Lois closes the door, and he hears her slide the security chain. Then she opens the door for him, and he follows her to a small round table. She sits and waits as he lays the box on the table, opens it, and withdraws the hammer.
She stares at it for a long time, seemingly unable to lift her head and meet his gaze.
“Friend of mine runs a big security firm that has its own forensics lab. I asked him to test the prints against the prints on the water bottle you drank from in my truck.” He doesn’t have to tell her they were a match; she already knows.
They sit for a while until he says, “It never made sense to me—that Cindy Dowd would let her daughter take the rap for killing Lester when Cindy did it herself. You seemed like a decent person when we met, so it didn’t make sense to me that you wouldn’t come forward once Cindy confessed to you, even given the risk you’d be discovered.”
She looks up at him now. “Please, can’t you just stop there? You know what’s at stake. You know what we have to do.”
He shakes his head: he has to see this through. “There was only one way Cindy’s silence and your own silence made sense.” He sees a tear slide down Lois’s face, and he gives her time to wipe it off. “You and Cindy didn’t come forward with Cindy’s guilt because she’s not the one who killed Lester. It was Darlene who killed her father, after all.”
Lois’s eyes lock onto his now. “That monster. He got what he deserved. Why should that poor girl spend the rest of her life in prison when he drove her to . . . do what she did?”
He lets the words hang in the air. “Tell me what happened.”
She closes her eyes, calms her breathing.
“Bobby, my husband, was away that weekend. I hated being alone on the farm overnight, so Cindy would come and stay with me sometimes. She was at my place that night. Around 5:00 or so, she got up and walked home. Our farms were only a quarter of a mile down the road from each other. It wasn’t twenty minutes after she left that she came running back. She was crying and screaming and carrying the hammer. It took me a while to calm her down. When I did, she told me everything—about what Lester had been doing to Darlene. She said she didn’t know at first but figured it out over time. I asked why she hadn’t gone to the police, and she gave me her excuses—that she was afraid she’d end up with nothing, have to go back to where she’d come from. I had a thing or two to say to her. But this was about Darlene, so as quick as we could, we came up with the story about me seeing Darlene walking home that morning. We thought Darlene’s lawyer could use that in court, help cast reasonable doubt. We didn’t get far with it, though, thanks to Sonny Foster.”
She pauses and purses her lips.
“Tell me about the hammers,” he says.
She slowly nods. “That was Cindy’s idea, to help Darlene down the road in case she did get sent to prison. Cindy brought the red-handled hammer, the one Darlene used on Lester. It was soaked with blood and hair and flesh. We unrolled some clear plastic wrap and used it to wipe as much of the blood off the handle as we could. Then we cleaned off the handle, to get rid of Darlene’s fingerprints. Cindy put her palm onto the plastic wrap, let it get nice and bloody, and then gripped the hammer.”
“To inculpate her down the line,” Tommy says. “Once she was in the grave and safe from prosecution. The plan being that you would testify Cindy asked you to hide the hammer; then later she would confess to the killing.”
“But that wasn’t enough,” Lois says. “Because if I died before her, there’d be no one to testify to her confession.”
“So you pressed your own palm onto the plastic wrap and bloodied your hammer as well. To be used if you died first. In which case, what? Cindy couldn’t very well say you had confessed to her—it wouldn’t make any sense for her to have sat on the knowledge that you’d killed her husband and blamed it on her daughter.”
“There’s a safe-deposit box in my bank containing two letters, addressed to Cindy and to Darlene, in which I confess that it was I who killed Lester and hid the hammer to protect myself. The letters give the location of the blue hammer.”
A frown appears on her face. “How did you know to look for it?” She indicates the blue-handled hammer on the table between them.
