But crime scenes are funny; they don’t always follow the rules or what’s expected or the way other, similar crimes have looked. So Robileaux tucked these details away as something to puzzle, to probe, to take out and examine again and again.
Then he found the letters in an envelope on the nightstand when he returned to her house two days after the stabbing. A long typed letter from Cesar, written in a grandiose style, accusing Marjorie of discomfort over his ethnicity—his father was Hispanic, his mother African American—of being embarrassed to have her family know him; he wrote that her family didn’t like darker-skinned people, that she didn’t respect him and truly want him to be a part of her life. An extended separation was called for, he wrote. Cesar told Robileaux that he’d gone to her office and given it to her the day before she was stabbed, that they’d had a brief, heated verbal altercation, and he’d left. Also inside the envelope was a short note Marjorie had written Cesar later that day, but had not yet given to him. In it she apologized for being rude and abrupt with him, explained that she wanted him to know her children and her family but now realized that was impossible. Their differences were too great. She ended with “I’m so tired.”
Robileaux dug into this like a hound. All the odd, unexplainable details of the crime scene shifted and fell into place. She was despondent, he decided, over a relationship gone awry. She was suicidal or, worse, she’d staged the whole thing for attention from her family or to get Cesar back. He thought about the Pollyanna comment she’d made when she saw Cesar, how coherent she seemed given the situation. He wondered how familiar she was with anatomy.
He talked to the doctors at the hospital. No, they’d found no evidence of bruising about the legs or vagina, consistent with an attempted rape. The smaller cut under her left breast could be a hesitation cut, he decided, often common when sharp objects are used in suicide attempts. He found it strange that Marjorie claimed not to remember this cut, when she remembered so much else, that she couldn’t explain the presence of the second knife on the nightstand. And the angle of the knife in her chest seemed inconsistent with her report of what happened. In fact, each time he talked to her over the next four weeks, her version of what happened changed slightly, small changes, but Robileaux found them significant.
And there was the composite drawing. Marjorie, frustrated with what she perceived as slow movement on her case, went to State Police Headquarters and enlisted the help of a prominent sketch artist. The artist, a woman younger than Marjorie with a gentle demeanor and crooked teeth, had her look through a number of face, eye, nose, and mouth shapes. Then, working off the selected shapes, to refine the drawing and make it as accurate as possible, she had Marjorie get down on the floor, reenact that moment again in her bedroom when the intruder leaned over her.
“The body will help remember what the mind might have forgotten,” she told Marjorie. “I want you to see it again, as closely as possible.”
What her body remembered was panic and terror, Marjorie told me later. And so, as she lay there on the floor, seeing and feeling it all again, her knees spread apart, her arms outstretched, she whispered, “Okay, make this real, this is real.” To encourage herself to get back to that moment, she told me, to stay strong.
But this wasn’t the way Robileaux read it when he talked to the sketch artist later. And it wasn’t the way she read it, either. She told Robileaux she thought Marjorie was too nervous, that she was deceptive at times, sincere at others. That she worried mostly about Marjorie’s children, that she thought Marjorie might at a later time take the children’s lives along with her own. But Marjorie didn’t find out about this until weeks later. She left the sketch artist’s office believing she’d taken a positive step to help find the man who’d stabbed her.
Meanwhile, Robileaux interviewed her parents, her ex-husband, Cesar. All seemed stunned that Marjorie might have done this to herself.
“But anything’s possible, I guess,” her ex-husband said at the end of a lengthy, intense interview.
“Do you think Marjorie would take a polygraph exam?” Robileaux asked him.
“She’ll probably say they aren’t reliable,” her ex-husband said.
Which is exactly what Marjorie LaSalle said, two raw, thirteen-inch scars now gracing her chest and upper back, when Robileaux asked her to submit to a polygraph exam five weeks after her stabbing. But she agreed, infuriated with Robileaux’s insinuations. The polygraph examiner asked her five questions, three of which pertained to the night of July 13.
“Did you stab yourself at your house?”
“No.”
“Did a Negro man stab you at your house?”
“Yes.”
“Have you made up any part of your story concerning a Negro man stabbing you?”
“No.”
The examiner’s finding? Marjorie was answering “deceptively” to the relevant questions.
Detective Ray Robileaux set up a meeting with Marjorie at the Homicide office and asked Hebert to join him. Without her knowledge, he arranged for the interview to be videotaped. He confronted her with the lack of evidence and pointedly accused her of stabbing herself, said her kinesics, or body language, clearly indicated her guilt. What body language that was, he refused to say. Hebert remained mostly quiet throughout.
Whatever shred of calm Marjorie had left, she lost. She yelled, she was sarcastic, she held her hand out and said “Stop” each time Robileaux interrupted her, which was frequently. She looked at the ground or the table or Hebert as she talked. She accused Robileaux of bias against women. She said the investigation had never been carried out properly. She told him she could prove she didn’t stab herself but that would cost her money and energy, neither of which she had. That what he accused her of was so exotic in interpretation that she felt a new sense of violation—she was being victimized by the police who were supposed to be helping her. The interview ended abruptly.
