Small Sacrifices (59 page)

Harm her children for love of Lew? It made Diane feel like laughing. "The two have nothing to do with each other." What about the nanny? The big house? Jagger presses.

"Maybe 'governess' is a better word. I don't know—Hazel," Diane giggles. "The vision of the house got bigger the worse Steve got. I guess it was an escape."

Jim Jagger puts the finishing touches on the portrait of the little family who had had it all. Who hadn't needed a father to make them happy.

In Oregon Diane and the kids loved to explore. "It's fun to drive through all those streets on the hill above the park, and get lost trying to find your way out. The kids liked that. They thought they were lost—which we were—but I never told them that." Yes, Diane had gone back once to Chandler—but only to

return Lew's gold chain personally. "He told me not to take it off for anything—'You're my woman' and all that mushy stuff. I gave him my word. And we all know what my word means, I think—" In Chandler, Diane had called Steve.

"I had a couple of drinks so I could tolerate Steve. I spent the night at his place. Steve and his friends were doing coke." After a few more drinks, she had fallen asleep.

Jagger urges her to expand on the events of that night at Steve's. Diane looks down, hesitant.

"Were you intimate with Steve that evening?" Jagger pushes.

"Do I have to answer that under oath?"

Jagger nods.

"I woke up cold, naked, and in pain. My mouth tasted horrible. I had a fuzzy head. I ran a cold bath. I can only remember coming out of a deep, deep darkness and I was crying. I heard Jeff yelling, 'Steve, leave her alone; she doesn't even know what's happening!' Jeff didn't help me, and I passed out again. When Steve took me to the airport the next day, he asked me, 'Do you remember making love last night?' I said, 'No.' And he said, 'Too bad because we had fun.' "

Why hadn't she taken a cab to a motel? Why had she called Steve Downs to pick her up at the airport in the first place? Past experience had taught her there might be trouble.

Fred Hugi notes the incongruity; he scrawls something on the legal pad in front of him.

?^ The

time has come to go over the night of May 19 in detail. Diane sounds tired as she recites the story again. The trip to Heather's, driving under the dark trees to the mobile home.

"I feel that I'm relating something over and over and over-"The kids were in the car and we talked through the window

[after they'd petted the horse]. She asked me if Lew was coming and I said. No, he wasn't."

They left Heather's at ten minutes to ten.

She has shaved ten minutes off Heather's estimate. How can she explain the entire twenty-five missing minutes between leaving Heather's and arriving at McKenzie-Willamette Hospital?

She went back the way she'd come, south along Sunderman. But she'd turned away from town at the intersection with Marcola Road, thinking she would find the pass where Deerhorn Road %|

went past a waterfall. But then, though Cheryl was still "babbling away," she realized that Christie and Danny had probably fallen

^^P-^ "I pulled off to debate where I'd go." tg Diane remembers talking to Cheryl: "We talked about school,

| about her bloody noses. I said the next day she had off, we'd go to an ear-nose-and-throat specialist. She wanted to go for a ride still. But she was pretty easy. She was going to take the unicorn to school the next day.

"We stayed parked there for a while, and then Cher curled up on the front floor board. I pulled the seat back for her--and she covered herself with my postal sweater. She was on her left side, in a fetal position. I was looking in my checkbook 'cause I had to buy school lunch tickets that next week."

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Diane has just about filled in the missing time. But is it believable? Why would she stop along a lonely road--in the dark after 10:00 p.m.--to balance a checkbook when they were only fifteen or twenty minutes from home? This testimony is the first time she has ever mentioned the checkbook.

Jagger asks her when she remembered it.

"I always remembered--but the detectives didn't ask specific questions."

After she put her checkbook away, she headed the red car back down Marcola toward Springfield. She turned off onto Old Mohawk, a soft right turn. There was a house on the right.

"I saw a man in the middle of my lane, flagging me down with his left hand ... my thought was 'He's a leftie--and he's in trouble . . . No--he's got too much energy to be in trouble.' I stopped rather quickly. None of the kids woke up. I looked to see. I took the keys with me--a standard safety precaution."