“That was your doing, in the graveyard. You stood before the two stones and hesitated. It was obvious you didn’t know which one to point me to. But the tell wasn’t in your hesitation; after so many years, it wouldn’t be surprising that you’d forgotten which grave you buried the hammer in. The clue came in how sharply you told me to wait before I dug. I wondered why you cared so much if I started on the wrong grave. Why was it as important that I not dig the wrong grave as it was that I dig the right one? It seemed clear to me that something was buried in both graves. So when everyone left, I went back.”
He sees her staring at the hammer, so he takes it from the table, puts it back into the metal box, and places the box into the canvas bag.
“That was some show you put on for us at your house,” he says.
She smiles sadly. “I told you I was an actress.”
“A damned good one.” He exhales, thinks for a minute. “Someone not as smart as Cindy might have decided just to get rid of the hammer, thinking, No weapon means no conviction. But she knew the lack of a weapon wouldn’t guarantee an acquittal, just make it harder for the prosecution. So she came up with the plan to hide it, for later. I get that. What I don’t get is why, if she felt so guilty about her daughter’s abuse, she didn’t just confess to the crime and turn over the hammer with her own fingerprints on it.”
“She wanted to,” says Lois. “That was her plan when she brought me the hammer. But I talked her out of it. I said I understood why she felt she needed to take the blame, given that she’d let Lester’s abuse of Darlene go on and on. But as bad as that was, she wasn’t a murderer. She didn’t deserve to go to prison for the rest of her life. The best we could do was set it up so that Darlene might be freed down the line after Cindy passed, or I did.”
Lois pauses for a moment. “I have a question for you. When you found the second hammer, and your man found my prints on it, why didn’t you conclude I was the killer? Or that Cindy was, based on the first hammer?”
“Because if it was you, Cindy would have turned you in to save her daughter. And if it was Cindy, she wouldn’t have let Darlene take the fall. The only way the two hammers made sense was if Darlene killed Lester.”
Lois nods. “I never told Cindy about my past. If I had, she’d never have trusted me to come forward to save Darlene in case Cindy passed first. Because of the risk I’d be taking that I’d be discovered. And to be honest,” she says, “I was never sure myself that I’d be able to go through with it. But once I started talking with Piper and Susan . . .”
“You got into the role,” he says. “And you thought you’d be able to get away with it. That you could come forward and testify, and no one would figure out the plan you and Cindy had hatched, or about your own criminal history.”
“But I was wrong on both counts. Thanks to Susan and Piper, and you.”
The words hang in the air.
After a while, he asks, “How much of this does Darlene know?”
“About my past? Nothing. As for what her mother and I did, Darlene had to know it all for it to work.”
“What I thought.”
His hands are resting on the table. She reaches out to grab them.
“Can’t we keep this between us? Let the show go on tomorrow?”
A deep sadness wells up inside him. He’s carried so many secrets in his life. The one about his father that almost destroyed him. The ones from the Hanson case. Secrets he kept from Mick. Secrets he still keeps from Piper. Too much weight to bear. He shakes his head.
“This isn’t my call.”
He watches as she lowers her head and tears slide down her cheeks. This time, she’s not acting.
Piper takes a large bite of the chocolate-covered ice cream. She closes her eyes and smiles as the rich, cool combi
nation slides down her throat.
She’s pulled from her reverie by a knock at the door. She lifts herself off the bed, walks down the narrow hallway, and looks through the keyhole. She removes the security chain and opens the door.
“Tommy! Where have you been? I’ve been calling you all day. Tommy? What’s wrong?”
It is 8:00 a.m. Piper sits at the gray metal table in the attorney meeting room of the Lehigh County Jail. Susan is beside her. Neither speaks. Piper glances at Susan, who stares straight ahead. Last night, once Tommy finished relating his conversation with Lois Beal, she went straight to Lois’s room and confronted her. An hour of tears and anger and harsh words ensued, ending with her storming out of the room and slamming the door. She made it about ten feet before doubling over in the hallway and then sliding to the floor, her back against the wall. Lois must’ve known what was happening, because she walked into the hall and helped her up. They stood like that for a long moment, each staring into eyes filled with anguish.