But Robileaux had one more step to take. He took the videotape to the police psychologist, McCants, and asked him to review it, his report, and all the witness interviews and statements. McCants asked to talk to only one person—Marjorie’s ex-husband. And then he called Robileaux and said, “I agree. All evidence points to deceptiveness. I’d say your findings are accurate.”
And so the investigation was halted and the offense changed from attempted capital murder to attempted suicide.
Later that night on the phone, Marjorie told me Robileaux had said that no one would know the final disposition unless she told them. But if she took this any further, if she took it to the media or publicized her dissatisfaction with the way the police were handling the case, “all the quirks will be pulled out.”
“I just find it intolerable, unbelievable,” Marjorie said. “He’s threatening me. He’s saying my alleged instability will be leaked and damage my position and viability as a professional psychologist.”
I made murmuring noises to acknowledge I was listening as I threaded my fingers through the hair around my dog’s face. Increasingly, I’d been avoiding her phone calls, letting my answering machine screen calls. I just didn’t know what to say to her. I’d started out wanting to help a woman who had been brutally attacked and who had somehow survived, a woman who had the strength to live and stay coherent through an unimaginable horror. I’d admired her. I still admired her. But this had swirled out into something much bigger than I could comprehend. Or handle.
“I told him,” Marjorie continued, “that I pride myself on three things. My integrity, first and foremost. And my honesty—I always tell the truth, well, except to my parents when I was a teenager, but as an adult, I always tell the truth, I don’t lie. And third, being a mother. I’m a good mother. I would never leave my children without a mother. I just wouldn’t do it.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I said, remembering the knife buried deep in her chest. I knew people killed themselves, I knew peop
le tried to kill themselves, but not like that. They didn’t do it like that, did they? They shot themselves or cut their wrists or hanged themselves or took pills. But they didn’t bury a knife deep into their own chest.
She was silent a moment. “You know, I always believed in the police. I always told my kids, the police will help you, they’re there to protect you and keep you safe.” She started crying. “But that’s not true, is it?” she whispered.
“There are lots of good cops.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Hebert seemed very nice.”
“But he didn’t do anything.” Marjorie’s voice rose.
I stared at my dog, thought about Hebert’s comments out on the porch. He’d seemed kind, genuine. Did he believe Marjorie had stabbed herself? Was there something I wasn’t seeing? I felt the edges of a headache coming on.
“You’ve gone awfully quiet,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“I keep feeling there’s something you want to say and aren’t.”
My head started throbbing in earnest.
“Cathy?”
“You probably should know, I’m entering the police academy in a couple of weeks.”
“Oh.” She was quiet for a long time. My dog nudged my hand with his nose. “Have you talked to them?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The police, Robileaux.”
“No! Why would I talk to them?”
I heard children’s voices in the background, the sound of dishes clattering before she said, “I wish you’d told me before.”
“You just seemed so down on the police, I didn’t want you to think…” I hesitated.
“You’ve been planning this for a while, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Since before you met me?”
“Yes.”
A deep sigh. “You know you’re the only one I’ve been able to talk to about this, really talk about it, besides my therapist. I haven’t wanted to burden people. But I’ve burdened you, haven’t I?”
“No,” I said, not sounding convincing even to myself.
“Well.” Her voice turned brisk. “You’ll be a good police officer, I’m sure.”
“I mean to,” I said quietly.
Our conversation didn’t last much longer. There really wasn’t anything else to say. After she hung up, I buried my face in my dog’s side. I felt old, confused, relieved. I doubted she’d call me anymore, and I was right. She never called my house again.
The next six years were good to me. I graduated the police academy in the top third of my class, qualified as an expert marksman, and went straight into a two-year tour of uniform patrol out of Broadmoor Precinct. Did over two years in Juvenile as a detective, got transferred to Scotlandville Precinct, got married, bought a house in Central, and then was selected for my current assignment: community liaison, the brainchild of the new police chief, a man I’d served under out of Broadmoor.
“Civilian complaints are rising,” he’d told me in his airy, light-filled office. “We want a fresh, objective eye. Someone they can connect to. Your job is to determine whether a case should be reopened, reexamined and by whom, or whether an officer should be investigated by Internal Affairs. You aren’t Internal Affairs,” he stressed. “You are a liaison between civilians, the police attorney, IA, and the Cold Cases teams.”
I’d nodded hesitantly, thinking cops would view me either as a rat, out to get them, or as a buffer, out to protect them. It would be a fine line to maneuver, and if I hadn’t trusted the Chief and believed in his motives, I would have said no.
“I’m asking for a two-year commitment,” the Chief said. “Mostly days, some evenings. If you agree, it’ll be you and George Donovan.”
It was tempting. No fighting to stay awake at 4:00 A.M., none of the blurry tension that came from working in the never-ending dark, no wondering what horrors the night might bring. That, and teaming up with George, clinched the deal for me, and I’d agreed with the promise that I’d be transferred into general detectives at the end of two years.
