Of course the worst that can happen, according to the Tibetans, is that you might come back as a hungry ghost or a hell-being and have to take another spin on the wheel of samsara. Sometimes this doesn’t sound so bad.
AS WE RUSHED down the courthouse stairs, down the corridor, and into the courtroom, my legs went to rubber. I have no idea why. My life wasn’t at stake, nor, at least on the most technical of levels, was Gary’s. By the grace of God, Michigan does not have the death penalty. No one in my family had tethered his or her future emotional stability or well-being to a conviction. Thirty-six years is a long time. And while time may feed some families’ desire for “justice,” it had not done so for mine. None of us really understood the economy in which one life can or should “pay” for another. I’d heard my grandfather say more than once over the past few months that he’d rather have a free Leiterman look him in the eye and admit that he killed his daughter than see him rot in prison claiming his innocence. Over the course of the trial my mother and I had each wondered aloud to one another whether Leiterman should “pay” for Jane’s murder (assuming he committed it) by being the best father, grandfather, girls’ softball coach, nurse, whatever, that he can be—presuming, of course, that he is no longer a danger to anyone. But Schroeder and Hiller and a host of others think he most definitely is. So might a certain sixteen-year-old girl somewhere back in South Korea.
Perhaps my legs went to rubber for Leiterman’s wife, Solly, or for their children, one of whom appeared to be very pregnant. Or for Schroeder, who had so clearly staked his heart and soul on this case, and who now slips me a heart-shaped worrying stone to rub for good luck as the jury files in.
At this point the bailiff—heretofore a pretty jovial guy—suddenly becomes frighteningly serious. He warns us, hand on holster, that if we show any emotion at all when the verdict is read he will immediately eject us from the courthouse. He says that choosing to convict or acquit in a capital case is an extraordinarily difficult decision for a jury to make, and howls of distress from either side will only make their burden harder to bear.
As we sit, the foreman of the jury rises. With little ado, he says they have reached a verdict. He then tells the court that they find the defendant, Gary Earl Leiterman, guilty of murder, first-degree.
The judge thanks them for their service, and they file out of the room. They had deliberated for four and a half hours, including lunch.
As soon as the door shuts behind them my family erupts in a greater outburst of emotion than I ever imagined possible. One look at my grandfather dissolves my entire previous conception of his psychology. This is not the face of a repressed, aloof old man. This is the face of a father now cracking apart with animal sobs. We each take turns holding his frail, ninety-one-year-old body as it crumples under these waves. They aren’t waves of relief, just waves of pain, a very old pain that perhaps he himself did not know he housed. Then, for the first time since her death more than twenty years ago, I hear him say my grandmother’s name. Marian should be here, he sobs.
I try not to look at Leiterman’s family. I know they are devastated. “Justice” may have been done, but at this moment the courtroom is simply a room full of broken people, each racked with his or her particular grief, and the air heavy with them all.
THROUGHOUT the trial my mother and I had complained daily about the media presence in the courtroom—about our complete inability to have a “private” moment when at each dramatic, disturbing, or violent turn of events the cameras would pan to our bench, layering our pain with self-consciousness. But back at Jill’s the night of the verdict, we all gather around the six o’clock news with an inexplicable, shared hunger to see our experience represented on the screen. We crowd into the living room and flip between the networks for about an hour, waiting for the story to appear. It doesn’t. Instead the stations are showcasing two different local stories: that of a three-year-old boy who somehow managed to get up on waterskis on Lake Michigan, and that of the arrest of Aretha Franklin’s son, who had attempted to steal a bicycle in a nearby suburb.
The following night my grandfather makes a reservation for us all to have dinner at the Spring Lake Country Club, where he plays golf, a few hours west of Ann Arbor, near Muskegon, where Jane was trying to get to on the last night of her life. Once there we sit around a party table covered with a white tablecloth, next to a plate-glass window overlooking the golf course, which is emptying out due to an oncoming thunderstorm. We all order variations of flounder, the club special. The tone of the dinner is hard to gauge—should we propose a toast? Are we celebrating? How can we celebrate a man’s miserable life-to-come in a miserable prison system? In the middle of dinner I excuse myself and pretend to head toward the bathroom but instead veer outside. I wander toward the golf course, which is now humming with the low moo of an alarm signaling the presence of lightning. Where are the Leitermans tonight? What are they eating? Sheets of rain start to sweep the green hills. I fight the urge to lie down on the grass, feel it turn to mud against my face.
A few weeks later, in what would become one of our last conversations, the man I loved told me that while I was away at the trial he had gone swimming in a lake during a lightning storm, and had there had the sudden feeling that perhaps it was our fate to get fatally struck by lightning at the same moment, and thus the whole painful mess we now found ourselves in would evaporate for us both in the same instant. As he said this I pressed the phone close to my ear, as if to imprint his voice against the clay of my brain. And once again I saw this expanse of wet green and mud, and heard the low hum of an alarm.
