A Death in Canaan (26 page)

Nanny was standing at the dinette window, watching, holding back one corner of the white organdy curtain. She opened the door and held it as Peter came in. He smiled shyly.

“You've grown, Peter,” Nanny said in a slightly shaky voice. Her dachshund Natasha darted around her feet, barking as she always did at strangers, with a shrill, furious bark. Peter reached down to the dog, but she skittered away. Peter and Geoff headed into the den, and Nan went to the phone to call Mickey's office.

Peter was showing Geoffrey a card trick when Arthur came in. “Hey, man,” Art said to Peter. “How you doin'?” Peter grinned.

“You got to go to court every day?” Arthur asked.

“Yeah,” Peter said, and shuffled the cards again.

A car pulled into the drive, and Nan went to the window. There was a rustle at the back door, and Marion came in. “I'm home,” she called. “I need some help with the groceries.” Arthur just kept talking, and Marion stood in the doorway of the living room, her hands on her hips.

“All right, guys,” she said. “Move it!” Peter grinned widely as he and Geoff went out to get the groceries. Jamie Madow, just coming up the hill, picked up one of the bags.

Marion had brought boxes of Kentucky fried chicken, cole slaw, and loaves of French bread. “This isn't Peter's homecoming dinner,” she explained. “This is just nourishment.” Nanny spread a cloth and got down the plates, and the boys pulled up chairs.

“How was the food at jail?” Geoff asked.

“Geoffrey, it was like eating the hot lunch at school three times a day,” Peter said, and all the boys groaned.

“I only had one fight in jail,” Peter said. “Some clown was wisin' off about my case. But I didn't cause any trouble. If somebody said to me, jump! I'd say, how high?”

Then suddenly, it seemed, the house was jammed with people—Father Paul and the Belignis, the Dickinsons, and more—a joyous crush, with a good deal of laughing and talking, hardly any crying. A newsman from CBS in New York, who had been in court that day, came in. His name was Rick Kaplan, and he said he might come back with a camera crew to do a segment for the network news.

The phone was always busy. Marion made Peter call Mrs. Bernard in New York, though he felt shy; he called the Kruses, who had written to him in jail and enclosed a $5 bill. Bea Keith, who had never met Peter, was calling, in tears. “I'm just fine,” Peter told her. Beverly King came by with two of her children. “I know I'm going to embarrass you,” she said, then she leaned over and quickly kissed him on the cheek. “God love you,” she said.

Ricky Beligni wore an ear-to-ear grin when he saw Peter and slapped him hard on the back. “How ya' doin', you ol' goldern houn'dog, you!” Ricky was a year younger than his brother Paul, but Ricky and Peter were friends, too. They'd played in the band together, and once, when Ricky and another boy were lost overnight on Canaan Mountain, Peter had joined a search party. Barbara had come over to wait at the Belignis' house while Peter helped look. It was a chilly night in November, the year before Barbara died. In the living room, little Gina was crying because Ricky was lost. “I'll take care of Gina,” Barbara said, and she'd told her stories, wonderful stories of knights in armor and beautiful ladies, stories of Arthur and Guinevere. Jean Beligni was very impressed. “She didn't read Gina those stories, she
remembered
them,” Jean said. Long before the boys were found, Barbara had soothed Gina to sleep.

Now Peter and his friends all went downstairs, where the guitars and drums were.

Upstairs, in the dinette and living room, the parents laughed too and talked about how difficult it would be to meet the interest payments, nearly $400 a month, on the bank loan that was keeping Peter out of jail. They were worried about paying Catherine Roraback, too, though she hadn't set a fee.

“Aldo drilled a well for Arthur Penn once,” Jean reported. “So I wrote him a letter. He directed
Bonnie and Clyde,
so I thought he might be interested.”

Marion held up a torn bumper sticker:
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE
in Day-Glow letters, bright orange on a black ground. Somebody had plastered the bumper of her car when it was parked at Mickey's office; Marion peeled it off. Dorothy Madow said a telephone man had come to her house to make repairs and had said to her, “Boy, your brother-in-law is in big trouble.” Dorothy asked him why.

