Winter of frozen dreams (14 page)

One of the fine points Barbaras lawyers had overlooked, or perhaps considered of no importance, was a clause that explained that in the event of a suicide the policy was void and the premiums refundable in full.

Jerry Davies had been convinced of his responsibility for the third installment, and he attempted to raise the staggering sum of more than $6,000. On February 27th he sold a Konica camera to a used-merchandise shop for $350. A few safe stocks, purchased years ago, were cashed. Fifteen hundred dollars was borrowed against three life insurance policies he owned through work. When the loan was procured, Davies also asked the agent, Phil Sprecher, for a change of beneficiary and ownership form. He wanted to make a change in these insurance policies.

Sprecher had been acquainted with Davies for over a dozen years, and he asked for an explanation. Davies replied that he was unofficially engaged to Barbara Hoffman and wanted to assign her the policies. Sprecher advised against it. Twenty-two years Daviess senior, he spoke paternalistically and cautioned the young man to wait until after the wedding before altering the legalities of his insurance. There was no need for haste.

Davies took the necessary forms home and promised to sleep on the change.

On March 2nd Dave Wallace received a parcel from Eisenberg that contained the Transport Life policy on Jerry Davies. Hoffman was forfeiting the policy. Two days later, however, Wallace received a personal check from Barbara Hoffman for $6,618.30, the premium payment on the surrendered policy. A confused Wallace immediately phoned Eisenberg, who was startled by news of the payment. The lawyer apologized for the mix-up. He promptly called his client.

When Barbara entered his office that afternoon, Don Eisenberg bristled. In a tirade, he said he demanded trust from his clients; he demanded honesty. Didn't she understand the situation? Without his courtroom acrobatics, without his strategic defense and magnificent oratory, she would spend, at an absolute minimum, the next eleven years and four months of her life in a cinder-block cell at the Taycheedah Correctional Institute for Women. The bullshit had to cease. She had to get her head together, or her ass was going to sit in cold storage for a long, long time. And if she didn't care, if she kept trying to hinder her own case, she could find a new lawyer. He despised losing and was not about to be defeated by the asinine antics of his own client.

Barbara was terrorized by the harangue. Tears spilled from behind the tortoiseshell glasses. What she could not tell Eisenberg, what she could not explain for herself, was why she had written a check to Transport Life for $6,618.30 when the balance in her bank account was $14.58.

A stop-payment order was issued for the check to Transport Life, which would have bounced anyway, and the deal negotiated with Wallace was completed when Eisenberg received a check for $2,000 and a notification that the policy was forfeit.

Davies, meanwhile, proceeded with the changes in his Central Life Assurance plans.

Davies mailed the proper forms to Phil Sprecher on March 6th. Two days later he phoned to be certain the paperwork had been done. The next day Sprecher got a note from Davies requesting confidentiality regarding these transactions due to the adverse publicity Barbara had unjustly been subjected to by the media. To alleviate Sprecher's concern, Davies included the following statement.

I have, of my own free will, as an act of love, trust, and affection, without any influence from Barbara Hoffman or from any other individual, made the

changes in ownership and beneficiary clauses of my insurance policies with Central Life Assurance Company.

The statement was dated March 7th and signed by Gerald Davies.

Central Life adjusted the policies according to Daviess request.

10

It was early afternoon before the February sun finally broke through a sky the color of ice. Winters gray fell away in pieces and revealed an expanse of deep blue whose texture hinted at transition and whispered of an early spring. Snow melted flake by flake in a slow, incessant dripping.

Jerry Davies steered the back roads to Spring Green, a circuitous and hilly route, traveling past dairy farms, past homesteads with homespun sobriquets. "Oleo Acres, One of the Cheaper Spreads/ 7 read a sign in a front yard. Barbara Hoffman stared out the passenger window at a countryside composed of whites, beiges, browns, austere and angular and enlivened by the sun. Jerry drove up and down the valley roads, smiling like a puppy at the thought of introducing her to his mother; yet, at the same moment, in the happy profile, there was a twitch of reservation, as if he was afraid to expose his origins because they might be found lacking.

