by Rich, A. J.
I stood and paced the cell. I remembered a story that Steven had told me when he came home from Afghanistan. While visiting a prison, he noticed an isolated cell at the end of a dank hallway. He looked through the tiny hole in the door and saw a young girl, maybe thirteen years old, lying in a heap facing the door with a blank stare, nothing else in the cell but a cot. No sink or toilet. He asked his interpreter to ask the warden what she was in jail for. The warden explained that her father had brought her there because she’d run away with her boyfriend and their families caught them, and then they ran away again. Steven asked why she had no water and why she was kept so isolated—wasn’t that cruel? The warden said yes, he felt bad for her, but he had no female prison guards to take care of her. The girl was going crazy from this, Steven could see; he reported it to the US embassy, and they eventually negotiated her release.
It was quiet now; the women’s argument about the phone had stopped. No COs were present. I was in the Tombs—buried alive.
This night would either dismantle me or show me what I was made of. Another person might find herself galvanized by the extremity of the situation, find herself searching for what she might have missed that led to one cop’s death and another’s mauling. Go over every opportunity to have stopped Billie, to have prevented the carnage. But that would not change what had happened.
I sat on the floor, leaning against a wall, and the first lines of an Emily Dickinson poem came to me: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes— / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—” Of course that was why it came to me there.
That was the last thought I had until I was awakened by the sound of keys, and a CO saying, “When I call your name, step out, shut up. You’re going into court. Don’t say a word. Don’t motion to anyone in the court. Just sit, look straight ahead, until they call your name.”
Half a dozen names were called, but not mine.
Two cops came for me about ten minutes later. My wrists were handcuffed and secured to a belt around my waist. I was driven to the Criminal Courthouse, less than a hundred yards away, for the traditional “perp walk” up the granite steps.
Once the squad car pulled up, a swarm of reporters with cameras and microphones were waiting for me. I was led past the press into the courthouse. I was taken on an elevator up to the fourth floor, to a small booth off a holding cell where Steven was waiting. The cops left me alone with my brother.
“Fucking unbelievable.” Steven hugged me and kissed my forehead.
At his touch, I started to cry. “What happens now?”
“They’re going to charge you with murder. Of a cop.”
“But the dogs were Billie’s. I was the target, not the cop.”
“Listen, we only have a few minutes. I’m going to ask for bail, but we can’t count on it.”
“What about the second cop? Is he going to be okay?”
“He’s in ICU at Columbia Presbyterian. He’s expected to survive.”
“Not to sound self-serving, but will he be able to talk soon? Maybe he saw what really happened.”
“You’ll know when I know.”
“Is that where Billie is?”
“She was released this morning. It was just a flesh wound. Her grandmother took her home.”
“But her dogs killed a cop.”
“She told the police that you let the dogs loose from their cages. What do you know about those dogs?”
“Billie gave them commands in German. They were attack-trained.”
“Jesus.”
I told him I knew how suspected cop killers were treated. I’d read Mumia Abu-Jamal’s book, Live from Death Row. I had seen the infamous video of Esteban Carpio, beaten unrecognizable and made to wear a Hannibal Lecter–like mask, escorted to his arraignment for killing a cop. I told Steven that if convicted, I would spend twenty-three hours a day in complete isolation.
An officer unlocked the holding cell and told Steven to wrap it up. Steven told me he’d see me in the courtroom in a couple of minutes.
The courtroom was right next door. The officer led me in and sat me at the defense table. To my right, a door opened, and a group of women wearing orange jumpsuits and handcuffs were directed into the jury box. Talk about a jury of your peers.
Steven entered the courtroom through the public entrance and joined me at the table.
The judge read the charges. Steven indicated the moment when I was to declare myself “not guilty.” It was over in less than half an hour. Bail denied.
The only way I could tell the time was by the arrival of meals, not that I could eat. The smell of urine and feces was constant. I didn’t want to lie down on the bench; I tried to touch as few surfaces as possible. My breath was sour from vomiting the night before. My clothes were rank. The itching had subsided, but the welts remained. Anxiety had mutated to dread—of the next ten minutes, and the rest of my life.
Shortly after lunch—a bologna sandwich and a small carton of milk—which I didn’t touch, a CO collected me, again in handcuffs, and walked me around the corner to a tiny office where McKenzie was waiting.
“You can take the cuffs off her,” McKenzie said, standing.
“You sure?” the CO said.
McKenzie waved him off and waited while the CO unlocked me. When we were alone, McKenzie pulled me into a hug and held me for a long time. Of all the things I should have been worrying about, I worried about the way I looked and smelled.
“You know Billie did this, right?”
“I’ve already been to the shelter and checked the intake records. They show that the Dogos were surrendered by ‘Morgan Prager.’ ” He watched for my reaction.
“Of course.”
“Steven told me they were attack-trained. I checked with all the training schools in the tristate, and no one has worked with Dogos in the last couple of years. Which means that she had them trained somewhere else, or she trained them herself. Do you have any idea where she might have kept them?”
“I never went to her home.”
