Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  “I know, you’re right,” said Gus. “There was a time when I wouldn’t have told the truth, or the whole truth, I should say, but I’ve passed that stage long since.”

  “Then do it,” said Jimmy.

  “I’ll get to it. I have to write this O. J. novel first.”

  “Do you ever get sick of O. J. in your life, Gus?” asked the columnist Liz Smith when Gus had Sunday-night supper with her in the kitchen of her house in Prud’homme.

  “Yes, I get sick of him. Deeply sick,” replied Gus. “He’s taken up too much time in my life. But I can’t give him up yet. I think about him all day long while I write my book. I talk about him at parties, or with whomever I’m having dinner, the way we’re doing now. I talk about him to Deb at the gas station when she puts gas in my car. I talk about him to the train conductor on MetroNorth. I talk about him on the telephone to all my reporter friends, who always know I’m good for an over-the-top quote about him. I still read—two years later—every word that is written about him. I never miss Geraldo or Chuck Grodin or Larry King, in case they’re talking about him, which they always are. My magazine gets me tapes of any show I might have missed. He’s vented his anger at me on radio station KJLH-FM in Los Angeles, calling in from home, speaking in the patronizing voice of a man recently acquitted of two murders. He said I had only one perspective from day one. On that; he’s absolutely right. I knew he was guilty from day one, and nothing has happened that has made me veer from that position. He singled me out in his speech at the Oxford Union in England, along with Tom Brokaw—I loved being grouped with Tom, climber that I still am—and also at the Scripture Cathedral in Washington just the other night. Did you see that show? It was terrifying—they practically put a death warrant on Geraldo Rivera, because Geraldo makes no bones about the fact that he believes O. J. is guilty of the crimes of which he was acquitted. Bravo, Geraldo. You’d think he’d know enough to go quietly into the night, to that ranch in Montana, or Wyoming, or wherever it was, that Schiller said he planned to go to for a few years if he was acquitted. But no such luck. He keeps pushing himself in our faces, waving from golf carts, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. The sick part of it is, Liz, that it excites me to know that I have angered him enough to be singled out by him. Do you think I’m losing my mind?”

  On the days leading up to the two nights that his miniseries was on the air, CBS played excerpts of his interview with Gayle to promote the show. Sitting in his media room, Gus watched. He saw his long driveway, his yellow house, his dock, and gazebo.

  “I wonder why the hell I let them shoot the outside of the house,” he said, talking to himself, which he sometimes did when he was alone at the house in Prud’homme.

  Then the promo cut to his living room, where he was sitting on a chintz-covered sofa, saying about the acquittal, in reply to Gayle King’s question, “I felt permeated by evil. I thought of the millions of dollars that had been spent, the lies that had been told, the cheating, the blackmail, the payoffs, the forgery, all that it took to make that moment of acquittal happen.”

  “That’s about the seventh time today they’ve played that same sound bite,” Gus said to himself, watching himself. “I’m beginning to sound like a nutcase.”

  The telephone rang.

  “Gus, you’ve been on television all day long,” said Colette Harron.

  “I was just saying to myself I’ve begun to sound like a nutcase, they’ve run that sound bite so many times,” said Gus.

  “Why don’t you come over tonight and watch your miniseries with us?” said Colette. “We’ll have dinner on trays in front of the television. Just us. No party.”

  “Thanks, but I like to be alone when I watch my miniseries,” said Gus. “I want to be near the telephone. I’m sure the boys will call when it’s over.”

  “And some of your fans,” said Colette.

  “Hardly. My luster is dimming. I was in the A and P today, and not one person came up to me to talk about O. J.”

  “Do you want company?” asked Colette. “I hate to think of you there all alone. Peter and I will come over, if you’d like.”

  “No, really, this is the way I always watch my shows,” said Gus. “I get nervous when I’m with other people, wondering about their reactions rather than concentrating on the movie. Oh, God, I just realized I was taping this conversation. Let me turn this damn thing off.”

  “Why?” asked Colette.

