Cartwheel (7 page)

Eduardo scrolled down further. A few months back, Lily Hayes had
posted a link to a blog. “I wrote a piece for my Intermediate Creative Writing class, imagining a crime,” she wrote, and fourteen people had “Liked” this statement, for reasons Eduardo could not fathom. He clicked on the link, which took him to what looked to be a mostly abandoned blog—
Reveries
, it was called, and underneath it were the words “feminist,” “artist,” “dreamer,” and “explorer”—and the top post was her imagined crime, creatively written, apparently, for a college course. The piece seemed to revolve around a jilted lover who goes back into the house of the woman who has betrayed him to steal an expensive necklace he has given her. Eduardo read with keen attention, feeling that he was watching a thing in the distance assume its shape. Underneath the florid writing, the girlish overreliance on adverbs, there was something troubling and emotionally askew—the same thing, he was almost sure, that he’d detected in the transcript from her interview. He read the piece’s ending. Then he read it again.

In my ire and haste, I have tripped the alarm. I must move with alacrity now. I grab the necklace swiftly. It is so beautiful. Its varicolored hues glitter dazzlingly in the light. I look at her sleeping peacefully there. I admire her swanlike neck of ivory. It is so innocent, so unsuspecting. I raise my knife in murderous wrath, but do not strike
.

Eduardo printed out the story with the benumbed feeling of encountering astonishing good luck. It was significantly less than a written confession, of course, though it was hard to think of anything much closer.

But still, he was not sure.

Thursday was the judicial interrogation, to which Lily Hayes had submitted without a lawyer. Her father would be coming, apparently, and a U.S. consultant to the Argentine defense team and various private defense attorneys were being hired; these people, it was clear, had some money. Eduardo did not know why Lily had rejected the offers of a state-appointed lawyer. Perhaps it was due to a low opinion of the
quality of Argentine state defenders, or a foolish calculation that this would make her look innocent, or an unusual though by no means unheard-of indifference to her own fate. Eduardo felt some sympathy for her. But he wasn’t going to talk her out of making her own strategic mistakes, if she wanted to make them.

In the interrogation room, Lily Hayes looked even paler than the day Eduardo first saw her; her fingers were spread out on the table in a gesture of bald terror, and her hair did not appear to be entirely clean. She did seem very young—but Katy Kellers had been young, too, and Eduardo’s empathy for her was not contingent on age. Neither was it contingent on her guilt or innocence. He was going to be as clear and kind as the situation allowed. This was only humane. He sat down.

“Quien es usted?” she said.

“Eduardo Campos,”
he said. He did not extend his hand, because he didn’t want to be patronizing. For the same reason, he did not switch to English. “I’m the fiscal de cámara, a representative of the investigative magistrate. My job is to help decide whether there’s enough evidence against you to bring you to a criminal trial. I have ten days to make that determination, starting from today. I’ll make my assessment and issue a recommendation to the instructor judge as to whether we should continue our case against you. In the eventuality that your case is brought before the criminal court, I’ll argue the state’s case alongside the instructor judge. It will be heard by a panel of three judges, who will determine your guilt or innocence. Has all of this been explained to you?”

He saw her pause, unsure whether to admit she had no idea what was going on.

“Yes,” she said carefully.

“This is your judicial interrogation. You understand that you don’t have to talk to me?”

“Yes,” she said, more confidently. Eduardo flashed to an image of the unthinkable cartwheel this girl had done during her initial questioning; he saw her starfishing her way across the interrogation room
under the cold light of the camera. “Why can’t my dad bail me out?” she said.

“Bail has to do with the seriousness of the crime, not the evidence against the accused. Do you have any other questions for me?”

She did not, but Eduardo had a few for her. He spent the first twenty minutes asking for factual information he already knew—Lily Hayes’s full name, her date of birth, her reason for being in Buenos Aires. (“I thought it would be an interesting place to study abroad,” she’d said. “And has it been?” She’d laughed a harsh, unbecoming laugh.) These were the equivalent of lie tests on a psych battery or polygraph. He asked her to go through the day of the murder minute by minute, in order to catch deviations from the account she gave to police; he then asked her to repeat it four more times, in order to catch variations between accounts. Certain variations were suspicious, of course, but then so was no variation at all. Lily Hayes was chewing a strand of hair, he noted, which was intriguing. It was a strange, careless thing to do—it was vulgar, really, and he wasn’t sure he could remember seeing anybody over the age of about seven do it—and it was interesting to him that she felt comfortable engaging in such an activity in this, one of the most important formal conversations of her life. At the forty-five-minute mark, Eduardo began asking the real questions.