“Neither did I.” My gratitude for what he had just told me must have been evident, because he repeated what he had just said. “And the address she gave when she worked for me was fake.”
“Her grandmother has a horse farm in Connecticut.”
“The family’s lawyer told me I’ll need a court order to search the property.”
“Wherever she kept them, she’s had them for six months at least.” I asked what the press was doing with the story.
“They’ll be on to something else tomorrow.”
“I hope it’s the murders of Susan Rorke, Pat Loewi, and Samantha Couper.”
“I got it all from Steven.”
“She wouldn’t be the first person to get away with murder,” I said.
“People slip up, even someone like Billie.”
“Unless they don’t.”
“Steven’s lining up a criminal defense attorney right now. Carol Anders will be here in the morning. She’s first-rate; she was in practice with my wife.
“And now that that’s out of the way, I can tell you I met with Billie before she was released from the hospital. Her grandmother was in the room—this was early this morning. With no reason to believe she would, I went there to try to get her to cooperate, to tell the truth. I asked where she had kept the Dogos. Her grandmother told me not to bother her, and Billie suggested her grandmother go down to the cafeteria for coffee while we talked.
“She became furious, but in this quiet, icy way. She couldn’t risk drawing the attention of medical staff, so she kept her voice down, but the rage in her eyes was absolute. She knew I believed you and not her. And she saw she couldn’t control me.”
“You met Libertine.” I told McKenzie the whole story.
“I knew there was something off from the start.”
“But you kept seeing her.”
“It’s a cliché, I know, but she was like a drug. I didn’t come down until she came to work in my office. I saw the way
she treated people she didn’t need anything from.” He raised his hand to signal the impatient guard standing outside that he needed five more minutes. “She never asked about the second cop, if he was going to make it. I think she feels she’s getting away with everything. And I think she’s enjoying it.”
“That’s why she’s so dangerous. I just found the silver lining to my incarceration. Billie can’t get to me in here.”
“I’ve got an investigator continuing the Dogos search. And we’re hoping the injured cop will be able to give a statement soon.”
I asked him to contact the Boston detective, to tell him about the e-mails I had read in which Billie as Libertine had confessed to killing Susan Rorke.
I asked him the question that had occurred to me before: “Are e-mails admissible as evidence?”
“If you can verify who sent them.” McKenzie apologized for having to leave me here. He said he could do more for me outside.
No way I could argue with that. I could do nothing.
• • •
I could do nothing, that is, except conjure the single act that might exonerate me.
After McKenzie left, I was told I had to wait in my cell until there were enough “bodies”—that’s what they called us—to bring upstairs. There, we were handcuffed behind our backs to another prisoner and marched down the stairs to street level, where a bus to Rikers Island was idling. It was awkward to sit while shackled to someone else, and the bus’s shocks were all but gone; since we were traveling on some of the city’s worst surface roads, the ride was painful. I had only ever entered Rikers as a grad student, there to get the required credit hours for clinical training. I had the absurd impulse to pull rank, immediately squelched by the woman I was shackled to, who didn’t stop coughing. Shalonda, the transsexual I was fond of, had told me that the incidence of tuberculosis at Rikers is three times higher than in the city, and mostly drug-resistant.
We women were separated from the men and led to the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s prison. I was freed from my partner, taken to a small ward with only eight doors, and put in a cell. I didn’t know where the rest of the women were taken.
My cell had a platform with a mattress, a metal sink, an exposed toilet, and a desk of sorts, attached to a wall. I sat on the bed on full alert. All those sessions I had conducted with inmates—was the guy who couldn’t stop telling jokes still here? The guy who had exposed himself in the Metropolitan Museum? I remembered Shalonda’s last words to me: “It’s a good feeling to surprise yourself—you’ll see.”
I lay down, folding my arms behind my head since no pillow was provided. Nothing was on the filthy, long-ago-whitewashed cinder-block walls to snag my attention. No graffiti. I willed myself to envision a bedroom that was the opposite of where I was. Whose bedroom came to mind? Billie’s, the one at her grandmother’s estate. Not a bedroom so much as a wing, a gallery, I recalled. Those white-carpeted floors, the paintings displayed, blue-chip art by Motherwell and de Kooning. And in the adjoining room, the electrifying black canvas with the red shape like the letter H filled with blood. This last by Loewi. Pat’s grandfather.
My breathing changed.
I was back in Pat’s studio, her showing me the naked photos of herself, and that dog of hers, the rottweiler, throwing herself against the window. She had not been found when Pat’s body was discovered.
How had I missed this? Billie had brought a rottweiler to For Pitties’ Sake. When she and I drove up there, she had asked Alfredo how the dog she’d brought in was doing. I remembered what Billie had said to him: “I worried about that one.”
I asked a guard if I could make a phone call.
• • •
It took McKenzie no time to find out that the rottweiler was microchipped. The information the vet scanned showed Pat Loewi as the dog’s owner. Alfredo said that Billie had told him the owner had died, so he had not scanned the chip. He said he would be willing to testify that Billie brought the rottweiler in. He said it freaked him out that the dog he had been caring for was evidence in a murder investigation.
