The Red Parts (15 page)

AT THE START of the trial, I set aside a page in my legal pad to record all the information I will learn about Leiterman over the next few weeks. At the end, this page appeared as follows:

• nicknames have included “Gus” and “Wimpy”
  
• known for a healthy appetite
  
• avid hunter of pheasant, squirrel, deer, rabbit, etc.
  
• once had a pet fox.
  

The only other potential insight into Gary’s character came in the form of a dirty visual trick used by the prosecution. In a PowerPoint presentation that attempted to match Leiterman’s handwriting to the words “Muskegon” and “Mixer” found on the cover of a phone book found by a pay phone in the Law Quad the day after Jane’s murder, a handwriting expert for the state took the majority of his samples from letters Gary had written to his family from jail and from the “emotional diary” he was required to keep in drug rehab in 2002.

The first sample appeared on the screen:

The next was more lyrical, albeit truncated:

The next veered away from this minimalist model, and was a chaotic collage in which the word “ANGRY” recurred about fifty times, often fiercely underlined. Many of the sentences referenced a female object of disaffection, as in
I was so
ANGRY
at her.
Other standout fragments:

Leiterman’s lawyer immediately objected, saying that the content of the projected material would prejudice the jury. The judge sustained the objection, but allowed the presentation to continue, instructing the jury to perform the perfectly impossible task of ignoring the meaning of the words on the screen and focusing exclusively on their
i
-dots, baselines, pen drags, and initial strokes. But it seemed to me that the jury was riveted by the character being revealed—or constructed—onscreen. So was I. The “Gary” appearing there was pensive and explosive.

While waiting for our egg-and-cheese sandwiches to come off the grill at the court coffeeshop later that day, I chatted with a Michigan State Police detective about the damning subtext of the handwriting presentation. He smiled mischievously.
Yeah, that was pretty low on our part. But given how little information about Gary we’ve been allowed to bring in, I’m just glad we found a way to convey
something
of his character.

I was glad too. But what that “something” was, I cannot say. Was it the fact that Gary carries around a lot of anger? Does that make him more likely to be Jane’s murderer? Do the Polaroids of the exchange student? His so-called “sexual dysfunction”? His alleged groping of a fellow nurse on a moving bus? His addiction to painkillers? His pet fox?

T
HE POET IN me may have loved these little handwriting collages, but the diarist in me was appalled. Having one’s intimate musings seized by the police, chopped up into incriminating bits, then projected onto a screen for all to see and later committed to the public record is nothing short of a Kafkaesque nightmare.

It is also one way of describing what I did with Jane’s diaries in
Jane.
I had told the CBS producer at dinner that I made use of Jane’s journals so that she could speak for herself. That was true. But I also selected the words I wanted, chopped them up, and rearranged them to suit my needs.
Poetic license
, as they say.

Years ago, home alone, about fourteen, I came across a soft, worn leather briefcase in a cabinet in my mother’s bedroom. It was a bedside cabinet, about a foot away from my stepfather’s jungle machete. I recognized the briefcase at once as my father’s. It was full of yellow legal pads, which I pulled out and started reading. Quickly I ascertained that these pads had served as his journals for the last year or so of his life.

The diaries of the dead do not feel inviolable to me, though those of the living do. Perhaps they both should, I don’t know. All I know is that I felt no dread or wrongness in reading these pages. Only curiosity, and sadness.

I learned there that my father had found out about my mother’s affair with the housepainter by reading her journal. He had read there that they’d first made love after going on a glider plane ride together, a ride that he had felt suspicious of at the time.

As I read this that day suddenly jumped into focus. I was about seven, maybe eight. We had all gone out for dinner that night to the Peppermill, one of Emily’s and my favorite restaurants. Emily and I liked the Peppermill because it had a little pond by the bar with a fire floating miraculously on top, and cocktail waitresses who looked like Charlie’s Angels wearing long, salmon-colored evening gowns. Its burgers came with pink plastic spikes in the shape of miniature cows which announced, in tiny red lettering, RARE, MEDIUM, or WELL DONE.

Our parents rarely fought; I rarely even saw them together. But that night there had been a fight, and it had something to do with a glider plane.

I read through his journals once that afternoon and never saw them again. I copped to finding them in a family therapy session—one of a handful of attempts my mother made to keep our new “family unit” from spiraling out of control—and though she and her husband acted understanding in the therapist’s office, as soon as we got out I was grounded for snooping. At this same session Emily knocked over the therapist’s floor lamp, stormed out of the office, and later had to be discovered then coaxed out from her hiding place between two cars in the underground parking garage before we could go home. The next time I went to look for the briefcase and the legal pads, they were gone.

