Chris shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess that’s what I mean about sometimes my memory is bad.”
“Your problem,” Brereton said, “isn’t your own memory. It’s other people’s memories. And some of them are pretty damned good. I’ve got some statements here from a few of your friends at NC State. Let’s take this Daniel Duyk, for instance. He says he told you that if your parents were dead, you’d have enough money so you could loan him some to start a restaurant.
“And as you may know, Upchurch’s lawyer let me interview Upchurch in jail. He didn’t say much I believed, but about the money he told me the same goddamned thing. You were planning to have it all.”
“Well, maybe they heard it from Vince,” Chris said. “I told Vince, I think, about the Camel City Dry Cleaners. And Vince is from Winston. He’d know that would be worth a lot of money.”
“I don’t give a fuck about Vince,” Brereton said. “I’m talking about what Daniel says you told him. Like, if your parents were dead, you’d have a lot of money and you could buy a big house with a long driveway and a fast car, and you could go there and take drugs and play Dungeons and Dragons, and someday you were going to write a book—a fiction book, you told him. One good book that would make you even more money.”
Chris’s discomfort was becoming increasingly obvious.
“Look, look, I was drinking a lot of beer. I was smoking a lot of pot. I was dropping acid. I might have said some of these things. Like I told you, my memory’s bad.”
“Chris,” Bill Osteen said, “think carefully now. I’m asking you one more time: Did you ever leave anyone with the impression—and this is not to say that you wanted to see anything happen—but did you ever give anyone the impression that you would be better off financially if Lieth and Bonnie were dead?”
He didn’t answer the question. Instead, he said, “It’s possible that I printed that word. Lawson. It’s possible I printed that on the map. I think it may have been James who drew the map. Upchurch. I think he drew it for a new D and D scenario we were just starting, and I could have printed the word on it then.”
“So it’s ‘possible,’” Brereton said. “And, ah, when was it ‘possible’ you could have done this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. About eight or nine days before.”
“About eight or nine days before what?”
“You know, before what—before what happened.”
“Listen, you silly little son of a bitch!” Brereton shouted. “I’m not swallowing this bullshit! I want to know what the fuck was going on. You might be able to fool a nice guy like Mr. Osteen, but I’m not a nice guy, and you’re not, fooling me at all.”
Chris looked scared.
“Upchurch used that map,” Brereton said, “to get to your house to kill your stepfather and try to kill your mother, so you could inherit a million bucks.”
“No!” Chris said. “He was only supposed to steal a few things.”
* * *
The room fell silent.
“All right, look, I’ll tell you the truth,” Chris said. “I did draw the map. And I gave it to them. And I also loaned them my car. James had said if he could get into the house he could steal a bunch of stuff and take it to a pawnshop and then we’d all have more money for drugs. There was some stuff I told him about. The TV, the VCR, a radar detector, the stereo. And probably some cash in my mother’s pocketbook. But it was downstairs! The only things I told him about were downstairs. He was never even supposed to go up the stairs. He wasn’t supposed to hurt anybody. Something must have got out of control. I don’t know what happened because I’ve never talked to either one of them since.”
* * *
Bill Osteen had to make another quick appearance in court. It was almost one P.M. by the time he returned.
“So you drew them a map,” he said, “so they could go down to your house and steal some things. You understand, Chris, this is a major difference from any story you’ve ever told before.”
“We just wanted money,” Chris said. “So we could do more drugs and keep playing the game.”
And it was then—with that reference to Dungeons & Dragons, which Chris habitually referred to simply as “the game”—that Tom Brereton jumped up from his chair. He pounded the conference table with one fist and stuck his other hand about three inches from Chris’s nose.
“Look, kid,” he shouted, “this is real life! This ain’t no more fuckin’ game!”
And Chris looked up at Brereton and said, to everyone’s surprise, “Okay, I did it. I planned it. That’s what you want to hear. Now you’ve heard it.”
* * *
While Osteen and Brereton and Bill Junior stared at him in utter silence, Chris Pritchard cried for about thirty seconds.
Still in his first year of private law practice, Bill Osteen, Jr., found himself suddenly peering over the edge of a deep abyss, at something very dark and formless far below.
“It was so foreign,” he said later. “The whole thing was so absolutely foreign to everything in my whole experience of life. I remember feeling so terribly sad, thinking about how much Bonnie loved Chris, and how much faith she had in him, how convinced she’d been that he’d had nothing to do with this at all.”
Quickly regaining his composure, Chris lit a cigarette, got to his feet, and in his sandals and T-shirt and short pants, began to pace the length of the conference room.
“I didn’t plan on telling you this,” he said. “I didn’t plan to tell anybody, ever. And I don’t know why I’m telling you now.”
But then he sat down again and told them the details.
* * *
When he was finished, they had him wait in an outer office while they had a private talk.
“Where I come from,” Brereton said, “this is when you put the cuffs on him and take him away. But we’re working for the little bastard, not against him.”
“And I’m afraid,” Osteen said, “that our real work is just beginning. We still have to defend him at trial.”
