A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  Then I got back in my car. The night was dark, without stars, and I drove for hours. I drove like a fugitive through the night, with a crackling feeling inside my head, angry and guilty. Angry at myself for not having spoken out before. I wished I had tried to attract more attention, that I’d talked on Rick Kaplan’s TV news, that I’d said, “Look at this. See what is happening here.” But I hadn’t wanted to miss the trial, which I enjoyed enormously; its marvelous characters with their marvelous lines, so tragic and funny, so much better than lines I could make up. I’d attended the trial as theater, a suspense drama with a happy ending, for not since the day I heard the tapes at the pretrial hearings had it occurred to me that Peter would be found guilty. At the trial, when I’d heard him say, “I’m not sure. Can you say I’m not sure?” that seemed to create plenty of doubt, and I’d written fancifully in my notes that I saw “reasonable doubt strewn over the dingy green carpet like rotting leaves.”

  I was stunned, too, by the freakish nature of all this, by the sheer chance that had brought me to the courtroom that December day, by the chance that had determined that it would be Judge Armentano who would hear the tapes; Judge Wall, they said around court, would probably have thrown the confession out. It was chance, too, almost a whim, that Judge Armentano had had some of the tapes played in open court. It seemed so random, and random was frightening.

  The law had never caused much stir in my life. I had served on a jury once, a ridiculous episode in a New York City Civil Court with me and eleven other unqualified people attempting to unravel a complicated insurance claim, involving holding companies, real estate, mortgages, and liens. The verdict didn’t have to be unanimous, just ten out of twelve, and after a few miserable hours, enough of us voted one way or the other to make a verdict, just to get it over with. As we were being polled in the jury box, one man changed his vote.

  When my magazine piece appeared, a letter came from a man in Indianapolis, a social worker. “Too often I have seen the law is a club, used to break open the lives of people,” he wrote. Now I had seen that too, and I ran from the sight.

  It was after midnight when I drove through Litchfield, past the jail, past the courthouse with the clock tower, a town at rest. I drove up our driveway, went into the house, turned on all the lights, and made a gin and tonic. I called Jim in New York and I made some other calls, but I was still restless, angry, bursting to talk. I got back in the car, leaving my drink melting on the slate counter by the sink. I turned the car radio to a crazy level and drove south, looking for Tarrytown, where a birthday party for a friend from my Life magazine days was going on. I got lost several times, and it was about four in the morning when I got there. But there was still a remnant of a party going on, a good audience. I began to talk about Peter Reilly and what had happened to him. Daylight came, and I talked on and on, insisting, like the crazed old mariner, that everyone pay attention to what I had to say.

  14

  Eddie Houston at the Shell Station had told Peter he could have a job anytime, so in the weeks between the verdict and the sentencing, Peter pumped gas a mile or so from the little house where Barbara died. At home, at the Madows, he seemed unworried, even content, as he played his guitar and worked on an old car he was rebuilding in the driveway. He watched Ben Hur on television and rode his bike. When Roger came by to interview him, he took a charming and most uncharacteristic picture of Peter, standing by his bike in front of the house. “The thought of returning to jail scares me,” Peter told Roger. “Someday I want to hold a job, own my own home, and raise a family. This whole thing is just throwing a wrench into all my plans.”

  My own plans hadn’t been devastated, but they had gone astray. As the end of the trial approached, I had accepted an assignment from The New York Times Magazine to do a piece on Robert Redford. After a courthouse winter, surrounded by autopsy slides and sheriffs, I was ready for a little glitter in my life. I told the Times I’d be free the week after Easter.

  Besides needing a professional change of scene, I needed psychological distance. Free-lance photography clearly was a dream we couldn’t afford; Jim had begun looking for a regular job again. It was sad to have our hopes collapse, Everyman’s dream of getting out of the rat race; it was even sadder to have so much trouble trying to get back in. Unemployment was a national epidemic in 1974; we began to borrow money, and our tempers began to shred.

