The Manhattan Hunt Club (2 page)

K
eith Converse reached for the knob of his truck’s radio, but changed his mind before his fingers touched it. If he turned it on, he knew what would happen: his wife would pause in her prayers just long enough to give him a reproachful look, and even though she wouldn’t say anything, her message would be loud and clear.

Don’t you even care what happens to Jeff?
the look would say as clearly as if she’d spoken aloud.

It wouldn’t do any good to try to tell her how much he cared about their son. She’d made up her mind, and he had given up trying to argue with her months ago.

“It’s God’s will,” she’d sighed when he first told her that Jeff had been arrested.

God’s will
.

Keith no longer knew how many times he’d heard that phrase in the last few years. It had become Mary’s rationale for refusing to discuss every problem that came up between them.

He knew its origin, knew as well as she did where it had started. After all, they’d both gone to St. Mary’s School, both grown up dutifully going to mass every Sunday at St. Barnabas Church.

When they were young, Mary had seemed just as relaxed about the Church as he was. But that began to change after the first night they made love, when Jeff was conceived. A thick blanket of Catholic guilt had fallen over Mary the moment she found out she was pregnant.

Keith assumed it would ease off as soon as they got married, and he’d seen to it that they did so right away. Eight months later, when Jeff was born, they told everyone he was premature, and since he’d been a small baby anyway, everyone accepted the lie.

Except Mary.

When she was withdrawn after Jeff was born, Keith hadn’t been concerned. He thought it was because she was busy with the baby. But then Jeff was a toddler, and her withdrawn attitude only got worse. By the time Jeff was in school, they were making love no more than once a month, if you could even call it making love. Then it was more like once a year, and when Jeff was in high school, Keith had almost forgotten what sleeping with Mary was like. Still, in other ways she’d been a good wife to him. She’d kept their house immaculate, and taken good care of all of them. Yet every year, she seemed to withdraw even further into herself, spending more and more time praying.

And every time something bad happened, she said it was God’s will.

Said they were being punished for having sinned.

That had hurt—hurt a lot. It was like saying they shouldn’t have had Jeff.

Keith had wondered if he should have insisted they go to some kind of counseling. But the one time he suggested it, the only person Mary had been willing to talk to was their priest, and Keith hadn’t seen how that would help. So he’d kept silent, concentrated on building up his contracting business, and hoped things would get better. When Jeff went off to college, Mary announced that she was leaving him.

“It’s God’s will,” she’d told him. “We committed a terrible sin, but I’ve done my penance and God has forgiven me.”

As usual, there hadn’t been any discussion. Keith knew he might be able to argue with his suppliers, his subcontractors, and his customers, but he couldn’t argue with Mary.

He couldn’t argue with God’s will.

So she moved out, and he rattled around in the little house in Bridgehampton that suddenly seemed way too big and way too empty, and tried to get used to having both his son and his wife gone.

It wasn’t easy, but he got through it. Since Jeff had been arrested, though, it had gotten much worse.

When Jeff had first called him, Keith was certain it had to be a terrible mistake. Jeff had been a good kid—never even gotten into the kind of trouble most kids did. And then they’d arrested him, and charged him with things Keith knew his son couldn’t possibly have done.

All through the fall, Keith’s faith in Jeff had never wavered, even as he and Mary listened to the victim’s testimony. He would pick Mary up and they’d go to the trial together. Keith knew the woman had to be mistaken, even though she sounded absolutely certain about what had happened.

Even though the victim pointed to Jeff in the courtroom and said, “That’s the man who attacked me. I’ll never forget that face as long as I live.”

When the jury convicted Jeff, Keith had still been certain it was a mistake. He’d been sure it would be all right—the case would be appealed and Jeff would be released, and they would all go on with their lives.

But Jeff hadn’t been released.

And Keith, despite himself, had started blaming Mary for what had happened.

Now, as the traffic on the Long Island Expressway came to a complete halt, he glanced at her.

“We’re going to be late.”

Mary sighed. “I suppose that’s my fault, too.”

Keith’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “I didn’t say it was your fault. Why do you have to take everything so personal?”

“Personal
ly
,” Mary corrected.

Don’t say anything,
Keith told himself.
It won’t matter if we’re late anyway. It won’t change anything.
But it would matter to Jeff. “I should’ve come in last night,” he muttered. “I should have been there all along.”