I liked the job for the most part. It exercised different muscles, and it allowed me to listen, something I’d always been good at. People came in angry and frustrated, and I soothed, explained, investigated; sometimes I made them happy and sometimes not.
George and I ruffled some cops’ feathers, but that was to be expected, especially when family members were involved. Nepotism was the norm in the BRPD. It seemed half the department was related to one another: husbands and wives or siblings and cousins, or sometimes the whole family—mother, father, sons (but rarely the daughters)—working in various divisions. Even George and I had family in the department: my husband worked in Auto Theft; his sister worked in Communications. It really wasn’t a problem. We didn’t have the final say on any case; there were always higher ups—the police attorney, the Captain in Internal Affairs, and sometimes the Chief or Civil Service Review Board composed of civilians, police officers, and firefighters—who evaluated our findings.
Still, our decisions were rarely overturned. George and I were a good team. We were overworked; civilians filed requests for reviews constantly, some dating back years before my time in the department. But everyone in the department was overworked. It was simply one of the factors of the job you accepted.
So when the police attorney, Lou Cox, came into my office and threw the file down on my desk, I barely flinched. Barely. It was close to quitting time, and my mind was occupied with what my husband was fixing for dinner. He’d promised crawfish étouffée.
“This one just came in. Interview’s set for Friday.” Lou tugged his silk tie even looser, then jammed his hands deep into the pockets of his linen trousers.
“You can’t be serious.” I looked at the stack of files already on my desk. “Give it to George.” I nodded toward my partner, who had his feet propped up on his desk, reading glasses perched low on his nose. Red reading glasses with yellow polka dots, my spare pair because he’d forgotten his somewhere earlier today. I was tempted to giggle every time I looked at him, and I looked at George a lot. He was one of the handsomest men I knew, like an older Denzel Washington but with salt-and-pepper hair and mustache.
“Don’t shove that shit off on me.” George’s lips barely moved.
“She wants a female officer, Stevens. You’re our female officer. I think.” Lou looked over at George, who never stopped reading but slowly raised his hand and gave him the finger.
“Generally that would be me,” I agreed. “But two days to prepare?”
“It’s just an interview,” Lou said. “Do the rest afterward.”
I rested my chin in my hand and looked at him. After seven months in the liaison office, I’d learned we did things on Lou’s schedule. Depending on the case, that was usually yesterday. Still, I had other plans for tonight, tomorrow was packed with appointments and cases to follow up on, and tomorrow night I’d intended more of what I had planned for tonight. I hated when my husband and I were on opposing shifts, and I guarded my time with him ferociously.
“Ray was the lead investigator, but the complainant’s emphatic about a female handling the case,” Lou said. “George’ll have to review your findings.”
“Sure.” I stared warily at the file on my desk.
Lou thumped his hand against the door frame before he left. “Won’t be a problem, right?”
“Hasn’t been before,” I said to his back.
“Good ole Ray Robileaux,” George said softly.
I reached for the file and read the complaint date, said, “Wow, an old one,” scanned the heading, Attempted Capital Murder/Reassigned: Attempted Suicide, saw the complainant’s name, and felt my body lock up.
“What’s a matter, girl? You gone a bit white there,” George said.
“I am white.” It was an old joke between us.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“What?” I was still staring at Marjorie LaSalle’s name.
I looked at George. He’d taken off my reading glasses. “You say that a lot, George, that you like him.”
“Well, I do.”
“I know he was an asshole; I know he’s changed.”
“Maybe you should give me that file.”
“You’ll get it soon enough.” I pulled the file back in front of me, glanced at my watch, called Ray and told him I’d be running a little late, then settled down to read my husband’s final nineteen-page report and accompanying notes on the stabbing of Marjorie LaSalle.
Ray Robileaux was legendary in the department for three things: his ability to read a crime scene, his high case clearance, and his drinking. Not that the drinking was that much of an anomaly. Back in the old days, when we had a police chief without much spine, cops, especially the detectives, often drank on duty. You could walk into the Pastime Lounge and find on-duty detectives eating a slice of pizza and throwing back a beer at lunch-or dinnertime. After 10:00 P.M., it was the Shipwreck Lounge, tucked into the back of BonMarche Mall, a dark, dirty dive with a loud juke box full of country-and-western tunes and songs from the 1960s. The Shipwreck was mostly frequented by off-duty uniform cops, the whole crew from ARAB—Armed Robbery and Burglary—and a scattering of detectives from Homicide, Sex Crimes, and Juvenile. There were lockers at the front entrance to secure your gun.
Ray Robileaux was a regular at both the Pastime and the Shipwreck. By the time I’d graduated from the academy, his marriage had ended in a ferocious divorce, he’d lost custody of both his kids, and he’d been busted down to Communications—just one step above the Governmental Building security detail or the Booking Desk, in terms of punishment. Ray’s drinking days were over if he wanted to keep his job. He checked himself into a rehab program at the Tau Center, started attending AA meetings, and dipped below the radar of department gossip.
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