If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Well, enough about them,” said Eleanor, seeing that her opening gambit was not a success. “Let’s talk about you. You’re a psychologist! How fascinating! Have you done anybody famous?”

  “Famous?” echoed the young man in his best Freudian manner.

  “Well, perhaps notorious is the better word. You’re an expert witness in criminal psychology, so you must lead a pretty interesting life. Have you met Jeffrey Dahmer? James Earl Ray? A Menendez brother?”

  Eric Stanfield’s face was impassive. He had been warned that Mrs. Royden was somewhat eccentric, and he had resolved not to be provoked by her behavior.

  “Now listen to that,” Eleanor went on, without waiting for his reply. “I haven’t mentioned a single woman in that list of notorious murderers. Do you think women aren’t as well suited to spectacular crimes, or do we just not get enough press? In your professional opinion.”

  Stanfield blinked at this conversational U-turn. “Now, Eleanor,” he said in his courteous monotone, “I’m here to talk about you. As you know, your attorney has asked me to evaluate your condition so that I can testify at your trial.”

  Eleanor Royden looked appraisingly at the bespectacled young man in the polyester-blend navy jacket. He gazed back, absently fingering his yellow paisley tie. He blinked first. Eleanor sighed and gave up. Another anal-retentive, just like everyone else she had been dealing with for lo, these many weeks. “I’m going to have to do a lot of background for you, Skippy,” she told the psychologist.

  He stiffened. “Mrs. Royden, my name is Dr. Eric Stanfield. I hold degrees from-”

  “Right, Skippy. And you probably still have your Smurf cocoa mug. Give it a rest. I need to make you understand what you’re dealing with here. Now, I’ll bet you studied the battered-woman syndrome in grad school, but, frankly, what we’re talking about in my case is much more sophisticated than that. You are taking notes, aren’t you?”

  Despite his resolution to remain impervious, Eric Stanfield glared at the madwoman in the orange prison fatigues. He took out his Cross pen and began to scribble on a yellow legal pad. “You were a battered wife, Mrs. Royden?” he said, attempting to regain control of the interview.

  “Jeb didn’t beat me up, no,” Eleanor replied. “I told you, my case is more subtle than that of the drunken bully who uses his wife for a punching bag because he’s a loser. Jeb Royden was not a loser. He was probably the most successful lawyer in southwest Virginia. If he could have kept his pants zipped, he might have run for attorney general.” She snickered. “Hey! Maybe he would have run for president if I hadn’t conducted my little exit poll in his bedroom.” She pantomimed the firing of a pistol.

  “Your husband was unfaithful.”

  “Show me one that isn’t,” snapped Eleanor. “Are you married, Skippy? Or do you still watch Winona Ryder movies and drool?”

  “Mrs. Royden, your husband is dead. It is your mental health that we need to focus on.”

  “He is the key to my mental health! You know what doctors tell you about allergies? Remove the offending substance from your life. It works with mental-health problems, too!” She laughed.

  “Tell me what you mean.” It was all Stanfield could manage in the way of a response.

  Eleanor spent ten minutes pacing the room and summarizing her marriage in an ironic invective that could have played at the local comedy club without a rewrite. Stanfield would have laughed if he hadn’t kept reminding himself that he was in the presence of a multiple murderer. This articulate, outspoken woman had killed two people in cold blood, and she didn’t seem the least bit remorseful for her crime. His notes were observations of her behavior, rather than a summary of her complaints. Uses punch lines when relating anecdotes.

  “I didn’t kill him because he was unfaithful,” said Eleanor. “Write that down. I killed him because he made a blood sport out of our divorce. And I killed the Bitch-she gave a whole new meaning for the term golden retriever!-she was certainly determined to retrieve Jeb’s gold, let me tell you. Anyhow, she had to go with him, because she enjoyed the process. My husband set out to destroy me, and she cheered him on.”

  “When you say that she-the second Mrs. Royden-had to go with him, do you mean that you had to fatally shoot her as well?” Stanfield thought it was time he injected some plain speaking into her narrative.

  “That’s right,” said Eleanor cheerfully. “I blew the slut to kingdom come. Maybe it will deter other gold-digging home wreckers, but I doubt it. Not until more wives… go ballistic.”