  But Peter wasn’t free the week after Easter, so neither was I. I called the Times Magazine and explained why I couldn’t do the Redford piece. My editor said all right, but later he grumbled goodnaturdly to my sister, who worked there, that he didn’t really understand my reasons. I couldn’t blame him. But Peter Reilly had occurred in obscurity, and it seemed urgent, now, that the discussion of what had happened, and why, and what might be done about it, spread beyond the silent Litchfield hills.

  I didn’t write an article, because we thought the publicity might hurt Peter, who was more than ever at the mercy of the courts. Partly it was the shadow of the gag order, and partly it was the shadow of self-censorship, the eeriest shadow of all.

  Bea Keith and her mother were writing letters. So was Jacqui Bernard. So I began writing letters, too. In my letters I asked for “legal, moral, or financial help,” asking for anything a person might be able to give or do. Along with each letter, I sent some stories Roger had written; my New Times piece, with the tapes; and an editorial from the Lakeville Journal, “The Issues in the Reilly Case.” The editorial, written by Robert Estabrook, pointed out that while a jury’s judgment had to be respected, the police methods used in the case might make a verdict questionable. The editorial also called Judge Armentano’s decision to allow the confession “appalling.” Altogether, it was a kind of amateur crusader’s kit, and Bill Dickinson made dozens of copies down at his shop. “If you need more, just holler,” he said. When Peter came over to our house one warm afternoon, he helped collate the pages of the piece.

  “Attention should be paid,” Arthur Miller had once written about obscure people, so I wrote to him. I wrote to Philip Roth and Martin Segal, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, William Styron and William Buckley. I didn’t know these people, but I knew they lived in Connecticut and thought they might care. At least, in my buttonholing fervor, I thought they ought to. I wrote to Mike Nichols, who had a house in Bridgewater. Somebody forwarded my letter to him in California, and late one night he called me from there. We talked a long time, then Mike Nichols began writing letters too.

  I sent a kit to Auntie B. by registered mail, but it came back marked “Addressee Unknown.”

  Peter sat at one end of our sofa, plucking little white feathers from the seat cushion. Dot Madow had driven him down to New Haven that day and he’d seen a car he liked, a silver and black 1934 Plymouth with a 318-cubic-inch engine. “It was beautiful,” Peter said softly. “It shone like a new diamond.”

  The tape recorder lay on a table behind the sofa, the microphone between us on the pillows. There was so much I wanted to know about this young man with the shy smile, who looked at me, sometimes, as though I were miles away. We hadn’t talked much during the trial, and now the day of sentencing was looming. I was afraid to think of what might lie ahead, but Peter didn’t seem afraid at all.

  “Did you know that I’m engaged?” he asked. “When Aunt Dot took us down to the car show at the Naugatuck Valley Mall, I saw a jewelry store. I went in and saw a one-third-carat diamond ring that I liked, but I’m going to need a bank loan.” I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. So I said that I had seen the girl at the trial a couple of times. She had an oval face, large dark eyes, and long, dark, straight hair. I said she was very beautiful. “She is,” Peter agreed.

  “When are you getting married, Peter?” I asked, finally.

  “It’s a long way off,” he assured me. “July or August of next year, nineteen seventy-five. We’ll both be out of school then, and I’ll be working. I’ll be on my feet financially.”

  “Where will
you be working?” I asked.

  “It’s still up in the air,” he told me, “but I’m thinking of the Southern New England Telephone Company. They pay four dollars and sixty-five cents an hour, with all the medical.” I thought of the two jurors who worked at the phone company.

  “I’m going to buy back the Triumph too,” Peter was saying. “The body doesn’t have much rust on it at all. The drive line is in rotten shape, but I’m going to put in a new motor, a new transmission, put a new rear end on it. I’m going to use foam mufflers, a three hundred horsepower Chevy V-8 engine. It’s going to be quite the little racing car.”

  He smiled, and I smiled back. I didn’t have any idea how to handle this. In a few days he would stand up in court to be sentenced for manslaughter. I hadn’t expected him to weep and wail, but I wasn’t prepared for this. He was making plans. He was making so many plans.

  Anne came in from the kitchen with a cup of apple juice, and sat in the window seat, watching us.