I remember only a few other fragments.

He referred to me as “the imp,” and described me as happy.

He described Emily as quiet and sensitive, and said he was worried about her.

He missed my mother’s breasts.

He had recently enjoyed the services of a prostitute on a business trip to Japan, and had especially liked the way that, after each activity, she bestowed a kiss on his penis with a quality he found both delicate and discreet.

Rarely does the man allow himself to be self-indulgent or sexually passive, letting the woman make love to him
, my father wrote in an essay called “So You Think You Want to Be a Man?”—an essay that was collected, along with two others, in a little book of his writings his friends put together after his death.

“So You Think You Want to Be a Man?” begins:

He then spends several pages reciting statistics about the various “hazards of being male.” Men are 143% more likely to be the victims of aggravated assault, 400% of murder. Women attempt suicide four times more often than men, but men actually succeed in killing themselves three times more often, and so on. But, the eternal optimist, he concludes:

One night, after taking Emily and me to see the ballet
The Nutcracker
, he unraveled two rolls of toilet paper, wrapped their ends around his hands, and leapt around the living room in a wild impersonation of “The Ribbon Dancer.”

He liked to don a rubber Nixon mask without warning and chase Emily and me around his house screaming,
I am not a crook, I am not a crook.

He sang “Duke of Earl” in a crazy falsetto, and often yelled his personal mantra,
I am immortal until proven not!
at the top of his lungs.

He learned, in the year before he died, how to weep. I saw him.

A
T THE TRIAL I learn that when detectives arrive at the scene of a homicide, they start far away from the body, and move slowly in toward it, so as not to miss or disturb anything, taking photographs, collecting evidence in sweeping, concentric circles.

SEVERAL YEARS ago, while working on
Jane
, I asked my mother if she thought I had grieved my father. I don’t know why I thought this was something she could know. But when I think back on the years after his death and try to locate myself in them, I feel like I’m scanning a photograph in which I’m supposed to appear but don’t. It occurs to me that in watching me grow up, maybe she saw something I couldn’t see.

Shortly after 9/11, some players from the Yankees came down to the fire station next to the bar where I worked in downtown Manhattan. They had come down to sign baseballs for all the kids whose firefighter fathers had died in the World Trade Center towers. Our station, as we called it, lost eleven men, many of whom drank regularly at the bar. I dropped what I was doing and went outside to watch the Yankees play catch with the boys in the street, the air still rank with the stench of the dead and smoldering steel.

The boys were euphoric. None was older than ten or eleven. They shrieked, high-fived, ran after balls in the gutter, and donned the autographed Yankee caps the team members had brought for them. It was impossible to forget that each one had just lost his father. The loss was only a few weeks old; they could not yet know how it would shape the rest of their lives. Watching their little bodies, I wondered where grief gets lodged in such small vessels. If I looked at them long enough, maybe I would actually see it.

The scene was bittersweet, and eventually unbearable. I went back to work.

Of course you grieved
, my mother answered me.

FOR YEARS growing up I was secretly furious at our mother for not letting Emily and me into our father’s bedroom on the night she found him there, dead. Everyone always said he died in his sleep. But my mother had told us it looked like he’d sat up before falling backwards, so he must have been awake long enough to know that something was going terribly wrong, had just gone terribly wrong, inside his body. Inside his heart. Maybe he woke up with a start, sat up, thinking,
Oh my God, what’s happening to me?
Maybe he had fumbled on his bedstand for the telephone, thinking,
I need help.
Or maybe he had fumbled for his glasses, thinking, one last time,
What’s happening to me?
If I had seen the traces of this fumbling, I would have been able to tell how long he had suffered. Whether there had been any pain. What his last sound was. His last thought. At the bottom of his staircase, behind the closed door to his bedroom, lay a secret I had been unjustly barred from knowing. If I had been allowed access to it, my dream journals would not have been filled for the next twenty years with imperfect resurrections.

My mother was damned any which way. Mostly she was damned because she was alive. If we had found her dead body that night, our loyalty might have swung the other way.

Also, with no other way to explain a massive, fatal heart attack out of the blue at age forty, a story began to circulate like a quiet poison among us that he had died, quite literally, from a broken heart.

She killed him
, I overheard Emily tell friends on our school playground, with a shrug.

I too believed this story. But gradually, as the years went by, I awoke to its fallacy. Beyond its medical dubiousness, it also elided the fact that my father had been riding a wave of happiness when he died. He had bloomed, as they say. And after a year or two of seemingly joyous promiscuity, at the time of his death he was considering getting married again. To a woman named Jane.