  “I had this amazing telephone call from O. J. Simpson’s niece today, and I recorded it, like I sometimes do when I interview people over the phone. But I didn’t tell Terri I taped it.”

  “O. J.’s niece? What did she want?”

  “She called about the miniseries. She read the book during the trial. She’s a very nice young woman. Then she told me that she had told her mother she thought Uncle O. J. might have been guilty, and her mother hit her. She said, ‘That’s how great my mother’s denial is.’ It must be tough living like that, the whole family in denial. Is your TV on? They’ve got another sound bite of me about the miniseries tonight.”

  On the screen, Gus was saying, “The miniseries is based on an actual unsolved murder in Greenwich, Connecticut, where a fifteen-year-old girl was savagely and brutally beaten to death by a wealthy young man whose powerful family has been able to hold off the police.”

  “I wonder if the Skakels are watching,” said Gus.

  Gus Bailey’s body was discovered by Jackie Bagwell, the owner of the Bagwell Cleaning Service in Prud’homme, when she arrived the next morning for her regular day at Gus’s house. Standing in the front hall, she called out, “Hello,” to let him know she had arrived. His tweed jacket hung on the newel post at the bottom of the stairway, where he always hung it, along with his blue baseball cap with CBS Evening News embroidered on it in white. When he didn’t answer, she assumed that he was already at work in his office, which was outside the house in what had once been a caretaker’s apartment attached to the garage. Jackie was forty and pretty. She and her husband, Dana, had a married daughter who lived in Honolulu and a teenage son who played football at Old Prud’homme High School and worked nights at the A & P. Jackie read Gus’s books and articles and watched all his television appearances.

  “You were great on Sixty Minutes,” she said one time. “Do you think Steve Kroft will be able to prove there was jury tampering?”

  “Oh, I hope so,” Gus replied.

  “What I can’t understand is how Judge Ito could kick Francine whatever-her-last-name-is off the jury on the basis of an anonymous letter,” said Jackie. She was up on every detail of the case, and she accepted Gus’s version of things as gospel.

  “In my day, Jackie, they flushed anonymous letters down the toilet; they didn’t act on them. Francine Florio-Bunten was the only juror who understood the relevance of DNA, and she would have hung the jury. She wouldn’t have capitulated to the pressure and voted for acquittal like the other one did. The defense wanted to get rid of her from the beginning. Don’t get me going, Jackie, or I’ll get all worked up again over Simpson’s acquittal, and I won’t get any work done.”

  Today Jackie was eager to discuss Part Two of the miniseries, which had been on the air the night before. Keeping to her regular routine, Jackie went upstairs first to Gus’s bathroom and gathered up his dirty laundry to put in the washing machine in the basement. That his bed had not been slept in did not concern her. He was fastidious about making his own bed as soon as he arose each morning, and she assumed that he had forgotten that it was her day to change the sheets. She stripped the bed, emptied his laundry basket, and carried the pile down to the basement. When the washing machine was going, she went up to the cleaning closet on the first floor, next to the lavatory, and got out the vacuum cleaner, broom, mop, and her pails of sprays, soaps, and polishes. She noticed that the light in the lavatory was on. Then she saw that one of the framed Robert Risko caricatures of Gus that hung on the lavatory wall was awry, the one of him with Faye Resnick, Cici Sha
hian, and Robin Greer, which had appeared in Vanity Fair during the Simpson trial.

  Jackie put down her utensils to straighten it. She knew that Gus hated pictures that were awry. Then she saw that the toilet paper with the picture of O. J. Simpson on every sheet, which the Marburgs had given him for Christmas, had been yanked off the roll and was lying on the floor. As she leaned down to pick it up, she recoiled at the sight of blood, for it looked as if a bloody hand had been wiped on it.

  “Gus? Gus?” she called out. There was no answer. Stifling the panic she was beginning to feel, she opened the front door and ran outside to his office. The door was locked. The light was not turned on inside. He had not been there. Then she thought that maybe he had gone to New York unexpectedly, as he often did, without telling anybody. She looked through the garage window. His Volvo station wagon and his green convertible Jaguar were both there. She ran back into the house. In the front hallway, she turned left to the living room. Gus was a stickler for order, for having everything in its right place.

