About the Author (33 page)

And what will happen once they revive her? Will she forget my belated kindness and betray me to the police? It no longer matters; she cannot harm me now. Suppose that in a day or two, after she has recuperated enough to be able to speak, she tells them her wild tale of a dead writer, a stolen manuscript, a stolen
destiny
. Her words will be dismissed as the deranged ramblings of a woman driven to madness by torture. I possess the sole evidence that could corroborate Les’s bizarre story: the laptop. If the police come to me in a couple of days with questions about Stewart, I will shake my head slowly, sadly, as if to say, “It’s not easy being a famous writer and thus the subject of the fantasies of strangers, but guys, let me tell you about some of my
other
fans, the deranged, the delusional . . . ,” and the cops will glance at one another, then look back at me and nod in unison, understanding the pitfalls of American fame, of American success. Yes, that’s how it will go. I am home free. I am finally in the clear.

Or, at least, I
will
be, in a moment. All that remains to be done is eliminating these two final pieces of evidence, these twin manuscripts: the one contained in Stewart’s computer, which sits before me on this desk, its green eye blinking; the other contained in these sheets of yellow legal paper stacked beside my writing hand. In just a few minutes, neither will exist.

As I bring my tale to a close, I find myself pausing in search of an appropriately solemn, and sonorous, signoff—a strange impulse, perhaps, since these words might as well be written in water. No one besides myself will ever read them. Yet I hesitate, seeking just that perfect combination of words, that elusive cadence, which will resolve the strange discordancies of my tale. Ironic that while my troubles as a writer have always involved beginnings, I now find myself hung up on the end, unable to finish, unable quite to let go.

Now that’s odd. Another siren. A
few
sirens. Just down the hill. Strange. They seem to be growing louder.

The sirens were indeed growing louder. They were screaming up the hill toward my house. Hardly had I had time to throw down my pen and bolt to my feet when I was greeted, through my den window, by a stunning sight—one that still causes me to shudder, eight months after the fact: four police cruisers were racing onto my property. They scrunched to a halt blocking the driveway’s entrance, then the cops tumbled out and took cover, the barrels of their magnums and assault rifles aimed at my home. A helicopter rattled from over the trees, then hovered directly overhead (I was later to learn that it carried not police reinforcements but rather an enterprising TV crew from Burlington, who had picked up news of the murder on their police scanner and were broadcasting the action live). An amplified voice began to blast from one of the cruisers. It told me to come out with my hands up. It told me that the house was surrounded. It told me that there was no chance of my escaping.

As I cowered behind the little lace curtain that shielded me from the commotion outside, I tried to figure out what the hell was going on. How had Les revived enough to unfurl her tale of literary theft to the cops? Why had they believed her so readily? And why on earth were they reacting with such
firepower
? I mean, plagiarism is a nasty offence, but
this
. . . ? I looked down at my desk. The manuscript and laptop were sitting there, right out in the open. Moving as in a nightmare, with clumsy limbs and leaden fingers, I gathered into my arms the loose pages and the heavy computer. Then I moved in a crouch to the kitchen, where I spilled the contents of the garbage pail onto the floor. All the while the frantic loudspeaker was hellishly demanding that
I come out with my hands up
. I crammed the laptop and legal pages into the pail, then scooped up the wet coffee filters, crumpled cereal boxes, orange rinds, and other detritus and packed them on top. Déjà vu. Then, as the voice continued to bellow its belligerent commands, I went to the front door, opened it, and stepped out with my hands up.

Somehow I was still deluding myself that the police would merely ask me a few questions, then depart with apologies for having disturbed my writing. So it was a shock when they pointed their guns at my head and yelled at me to lie facedown on the driveway with my hands behind my back. I did. As they handcuffed me, I was still saying things like, “What seems to be the problem, Officers?” and “There must be some mistake . . . ,” but they ignored my polite protests and simply hauled me to my feet and deposited me in the back of a cruiser. We had started to pull down the driveway when something happened to subvert the smooth passage of my arrest: a car was coming up the drive. From my position in the backseat I saw that the other driver was Janet. It was almost noon; she was arriving home from Boston right on schedule.