"How did you feel about the police who doubted you?"

"It made me angry. It made me feel a disbelief in myself. Do I remember what I think I remember?"

But Polly Jamison has helped her to feel secure with her own memory.

"I felt like I was going crazy back then. I really didn't know what was real and what wasn't real."

Diane began revising her original story because of the dreams she was having. It was. easier for her to believe that there had been two men--rather than just one--because it helped her convince herself that there had been nothing at all she could have done to save her children.

"How do you feel about going through the facts now?"

"I feel emotion--but not as strong. I'm scared. It was an ugly night--a crazy night. I still can't remember everything." Jim Jagger stops his client repeatedly when she becomes

defensive; he gives her a chance to expound on her feelings and memories, allows her to let logic dictate some of the sequences of that "crazy night."

"My own memory messed me up good," she says feelingly. Diane takes a deep breath and continues more calmly. "I stopped the car. I looked around to see if the children were still asleep or awake. I opened the door, got out. He was standing at the point of the car door. He made a comment about wanting my car.

"I said, 'You've gotta be kidding.' " i

Jagger cautions her, "Don't fill in, Diane."

"He shoved me back toward the back of the car--a few feet. I didn't fall. I had to catch myself. He moved toward the car. I looked in the window--and Christie was shot. It was almost simultaneous."

"You're not crying," Jagger offers quietly.

"No."

"Why?"

"There's nothing I can do about it now."

Diane's attorney comes finally to the end of his direct examination. Jim Jagger asks Diane, "You didn't shoot your kids, and you didn't cause anyone else to shoot your kids, did you?"

"No, I did not."

Fred Hugi rises slowly and walks toward Diane, It is one year and twelve days since their brief meeting in the corridor outside the Intensive Care Unit of McKenzie-Willamette, that moment when she assured him that no one would beat her.

Bs The time has come for cross-examination. f>-Hugi is ready. He has thought about this confrontation a

thousand times, ten thousand times--at night, driving, during the lunch breaks while he sat alone in the little park across from the-courthouse sipping a milkshake.

Adrenalin heightens Hugi's senses and blocks out the pain in his tooth. At last, Diane sits there on the witness stand. It is his turn.

He expects no major revelation. "We knew Diane was not going to confess on the stand. The goal of cross-examination was to try to let the jury see her under some stress--to see her convoluted reasoning, inconsistencies, the improbability of her story ... to show the development of her antisocial personality." _ It is going to require infinite patience, and Hugi knows he

|nsks alienating the jury. Jagger did that when he pushed too far with Christie. Christie is handicapped by her age and disability, but Diane is pregnant. She looks fragile--not at all like the suntanned hardy woman she was last year.

Only her eyes are the same.

Fred Hugi has a narrow path to walk.

At all cost, he has vowed to appear courteous and reasonable. He will not respond with hostility unless Diane deliberately provokes him. His goals are modest. He wants only to expose 416 ANN RULE

what lies beneath Diane's facade; he is quite willing to settle for a

"few small victories and not get carried away with myself. After all this isn't a high-school debate."

Diane waits for him now on the stand, full-blown with child, faint pastel circles beneath her huge eyes. It is apparent that she holds Fred Hugi in low esteem.

Occasionally, as Hugi questions Diane, he glances toward the gallery, but his eyes never really focus on anyone. All his energy is directed toward Diane. He respects the mind behind the mask. In no way does he underestimate her.

Fred Hugi too begins far back in Diane's life. The mosaic is about to be rearranged once more, flooded with a different light. He speaks to her as gently as if she is a child, his voice kind and interested.

And still Jagger objects; he wants Hugi to sit down while he questions Diane.

Fortunately, Foote overrules him. Hugi has stood to question witnesses the entire trial; he is more comfortable thinking on his feet.

"Let's go back to your childhood. Was it happy? Was it sad?"

"Sad . . . lonely."

"Why was that?"

"Because my father was quite strict—intimidating—and my mother remained in the background."

"You tried to interact?"

"No."

"You tried to please?"

"Of course."

"How?"