M
ary Converse saw no point in responding to her husband’s words. Indeed, she was weary of trying to talk to Keith at all. If he only had the same strength that she had—

She cut her thought short, knowing that Keith didn’t share her faith, and never would. At first, like Keith, she assumed that her son was innocent, too. But since then, she’d come to grips with what had happened to Jeff. For a while she’d blamed herself, believing that if she and Keith hadn’t sinned all those years ago, none of this would have happened.

Jeff wouldn’t have gotten himself into trouble.

After he’d been convicted, she felt so guilty, she almost wished she could just die. But she’d talked it over with Father Noonan, who had explained that she wasn’t responsible for anything Jeff had done, and that her role now was to let Jeff know she forgave him.

Forgave him, and loved him, just as God forgave and loved him.

In her faith, she’d been able to find peace and acceptance.

Keith, however, kept right on denying Jeff’s guilt, insisting it had to be a mistake, utterly refusing to accept that all things are God’s will. Deep in her heart, Mary knew better: Jeff had been conceived in sin, his soul corrupted from the very moment she had been weak enough to give in to Keith Converse’s basest desires. The sins of the father were now being visited upon the son, and there was nothing she could do but accept it and pray—not only for her own soul, but for Jeff’s as well.

Now, as the traffic jam evaporated as suddenly as it had started and they headed west on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Mary’s fingers began to move over the beads of her rosary as she once more began to pray.

God’s will be done,
she silently prayed.
God’s will be done . . .

CHAPTER 2

F
or Jeff Converse, mornings had taken on a terrible sameness. Each dawn that had broken over the last several months had brought with it a fleeting hope that he was finally awakening from the terrible nightmare his life had become. But as the comforting fingers of sleep released him from their touch, the hope that he was waking up from a bad dream always slipped away. The knot of fear that formed in his stomach when he’d been arrested pulled steadily tighter as he pondered the horrors the new day might bring.

At first he’d assumed it would be over within a few minutes—maybe an hour or two at the outside. As they locked him in the cell in the detectives’ squad room at the police station on West One hundredth Street, he’d looked around with more curiosity than fear. After all, what had happened to him was obviously a mistake.

All he’d been trying to do was help the woman in the subway.

He had barely seen her at first—he’d been starting up the stairs from the platform when he heard something that made him pause.

If he’d just ignored it and kept going, if he’d paid no more attention to the muffled scream than he did to the car alarms that were always going off on the streets, he’d have been fine.

But a scream wasn’t a car alarm, and without thinking about it, he had turned away from the staircase and started toward the far end of the platform.

There’d been no mistaking what he saw in the shadowless glare of the fluorescent lights that filled the white-tiled subway station: a woman was sprawled out on the platform, facedown.

A man with his back to Jeff knelt next to her, tearing at the woman’s clothes.

The idea of turning away from the scene never occurred to Jeff. Instead, he began running toward the kneeling man, yelling at the top of his lungs. Startled by the noise, the man glanced over his shoulder, then stood up. But as Jeff charged toward him, the man didn’t turn to face him, made no move to defend himself. To Jeff’s surprise, he leaped off the platform onto the subway tracks, vanishing into the darkness of the tunnel. By the time Jeff reached the woman, her attacker was gone. In the distance, Jeff could hear the rumble of an approaching train, but he ignored the sound, all his attention focused on the woman.

She was still lying facedown, and Jeff picked up her wrist, feeling for a pulse. As the artery beneath his fingers throbbed, he gently turned the woman over.

Her nose was crushed, her jaw was swelling, and her face was covered with blood. As the train roared into the subway and slowed to a stop, the woman’s eyes opened. Her gaze fixed on him for a second, and then she suddenly seemed to come back to life. A scream erupted from her throat and the fingernails of one hand raked across his face. He grabbed her wrist, and her other hand came up, tearing at him. Jeff had no idea how long the struggle lasted—perhaps only a few seconds, maybe as much as half a minute. As he tried to pinion the thrashing woman beneath him, hands closed on his shoulders and he was jerked away.

“She’s hurt,” Jeff began. “Someone—” But before he could finish he was manhandled away from the woman and slammed facedown onto the subway platform.

His arms were jerked behind his back.

And his nightmare began.

As the handcuffs tightened around his wrists he heard someone say something about his not having to say anything.

They took him to the precinct house on West One hundredth Street.

