A Death in Canaan (22 page)

Marion turned to Jim and me, at the end of a semicircle of metal folding chairs. “We're not asking people to decide whether he's innocent or guilty,” she said. “It's the treatment we're protesting, the treatment he got, the treatment we all got.”

“I'll say this,” Bill Dickinson said. “If he did it, he had his reasons, and he should have taken off right away.”

“He didn't do it,” Jean said swiftly.

“I know, I know,” Bill said. “I'm only saying, if.”

“Peter doesn't have a mean bone in his body,” Cilia Belcher said. “Barbara was a pain in the ass, and Peter didn't always get along with her, but they liked one another.” Mrs. Belcher was the only member of the committee who'd ever seen Auntie B.

“Should some of us go down to New York to see Auntie B.?” Mickey wondered. “Confront her in person?”

“She's got a brother who's a lawyer,” Jean said. “He probably told her not to get involved.”

Although Jean talked the most, Mickey was the chairman of the Peter Reilly Defense Committee. Beverly King was secretary. She took notes, and she had begun to keep a scrapbook of clippings, pasting them neatly in a loose-leaf binder and dating them. The other officer was Bea Keith, treasurer. Bea had short, shaggy grayish hair, big round glasses, and a breathless manner. She had been a ballet dancer in New York before she came to Canaan to live with her mother, Florence Tompkins. Both of them were widowed now, and they lived in a big old house on the edge of town, once a country inn. Mrs. Tompkins couldn't get to the meetings, but she wrote letters at home, beginning with a “Dear Neighbor” letter to everybody in the Canaan phone book.

Bea had demonstrated in favor of Richard Nixon's impeachment and had been standing on the village green in Sharon for an hour a week, every week, for the past three years, in a silent vigil for peace. One or two people teased her gently about this, but most of the committee ignored it. Politics was not one of the common denominators of the Peter Reilly Defense Committee members, who had only Peter Reilly himself in common. Even that bond would wear thin as time went on, as tensions accumulated, as the worry became sustained. The members of the Peter Reilly Defense Committee would never be as united as they were in the first weeks after Barbara died.

At that point, their main worry was financial. Peter's bond had to be a cash bond, not a property bond and they couldn't afford several thousand dollars for a professional bail bondsman. They talked about tag sales and bake sales; they still needed $44,000. “That's a lotta brownies, honey,” Jean said, to no one in particular.

Besides the bond fund, Bea was keeping a separate account called the defense fund. They had $378.95 in that fund so far.

“I put a canister at the Falls Village market,” Marie reported. “And there was thirty dollars in it over the weekend.”

“I tried to put one at Leader's,” Jean said. “But they wouldn't take it. They said, ‘It's too controversial. You know how it is.' I said, ‘No, I don't know how it is. You tell me how it is.'”

Partly it was controversial because of the police. Lieutenant Shay, aware of the attitudes toward the police that were crystallizing in town, had told the
Lakeville Journal
that people must trust the police, and that the problem in this instance was that the local people didn't understand how a big-time murder investigation was carried out. “He made us sound like a bunch of hicks,” Marion said indignantly. Marion was careful with her makeup; she wore wigs when her hair was messy, never a scarf over rollers, and she considered herself every bit as sophisticated as Lieutenant Shay.

And partly it was controversial because of Peter. When reporters roamed the streets of Canaan the weekend Barbara died, asking people outside Bob's Clothing Store, and the Rexall store, and Collins' diner what they thought, some people had said they didn't know, or didn't want to say. Many people had said, “They've got the wrong guy.” But someone who knew a trooper at the barracks pointed out that all that Friday night, and all day Saturday, Peter had never shed a tear.

When the meeting broke up, Mickey Madow asked us to come by for coffee. In the dinette, with the dark blue and red poppy wallpaper that Jim Mulhern had helped hang two months before Barbara died, we sat around the table. Nanny sat in a chair by the window. She was petite and white-haired; she wore a lime green pants suit and shocking-pink lipstick. We talked about Peter and Barbara.

“Barbara was always watching the Watergate hearings,” Geoff recalled. “We'd come home from school, she'd be yelling at the TV set, ‘You damn fools!' She had an old marine band radio, more than thirty years old, but it worked fine until they broadcast something she didn't like, and she threw the radio right out the window.”