McKenzie updated Amabile’s detective cousin, Bienvenido, at the Suffolk County PD, since Pat’s case was in his jurisdiction.
Steven had already picked up my computer and turned it over to the police, whose forensic computer expert traced Libertine’s IP address to Billie.
Once the police suspected Billie, they impounded her car, and even though she’d had it detailed since that trip, they found fur that matched the Dogos.
Billie was taken into custody at her grandmother’s house. I like to think that she was put in the cell I had vacated. Carol Anders, the criminal attorney Steven and McKenzie had retained for me, got the charges against me dropped once Billie was picked up. She was charged with the murder of a police officer and the attempted murder of a second, and the murder of Pat Loewi. After another couple of days the Boston police found the hammer that had killed Susan Rorke. Billie had hidden it in the same closet at her grandmother’s house where she had kept her toys. The Tiramisu lipstick found in Billie’s glove compartment had been used by Samantha Couper—DNA proved it. The New York police turned this evidence over to the Toronto police, and the murder of Samantha Couper was added to the list of charges. Which left Bennett. Or Jimmy Gordon. The DA told me that in order to charge Billie with this murder, Jimmy’s body would need to be exhumed. I thought of what that would do to his mother. New York had eliminated the death penalty in 2007; Billie would not be getting out of prison even without a conviction for his murder.
I knew some people looked for—believed in—closure. How I loathed that false notion, that one could tie up the loose ends of mystery and grief. Did that mean one stopped being haunted day and night? Did it mean one could get on with one’s life, such as it was? I thought it was a cruel term, a grail that could never be found. But maybe some people did find it. Or convinced themselves that they did.
Whatever works.
As someone who had been deeply conned by not one person, but two, and not just conned, but exposed to a multiple murderer, I found myself examining both my suitability for the work I had chosen and the definition of the people I had been studying. Neither the term sociopath nor psychopath appears in the DSM-5. The closest term to sociopath is antisocial personality disorder. The criteria for diagnosis include impairments in self-esteem, self-direction, empathy, intimacy, plus the use of manipulation and deceit, and the presence of hostility, callousness, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and a lack of concern for one’s limitations: risk-taking.
• • •
The most widely used test for psychopathy is the PCL–R—Psychopathy Checklist–Revised—also known as Hare’s Checklist. The Canadian psychologist Robert Hare has pointed out that sociologists are more likely to focus on environmental or socially modifiable facets, whereas psychologists and psychiatrists include the genetic, cognitive, and emotional factors when making a diagnosis.
I did use Billie as the case study for the final chapter of my thesis. I ended with the question Should these people be forgiven?
I could not forgive myself.
Forgive yourself for what? my brother and McKenzie asked. For thinking the best of people? For having a trusting heart? But I needed to find another way to think about forgiveness—some people think the ability to forgive will just come to them at a certain point, but others recognize that it can be a choice. That it can manifest as another form of empathy, a gift to oneself.
• • •
Billie’s grandmother’s money bought a team of attorneys who are fighting to get Billie committed to a private psychiatric hospital rather than prison. This despite the fact that psychopaths are believed not to benefit at all from psychiatric intervention. She is being held for now in the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, a maximum-security hospital of the New York State Office of Mental Health, where she is being evaluated by a state psychiatrist for the prosecution and by eminent expert witnesses for the defense. It is the large, grim-
looking structure that Billie and I saw across the Harlem River the day we got Cloud out of the shelter and walked her along the water, letting her taste and sniff her freedom.
• • •
When you meet someone during a crisis, you have immediate history, Cilla had told me. You skip over the petty revelations and embarrassments. You bypass the quotidian and go right to the core.
McKenzie had seen me in jail. He’d seen me gullible, afraid, and jealous. He’d seen me miss what was right in front of me. Yet he had seen me.
And wanted to see me again. We all have a fantasy that collides with reality. I would not have pictured a first kiss when I was just released from Rikers with dirty hair, unbathed, feeling less desirable than I ever had. But that is when McKenzie pulled me into him and held my face—that gesture that is both tender and possessive—and kissed me. I thought of the old song Betty Everett sang, “If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss.” The reality was better than the fantasy. Better because desire was fused with ease, not the anxiety that accompanies obsession. Better because he had been courtly—I noted the pun even as the word occurred to me—and because I knew who this man was.
• • •
McKenzie filed a petition to get Cloud released a week after my own release.
He had offered to drive me to the sanctuary to pick her up, but I wanted to go by myself. I passed the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center as I drove along the FDR north and out of the city. Billie was behind one of those thousand barred windows.
The day was clear with a few clouds that, according to weather reports, would gather in the late afternoon, possibly bringing showers. There was little traffic, and I was content to drive at the posted speed limit, even though I was headed to get my dog back. I did not turn on the radio or put in a CD. I reveled in the clarity I had in the aftermath of finding myself alive. I was proud to know that I had fought for my life. It seems obvious—that a person would fight for her life—but it wasn’t at the time. This is not to overlook luck, that I was lucky, too. It was humbling to acknowledge how much luck was involved.