The cop hit his siren. Janet jerkily pulled into the ditch to make way. The cop stomped on the gas, and we gunned past—but not before I turned my head and through the side window saw her horrified face gaping out at me. I produced an expression meant to convey that this was all some kind of mistake. I’m not sure it was too convincing.

On the ride to Burlington, I was still crazily, insanely hoping to initiate the exchange in which I would laugh off Les’s claims of my literary imposture; still holding out hope that the cops might realize that they had been a little hasty in believing her mad tale; still clinging to the notion that they would, once they heard my explanation, turn around and drive me home. But in the face of all my questions about why I was being arrested, the cops remained stonily silent. Indeed, the only time they said anything to me was when they were shackling my hands and one of them read me my
Miranda
rights.

When we got to Burlington, I was—incredibly—led through a scrum of shouting reporters and clacking cameras into a large, grim-facaded building. The helicopter (which had followed us all the way from New Halcyon) still hovered overhead, adding to the general chaos. Inside I was fingerprinted and photographed, then told I could make a single phone call. Freed from my manacles, but with a pair of cops looking on, I called Janet. She said that she had been watching the live feed for the past half hour on TV. By now all the networks and CNN were carrying it. “Cal, what’s going
on
?” she cried. I was starting to say something about its being a very long story when she interrupted and told me that the television reporters were saying that I was being arrested for a
murder
, possibly a
double
murder, depending on whether or not one of the victims, currently in a coma, died. I began to babble some forgettable incoherence, but Janet again cut me off and said that she had already spoken to my father, and together they had retained a lawyer for my defense. Unfortunately, though, this attorney could not make it to Burlington until tomorrow morning. “Don’t say anything to anyone until then,” Janet said. I promised her I would not. I told her that I loved her, and then I was led off to my cell.

It was the standard barred chamber with a bench bed and steel latrine. I lay awake most of the night listening to some fellow captives in adjacent cells shouting, snoring, and, in one case, loudly masturbating (never before had I heard a man address endearments, mixed with grave threats, to his imagined lover—very unsettling). Meanwhile I tried to puzzle out how the police could have supposed that
I
was the author of the carnage at the Halberts’ house—a mystery that was cleared up for me in the morning when I was introduced to the man whom Janet and my father had hired to defend me. Carston Arthur Roehampton, Esq., was a well-known criminal-defense lawyer notorious for having saved the necks of a number of celebrity clients, and was also the author of the best-selling autobiography
I Object!: The Trials and Tribulations of an Attorney for the Defense
. A tall, deeply tanned man of sixty-some years, with suspiciously dark hair and an unexpectedly anodyne manner (behind which a fierce competitive spirit obviously raged), Carston gave me the basic rundown of the charges against me and how they’d come to be filed—information that I have further fleshed out, here, from subsequent press reports and legal depositions.

My troubles stemmed from the testimony of little Chopper Pollard (whose role in all of this I had, alas, completely overlooked). It seems that Chopper had arrived at the murder scene even before the police had finished packing Les onto a stretcher (Chopper had been awakened by the sirens’ screaming into town and, fearing the worst, had immediately made for the Halberts’ house.) Questioned at the scene, she revealed that Les had been using the house as a hideout from the jealous boyfriend who had come to kill her. The cops, though intrigued by this information, were more interested in whether Chopper could throw any light on the identity of the “third party” who had been present in the house at the time of the killing. A size-ten shoe print in blood had been found leading away from the scene, along with numerous bloody fingerprints that did not match those of either victim (apparently I had not been as careful as I had hoped during those nightmare minutes I spent in the Halberts’ house). At first, Chopper (forgetting, in her state of shock, all about our evening colloquy) said that she herself was the only person who had known where Les was hiding. But the officers were persistent and asked Chopper if anyone else—
anyone at all
—could have known Les’s whereabouts. That was when the penny dropped, and she gasped and threw a hand up to her mouth: “Well, I did tell one
other person
. . . .”

And so it was that I had received my morning house call from the police (whose SWAT-team tactics reflected their panicked belief that I might have been engaged in an actual murder “spree,” perhaps chopping my wife, and anyone else in my house, to bits). According to my lawyer, Carston, all of this was standard police procedure, though he did concede that at an earlier and more innocent time in America’s history, I
might
have been immunized by my celebrity against suspicion of having performed a midnight knife attack on a young woman and her male friend—“But today?” he added.