It is a safe guess that Barbara neither loved nor loathed Davies. Those emotions require time and energy, commodities she didn't squander on him. He was chosen for a reason. She grasped where Davies was malleable and sensed where he might snap. His psychological profile was similar to Harry Berge's, and perhaps Barbara perceived him as a younger edition of Berge—lonely and timid, fearful of women and mystified by their subtle powers, desperate for contact, petrified by contact.

The trip to Spring Green with Davies might have satisfied a perverse interest Hoffman had in other peoples pasts. More than a couple of times she drove with Harry Berge to his home in Stoughton. More likely her consent to meet Daviess mother was an effort to placate and manipulate the man whose testimony could decide her fate.

Visiting Daviess home that afternoon must have provoked thoughts of her own upbringing in Park Ridge. Whereas the Davies household was mired in rural poverty, the Hoffman household was modest and ordinary, proper and ambitious. Her father was an engineer, her mother a school secretary. All three of their children had attended college. The Hoffmans were suburban and solidly middle-class. But something in this happy family scene must have disturbed Barbara. Perhaps, like many children of her generation, she felt her parents' life reeked of stagnation and phoniness. Maybe she felt that the opportunities and aspirations that had been foisted on her led to a slow and certain suffocation. Maybe it was too easy. Maybe when there is nothing to want for, there is also nothing to want. Barbara drifted away, and once she enrolled in college she was gone forever. She returned once a year, at Christmas, because her parents insisted on the ritual. She granted them this one shallow formality.

For dinner that afternoon Ruth Davies served a tuna noodle casserole. She was impressed by Jerrys fiancee. The girl was quiet but pretty, prettier than she had expected Jerry would find. Ruth didn't know about Barbaras arrest. Barbara smiled obligingly when Ruth gave her a tour of the humble home. Without Ruths commentary the tour would have taken a minute or two, no longer. The Davies home formed a stark contrast to the suburban luxury in which Barbara had been reared. It was the smallest, shabbiest dwelling in Spring Green.

The living space was cramped and dilapidated, constructed with a variety of materials—cinder block and barn board, mostly; five tiny rooms and a pantry, and in certain spots the window jamb was no longer flush with the wall, and plastic had been stapled over the openings to

defend against the elements. Barbaras house in Park Ridge had closets bigger than the bedroom that had serviced the three Davies boys, replete with a hole in the floorboards that gave sight to the earth beneath.

The bathroom had been added when Jerry was three, Ruth said.

Whether out of shame or weariness or because he was ready to depart, Jerry intervened and declared it was time for them to return to Madison. Perhaps Barbaras boredom had become palpable. Maybe his mothers desperate craving for companionship had broken through. He fetched their parkas, and abruptly they left.

Ruth Davies stood at the door, oblivious to the cold, thin and erect in her apron, fingers knotted around her teacup. She watched the taillights jitter as her sons Chevy bucked the railroad tracks. One of the lights winked as the car joined the country road, and then the lights dwindled into twin embers and were extinguished by the night.

— 11 —

It was March 27th, Easter Monday. Anita Clark drank her morning coffee and checked the days schedule. A verdict was due in the Sam Cerro drug trial, and her sources predicted "guilty." Cerro had been charged with purchasing $72,000 worth of cocaine from undercover cops. Her errands included a couple of interviews, and as she reviewed the court calendar she noticed that the Hoffman arraignment was scheduled for April 7th, less than two weeks away. Anita Clark was the best crime reporter in Madison, and she'd been assigned to the Hoffman trial.

Someone from the mailroom, eyes puffy with a hangover, strolled over to her desk with an envelope. It came an hour ago, he complained, as if the letter and not yesterdays beer were the source of his headache.

The letter was postmarked Saturday, March 25th, from Madison, and had no return address. Anita opened it

carefully. The missive was handwritten in blue ink, on unlined paper, and the scrawl rose as it traveled the paper from left to right. There was no salutation. She read slowly:

I want to write these letters because I want to set the record straight. I was scared, I was jealous, Barb is innocent and I wrecked her life. All those stories I told about Barb are false.

She never had anything to do with a body at all. She never did. I went crazy, I was so scared. The police scared me. I was crazy and I didn't know what I was saying.