“How the fuck can we do that?” Brereton said. “What if the son of a bitch is found innocent?”
“I don’t know.” Osteen said. “He’s a mess. But no matter what he’s told us, he still stands a chance of being acquitted. In fact, it’s our job to get him acquitted. But what happens if he goes free? What happens to him, knowing that he’s gotten away with murder, and that we know it? And what happens to Bonnie?”
The thought occurred to Bill Osteen that Chris had just confessed to trying once to kill his mother to get her money. How could they be sure he wouldn’t try again?
“Jesus Christ, I don’t think I can handle this,” Brereton said. “That kid walks, and I’ve gotta spend the rest of my life down on my knees, prayin’ he don’t hurt anybody ever again.”
“We’re going to be down on our knees before that,” Osteen said. “Knowing what we know, how do we let him go home to Bonnie tonight? There’s no telling what he might do. And she’s even given him a gun.”
“For his own protection,” Brereton said.
“Here’s what I think,” Osteen said. “For his own protection and for Bonnie’s, I don’t think we can let him go home. I think we’ve got to get him straight to a psychiatrist. I don’t know if he’ll kill Bonnie, but I’m afraid there’s a doggone good chance he’ll kill himself.”
* * *
After two hours’ worth of frantic phone calls they located a Chapel Hill psychiatrist named Billy Royal, a man experienced in legal matters. By then, an eerie and unnatural calm had come over Chris, as if he’d realized that, for him, the game—whatever it had started as, and whatever it had become—was over now.
Osteen explained to Billy Royal that a young client of his had just confessed to involvement in the murder of his stepfather and the attempted murder of his mother, and that his current condition was somet
hing Osteen did not feel qualified to judge, but that it might well be either suicidal or homicidal.
Dr. Royal, much of whose work consisted of evaluating criminal defendants to determine their fitness for trial, agreed to see Chris immediately.
* * *
Having sought the truth, and now obtained it, Bill Osteen was faced with the thorniest ethical and moral dilemma of his long and distinguished career.
With Chris on his way to Chapel Hill, Osteen had a ninety-minute telephone talk with Jim Vosburgh. Before it was over, the two of them had to confront three unattractive facts:
First, it remained Chris’s right, and might well remain his inclination, to continue with his plea of not guilty. This would put Osteen and Vosburgh in the unenviable position of trying to win acquittal for a client they knew to be guilty not only of murder, but of the attempted murder of his own mother, a woman who continued to believe in his innocence.
Second, Osteen felt he could not permit Chris to testify in his own defense, for such testimony would constitute perjury. An attorney can harbor many suspicions about the veracity of his client’s story, but once he knows the truth, and knows his client intends to lie under oath, he cannot—under Osteen’s standard of ethics—allow the client to take the stand. But jurors—especially in a murder trial—no matter how often they’re instructed not to infer guilt from a defendant’s decision not to testify, can hardly do anything else. Common sense dictates that an innocent man would demand the chance to tell his story, especially with his own life at stake. Chris’s silence would count heavily against him at trial, yet Osteen could not permit him to speak.
Third—and perhaps worst of all—Osteen and Vosburgh realized they could not let Bonnie know the truth.
The State still had the burden of proving the charges against Chris beyond a reasonable doubt. Without question, the State would call Bonnie to testify. She was, after all, the sole surviving victim of the attack. And when Bonnie testified, she’d tell the truth: of that Osteen was certain. He had come to know her well enough to be certain that she would not lie under oath, not even to save her son.
If Bonnie knew the truth, therefore, Chris would lose all chance for acquittal.
The only way in which her testimony could help him—and both Osteen and Vosburgh believed it would help mightily—was if she was able to tell a jury honestly that there wasn’t a chance in the world that her son had had anything to do with the crime.
But Bonnie had been Chris’s intended victim and she might be again. So did they not also have an obligation to her? Could they let her continue in her ignorance, now that they knew her son had tried to have her murdered?
These were questions Osteen and Vosburgh would put to themselves, and to each other, more than once in the months that lay ahead.
But for now, Osteen said, he’d better call the poor woman to tell her not to expect Chris home for supper.
24
Bonnie was at a neighbor’s house, having a cup of tea, when the call from Osteen came at shortly after five P.M.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but Chris is not going to be coming home tonight.”
“What do you mean?” For an instant, she thought he was dead.
“We had a very rough session here today,” Osteen continued, his voice not quite gruff, but with a certain gravelly, matter-of-fact edge to it. In personal style, he was more the steel fist than Wade Smith’s velvet glove.
“Tom Brereton and I found it necessary to put some very hard questions to Chris today. We got quite tough with him, as a matter of fact. By the end of the meeting he was very upset. Frankly, I wouldn’t have been comfortable letting him go home in the shape he was in, so I’ve sent him on to a psychiatrist in Chapel Hill.”
Osteen said the psychiatrist’s name was Billy Royal, and that he’d been highly recommended by everyone from whom they’d sought a referral. He said Chris was to meet with Dr. Royal at seven P.M., and he was sure that the doctor would be in touch with Bonnie as soon as possible after that and would answer any other questions she might have.