“Peter came here a lot,” Marion said. “Sometimes he'd wait in the car while we were eating, and when we'd ask him to come in and join us, he'd say, ‘Are you sure you have enough?' He'd keep standing until somebody told him to sit down, and after he ate, he'd take his dishes off the table.”

Nanny nodded. “He was a good boy,” she said softly. “He still is. That's why we want him back.”

In jail, Peter spent the time in a kind of uneasy limbo, as he waited for a hearing on the motion to suppress his confession.

Sometimes he watched TV. He listened to the radio Jean had brought him, using the earplugs. He went to a couple of AA meetings, just to pass the time. Jean had brought him books and homework, too, but he wasn't particularly interested. He preferred playing cards, and he once won a watch in a card game, then lost it in another game the next night. When Marion visited, Peter bragged to her about his new gambling skills. That dismayed her, and so did his new cynical attitude, which she felt he'd never had before. But Marion didn't know what to do about it. He wasn't always cynical, just for the first fifteen minutes or so of the two-hour visiting period. “It takes him a while to become Peter again,” Marion would report sadly when she got home.

No one under eighteen could visit Peter in jail, so a spirited letter-writing campaign began. Altogether he got 143 letters, mostly from teen-agers, although Joanne Mulhern wrote, and so did the Marine Corps, trying to recruit him. Auntie B. wrote an encouraging letter, telling him to keep his chin up.

Except for reading, and writing, and waiting, the only other thing Peter did one day was to walk across the Litchfield green to the courthouse. As he stood there, handcuffed, in the second-floor office of the State's Attorney, a state trooper took out a pair of scissors and cut off three thick strands of his hair. “Man, they must have found something,” an inmate told him later, “or they wouldn't need a piece of your hair.” Peter seemed worried then.

One rainy, cold morning in November, I went back to Canaan and drove around for a while with Jean Beligni. We drove past the little white house where Barbara died, with the mountain skimming up behind it. Now there was a sign out front saying
WARNING
!
KEEP AWAY
! Jean pointed out the Dickinsons' neat red house, and the Parmalees' house beyond it, a frame house in a cluttered yard. In Falls Village we stopped at Peter's high school, where Jean had graduated and where her boys now went. We took Sand Road, past the cemetery where Barbara was buried, back into town. Jean pointed out Bob's Clothing Store, where Barbara had shopped the day she died.

In Jean's kitchen, we talked a little more about Peter. She remembered a picture, the last picture of Barbara and Peter together, taken in the spring. Father Paul was allowed to see Peter in jail any day, not just on Saturday, and Jean said she'd ask him to get the picture for me from Peter. Then she showed me some of the letters he'd written to her and Aldo from jail, letters that started out “Dear Mom and Dad …” He was usually in good spirits on visiting days, Jean said, except for one Saturday when he'd seemed depressed, really down in the dumps. When she left, Jean noticed tears in his eyes. She thought about it all the way home, and by the time she got home, she was so upset that she sat down and wrote to Auntie B. “There are people on our committee who have worked so hard to help Peter who don't even know him,” Jean wrote. “They are doing it because he is alone, and in the name of justice. Many are doing it out of Christian decency and in God's name, because they believe they are their brother's keeper. In God's name, why aren't you?”

Auntie B. called Jean when she got the letter. “I just can't get involved,” she said. Jean thought Auntie B.'s voice was trembling. “I can't explain it to you,” Auntie B. said. “You just don't understand the situation.”

It wasn't easy to write about Peter Reilly without meeting him, so I wrote to Warden Brownell, asking if I could visit. The warden said no, but he said it nicely. He added that I was free to correspond with Peter, and he with me. So I wrote, telling him who I was, and he wrote back. Altogether he wrote me four letters from cell 4. The stationery was standard jail paper, and the spelling was standard Peter.

“I am very happy that your magazine is writing the story,” Peter wrote. “My personal opinion about the situation is, The enterigation prosedures are, Mind boggeling and upsetting.…” He said he had been questioned by a guy who looked like Dick Tracy.