  “Has she been baptized?” Peter asked suddenly, just as he’d been asked in Hartford, so long ago: “Have you been baptized? Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” Barbara had brought Peter up in a religious void, but apparently he hadn’t stopped wondering. I said Anne was baptized Catholic, and we’d bring her up that way, so that later she’d have a basis for her own decision. Peter agreed. “I’m studying the Catechism myself now,” he said. “You have to start someplace.”

  “I’d like to know a little more about your mother, Peter,” I said. “I’m going to have to talk about her in the book, and make her seem real. That’ll be hard, because I never knew her.”

  Peter nodded. “I wish you could have met her,” he said. “You’d have liked her. She was something else. She was terrific.” He laughed, a soft laugh with a crinkly tone. “When I was about eight or nine, when we still lived with my grandparents, my mom built a treehouse and she gave a cocktail party there. I remember stealing all the little olives and onions. Somebody who was running for office—I think it was Tom Meskill, before he became such a big wheel in this state—came over, and everybody sat around in a little circle twenty feet in the air.

  “Then we decided to leave my grandparents’ house,” he said. He said it easily, with no hint at all of the hostility between the women.

  “We lived on Music Mountain for about a year,” Peter continued. “Then we moved back to Johnson Road with my grandmother until we decided to leave again.”

  “Do you know why your mother stopped working?” I asked. I had heard the other rumors of trouble surrounding Barbara, that she’d been fired because of an affair she’d had, a scandal involving blackmail. Barbara herself, in a letter to her Uncle Jim, had complained that Hilda had caused her to lose jobs, by writing “poisonous letters” to Barbara’s employers.

  But Peter didn’t mention any of these things, so I didn’t press him.

  “I remember when she worked at the Cole Insurance Company in Cornwall Bridge,” he said. “Now it’s a real estate office. She worked there ever since I could remember. The Dickinsons used to baby-sit for me. I met Eddie when I was only four or five. Say, have you seen Eddie’s car since he got it painted? It’s candy apple red and gold, with swirls in back. It’s really nice.” I said I hadn’t seen it.

  “Then around 1965 or 1966 we went on welfare,” Peter went on. “I was getting older, and I didn’t have my grandparents to take care of me after school, and my mom couldn’t have kept house and looked after me too. It was such a hassle,” he said vaguely. “So she just decided: me, not the job.

  “She used to write, I know,” he said. “But I never saw any manuscripts.” I said if there were any, I could show them to somebody in New York, and perhaps they could be published. “I could use two thousand, eight hundred dollars to get that car I saw this afternoon,” Peter said thoughtfully. “But I wonder if the state of Connecticut would take the money.”

  We talked about Auntie B. “I don’t know that much about her,” Peter said. “She was just always called my godmother. I wrote her quite a sarcastic letter. I said, I’m out on bond, with no help from you. Where were you when I needed you? I haven’t heard from her since. Where is she? It just totally baffles me. There are so many things that don’t make sense to me.”

  Anne had left the window seat, and now she popped up behind the sofa, wearing a witch’s mask from last Halloween. Peter smiled at her.

  “I see you,” Peter said.

  “I see you,” Anne echoed. We laughed, then Anne wandered away.

  “I just think the cops were too darn gung-ho to grab someone,” Peter went on, “and in the time they spent, whoever did it just got away.” He said he wasn’t bitter. “Just leery, now. I don’t trust them anymore.” But he said it casually. Something else he had learned from Barbara.

  “She was a very nonchalant person,” Peter said. “Didn’t get uptight about anything. I’m not so used to my new surroundings. Dad goes by the rules, you know? I’m used to playing everything by ear, you know what I mean? I think things work out best that way, myself. Just give it time, and it’ll work out. Things work out. They always do.” He smiled at me, as though he didn’t have a care in the world. And in a way he didn’t. He seemed shielded—insulated, isolated from whatever was happening to him, even while it was happening. And so much had happened, not just on the murder night but in the time since. In the past eight months he had called three different women “Mom.”