  “Did you attempt to counter your husband’s legal maneuvers through the court system?” He had to speak loudly, because she was laughing at her own pun.

  Eleanor stopped laughing, and made a face at him. “You really don’t get it, do you?” she said. “Take Jeb to court? That would have been like trying to fight a tiger with a toothpick. Jeb was a golf buddy to all the judges in the district, and every lawyer in town was his pal. Besides which, they all truly believed that he was right to dump me, and that I ought to go away quietly with no settlement, and get a job in a hash house. His last threat was that he’d convince the world that I was crazy, and have me locked up in a mental institution. The more I protested, the more evidence he had of my derangement, as he called it. I had no alternative. A bullet was the only thing that Jeb couldn’t bribe or bully into being on his side.”

  “I see what you mean,” Eric Stanfield said, nodding.

  “I don’t think you do,” said Eleanor. “You are supposed to think how tragic it is for a woman to be driven to the point of believing that she could only solve her problems with a pistol. That’s the state of desperation I had reached on the night Jeb died. I was a victim of emotional abuse and psychological brutality. You do see that, don’t you?”

  Bill MacPherson had never before interviewed a prospective client while wearing madras Bermuda shorts and tasseled loafers, but since the client in question was au naturel and leering at him from the edge of the pool, Bill felt that the honors of formality rested with him. At his elbow hovered Miri Malone, in a black swimsuit and sunglasses.

  They had taken an early flight to Florida and proceeded to the marine mammals park in a rented Plymouth. Bill had been apprehensive about a possible trespassing violation, but Miri assured him that the owners did not object to visitation, since she was a former employee. “I go back all the time to see the gang,” she explained.

  He wondered how they would react to the notion that she might soon be using illegal maneuvers to kidnap one of the gang, but since Miri was his client, he abandoned that train of thought. Maybe it’s a far, far better thing we do, he reasoned, and followed her through the gate to the large saltwater pool.

  “Bill MacPherson, I’d like you to meet Porky Delphinidae,” Miri was saying.

  Nearby, a nervous young man, wearing a wet bathing suit and a Sea Park towel, consulted his watch. “This isn’t going to take long, is it, you guys? Porky is on in half an hour.”

  “I doubt if we’ll get too caught up in the conversation,” Bill told him solemnly. He still couldn’t believe that he was doing this at all. “I have a thing for you to sign here, Mr. Edmonds, certifying that you are a disinterested party in these proceedings, and that you understand what the dolphin is saying.”

  “Porky wants Rich to be best man,” said Miri, stroking the dolphin’s head.

  Whereas, Porky will be best what? thought Bill wildly, still trying to figure out how to proceed. Perhaps he should have brought a tape recorder. “Look, before we go any further here, I need to know how the owners of this marine park feel about-er-Porky’s personal life. I mean, what if you win the lawsuit, and they refuse to part with him?”

  Miri Malone smiled sweetly. “If they refuse, they will have the public-relations nightmare of the decade. I will go on every talk show on the planet, telling how the cruel dolphin-slavers are keeping true lovers apart.”

  “She would, too,” Rich assured him. “She’s quite a woman.”

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p; Bill looked at the pair of them appraisingly. “Hmm,” he said. “Miri, what about you and Rich here-”

  “I told you how I feel about primate males!” said Miri.

  “Whereas those are my mates of choice,” said Rich, grinning. “Besides, I couldn’t cut in on a pal, could I, Porky, old buddy?”

  Porky favored them with his maniacal smile, and bobbed in agreement.

  “So you’d better talk to this guy about getting engaged,” said Rich. “Because I’m not available. And you’d better hurry, because in twenty minutes it will be show time, and then we’re outta here.”

  “Right,” said Bill, consulting his notes and turning to the male half of the couple he had come to think of as the starboard-crossed lovers.

  “Er-how do you do, Porky?” he said to the dolphin, who was still leering at him with an expression of antic cheerfulness.

  “Give me a kiss, Porky,” said Miri Malone, puckering her lips and making smacking noises at Porky. Obligingly, the dolphin touched her lips with its own.