Once again he was told that he had the right to remain silent, but since he knew that he’d only tried to help the woman in the subway station, it didn’t occur to him to demand a lawyer before he recounted what had happened. He told them all of it—and kept telling them, even as he was processed into the system. By the time they’d taken away his watch, his class ring, his keys, and his wallet; by the time a computer had scanned his fingerprints and confirmed that he had no prior arrest record; by the time they finally sat him down in the detectives’ squad room and asked him to once more describe exactly what had happened, he’d already told his story three or four times.

Even when they locked him in the holding cage in the squad room, he was certain it would soon be over. As soon as the woman from the subway station calmed down, she’d remember what had happened.

She would tell the police.

And that would be the end of it.

When they asked him if he wanted to call someone, he thought of his parents first, then changed his mind—with both of them far out on Long Island, what could they do? Besides, it was all a mistake, and why have them worry all night when by morning he’d be back home? Finally, he settled on Heather Randall, certain she would still be waiting for him at his apartment. But before he could even make the call, she arrived at the precinct.

“I’ll have my father find out what’s going on,” she told him. “Don’t worry—we’ll get you out in an hour.”

But they hadn’t gotten him out. An hour later the police let him talk to Heather again, and she told him what was going on.

“The woman’s in surgery, but the last thing she said was that you attacked her.”

“But I didn’t!” Jeff protested. “I was trying to help her!”

“Of course you were,” Heather assured him. “And I’m sure when they show the woman pictures tomorrow, she’ll know it wasn’t you.”

But when the police had shown the woman the photographs of a dozen men the next morning, she immediately placed a finger on the one of Jeff. Even though her face and jaws were heavily bandaged, she’d made it perfectly clear that he was the man who attacked her in the subway station.

So they’d taken him downtown.

The oddly detached feeling he experienced the night of his arrest gave way to real fear as he was processed into the Manhattan House of Detention.

Thinking about it later, he remembered most of that day as a blur. All he could recall was being moved through a maze of barred gates and climbing up two floors through a steep, narrow staircase that echoed with his own footsteps and with those of dozens of other people who were being moved slowly through the legal system.

There’d been an elevator, filled with the heavy, unmistakable smell of incense.

He remembered a holding area with cells containing the kind of disreputable-looking people whose gaze he had always avoided on the streets or subways. Now they were staring at him, calling out to him, demanding to know what he’d done.

He’d said nothing.

Finally, he was led down another stairwell and put into what looked like a cage on one of the landings. Perfectly square, the tiny chamber contained only a plastic molded chair.

He sat down.

He had no idea how long he waited—his watch was still in the envelope with everything else he’d had with him last night, and there were no clocks in sight.

At last, he was led into the courtroom, and the nightmare grew even more monstrous.

T
hough he was waiting in a different cage outside a different courtroom on this morning of his sentencing, in the Criminal Courts Building adjoining the Detention Center, the only apparent difference between them was the floor he was on. When he’d been arraigned and the charges against him were formally read—charges that ranged from assault to attempted rape and attempted murder—it had been on one of the lower floors. Back then, nearly half a year ago, his hopes had still been high. Cynthia Allen would recognize her mistake, he assumed, and the charges would be dropped. But the charges hadn’t been dropped. Instead, he heard the cops who had arrested him, followed by two people from the subway that had pulled into the station right after he’d found her, and finally Cynthia Allen herself, all testify to what they thought they’d seen that night. As he sat listening to Cynthia Allen speak—sitting in the wheelchair she had been confined to since the attack, her face still misshapen, even after the first of her cosmetic surgeries—he realized he was going to be convicted.

Known that if he’d been sitting in the jury box instead of behind the defense table, he’d have believed every word she was saying.

“I saw him,” she whispered, glancing toward him before turning back to the jury. “He was on top of me—he was trying to . . .” Her voice trailed off, and her silence was far more persuasive than any words she could have spoken.

Then it was his turn to testify. As he sat in the witness box wearing a shirt whose collar was now too large for his neck and a jacket that sagged on his gaunt body, he knew that the jury wasn’t believing a word he said.

He’d seen the doubt in their eyes as he told them about the man who ran into the ink black tunnel, disappearing with the speed of a cockroach escaping from the light.

