Evil Eye (16 page)

One of the problems.

Innocent till proven guilty
—that was a laugh.

Bart is thinking: he will go on TV talk shows, when this fiasco is ended. He will
plead his case to the American public and see who they believe!

Here was good news: the judge granted the defense a change of venue for the trial, to Niagara County in western New York State, due to the “extensive and protracted” publicity accruing to the case in the Rensselaer-Albany area.

This was a triumph for Deekman. And it was a triumph for Deekman that the statements of two medics who'd claimed to have “witnessed” Louisa Hansen identify her son as her assailant at the crime scene would not be admissible in court.

Deekman said, not a chance the prosecution can convince a jury, all they have is circumstantial evidence not physical evidence.

Physical evidence
meant fingerprints for instance.

Physical evidence
meant bloodstains on clothing known to be Bart Hansen's clothing not merely the Hansens' bloodstains on clothing retrieved from a reeking Dumpster at a rest stop at exit 19, New York Thruway (east) that were “so generic” they could belong to anyone.

The assailant's clothing, evidently. This was indisputable. But that the clothing was Bart Hansen's was not so easy to confirm, as Deekman would brilliantly argue.

Months later at the trial—in Niagara County, in western New York State—the bloodstained clothing would be a hotly contested issue. No prosecution witness could claim that the bloodstained clothes were definitely Bart Hansen's—or maybe just looked like clothes Bart wore.

Kind of, like, a heavy-metal influence—except Bart didn't have tattoos or piercings.

As, at the trial, when the Delt-Sigs took the witness stand to testify—in suits, dress shirts, and ties, clean-shaven and abashed, unable to bring themselves to look at their frat brother Bart Hansen quivering with indignation at the defense table—it would turn out that, closely questioned by Davis Deekman, not one of the frat boys could
absolutely claim that Bart Hansen hadn't been in the fraternity house through the night of April 11, only that they hadn't seen him between the hours of 1
a.m
. and approximately 8:30
a.m
.

As to the E-ZPass “evidence”—and the claim of a Juniper Drive neighbor that he'd seen Bart's Explorer in the driveway of the Hansens' house at about the time of the attack—Deekman offered an explanation that was, if not entirely plausible, yet not entirely implausible: that another individual, unknown to Bart Hansen, or perhaps known to him, had taken the Explorer while he was sleeping in the frat house, driven three hours and twenty minutes to East Rensselaer to break into the Hansens' house, having heard that Bart Hansen's family was well-to-do, and committed the terrible crimes—all while Bart was sleeping oblivious.

This may be one of the most ingeniously planned and staged crimes of our time—it may be revealed, my client is as much a victim as his parents!

Then, the most astonishing reversal: Louisa Hansen, the prosecution's leading witness, had changed her mind about accusing her son.

Far from identifying Bart as the individual who'd killed her husband and had tried to kill her, Mrs. Hansen was now claiming that she remembered nothing of the assault; and that she could not have said what police officers were claiming she'd said—
That is ridiculous. I never saw his face.

The badly injured and mutilated woman had regained consciousness after nearly twenty days in a comatose state but for some time afterward her condition was so grave, her ability to comprehend and to communicate so limited, no one from the Rensselaer County prosecutor's office was allowed to meet with her.

During these weeks Mrs. Hansen underwent a number of surgeries—neuro, ophthalmologic, dental, cosmetic; she had surgery to repair a near-severed tendon in her left leg, and she had gastrointestinal procedures to correct inflammations and abscesses in her large colon. She was fed intravenously. She began to regain some of the weight she'd so drastically lost and gradually, with the purposeful air of one struggling to haul herself out of a murky sea, she began to regain a fuller consciousness, and a memory.

Five months after the ax attack it began to be rumored in courthouse circles and in the media that
the murderer's mother
was changing her statement; the following week, a gloating Davis Deekman called a press conference to announce that Louisa Hansen was “not only repudiating her accusation of her son” but would be the defense's “leading witness” in the upcoming trial.

