American Appetites (28 page)

“Yes or no?”

“No.”

“You weren't her lover?”

“No. I was not your wife's lover.”

“Then do you know who was?”

“Certainly not. I don't believe, as I've said, that she had a lover.”

“At any time?” Ian asked skeptically. “At
any
time?”

“Judging from what I knew of her, and of you, of your marriage—yes, at any time.”

“I see,” Ian said.

He felt light-headed suddenly, as if with exhaustion. The conversation was over! He was free to leave!

At the door he thanked Denis for the squash game and for having lunch with him: for allowing him to speak so frankly about so personal a matter. “It's just that I seem to have no one else,” he said with his slow sweet perplexed smile. “If you can forget what I've said, please forget it. I won't embarrass you again.”

Denis said, “Of course.”

“Will you? Forget it?”

“Of course.”

“I suppose,” Ian said, “I had wanted to think it was you. Of the men I know, and Glynnis knew . . . I had wanted to think it was you.” Denis laid a tentative hand on Ian's shoulder. He said, softly, as if in an undertone, “I'm sorry to disappoint you, Ian.”

1.

A
nd then he was indicted, after all: Ian McCullough, who had wanted to believe that his destiny, legal and otherwise, was determined for him not by mere men, mortal like himself, and fallible—if not “shrewd,” “manipulative,” “opportunistic”—but by inhuman processes beautifully abstract as the rising and falling of the tides, the clockwork orbiting of planets, the ghostly trajectory of starlight across the void. But of course such thinking was, in the crude but accurate vernacular, bullshit. For the six women and nine men of the Cattaraugus County grand jury, June session, had simply voted to support Samuel S. Lederer's case against Ian McCullough: had found his narrative account of Glynnis McCullough's death persuasive. It was that, and nothing more.

And they had voted to indict not on lesser charges of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, but on charges of second-degree murder: had signed their names to the “true bill” of indictment, which charged that

On the night of April 23 of this year, within the venue of Cattaraugus County, New York,

Ian J. McCullough,

defendant herein, did commit murder in the second degree in that he caused with force the death of Glynnis McCullough, his wife, thereby taking the life of the aforementioned Glynnis McCullough:

In violation of Section 125:25 of the New York State Statutes.

And so he was arraigned in the Cattaraugus County courthouse another time, before another judge, his case to be sent to the docket of one Chief Superior Court Judge Benedict Harmon, of whom he had never heard, for motions and trial. The defense had fourteen days to file motions and the prosecution fourteen days in which to respond, at which point a date for the trial would be set, very likely in the fall. When Ian McCullough would have, as it's said, his day in court; when he might be exonerated of the crime lodged against him. When he might be publicly eviscerated, gutted like a fish.

Ian asked the assemblage, “If I were to plead guilty now, would this all come to an end?”

And they looked at him, to a man, as if he were mad. And Ottinger took him hastily aside and spoke with him:
What are you saying what on earth do you mean don't you understand have you no idea for Christ's sake Ian I'm not even open to pretrial conference for purposes of plea bargaining don't you know they have no case against you don't you understand a jury will never vote to convict
, and Ian sighed and acquiesced, or must have acquiesced, since the procedure, the talk, legal quibbling, paperwork, continued. It was lengthy and exhausting. His jaws ached from yawning. He thought, How could Glynnis have done this to me! I will grow to hate her, yet.

He thought, If I am guilty, I am guilty.

He thought, I will not lift a finger to defend myself. I will not play their contemptible game.

THIS TIME THEY
were waiting for him; this time he could not contrive to elude them, reporters, photographers, “media” people with handheld cameras and microphones jostling close, shouting questions at him:
Dr. McCullough? Dr. McCullough? Ian? How did you plead? What is your defense? When is the trial?
A crowd of thirty or more, men, women, all of them strangers, a proverbial pack, they seemed to him, like hyenas: yet with such enthusiasm for the hunt and, for the moment, for him, he stared at them with interest.
Dr. McCullough? Over here! Could you say a few words to our viewers
—

The contentious little crowd followed him to the sidewalk, where one of Ottinger's young assistants was waiting with a car; like any guilty man Ian ducked his head, shielded his face. He felt his sleeve plucked, a blow of sorts against his shoulder, heard Ottinger's raised voice, the startling fury of Ottinger's raised voice.

