He left jail, promptly got plastered, and returned to the apartment, where he still had a few firearms squirreled away.
By now, Shirley had had enough time to assess her situation and she regretted calling the cops. She’d never lived alone in her entire life. She didn’t drive. She’d never written a check or paid a bill. She didn’t have a single friend she could call her own. She ate what Jimmy told her to eat. She wore what Jimmy told her to wear.
I’ll die without him, she told herself.
He knew what he was doing all those years. He’d set her up.
When Jimmy stormed in the front door, Shirley didn’t know whether to hide from him or hug him.
She tried to apologize, to smooth things over.
Jimmy was still mad as hell. He got out a suitcase and pretended to pack. He told her she wouldn’t last two weeks without him. He told her it would get around that she was living there all alone. He told her one of the junkies they sold OxyContin to would break in and beat her skull in.
She begged him not to go.
The phone rang and Jimmy answered—hell, it was his goddamn phone.
A woman from the police department was checking up on Shirley. When the woman found out Jimmy was there, she hung up and sent a cruiser over to the apartment. One of the cops who arrived had handcuffed Jimmy the day before. He knew Jimmy wouldn’t go without a fight, so he already had his handcuffs out.
This time, Shirley told the cops to beat it.
“Can’t two people fight in peace?” she pleaded.
But it didn’t matter what Shirley said or what she thought she wanted. The cops told Jimmy he was under arrest for violating his bail conditions.
“Go fuck yourself!” Jimmy yelled, and ran down the hall and into the bedroom. The cops took off after him. When they got to the doorway, Jimmy had already dropped to his knees and was reaching under that saggy mattress for his loaded pistol. The cops tackled Jimmy before he could get his hands on the gun. They struggled to handcuff him, Jimmy fighting all the way.
Outside, before they got him in the car, Jimmy told the cops if he could’ve gotten to that piece, he would’ve shot them both through the head.
Jimmy was rebooked into the Valley Street jail.
He was now facing two felony charges—resisting arrest and pulling a gun on a police officer. He was looking at a possible four years in prison.
When Shirley called to tell me what had happened, she left out a lot of the details. Most of those I learned down the road when I read the police report and when Shirley was a little more forthcoming.
Still, it sounded pretty terrible. I flew home to see her. She looked like a different person than the one who had come out to California. All the happiness had been wrung out of her like a dishrag.
She wasn’t supposed to be in touch with Jimmy, but he was getting messages to her through his brothers, his friends, and sometimes Virginia, who he could still manipulate pretty good when he wanted to.
“He’s sorry, he really is,” said Virginia. “He can’t stop crying.”
“I don’t give a damn how he feels. I want him locked up.”
He called me on my cell phone, crying.
“I’m a palooka, but I love her,” he said.
It sounded like a line from a boxing movie. But whether he was feeding me a line or he really meant it didn’t matter.
“I don’t want you anywhere near her,” I said.
“You’ve never been on my side,” he sobbed.
I hung up.
I told Shirley this was finally her chance and she should take it.
“Let them put him in prison and you’ll be safe,” I told her.
“I won’t be safe,” she cried. “I’ll get my skull beat in. Those hopheads will all know he’s not here to protect me.”
“Then move. Just leave. Come out to California with me.”
“I’m too scared to move. I’m not like you. You’re the brave one in this family.”
“Nothing could be as scary as living with him all these years.”
“Your father’s not all bad.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But he’s bad enough.”
“I can’t do it. I can’t move out to KooKooLand.”
I shook my head, resigned.
I returned to California, alone.
Before I left, Virginia and I made a plan. She’d spend some nights with Shirley. We’d both call her every day. I bought dowels to put in the windows so they couldn’t be jimmied from the outside. I bought a phone with an answering machine so she could screen her calls. We did what we could.
“He’s really sorry,” Virginia repeated to me. “He’s calling me every day. Maybe he deserves a second chance.”
“He’s had a million second chances. I don’t think one more’s going to make a difference.”
“I can’t abandon him like you,” she burst out sobbing. “He didn’t abandon me when my own mother didn’t want me. I owe him something.”
“He told you that, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but it’s true.”
I hugged her and that was all I could do.
After I was gone, Virginia threw herself into caring for Jimmy and Shirley. She helped Jimmy move into an apartment near hers, cooked him Greek egg lemon soup, and did his laundry. She drove Shirley to the supermarket and to doctor appointments and did her laundry too on days when Shirley was too sad to do it herself.
Shirley took all of the money she had hidden away to pay for the best lawyer she could get for Jimmy.
The lawyer got Jimmy’s friends to write letters on his behalf. Everyone attested to what an all-around great guy he was. Shirley wrote a statement saying Jimmy was a wonderful, loving husband who had made one terrible mistake. Jimmy went to AA and made a good show of sobering up.
Finally, Jimmy appeared in a trial before a judge. I stayed away, but Shirley and Jimmy gave me a full report later.
Jimmy was wearing a suit and tie and shiny new shoes. He’d had a haircut and a shave and there was no deer blood under his fingernails. He’d been sober for several weeks and his eyes were clear and contrite.