  She saw with her expert eye that everything was in its right place in the huge room: the orchid plants, the Chinese export porcelain, the leather-bound first editions of Anthony Trollope and Edith Wharton, the silver-framed photographs of his children and his former wife, Peach, of whom he always spoke with affection. Surprisingly, however, the door to the terrace off the living room was open. Then she walked slowly, as if anticipating something dreadful, into the smaller room beyond, which he had insisted on calling his media room, although it was in fact merely a library with a large-screen television set, a few hundred videos of old movies, a vast collection of CDs, framed book jackets of his novels and collections of essays, and photographs of some of the famous people he had interviewed or written about over the years. Imelda Marcos. Elizabeth Taylor. Audrey Hepburn. Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The Collins sisters, Joan and Jackie. Queen Noor of Jordan. The Glenconners from England with their friend Princess Margaret. Claus von Bülow and his mistress at the time of his second trial, Andrea Reynolds. And others. It was in this small room that the two thousand people who had gone through his house on the Prud’homme Garden Club tour had lingered to look at the glamorous figures in the photographs.

  “Is that Princess Diana talking to Gus Bailey?” was the most frequent question asked of the docent on duty in that room on the day of the tour. Others asked, “Could you possibly read me the inscription that Nancy Reagan wrote to Gus Bailey on that picture in the silver frame?” Or, “Isn’t that a shot of Claudette Colbert and Ann-Margret from the miniseries of one of his books?”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to keep moving on to the next room,” the docent said over and over. “There are others waiting.”

  Gus had often told his friends that his house in Prud’homme would be his last house; he wanted to have all the things that mattered to him in one place. The tables in the media room were filled with the memorabilia of his life: the leather box that held his Bronze Star from the Battle of the Bulge, where he had saved a man’s life; the lucite clock with the insignia of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which the deputies at the trial of the Menendez brothers had given him; a cheap watch on the face of which a police car followed a white Bronco in a battery-operated unending freeway chase, a memento of the Simpson trial given to him by a reporter friend named Dennis Schatzman; and the key to the city of Providence, Rhode Island. Sacha Newley’s portrait of him, which was to be the book jacket of his next novel, Another City, Not My Own, hung on the Chinese-red wall. In the portrait, he is writing his novel with a maroon Mont Blanc pen in a green leather notebook with gold-tipped pages, one of the dozen from Smythson’s in London that Graydon Carter, the editor of his magazine, gave him for Christmas each year. There, in front of the bay window, on the Chinese-red sofa, its vivid color on first sight absorbing the enormous amount of blood that had spilled on it, lay the dead body of Gus Bailey. It was faceless.

  Jackie Bagwell screamed and screamed, but there was no one to hear her. Afraid to be in the house, she ran out the front door and over to Gus’s office. She knew where the key was kept, under the eave of the garage. She unlocked the office and went in to use the telephone. Crying, verging on hysteria, she told her husband, Dana, “He has no face. They shot off Gus’s face! Call the police.”

  In his left hand was the clicker for the VCR. In time it would come to light that he had stopped the VCR as he was expiring, possibly to give a clue to the police as to the time of his death. The video showed that he had clicked it off during the scene in which the bloody clothes of Constant Bradley are found by boys fishing on the dock, found after Constant has been acquitted of Winifred Utley’s savage murder, clothes that were valueless now as evidence against him, since he cannot be tried twice for the same murder. In his green leather notebook, while watching that scene in his miniseries, Gus wrote the last words that he would ever write: “This same thing is going to happen in the Simpson case; the bloody clothes are going to be found. Too late, of course.”

  The time of death, according to the video, was 10:46 P.M.

  * * *

  Zander Bailey made the arrangements for a three-way conference call between the cabin where he was living in northern California, the George V in Paris, where Grafton was casting his next movie, and their mother’s house in Nogales, Arizona. The brothers wanted to break the news to their mother together. Zander, who was meticulous in his preparations, had instructed the nurses to keep the television set off until they had finished telling their mother.