She returned to her room and called Mick. She hated to do it, because he was already dealing with so much in the Nunzio case. But this was too big not to ask his advice. She laid it all out for him and waited, listening to him breathe and think and weigh his words. Unable to bear the silence, she spoke first.
“So what it all comes down to,” she says, “is that the best that could happen here is that Susan and I put Lois Beal on the stand and let a fugitive killer lie under oath to spring another murderer.”
“That’s one way to look at it. The other way is that you’re giving a woman who participated in a terrible crime the chance to redeem herself by winning freedom for another woman who was physically and psychologically tortured to the point that she committed an act of unspeakable violence, causing her to be locked away like an animal. In the end, all that happened was that she was moved from one hellish existence to another.”
That’s when she broke down completely. She wept and wailed and heaved until she was spent. She couldn’t tell how much time passed, but when it was over, she realized she was still clutching her cell phone. And Mick was still on the line. He consoled her as best he could and promised that, whatever she decided, it would be the right choice, and he was behind her 100 percent.
It was only after she hung up that she realized she had no choice at all. Susan would never agree to move forward with the hearing. And Mick was firm that Susan had to be told.
We can’t put Susan’s license on the line by using her to suborn perjury to free a convicted killer.
The words remained unspoken by both of them, but they were thinking the same thing: how close they came to doing exactly that in the Hanson case.
She glances again at Susan as the door opens and the guard brings Darlene Dowd into the room. Darlene’s eyes are aglow with hope and gratitude, much as they were when they met last evening.
“Sit,” Susan says. Just one word.
Darlene slowly lowers herself into the chair, looking first at Susan then at Piper, then back to Susan. Piper sees that Darlene can tell something is wrong.
Piper is the first to speak. “Lois told us.”
“Told you? What?”
Susan leans forward. “Everything.”
Darlene’s eyes grow wide. Her lower lip begins to quiver. She crosses her arms around her chest.
“Our firm’s innocence project is just like the state’s Innocence Project,” Piper says. “It’s only for people who did not commit the crime they were convicted of. People who are actually innocent. You knew that, Darlene.”
“I was innocent! He stole that from me! He took everything. Everything!”
Piper can see that Darlene is struggling mightily not to cry. She succeeds in holding back the tears, but she can’t hide the anguish and fear in her eyes.
“Tell us what happened that night,” Piper says.
“It won’t change anything,” Susan says. “But we have a right to know.”
Piper watches as Darlene’s shoulders slump, and she shrinks into herself, resigned now to her fate.
“I was with Dale that night. Dale Forney. My mother was going to spend the night at Lois’s house, because Lois’s husband was away. And I knew my father was going to be at one of his poker games and wouldn’t be home until early morning. So I knew there’d be time for me and Dale to be together. It would have been our first time. We’d only gone out a few times before that, and he’d kissed me, but that was it. I wouldn’t let it go any further, and he respected that.”
Darlene pauses here, and Piper can see that she’s taking herself back fifteen years.
“I knew my parents would both be out of the house by 9:00, so I told Dale to come for me then. I walked to the end of our driveway, and he was waiting for me. He had one of those big pickup trucks they sell at the dealership. It was white, and I remember thinking, Oh, there’s Dale, my white knight.”
She smiles at this—a sad and pitiful sight that stabs Piper in the heart.
“Dale took me to a movie. It wasn’t very good, but I didn’t care; I was out on a date, like a normal girl. With a nice boy. I was having the time of my life. After the movie, Dale took me to a diner. He had a hamburger and fries, and a chocolate shake. I wasn’t hungry, but I did have a shake of my own. Dale said things that were funny, and I remember laughing a lot. He laughed, too. And he held my hand across the table.”
Piper listens to Darlene’s story, thinking it sounds like something right out of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. She wonders whether it was as sweet as Darlene’s telling, or whether she’s idealizing it.