As Jimmy would say, he looked like John Q. Public.
The prosecutor didn’t buy this new and improved Jimmy. He said the real Jimmy was a ticking time bomb. He compared him to a mass murderer named Carl Drega who had just terrorized New England. He wanted Jimmy locked up so he couldn’t terrorize Shirley or anyone else in New England.
Jimmy was a ball of rage inside.
I’ll show you a frickin’ time bomb, he wanted to scream. Just let me out of this frickin’ monkey suit and I’ll show you, you punk.
But he just stood there, quietly remorseful.
The judge bought Jimmy’s baloney, like people often did.
For the two felonies, including attempting to pull a gun on a police officer, Jimmy was given a one-year prison sentence, deferred—meaning he didn’t even have to serve one day behind bars. He was also given two years’ probation.
In a separate decision, for the hammer assault and attempted strangulation of Shirley, Jimmy paid a fine of about two hundred dollars.
I called home to find out what had happened and he picked up the phone.
My heart sank.
I learned Jimmy, like his old buddy Hank, had beaten the rap.
Jimmy thought otherwise. He thought he’d gotten railroaded. Totally frickin’ railroaded. Big Brother had taken away his guns. He couldn’t own a firearm for seven frickin’ years.
“Those bastards might as well have cut off my arms,” he said. “They cut off my goddamn prick.”
He vowed that when he got his hands on a weapon again, the cop who fingered him twice, that smart-ass with the handcuffs, was a goner. So was the loudmouth prosecutor.
Two shots, right to the noggin.
Bang bang.
The Last Round
A few months after Jimmy tried to kill Shirley, I began to look for Susan again. Maybe I was just looking for my next s
creenplay. Or maybe I was procrastinating about the screenplay I should’ve been writing. Or maybe I just felt she’d understand better than anyone what I’d been going through.
It was the beginning of 1998 and I hadn’t been in touch with her for several years. I had no idea where she was or if she was even alive. But if she was, I was determined to find her.
I thought the most logical place to start looking for her, her most likely residence, was the women’s prison. I called and tried to find out if she was incarcerated there. The pleasant woman who answered the phone turned unpleasant when I mentioned Susan’s name. She put me on hold forever. When she finally came back, she said Susan wasn’t in their system and hung up.
I tried a few more times, pretending to be other friends or relatives looking for Susan, but each time I got the same response. She wasn’t there and nobody knew where she was.
I quickly discovered that Susan wasn’t too popular with the folks in the criminal justice system. For one thing, she was a criminal, and a repeat offender at that. But, a bigger deal, I suspected, was that she had shown up the prison authorities with her lawsuit. They were supposed to be the good guys and she’d made them look bad.
And it wasn’t just the jailers who weren’t keen on Susan.
I ran into a roadblock at the Manchester library too. When the friendly librarian learned that I wanted to search the archives to find information about Susan, she became unfriendly. “You don’t want to read about her,” she insisted. I had to practically twist the old bat’s arm to get her to show me the microfilm.
I didn’t get any better reception at the local newspaper. I tried to place an ad to solicit information on Susan’s whereabouts, but no amount of cajoling could get the paper to run it.
I reached out to some of Susan’s relatives. I spoke to her uncle Ted, an ornery man who reminded me a lot of his younger brother, Hank. Ted had an additional reason to despise Susan. Susan had swiped the gun she’d used to kill Hank from Ted’s son, Mark. Ted didn’t know if his murderous, thieving niece was dead or alive, but the one thing he was one hundred percent certain of was that Susan had killed more people than she ever got caught for. In fact, she’d killed her own mother and made poor Hank take the fall for it.
“But she was away at college and Hank’s truck was seen leaving the house,” I said, incredulous.
Ted looked like he wanted to take a swing at me.
Clearly, he was not going to be of much help.
As a last resort, I turned to Jimmy. If anyone could get a line on where a druggie or thief was holed up, it was him.
Jimmy had settled right back into living with Shirley after his close brush with the law. I didn’t talk to either of them very often. When I did, Shirley said Jimmy was a new man. I thought he sounded like the same old Jimmy. Dealing pills, gambling, boozing—but hey, in moderation so he wouldn’t get caught by his probation officer.
When Jimmy heard about my search for Susan he told me he’d ask around, but take it from him, I was wasting my goddamn time.
“What is it with you and that hophead? Forget about her, will ya, once and for all! She’s rotting in a ditch somewhere. Right where she belongs.”
If anyone deserved to be rotting in a ditch, it was him, but I didn’t tell him that. The last thing I wanted was to get him all riled up. He’d already purchased a few guns under the table to replace the ones he’d had to get rid of when he got pinched. A hunting buddy was keeping them for him so Jimmy’s probation officer wouldn’t find them during his periodic searches of the apartment.
At the time Jimmy bought those guns, he’d called and offered to hook me up with one of my own.
“You need a piece to defend yourself against those niggers in L.A. the next time some lowlife Rodney King fires them up.”
If I needed a piece, it was to get peace from him.
But still, I said no. I didn’t trust myself not to pull a Susan and use it on him.