  “Mom, Dad’s dead,” said Grafton from Paris.

  There was no reply.

  “Did you hear me, Mom?” asked Grafton.

  “Yes.” Her name was Rebecca, but she had been called Peach all her life.

  “Mom, it’s Zander,” said Zander from northern California. “Someone shot him dead in his house in Prud’homme.”

  There was no reply.

  “Did you hear me, Mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “They don’t know who did it,” said Grafton.

  It was not the first time the three people had played this scene.

  As word of the murder spread, a constant stream of people from Prud’homme, Old Prud’homme, Chester, and East Prud’homme, where the old opera house was, walked, bicycled, or drove slowly by the house, staring and whispering. Nothing so exciting had ever happened in Prud’homme. In the milling crowd, conspicuously alone, was a woman named Zara Soames, a newcomer to the area. Her eyes were red from crying. She pushed her bike from group to group, listening to all the latest bits of news. “I knew him,” she said aloud on several occasions, overcoming her shyness, but her voice was meek and did not carry.

  “There is a woman who has developed an obsession about me,” Gus had said to his friend Alexandra Isles on the day of the garden-club tour of his house. “She moved to Prud’homme because I am here. She sends me flowers. She writes me poems. She cooks me muffins. Once I found her in my house. She is driving me crazy. I don’t know how to deal with it.”

  “Are you afraid of her, Gus?” asked Alexandra.

  “No. It’s not like that, I don’t think,” Gus replied.

  That night Gus Bailey’s death was on every newscast. Dan Rather opened his CBS Evening News with the story, even though reports of Hillary Clinton’s alleged séance with Eleanor Roosevelt were the main topic of the day on the other networks.

  “Augustus Bailey, the novelist, journalist, and special correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, who appeared on this program each Friday night from Los Angeles during the O. J. Simpson trial, was shot to death last night at his house in Prud’homme, Connecticut, where he was writing a novel set in Los Angeles during the Simpson trial. As of this moment, details of Bailey’s murder are sketchy, and there are apparently no suspects. Three shots were fired into Bailey’s face. Local police investigating the case say there is little doubt the killing was a carefully planned professional job. Correspondent Bill Whitaker, who became a p
ersonal friend of Gus Bailey’s during the Simpson trial, reports from Prud’homme, Connecticut.”

  Bill Whitaker stood by the closed white wooden gates at the bottom of Gus’s driveway. In the background, at a higher level, could be seen his yellow frame house with the gambrel roof. Police walked in and out of the front door.

  “In this lovely, quiet town on the Connecticut River, violence has always been an unknown thing, unknown, at least, until now. Sometime in the half hour between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock last night, a person or persons entered this house behind me, belonging to the writer Augustus Bailey, through a terrace door opening off the living room. There are unconfirmed reports that the perpetrator may have arrived by a small motor boat, coming off the river into Whalebone Cove behind the house, and tied up at the small dock at the bottom of Bailey’s garden. I have with me Police Chief Charles Olin of Westbrook, Connecticut.”

  “Do I look at you or straight into the camera?” asked Chief Olin.

  “To me,” said Whitaker. “Go on, sir.”

  “This sort of thing is new up here for us, you know,” said the chief. “Things like this don’t happen here, but a lot of celebrities have moved into the area in the last few years and bought up the old places, and I guess things change.”

  “Were there any signs of struggle?” asked Whitaker.

  “None. Mr. Bailey was sitting on the sofa in his media room watching television. He had the VCR clicker in his left hand, taping the show he was watching. It is our feeling that the perpetrator entered the house through the terrace doors, which were open. There seems to be little doubt that the killing was a carefully planned professional job. You’re going to have to excuse me, Mr. Whitaker. I see one of my boys calling me.”

  “Thank you, Chief Olin,” said Whitaker.

  Rather turned directly to the camera. “We’ll keep you up to date on this story. Beleaguered First Lady Hillary Clinton denied emphatically today that she was involved in a séance with Eleanor Roosevelt. ‘It’s politics,’ she said in New York.”