A Death in Canaan (36 page)

“What do you mean, he had a blank expression on his face?” the prosecutor asked scornfully.

“I don't know how to explain it,” Geoff said helplessly, and Mr. Bianchi looked satisfied.

“Are you
sure
Peter Reilly was wearing the brown shirt we've been talking about?”

“Yes I am,” Geoff said.

“He
does
have a brown plaid jacket, doesn't he?”

“Yes he does,” Geoff said, and the prosecutor abruptly returned to Barbara's drinking.

“You visited Miss Gibbons's home about five or six times a week?”

“Yes.”

“And about half the time she was drunk?”

“About that, yes,” Geoff said.

Mr. Bianchi's last question was whether Peter was crying. “No,” Geoff said, and the prosecutor thanked him. “No further questions,” he said, turning aside.

Marion told about arriving that night and putting her arms around Peter. “I held him for a minute because I didn't know how to tell him what had happened. I just hugged him.”

John Bianchi smiled widely at her, but she did not smile back.

“It was cold that night?” he asked Marion.

“It was cold, yes,” she said, and the prosecutor asked whether Peter was shaking from the cold.

“It was not that kind of shaking,” Marion said.

Mr. Bianchi widened his eyes.

“Oh, there are different kinds of shaking?” he asked.

“With children, yes,” Marion said.

“He's eighteen,” Mr. Bianchi told her. “The state of Connecticut says he's a man.”

Marion looked at him. “But a mother says he's a child,” she said. Helen Ayre smiled.

“Was he crying, Mrs. Madow?” the prosecutor asked.

“No,” Marion said.

When Mickey Madow testified, there was a verbal scuffle, as John Bianchi tried to prevent the jury from learning that Mickey waited around that night, wanting to take Peter home. When Miss Roraback asked Mickey what he'd said to Sergeant Salley—that he would come down to the barracks and take Peter home when the police were through—the prosecutor jumped up and said it was immaterial. “It's highly material to the subsequent detention of Peter Reilly,” Miss Roraback said dryly.

“Is it your testimony that you checked the pulse of the left wrist?” Mr. Bianchi asked when his turn came.

“Right,” Mickey said.

“On the
left
wrist?”

“Right,” Mickey said.

It was an Abbott and Costello bit, and the courtroom broke up. But the prosecutor's last question wasn't funny.

“Was he crying, Mr. Madow?”

“No, he wasn't,” Mickey said.

The new witness had a faraway look in his eye. His name was Robert Erhardt, and his address was the State Prison at Somers, Connecticut. He said he'd first met Peter Reilly at eight o'clock in the morning, at Litchfield jail, the Sunday after Barbara died, and that at first Peter wouldn't say why he'd been arrested.

“I made him a cup of cocoa and gave him a pack of cigarettes, and he said, ‘They're charging me with killing my mother.' I said, ‘You got to be kidding.' I asked him if he had made a telephone call or talked to an attorney. He was talking in circles. He didn't know what to do … one minute he'd be talking about his school classes, then he'd leave it unfinished, and he'd talk about playing his guitar, then he'd say, ‘What am I here for?'” Erhardt shook his head. “None of his statements were coherent,” he recalled.

John Bianchi, who prosecuted this witness on a robbery charge, asked him whether he recalled saying to Sergeant Norman Soucie about Peter, “I don't think it was a planned thing.”

“Definitely not,” Robert Erhardt said.

“You don't remember saying it?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“I didn't say it,” the witness said firmly.

Instead of giving a statement to the police, Robert Erhardt had prepared his own statement, saying he'd been offered a “time cut” and a transfer if he would testify against Peter Reilly. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “and I was asked for an opinion by Sergeant Soucie, I really feel that Peter Reilly is not guilty of the crime he is charged with.” He sent copies of his statement to Catherine Roraback, to Peter Reilly, to me, and even to the state police.

John Bianchi asked Robert Erhardt whether he had refused to sign a statement for Sergeant Soucie because he was afraid some other inmate might hurt him.