  Peter was not sentenced on May 14. Albert Roraback died that day in Amsterdam. Judge Speziale had already postponed sentencing for one week, when Miss Roraback sent word that she wanted to stay with her brother a while longer. The judge had not been in touch with her directly, but he had called Peter Herbst and told him to telephone her over there and put a stop to the petitions he’d heard were being passed around in support of Peter Reilly.

  Along with the petitions, buttons were being sold for $1, to help the Reilly Fund. Nearly everybody liked the idea, although not everybody had agreed on what the buttons should say. Some people had favored JUSTICE FOR REILLY, but others felt that that might upset the judge, who presumably felt Reilly had had his dose of justice already. Finally, PEOPLE BEHIND REILLY won by a show of hands. “But don’t wear them in court,” Mickey warned. “No buttons, no chewing gum, no posters.” Bea Keith suggested a silent vigil, and Elaine Monty agreed. “We won’t need posters,” Elaine said. “They’ll know why we’re there.”

  Money was still a problem, although there had been a small increase in checks after the verdict, and only one, for $5, had bounced. The committee had sent checks to Catherine Roraback whenever it could, but in May, after eight months on the case, she had only been paid $3,500, not enough for her to pay Peter Herbst’s salary. The committee held a coffee hour at which Murray Madow auctioned baked goods. The coffee hour was successful, in spite of the controversy over its location. The committee had hoped to hold it in one of the halls or parish houses connected with one of the churches in Torrington. But eight churches turned them down, and after some discussion of what Christianity was all about, or ought to be all about, anyway, they ended up having their coffee hour at a cocktail lounge, the Starlite Room of the Sky-Top Bowling Lanes, on a Sunday afternoon, when the lounge was closed.

  Mickey and Father Paul asked the police commissioner to reopen the investigation into Barbara’s death. There were several things they still wondered about, including the fact that Barbara’s clothes were wet; the time sequence; the unidentified fingerprint; and, then, the wallets.

  One old wallet of Barbara’s had been found in the house when she died. But two wallets were missing then: the new one she’d bought that day, and the wallet she’d reported stolen, with more than a hundred dollars in it, not long before she died. On the Monday after Peter was found guilty, Elizabeth Mansfield, who ran a general store in Falls Village, called the Hartford Courant. She said that on November 15, 1973, she had found a wallet near the driveway of the vacant house she owned, just down the road fr
om Barbara’s place. There was no money in the wallet, only identifying papers of Barbara’s. Mrs. Mansfield had taken the wallet to show to the defense lawyer, and then she’d turned it over to the state police.

  The theft of Barbara’s wallet always seemed part of an ominous pattern in the weeks before she died. She’d had harassing phone calls; obscene scrawls had been found on the walls in the vacant house nearby. Lieutenant Shay himself, in a news story shortly after Barbara died, had confirmed that the police were still investigating a reported break-in and theft. Jim Mulhern had testified about the phone calls, and Peter had testified about the stolen wallet. But the wallet that Mrs. Mansfield found wasn’t produced at the trial. One more ambiguity; one more unanswered, or half-answered, question.

  Peter was sentenced on Friday, May 24.

  In the courtroom, the atmosphere was tight and tense. Marion sat with her chin in her hands, staring straight ahead. Peter’s girl sat next to the bar rail, and alongside her, Peter was kneeling on one knee so they could talk quietly. Her long hair was spilling down onto the rail. Miss Roraback came over to get Peter, and took him into the little room that the jury had used. Miss Roraback closed the door behind her. A few minutes later, when Father Paul arrived, he walked over to the jury room and knocked. He was carrying his brown leather Bible, and, except that he was a little too young, it was like a scene from an old prison movie—Jimmy Cagney, or Mickey Rooney, on Death Row, and the padre coming to say a prayer. Mr. Roberts was as crisp and sprightly as ever, with an American Legion poppy in his lapel.

  The judge came out. “Good morning, your honor,” John Bianchi said loudly. “We are here this morning for sentencing, your honor, in State of Connecticut versus Peter Reilly. On Good Friday, April twelve, a jury of twelve found Peter Reilly guilty of manslaughter in the first degree after a seven-week trial. Since your honor presided at that trial, it seems unnecessary for me to review the facts of the case.…