I'd asked Peter to tell me about himself, and he answered in terms of music and cars. He said that although he'd gotten his first guitar when he was only six or seven, he didn't learn to play until several years later, after he'd taken lessons from a farmer up the road. “Music is a part of my life,” Peter wrote, “and these last ten weeks without a guitar has been absolutely dreadful.…

“I also am a nut about cars and I have a 1968 Corvette that I am going to have to sell. I think I'll buy a used V.W. Square back.…”

He said he wished they would catch the person responsible for killing his mom. He wished that eventually he would become very wealthy. He wished me a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

8

On a cold December morning, Peter walked from the jail to the courthouse, still in handcuffs, for his pretrial hearing. Catherine Roraback was asking that the confession he'd signed be suppressed as evidence, claiming that it was “involuntary and coerced” and had been obtained “in violation of his constitutional rights, including the right to have a lawyer present during questioning.” The prosecution claimed that Peter had been informed of his constitutional rights—more than once, in fact—and that not only had he been aware of his rights but he'd also signed a waiver.

The elms were bare as Peter walked across the village green. They stood proud and rigid, as they were intended to. “We have the people and the houses and the elms and the hills,” says an old history of Litchfield.

The first courthouse in Litchfield was a temporary affair, erected quickly in 1751 when the town was chosen as the county seat, over the ferocious protests of Goshen, Cornwall, and Canaan. The second courthouse was more impressive, a picturesque oak building, painted white, with a red roof and a picket fence and windows of English crown glass, twelve squares to a window. It burned down in the fire of 1886, and its replacement burned two years later. Then the community, finally wiser, built a courthouse of granite, which is the one standing today.

Peter had been in this gray granite building before, on the day of his bail hearing, and on the day they cut off a lock of his hair, so it wasn't totally unfamiliar. I'd never been in the courthouse before, but I felt more or less at home, there was such an aura of friendliness about the place. Most of the courtroom staff had been around for years, notably Phil Plumb, a wiry, white-haired; fellow who, as court messenger, filled the water carafes, did other odd jobs, and kept everyone entertained with yarns from his years as a sports reporter, when he wrote about the Gashouse Gang and Dizzy Dean.

In his courthouse career, Phil had worked both upstairs and down. On the first floor was the Court of Common Pleas, used for civil cases, along with clerks' offices, rest rooms, and the jury waiting room. Everything else went on upstairs, in Superior Court. Divorces were granted on Friday, which Phil, who liked to view life in terms of sports writing, called “Ladies Day.”

The court on the second floor could be reached by two flights of stairs—one for the press and the public, for the witnesses and for people on trial, and the back stairs for the judge, the attorneys, and the courthouse staff. The courtroom itself was considerably less charming than country courtrooms are generally thought to be. The walls were painted an uneasy green, and fluorescent lights glared on the dingy carpet. The jury box, two rows of wooden chairs with arms and a thin brown cushion on each chair, lay to the right of the courtroom, just to the right of the witness stand. The sheriffs' chairs, also cushioned, ranged along the walls, and the thickest cushion of all was on the chair used by the official court reporter, Arthur Roberts.

Mr. Roberts was tall but a trifle hunched in the shoulders from so much sitting and bending over the stenotype machine. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and suspenders. His hobby was reading reference books. Mr. Roberts had been in the courtroom for twenty-six years, but there was a gleam of humor in his eye, in spite of it. He could take down three hundred words a minute on his machine and read them back instantly in precise diction, near-Shakespearean with a Massachusetts flavor. When Mr. Roberts pronounced the word
defendant,
as he often did, the last syllable rhymed with “can't.” “Whatever would we do without Mr. Roberts?” a judge once mused aloud, during a hearing, and everybody smiled, including Mr. Roberts who, as a reflex, took down the phrase on his machine.

Two tall, high windows, the old schoolroom kind that are opened and closed from the top with a long hooked pole, were set into the west wall of the courtroom. Right next door was the Marden Coffee Shop, the only quick eating place on the block. It was run by a man who was also a guard at the jail; his wife worked at the counter, serving mostly pies and coffee and grinders. She had a brusque air and went about her business of serving in a hard-boiled way, like the waitresses Hollywood has always believed in.