Denis said, “Cut the crap, Mal. Did you ever call her?”
“Of course I never called her,” Malcolm said. He looked at Denis, smiling. “Did you?”
Denis laughed. “In fact, no.”
“Did you want to?”
“Did you?”
There was a sudden wild silence. Ian said quietly, “When one is happily married one doesn’t do such things.”
“Exactly,” Denis said.
“That’s the point,” Malcolm said, raising his bottle to his mouth. “The entire point. One doesn’t.”
“And now, in any case, she seems to have vanished,” Denis said. His face was still flushed from their game, and his hair, parted low and combed conspicuously over the crown of his head, was still damp. He did not look at Ian, though he seemed to be addressing him. “As the media has it, ‘without a trace.’”
It was true, sadly, grotesquely true: in mimicry of Ian McCullough’s dead wife the young woman with whom he was generally believed to have had “relations” had become, too, an absence.
Ian shrugged his shoulders, said carelessly, “I suppose, eventually, I will be blamed for her death too.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Denis said, shocked. “For Christ’s sake, Ian!”
“Why not?” Ian said. “Do you think I would mind?”
AS THEY LEFT the dining room Malcolm reverted to the subject of the grand jury: the rumors he’d been hearing from his lawyer friends. He was acquainted with the county prosecutor, Lederer, Samuel S. Lederer: had had a nasty confrontation with the man five or six years ago, over a case taken up by the ACLU. “The bastard is shrewd, manipulative, opportunistic, yet—and this is the worst part of it—sincere. A Republican, and conservative, anxious to placate his constituency, so far undistinguished in office—this is his first term, I suppose you know—and casting about for something or someone to make a public issue of. To erect a mission around.” Malcolm looked at Ian frankly. “That makes him a dangerous adversary, given the power he has as prosecutor. But I suppose Nick Ottinger has filled you in on all this?”
“Yes,” Ian said, wanting to change the subject. “I suppose he has.”
“Lederer will probably stack his case against you with an undercurrent of populist sentiment, if he can get away with it,” Malcolm said. “Playing off the jurors’ supposed resentment of people, in Hazelton, like us.”
“Like us?” Ian asked mildly.
“Playing off the notion that we are not indigenous to this part of the country but are intruders, of a kind . . . that we constitute, or even think of ourselves as, a sort of elite, a class of our own.” Malcolm made a gesture, at once extravagant and dismissive, that took in the Institute dining room with its high vaulted ceiling and tall leaded windows and gleaming parquet floor, the numerous tables at which their colleagues, most of them men, were sitting. His nostrils widened darkly in contempt: to Malcolm Oliver, the Hazelton faculty was hardly a homogeneous community, nor was it one with which he felt an identifying kinship. “That we live in Hazelton but aren’t of Hazelton. That sort of thing. I don’t really know who the jurors are on the grand jury but, God forbid, if there is to be an actual trial . . .”
Malcolm’s voice trailed off in embarrassment; clearly, he had not meant to say all he’d said.
Denis said, “I’d let Ottinger worry about it; it’s his job, after all. I wouldn’t worry.” He laid a consoling hand on Ian’s shoulder and said, in a kind, vague, falsely hearty voice, “I wouldn’t.”
MALCOLM LEFT THE building, and Ian and Denis climbed the stairway to the fourth floor. Instead of turning in the direction of his own office, however, Ian walked with Denis to his. He had not meant to do so, yet, evidently, he was doing so; the gesture took both men by surprise.
Denis asked if something were wrong, casting Ian a worried sidelong glance, and Ian said, no, of course nothing was wrong, but he’d like to speak with Denis for a moment, if he could. In private. Just for a moment.
“Of course,” Denis said.
As soon as Denis closed the door behind him and they were alone together in his office, Ian began to speak. Afterward, recollecting this strange scene, Ian would think it extraordinary that, until the moment of crossing the threshold into Denis’s office—a long, narrow, crowded space the approximate size of Ian’s own office—he had not known he meant to say such things: meant to speak so freely. Even his voice, higher-pitched than usual, was not one he might have recognized. “There is no one else I’ve told this, Denis,” he said, “but, that night, the night she died—I mean the night she injured herself—Glynnis told me something . . . unexpected. Something I haven’t been able to forget.”
