American Appetites (42 page)

AFTERWARD IAN ASKED
Ottinger why the prosecution had not edited or summarized this interminable tape, and Ottinger said, “To punish us, I suppose”; then, more seriously, “I wouldn't have wanted it summarized, in any case.”

“Why on earth not?” Ian asked.

“Because it's your voice on the tape, for one thing, which the court won't otherwise hear,” Ottinger said. “Unless you change your mind, as I hope you will, and testify.” When Ian said nothing Ottinger added, “My instinct is, your existence must be established. It should seem after all more substantial than that of . . . the person whom you have been accused of killing.”

Ian was struck by this remark, which he could not quite comprehend. “My existence? Has it been in doubt?”

Ottinger smiled his ambiguous smile, in which, depending upon one's mood, one could read sympathy or contempt. “Hasn't it?”

AND THEN CAME
what Ian had long dreaded, the prosecution's dogged pursuit and amplification of the “motive” for the crime: the matter of Sigrid Hunt, missing since the approximate date of the defendant's arrest, on May 30, 1987.

This aspect of the case was taken up with gusto by Lederer, who called Mrs. Elizabeth Kuhn to the witness stand, and Mrs. Roberta Grinnell, “intimate friends of the deceased”; and Mr. Horace K. Vick, caretaker for the rental property at 119 Tice Street, Poughkeepsie, where Sigrid Hunt had lived, at least intermittently, from September 1984 to May 1987. Elizabeth, whom Ian realized, with a sinking sensation, he had not seen in a very long time, gave almost verbatim the testimony she had given to the grand jury: handsome, white-haired, rather regal in responding to Lederer's questions, and resisting when he tried to lead her where she would not be led—into acknowledging that there might be grounds for believing that Mrs. McCullough was correct in her assumption that Mr. McCullough was involved with another woman. Yet she made Ian uneasy by the sharpness with which she replied to Ottinger's questions, as if she cared to make no distinction between him and Mr. Lederer. The carefully worded, very nice things she said about Ian McCullough—“One of our dearest most beloved most loyal friends”—sounded, to Ian's ear, rather forced, as if rehearsed; and the smile Elizabeth directed toward him, as she stepped down, seemed to him forced as well. How she had aged, since Ian had seen her last. . . . Someone has broken her heart, Ian thought.

And then came Roberta Grinnell, looking rather drawn and resistant, regarding Lederer with an expression of frank dislike, hands nervous in her lap, voice nearly inaudible, the streak of gold in her hair strangely dulled, as if by the opacity of the white winter sky beyond the window. (But why did she refuse to look at him? Had someone told her about Meika?) Her testimony was terse and ungiving; several times, Harmon instructed her to speak louder. It seemed clear that she was a hostile witness, which fact did not endear her, Ian suspected, to the court.

He had not spoken with her in weeks. He had intended to telephone her . . . but somehow he had not.

Roberta was recounting her grand jury testimony, point by point: the telephone call to Glynnis McCullough; the startling conversation that followed; Glynnis's distress, incoherence, anger; Glynnis's conviction, which Roberta knew to be unfounded, that her husband was having an affair with another woman.

“Did Mrs. McCullough tell you about a check she had found in her husband's desk made out to ‘Sigrid Hunt,' a mutual friend, for the sum of one thousand dollars?” Lederer asked.

“Yes, she did,” Roberta said.

“But still you thought her suspicions unfounded?” Lederer asked.

“Yes I did,” Roberta said.

“But why, given the apparent evidence?” Lederer asked.

“It didn't seem to me . . . that it was evidence,” Roberta said.

“Mrs. McCullough was one of your closest friends, wasn't she?” Lederer asked. “Yet you chose not to believe her.”

“I didn't ‘choose' not to believe her,” Roberta said nervously, “it just seemed to me that she was exaggerating the situation, overreacting, as people sometimes do when they think they have been hurt.”

“Was Mrs. McCullough in the habit of exaggerating?” Lederer asked.

“She was an intelligent woman but she could be emotional; she had a temper; you could say she had a dramatic personality,” Roberta said.

“And Mr. McCullough—”

“Much quieter, much more in control.”

