Fatal Vision (23 page)

And I have to tell you that seeing someone in a state hospital is an incredibly awesome event. It's just shattering, the type of care that I know they get and having gone through medical school and taken a period of training at an institute like this and knowing all the scare stories. Seeing your own brother—who was always sort of an All-American hero—truly psychotic, was a very frightening thing. A tremendous, scary, vacant, desolate feeling about Jay and how he looked and the unbelievable turmoil that my mother was in from this.

So I went in and checked out his apartment in New York and that's when I went down to the bar he worked at and found a guy who may or may not have given him some of the drugs, but I thought he did, and he was the local supplier for some of the bartenders, and we had a little altercation—I sort of punched him out. Then I had to go back to Fort Bragg.

But the overriding feeling that immediately comes to mind about Fort Bragg^as the sense of ease that Colette and I finally had and the new togetherness that really developed nicely.

Colette was getting out of, you know, a reasonably tough situation because she had been forced to live with my mom on Long Island and not really have control over her own life for a while, so there was the relief of getting together again and building our house again and her being able to go back to school, and having the cheap shopping available and the steady income.

So we were becoming really reacquainted and it was kind of fun because there was no pressure on me. It was low-key. I could be around, play with the kids, and there weren't other contributing things. There were no other women, I wasn't dating any nurses, I wasn't seeing people on the side. We were really recommitting ourselves to each other and it was a nice feeling.

I think emotionally, without any question, our relationship was getting stronger. I think the trust was building. I think some of the more obvious past escapades were beginning to fade. The little things that I did, the little affairs and the motel trips and stuff like that, that was nothing. It just meant absolutely nothing except it was a guy away from home, and it didn't make any difference one way or the other. Colette had never been happier. I think the kids were growing by leaps and bounds and were extremely happy and essentially oblivious to any problems at all between us.

So the Army remembrances are of, you know, for the first time in five years, a reasonably easy life and enough money coming in and new enjoyment with the kids.

It was really a flowering of the fatherhood and childhood times. It was Kimmy developing and running and playing and reading and becoming bright and inquisitive and us realizing that we had a super-bright daughter, and Kristen just beginning to be a little tomboy and running around the neighborhood and protecting Kimmy, and being a little more aggressive than Kimmy, and us realizing that we had a beauty on the way up, also bright and cheery and nonstop, and that we had a, you know, a good future ahead.

The kids were basically past, you know, the real diaper stage. Kristy still wore diapers but it wasn't like she was a little infant anymore. She was beginning to grow and, you know, talk and everything.

Specifically, each day I remember like breakfast with the kids was so nice. I hadn't had that really, that luxury of sitting and enjoying the kids at breakfast, and it
was
an enjoyment; it wasn't a chore.

Sunday morning, especially, was a beautiful, beautiful time. We always had a late breakfast. Very often, either Colette or I would get up and sneak out while the other one was sleeping and go down to the bakery and get some baked goods. We even tried to do this in Chicago and Bergenfield— get bagels and lox or something like that, which wasn't very available at Fort Bragg.

But we—very often one of us would get up and do that, and begin breakfast and then come back to bed when the kids got up and fool around for a while. Um, and this was like a big thing, this was a reattachment of our entire family because we were having the time and I wasn't tired and I didn't have to rush off to work and I hadn't worked all night the night before and Colette was the most relaxed she'd ever been, and we were making love with, I think, more abandon than we ever had before.

Lovemaking with Colette was always a love thing. It wasn't just getting laid or making out or, getting, you know, getting fucked or whatever you want to say. It was always a much prettier thing than that.

Colette never, like, openly demanded love from me physically. She never sort of really grabbed me or she never said, ah, "I want you to fuck me tonight," or something like that. We never—it was never that kind of a thing between us. It was not like the incredible physical sex that I had had with Penny Wells. It was definitely lovemaking rather than pure sex. There's no question or comparison at all.

Our lovemaking had a very gentle quality to it that was exciting to us both, I think. And it took us a long time for new things to happen—new positions, new techniques. It always seemed that we were gentle and considerate to each other in our lovemaking and that each effort sufficed. We didn't have to do the next major position or change, or—we didn't go through these things violently or passionately, we went through them sort of quietly.

As a matter of fact, Colette was scared. I thought initially she was just a little vulnerable and a little naive, but it turned out that she had a real fear. You never really could pin down what it was from—whether it, sort of the unasked question: had she made love with her high school boyfriend, Dean Chamberlain, and had not been successful—which was quite possible, because, to be honest, Dean was a jerk as far as I was concerned, I always thought he was a nitwit.

Or had the Purdue sophomore traumatized her? Or was it, in fact, that she was a virgin and had never really made love and was terrified of it and had, you know, quote, successfully, unquote, held off both Dean and the Purdue sophomore, and I was th
e first man she ever slept with
—I don't know.

But it took many, many, many, many months—in fact, years—before Colette was able to really lose her inhibitions in our lovemaking. It wasn't until, I think, maybe the middle years of medical school that she was really comfortable walking around naked in front of me, and she never really got over it totally—it was always a little bit of concern, and that, of course, was basically a turn-on. She was always

feminine and a little bit naive and a little bit vulnerable and it was a very exciting thing.

