American Appetites (24 page)

“I don't remember any knife,” Ian said carefully. “There wasn't any knife.”

“According to the officers' report there was a knife, and your hand was cut from the knife; it was bleeding pretty badly from the knife, wasn't it?”

“From the glass,” Ian said. “The broken glass.”

“Wasn't there a knife?”

“I don't remember any knife.”

“Don't remember any knife?”

“There wasn't any knife.”

“And how did you cut your hand so severely?”

“It wasn't cut severely,” Ian said. He held out his hand for the detectives to examine, should they wish to examine it: the stitches had been taken out; the cuts were healing nicely. “I cut it on the window,” he said. “On pieces of glass in the window.”

He was trembling violently, absurdly. His teeth were nearly chattering in his head.

“I didn't know what I was doing, I was so upset. When Glynnis fell. I tried to catch her, I think—I nearly fell through the window with her. I reached out and grabbed hold of something and it was glass—”

“What exactly happened between you and your wife, Dr. McCullough? could you tell us, in as much detail as possible?”

They led Ian back into the dining room, as onto a stage. Ian was sweating inside his clothes, badly confused, unable to judge if the detectives were respectful of him or mocking. Did they know? But what did they know?

“Where were you standing, approximately, Dr. McCullough, when your wife ‘fell' through the window? Where was she standing?”

“I don't know . . . I really can't remember.”

“Assuming she was standing where I am, with her back to the window, where were you standing? Why were you standing, the two of you? Hadn't you been sitting, at the table?”

Ian said, “I've explained so many times . . . it was an accident. I truly don't know how it happened.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes, his eyes that were raw with pain, unable to bear the men staring at him, so casually yet so frankly, with their air of knowing that he lied even as he inwardly protested he did not lie. “It was an accident,” he said. “A tragic accident. An accident that grew out of a misunderstanding.”

“Yes? A misunderstanding?”

“A misunderstanding.”

“A misunderstanding about what?”

But Ian, try as he could, could not remember.

“Finances, marital problems, another woman? You weren't seeing another woman, Dr. McCullough, were you?”

Ian shook his head angrily. He said, “My wife and I were happily married.”

BY THIS TIME
Ian's legs were so shaky he had to sit down. Invited the detectives into the living room, to sit down. Thank you, Dr. McCullough, they murmured. Wentz, Holleran: his enemies. His and Glynnis's.

He recalled the state police officers, last September, pounding on his door. The terrifying authority of the police, of raw physical power. These men, for all that they wore suits, ties, decently polished shoes, Wentz with his horn-rimmed glasses and Holleran with his affable potbelly, nonetheless carried revolvers on their persons. Should Ian make a sudden, desperate move, should he in any way threaten them with “bodily harm,” they had the authority to shoot him down; even to kill. He wondered how easily that might happen . . . so lurid, improbable, yet rather tantalizing a scenario. Suppose he'd opened the door to the policemen that night, in a mimicry of rage, shouting for them to get off his property, threatening them with his fists—or, better yet, a knife, a gun—they would certainly have shot him down on his very doorstep and been considered justified in doing so. In such ways, Ian thought, we
do
control our destinies.

They continued to ask him questions, and he continued to answer, in his vague, halting, suspicious manner: a man still in shock, it seemed; stunned, still, by the fact of his wife's death. And indeed the fact of it was to Ian, and would be for weeks to come, if not months, like a sound so explosively deafening it could not be heard, only felt.

The subject now was the McCulloughs' drinking on the night of the accident, the high alcoholic content in their blood, and Ian, deeply embarrassed, said yes, yes, they'd both been drinking, more than they were accustomed to, wine mainly, wine at dinner, a protracted dinner, a mistake. Why was it a mistake? Wentz asked. Because they weren't really drinkers, weren't really accustomed to drinking, Ian said. And why was that? Holleran asked, frowning the way a friend might frown, purse-lipped, thoughtful, wanting to know the truth; but Ian was silent, Ian was mute, not knowing the truth or not knowing how to speak it. He sat with his hands clasped in his lap, long bony fingers they seemed to him, their backs covered with pale hairs, as his forearms, his legs, his chest was covered in pale, fine, baby-fine hairs, which Glynnis used to stroke: so long ago, when they were first lovers, and each small discovery in the other's body had the force of revelation. What were they asking him? What was the mistake? Ian lifted his face blindly to his interrogators and said, with dignity, “I tell you, I don't know.”

