Absolute Brightness

by James Lecesne

  After that, Travis was pretty much on his own. He became the star attraction, the psychopath. He was the monster with a mind of his own, and no one could hold a candle to him. It was just a matter of charting his every move, exposing his world, plumbing his life for the damning details to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did it.

  The prosecution—in the person of Mr. Griswold—was assigned to this task. Mr. Griswold was tall and thin and wore double-breasted suits that had a silky sheen to them. His hair was an indeterminate color, not exactly gray, with a patch of scalp showing through at the top. From his plain, masklike face, it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  Watching Mr. G present his case was like watching a high school biology teacher dissect a frog—gross, but also fascinating. Everything was laid bare. Even Travis’s most private thoughts in the form of amusing or hateful or tender e-mails were pulled apart, examined, and assessed by the courtroom. When the details got to be too much, we looked away, appraised our shoes, checked out everybody’s hair and makeup, thought about lunch.

  There was not much debate about whether Travis did it or did not do it. The evidence was overwhelming. First-degree murder, aggravated assault, kidnapping. Crimes like these had to be someone’s fault, and someone had to be the evil behind them. Mr. G, along with his prosecution team, worked hard to expose Travis as the source. They created a portrait of a boy who had gone astray not because he lacked guidance and a firm hand, but rather because he was born with the cold heart of a criminal and a clear intent to kill.

  Curtis Calzoni’s confession in exchange for the lesser charge of accessory to murder and the promise to try him as a minor, followed by his teary-eyed appearance on the witness stand, didn’t leave much doubt in anyone’s mind. Travis had done it.

  But even after several weeks of presenting and disputing the evidence, calling witnesses to the stand, asking experts to weigh in on matters related to the boat, the dead body, the scene of the crime, the rope, even after everyone had had enough of the whole case and all its players, one big question remained: Why did Travis do it? After sitting in the courtroom, listening to the endless drone of expert witnesses, the sobbing testimonies, the steely exchange of the cross-examination, I still didn’t get it. Not really. And I doubt whether the jury understood it either. Whatever happened that night to make the violence seem inevitable and irreversible remained out of reach, unknown.

  What we learned from the trial was this: Travis had been driving around with Curtis, looking for trouble. When they happened to spot Leonard walking west along Colter Road, Travis suggested that they give the kid a ride. Leonard was on his way home from Buddy Howard’s house, where he had spent the evening proving to Mr. Buddy that he had, in fact, learned all his act 1 lines in The Tempest. Usually Mr. Buddy drove Leonard home as arranged by my mother; but we learned from Mr. Buddy’s own testimony that Leonard said he wanted to walk instead because he was meeting a friend. After Leonard had said good night, Mr. B continued to read act 2 of The Tempest and then he answered some e-mails. All of this was corroborated by Mr. Buddy’s computer records.

  Travis pulled over, and after a brief exchange, Leonard got into the car and sat in the backseat. Had their meeting been arranged beforehand? Not according to Curtis; he claimed it had been purely accidental. Leonard leaned his head forward into the front seat so he could discuss with Travis and Curtis the details of his upcoming performance. He asked them if they wanted to be backstage crew. They laughed at the thought of themselves standing in the shadows while Leonard, dressed as a fairy, jumped around in the light. Leonard said they were philistines.

  “Whatever,” Travis reportedly replied.

  At some point, according to Curtis’s testimony, Leonard suggested that they head out to Shark River. To cool off, Curtis had told the court. “Y’know, to swim.” This was odd because, as I told Mr. G earlier, Leonard didn’t know how to swim and it seemed unlikely that Curtis would’ve come up with this idea himself. At the time Mr. G grunted, scribbled something down on his legal pad, and said that bit of info might come in handy.

