A Death in Canaan (23 page)

Opposite the windows in the courtroom was a large institutional clock, with big black letters on a white circle and a sweeping second hand. At one side of the courtroom was the jury room, where jurors were sent when they weren't supposed to hear something said in court, or when they were deliberating. To reach the jury room, the jurors had to file out of the jury box and walk all the way across the center of the courtroom, very much as though they were crossing center stage. Behind the witness stand, just next to the judge's bench, there was a chalkboard and a tall gray steel locker, a regular gymnasium locker with a padlock. A deputy sheriff told me there was a skeleton in the locker, but I never looked.

Altogether, the nicest thing about the courtroom was the wood—dark and old, deep with the patina of the years. A broad wooden railing, hip-high—literally, the bar—separated the people in the spectators' gallery from the central well of the court. The judge's bench was handsome—as imposing, perhaps, as the bench in the grandly designed oak courthouse of old Litchfield, which one town historian described as “a raised dais with a broad pulpitlike desk [lifting] the judges to an almost ecclesiastical height.”

Catherine Roraback smiled when Peter was brought into the courtroom, and she walked back to the rear of the room to meet him. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he smiled then, too. His face looked thin and somewhat hollowed, his nose sharp in the thin face. His hair was still long. Marion had brought over some of his clothes that the police had returned to her, and he was wearing plain brown slacks and a raspberry shirt, a ribbed knit that clung tightly to his chest. He was very slender. I remember Marion saying, “He's gaining weight at the jail, with all the potatoes and bread,” and I wondered what on earth he'd looked like before.

Catherine Roraback was one of the best-known lawyers in Connecticut, and her family was one of the oldest, its roots running deep and tangled. Her grandfather and two of her uncles had been lawyers. They were all dead, but she still carried their names on her letterhead, the dates spreading back as far as 1872. One uncle, J. Clinton Roraback, had been a defense lawyer too, a big, portly man who carried a cane and lived most of his life in court, which is where he died, too, in the arms of the court reporter, eighteen years before the Reilly trial. “Good morning, Mr. Roberts,” the attorney boomed, then crashed to the floor. Mr. Roberts knelt quickly, cradled Mr. Roraback's head in his lap, and called for a sheriff. Later, when the body had been taken away, the judge asked Mr. Roberts whether he should adjourn court. “No, I think Clint would prefer that court go on as usual,” Mr. Roberts said. And it did.

Catherine's father had not chosen the law. He had been a minister at a church in Brooklyn, where Catherine grew up, only a few blocks from the Kasper family. One of the Kasper girls, Charlotte, who knew Catherine, married John Bianchi, the state's attorney, who was the Rorabacks' neighbor in Canaan. It was a small, complicated world.

Catherine had gone to Mount Holyoke, then Yale Law. She still kept an office in New Haven, though her main office was a little white-frame building on Main Street in Canaan, which she kept just as her uncle had kept it, with rolltop desks and wooden coat racks, left from olden days. Her mother had died, and her father was retired, a patient at Geer Memorial, where the VFW ambulance was kept.

Although her life was so deeply rooted in Canaan, Catherine Roraback was, in a way, more at home in New Haven. She fit in better there. She had been one of the defense lawyers at the Black Panther trial, and her work for liberal causes was well known, especially the legal work she'd done for Planned Parenthood, helping to get the state's ancient ban on contraceptives reversed. She'd gone into that project, which some doctors and lawyers were running as a test case in the courts, at the invitation of a doctor she knew from Yale. When he called and asked her to join the contraception crusade, she pretended not to understand. “Do you want me as a lawyer, or as a single woman?” she asked.

But for all her humor and candor, Catherine Roraback was not popular at Litchfield Superior Court. Partly because she was blunt and outspoken and liberal, involved in controversial causes, partly because of some of her family history, and partly because she was a woman, and a smart one at that, Catherine Roraback seemed to rub some people the wrong way. She was strong-looking, with a chunky figure and short, choppily cut hair that often fell into her eyes. She wore sensible shoes and had a habit of whipping off her glasses, nibbling thoughtfully at them, gazing at the ceiling with great interest, then turning sharply back toward a witness and hurling a question. Her nickname wasn't Cathy, but Kate.