“I seem to be becoming a celebrity,” Ian said, as they drove away, “without quite remembering what I did, still less why I did it.”

Ottinger was not amused. “Just don't talk to those people,” he said. “Any of them.
Any
one.”

Ian, still cringing, nonetheless looked back at the crowd. It had grown alarmingly, within a few minutes, and was growing still. Women shoppers, men in business suits, boys on bicycles who slowed, stopped, straddled their bicycles, asking what was going on; who was in the Cadillac Seville as it sped away from the curb, why the cameras? In his rumpled seersucker suit, a tie of drab neutral colors knotted loosely about his throat, the object of the crowd's excited scrutiny looked like no murderer of distinction; certainly like no celebrity. Ian said shakily, but smiling, “It seems so easy, somehow.”

“So easy? What is?” Ottinger asked. He was beginning to regard his client with a look of professional caution.

“Crossing over.”

“Crossing over—?”

“To what's on the other side.”

Ian was driven by a roundabout way to the Sheraton Motor Hotel by the Thruway, some six miles north of Hazelton-on-Hudson, a “tenstory” structure so new it was surrounded not by a carpet of perfectly trimmed green grass but by jagged rutted raw earth that gave it a startling, improvised look: the very place, Ian thought, for a murderer incognito. Ottinger had made a reservation for Ian and Bianca there under the pseudonymous identities of “Jonathan Hamilton” and his daughter “Veronica” until such time—it might be a few days, it might be two weeks—it was believed to be safe for them to return to 338 Pearce. If it would ever be safe.

WHEN, ON THE
morning of July 2, Nick Ottinger telephoned Ian to tell him the grand jury's decision—“Ian, I'm so sorry, I'm afraid I have bad news, preposterous bad news”—Ian felt a spasm of physical chill that left him weak and breathless. He had to grope for a place to sit down, telephone cord comically twisted around his legs, glasses skidding down his nose.

So extreme was his reaction, so stunned was he for hours afterward, like a steer struck a sledgehammer blow to the head, Ian realized that, yes, he had come to believe the grand jury would not indict; he had listened to Ottinger and his friends, had believed what they'd said. Not only that the grand jury would not indict but that it would not dare. I must have been desperate to believe, Ian thought. Even as I tried to convince myself I felt nothing.

Even as I tried to convince myself I am already a dead man.

Of course, capital punishment was not a possibility. The charge of murder in the first degree had been reserved in New York State for cases involving the killing of police officers or prison guards, but it was recently declared unconstitutional. Second-degree murder, as Ottinger explained, was a fairly general category, with which prosecutors might do as they wished; it yielded to three subcategories, which blurred and overlapped—“intentional” murder, “felony” murder, and “depraved indifference to human life.” Such homicides ran the gamut from coolly premeditated gangland murders to crimes of passion to acts of self-defense, overzealously prosecuted. And there were those “murders” that were, at best, types of manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide.

“If I am convicted,” Ian said, “what would be my sentence, and where?”

Ottinger winced. “You aren't going to be convicted, Ian. Lederer's case is so weak, I'm reasonably sure Harmon might dismiss it. I intend to—”

“Yes, of course,” Ian said, “but if he doesn't, and if there is a trial, and if—?”

“It's impossible to say. The charges will probably be dropped to manslaughter-one or -two, for one thing. And there is the fourth degree of homicide, ‘criminally negligent.' Which, at the discretion of the judge, could mean probation and no prison sentence at all. You have no prior record, your character witnesses will be impressive, your professional standing is extraordinary . . . and so forth. When you take the witness stand—”

“I'm not going to take the witness stand,” Ian said.