  “Don’t lead the witness, Miri,” said Bill. “Lots of guys will kiss you, but it doesn’t mean they’re willing to get engaged. Does Porky kiss just anybody?” he asked.

  Miri smiled. “Want to give it a try?”

  “Can’t kiss clients,” said Bill, shaking his head. He turned back to Rich Edmonds. “He’d kiss just anybody, wouldn’t he? You, for instance?”

  “Well, Porky’s a pretty friendly guy,” Rich agreed. “But he’s certainly more affectionate toward Miri than toward anybody else. He-how can I phrase this?-put the moves on her a few times in the pool. That’s only to be expected, of course. You can ask him yourself, you know. He understands human speech pretty well.”

  Bill knelt down beside the dolphin. “Porky,” he said, resisting the urge to speak loudly. Where were its ears? “Miri says that you would like to leave the ocean park here, and go to live with her. Is that what you want?”

  Porky whooped, and bobbed his head.

  Bill looked to the dolphin’s trainer for a translation. “I’d say that was a yes,” he said.

  “Watch this, and see what you think.” Rich went to a bucket near the tiers of seats and took out a fish. “Want a snack, Porky?”

  Porky whooped again, bobbing his head vigorously. Bill thought the reactions were identical, but in proper legal fashion he remained skeptical. Perhaps the dolphin reacted that way toward any string of phrases addressed to him, regardless of their meaning. He leaned forward and said in a hearty tone: “Porky, would you like to end up in a can of tuna?”

  Several minutes later, when Bill had gone through a stack of towels and was now reasonably dry again, he looked up at Miri Malone with salt-reddened eyes and shrugged. “All right, let’s assume for argument’s sake that he does understand what people say to him. How do we know that he understands the concept of marriage? And, by the way, there’s very little chance we’ll get any of this past a sober judge. But just supposing. How do we know he understands what you’re asking?”

  Miri thought about it. “The conditions are spelled out in a conventional marriage ceremony, aren’t they? You could go point by point and ask him.”

  “Sure, why not?” said Bill, dumping a small puddle out of his tasseled loafer. “Dolphin law. It could be a whole new area of specialization. We have to give him the benefit of the doubt, don’t we?” Solemnly he turned toward the pool. “Do you, Porky, take this woman to have and to hold? In sickness and in health?”

  Elizabeth MacPherson sat on the rug in her living room surrounded by a stack of old books and dog-eared photocopies on loan from Everett Yancey. Bill was off in Florida on a daft case for one of their mother’s friends. She had finished dinner; now she planned to spend most of the evening listening to classical guitar on the stereo while she read material on the Lucy Todhunter case. She was only about a quarter of the way through the documents after an hour of reading, and making notes of comments that seemed relevant to the case, but already she had a much clearer image of the Todhunters, having seen them characterized by friends, servants, and physicians.

  From what she learned, Elizabeth did not regret missing the chance to meet them herself. In fact, she thought she had met versions of them several times in couples of her parents’ acquaintance. Philip Todhunter was the hearty, crass fellow, whom everyone suspected of having a terrible temper, although no one had ever seen it. Lucy was the smiling slender belle, with the Miss Georgia good looks, the brand-name vocabulary, and the decorator-magazine decor. As a couple, they would socialize with people important to the husband’s business interests, or the “right” people from the neighborhood or the country club, but no one would know them very well, because their conversation was confined to trivial pleasantries. Perhaps it was all they were capable of. Such people made Elizabeth feel five pounds heavier, and colt-awkward, because try as she might, she could not think of anything to say to them. She was glad that the Todhunters had been dead for more than a century, thus relieving her of the task of interviewing them in person.

  Elizabeth turned to the transcript of Lucy Todhunter’s trial, but she found that the court record added little to the summary provided by Everett Yancey in his history of the case. Next she turned to a photocopy of a lengthy newspaper interview with Richard Norville. Since the case had been a cause célèbre in Danville, considerable coverage had been given to the trial, to the background of the unhappy couple, and to interviews with the principal witnesses. A pen-and-ink sketch of Norville, captioned WARTIME COMRADE: FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH, accompanied the article.