“Because people should support the police, no matter what,” the phone man said.

Everyone wanted to know more about Jacqueline Bernard, the woman who'd bailed Peter out of jail. It was an amazing gesture from a stranger, and I'd have liked to know more myself, but there wasn't much I could tell them. She had asked that her name not be used because she didn't want to be known as a Lady Bountiful. When I talked with her, she mentioned that her son Joel had taken a year out of college in the early 1960s to do civil rights work in Mississippi, so she knew exactly what it was like to have an eighteen-year-old in jail and to want to get him out.

Late into the night, there was laughter and talk. Gina and Anne were playing in the den, little girls then. At the dinette table, Marion had piled some of the mail that had come in since the
New Times
piece. The magazine had run a box, asking for contributions to the Reilly Fund, so many of the letters had brought checks, too, some of them from well-known people. Beatrice Straight, an actress who had a house in Norfolk, had sent a large check and had persuaded a friend of hers to send one, too. Brendan Gill of
The New Yorker
sent a nice check to Peter and a nice letter to me. He said he liked my article, and he'd sent copies to some lawyers he knew.

Most of the letters were from ordinary people. One retired couple sent part of their Social Security check. An anonymous note, with a dollar bill enclosed, said, “I am a law student, and this abuse of our legal system must be stopped.” A prison officer in Louisiana sent $5 and a sad note, wondering how many of the young people he saw had doubts about what had happened. From places as distant as Deadwood, Oregon, Pineville, Louisiana, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, the letters came; already the Peter Reilly affair seemed to be touching a sensitive nerve somewhere in the national consciousness. A psychiatric nurse who had worked in New York prisons thanked the committee for what it was doing. “You are all bright lights in a dark world,” she wrote.

I thought so too, not only that night, when Peter got out of jail and we were all so happy, but even afterward, when so much of the happiness had drained away, when some minor tensions, then some real grievances, had developed between members of the committee, and between some of them and me. I always thought so.

It was a wonderful night, but from time to time, in the midst of the laughter, somebody would say something serious, something that would recollect for everyone what might lie ahead. With several jurors already chosen, Peter's trial was not far off. The charge was murder, a Class A felony in Connecticut. In Peter's case, the state was asking for a penalty of ten years to life.

“The judge told the jurors not to think of the penalty,” Jean exclaimed. “How could they
not
think of the penalty? They might be putting this boy away till he's fifty years old.”

Meantime, the boy was downstairs with his friends, playing his guitar. It seemed so unbelievable. How could it have happened? And who had let it happen? Whose fault was it, anyway? Was it Lieutenant Shay, telling Peter he was a suspect but not telling him he should get a lawyer? Was it Sergeant Kelly, telling Peter the truth was on his tape? Was it the prosecutor who'd pressed for an indictment before he'd heard all the tapes? Was it the other policemen, too, or some of them? Were there several villains, or just one nameless, faceless villain, the System? Because the people here knew Jim Mulhern best, and because he'd known Peter, they talked of him more, and thought he should be given the button that a
New Times
reader had sent in. The button had a picture of Adolf Eichmann and the caption read:
I WAS ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS
.

John Bianchi looked disgusted as he picked up the newspaper and read the quotation out loud: “It's a good feeling to be out of jail, but I won't be happy until they catch the right person.”

He threw the paper down onto the counsel table and gestured toward other papers in a small stack. The prosecutor was angry about articles that had quoted Peter the day he was freed on bond. Peter talked about the mail he'd got from people who read his story in
New Times,
and he'd quoted someone as writing “We couldn't believe the police worked that way.” Mr. Bianchi also complained about a
New York Times
story in which Catherine Roraback had talked about the case, referring to Peter's interrogation by the state police as “a grilling … they planted in his mind that he must have done it,” and describing Barbara Gibbons, whom she'd known, as a kind of “rural Bohemian.” Mr. Bianchi said he was very upset by these articles; he felt they were prejudicial, and he said he felt very close to asking for a mistrial.

Judge Speziale peered over the bench.