At the crack of dawn the morning after the country club dinner, I drive my mother, her new boyfriend, and Emily to the airport in Detroit so that they can fly back to California together. I watch their bodies and luggage disappear into the terminal with one slice of the sliding glass doors, pull my car away from the curb, drive around a loop that dumps me back onto the freeway, then speed along mindlessly for some time until I realize that I have no idea where I am and no idea where I’m going. How do I get home from here? Do I head north, through Canada? Do I try to find Ohio? Is Middletown home? My clothes and dishes and books are there, but beyond that I don’t really care if I ever go back. My job there is over; my love there is over. When I think of the East Coast all I see is a cavernous darkness, like a museum at night, streaked with fits of bluish-white light, the traces of tears and cum once shed in miscellaneous bedrooms, hotel rooms, parkways, forests, and cars.
I pull over onto the shoulder of the highway and rummage around my station wagon for my torn, outdated road atlas, which, when I find it, might as well be in Cyrillic. My mind does not feel right. Should I go to Niagara Falls? Montreal? What about Akron—didn’t my father have a younger brother who once lived in Akron? Where are my father’s other siblings, my other aunts and uncles, whom Emily and I have neither seen nor spoken to since his funeral over twenty years ago? Were they even there? Were his parents? I know his mother wasn’t—she died the year before my father, at sixty. But was his father? I think he died the following year, also young, but I’m guessing. What did they die of? In my memory my father’s father died of grief—the grief of losing his wife, then his most beloved son. Didn’t one of my cousins douse himself with gasoline and set himself on fire a few years later? Whatever happened to him? Why couldn’t Jane have just driven herself home? Did she simply not have a car of her own? Did women even have cars in 1969?
I lay my head against the steering wheel, feeling the shell of my car shudder with the boom of each car that hurtles past, my map shaking in my lap. Deadly Ride. Boom. This journey of stepping into the light. Boom. If I die before I wake. Boom. A swift and successful conclusion. Boom. I begin to weep. There is no place to go.
Primetime
A FEW WEEKS after the trial ends, back on the East Coast, I start repacking my car. Each day I bring a few more things out to it, stuffing vitamins in the glove compartment, tucking a bottle of whiskey in with some bl
ankets in a hamper, shoving pots and pans under the seats, until slowly the apartment becomes empty and the car becomes full.
Oh California, will you take me as I am, strung out on another man, sings Joni Mitchell, in a song I’d been singing my entire life. I started singing this song before I even knew that a world existed outside of California. Then I sang it for fifteen years every time the wheels of the plane from New York City touched down on California soil. Usually I was strung out on another man, but in my heart New York was the main man, the one who had made me euphoric and miserable but whom I never really believed I’d have the guts to leave. And now, suddenly, strangely, I was leaving. I’m moving to Los Angeles. It seems as good a place as any other. I don’t have a route planned; my plan is simply to point the car west and give myself over to grace. Part of me doubts I’ll ever get there, and part of me doesn’t care. California I’m coming home.
But before I go, I agree to spend my last day in the city doing another interview with 48 Hours Mystery.
It’s hazy and hot, a dog day of summer. I meet up with the crew in an empty loft in Soho kept blissfully dark and cool by black crepe paper stapled over its arched windows. I enjoy the cool air and the free Greek salad they feed me for lunch, but the interview itself is not easy. It goes on for hours, and the correspondent is smart, asking much harder questions than I had anticipated.
At one point she asks me if, while writing Jane, I had ever stopped to wonder why murders like the Michigan Murders, or my aunt’s murder, occur.
Does she mean serial murder? Torturous murder? Random murder? Rape-and-murder? Just plain-old, run-of-the-mill men killing women?
Of course, I say, flashing on the awful Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive Homicides textbook sitting on my desk like a dirty bomb all winter in the Ponderosa Room. But it doesn’t strike me as the right question.
She doesn’t respond, so I add, The why seems like the obvious part.
Then she zeros in: If it’s so obvious, then tell us, why do they?
Remember: QUESTIONS are not evidence, the judge had instructed the jury at the start of the trial. Only ANSWERS are evidence.
The answer on the tip of my tongue is a curt one: Because men hate women. But I can’t say that on national TV without coming off as a rabid, man-hating feminist, nor is it really what I mean. James Ellroy can say it in My Dark Places: All men hate women for tried-and-true reasons they share in jokes and banter every day. Now you know. You know that half the world will condone what you are just about to do. Look at the bags under the redhead’s eyes. Look at her stretch marks. She’s putting that cunt rag back in. She’s getting blood all over your seat covers—
Men are animals, my grandfather told me so many times growing up that I began to wonder if he was making some kind of veiled personal confession, or just voicing a lament for his greater tribe.
The most disturbing murderers kill for only one reason—their own enjoyment, declares the voice-over at the start of Killing for Pleasure, a History Channel show I chanced upon a few days after the January hearing while channel-surfing at a friend’s apartment—a show which featured, to my great surprise, the Michigan Murders. With a grandiosity better suited to an inaugural address, the closing voice-over says that despite their differences, John Collins and the other rapist-murderers featured on the program all share one thing: “the ancient bloodlust of the Greeks and Romans.” The parting shot is of the Coliseum.
