“How else could she have loaded and hoisted up that heavy gun that even she says was too big for her?”
Indeed, I wondered. How else?
“Even her brother says she couldn’t have done it alone.”
Put the brother on the interview list, I thought.
Louisa continued, “It was because of the abuse from Vernie that she had the breakdown.”
I don’t think she remembered whom she was talking to. Had she forgotten all the days I’d spent at their house and that I saw what went on? I guess she didn’t know how aware I was of real abuse. When I was a little girl growing up in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, with my mother, father, and my siblings—brothers Johnny Ray and Raymond and sister Janet, with me as the youngest—I thought the reason people bought kitchen dishes was so the father could throw them at his wife, breaking them all against the wall. When all the dishes were used up, my father graduated to his fists. So when someone starts talking about abuse, I probably have a better sense than average to know if it really happened.
* * *
I remember Vernie and Suzanne arguing a lot. Such as one late September when I was eating breakfast at their wooden table, with carved spindles for legs. One side of the table was covered with mail, some envelopes opened, some not. A couple of pans with caked-on food were sitting on top of the white gas stove, and a pile of dirty dishes teetered in the sink. Vernie, in a blue shirt, tie, and suspenders, took a final sip of coffee and stood up quickly, looking at Suzanne, still in her pink robe, with her long hair down her back, who was pretending to read the front page of the Madison Capital Times.
“Where’d you put the car keys?” he’d asked in a quiet but controlled voice, pulling on one of his suspenders in a way that let me know he was covering up some anger. She ignored him and kept up the pretense of reading.
“I said, where are the keys?” This time the anger was more evident. “Sue! I’m asking you a question.”
“You can go lick yourself, for all I care,” she said, her voice mannered and quiet, never looking up from the paper.
David was on the other side of Suzanne, putting large spoonfuls of oatmeal laced with sugar in his mouth as he sat there in his boxers and white undershirt, his wild and curly hair covering up parts of his chubby face. The youngest, Danny, was blond, with hair as straight as the living room’s leaded-glass edges, and whose slight figure could be seen beneath his striped pajamas, with a couple of buttons missing. He was sitting with food untouched, playing with a G.I. Joe and kicking his feet against the table leg.
“Sue. I’ve got to run by the office this morning.” Now he stepped closer and was looking down at her. She didn’t respond, so he took the paper.
“You think you can bully me around, Mr. Big Shot, Mr. Attorney General’s Office?”
“I just want my car keys.”
“What we want and what we get are two different things.”
Vernie ripped the paper from Suzanne’s hands and started rummaging around the kitchen, looking in drawers, under mail, under the piles of dirty dishes.
Suzanne just sat there with a Cheshire-cat smile. She picked up an emery board and began working on her nails. “My boss needs this report, Sue. In thirty minutes.”
“La-di-da,” she said, still not looking at him. “You think you can just stand up after the breakfast I cooked—”
“You cooked? When’s the last time—”
“Goddamn it, Vernie. You never appreciate anything I do for you, do you? Always ‘me, me, me, me.’ Like your job is so important and I’m not. What if I had plans for today?”
“I’ll be back in an hour,” he said, taking a deep breath.
“And what am I supposed to do for that hour?” At this point she looked up at him. “Saturdays are for family, Vernie. Family. And all you ever care about is yourself.”
“I’m trying to make a living for this family. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“You don’t fool me with all these trips to the office on weekends,” she said so close to his face, a few drops of her spit fell on his nose. “Who is it, that Charlene, who’s always wearing those short skirts? Or maybe Pauline, the one who talks like Marilyn Monroe?”
Vernie closed his eyes and didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. The others at the table pretended not to hear, and I was trying to be invisible, but it didn’t work.
Vernie continued, “If I don’t get this in, I might get fired.”
“That’s your excuse so you can go have sex with your girlfriend?” she said with eyes so angry, I thought she’d explode. “You think I don’t see those short skirts and how she can’t seem to expose enough of her cleavage.”