Wentz was seated on one end of the sofa, Ian on the other, Holleran in a lime-green velvet chair whose small, spare frame looked inadequate to bear his bulk. Ian watched the chair's curved legs nervously. Once, many years ago, when they were all new to Hazelton, Vaughn Cassity, having had a few too many drinks, had sat down hard in an antique chair at someone's house, and the chair had comically buckled. Holleran must have weighed two hundred thirty pounds and had a disconcerting habit of leaning forward, then settling backward, readjusting his buttocks in the seat.

The detectives circled about the idea—the theme, it might have been—of the McCulloughs' mysterious misunderstanding. Did it escalate into a quarrel? Did the quarrel escalate into a pushing and shoving match? Were there weapons of any kind involved . . . candlestick holders, bottles, a knife? Ian shook his head mutely, stubbornly. He knew he must say nothing further, must not incriminate himself, or poor Glynnis, further. He would not make of his wife whom he loved a drunken frenzied knife-wielding woman, to save his own skin.

Casually, or with a pretense of casualness, Wentz informed Ian that it had not been only the Dewalds who'd heard screaming on the night of April twenty-third; the twelve-year-old son of their other neighbors, the Weschlers, had heard something too but hadn't been certain, thinking it might have been a television set turned up loud. The boy told police he'd heard shouts or screams for a long time, an hour maybe. Did Ian have any comment on that?

Ian stared at the floor at his feet: one of Glynnis's inherited Oriental rugs, beautiful colors, serpentine patterns, arabesques. He said, “The boy is lying.” He said quickly, “I mean—he's exaggerating.”

Again, quite casually, Wentz mentioned that they'd heard, from residents in the neighborhood and in Hazelton generally, that the McCulloughs belonged to a circle of unusually social people; that they were in the habit of giving parties frequently, going to parties frequently . . . was that true? Reluctantly, Ian said, “Yes,” still staring at the floor, “it's more or less true, we seem to have been caught up in social life more than I wanted. . . .”

“This looks like a great house for a party,” Holleran said. “You could fit how many people in here, fifty? Sixty?”

Ian said, as if in rebuke, “But we weren't in the habit of drinking heavily.”

“Why, then, Dr. McCullough, on the night of the twenty-third, were the two of you drinking ‘heavily'?” Wentz asked.

His tone was matter-of-fact, in no way aggressive; as if, Ian thought, the three of them were uniformly engaged in the pursuit of an elusive but not ineluctable truth. Yet Ian spoke with surprising anger. “How many times must I tell you!
I don't know
.”

Wentz regarded him quizzically. “Don't know
why
you were drinking? Why that night was something out of the ordinary? You told us—”

“
I don't know
.”

It was nearly ten o'clock. The detectives had been questioning him for two hours.

Ian got abruptly to his feet, told Wentz and Holleran that he couldn't speak with them any longer; he had an appointment (it was true: he had an appointment) at the Institute, at ten o'clock. And he couldn't speak with them in any case, any longer, without an attorney.

So, affably enough, they put away their notebooks and thanked Ian for his trouble; and, at the door, which Ian opened for them, Wentz, unless it was Holleran, the one with the horn-rimmed glasses, shook Ian's hand, and smiled, and said, “You won't be leaving town of course; you'll be staying in this area, Dr. McCullough, for the foreseeable future, won't you.”

And Ian said, furiously, “I'll go anywhere I damned want to go; in fact I am going to a conference in Frankfurt very soon”—though the Frankfurt conference was past; he'd missed it of course, had never even completed his paper.

“Well,” Wentz said, still smiling, “I wouldn't, Dr. McCullough. If I were you.”

HE'D KNOWN AT
the time that he was making one blunder after another in talking to the detectives as he had: with so little premeditation or calculation; with such emotion, such a hope of making them see his innocence, even as he lied. His initial mistake, of course, was letting them into the house without a warrant.

Yet, as he was to tell his attorney, would an innocent man refuse to talk to the police?
Why
would an innocent man refuse to talk to the police?