“So,” he said. “I understand you felt that Katy was insipid.”

At this, Lily looked green and appalled. “Where did you hear that?”

Some prosecutors wouldn’t tell her, in order to make her wonder who among her friends might not be on her side. They’d want to make her understand that the days when she could expect answers were over; that avenues to comprehension were charities now, to be dispensed or withheld at their whim. These kinds of prosecutors would want to build up the breathy edginess of paranoia, that bewildered lost-in-the-woods-at-night disorientation that makes someone look for any sort of beacon or semaphore. Paranoia in a defendant was a great asset for a prosecutor, it was generally thought. But Eduardo did not like to withhold answers. Partly, it offended his sense of fair play.
And partly, he disagreed with the strategy. He felt that giving defendants a false sense of marginal competence—a slight idea of where they stood in relation to the world—made them relax just enough to make a mistake, if there were any mistakes to be made (which, of course, he never assumed that there were).

“An email you wrote,” he said.

“I see.”

“Do you remember who you wrote that email to?”

“No.”

“So it could have been any number of people, then?”

Lily said nothing. Eduardo pretended to look at his notes. “When you said she was insipid,” said Eduardo, “did you mean she was ‘lacking in qualities that interest, stimulate, or challenge’?”

“I mean—yes, I suppose so. Yeah.”

“Was there anything in particular you found especially insipid about the victim?”

There was really no need to refer to Katy as the “victim” just now—though it was how Eduardo would refer to her in court, of course, to remind the three judges (over and over and over) that the dead girl, in stark contrast to the living girl in front of them, was dead. But it was best to get in the habit early.

“I don’t know,” said Lily.

“Her reading tastes, perhaps? Her vocabulary?”

“I guess so.”

“Do you consider yourself a smart woman?” said Eduardo. This language, too, was intentional. In public, in the courts, Eduardo would refer to Katy as a “girl” and Lily as a “woman,” whenever he wasn’t referring to them as “victim” and “defendant,” even though Lily was, in fact, three and a half months younger than Katy had been when she died. This was, again, just good sense. You could subtly direct the judges toward the truth through small adornments and pressures and omissions; Eduardo would never deviate from the facts, of course, but there was nothing wrong with using words with slightly different connotations
in order to illuminate the reality of a situation. Who could deny that the differing designations reflected an emotional veracity, if not a biological one? You looked at Lily—leaving aside questions of guilt or innocence—and you saw her callousness, and her emotional remoteness, and her sexual experience, and you knew you were dealing with an adult. And then there was the small matter that Lily would grow up, in prison or out, and Katy would always be a girl and would always be dead.

“What?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Is it fair to say you thought were you smarter than the victim?”

“Is it fair to say you think you’re smarter than me?”

Eduardo put down his notepad and raised his eyebrows. Lily’s face was flushed; he could tell that she was slightly surprised, but also slightly pleased, at what she had said.

“I would not presume that,” he said firmly, and lifted his notepad again. “Insipidness aside, there were a lot of other things you didn’t like about Katy Kellers.”

“That’s not true.”

“Let me remind you of some of the things you didn’t like about her, according to emails you sent during the month of January alone: her hair, her name, her teeth—”

“I loved her teeth!”

“ ‘They were not the teeth of a serious person,’ according to a Facebook message you wrote to your friend Callie Meyers on January seventeenth, 2011.”

“I liked her teeth. I wanted teeth like that.”

“Do you think Katy ever had to have braces?”

“I don’t know.”

“She never had braces. They were just naturally straight.”

Lily stared at him.

“You had to have braces, didn’t you?” said Eduardo. “I understand
you had them into college. I understand you had to visit home on weekends for orthodontic follow-up.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

“We’ll move on. Tell me about your relationship with Sebastien LeCompte.”

“We were friends.”

“You had a sexual relationship?”