“After the diner, it was getting on to midnight, but I knew I had hours before my father got home. Dale knew it, too, because I’d told him. So he drove me down to a small lake at the end of a country road that was barely a road. He had one of those metal cabs over the bed of his pickup, and he led me to the back. We both got in. There was an air mattress with a comforter on it. I knew what he had in mind, and I wanted that, too. I really liked Dale, and I thought if I did it with a boy like him, it would help wipe away . . .”
Piper sees Darlene’s breathing getting shallower, faster. She reaches across the table to where Darlene’s hands are folded. Susan remains bolt upright in her seat.
“Take it slow,” Piper says.
Darlene nods. “We started making out. Dale was very considerate—he took things very slowly. It was wonderful. And then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. I’m not sure how far things had gone—I think my shirt was off. Maybe he was, you know, feeling me. Something happened. It was like . . . all of a sudden it wasn’t Dale’s hands that were on me, but my father’s. I flipped out. I started screaming and kicking and hitting Dale. I scratched his face. It was bleeding. He jumped off me and bolted from the truck.”
Darlene stands, paces.
“I threw my shirt back on and climbed out of the truck, too. He was holding his face, wiping the blood off. He couldn’t believe it. He started yelling at me, shouting that he didn’t do anything I hadn’t wanted him to. He called me a freak.” Darlene shouts the word, tears now flowing freely. “That’s when I knew my father had ruined me. Ruined me forever.”
Darlene closes her eyes and squeezes her fists, then slowly seats herself back at the table.
“Dale drove me home, but we didn’t say a word to each other the whole way. I tried to say I was sorry, but I couldn’t get the words out. I think I was afraid that if I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop—that I’d tell him everything. And then he’d think I was even worse than a freak. I watched him drive away, and then I went inside. It was after 2:00 by then, and I went straight to bed.
“I cried myself to sleep. Then I heard my father come home. He moved around the kitchen for a while, then he came upstairs and stood in my doorway and stared at me. I pretended to be asleep, but, somehow, he knew I wasn’t, and he told me so. He told me he was going to his workshop, and I needed to come up after him. ‘Right quick,’ he said. He left the house, and I forced myself to get out of b
ed. I went downstairs, but something came over me. Every step I took down the stairs, I felt more and more numb. He’d be coming back for me, I knew, once he realized I wasn’t coming up to the shop. He would come in and grab me by the hair and drag me up there—he’d done that more than once before. But this time I wasn’t going to let him. I searched the kitchen for something to wave in his face when he walked through the door. I found a pair of scissors in the drawer, but I knew that wouldn’t scare him away. So I pulled out a big knife . . . but I was scared to use it. Finally, I found the hammer my mother used to hang pictures and such.
“It wasn’t long before I saw him coming down the driveway from his workshop. The motion-detector lights outside our house turned on once he got close. I could see he was pissed that I hadn’t come up, and I knew what that meant for how he was going to handle me that night. He opened the kitchen door and stepped inside. I went to wave the hammer at him, to scare him. But something happened, and I didn’t just wave it—I hit him with it. He went down, and I went down after him. I don’t know how many times I hit him, but I know it was a lot.
“I say it was me doing this, but it didn’t feel like me. I was floating up by the ceiling, watching it happen.”
“Can we take a break?” Piper says. “I need . . . I need a minute.”
“Are you okay?” Susan asks once they’re both in the hallway.
“It was awful reading about it in the trial transcript, but it’s even worse hearing it from her.”
“The thing about watching herself do it,” Susan says. “She was in a dissociative state.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think Darlene suffered a complete psychotic break.”
Piper doesn’t know what to say.
“Darlene wasn’t in her right mind. In a sense, it wasn’t even she who was doing it.”
“Does that matter?”
“At this stage, no. If Darlene had admitted to the killing when she was arrested, her attorney probably could have presented a strong case for legal insanity.”
“You mean she would have gone free?”
A Killer's Alibi (Philadelphia Legal) Page 29