“Yes? Did she? What was that?”
“She said she’d been . . . that she had had . . . a lover. Lovers. That there was a man in Hazelton whom she loved . . . and had given up, she said, for me.”
Denis regarded Ian with a look of absolute and seemingly unfeigned astonishment. He said in a whisper, “Really! Really!” Then, “Are you sure you want to tell me this, Ian? Under the circumstances . . .”
Ian said quickly, “I must tell someone.”
“. . . considering that Glynnis is dead.”
“I must tell someone.”
It seemed to him that Denis was frightened of him; as, so very suddenly, he’d become frightened of Denis.
He was standing close by a window, in a humid patch of sunshine. Below was the Institute pond, its rippleless sky-mirroring surface, and, beyond, a spectacular stand of birch trees. They were the same trees Ian saw, at a slant, from his own office window, and he recalled having thought, as a boy, a city boy, that birch trees were too elegantly beautiful to be real. “Those trees,” he said.
“Yes? What?”
“They look artificial.”
“Artificial?”
“If you didn’t know better, wouldn’t you think they’d been painted? By hand?”
Denis stared at him as if he had said something incomprehensible.
“They look flat, too,” Ian continued. “But then, I suppose, if you look at objects hard enough, people as well, they begin to go flat. Into two dimensions.”
“Would you like to sit down, Ian? You’re looking a little tired.”
“It’s just that she was unfaithful to me, you know. And then she died. I mean, she was injured: there was the accident; she recovered consciousness only for a few minutes, without speaking to me; then she died. It happened,” Ian said, frowning, “so damned quickly. And irreversibly.”
“Please sit down, why don’t you.”
“I’m not at all tired. I feel in fact as if I’ve just woken up. That last game of ours . . .”
Denis said, “If Glynnis was upset when she told you . . . what you say she told you . . . I don’t really think you can take it seriously.” He chose his words carefully, as if they were being recorded. “We all know that Glynnis sometimes said things without thinking: things meant to surprise, or to wound. She was a passionate woman, and—”
Ian looked searchingly at him. “‘To surprise, or to wound,’” he repeated. “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t telling the truth, does it.”
“Look, I don’t care what she said, or what you remember her saying,” Denis said quickly, “the fact is she loved you. That was obvious. Everyone knows that. Whatever she said, whatever she wanted you to believe . . . I don’t think you should believe. Or repeat: to me, or anyone. Under the circumstances.”
“Because it casts me in an unfortunate light?”
“An unfortunate light?”
“Because it suggests we were quarreling?”
Denis made an impatient gesture. It was clear to Ian that he was greatly agitated, yet making an effort to appear calm: as on the squash court, when the play was unexpectedly accelerated. In the jaunty V of his sport shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, some twists of chest hair—curly, kinky, gunmetal-gray—seemed to glisten with an electric, kinetic alarm.
Ian smiled, staring
. “Because it suggests we were quarreling, before the accident?”
“Because we all know Glynnis,” Denis said. “We know how emotional she could be. Not that, to a degree, we all aren’t emotional, even Roberta. To a degree. Saying things we don’t mean, lashing out at people we love. And if she was, as you’ve said, drinking . . .”
“We were both drinking.”
“. . . all the more reason not to take it seriously. Any of it.”
“Wouldn’t you take it seriously, if your wife told you what mine did? Or if Glynnis herself had told you?”
“I don’t consider it any of my business,” Denis said. Though he spoke calmly enough, he’d begun to pace about his office, not quite meeting Ian’s eye: all but pressing his hands, in desperation, against his ears. “As I said, I don’t think you should be telling me this. I think our conversation should stop right here. Out of respect for poor Glynnis, and for . . .”
“. . . the cuckolded husband?”
“No matter what she said, Glynnis loved you. You must know that.”
“But she was unfaithful to me. Not once but, by her own account, numerous times.”
