't think about it either.

She was very quiet as she slipped out of the house. If she had banged the door or the screen door shut, the boys might have awakened, and probably their parents, too. A noise in the night—unexpected, startling—is enough to make almost anybody bolt straight up in bed, exclaiming, "What was that?"

But she was very quiet, like a little mouse.

Susan found the inside door open in the morning. By that time the boys were up and playing outside, so she assumed they did it.

Natalie loved the feel of grass under her bare feet.

She may have walked directly to their dock, or she may have wandered a bit first. She probably wasn't in the least afraid. Not of the dark. Not of her own yard, or her own safe neighborhood where everybody kindly watched out for the little deaf girl when they backed out of their driveways. Unlike hearing people, she wouldn't have been spooked by strange noises in the night.

At some point, she ended up down at the dock.

Natalie wasn't afraid of the water, and she adored boats. "When there wasn't an adult around to watch her, it was a fight to keep her off of our boat," her mother told the investigators. "When we visited other people's docks, I kept my eye on her every minute, or else she'd be scrambling around in their boat."

She wasn't afraid of strangers, either.

"She never met a stranger," her father says. "We tried to tell her, not everybody was her friend, but it seemed like everybody really was her friend, because they were nice to her. Wherever we went, she smiled at people and they smiled back at her. She couldn't hear what they were saying, so they could be total jerks and she wouldn't even know it."

It is surmised that when Natalie reached the dock that night, she was attracted there by a cute little black and white boat slowly puttering down the canal.

The second of three calls connected to the murder of Natalie McCullen came into Bahia Beach 911 at 11:55 p.m. on Monday, June fifteenth, the night before her body was found hanging from the bridge. The call was from a woman who lived catty-corner across the canal from the McCullens and who reported a boat moving along the water. She thought it seemed suspiciously slow, suspiciously quiet. In south Florida, burglars have access from land and water, so residents keep an eye on both.

"Send someone to check on it," she requested.

"Yes, ma'am," responded 911.

The caller was Mrs. Marjorie Noble, an eighty-six-year-old widow who lived alone, and who was alert to untoward activity on her canal. At the time of the incident, she was reclining in the dark in the Florida room at the back of her home. If you've never seen one, a Florida room is a king-size screened-in porch, more like an actual room in the house, and frequently holding a swimming pool, as did Mrs. Noble's. She thought she heard something approaching from the east, where the canal opened directly into the much larger Intracoastal Canal.

Knowing that she couldn't possibly be seen, Mrs. Noble got up and peered through the screen as best she could. It wasn't unusual to see boat traffic at any hour on the canals, but Mrs. Noble suspected there were very few innocent reasons for people to be roaming about in a boat in her neighborhood near midnight. She felt that her neighbors appreciated her watchfulness, which derived, she explained, from insomnia. Many nights, Mrs. Noble stretched out on her La-Z-Boy on the porch, watching for hours the slow, peaceful night go by.

Normally, an eighty-six-year-old person claiming to witness criminal activity at night was a defense attorney's dream. On cross-examination, the value of the senior citizen's eyewitness testimony could be respectfully demolished on the grounds of aging eyesight, hearing, and memory. Whether that was fair, or not, it could be done. But not in the case of Mrs. Noble. She was, in fact, a prosecutor's dream.

"I had the last of my cataract operations, only six weeks before," she told the jury.

"What effect did those operations have on your eyesight, Mrs. Noble?" Franklin DeWeese inquired courteously. The defense objected, claiming that called for an expert opinion she was not qualified to give, but Franklin calmly pointed out that she was the best expert on the view from her own eyes, and that he could provide the testimony of an opthomologist, anyway, if they liked. Leanne English, the lead defense attorney, did not like any of it, but the judge allowed Franklin DeWeese to carry on. A journalist covering the trial observed this was one of the times when Franklin looked like he was struggling to keep from looking smug, because this case was so easy to prosecute.

When Mrs. Noble was finally permitted to answer his questions, she said, "It restored my sight to twenty-twenty."

Actually, as her own surgeon would testify, the operation had left Mrs. Noble with slightly better than twenty-twenty vision.

Even that might have been demolished by the defense, except that this dream witness had two other gifts for the prosecution: binoculars and cassette tapes that came complete with date, time, and recorded descriptions!

"I wanted to kiss her," Franklin DeWeese says, "after reading her deposition. When I met her, I did kiss her. Nice little buss on her cheek. I hope she didn't mind; she didn't seem offended. I told her I loved her, and wanted to marry her." The prosecutor smiles, remembering her reaction. "Mrs. Noble said that would be all right, as long as I didn't have any objection to her continuing to go to her bridge games on Wednesdays. I said, heck, no, I'll even drive you."

It was no wonder the prosecutor was enamored of his witness. Not only was she sharp and clear-spoken in person, but she had that more-than-perfect vision, those binoculars, and those recordings.

"I am a bird-watcher," she testified. "You've got to have really excellent binoculars to be a serious bird-watcher. With mine, I can see the crest on a tufted titmouse from fifty yards away." A tit is a very small bird, as Franklin made sure to point out to the jury. Much tinier, by far, than a boat on a canal, or the man steering it.

As for her notes, Mrs. Noble kept a tape recorder and a journal by her side on the porch, where she spent most of her time. She started keeping the journal for medical reasons ("You wouldn't believe what those doctors want you to keep track of!"), but it turned into a sort of hobby in which she jotted down practically everything she did, said, or thought. When writing all that down became too burdensome, she switched to a little tape recorder that her son gave her.

From then on, Mrs. Noble talked into it just as if she were talking to another person, or to herself. Everything was there, on stacks of tiny tapes. Until the prosecutor subpoenaed them, none of the tapes had ever been transcribed, but each was dated, in Mrs. Noble's tiny script. (She did continue to keep the written journal, but only for notations related to her medical affairs.)