Crude tabloid headlines trumpeted this reversal, a terrible blow to the prosecution:
bart's mom claims: “my son is not a murderer.”

And,
brain-injured mom-victim claims: “not my son!”

Louisa Hansen was insisting now that she could not remember anything of the assault, or almost anything; she could remember nothing of what followed when the Rensselaer police officer allegedly questioned her in the bedroom. She had a “vague, confused” memory of being lifted onto a stretcher, and being strapped down and carried away. She may have had a “blurred” memory of a siren, an ambulance ride, a hospital. But she did not remember seeing her husband—her husband's body. And definitely, she
did not remember seeing her son in her bedroom, with an ax.

To refute the prosecution's initial claim that Louisa Hansen could have identified her son as the assailant, given her physical injuries at the time, Deekman had enlisted a battery of expert witnesses to present to the court—a neurologist, a neuroscientist whose specialty was vision, a psychiatrist, a cognitive psychologist, even a family therapist whom Louisa had seen intermittently in Rensselaer: for how could so severely traumatized an individual, her skull smashed and scalp bleeding profusely, one eye hanging from its socket, lacerations and deep wounds on many parts of her body, obviously in shock, and, seven hours after the attack, weak from loss of blood, possibly have comprehended any question put to her, let alone answered it accurately? Now, Louisa Hansen herself would be refuting the prosecution's claim: the testimony by the police officer who'd allegedly asked her if “her son” had hurt her and her husband. Without the medics' testimonies to bolster his, the police officer did not appear so convincing, cross-examined by Davis Deekman. For he, too, would have been “shaken and distracted” by so horrific a crime scene and could not possibly remember all that had passed between him and the injured woman.

Initially, Louisa Hansen had said that she was sure that Bart had nothing to do with the attack: she
would know
if he had—she was his mother after all. She
would know.

Then, as she regained strength, and her voice, Louisa began to insist that she had not ever identified her son as her assailant: that this was an “outright lie.”

She had no memory of that night—or, the vaguest memory.

Things had passed in a “blur”—“like a dream”—yet she was sure that Bart had not been “anywhere near” the house that night.

At the trial, testifying on behalf of her son, Louisa Hansen spoke haltingly but forcefully as everyone in the courtroom stared at her; and no one more avidly than Bart Hansen.

Louisa said she didn't know if she'd dreamt—something. She knew that her brain had been injured and she'd had neurosurgeries and had been unconscious and conscious and unconscious and “floating” with painkillers—but sometimes things were sharp, what was cloudy became clear like a smudged glass that was polished, and so she thought now she could remember—she
did remember
—a human figure, a man, a “stranger”—she'd had an impression of a “swarthy” skin—a “creased” face—a “not-young” face; he'd had that kind of beard that's trimmed short—“I think it's called a—goatee.”

Carefully Deekman summarized: “Your assailant, Mrs. Hansen, was a ‘swarthy-skinned' man, ‘not-young,' with a ‘creased' face and a ‘goatee'? No one you recognized?”

“I think so. Yes. Or it might have been a . . .”

Louisa's single, occluded eye shifted in its socket, as if with effort. Her sunken mouth was fixed in a small determined smile of the kind intended to assure others,
I am all right, I am fine: don't worry about me!
despite her ravaged face and slight, broken body. She was peering past the aggressive Deekman at her son Bart who sat at the defense table not fifteen feet away with hunched shoulders, an abashed and stricken look on his face. Bart's youth was fading, even his dun-colored limp hair appeared thin at the crown. His skin had become puffy and sallow as if water bloated. His eyes formerly quick, elusive, and sly as small fish darting in a pond were puffy, too, and chronically ringed in fatigue. Yet on Bart's lips, too, there appeared a faint hopeful smile.

Son and mother had seen little of each other in the intervening eleven months.

“. . . might have been a dream. I can't be sure.”

“But you are sure, Mrs. Hansen, that you didn't see
your son Bart
in your bedroom that night?”