“Sue, be sensible!”
“ ‘Sensible’? Sensible? You think I don’t know what goes on down there?”
“I go to work and come home.”
“And you COME down there, too, don’t you?”
By now, I wanted to slink out of the room. No adult I had ever known would say “sex” or other racy words out loud in front of their children. Vernie was lifting up magazines and looking inside the cookie jar.
“Where are the keys?” he screamed.
“All you ever do is yell at me.”
“When you make my life difficult.”
“I knew it,” she said as she plopped down on the chair next to me and I turned and gave a weak smile, as if nothing was going on. “That’s all you see in me is how bad your life is.”
“It’s sure a hell of a lot worse since I left my home.”
“This is your home, Vern. And don’t you forget it.”
“How could I when you keep reminding me?”
“Because you keep wishing I was like that sugar-ass J-woman, who’s so sweet you have to take some insulin.”
“At least she treated me decently.”
“Admit it. You still love her and wish I were dead.”
“Be reasonable, Sue,” he said unreasonably. “And give me those damn keys.”
“You know when you’ll get your precious keys.”
“When I find them.”
“Oh no, mister, you don’t know how smart I am. You won’t get them until you promise not to talk to her.”
“She’s my mother.”
“Anybody who talks to Her Royal Highness—”
“Say her name. Jenylle. Who was my mother’s daughter-in-law for many years and they live two blocks from each other.”
“Anybody who talks to that sugar-infested J-woman . . . well, that person is off-limits. You get it? That’s when you get your keys. And if you ever want sex again from me—”
There was that word again. I shivered inside and tried to figure out how I could wriggle out of the room without anyone noticing.
Just then, Vernie found the keys underneath the coffee grounds in the can and he held them up, triumphantly, like a soccer player does with the ball when the game is won. Suzanne came after him but he was out the door too fast, so she grabbed that coffee can and threw it hard against the door, cracking the glass. The can fell to the floor and grounds scattered everywhere. Next to her was the sugar canister David had been using. She grabbed it and ran toward the door, opening it and throwing the whole canister out toward the driveway, but it landed on the grass near the porch.
Suzanne came back in, closed the door, and turned toward the table, looking blankly at the three of us, as still as if we’d been turned into stone.
“Clear up the table, do the dishes, and clean up this mess. I have a headache.” And she walked upstairs to their bedroom.
Such a scene was more and more common, but I never saw Vernie once raise a hand to Suzanne. With my mother there were frequent black eyes, bruised and swollen ankles from clocks being hurled, cut lips, and matted hair. Suzanne never had any of those signs.
* * *
By now, at the farm outside Chattanooga, it was getting late and it was pitch dark out. I had at least four hours of driving ahead of me. I said I had to go soon. Louisa looked genui
nely disappointed and I could see the gentleness in her spirit, the sparkle in her eyes, the loving kindness. How do such angelic qualities come out of a family that murders, and maybe even a mother who murders? Maybe I had Suzanne all wrong. Maybe she was a wonderful person, a great mother, and just had that temporary break with sanity.
“We thought you would stay overnight. We have the space.”
Oh, Louisa, I thought, some person in this house murdered my uncle in his bedroom. I had visions of lying under an Amish quilt in the recreation room while someone quietly crept up and aimed a rifle at my head. Pow! I knew there was no way I could get those images out of my brain and be able to fall asleep. I couldn’t say that I was afraid of getting offed, of course, so instead told her I had obligations the next day.
At least stay for dinner, she insisted, because she was preparing their own organically raised chicken with some vegetables from their garden. I looked at my watch. It was 8:30 P.M. and I had only intended to stay for an hour or two, but I couldn’t refuse that sincerity in Louisa’s eyes. “Just until after dinner,” I said. If I had known back then about all the other mysterious deaths surrounding Suzanne and David, I might have dodged the meal and trotted back to New York faster than a Tennessee walking horse.