The tape player became a place for recording both the past and the present. There were thoughtful passages on the tapes, philosophical pieces derived from her many decades of life; some clever, rhyming poetry; memories to leave for her descendants, and, of course, a constant log of her activities, from brushing her teeth in the morning to watching the moon rise at night.

"I think I hear a boat. At this hour? My watch says it's eleven-fifty-four p.m. I'll use my binocs to look. It's a motor-boat. Small. It's got some kind of ugly black-and-white design on it, like a checkerboard square. And there's writing on the side, but I can't . . . the number six, it's got the number six on it. I've seen it before, or one like it. I only see one person in it, looks like a boy, but surely not at this hour. If it is, what can his parents be thinking? He's got on a yellow shirt, pink pants, green baseball cap. Crazy outfit. He looks like a parrot.

"Eleven-fifty-five P.M. Called 911. I reported young man in boat. Got no business going up and down our canal at this hour. They said they'd send someone to check. They'd better just do that!

"Twelve-oh-five A.M. When I looked through my binocs again, I saw that same boat moving back down the canal. I mean, I heard it again, I didn't see it, because my view is blocked by that roof on my neighbor's boat dock, which they ought to knock down. I've told them and told them.

'Twelve-thirty-five a.m. Good grief, there are lights being flashed through our yards. Police? Well, they're just too late, if it's them. That boat is long gone."

It was, in fact, a patrol car checking the neighborhood from the street. A few minutes later, Mrs. Noble wrote down that she heard a helicopter overhead and then saw the canal cast into high relief in its searchlight. It was so bright that she saw a fish jump out in the water, as if it were rising to a bait of false sunrise. The Bahia Beach police had not sent the 'copter over especially to check out the 911 call; it just happened to be over the neighborhood and took a look.

Two and a half hours later, Sergeant Broyle Crouse, the forty-one-year-old pilot, reported seeing a small black and white boat five canals to the west. He recognized it as a Checker Crab water taxi, not a waterway prowler. Sensing no problem with that, he banked steeply toward the ocean, and whirred away. He reported seeing only one person in the boat, which was pulled up to a much larger boat docked next to the bridge.

Crouse had spotted the number six Checker Crab at the bridge where Natalie's body would be found the next morning. Most likely, she was already dead by then.

Unfortunately, due to a shift change in the police dispatcher's office, there occurred one of those communications bollixes that curse even the best of police departments. There had been an earlier call to 911 relating to the case. It came in at 11:45 p.m. from an angry boatyard owner who called to report that one of his boats was missing and probably stolen.

"Your name, sir?"

"Donor Miller."

He spelled it for her, at her request.

"You own the missing boat?"

"Goddamn right I own it, that one and five others just like it. Tell 'em to look for a black-and-white checkered boat with a number six on it. That's my boat, goddammit."

The dispatcher who directed Sergeant Crouse to look for a possible intruder on the water didn't know about that call, and so Crouse didn't know that at 2:30 A.M. he had spotted a boat that had been reported stolen. Neither were they informed that Mr. Miller called back at 2 A.M. to cancel his earlier complaint.

"False alarm," he told the 911 operator. "Boat was here all the time, goddammit. One of my idiot employees put it in the wrong slip."

"You want me to cancel your request for an officer, sir?"

"Oh, hell, yes."

It is department policy to send an officer to check out 911 calls, even if they are later canceled. It's a well-intentioned policy, intended to prevent the sort of situation that occurs when a gun is being held to the head of the person who is calling 911. The Bahia Beach police like to make sure everything is copacetic, by sending an officer to the door to inquire, "Are you sure everything is all right, ma'am?" Or, sir. But it is only rarely carried out, because there simply aren't enough officers to handle all the false alarms, plus the legitimate requests, too. A small-boat theft was a low-priority crime, anyway, especially for the night shift. Despite departmental policy, no police officer drove out to make sure that the boatyard property and the people on it were as secure as the owner claimed they were.

It appears then, that Natalie died sometime between 11:55 P.M., when Mrs. Noble put down her binocs to pick up the phone, and 2:30 A.M., when Broyle Crouse spotted the boat near the bridge.

3

Raymond

Ray Raintree has escaped from the county courthouse.

By the time I finally get home tonight, I know enough about how he pulled it off to be able to write about it, although I can't get further than two paragraphs into it without having to stop and take a few calming breaths.

I write, on my laptop this time:

He rolled off the gurney and grabbed the deputy's gun out of its holster just as the elevator door was opening on the basement level. It was cramped in the courtroom elevator, with barely enough room for all four people who were standing, plus the gurney with Ray. He took advantage of the tight space to create maximum panic and pain. As he came up from his roll, he flailed his arms around wildly, hitting people in their faces hard, causing them to cry out and to raise their arms to protect themselves rather than acting to prevent him from escaping.

Once he had the gun, he flailed it around, too, striking everyone in his path with the hard hurtful metal weapon. Blood was flying as he grabbed Leanne by the front of her suit and jerked her off the elevator with him, leaving carnage behind them. Like a wild animal with a victim in its claws, he came out of the elevator pushing his lawyer before him.

Both paramedics fell bleeding and screaming out onto the floor.

The doors closed, sending the stunned and wounded deputy back up.

I stop writing, needing to get up and walk around a bit. The man has sent four people to the hospital in conditions ranging from fair to critical. The poor deputy will need reconstructive facial surgery and they still aren't sure if bone fragments entered his brain. The paramedics have broken facial bones and gruesome bruises going clear to their bones, while Leanne English has a broken jaw and a dislocated shoulder from the way he manhandled her before releasing her several hundred yards from the courthouse.