Any other questions? She hadn’t even started to ask questions. Yet she found herself almost too stunned to begin. It was as if, just as on the night of the murder, she’d been struck a sharp blow in the head.
In an almost trancelike state, she reached out for pencil and paper and wrote the psychiatrist’s name. Finally, she managed to ask, “But what happened? What brought this on?”
“As I said, Bonnie, Tom was pretty tough in his questioning. When he got into some of the nuts and bolts, frankly, it seemed a bit too much for Chris to handle. I don’t want to go into detail at this point, and I don’t want to alarm you any more than necessary, but by the end of the meeting, we all felt—and Bill Junior was here with us, too—that in the state Chris was in there could be a danger that he might harm himself. We agreed that the best thing would be to send him on to Dr. Royal.”
After hanging up, Bonnie returned to her own home and sat alone, as the muggy evening turned to dusk and darkness. She knew it made no sense, she knew she was in no greater personal danger now than at any other time since the attack, but she went to her bedroom and got her gun anyway and placed it on the arm of the chair in which she sat, waiting for the phone call from Dr. Royal.
It was ten P.M. before the call came and when it did, the news was not good.
Billy Royal was sixty-two years old, North Carolina born and bred, a soft-spoken man with a gentle manner and a voice that, especially on the telephone, tended to trail off before he reached the end of a sentence. His voice did not possess the crisp authority of Bill Osteen’s or the hearty good-fellowship of Jim Vosburgh’s or the comforting composure of Wade Smith’s. His voice sounded tired, resigned, even maybe a little bit sad about all its owner had been exposed to over the years. It also, quite frequently, was a voice that contained a hint of subtle humor, good cheer, and profound appreciation for those aspects of life that did not involve forensic psychiatry, but those were not qualities that Bonnie would ever have an easy time detecting, and certainly not now.
Billy Royal—and Billy was his given name, not William—told her that he’d had Chris admitted to the psychiatric service of Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill because, after an extended interview with Chris and a conversation with William Osteen, he thought Chris might be suicidal.
He added, however, that Chris was, for the present, perfectly safe and suggested that Bonnie not visit until the next day.
* * *
Early the next morning, Osteen called Wade Smith. As Wade later recalled it, Osteen, speaking “hypothetically,” and in the most vague and indirect language he could muster, tried to suggest some of what had occurred the day before, and to describe the dilemma with which he found himself confronted.
In this talk—as can happen when two skilled and experienced attorneys speak to one another about so delicate a matter—information was conveyed so inexplicitly that anyone looking at a transcript of their conversation would have had a hard time determining even what the subject was, much less what conclusions were reached.
“Wade, there are some things I can’t tell you,” Osteen said.
“Bill, don’t tell me anything that you don’t want me to tell Bonnie, because I’m going to have to tell her if I know something that I think is relevant to her welfare.”
Osteen fell silent.
“So,” Wade said after maybe thirty seconds had passed, “I guess there will just have to be a lot of things I don’t know.”
“That’s right, Wade. We’re going to have to have this understanding. I’m going to know things that you can’t know. But in effect, I want you to understand something, and that is, it is conceivable that Chris did this. I’m not telling you anything more, but I’m telling you it is conceivable, and you need to take any action you feel you need to take in that regard. I don’t wa
nt you to be blindsided.”
And so Wade had to engage in his own wrestling match with his conscience and ethics and sense of professional duty.
“I was walking down a tightwire,” he said later. “I had a duty to tell my client things I learned about the case. I can’t just keep a secret from my client. But the ethical constraint that is requiring me to tell my client things is not anything like the ethical constraint that is keeping Bill from telling me things his client tells him. Still, I couldn’t hold things back very long, and I couldn’t hold back things that put Bonnie in danger.
“Was she in great danger? Would Chris try to hurt her in some way? That was a burden. I worried a lot about that. My view was that Chris might do something to himself, but he wouldn’t do anything to Bonnie. But it was a risky moment.”
Risky, in particular, for Bonnie. Especially given the fact that Wade had never even met Chris.
For the moment, however, he decided that the best thing he could do was to be sure that Jean Spaulding was kept apprised of the direction in which events seemed to be moving.
* * *
After speaking to Wade, Osteen called Bonnie. He told her he knew Chris had been hospitalized and that he thought Dr. Royal had made the right decision. But he told her, too, that before she visited Chris, it was imperative that she meet with him.
She reached his office at one-thirty P.M.
Osteen seemed sympathetic and concerned, but his first words struck Bonnie as uncharacteristically vague.
“Some of the things we’d hoped were correct we now have to question,” he said. “Certain facts turned out to be not as we had anticipated. Bonnie, there’s no way for you not to be concerned at this point, but oftentimes we think things are one way when they’re not.”
She just nodded, barely listening, not comprehending any meaning behind the words. All she knew was that Chris was suffering a new and more acute kind of pain, and that she wanted to do whatever she could to ease it.
Cruel Doubt Page 27