Catherine and Peter walked to the center of the courtroom, to the long rectangular table where her assistant, Peter Herbst, was peering at papers. This was Peter Herbst's first job as a lawyer. He had a long, handlebar moustache and an air of dignified innocence, rather like a law clerk in Dickens.

Catherine and the two Peters and the lawyers at the opposite table and the handful of spectators in the courtroom all stood as Judge Anthony Armentano swept in. He was presiding over this pretrial hearing, which was an important step for Peter Reilly. Though the language was often intensely legal and hard to understand, the issue was vividly clear: If Peter Reilly's confession were squashed, the state would have a far flimsier case against him, and he would be likely to go free. If the confession he'd signed, and later recanted, was allowed to stand, obviously he was in far greater jeopardy. Everyone in the courtroom understood this, including Peter himself. He looked pale and tense as Catherine Roraback rose to ask that Peter's $50,000 bail be reduced. “His friends in the community have engaged in an extensive campaign to raise money for him,” she said. “Mr. and Mrs. Madow have been anxious to have Peter come to live with them, and I know that Peter is anxious to do so.”

Judge Armentano peered over the bench at Peter Reilly, standing beside his lawyer, gazing at the judge with a serious, tense expression. The judge looked cross, almost waspish, as though he had a touch of heartburn. “The bond remains at fifty thousand dollars,” the judge said in a husky voice. “The crime is a serious crime. A man may be tempted to flight.” Peter sat down then, his expression unchanged, and it didn't change many times during the next two days. The hearing lasted that long because, after a good deal of argument, Miss Roraback was allowed to play the tapes of Peter Reilly's polygraph test in Hartford.

“Pete, how are you?”

“OK. And you?”

“Good. Tim Kelly is my name. Sergeant of the state police.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Know why you're here, Pete?”

“Well, I guess, to determine whether the things in my statement are true.”

“Right.”

I was taking notes in shorthand, my own brand of shorthand, evolved over the years from classic Gregg into a personal system that went beyond classicism into more creative realms of abbreviations and spontaneous scrawls. But when I typed up my notes that night, I understood them very well.

“Do you know for sure who hurt your mother?”

“No.”

“Did you hurt your mother?”

“No.”

Here was Barbara, here in our winter courtroom, lying among us, naked and bloody on the floor, her T-shirt pushed up to
here
. I could see Peter making the gesture. Pushed up to here. Blood all over the place, on the chin and the throat and the carpet. Here was Peter, rubber-cuffed and connected, sitting in the seat of honor. Talking about Barbara.

“Does that read my brain for me?”

“Definitely. Definitely. And if you've told me the truth, this is what your brain is going to tell me.”

“I just want to understand how it works.”

“It works on your heart. That's your conscience. All we're trying to do is arrive at the truth. And the truth will be on that tape.”

Sergeant Kelly had come to court to testify and to play the tapes. He looked big and strong, a striking figure, every inch a brown belt in judo. He had a round, full face with a round, full smile.

“Did any of these questions bother you?”

“Well, whether I harmed my mother or not.”

“Why?”

“Well, that question … they told me up at the barracks yesterday that—how some people don't realize—all of a sudden, fly off the handle for a split second …”

“Right.”

“… and it leaves a blank spot in their memory.”

“Right. This will help bring it out.”

“Well, I thought about that last night, and I thought and I thought and I thought, and I said no, I couldn't have done it, I couldn't have done it, you know. And now, when you ask me the question … that's what I think of.”

“Do you have a clear recollection of what happened last night?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any doubt in your mind, Pete?”

“I didn't understand that last question.”

“I was just trying to probe your subconscious.”

“But I wasn't sure whether you meant what happened to her, or whether I knew who did it to her and everything.”

“Well, I think we got a little problem here, Pete.”

I smiled at Peter when he was taken out of the courtroom—one guard at his side, one behind him—and he smiled back at me. We still hadn't met, but he guessed who I was, there were so few people in court. I met Barbara's cousin June for the first time.