Robert Erhardt was a wry, thin man with a glint of humor in his eyes, a man who, like Peter Reilly, had been put into Litchfield jail when he was eighteen. Now he was forty-five years old. He had been in various prisons, on serious charges—robberies, car thefts, intermittent escapes—off and on for sixteen years. So when John Bianchi asked whether he was afraid of another inmate, Erhardt smiled, a slight, wan smile. “I'm pretty well aware of how to carry myself in prison,” he said. The wry remark had nothing to do with Peter Reilly but, in a way, it seemed the most important thing Robert Erhardt could say.

Of all the young people who took the stand, Paul Beligni seemed the most self-assured. Jean had given him a little lecture on how to handle himself. “Try to sound humble,” she said, and she'd hoped that as Paul sat facing the courtroom, her cousin John would notice the boy's profile and think, “Here is Sam's grandson, he's got the Speziale nose.”

But as it turned out, it was neither Paul's humility nor his nose that seemed to matter most. After testifying, with a broad smile, that he and Peter Reilly were “the best of friends,” and that he'd visited him “many, many times,” Paul recalled the summer of 1973. The two boys were target shooting in the backyard, and Paul dug one bullet slug out of a tree on the side of the house, using the knife that was now Exhibit X.

“And what happened?” said Miss Roraback.

“I broke the point off,” Paul said, smiling.

The calendar turned to April, but an ice storm came through, turning the branches of the elms on Litchfield green into sheaths of brittle diamonds. Charles said the sheriffs were keeping winter going so we wouldn't find out it was spring. There was, indeed, an air of unreality about all this, a sense of time suspended, as though we were Sartre characters, forever sipping lukewarm coffee from our paper cups, grouped around the water cooler in futile debate, doomed to roam restlessly, endlessly through the corridors at Litchfield Superior Court.

In fact, though, the trial was nearly over. Only a few more witnesses were called for the defense, most of them professionals.

Dr. Abraham Stolman, chief toxicologist for the Connecticut State Department of Health, said he had examined the razor and had found no blood on it. On cross-examination, Dr. Stolman said he found 22 percent alcohol in Barbara's blood, the equivalent of ten ounces of 86-proof whiskey or ten 12-ounce bottles of beer. He couldn't tell whether she'd been drinking whiskey, beer or wine, but she was “definitely under the influence of intoxicating liquor.”

Trooper Walter Anderson looked at a sketch of the inside of the house and said he had marked “a bloody footprint” on the carpet, pointed out to him by Lieutenant Shay, near Barbara's left foot. But when the section of carpet was sent to the FBI lab, they sent back word that it was not a discernible footprint.

It had always been a puzzle that the razor that Peter said he used to slash Barbara's throat had been found closed and clean on the living-room shelf, where it was always kept. Obviously the police thought he might have washed it and dried it and put it away. So they had taken the kitchen sink trap and its contents, the bathroom sink trap and its contents, and the bathtub drain trap and assembly and contents, and sent everything down to the state police lab. No blood was found.

Sergeant Gerald Pennington of the police lab at Bethany testified that he'd compared fingerprints found on the door with prints of the victim, with prints of the officers at the scene, and with prints of the defendant. Two of the prints belonged to an auxiliary trooper, he said, but there was a partial palm print on the inside of the front screen door and a partial fingerprint on the rear screen door that were not identified, though identifiable. He said he couldn't tell how long the prints had been there, but they were definitely not Peter's.

There were only a few nonprofessional witnesses in the last days of the trial. There was Vicky, Barbara's childhood companion, all grown up now, plump and matronly, with gray in her hair and grown sons of her own. “His mother was my cousin,” she said softly. She had never met Peter Reilly, until she saw him at his arraignment, but she said she'd held him in her arms that autumn morning, and he'd cried and cried. Vicky's husband, John, a large, ruddy-faced man, also testified. He waved toward Peter Reilly and toward his wife in the gallery. “He was crying—she was crying—I was crying!!” he boomed, throwing his hands into the air. Helen Ayre smiled broadly. Margaret Wald and Raymond Lind whispered together, but Gary Lewis merely looked bored.

The other nonprofessional witness took the stand late on a Thursday afternoon. The court had been recessed most of the day, and a number of people, to their everlasting regret, had already decided nothing would happen anymore that day and were not there when the jury was called back, after four o'clock, and the judge told Miss Roraback she could resume.