“‘In control'? Of himself, or of others?”

“Of himself. Ian was not in the habit of controlling, or trying to control, others.”

“You knew them both well, you and your husband?”

“I think I could say that, yes.”

“And you found it absolutely impossible to believe that Mr. McCullough might have been involved with another woman?”

“I found it unlikely.”

“Because—?”

“Because I knew him, and I knew Glynnis,” Roberta said, her voice rising. “Ian wasn't the type.”

“And of this you were absolutely certain?”

“What can I say, except to repeat what I've already said?”

“It is such an extraordinary thing, in your circle of acquaintances, that a husband might occasionally be unfaithful to his wife, or a wife to her husband, it simply cannot be believed?”

“Of course not, you're distorting my words.”

“But in the McCulloughs' case, it could not be believed? At least by you?”

“In their case . . . yes.”

“And you base this on your intimate acquaintance with them, and with their marriage?”

“I base it on common sense.”

“There were no marital difficulties that you knew of?”

“There were no marital difficulties that I knew of.”

“Had there been, do you think you would have known?”

“Glynnis, or Ian, would have told us, I'm sure . . . would have told Denis or me. I'm sure. Or we would have known, the way friends know what is happening with one another.”

“You would have known, you think, if there had been marital difficulties?”

“Yes.”

“You would have been told?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Yet on the day, when Mrs. McCullough called you—”

“I called her.”

“When you called her, and she tried to tell you about a crisis in her marriage, you didn't believe her.”

“You distort everything!” Roberta said sharply. “My primary motive that day was to calm Glynnis, to reason with her, not to make things worse. I knew she was probably exaggerating something very minor that Ian could explain, and I tried to tell her that. I tried to tell her that several times. And she got angry with me, and wouldn't listen, and hung up on me; and that was that.”

Later, when Ottinger questioned her, Roberta spoke more readily, even passionately, insisting that Ian and Glynnis had been a “perfectly happy couple,” “a perfectly matched couple”; that the McCullough family was “an ideal Hazelton family.” Watching her, Ian felt only a dim stirring of emotion, and that, mainly of regret, as if they were separated by a medium that was not quite transparent: badly scarified glass, for instance. Meika had interceded; Meika had made her claim; it was too late.

The Grinnells were formally separated now: Denis had moved out of the house; Roberta had moved back in, but only temporarily, for the house was to be sold. Denis had explained the breakup as the consequence of “irreconcilable differences.” But what on earth does that mean? Ian asked, and Denis merely shrugged, saying, When a woman stops loving you that's that; it's like touching dead meat. And Ian had recoiled from his friend, who had never in their long acquaintance spoken so vulgarly, or in such despair.

AT LAST, WITH
a dramatic flourish, as if these items constituted absolute proof of the defendant's guilt, Lederer introduced as evidence a facsimile of the check for $1,000, made out by Ian McCullough to Sigrid Hunt and dated February 20, 1987; and a record of the toll calls, eight in number, made from the McCullough's telephone to Hunt's Poughkeepsie number in the spring of that year. “Mr. McCullough has never explained the check to Hunt or the telephone calls,” Lederer said, with an air of pique, as if Ian had personally offended him. “When asked, he has refused to answer. The matter is a ‘private' one, he says: ‘no one's business but his own.'” Lederer regarded the court, in particular the jurors, with an expression of mild disbelief. How was it possible that any man, charged with murder, should be so arrogant? so defiant? so self-destructive?

Ian squirmed in embarrassment and willed himself to retreat, to withdraw, to disappear into that space, whether in his soul or in his brain, where such indignities could not follow. For it seemed now publicly clear that Ian McCullough was not only a liar but that his longtime friends Mrs. Kuhn and Mrs. Grinnell were actively involved in lying on his behalf, or had been duped by him.