Ottinger very carefully did not look at him. “That is your prerogative, of course.”

“I have nothing to say in my ‘defense.' It was an accident, and I don't remember its details. It was not my fault, nor was it Glynnis's fault, no one can prove it was not an accident, and I have nothing more to say.” Ian paused. His voice had become high-pitched and defiant.

“As you like, Ian.”

“Except for me, Glynnis would be alive today. I know that, and you know that; it is the single incontestable fact.”

“Yes, perhaps. But—”

“If it had not been for me, for the very fact of me, not even taking into account any of my actions,” Ian said, “my wife would be alive today.”

“Perhaps. But you must not say such things.”

“I will say such things,” Ian said excitedly, “as I want to say. And I will not say such things as I do not want to say.”

Again Ottinger spoke carefully, and tactfully. “You must understand, Ian, that the law is incapable of calibrating anything so subtle as metaphysical distinctions. It tries to measure intent, but it cannot measure what one might call the swerve, or the inclination, of the soul. . . . If you retain me as your defense attorney you will have to allow me to defend you as if I were defending—which indeed I am—an action, and not, in the most abstract terms, a man. Do you understand?”

Ian shrugged impatiently. “I'm not sure I want to understand.”

“The law under which we operate, and cooperate, is adversarial in structure, as you know. It's a game of a kind, but unlike most games its boundaries are somewhat hazy. For instance, if the jury, however improbably, were to vote for conviction—”

“Yes, if the jury
were
to vote for conviction?”

“We would naturally appeal to the state supreme court. And there, of course, the game is radically altered: no jurors, for one thing; no emotion, or not much. I have had good luck,” Ottinger said modestly, or was it in fact reluctantly—an acknowledgment of past success being simultaneously, in this instance, an acknowledgment of past failure—“with the state supreme court as it's presently constituted. But I won't go into that now. The point is—”

“But if I
am
convicted,” Ian interrupted, “and if the supreme court upholds the conviction, what then? How long might I be sentenced to prison, and where?”

Ottinger said, almost irritably—how the man disliked being driven into a corner!—“It's difficult to answer, since sentencing is at the discretion of the judge. Murder-two, with which you're charged, carries with it a mandatory minimum of fifteen years; the maximum is twenty-five years of life. By minimum I mean that you would serve fifteen years before being eligible for parole.”

“Fifteen years. That doesn't seem very long.”

Ottinger stared at Ian as if he had said something not only mad but incomprehensible. He said, “In one of our state prison facilities, for instance at Sing Sing, a man like you—given your background, your profession, your temperament, your physical type, and, not least, the color of your skin—might discover that a single week is very long. A single day. A single hour. What
is
your field exactly? Demographics? It might be difficult to explain that to some of your fellow inmates.”

“They would not like me, would they,” Ian said slowly.

“They would not like you quite as you are accustomed to being liked.”

“As, perhaps, I have not deserved being liked.”

“
That
has nothing to do with the law,” Ottinger said. “Very few of us are liked, still less loved, to the degree we imagine we deserve. The point is, Ian, for the sake of everyone in your life, particularly, I'd think, for your daughter's sake, you want to keep out of prison. Being physically humiliated, beaten, terrorized, sodomized, whatever, might have its theoretical appeal—”

“You think, then, it is only theory?”

“—but you are not a criminal in any reasonable sense of the word, and it's ridiculous to acquiesce to charges that you are. Keep in mind that ‘Samuel S. Lederer' is no principle of wrathful justice but a run-of-the-mill backwoods prosecutor who went to a third-rate law school, hides his envy of more successful men inside a pose of moral rectitude, and would railroad his own grandmother into prison if it could help his faltering career. If you don't want to testify in your own behalf that is your decision; you can't be forced, and I won't try to coerce you, though I should say it's possible, in mid-trial, when you hear some of the prosecution's witnesses, you'll be moved to change your mind.”

“I will never change my mind,” Ian said. His voice was flat, icily uninflected. “There is no power on earth that can make me change my mind.”