Through it all, his parents sat side by side in the first of the six rows of hard wooden benches—benches that reminded him of church pews—that were reserved for spectators. Every time he looked at them, they smiled encouragingly, as if they thought their own belief in his innocence would somehow be transferred to the jury. What they couldn’t see—and he could—was Cindy Allen’s family, sitting on the other side of the courtroom behind the prosecution table. His parents’ smiles had been countered by their looks of pure hatred. Though his parents appeared shocked by his conviction, Jeff had felt only a numb sense that the verdict was inevitable, that his nightmare was never going to end.

Now, as he waited for the final phase of his trial to begin, he tried to summon up some shred of hope, but found nothing.

Where his body had once been full of energy, it now seemed exhausted. At twenty-three, he felt like an old man.

Where six months ago his life had stretched before him like a landscape with limitless horizons to explore, now all he could see ahead were endless days confined within the bars of a prison cell.

That morning, when he had looked in one of the worn pieces of polished metal that served as a mirror in the building known as the Tombs, he found himself staring for a long time at the pallor of his face, the gauntness of his neck and chest, and the dark rings of exhaustion around his eyes.
I look like what they think I am,
he’d thought.
I look like I belong in prison.

The door leading to the courtroom opened then, and Sam Weisman appeared. In the months since his trial began, Jeff had learned to read more from his lawyer’s posture and expression than from what he said. At sixty, Weisman’s thick hair was snowy white, and his shoulders tended to sag as if carrying the weight of every case he had handled. “They’re ready,” he said, and though his tone was neutral, there was something in his stance that made Jeff wonder if, finally, something good might be about to happen.

“What’s going on, Sam?” he asked as the correction officer unlocked the gate of the cage and swung the barred door open.

Weisman hesitated, as if weighing his response, but then simply shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ve just got a feeling, you know?”

The brief flicker of hope faded as quickly as it had flared up. Sam Weisman had had a “feeling” when the jury stayed out for more than one day, and he’d had a “feeling” when they filed back into the jury box the following afternoon. The jury had found him guilty on every count he’d been charged with.

So much for Sam Weisman’s “feelings.”

Now, with the cuffs removed from his wrists, Jeff stepped through the door and into the courtroom, Sam Weisman right behind him.

Jeff felt suddenly disoriented. They were all there—the prosecutors at their table, Sam Weisman’s assistant at the one next to it.

The same people sat on the spectators’ benches—his parents behind the defense table, and Cynthia Allen’s parents behind the prosecutor’s. The same smattering of reporters who had covered the trial were in the rear, present now to witness the final act.

And Heather Randall was sitting by herself at the end of the bench his parents occupied, just as she had every day of the trial.

“Why don’t you sit with my folks?” he’d asked when she visited him after the first long day in court. Heather had shrugged noncommittally, and the impenetrable look she always adopted when she was hiding something dropped over her face. He realized that he knew the answer to his own question. “Dad’s blaming you, isn’t he? He thinks that if it hadn’t been for you, I would have stayed in Bridgehampton.”

“Wouldn’t you have?” she asked.

Jeff shook his head. “He might as well blame Mom—she’s the one who made sure I went away to college.”

“Easier to blame the summer people,” Heather replied. “And God knows, as far as your father’s concerned, that’s all I’ll ever be.”

“He’ll change his mind. When all this is over, he’ll see.”

And now, this morning, it
was
all over, but obviously Keith Converse had not changed his mind.

One thing in the courtroom was different today, though: except for the day she had testified, this was the first time Cynthia Allen was present. Looking diminished and helpless, she sat stoically in her wheelchair. Her husband stood behind her, his hands resting on her shoulders as if to shield her from any further harm. One of Cynthia’s hands covered her husband’s, the other was clasped by her father, who sat on the bench next to her chair. All three were staring at Jeff with such coldness that he shivered. Still, as he walked to the defense table, he held Cynthia’s gaze, praying that even now she might remember what had really happened, might see in his eyes that he’d never intended to do anything but help her.

All he saw was her hatred of him.

He lowered himself into a worn wooden chair, only to rise again as the bailiff’s voice began to drone and the door from the judge’s chambers opened. A moment later, as Judge Otto Vandenberg settled himself behind the bench, Jeff sank back into his chair.

Vandenberg, a large, gray-haired man whose body seemed even more enormous in his black robes, began shuffling through the stack of papers that lay before him. Finally, he peered over his half glasses at Jeff. “Defendant rise,” he said in a voice so low-pitched that people had to strain to hear it, yet carrying such authority that no one ever missed a word he uttered.

Jeff rose to his feet, Sam Weisman at his side.