What can I say? All men hate women, men are animals? “In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation”? “We live in a society in which there really are fearful and awful people”? Or, conversely: Gosh, I have no idea—how could I possibly understand the sick, depraved, monstrous things human beings do to each other, and have apparently done since time immemorial? Might as well chalk it up to “the ancient bloodlust of the Greeks and Romans.” Both answers come out of a script, a script I want out of, a script with two equally lazy endings—cynicism, or incredulity. Neither is right, neither is good enough.
BEFORE WE STARTED this interview, I had vainly asked the correspondent if she thought I should put on some makeup so that I’d look better on camera. I had arrived wearing none, assuming they’d want to cake me up.
She tells me not to worry—they wouldn’t be filming me if I didn’t look good.
This is primetime, she winks. No black people, no bad teeth.
I freeze in horror, then try to go in on the joke.
Not even good-looking white people with bad teeth?
She laughs, shakes her head, adjusts her microphone.
What about good-looking black people with good teeth?
She laughs again, and signals to the camera that we’re ready to roll.
Inside I am not laughing. Am I sitting here so that Jane Mixer can join JonBenét Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, in the dead-white-girl-of-the-week club? Girls whose lives and deaths, judging by airtime, apparently matter more than all murdered, missing, and suffering brown people combined?
I’m sitting here because I wanted—I still want—Jane’s life to “matter.” But I don’t want it to matter more than others.
Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don’t want it to matter more than others.
I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don’t.
AFTER THE interview the crew asks if I will take them on a little tour of the city, pointing out some places that were important to me while writing Jane. At dusk we end up at the main branch of the New York Public Library, where I answer a few more questions on the big marble steps out front. Fifth Avenue is starting to buzz all around us, a languid, soupy summer rush hour. Yes, this is where I first looked into my aunt’s story. Yes, this is where I first embarked on plumbing its deep mystery.
The narcissistic pleasure is immense. A story that I felt so alone in caring about for so long is suddenly of interest to a camera crew. Years of compulsion, confusion, and damage suddenly gel, right there on the steps, in the light of the camera, in the eyes of intrigued passers-by, into a story. And not just any story—a “story of struggle and hope.” I am the hero of this story; perhaps I am even a master warrior.
But standing there on the steps, I feel like a phony. Inside my mind the fragments are rolling loose. The bullet fractured the bone long ago. Now there is but a pile of lead shards, rattling in a glass vial. There is no smoking gun.
NEITHER THE correspondent nor I knew it then, but in just a few weeks Hurricane Katrina would rip in and over the levees of New Orleans, forcing CBS to cancel several weeks of 48 Hours Mystery, and instead to bring the faces of thousands upon thousands of black people with bad teeth onto primetime—people whose desperation and abandonment by the state made it instantly, abundantly clear exactly how much their lives mattered.
LATE THAT night I return to the trendy hotel in the meatpacking district where CBS has graciously put me up. Not knowing beforehand that the penthouse bar there will be wall-to-wall drunk fashion models, white linen suits, and $18 bright-blue cocktails, I had invited some friends to stop by and say good-bye to me there.
The bar is too loud for conversation, so eventually we give up and crouch on our toadstools, watching the beautiful people do their thing. The most amusing spectacle is a group of Hasidic men getting lap dances from a trio of busty blondes. Things really get going when the blondes tear off the men’s yarmulkes and put them on. The Hasidim think this is hilarious, and take several photographs of the half-dressed, yarmulked women with the digital cameras on their cell phones.
Life is a cabaret, toasts one of my friends, gesturing out to the scene. Come to the cabaret.
You can also look upon our life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness, wrote Schopenhauer.
Eventually I take the elevator down to my room, where I lie down to
sleep under a wall-sized, framed glass portrait of Kate Moss.
Open Murder
THIS TRIAL HAS done an enormous disservice to both of these families.
So said Leiterman’s lawyer at the start of his closing arguments. He went on to say that Leiterman was a father and a grandfather who had been uprooted from his home, where he was needed and loved, incarcerated for months without bail, then forced to stand trial for a decades-old murder he had nothing to do with. Meanwhile my family had been dragged through an agonizing ordeal that had cracked open old wounds, and which would undoubtedly leave us racked with more uncertainty, more pain, and more unanswered questions. At the end of his monologue he approached the jury box and asked theatrically, Why Jane? To underscore the fact that there was no apparent motive linking his client to her death, he repeated, Why Jane? Why Jane? several more times, as if it were a question no one in my family had ever posed before.
None of it makes any sense, he concluded, shaking his head.
He was right on almost every count.
In his closing arguments, Hiller was as deadpan and meticulous as he had been all along. But to this somber presentation he now added gesture, elaborately miming how the killer would have lifted Jane out of the passenger side of a car and deposited her on the cemetery ground. He was trying to give the jury a visual image of how and why Leiterman’s skin cells would have sloughed off around certain parts of her pantyhose, his hands slick with the sweat of adrenaline, the physical expenditure of killing, carrying, and dragging. Throughout this performance it looked as if Hiller were carrying an imaginary bride over the threshold, or putting a ghost to bed.
The Red Parts Page 13