But there came, next, as if for comic relief of a kind, Mr. Horace K. Vick, caretaker of the rental once occupied by Miss Sigrid Hunt: the very man Ian had inveigled into unlocking the apartment; though, on the witness stand, having sworn to tell the truth so help him God, he lied with extraordinary ease and an air of self-righteousness, claiming that he had resisted Dr. McCullough's offer of a bribe. He wasn't that type, he said. To snoop on tenants. Vick was wearing a shiny black suit, with a white shirt and a bowtie; his hair had been brutally trimmed for the occasion; his wizened, malicious face fairly lit up with pleasure as Lederer led him, with ever more insinuating questions, through his testimony. He pointed at Ian with an accusing forefinger, to identify him as the man he'd seen visit Sigrid Hunt several times, oh, three or four times it must have been, over the winter; maybe stayed the night, around Christmas; and, in the spring sometime, asked to be let into the apartment. 'Cause he was worried she'd been hurt or something, maybe killed. 'Cause she had other boyfriends too.

Despite Lederer's effort to rein him in, Vick began to embellish his story, adding extraneous details, smiling and grimacing, as if, with the attention of the court upon him, he were demonically inspired. He spoke of Dr. McCullough's “fancy red sports car, some kind of Eyetalian make,” and Dr. McCullough's fancy fur coat, “or maybe it was a coat with a fur collar—either way, you don't see many men that's normal men, I mean that go for women, with an outfit like that.” He spoke excitedly of wild parties in Sigrid Hunt's apartment, and people from the college where she used to teach—“the college that used to be all women, you know, what's it, Vassar”—cars parked in the driveway and music and noise and “some coloreds” on the scene too, though this was before McCullough showed up. Or somebody who looked like him.

“Then there was this poor s.o.b., another one of them old enough to be her father, that turned up one night, knocking on my door and asking for her . . . says he's her brother. So I says to him, I says, ‘Yeh and I'm her brother too, there's a whole long line of ‘em that's her brother.' And I says—”

“Please, Mr. Vick. Stay with the line of questioning.”

“You
asked
me, I'm
telling
you,” Vick said, flaring up in anger. “You want to know, or what?”

So the witness discredited himself and drew a rebuke from Judge Harmon, and Lederer tried, with little success, to salvage what he could; but the damage had already been done. Under Ottinger's skillful questioning—What sort of car did Dr. McCullough drive? What sort of coat did Dr. McCullough wear? How many times had Dr. McCullough visited Sigrid Hunt? And when had he visited? And when was the party? And who were the other guests?—Vick was made out to be not only a wholly unreliable witness but a malicious one. And when he stepped down, having been several times rebuked by Harmon and threatened with contempt of court, he could not resist making an ambiguous gesture in the direction of the judge's bench, which of course prompted an immediate, and very angry, response and some minutes of courtroom flurry and suppressed merriment, when it looked as if Horace Vick might be carried out bodily by police and put into a detention cell.

Ian smiled, with the others; it may have been his first smile in this terrible place. He could not, for the life of him, comprehend why Vick disliked him so; why, in all his rambling about Sigrid Hunt and her men, he had never once mentioned Fermi Sabri; why he had focused his venom upon Ian McCullough. Had $25 been too small a sum and, in retrospect, injurious to Vick's pride? Or had he forgotten he'd been given any money at all?

Asked, afterward, about Vick's probable motive, Ottinger had said indifferently, “Who gives a damn? The witness is gone, dead,
finito
.”

IN THE REAR
of Ottinger's elegantly cushioned car, returning to Hazelton and to home, Ian lay back and shut his eyes, made an effort not to sleep, for sleep was out of the question, but simply to clear his mind of that day's accumulation of griefs. The others, including Bianca, were talking about the trial; of course they were talking about the trial; there was nothing else to talk about but the trial; there would never be anything else to talk about, in Ian McCullough's life, but the trial. The prosecution would be closing its case in another day or so, and then the defense would present its case. And then, and then. The summations, the judge's instructions to the jury, the jury's deliberations, the verdict. And then.

Ian thought of that day, that day of such extravagant innocence and recklessness, in Bridgeport: the wood-frame duplex in which they'd lived, painted its bright inappropriate blues; the old neighborhood streets; the elementary school and the junior high school; the melancholy little park. He had felt a yearning so palpable as to be almost physical, like sexual desire. And for what? And why? It had brought him to this, a stranger's Mercedes-Benz speeding along a country highway, in the dark of an interminable winter, toward the house he could think of in no other terms than home.