“Oh yes. I am sure of that. I didn't see my son Bart in my —our—bedroom that night. The intruder was a—
stranger.
”

Louisa's right eye had been surgically removed and had not yet been replaced with an artificial eye: the socket was empty, but resembled melted wax, and was not deep. Her skull and facial bones had been smashed and had not quite healed, appearing re-aligned, mismatched; her nose had been mashed and flattened; her skin was scarred and ravaged and her mouth shrunken, for her lower jaw had been badly lacerated; most of her teeth had been lost, and she'd been fitted with an abbreviated set of artificial teeth. Her hair, shaved for surgery, had grown back thinly, and was ghostly white. Yet relatives and friends of Louisa Hansen claimed that within the mutilated face you could see the former face of Louisa Hansen, unmistakably.

The poor woman's body appeared broken, her spine hunched and her head pushed forward; she walked with difficulty, using a cane, needing assistance, yet there was an air of resilience and even defiance about her, that made her a powerfully appealing figure. For her courtroom appearance Mrs. Hansen had dressed herself, or had been dressed, in a way to suggest understated good taste, a dark mulberry pants suit, a white silk blouse, a strand of pearls and matching earrings.

In the Rensselaer-Albany area there was intense, intrusive interest in the “murderer's mother”—in Niagara County, hundreds of miles to the west, there was a sympathetic if somewhat morbid interest in the “mother of the defendant”: Louisa Hansen's bravery, her composure. For Louisa was a widow, too—she'd lost her husband, as she had nearly lost her own life. Yet she seemed totally
without bitterness or reproach.

She'd described herself as
A Christian woman
.
That is my family heritage, and it is my son's heritage, too.

Bart wiped at his eyes with his fists. Oh Christ now he would cry!

Crying was a sign of guilt, remorse.
He would not cry.

He was sulky, sullen. He'd been humiliated, plenty—his frat brothers had let him down publicly. No girl would ever go out with him on the S.U. campus even if he was fully reinstated. Unflattering photographs of him had appeared in print, on TV, and online—he'd have liked to protest
That is not me! That is not me God damn you.

Why the Delt-Sigs had caved and testified for the prosecution, Deekman had explained: they'd been threatened with
aiding and abetting a crime
and
obfuscation of justice
if they'd supported Bart's alibi and it had turned out that Bart was found guilty of the crime.

Hadn't had faith in him, that was the point.

At least his mother was on his side. Finally!

Her
—she'd caused all this. She'd let him down. She'd reneged on promises she'd made to him, many times. She'd cared more for her God damn garden-club friends than she ever had for
him.

In the flower beds about the house, those tall showy neon-orange flowers—gladioli? Weird
vertical
flowers that had to be propped up or they'd fall over in a rainstorm.

Still, Louisa Hansen's flowers were impressive. Classy, eye-catching. His mom was some kind of star in the Rensselaer Women's Garden Club—he'd seen her photo in the local ­newspaper —that meant a lot to her.

He hadn't even realized that she was forty-six years old!—until it was mentioned in the media. And his father, fifty-one.

So
old
. Bart intends to never wind up so
old.

Seeing their pictures was weird. The first thing you think, why'd anybody care enough about Dad to print his picture in the paper? Or Mom?

The grotesque melted face, the faltering voice, the single recessed eye and the way her slight body was collapsed into the witness chair like a discarded puppet—all this seemed to assure the courtroom that Louisa Hansen was telling the truth. Where her testimony differed from the testimonies of others, it was those others who were mistaken, or lying, and not her. In fact, after Louisa Hansen's testimony it was difficult to recall others who'd preceded her.

Until now, the trial had passed, for Bart, in a toxic haze. To save his sanity he'd had to let his mind wander. Shoot up with something like Novocain. Hadn't smoked pot in such a long God damned time, he tried to recall the sensation, that was soothing. Comforting. And the beer buzz at the back of his head, Christ he missed
that
. Ritalin and any uppers he didn't want, fuck no. Just needed to be calm—like, meditate. Sat at the defense table with his arms folded tight across his chest, trying not to wince with intestinal pain.
Try not to scowl
he'd been advised by Deekman. Fuck he wasn't
scowling
!