I told him I saw what he meant.

And apparently so did the international media. Inevitably dubbing me a “literary-world O.J.,” the newspapers and networks were in heaven trying daily to one-up one another by coming up with a headline that would encompass every juicy facet of my case. On the day following my arrest, the
New York Post
went with a stark, staccato front-pager—BRAT-PACK SCRIBE HELD ON TORTURE, SEX-SLAY RAP—while the
Daily News
aimed for symmetry: BESTSELLER, BESTKILLER? The
Times
used the more subdued but no less grabby front-page headline KILLING SHAKES A SMALL VERMONT TOWN—AND MANHATTAN LITERARY WORLD. Even the editor of our tiny local paper (who had conducted an interview with me six months earlier for one of his mild little columns on “Local Notables”) got in on the act, splashing across the front page of the
New Halcyon Goose Egg
the banner headline MURDER, HE WROTE!

Over the next several weeks of pretrial motions, the DA’s office stoked the media blaze with regular doses of judiciously leaked “evidence.” This included the rather devastating discovery, in the woods behind my house, of the bloodied penknife and gun, as well as my bloodstained shoes and clothes (I knew I should have sunk those things in the lake, but who could have guessed that the police would one day conduct a fine-tooth-comb search of every inch of our property?). The authorities had also assembled a cornucopia of circumstantial evidence to suggest a possible motive for the crimes, including testimony showing that Lesley and I had had a relationship that long predated her attempted murder. The Pleasant View Hotel’s desk clerks (in spite of their apparent obliviousness to the comings and goings of guests and their visitors) described to the police the two occasions upon which I had visited Les in her room during her stays at the hotel (under the easily punctured alias of “Sally Monroe”). Farmer Ned Bailey was able to place the girl in the backseat of my car on, or near, the date of one of those “assignations.” Then there was the stunning revelation, compliments of the New York City Police Department, that I had had sexual relations one evening in Manhattan, over two years earlier, with a young woman whom I had (in a police complaint) identified as “Les,” and who answered to the precise physical description of the victim in the current case.

That last item pretty much sealed the deal in proving that Les was my longtime mistress, an inference supported by further evidence culled from my subpoenaed financial records (and the testimony of bank managers Brenda Rasmussen and Frederick Willows), which showed that I had used a complicated scheme to siphon off money secretly to the girl. Then, of course, there was always the evidence of my own famous, best-selling novel,
Almost Like Suicide
, which painted me, with my own brush, as an incorrigible skirt chaser and cad. In a nutshell, the DA (along with the media) reached the quick and unanimous verdict that I had been having a torrid affair with the sexy young runaway and had grown insanely jealous at learning that my paramour was sharing her favors with an old boyfriend, the dangerous but sexy Tommy. One night, in a cataclysmic spasm of sexual rage and humiliation, I had interrupted the lovers during one of their trysts, knifed my male rival to death, then set about administering a macabre punishment on my lover for her infidelity: sexual torture.

The evidence against me was so compelling, and the story line so luridly gripping, that I was almost beginning to believe it myself, and to prepare for a life behind bars, when finally luck began to turn in my favor. In late September, Les emerged from her coma and bluntly (and not without a certain amount of pride) informed the police that
she
had killed Tommy—though purely in self-defense (a claim that her scarred and ravaged body seemed to firmly prove). After describing how she had managed, before he cuffed her, to wrest the knife from him during a struggle and jab it into his midsection, she went on to say that she would have carved him up “like a Christmas fucking turkey” if she’d had the chance, because he was a “fucking scumbag of the highest order,” adding that she was glad he was dead “because he was a fucking animal.” (A rap sheet on the departed Tommy went far to endorse Les’s take on her former fiancé: his long list of crimes reached back to early adolescence and included everything from assault and battery to rape, burglary, purse snatching, impersonating a police officer, and mail fraud.) Furthermore, Les denied any sexual relationship with me beyond our one liaison back in New York, “because he’s not that great in the sack, and besides, lately I’m more into girls.” (All quotes are from a tape transcript of the police interview.)