Broken (28 page)

“Can I finish the question?”

“No!”

Simon, eyes glinting with malice said, “You hated Walter Lipinski enough to kill him, didn’t you?”

“No,” she said. The viciousness in Simon’s voice caused Anna Mae to shudder.

“Where did you hide the ax?” he hissed.

Anna Mae frowned and leaned forward in the witness chair.
That voice. There’s something about that voice!

“Where did you hide the ax?” he repeated.

She had heard it before—that voice. She knew that voice. And now she remembered where she had heard it.

I’ll get you! If it takes me the rest of my life, bitch! I’ll get you!

“Answer the question!” Simon demanded. “Where is the ax?”

Suddenly her memory broke open and the whole thing came flooding back. Anna Mae’s heart was pounding. “I didn’t kill Walter.”

“Didn’t you go to the kitchen intending to...”

“I only wanted to talk to him.”

“Is that why your clothes were covered with blood? Because you were talking to him?”

The courtroom was becoming a blur and Anna Mae’s hands were growing numb. “I didn’t kill Walter,” she repeated.

“Where’s the ax now, Anna Mae?”

“I saw it...”

“You saw the ax?”

“Yes.”

Simon moved closer, glowering at his witness. “You lied to the police, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t lie to anybody.” 

“Didn’t you tell the police that you didn’t remember what you did?”

“I didn’t do anything,” she said slowly rising to her feet. “But you!” she pointed an accusing finger into the prosecutor’s face. “Why didn’t you come home and take care of your father?”

“Excuse me?”

“George!” she seethed. “George Siminoski! If you had only come home and taken care of your father. If you hadn’t left him alone and in misery. He needed you. But no! All you cared about was the money he got from the accident. The mill—that ladle—it wasn’t an accident, George. Walter did it! Walter rigged that ladle so it poured off-center. And somehow your father found out. My God—that pitiful old man!”

From a distance, Anna Mae heard the judge’s admonishments, but the words continued to tumble from her lips.

“Your father killed him, George! That poor, damaged, lonely, crazed old man! He had the ax, George. Walter was already on the floor when I got there. Blood everywhere! I heard what your father was saying. ‘You! It was you!’ your father kept repeating...”

Dr. Rhukov dashed to the front of the courtroom. Angelo leaped over the rail almost knocking Ivan over.

“…your father was out of his mind, crazy...”

The bailiff grabbed Angelo by the arm, pulling him back to the defense table. Ivan just stood there, stunned.

“…I saw him hitting Walter with the ax. It was your father, George! I remember! I saw it and I remember!”

Anna Mae ignored the turmoil in the courtroom and Judge Wittier banged the gavel. 

“Go home, George!” she yelled. “Go home and talk to your father! He’ll tell you where the ax is. He’ll tell you why he killed Walter. Ask him to tell you how my uncle—how my father—how Walter Lipinski rigged that ladle of hot steel because he wanted your father’s job. Go home and ask him, George. He’ll tell you where to find the ax.”

Tom Simon’s face was white. He stumbled backward, collided with the prosecution table then collapsed into his chair.

The courtroom was in a frenzy. Angelo and Ivan guided a trembling Anna Mae to the defense table. Dr. Rhukov took her hand as she sat down beside him. “God bless you,” he said over the chaos, “You did it!”

“Order! This courtroom is called to order! Sit down!” Judge Wittier addressed no one in particular and whacked his gavel one final time. “This court will take a one hour recess.”

The bailiff led the jury out, but only a few spectators left the courtroom. JD leaned over the railing. “I was right, wasn’t I? A nose job, a weight loss, contacts, that terrible wig, the son-of-a-bitch almost pulled it off.”

“Dr. Rhukov,” said Anna Mae as tears ran down her face, “I remembered!” She said it over and over and the doctor kept nodding, “Yes, yes, yes! You remembered. Do you know what this means? You will get better now.”

She looked up at Joey Barn’s whose unrestrained joy made her smile. “Will you get out of jail? Will you? Huh?”

A woman’s voice came from behind her. “You didn’t do it! My God! I didn’t believe you. I am so sorry.”

Anna Mae turned and saw Sarah standing on the other side of the rail. Her face was ashen and streaked with tears. Anna Mae stood up, reached over the railing and pulled her aunt into an embrace. Sarah wept in Anna Mae’s arms. “It’s over now,” said Anna Mae. “The nightmare is over.”

A few feet away Ivan Hammerstein watched the happy chaos. Then he turned to look at Tom Simon who was standing by the defense table dazed and disorientated. Hesitantly, Ivan stepped closer. Simon looked up; perspiration ran down his face, his tie was undone and his jacket hung lopsided from his shoulders. He was holding his briefcase with papers sticking out haphazardly.

Thomas G. Simon—George Thomas Siminoski, was no longer the pompous, self-serving man he had been twenty minutes before. He was utterly destroyed.

Defense Attorney Ivan Hammerstein walked over to State Prosecutor Tom Simon and gently led him by the elbow out of the courtroom.

February 14, 1971

Sunday

The icy winter sun streamed through Anna Mae’s bedroom window, creating golden highlights in her hair as it spilled over the pillow. The barely perceptible rise and fall of the flowered comforter confirmed the soundness of her slumber.

“I bet she sleeps for five days,” said David peeking into the room.

Sarah had to look up at David for he had grown so tall. “Poor thing,” she said, stepping into the room and tucking the comforter around her niece. “How could I have...”

“Forget it, Mom,” David said gently. “It’s over. She doesn’t blame you.”

David followed his mother downstairs to the kitchen. A breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and pancakes sat untouched and cooling on the stove. “You don’t care if I eat some of this, do you?” said David, heaping the food onto a plate. 