Lily turned her face to the side. “Briefly.”

“Were you aware that the victim was also having a sexual relationship with Sebastien LeCompte?” This query contained a bluff, as well as a fairly obvious supposition—but, being a question, it was not exactly a lie. And at any rate, the reality of Sebastien LeCompte’s involvement with Katy Kellers did not matter half as much as whatever Lily had believed that reality to be.

“I wouldn’t necessarily have called it a relationship.”

“You were aware of it, though?”

“I mean, I certainly wondered.”

“What made you wonder?”

“I’m not stupid.”

Eduardo pretended to make a note of this, though he wasn’t really writing anything.

Lily shifted in her seat. “I just mean, I could tell. They weren’t as careful as they thought they were.”

“And how did you feel about it?”

“Not much.”

“Really? You weren’t angry?”

“Not really. We weren’t in love or anything.”

During his seventh week with Maria, Eduardo had whispered into her ear while she was sleeping: “Tell me who you are, because I love you already and I want to know who I love.”

“I mean,” said Lily, uncertain about what to do with his silence. “Sebastien and I weren’t, like, a couple.”

“But you were sleeping together.”

Lily looked pensive; the light through the bars made long tapering wicks on her face. “I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore today,” she said.

Eduardo nodded. “That’s your right,” he said. He snapped his notebook shut in order to convey a sense of finality, of satisfaction. “This has been a good conversation. You can go have your medical exam now.”

Though he would never let it matter, it was true that something about Lily Hayes reminded Eduardo of Maria. What was it, exactly? The breeziness of a person to whom nothing was ever denied? But in Maria this quality had been charming and elfin, and in Lily it was, assuredly, only obnoxious. And at any rate, Eduardo knew that there was something sinister about Lily that went well beyond impulsivity.

Take, for example, the cartwheel. Eduardo had worked enough high-profile cases to know how the cartwheel would play, what binary of accusation and defense would grow in its wake. For the prosecution, by way of the media, an argument would be made that the cartwheel was callous, flippant, reflective of the same kind of bottomless disregard that could, given the right circumstances and drugs, disregard another human life. The counterargument, obviously, would assert that the cartwheel was whimsical and guileless; an exuberant outburst that was now being willfully misunderstood by the old and the humorless and the agenda having. Indeed, the defense might say, if the cartwheel was evidence of anything it was evidence of innocence: How could someone guilty, someone who wanted to look
not
guilty, do something like that? Only a person who knew that she was innocent and was too young to know that this might not matter would ever, ever do a cartwheel in an interrogation room.

But Eduardo knew better, because he had spent years studying an impulsive woman. Maria sometimes did things that were crazy or ill-advised, Eduardo would be the first to admit—though more commonly she did things that were merely strange: He’d once found her in
the living room at three a.m. staring at a red umbrella she’d lit up with a flashlight, and more than once he’d passed by the closed bathroom door and heard her murmuring to herself in the claw-footed tub. One time she’d hung up a paper moon in a tree, where it shone through the branches like an illuminated coin.

“It’s beautiful,” he’d said, assuming Maria had wanted to do something beautiful.

“Oh, is it?” she’d said distractedly, as he wrapped his arms around her.

“I just wanted it to be interesting.”

“It is,” said Eduardo. He could hear the sticky note of pleading in his own voice. He so wanted to see whatever it was she wanted him to see.

“No,” said Maria, looking at him calmly. “Nothing beautiful is really interesting.” She’d torn it down then, though not angrily—just methodically, thoroughly, as though correcting a mistake she now saw that she’d made.

There were difficulties, too, of course. Maria had a tendency to internalize free-floating stress from the universe, though her life was not, as far as Eduardo could discern, at all stressful. This knotty, inaccessible melancholy of hers was so different from his own; whatever went on with Maria was always some strange iteration away from sense. She’d fall into black spells, growing monosyllabic and morose, speaking in a kind of halting iambic pentameter. She’d disappear into the bathroom to sob (and how she sobbed—these choking, wretched sobs that somehow came at exactly even intervals, so that they seemed almost like some kind of biological or geologic process). One winter she even went a little bald; Eduardo came upon a collapsed black octopus of hair in the shower drain, looking like the remnant of a massacre.