Unable to talk me into getting a gun, Jimmy sent me a can of Mace instead. I stuck it in my underwear drawer and it leaked all over my lingerie.
No doubt he’d gotten it from Uncle Barney, who was still out there moving lousy merchandise.
Jimmy’s efforts to find Susan were a dud too.
But he did turn up some upsetting information about her brother, Terry.
He had killed himself at the age of forty.
It seemed incredible. Every member of Susan’s family had died violently.
“There’s a curse on that family,” said Jimmy, sounding like he wanted to spit. “Don’t get yourself in the middle of it.”
I asked him if he knew whether Terry had ever reconciled with Susan.
“Nah, he never had nothin’ to do with her. That’s what I heard, anyway. Look, I’m tellin’ ya, just forget about that hophead. She’s gotta be a goner by now.”
But I refused to throw in the towel.
“Something tells me she’s still out there. I just feel it.”
“Ya know, you woulda got creamed in the ring,” said Jimmy. “You won’t even go down when you’re beat.”
He was right. If life was a boxing match—and that’s what he’d always taught me it was—I wanted to be the last one standing.
I never, never wanted to give up.
So, I went back to where I started. I began calling people in the prison system again. I was convinced one of them must have a bead on Susan. One of them must know something.
And at long last, as Jimmy would say, badoom—I hit the target.
I got a parole officer on the phone, a guy I’d never spoken to before. He’d been on the job only a few months and I guess he didn’t know enough to clam up like everyone else. He told me Susan was incarcerated, had been incarcerated the whole time I had been looking for her. She’d been in the women’s prison for a while but they couldn’t handle her there and had shipped her off to the men’s prison in Concord. She was now in a mini prison within the men’s prison, the secure psychiatric unit. SPU—pronounced spew—housed the most severely mentally ill criminals, men mostly and a few women. When I called back a prison official I had previously spoken to and told him I knew Susan was in SPU, he seemed surprised I knew and finally admitted that she was there. He grudgingly agreed to check with her treatment team and see if she was well enough to have a visit from me.
I waited and called and waited and called and waited and called. Finally, I got an answer. No visit. Sorry. Tough luck.
I asked if I could at least write to Susan. The prison official said I could try but he wasn’t sure they’d pass on the letters. Over a few months I wrote to her several times. The letters were never returned, but I never heard anything back. My biggest fear was that Susan had gotten the letters and didn’t want anything to do with me. Or maybe I’d stirred things up for her and made her worse. I pictured her getting a letter and freaking out and being put in a straitjacket. I didn’t know if they still gave shock treatments in those places, but I pictured that too.
One day, with nothing to lose, I picked up the phone and called SPU directly. I was persistent and got the director of the unit on the phone. I told her I was an old family friend of Susan’s. I told her I’d been searching for Susan for a long, long time. I told her Susan had been my inspiration to make something of my life.
There was a long pause.
The woman made no promises but said she’d see what she could do.
The next day, a sunny March morning in L.A., my phone rang early.
The caller’s voice was throaty and playful, and I would’ve known it anywhere.
“This is Susan . . . Piasecny . . . Hughes . . . Adair,” she said, pausing between each word for maximum dramatic effect.
I leaned against the wall to hold myself up. I said her name over and over, like the mantra it had once been for me.
Susan. Susan. Susan.
I finally managed to ask how she was. She laughed and said she was pretty good—except for being locked up with a bunch of lunatics.
I was relieved to see she still had that sense of humor. In fact, I thought she sounded pretty good.
She said she couldn’t stay on the phone because she was on the director’s line, but she gave me a number to call back on.
I hung up and let out a scream.
My husband hugged me.
“You found her,” he said. “You finally found her.”
I dialed Susan right back. We spoke for two hours that morning and another two that afternoon. There was so much to catch up on.
We talked about Susan’s life over the past several years, her fight to get released from prison, her third marriage to a man who had died, her isolation from her family.
“There’s just one thing I’d like to know—how’s my brother doing?” she asked.
“I—I’ll try to find out,” I stammered.
I didn’t know how to tell her about Terry.
Then she asked about Jimmy and Shirley.
I didn’t dodge that question. I told her what Jimmy had done to Shirley.
She said Shirley should dump him and join me in California.
“That was my dream, remember, to move out there. Hey, maybe I can come visit you too when I get out?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, trying not to sound too ambivalent. I wasn’t sure Susan visiting me would be such a hot idea. After all, she was an addict, possibly crazy, and a bit of a con artist. I knew she’d crept into a man’s house in the middle of the night and shot him dead, even if it was sort of justified.
I knew she wasn’t the person I had imagined her to be when I was nine.
That person had never really existed.
After all these years, I was just getting to know her.
“Can you come visit me?” she asked shyly.
“I’m coming,” I replied, with no hesitation.
Before I could visit, the prison authorities had to run a felony check on me. I assured them they wouldn’t find anything. I was so squeaky clean I didn’t even have a parking ticket.
“You turned out to be a real Dudley Do-Right,” complained Jimmy, when I told him about the felony check. “Don’t you ever just wanna go out and raise hell?”
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