Sarah smiled at her son. “May as well. But when you’re finished, get some of those fresh oranges out of the refrigerator and squeeze them. Anna Mae loves fresh squeezed orange juice.”

Sarah was placing the food into the oven to keep warm when the doorbell rang. Moments later, out in the foyer, Angelo removed his snowy shoes and walked into the kitchen. He waved the Sunday newspaper. “She made the front page,” he said draping his heavy woolen jacket over the back of a kitchen chair and spreading the paper on top of David’s breakfast.

David stuck his head under the newspaper and kept eating.

“McBride is Innocent,” Angelo read aloud. “On Friday, in Judge Wittier’s courtroom, Anna Mae McBride, in an explosion of memory, identified the man who bludgeoned Walter Lipinski to death...”

Sarah poured Angelo a mug of steaming coffee then sat at the table to listen.

“…the police found Dobie Siminoski at home. The housekeeper, Maria Tamero said Mr. Siminoski had been deeply depressed for months. and that she had tried to get him to see a doctor but he had refused. When the police told Siminoski he was under arrest for murder, he submitted without protest.

“Cooperating fully, Dobie Siminoski led the arresting officers to the shed where they retrieved the murder weapon. The ax was coated with dried blood. Officer Smith told the reporters that Siminoski asked what had taken them so long to arrest him. He appeared to have been waiting for them.

“Maria Tamero said that Dobie had not watched television since his wife died in August of 1970. She said that she believed if Mr. Siminoski had known Anna Mae McBride was on trial for the Lipinski murder, he would have come forward. Siminoski did not appear to realize the amount of time that had elapsed between the murder and his arrest.

“It was later discovered...”

Anna Mae appeared in the doorway and Angelo stopped reading. With her eyes puffy from sleep, and her long hair hanging in tangles, she clutched her pink chenille robe together at the neck. “What time is it?”

Angelo reached out, pulled her onto his lap and happily locked both arms around her. “Time for you to get up, sleepy head.”

She kissed his forehead. “Please! Put that newspaper away. I don’t want to hear another word about that trial. I just want to be home.”

Angelo removed the paper from David’s head, folded it and placed it under his chair.

With a gust of frigid air, Olga Nikovich burst through the back door. “Oh! Mine Annie! Mine Annie is home!” she squealed. “Let me look at you!” She shrugged out of a coat that was made for Siberian winters, colliding with David’s chair in the process. David leaned over to recover a forkful of pancakes from the floor. The doorbell rang again.

“Good grief!” said Sarah heading down the hallway. “It’s not even eleven o’clock yet!”

The press reporter, Robert McCarthy, stamped his snowy feet on the foyer floor and blew into his hands to warm them. Sarah hung his wet coat on the banister. “Don’t worry about your feet. It’s only cold water. The rug will dry.”

Anna Mae suddenly felt self-conscious. All these people and here she is in her bathrobe and her hair, looking like a Halloween wig. She slid from Angelo’s lap, hurried by McCarthy and ran up the second floor steps. When she reached the top landing, she stopped to listen to the reporter: “Angelo’s mother found a pile of papers in Dobie’s room. They were old letters and stuff, dating back to the winter of sixty-one. Apparently, shortly after the accident, the men at the mill approached Irene with their suspicions that the tipped ladle was not an accident. They were convinced that Walter Lipinski had done something to cause it. There was a written description of how they thought Walter had rigged the ladle and a list of signatures—fellow steelworkers who wanted to dispute the expert’s findings and formally accuse Walter. But they would need Dobie’s cooperation.”

Anna Mae was now sitting on the top step listening intently.

“In an effort to protect her husband from further trauma, Irene Siminoski had asked the mill workers not to pursue their suspicions. Dobie was still going through an agonizing healing process. But almost worse than that was the severe emotional pain. All he had to look forward to were months of rehabilitation and permanent scars. Irene felt it would serve no good purpose for her husband to learn that Walter, who Dobie considered a friend, deliberately rigged that ladle intending to hurt him, simply because he was next in line for that job. So she asked the mill workers not to pursue it and hid the papers.

“After his wife died, it took Dobie months to gather up the courage to go through her things. That was when he discovered the pile of papers that revealed everything. Dobie remembered that he had seen Walter just before the accident. And Walter was definitely at the wrong place at the wrong time. Dobie was convinced that it was Walter Lipinski who ruined his life. Already unstable, that drove Dobie right over the edge.”

Not wanting to hear more, Anna Mae went to her room. She dressed slowly, pinning her jeans that were an inch too big at the waist. Standing in front of the mirror, she pulled a baggy gray sweat shirt over her head. The jail shampoo had dried her hair so badly she could hardly comb through the knots. When her hair was finally tangle free, she applied a pale shade of pink lipstick.

She stood staring into the mirror. She was different now—a different person completely. Dr. Rhukov said that her memory returning on the witness stand was a giant step toward her recovery. Now, with no effort at all, she could recall the tragic events of the day Walter was murdered. But, she pushed them out of her mind. There would be plenty time for that when she went back to therapy.

The long, lonely howl of a train whistled echoed across the valley. She walked over to the window and opened it to let in a cold breeze. She gazed into the distance, at the silent, snow covered mills. The sky was icy clear, with no ugly black pollution spewing out of the smokestacks that stood like silent sentries across the horizon. Corporate greed and foreign imports had finally wiped out the heart blood of the valley’s steel industry. Her eyes traveled to the river beyond. She smiled. Her angels were, again, casting sparkles over the water.

“Anna Mae! Annie!” David called from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be right down,” she said.

“You better hurry,” yelled Angelo from the kitchen. “He’s drinking your orange juice!”

She heard someone climbing the steps. Then Sarah was standing in the doorway. Anna Mae walked over and put her arms around Sarah. They stood there holding each other for a moment, and then together they turned and went downstairs.

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