  According to Richard Norville, his friend the major was something of a dandy, meticulous about his clothes and his possessions, but he was not a man of robust health. Philip Todhunter had suffered from neuralgia and stomach complaints during the war, and he was accustomed to dosing himself with patent medicines, in hopes of relieving his discomfort. Norville maintained, though, that despite his health problems, the major had been a good officer and, later in civilian life, a hardworking businessman.

  “He was a hypochondriac and a carpetbagger,” Elizabeth remarked aloud. “I expect he was tiresome, but I wonder why anyone would want to poison him? Especially, why Lucy? If wives poisoned spouses just for being tiresome, entire continents would have to be used as prisons.” She added, “No offense, Cameron!” in case any angelic presences were passing through the room.

  The journal of Dr. Richard Humphreys went into greater detail about the medical tribulations of the Todhunters. According to Humphreys’s narrative, Philip Todhunter was a cornerstone of his medical practice, forever calling in the physician to treat his headaches, his sleeplessness, and his aching joints. Humphreys noted that his patient was in the habit of dosing himself with patent medicines obtained from the cities he frequented on business. Despite the physician’s warnings about these nostrums, Todhunter was forever trying some new elixir guaranteed to cure all ills. Elizabeth thought she detected a note of asperity in the doctor’s description of his perpetually ailing patient. Apparently, he considered Todhunter a hypochondriac.

  Humphreys’s attitude toward Mrs. Lucy Todhunter was altogether more sympathetic. He chronicled the difficulties of her pregnancies, and the sorrow and suffering that accompanied her miscarriages. She will not live to stand many more assaults on her constitution, Humphreys wrote. To my mind it is odd that the Major is so mollycoddling of his own health, and so indifferent to that of his wife. I have warned him that his determination to get an heir will make him a widower, but my counsel falls on deaf ears. I have told Miss Lucy as well, and she wept a bit and implored me to speak to Todhunter. Finally, I sent her off to White Sulphur Springs. The rest will do her as much good as the waters, I daresay.

  Elizabeth read this passage three times, before finally putting the photocopy aside and staring at the white ceiling for some time. She resumed her reading with an air of determination. “Maybe Lucy wasn’t guilty,” she said aloud, turning a page. “I wonder if it can be that simple.”<
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  Her next path of inquiry was to study Mary Hadley Compson’s version of the events. Everett Yancey had written a notation at the top of the page: The Compsons were Lucy Avery Todhunter’s North Carolina cousins, visiting at the time of Philip Todhunter’s death. Mary Compson’s account of that fateful visit was contained in a series of letters written to her married daughter in New Bern. The letters spanned the period of time both before Todhunter’s death and later during the trial. Because they dealt with a Danville cause célèbre, a descendant of Mary Hadley Compson had donated the letters to the city’s historical society. Everett Yancey had dutifully photocopied the lot of them, occasionally penciling in missing words where the copperplate script had faded into illegibility.

  “He’s thorough; I’ll give him that,” said Elizabeth, settling down under the stronger light of the table lamp as she attempted to decipher the spidery writing.

  Though she has much in the way of material wealth to make her proud, I cannot think that Cousin Lucy is a happy woman, Mary Compson had told her daughter, in a letter dated the week before Todhunter’s death. Her recent confinement has left her much weakened, and there is an air of strain between husband and wife that saddens me greatly. Mr. Todhunter seems to be neither a brutal man, nor a drunkard, but he seems more concerned with his own trifling ailments than with the health of his young wife. It grieves me to see them, Louisa, and I trust that you will count yourself fortunate to have been spared such a fate. You have not your cousin’s finery or possessions, but you will be the happier for it, I am certain.

  “I wonder if she thought Lucy solved her marriage problems with white powder,” murmured Elizabeth, reading on.

  Cousin Lucy’s husband has been taken dreadfully ill, Mary Compson wrote her daughter. At first we feared that it was some outbreak of fever that would imperil us as well, but that does not seem to be the case. It cannot be bad food, as the Major has taken nothing in several days. Both attending physicians have been most stern in their questioning of the household, but we could tell them nothing. Nor would we, if we knew anything to the detriment of that poor young woman, our cousin. She tends her stricken spouse like an angel of mercy, but I cannot say I have seen her in much distress over his condition.