“I don’t believe that,” Denis said. “Nor do I want to hear about it.”
“Don’t you?”
Denis said, recklessly, “Look: I could believe it of a few women of our acquaintance, of Meika Cassity for instance, but in truth, Ian, and I mean this seriously, I can’t believe it of Glynnis; she wasn’t the type.”
Ian looked at him, considering. “You have such confidence in her!”
“I know Glynnis, and I know you.”
“You knew Glynnis. Glynnis is no longer living.”
“And I know you.”
“Really? Do you?” Ian removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes hard, stood motionless in the patch of sunshine: content, for the moment, simply to stand there, as if his friend’s indignation were a kind of protection. “Such confidence! It’s remarkable. It does you credit. I’ve lost that sort of feeling, myself: the luxury of it. Glynnis killed it in me. She has killed everything in me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Denis said nervously. “You’re upset. And I’m upset. This isn’t the time or the place to talk about such things.”
“Where would be the place, and when would be the time?”
“It’s all so close, so raw. . . . I’m still having trouble grasping the fact that she’s dead.” Denis wiped at his face with a wadded tissue. His eyes brimmed with moisture, and his cheeks were reddened as if they’d been slapped. “And this thing that has happened, is happening, to you. . . .”
Ian said, “Were you the man?”
“Who? What?”
“Glynnis’s lover? Her lover, here in Hazelton?”
Denis stared at him, appalled.
“Just tell me the truth, Denis,” Ian said. “Yes or no.”
Denis said, “I would think you knew me better than that, Ian. To even ask such a question.”
“Yes or no?”
“No.”
“You weren’t her lover?”
“No. I was not your wife’s lover.”
“Then do you know who was?”
“Certainly not. I don’t believe, as I’ve said, that she had a lover.”
“At any time?” Ian asked skeptically. “At any time?”
“Judging from what I knew of her, and of you, of your marriage—yes, at any time.”
“I see,” Ian said.
He felt light-headed suddenly, as if with exhaustion. The conversation was over! He was free to leave!
At the door he thanked Denis for the squash game and for having lunch with him: for allowing him to speak so frankly about so personal a matter. “It’s just that I seem to have no one else,” he said with his slow sweet perplexed smile. “If you can forget what I’ve said, please forget it. I won’t embarrass you again.”
Denis said, “Of course.”
“Will you? Forget it?”
“Of course.”
“I suppose,” Ian said, “I had wanted to think it was you. Of the men I know, and Glynnis knew . . . I had wanted to think it was you.” Denis laid a tentative hand on Ian’s shoulder. He said, softly, as if in an undertone, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Ian.”
THE INDICTMENT
1.
And then he was indicted, after all: Ian McCullough, who had wanted to believe that his destiny, legal and otherwise, was determined for him not by mere men, mortal like himself, and fallible—if not “shrewd,” “manipulative,” “opportunistic”—but by inhuman processes beautifully abstract as the rising and falling of the tides, the clockwork orbiting of planets, the ghostly trajectory of starlight across the void. But of course such thinking was, in the crude but accurate vernacular, bullshit. For the six women and nine men of the Cattaraugus County grand jury, June session, had simply voted to support Samuel S. Lederer’s case against Ian McCullough: had found his narrative account of Glynnis McCullough’s death persuasive. It was that, and nothing more.
And they had voted to indict not on lesser charges of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, but on charges of second-degree murder: had signed their names to the “true bill” of indictment, which charged that
On the night of April 23 of this year, within the venue of Cattaraugus County, New York,
Ian J. McCullough,
defendant herein, did commit murder in the second degree in that he caused with force the death of Glynnis McCullough, his wife, thereby taking the life of the aforementioned Glynnis McCullough:
In violation of Section 125:25 of the New York State Statutes.
And so he was arraigned in the Cattaraugus County courthouse another time, before another judge, his case to be sent to the docket of one Chief Superior Court Judge Benedict Harmon, of whom he had never heard, for motions and trial. The defense had fourteen days to file motions and the prosecution fourteen days in which to respond, at which point a date for the trial would be set, very likely in the fall. When Ian McCullough would have, as it’s said, his day in court; when he might be exonerated of the crime lodged against him. When he might be publicly eviscerated, gutted like a fish.