It was a scrumptious dinner in the dining area with the wraparound windows, which offered some distractions. But the conversation was awkward, as Louisa, her husband, and David all took turns talking to me about Jesus, and Redemption, and the Resurrection. Louisa wanted me to know she was a Messianic Jew, not like David’s born-again Christianity. Still, they were concerned about my soul and what would happen to me in the afterlife. It was touching in an invasive kind of way.
I listened politely, not wanting to get into any conflicts that might change the tone. I believe in God, I thought about saying, and in Jesus and other Messengers of God, and my faith has sustained me through many tests, including the murder of my uncle. But I kept those thoughts to myself.
I went to Suzanne’s bedroom to say good-bye and we chatted for a while. Whenever I brought up Vernie, David would talk about Vernie’s sense of humor, or his desire to help people. I realized David was the only person there who was willing to actually talk about my uncle.
When it was after 10:00 P.M., I got up and said I really had to go. They all tried to get me to stay overnight, but there was no way on God’s (or Jesus’) earth that was going to happen. David looked at me with some kind of eager longing in his eyes and offered to walk me to the car. My heart leapt, because I thought I might get some insights from him.
Outside in the cool, dark air of eastern Tennessee, surrounded by large trees, a looming barn, and the small guesthouse near the road, I asked him to tell me about Vernie. He stopped and looked at me. Floodlights attached to the house had been aimed at the driveway and I could see his face clearly. “I understand. You want some closure,” he said as he drew a couple of paces closer.
At last! It had been ten hours since I’d left Nashville and I’d meant to head back four hours ago. What was I thinking? That I would just sashay in there, stay for ninety minutes, and then ask, “ So which one of you actually did kill my uncle?” By the end of dinner I had felt I was on a mission of folly and that all I was going to hear were generalities.
Then David and I were there in the driveway and he seemed eager to tell me what had happened. We talked for about two hours, and I forgot that I was cold and we were in semidarkness, with three outdoor lights above the carport saving us from total blackness.
* * *
“What do you remember about Vernie?” I asked, wanting to start with lower-risk questions. He looked off into the dark for a moment, then turned back toward me, his face somber.
“I was just a kid when my mom married Vernie.”
“Do you remember how old you were when they first got together?” I asked, because the whole time frame of exactly when he and Suzanne got involved was pretty sketchy to me.
“Maybe seven or eight. Or nine. I don’t know.” He had been born in 1953, so that would make the original hookup around 1960 to 1962. David’s younger brother, from Suzanne’s third marriage, was born in 1960.
David continued, “I just remember him trying to teach me how to be a better person, making sure I did my chores and was polite to adults. He also taught me how to shoot guns. We’d go to the dump on Fish Hatchery Road in Madison and spend hours standing between old baby buggies and broken TVs piled on top of mountains of garbage, aiming at tin cans or plastic bottles.”
“Did your mom ever go along?”
“No. She never cared about guns. It was just Vernie and me. And I think Vernie liked that. He treated me like his own son and tried to toughen me up.”
I was intrigued. “Toughen you up?” At this question David got more enthusiastic.
“He always told me stories about growing up and how he was the youngest kid and smaller than a lot of the neighbor boys. He had to learn how to defend himself against those big bullies. I think that’s why he became a policeman. You know, watch out for the little ones who are defenseless. That was his reason for living.”
By now, my body was shivering in the near-freezing temperature, but I was afraid if I asked if we could move inside or sit in my car, I would break the spell.
“Do you remember that night?”