The witness gave his name, Peter Anthony Reilly, and said that he lived on Locust Hill Road in East Canaan, “at the moment.”

His appearance on the stand, so late in the day, seemed a carefully planned move by Miss Roraback, who knew that she had to get to the language matter first, before John Bianchi did, to take the sting out of the words. So she asked Peter, right away, about the sort of language he and Barbara had used.

“Well, we did use bad language,” Peter said, managing to look both a little abashed and a little pleased at his daring, an accused murderer in the role of Peck's Bad Boy. “I guess you would call it profanity.” And when Miss Roraback asked him for an illustration, Peter smiled sheepishly. “We used terms such as ‘fuck you,' ‘bastard,' and ‘bitch,'” He added that they didn't talk that way “on all occasions,” only when they were arguing—sometimes about the car, sometimes about other things, “anything that happened to be of interest at the moment.”

After only twenty minutes of testimony, court was adjourned for a long weekend. It seemed to have been a slow day, but there had been interesting activity backstage. The state had offered to plea bargain with Peter, promising a light sentence—three to five years—if he would plead guilty to manslaughter.

He turned it down.

Over the weekend, the word was out that Peter Reilly had been on the stand, like a Preview of a Coming Attraction, and on Tuesday morning, April 2, the courtroom was packed. Pat Alfano's hand-lettered sign had gone up on the door:
COURT FULL
.
NO SEATS
. Dot Madow said she thought she was more nervous than Peter himself, and he certainly looked relaxed, not tense at all, as he took the stand. He sipped water from a styrofoam cup that Phil Plumb had filled, and he smiled a little as he looked around, glancing briefly at the jury, then toward his friends in the spectators' rows.

“Do you recognize it?” Miss Roraback asked, holding up the knife, State's Exhibit X.

“Yes, I do,” Peter said. He explained that his friend Wayne Collier had given Barbara the knife about a year and a half before, when she had complained that she didn't have a really good meat-cutting knife. “Wayne said that he had one that was old, but he gave it to her,” Peter said, adding that Barbara kept it in a pouch on the side of the cabinet in the kitchen.

Miss Roraback held up the razor, State's Exhibit CC. “Do you recognize it?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” Peter said. He explained that Barbara had got it for him from Mario's Barber Shop in Canaan because it had a handle on it, and “I could work on balsa models without carving up my fingers.” He said Barbara usually kept the razor on a shelf in the living room, on the shelf where they kept odds and ends, with two rows of books below it and one row above. That was the usual place.

“Do you know a lady by the name of [Auntie B.'s name]?” John Bianchi asked abruptly.

“Yes, I do,” Peter said.

“Is she related to you?”

“No, she is not related,” Peter said. Judge Speziale looked up from his notes and asked him to spell that name.

“Does she hold some standing in relationship with you, though?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“I would say she is my godmother,” Peter said. He said that she had bought them the car and had sent money regularly.

“Was your mother a welfare recipient?” the prosecutor asked.

“I believe so, yes,” Peter said.

“And on September twenty-eight, do you know whether or not a letter was received at your home from [Auntie B.]?”

“I don't think so,” Peter said. “All I know is, my mother cashed a check that day, that she received in the mail.”

“Who did she receive the check from?” the prosecutor asked.

“It may have been from my godmother,” Peter said. “I don't know.”

“You don't
know?”
the prosecutor asked scornfully.

“Mm-hm, right,” Peter said, very casually, perhaps a little too casually.

“Have you seen [her] since September twenty-eight until today?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“No, I haven't,” Peter said.

Mr. Bianchi asked him about the arguments he and Barbara had had, and about the “extremely rude and crude language” they'd used, and about Barbara's drinking.

“She drank wine,” Peter said. “Every day, she drank wine. It was just something that she always did.” When the prosecutor pressed, Peter said yes, that Barbara had had a drinking problem, but that he hadn't realized it until now.

“Do you remember when you left your grandmother's and your grandfather's house on Johnson Road?” Mr. Bianchi asked.