“Do you care to respond, Miss Roraback?” he asked.

Catherine Roraback sighed a little as she stood up; she had known this was coming. She said she would address herself to two separate issues. As for the
Times
piece, she said, she had already complained to the newspaper, because her telephone talk with their reporter was off the record. Miss Roraback said she was as upset about the article as Mr. Bianchi—in fact, more so.

She defended the other articles, though. “Whether Peter Reilly's statements are wise or not, whether they help or hinder is quite another matter. But I think he has the right to make these statements,” she declared. “I feel strongly that Mr. Reilly has the right of free speech.”

Thus in a small way, and in a small place, in an out-of-the-way courtroom tucked into a corner of Litchfield County, Connecticut, ah argument continued, one that stretched back over many years, many centuries. In general, the question was how free a person was to speak, and under what circumstances, or whether any qualifiers ought to apply. Those who opposed restriction leaned heavily on the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of speech and press, and those who were in favor of various restrictions leaned just as heavily on the Sixth Amendment, which guaranteed a fair trial. In the courts, restrictions on the press were popularly, or not so popularly, called gag orders, and in the case of Peter Reilly, one had already been handed down. “It's like Grand Central Station in this courtroom,” the judge had complained on the morning of February 19, when the jury panel crowded into the room, and he spent his lunch hour that day dictating the gag order to his secretary. The defendant and the witnesses were prohibited from making “extrajudicial statements that might be reasonably calculated to affect the outcome of the trial.” Besides the ban on interviews and extrajudicial statements, there were to be no tape recorders, no cameras in or around the court, not even any sketching.

Now, a week after that order, the judge was hearing from the prosecutor that perhaps his order had been violated. Judge Speziale frowned deeply, and said he would call a recess so that he could read the articles Mr. Bianchi had complained about.

“The car's gone,” Peter said casually, as we stood in the hall. “The state of Connecticut put a lien on the 'vette. But I'm better off without it.” He lighted a cigarette and leaned against the wall in the hall outside the courtroom. He still looked thin, but he looked far less tense, far more rested than he'd looked the week before. He'd had a good weekend, playing guitar with the boys, going to McDonald's. On Sunday he had gone to the 7:30 mass at St. Joseph's with Aldo and Paul, and at the Madows' he'd slept well. One morning, when Marion and Mickey passed by the den where Peter was sleeping, Marion had whispered, “Mickey, do you think he knows he's here and not in jail?” Peter had heard her, lifted his head from the pillow, and grinned. “I know I'm here,” he said. “This is too soft for jail.”

Aldo Beligni had picked up Peter at the Madows and brought him into Litchfield. All the grown-ups planned to take turns driving Peter to court; they felt that in this precarious period, he should have older people around, and indeed, this morning he seemed to be the youngest person in the room. Miss Roraback had even challenged the validity of the process by which a jury pool was drawn, on the grounds that it excluded persons from eighteen to twenty-one, but her motion had been denied. As the trial progressed, more young people began coming to court—Geoff Madow and the Belignis, Art Madow, and occasionally Wayne Collier and the Parmalee brothers, Tim and Mike. Groups of young people eventually showed up, too, often led by their teachers, to watch the proceedings as a kind of living lesson in sociology, psychology, criminology, even social studies; the criminal trial of an eighteen-year-old male accused of murdering his mother clearly fit into all sorts of interesting curriculum categories.

Meantime, however, Peter had only grown-ups to talk to. Legally, of course, he was a grown-up himself, as Sergeant Kelly had pointed out to him in Hartford. But emotionally and psychologically he was not. As Jean Beligni had pointed out earlier, he was still in school, accustomed to taking orders. “Making the legal age eighteen instead of twenty-one is the best thing that ever happened to the police around here,” another committee member once said, with a trace of anger. Peter himself had underlined the point when he talked on the phone to a reporter the night he got out of jail. “I'm eating and sleeping and playing my guitar,” Peter said, “but I'm staying close to home. I don't go anywhere unless I have an adult with me.” He said it casually, not sarcastically; apparently he found no irony in what he said, and neither did the reporter.