In the front row, the press row, there were just four of us. Two of the newspaper reporters looked incredibly young, just out of college: Stan Moulton of the
Berkshire Eagle,
and Greg Erbstoesser, who wrote for the
Lakeville Journal
.

The only veteran in the press row was Joe O'Brien, who had written the first
Courant
story.
WOMAN, 51, DEAD WITH THROAT CUT
. He had covered murder cases before and he looked hardened, at least in comparison with Stan and Greg and, I hope, with me. But Joe O'Brien was less cynical than he appeared. He was a family man, with five children, including two teen-aged sons. At the end of the second day of Peter Reilly's pretrial hearing, after he'd heard the tapes, Joe O'Brien went home and told his boys that if they were ever arrested, they should say nothing.

“About hurting my mother. We went over and over and over it, you know what I mean? When he told me I could have flown off the handle, I gave it a lot of consideration. But I don't think I did.”

“But you're not sure, are you?”

“That's right. Well, I could have.”

“I think you possibly did.”

Man and boy, talking man to man. Even smoking in the polygraph room.

“Is there any doubt in your mind, right now, that you hurt your mother last night?”

“The test is giving me doubt right now. Disregarding the test, I still don't think I hurt my mother.”

“But you have a doubt, don't you?”

“Yes. I've been drilled and drilled and drilled.… I'm trying to think of what he did say. I know he told me something. I'm losing all memory now because I'm getting tired. But he did tell me that I could have forgotten. That really shook me.”

Lieutenant Shay was in court. He was big too, but not as burly as Sergeant Kelly. He was in plainclothes, a chocolate-colored suit with a vest. Looking at his craggy, handsome face and square jaw, with his thick black hair and intense eyes, I could see what Peter meant about Dick Tracy.

Although there were just four people in the press row, John Bianchi thought that was four too many, and he asked Judge Armentano to bar us from the hearing. Mr. Bianchi declared that press coverage might create “an inflammatory situation” and he complained especially about the
Lakeville Journal,
which he pointed out had “headlines every week.”

That was true. Even before the Reilly case, Mr. Bianchi had not been on the best of terms with the
Journal,
which had opposed him on various community issues. And then came the big headlines.
SECRECY SHROUDS MURDER CASE IN FALLS VILLAGE
was one of the first, then
FRIENDS SAY POLICE KEPT THEM FROM PETER REILLY
. In that piece, Greg Erbstoesser had recreated the attempts by Peter's friends to find out what was going on, in the long hours after Barbara died. The article didn't mention Mr. Bianchi by name, but since he was the prosecutor in the case, whatever went on seemed to have had something, at least vaguely, to do with him.

Miss Roraback objected to Mr. Bianchi's motion. She wanted the press to stay. Judge Armentano peered out at us thoughtfully, and for a moment I expected he actually would throw us out. But he turned to Mr. Bianchi. “Can't we give credit to the rights of a free press?” he asked, in that slightly waspish way.

Then, however, he peered out into the courtroom again, studying us. I couldn't blame him. We were a motley quartet—two shaggy haired boys, who must have looked like children to the judge; Joe O'Brien, a character straight from
The Front Page,
and me, somewhere between Nancy Drew and Dorothy Kilgallen, a woman no one knew who wrote for a magazine no one had ever read. The judge asked us to come see him in his chambers, and we trooped across the thin green carpet, single file.

I sat at the end of the couch in the little study. Now that I was in the judge's chamber, I was ready for an argument on the First Amendment, but the judge didn't even sit down. He leaned against his desk in a casual way, and said a few words about the responsibilities of the press. Then he nodded. “Use your own judgment,” he said.

Even though he felt as he did about the press, Mr. Bianchi seemed generally friendly with everyone. He was a remarkably affable man. Some people swore up and down that they'd never seen John Bianchi without a smile on his face. He was dapper and ruddy, with a haircut that always seemed fresh. His shoes gleamed, and he had a well-fed, prosperous look.