  Travis parked the car on a quiet side street and all three boys got out. There was no indication of a struggle. Not yet. One of them (Curtis wasn’t sure who) suggested the possibility of breaking into a nearby house and stealing stuff, but they decided against it. Leonard had to pee and he insisted that they find someplace private so he could do it. Together they worked their way farther down the street, where they couldn’t be seen from any of the lakefront homes. When they reached a small natural cove, surrounded by a stand of birch trees, Travis said he wasn’t going any farther. He quickly stripped naked and dove headfirst into the lake. When he had cleared the pontoon that was floating about twenty feet from the shore, he turned and called to the shore. He wanted Curtis and Leonard to join him.

  “Now!” he shouted.

  Curtis stripped down to his underpants, kicked off his sneakers, tore off his T-shirt, and made a splash as he dove into the water. Leonard remained on the shore, watching. Curtis hooted a few times, a reaction to the cool temperature of the water and, as he reported it, the pure fun of it all.

  What happened next isn’t exactly clear. Curtis’s testimony became sketchy at this point, and even Mr. G’s no-nonsense examination technique couldn’t clear things up. Why, for instance, did Travis swim back to the shore? Was he trying to get Leonard into the water, or did he already have darker motives? According to Curtis’s calculations, there were about five or six minutes that he was unable to account for. What happened between Travis and Leonard during that time and what they said to each other remains a mystery, because Travis refused to elaborate.

  What we do know is that by the time Curtis reached the shore, Leonard was still alive and lying unconscious on the grass. Travis stood over him with a large rock in his hand, and he was still naked. As a way of explaining what had happened, Travis allegedly muttered, “Fucking faggot.”

  Travis then handed his car keys to Curtis and told him to hurry up and get him the rope that was in the trunk. Curtis said he was probably in shock at this point. But when Mr. G examined him further, he said he figured Leonard was already dead (he was not), and he was scared that he’d be Travis’s next victim if he didn’t do as he was told. In any case, Curtis did as he was told. He claimed that he wasn’t an accomplice or an accessory or anything like that. The judge advised him to calm down and just continue answering Mr. G’s questions.

  After getting the rope from the trunk of the car, Curtis returned to the scene of the crime. By this time Travis had found a small rowboat that was moored nearby and had pulled it ashore near to the place where Leonard’s body lay. Curtis watched as Travis leaned over Leonard.

  “Help me,” Travis said, and that was when Curtis stepped in and performed his lousy rope trick—the square knot, also known as Exhibit F. Then quickly, efficiently, Travis and Curtis picked up Leonard’s limp body and placed it in the hull of the boat.

  “Did you at any point notice that Leonard was still breathing?” Mr. G asked Curtis.

  “Objection,” Ms. Fassett-Holt offered.

  “Overruled,” said the judge, and then she slid her eyeballs over to where Ms. Fassett-Holt was standing. “We’ve already heard from the experts that the victim died from drowning. I think we can agree that if he was still alive when they put him in the boat, he had to be breathing. Or do I have my science wrong?”

  Ms. Fassett-Holt sat down again to chew her pencil end, and the story continued.

  Curtis did not in fact notice whether Leonard was still breathing, but he assumed that the kid was dead and they were getting rid of the corpse.

  Curtis helped Travis lift Leonard’s body into the boat. Together they paddled out to the center of the lake, cut the anchor loose from the boat, and attached it to Leonard. Then they dumped the body overboard, slipping him into the water without a splash. Leonard sank to the bottom of the lake, where he remained until he was found by the divers Vlad and Brian.<
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  “Were you aware that Leonard had two-pound weights attached to his ankles?” Mr. G asked Curtis.

  “Yeah,” said Curtis, trying to suppress a smirk. “Everybody knew about that. It was for the play he was in. He never shut up about it.”

  “Since you are so familiar with the story,” Mr. G intoned, “would you be kind enough to explain it to the court for us.”

  “Okay,” Curtis began. “Leonard was in a play at the high school. We didn’t think he’d seriously flit around the stage in tights. Nobody did.”

  “And what was the play?”

  “Shakespeare. Something by Shakespeare, and he was going to play a kind of fairy.”

  The courtroom erupted in titters and suppressed laughter. Judge Gamble whacked her gavel.