“The night ‘it’ happened, I was asleep in my room down the hall. Louisa was away at school in New York, and my younger brother was staying with a relative in Madison. They were yelling and it woke me up. Vernie was shouting, ‘So shoot me, then. Just shoot me!’ I was laying there in my warm bed, under the covers, so tired, and I just couldn’t pull myself up to go stop their fight, which is what I usually did. David the mediator. But I just decided to go back to sleep. A little later I heard a loud bang and then my mother was knocking on my door. ‘I shot Vernie,’ she said. I got out of bed and let her in the room and asked her where: Leg, arm, or what? ‘The head.’ I ran fast to their room and saw blood and brains everywhere. Vernie was on the floor, all bloodied, with this gun lying next to him, and it looked like he had been shot straight on, in the face. I guess it was just instinct from all the times I’ve been hunting, but I picked up the rifle to see if it was still loaded and the spent shell popped out. ‘This couldn’t be happening, ’ I thought, and I threw the gun down. That’s why the police found two sets of fingerprints on the gun, both my mom’s and mine.”
I didn’t want to say anything other than nod, because David was on a roll, talking very fast. But my mind was racing. My uncle was a strong and proud man who had served as a soldier and then a police officer and at the time of his death was on an elite investigation team for the state. He had mob death threats against him and been in many compromising, scary positions in his twenty-five years in law enforcement. The uncle that I knew personally, and what I surmise professionally, would never have asked anyone to shoot him. He had told friends he was going back to his first wife and daughter. Why would he want to die?
Then David went on: “My mother asked if she should call the police and I thought, ‘Heck, yeah, ’cause maybe we can save Vernie.’ That’s when I went into shock, because the rest is all jumbled up in my mind. I remember being in the police station all night and the police threatening to arrest me, unless my mom confessed, because they had my fingerprints on the weapon. Her lawyer was there and told her not to say anything, but after I don’t know how many hours, she finally said she would take the blame if they could arrange an insanity plea.”
Is that how it works? I wondered. You shoot somebody and then negotiate with the police so they’ll agree you’re crazy? But I had to find a better way to say it to David.
“Looking back on that night,” I started carefully. Here was a guy I barely knew as an adult who was only one of two living witnesses to my uncle’s murder. How did I ask a difficult question in a way that would make it easier for him to tell the truth? “Do you think she actually did have a psychotic break?”
He stood very still, like an animal that doesn’t want the predator to know it’s there. As he looked down onto the impenetrable black asphalt of the driveway, he said, “I think my mother’s been able to live with what she did all these years because she tells herself she was a victim, someone who became an alcoholic herself to stop Vernie from drinking, a woman abused by that alcoholic who begged her to be shot. But her thinking doesn’t take into account that alcohol and arguments were a lethal combination for those two.”
I was agreeing with David, that alcohol and arguments are not a good combination, but I also remembered lots of alcohol and lots of arguments in my own family, but no one ever pulled out a gun and murdered anyone. And what was all this about becoming an alcoholic to stop Vernie from drinking? How did she know he was an alcoholic? Lots of people drink heavily, but that does not make them addicts. And stopping him by accompanying him to the bars and loading up on drinks? No matter how hard I try, I can think of no reasoning that fits her strategy with the intended outcome. Wouldn’t a Mensa-level woman have figured out that you don’t get someone to reduce or stop alcohol consumption by becoming a drinking buddy?
My attention went back to David, who continued. “And my mom has this story, which I never heard about until recently, that Vernie burned cigarettes on her back while they were dancing. She says she thought he was putting an ice cube there and had done so several times previously.”
Wait a minute, I thought, this is the same incident Suzanne was telling me about. If he had done it before, why did she still think it was an ice cube? If her story were true, wouldn’t this Mensa woman have figured out he wasn’t carrying ice cubes around to torment her? And that when she felt an ice cube on her back, watch out!
Almost as if he were reading my mind, David went on: “But I’ll tell ya, I never saw any evidence of cigarette burns or heard her talk about it back then.” He paused and I just stood there. Words would not come out of my mouth. “You know something else?” he said as I shrugged, having no idea what might be coming next. “Vernie was really different the last two weeks of his life.”
With One Shot Page 4