Ian asked the assemblage, “If I were to plead guilty now, would this all come to an end?”
And they looked at him, to a man, as if he were mad. And Ottinger took him hastily aside and spoke with him: What are you saying what on earth do you mean don’t you understand have you no idea for Christ’s sake Ian I’m not even open to pretrial conference for purposes of plea bargaining don’t you know they have no case against you don’t you understand a jury will never vote to convict, and Ian sighed and acquiesced, or must have acquiesced, since the procedure, the talk, legal quibbling, paperwork, continued. It was lengthy and exhausting. His jaws ached from yawning. He thought, How could Glynnis have done this to me! I will grow to hate her, yet.
He thought, If I am guilty, I am guilty.
He thought, I will not lift a finger to defend myself. I will not play their contemptible game.
THIS TIME THEY were waiting for him; this time he could not contrive to elude them, reporters, photographers, “media” people with handheld cameras and microphones jostling close, shouting questions at him: Dr. McCullough? Dr. McCullough? Ian? How did you plead? What is your defense? When is the trial? A crowd of thirty or more, men, women, all of them strangers, a proverbial pack, they seemed to him, like hyenas: yet with such enthusiasm for the hunt and, for the moment, for him, he stared at them with interest. Dr. McCullough? Over here! Could you say a few words to our viewers—
The contentious little crowd followed him to the sidewalk, where one of Ottinger’s young assistants was waiting with a car; like any guilty man Ian ducked his head, shielded his face. He felt his sleeve plucked, a blow of sorts against his shoulder, heard Ottinger’s raised voice, the startling fury of Ottinger’s raised voice.
“I seem to be becoming a celebrity,” Ian said, as they drove away, “without quite remembering what I did,
still less why I did it.”
Ottinger was not amused. “Just don’t talk to those people,” he said. “Any of them. Anyone.”
Ian, still cringing, nonetheless looked back at the crowd. It had grown alarmingly, within a few minutes, and was growing still. Women shoppers, men in business suits, boys on bicycles who slowed, stopped, straddled their bicycles, asking what was going on; who was in the Cadillac Seville as it sped away from the curb, why the cameras? In his rumpled seersucker suit, a tie of drab neutral colors knotted loosely about his throat, the object of the crowd’s excited scrutiny looked like no murderer of distinction; certainly like no celebrity. Ian said shakily, but smiling, “It seems so easy, somehow.”
“So easy? What is?” Ottinger asked. He was beginning to regard his client with a look of professional caution.
“Crossing over.”
“Crossing over—?”
“To what’s on the other side.”
Ian was driven by a roundabout way to the Sheraton Motor Hotel by the Thruway, some six miles north of Hazelton-on-Hudson, a “tenstory” structure so new it was surrounded not by a carpet of perfectly trimmed green grass but by jagged rutted raw earth that gave it a startling, improvised look: the very place, Ian thought, for a murderer incognito. Ottinger had made a reservation for Ian and Bianca there under the pseudonymous identities of “Jonathan Hamilton” and his daughter “Veronica” until such time—it might be a few days, it might be two weeks—it was believed to be safe for them to return to 338 Pearce. If it would ever be safe.
WHEN, ON THE morning of July 2, Nick Ottinger telephoned Ian to tell him the grand jury’s decision—“Ian, I’m so sorry, I’m afraid I have bad news, preposterous bad news”—Ian felt a spasm of physical chill that left him weak and breathless. He had to grope for a place to sit down, telephone cord comically twisted around his legs, glasses skidding down his nose.
So extreme was his reaction, so stunned was he for hours afterward, like a steer struck a sledgehammer blow to the head, Ian realized that, yes, he had come to believe the grand jury would not indict; he had listened to Ottinger and his friends, had believed what they’d said. Not only that the grand jury would not indict but that it would not dare. I must have been desperate to believe, Ian thought. Even as I tried to convince myself I felt nothing.
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