  “Go on,” Mr. G said.

  “Anyway, his character was trapped on this island. I don’t know the play. And I didn’t get what he was talking about. Something about how wearing the weights would help him to flit about like … well, like a fairy.”

  More titters. Another gavel whack.

  And then, even though Mr. G was addressing himself to Curtis, he did this thing where he turned to face the jury.

  “You realize of course, Curtis, that if Leonard had suddenly become conscious in the water and managed to free himself from the weight of the anchor, his ankle weights would’ve taken him down. You saw that as a possibility?”

  “Objection, Your Honor. Leading the witness.”

  “Sustained.”

  “I’ll withdraw the question,” Mr. G said, knowing he had done the damage he’d set out to do. He didn’t care about the court records; he only wanted the jury to understand the situation clearly. “No more questions, Your Honor.”

  nineteen

  JUDGE GAMBLE INSTRUCTED the jury that while it would be emotionally satisfying to have a clear motive in this case, it wasn’t essential in establishing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But without a clear motive, all the evidence in the world is just stuff laid out on a table. Without a why, the story hangs there unresolved. Turns out it’s the motive that connects the dots, makes a case, and allows us to sleep at night. And really, there was no motive—nothing that could be said out loud and with certainty.

  Once the trial began, all the reporters we had seen the previous year after Leonard died were back in our lives. They were free to speculate about what Travis’s motive might have been, but for them it was a professional matter. Most of them camped out in front of the courthouse in Trenton and reported daily what was going on inside the building. A few of them with names and microphones that we recognized parked their vans on our street, determined to get a statement from one of us set against the charming backdrop of the salon. Usually we just stayed indoors when they were around. None of us appreciated being local color for the evening news. Not again.

  When Deirdre, Mom, and I weren’t busy hurrying from the house to the car with a coat draped over our heads, we were peeking through curtains to watch on-the-scene reporters with TV hair stand in a shock of light and yak about us to their at-home audience. In their most professional tones and snazziest outfits, they speculated about how we felt, why Travis did it, and what would be his fate when the whole thing was finished. Some of the more seasoned reporters, like my old pal Carol Silva-Hernandez, spoke directly into the camera and tried to convey the impression that she was feeling something for all of us, even for Travis. If she talked about the future at all, she made it clear that she had adopted a wait-and-see attitude.

  Of course, once the gays and lesbians got wind of Leonard’s fate, they all hopped on their bandwagon and headed in our direction. They claimed that Travis’s motive was hate. They called it a hate crime. At first I was like, “Wait. Isn’t all crime about hate?” But then Jodi, a lesbian from Weehawken, informed me that some people are targets of violence because of their “difference.” Jodi had come to Trenton to “be a public face,” talk to the press, and demonstrate outside the courthouse. She frequently held forth on the steps of the courthouse and also on our front lawn when she came to visit us. Reporters either made the most of her, offering her airtime and egging her on with questions, or they ignored her completely and treated her like a nutcase. Jodi couldn’t have cared less what people thought of her. She was an activist—also a poet. Her life, she told me, was her art. Take it or leave it.

  Personally, I don’t think art should ever be an excuse for bad hairstyling. Everybody should take pride in the way they look, especially if they happen to be appearing on TV. Jodi had a mullet. When she appeared on TV, her head looked as though it had been set in a box of flyaway and fuzz. Not a good look. Mom and I tried many times to break the news to her that she was in need of a makeover, but she was so busy explaining the proceedings at court to us whenever she had a chance that we rarely could get a word in edgewise. Clearly, beauty was not a priority for Jodi. If only Leonard had been around, I thought, Jodi would’ve been invited back to Neptune for an overnight, and she would’ve left our house the next morning a changed person.

  This crime, she explained, wasn’t motivated by greed or passion or jealousy or even rage; it wasn’t that personal. She said that the perpetrator (Travis) saw the victim (Leonard) demonstrating certain traits of a particular type (gay), and though the perpetrator may not have had any feelings one way or the other for the victim, he certainly had strong feelings (hate) toward the type. In this particular case, she explained, it was pretty obvious from Curtis’s confession that the real reason Travis singled Leonard out was because he couldn’t tolerate the fact that Leonard might be gay.