Then I had to keep telling the same story or they would charge me with a crime. Now they did it to Barb instead and I don't know what to do anymore except to tell the truth. I'm not crazy anymore and I'm not scared. I want to tell the truth, I'm not afraid to go to jail. Barb never had anything to do with a body at all. I swear it and they can do what they want to me.

Sincerely,

Gerald Thomas Davies

Anita Clark was stunned. A desperation leaked from the letter. She reread it. Desperation and futility and resignation; Jerry Davies was exonerating Barbara Hoffman and implicating himself for the Berge murder. For a reason she could not explain Clark had not a doubt about the letters authenticity. She picked up the phone and called the district attorney.

Forty minutes later Clark and Doyle and John Burr buzzed over the letter like bewildered bees. They were cognizant that Davies had been dating Hoffman despite their warnings. When February 26th had passed and the thirty-day grace period on the Transport Life policy had expired, Doyle had quit fearing for Daviess physical welfare. Since the initial interrogation by Lulling, however, it had been a constant worry that the fragile shipping clerk might recant. His testimony, in John Doe hearings and at

the prelim, was firm and unequivocal. But the arraignment was a mere eleven days away, and the impending reality of a court trial, the impending reality of his fiancees serving a possible life sentence in jail, had apparently eroded his fortitude. Undoubtedly Barbara had exerted pressures subtle and severe. Panic was what they decided the letter was about—panic, perhaps coercion.

Chris Spencer knocked on the DA's door, waving an envelope he'd just received in the post. The letter to the assistant prosecutor was identical in every syllable to the one Anita Clark had received. It was not a photocopy but a second longhand copy.

The prosecutors speculated about the implications of the letters and the appropriate response. They considered contacting Davies immediately. But Davies was fragile. They did not want to risk antagonizing him and losing his cooperation, so they opted to wait.

Let matters rest for a day or three, Doyle decided. In the meantime they needed to devise a strategy to counter Barbara's influence. Daviess testimony already on record could not be erased. But they needed him solid. With him, their case was precarious. Without him, it was lost.

12

The bathroom ceiling fan whirred noisily, and the metallic prattle echoed through Jerry Daviess apartment at 2305 South Park Street. The place seemed abandoned. The drapes were open, permitting a peek at a gray afternoon, at a clump of winter grass, at a quartet of evergreen trees, and beyond the evergreens the mud-streaked macadam of a motel parking lot.

It was Monday, March 27th. Meticulously arranged on the dining room table were three grocery bingo cards from Kohls and a collection of corresponding numbers on cutout paper squares. Jerry Davies was one coupon shy of winning a cartful of groceries.

The kitchen was sparse and neat. A trio of wooden bowls rested in the sink, water and a spoon in each. An ice cream scoop lay on the counter. The icebox was as bare as the apartment, holding only a can of soda, a cellophane package of sliced bologna, and a stick of margarine, with a half gallon of Schoep's butter brickie in the freezer. The thermostat was pushed to a clammy seventy-nine degrees. The air conditioner fan hummed faintly in the living room.

The bedroom smelled of air freshener and dirty socks. The walls were pale blue and empty, except for a University of Wisconsin hockey schedule taped above the dresser and a newspaper photograph of Barbara Hoffman pasted next to the bed. The monocle of a portable television set stared from a TV stand. A crescent of tin foil arced from the antenna.

The place was in perfect order, as if someone were readying to move out or had just moved in. The stillness was broken by the dissonance of the bathroom fan, which was unceasing. Its pitch altered, from sibilant to shrill to choppy, a sound like the rotary blades of a helicopter— whap, whap, whap.

The noise did not disturb Jerry Davies, who lay in the bathtub in six inches of tepid water. The heels of his feet were propped on the porcelain next to the faucet valves. His shoulders slumped at the back of the tub. His head was relaxed, leaning back against the dull blue wall tiles, and tilted, so that if it were not for the ceiling and roof above, he would have been gazing at the heavens. Daviess hands were folded and held his penis. Where the skin dipped below the water it was splotched white and wrinkled. Where the fingers poked above, the tips were shaded purple. The toes too exhibited an edging of purple, and the chrome tap handles mordantly mirrored the discoloration. Daviess mouth showed lividity. A purplish tint rimmed the nostrils. His guileless brown eyes were open. Death had given him what life had refused—an appearance of serenity.