I don't mean to sound the music and roll the drums, but at Fort Bragg, finally, with more time alone with each other and me in certainly a better mood than I had been in for at least the prior year at Bergenfield and maybe even better than a lot of times in medical school, we could be more relaxed with each other, and we made time for each other and took a lot of time, and each person's—the other person's— satisfaction was important to us.

And we were beginning to realize that the outside world, the civilian world, offered limitless opportunities to us, and that we would have this great, you know, sort of dream come true without too much effort from here on in.

We also came to the realization that there was a world out there that we could conquer. I'd be at Yale for my residency and later probably teaching at Yale and practicing surgery and we'd have the farm, we'd have the horses, we'd have a boat, we had beautiful kids and a third on the way, and Colette was looking forward to the future with real glee and anticipation and Colette and I were very much in love again.

Instead of simply having a cup of coffee in a corridor, Jeffrey MacDonald had left CID headquarters for ninety minutes. When he returned, at 1
p.m
., the radio had been turned off. Franz Joseph Grebner began to speak.

"I have been sitting here most of the morning," Grebner said, "not saying very much, just listening to your story, and I have been an investigator for a long time, and if you were a Pfc.—a young, uneducated person—I might try to bring you in here and bluff you. But you are a very well-educated man—doctor, captain—and I'm going to be fair with you.

"Your story doesn't ring true. There's too many discrepancies. For instance, take a look at that picture over there." Grebner gestured toward a photograph of the living room of 544 Castle Drive.

"Do you see anything odd about that scene?" "No."

"It is the first thing I saw when I came into the house that morning. Notice the flowerpot?" "It's standing up." "Yes. Notice the magazines?" "Yeah."

"Notice the edge of the table right there?"

"I don't understand the significance of it."

"Okay. The lab technicians, myself, Mr. Ivory, and Mr. Shaw, and any number of other people have tipped that table over. It never lands like that. It is top-heavy and it goes over all the way, even pushes the chair next to it out of the way. The

magazines don't land under the leading edge of that table, either. They land out on the floor."

"Couldn't this table have been pushed around during the struggle?"

"It could have been, but it would have been upside down when it stopped. And the plant and the pot always go straight out and they stay together in all instances."

"Well, what—what are you trying to say?"

"That this is a staged scene."

"You mean that I staged the scene?"

"That's what I think."

"Do you think that I would stand the pot up if I staged the scene?"

"Somebody stood it up like that."

"Well, I don't see the reasoning behind that. You just told me I was college-educated and very intelligent." "I believe you are."

"Well, why do you think I would—I don't understand why you think I would stage it that way if I was going to stage it."

"And your glasses, which are over there underneath the drapery. They could have gotten there, but you weren't wearing your glasses when you went into the bedrooms. And they are lying with the outer edge of the lens down on the floor, yet on the face of that lens there's blood."

"Maybe someone knocked them over."

"But how did they get the blood on them?"

"I assume from the person who knocked them over."

"Another feature here. There's an
Esquire
magazine laying there. There's a box laying on top of it. And on this edge, right underneath the box, there's blood on the edges of the pages. This whole thing here was staged."

"That's a pretty powerful statement
. Changes things around, doesn't
it?"

"Yes, it does."

"Well, I can't help you," MacDonald said. "What do you want me to say? You are telling me that—that I staged the scene and that's it. It is a little ludicrous."

"You must understand," Grebner said, "that I am looking at this from the point of an investigator, past experience."

"I understand that."

Grebner gestured toward another photograph. "Notice the rug right there?" "Right."

"It slips and slides and rolls up very easily. In the position it is in, that's where you would have been having this struggle, pushing against three men."

"Well, at the edge of the bed
[sic]
and on the end of the hallway." (This was the third time MacDonald had said "bed" when he had apparently intended to say "couch.")

"This rug was undisturbed," Grebner said.

"Well, what do you want me to say? I don't—I'm not an investigator. You are telling me that—that I staged the scene and I—I'm telling you that things happened the way I told you."

"You know," Grebner continued, "you as a doctor and I as an investigator have seen many people come into emergency rooms and they are pretty badly hurt."

"Right."

"I've seen people who were shot directly in the heart with a .38 run over a hundred yards. You had one icepick wound— apparently from an icepick—punctured your lung to the point that it collapsed 20 percent. You had one small bump on your head."

"No, correction, I had two."

"Two? Okay, two. Not apparently wounds or bumps that would have been caused by this type of club that we have in this instance if anyone was swinging with any force."

"Well, I can't agree with you there, medically. I have treated patients who have died and there's nothing but a little abrasion on their forehead."

"That's probably true, but here you are. You've been hit twice by now. This didn't knock you out. This is according to your story. You're at a point here where the old adrenaline is pumping into your system—you are fighting for yourself and your children—and yet you pass out here, according to your story, at the end of the hallway."