“Because he's an amateur,” Ian's attorney said. “And they are professionals.”

5.

After May 27 things happened swiftly.

As if a dike were unlocked, a great flood of water unleashed.

And there is no stopping it now, Ian thought.

He hired Nicholas Ottinger to represent him, upon the advise of his friends, for suddenly, within a space of twenty-four hours, it was obvious he would need representation; might even need, in time, “defense.” Ottinger spoke cautiously yet optimistically; he thought the Hazelton police were probably just harassing Ian, trying to intimidate him with the possibility of pressing charges against him in Glynnis's death: involuntary manslaughter was the most they could try for, and that, without witnesses, would be very difficult to prove. There was no motive, for instance. There was no prior history of arrest, no criminal record. And Ian's position in the community, his professional reputation . . . all above reproach.

“It might be that the police have a grudge against you because of our ACLU campaign a few years ago,” Ottinger said speculatively. “You remember: Thiel and Edwards. You and Glynnis were involved in the protest, weren't you?”

Ian was astonished and hurt. His political beliefs were so intimately allied with his sense of personal integrity—and his activism in such matters, in fact, so rare—it struck him as profoundly unjust that he should be punished for them. “They would harass me, make me the object of a criminal investigation, a suspect in the death of my own wife, because of . . . that?”

Ottinger said, in mild rebuke, “Of course, Ian. This is the real world, now. This isn't the Institute for Independent Research.”

Nicholas Ottinger, a friendly acquaintance of the McCulloughs, though not in the strictest terms a friend, was a criminal lawyer with an excellent local reputation. A slender sinewy man in his mid-forties with a thin olive-pale skin and wiry black hair, quick, shrewd, inclined to impatience—Ian had admired his squash game over the years but would never have wanted to play with him—Ottinger had narrow opalescent eyes that looked as if they might shine in the dark. He was a graduate of Harvard Law who had, according to Ian's friends, distinguished himself in several criminal cases in recent years; he'd been involved since the 1960s in liberal-activist causes and in the American Civil Liberties Union; he knew, in the jargon of the trade, where the bodies were buried. Thus it should not have surprised Ian that he did not come cheaply. His fee was $200 an hour . . . for time out of court.

“And in court?” Ian asked.

“This will never go to trial,” Ottinger said. “It will never get past a grand jury.”

“But if it does?”

“A retainer of, say, thirty thousand against the two hundred dollars out of court, and three hundred and fifty an hour for time in. The balance to be returned if the jury doesn't indict.” Ottinger spoke casually, as if he and Ian were discussing something quite innocuous. “But, as I say, this will never go to trial. They're just bluffing.”

FROM ALL SIDES
, so very suddenly, Ian began to hear of the police “making inquiries” of people: his friends, his neighbors, his associates at the Institute, even the secretarial staff, even his young assistants. What shame! What mortification! Like Glynnis, Ian found it painful to tolerate the very idea that other people were talking of him, forming opinions and judgments of him, enclosing him, it might be said, in a cocoon of words, a communal adjudication in which he had no role. Denis spoke with him, worriedly, and Amos Kuhn, and Dr. Max (who struck Ian as rather more embarrassed than sympathetic), and Malcolm Oliver, who warned him against incriminating himself in any way—“Don't give those bastards a crumb.” Meika Cassity assured him, with a vehemence he found both touching and alarming, that she would “never give the police the slightest grounds for suspicion of
anything
.”

He wondered if they had contacted Bianca, but the thought filled him with such sick dread he pushed it out of his mind at once.

He wondered what were the questions they asked.
Tell us what you know of Ian McCullough. Tell us what you know about his relationship with his wife. Tell us what you know about his character
.

He wondered what were the answers they were given.

ON MAY 29
Ian was summoned to police headquarters for further questioning, as it was judiciously phrased: this time, of course, in the presence of “counsel.” Entering the building, Ottinger beside him, passing through the revolving door—and stumbling as he maneuvered it, out of sheer nerves—Ian understood with a dreamy resignation that he was crossing the threshold into a new realm of being; had he any residual innocence, it was now to be shorn from him, as a sheep's clotted and soiled wool is shorn from it, to lie in tatters on the ground.