"I was obedient."

"You were a good student?"

"I got good grades ... I hated lecturing by my father."

"You were frustrated at home?"

"Yes."

"Angry?"

"No." There. She has stopped him. She smiles. She wasn't

. angry, and he couldn't make her say it.

Unfazed, Hugi asks about the incestuous incidents between Diane and her father. "Could you be specific?"

"I'd prefer not to ... it continued for approximately a year." He asks her to explain. ,

She sighs. "Specifically?"

"Yes."

"Talking, touching, being told not to tell anyone--at my father's hand, in my house, in different rooms. The others were

sleeping. My mother was working. In the car ... there was fondling, touching of my chest--I had no breasts then--and other parts of my body where little kids aren't to be touched. I blanked it out. . ."

Her life is so sad, her problems as a child seemingly so overwhelming--and Hugi's voice so soft--that it is easy to forget that this is the prosecutor, not the defense attorney.

Yet, if one listens very carefully, certain words and attitudes are being elicited from the defendant. She talks often of being trapped, of being depressed, suicidal, reclusive, rejected. Fred Hugi is showing the jury a woman who has spent years absorbing the motivation to murder--a sponge storing up rage.

Diane is obviously intelligent, but she has blind sides. She cannot see where Hugi is going.

Her married life certainly sounds like hell. "I couldn't make it on my own, and I wanted children. It was a case of either staying with my parents and scratching my face or going off with 'Evil Steve.' "

"Your whole life has been stressful?" Hugi asks quietly.

"Not all," she blurts cheerfully. "We haven't even gotten to the good part yet!"

Hugi reads from the Washington Post and from her essay on surrogate parenting.

Suddenly, Fred Hugi has led Diane into more dangerous

waters, and she has not seen it coming. She was too busy talking. How was it that she found a suitable sperm donor for Danny?

She explains that she really "liked" Russ.

"But I set it up so he wouldn't know about the pregnancy. I got pregnant for me--and my kids. I didn't have many feelings about how a prospective father would feel."

Hugi's tone has the thinnest veneer of sarcasm: "Your whole goal then was to 'interact' with these children?"

"I still wish that I could someday get married and have a husband who would interact with his child."

"Were you getting what you needed from your children?" Hugi asks rhetorically.

Apparently not. There were men in her life. She is quite 418 ANN RULE

willing to talk about past lovers. She divorced Steve, worked full-time at the Chandler Post Office, and met Mack Richmond.

"You flirted with him?"

"I flirt with everybody."

"Were there temper tantrums?" [On Diane's part.]

"Very much so!"

"What brought that on?"

"Mack and his wife. I couldn't stand the way they treated their kids."

Suddenly, Diane lifts her head. She has picked up on a

change in the wind, aware at long last that Fred Hugi is not as innocuous as she thought--but she relaxes again. She finds him hostile, but a humbler who misses the points she is trying to make. Diane is condescending with Fred Hugi. If he wants to talk about her lovers, it's fine with her. She has definite opinions on sex--about the fine points that differentiate dating, friendship, and sex. She "loved them all" though.

To expedite matters, she offers to list all of her lovers, the circumstances of their meeting, the details of the affairs. The press row waits--pencils poised-Hugi demurs.

Diane still manages to slip most of the names in as her

testimony flows. The press row keeps count; the roster grows longer.

"It ended up with Lew Lewiston?" Hugi presses on.

"No, I can't say that it did."

"Any others as intense?"

"How? You mean the cards and letters?"

"No--the intensity of the emotion."

She laughs harshly. "Lew was the only one dumb enough to s tell his wife we were having an affair!"

Diane flushes frequently, the now-familiar wave of red suffusing her throat, but she never stops talking, detailing her affair with Lew, and her struggle to wrest him free of his uncooperative wife.

Even after Diane has denied that Lew means very much to

her, she defines "heart love" as the only love that really matters. (, Heart Love carries with it no sexual connotations at all.

That was what she had found only with Lew, she tells Hugi. Diane is amused remembering aloud how she was kicked out of Bible school for promiscuity. She is sad because she has