  I think if you had asked Leonard point-blank if he was gay, he would have totally sidestepped the question. He would have told you (as he told me) that he was just being himself—obviously. But I think everyone who knew Leonard would agree that “being himself” involved giving off homo signals like fireworks off a lit barge. If he wasn’t already officially there, he was definitely on his way. It was just a matter of time.

  A chorus of people took the stand, one after another, and each of them backed up the idea that even if Leonard wasn’t exactly gay, he was at the very least “flamboyant.” “Colorful” was also a word the witnesses used to describe Leonard. And “original” was tossed around, too. Leonard’s teachers, some of Mom’s customers, Uncle Mike, and even a few of Leonard’s classmates all said the same thing in so many words—Leonard was a big sissy. From there it was just a short leap for Mr. G to propose that Leonard was what he called “pre-gay,” and therefore subject to the same prejudices that gays and lesbians might suffer. The case wasn’t being tried as a hate crime, not officially, but Mr. G had made his point.

  Every once in a while Travis moved his head, but he never fully turned toward the witness stand or toward the jury, and as far as I could tell nothing seemed to register with him. Even when Mr. G pointed at him and referred to him as the “defendant” and accused him of doing something called “entrapment,” Travis never moved in his chair. Jodi told us later that Mr. G was playing the hate card. And Travis just watched him do it without budging. Jodi said it was either an impressive show of self-control on Travis’s part or the guy was just plain dead inside.

  When Mr. G introduced Travis’s e-mails as evidence and had Curtis read snippets of them aloud in court, Travis leaned over and whispered something into Ms. Fassett-Holt’s ear. But at that point she didn’t raise an objection. How could she? She seemed to realize right then that her boy was sunk. Though the words Travis had used to describe Leonard in those e-mails were shocking to the people in the courtroom, the content of them was pretty straightforward. Gays were dead meat.

  What was still missing, however, was an indication that Leonard’s murder had been premeditated. Sure the hate was there, but not the plan.

  During our lunch break, Mr. G told us that he hadn’t been able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Travis had planned the whole thing, with or without Curtis. An important point, he said. Still, he explained to
us as he delicately bit into his machine-vended Kit Kat bar, without an airtight alibi, without credible character witnesses, and with so much of the evidence stacked against the defendant, Ms. Fassett-Holt didn’t stand much of a chance. He said Travis would most certainly be found guilty and then only one question would remain—how harsh would his sentence be?

  “What about motive?” I asked him. “Is that over with?”

  He raised his shoulders and then let them drop. It was anybody’s guess. The jury would have to decide for themselves if there was enough to support a probable motive. But Mr. G explained that unless something unexpected was introduced at the last minute, he felt the case was sown up. And then he chomped the last of his Kit Kat and licked his fingers as if to emphasize his point.

  The next two days were spent listening to Ms. Fassett-Holt present her case. She called several people to the stand: experts and witnesses who testified about the extent and depths of Travis’s miserable childhood; and together they shored up the argument that the boy deserved, at the very least, kindness. There were no big surprises or star witnesses, and as a result the proceedings were at times almost too painful to sit through. Nonetheless, Ms. Fassett-Holt persevered.

  At the end of day two, I watched as they led Travis out of the courtroom. He was (as my Nana Hertle used to say) “calm as damnit,” floating above it all and showing not even a flicker of human emotion. He didn’t seem to have any idea of the trouble he was in or of the consequences he was going to suffer if found guilty. It was as though he didn’t care if he won the case or not, and that afternoon, instead of looking back at the courtroom as he usually did when he was led away, he just went with the guards. As they hustled him through the doorway and out of sight, I remember thinking, That’s it—he’s gone. Travis Lembeck was already living in another world, another dimension. The Past had ceased to exist for him. The Future was too painful to consider. He was already serving time.