American Appetites

  He hired Nicholas Ottinger to represent him, upon the advise of his friends, for suddenly, within a space of twenty-four hours, it was obvious he would need representation; might even need, in time, “defense.” Ottinger spoke cautiously yet optimistically; he thought the Hazelton police were probably just harassing Ian, trying to intimidate him with the possibility of pressing charges against him in Glynnis’s death: involuntary manslaughter was the most they could try for, and that, without witnesses, would be very difficult to prove. There was no motive, for instance. There was no prior history of arrest, no criminal record. And Ian’s position in the community, his professional reputation . . . all above reproach.

  “It might be that the police have a grudge against you because of our ACLU campaign a few years ago,” Ottinger said speculatively. “You remember: Thiel and Edwards. You and Glynnis were involved in the protest, weren’t you?”

  Ian was astonished and hurt. His political beliefs were so intimately allied with his sense of personal integrity—and his activism in such matters, in fact, so rare—it struck him as profoundly unjust that he should be punished for them. “They would harass me, make me the object of a criminal investigation, a suspect in the death of my own wife, because of . . . that?”

  Ottinger said, in mild rebuke, “Of course, Ian. This is the real world, now. This isn’t the Institute for Independent Research.”

  Nicholas Ottinger, a friendly acquaintance of the McCulloughs, though not in the strictest terms a friend, was a criminal lawyer with an excellent local reputation. A slender sinewy man in his mid-forties with a thin olive-pale skin and wiry black hair, quick, shrewd, inclined to impatience—Ian had admired his squash game over the years but would never have wanted to play with him—Ottinger had narrow opalescent eyes that looked as if they might shine in the dark. He was a graduate of Harvard Law who had, according to Ian’s friends, distinguished himself in several criminal cases in recent years; he’d been involved since the 1960s in liberal-activist causes and in the American Civil Liberties Union; he knew, in the jargon of the trade, where the bodies were buried. Thus it should not have surprised Ian that he did not come cheaply. His fee was $200 an hour . . . for time out of court.

  “And in court?” Ian asked.

  “This will never go to trial,” Ottinger said. “It will never get past a grand jury.”

  “But if it does?”

  “A retainer of, say, thirty thousand against the two hundred dollars out of court, and three hundred and fifty an hour for time in. The balance to be returned if the jury doesn’t indict.” Ottinger spoke casually, as if he and Ian were discussing something quite innocuous. “But, as I say, this will never go to trial. They’re just bluffing.”

  FROM ALL SIDES, so very suddenly, Ian began to hear of the police “making inquiries” of people: his friends, his neighbors, his associates at the Institute, even the secretarial staff, even his young assistants. What shame! What mortification! Like Glynnis, Ian found it painful to tolerate the very idea that other people were talking of him, forming opinions and judgments of him, enclosing him, it might be said, in a cocoon of words, a communal adjudication in which he had no role. Denis spoke with him, worriedly, and Amos Kuhn, and Dr. Max (who struck Ian as rather more embarrassed than sympathetic), and Malcolm Oliver, who warned him against incriminating himself in any way—“Don’t give those bastards a crumb.” Meika Cassity assured him, with a vehemence he found both touching and alarming, that she would “never give the police the slightest grounds for suspicion of anything.”

  He wondered if they had contacted Bianca, but the thought filled him with such sick dread he pushed it out of his mind at once.

  He wondered what were the questions they asked. Tell us what you know of Ian McCullough. Tell us what you know about his relationship with his wife. Tell us what you know about his character.

  He wondered what were the answers they were given.

  ON MAY 29 Ian was summoned to police headquarters for further questioning, as it was judiciously phrased: this time, of course, in the presence of “counsel.” Entering the building, Ottinger beside him, passing through the revolving door—and stumbling as he maneuvered it, out of sheer nerves—Ian understood with a dreamy resignation that he was crossing the threshold into a new realm of being; had he any residual innocence, it was now to be shorn from him, as a sheep’s clotted and soiled wool is shorn from it, to lie in tatters on the ground.

  Awaiting Ian at headquarters, in a room resembling a seminar room, were Wentz and Holleran, old friends turned informants, and another detective, an older man, white-haired, ruddy-faced, with glacial blue eyes and a look of professional impatience, whose name Ian clearly heard and immediately forgot. The questions put to Ian were numbingly familiar: how had the “fatal” accident occurred . . . how could it have been an “accident,” given the nature of Mrs. McCullough’s skull fractures . . . had Ian and his wife been quarreling . . . what would account for the screams, “over a considerable period of time,” reported by neighbors . . . why, if the McCulloughs were not, by Ian’s own testimony, drinkers, had they been drinking on the night of the twenty-third of April . . . ?

  “I don’t know,” Ian said, frequently.

  Or: “I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

  Nick Ottinger had coached Ian on how to respond to the detectives’ questions, had assured him he need not answer any questions he didn’t want to: or, indeed, any questions at all. If Ian did not know, he did not know; if he did not remember, he did not remember. He had after all freely confessed to having been drinking heavily . . . which the hospital report substantiated. (“Of course,” Ottinger said, in warning, “you must know how residents in the area feel about people associated with the Institute,” and Ian was moved to ask, naïvely and with dread, “No, how do they feel?” “Resentment, hostility, generally,” Ottinger said. “You might say ‘grudging admiration’ if you wanted to stretch things a bit.”)

  Ian saw it now: resentment, hostility, thinly disguised contempt—the appellation “Dr.” quickly acquired a certain mocking tone, as did “McCullough”—and, if admiration, very grudging indeed. It hurt him, and bewildered him, that he, of whom everyone was so fond, should be disliked generically; and that Wentz, whom Ian had thought an ally of a kind, stared at him with a peculiar intensity, as if he were a rare species of creature, like the unicorn, to be netted, entangled, trapped, brought down, his sides pierced with spears. . . . You are smart, Wentz seemed to be saying, but we are smarter.

  It was not Wentz, however, but the older detective who, in the second hour, at about the time Ian thought the session might be ending, suddenly asked if the name “Sigrid Hunt” meant anything to him. The dramatic abruptness with which the question was posed, the misleading sense Ian had had of the session’s coming to an end, suggested contrivance of a particularly clumsy and malevolent sort.

  Quickly he said, “No,” and then, his face heating, like a child caught in an obvious lie, “Yes. The name.”

  “But only the name, Dr. McCullough?”

  Again Ian said, without quite thinking, as if, by answering so quickly, seemingly so spontaneously, he might deflect further questions of this kind, “Yes. She was a friend of my wife’s.”

  “‘Was’?”

  “My wife is no longer living.”

  “But Miss Hunt wasn’t, or isn’t, a friend of yours?”

  Ian was staring at the tabletop, at its dull, scarified surface. For a long moment he could not speak. He felt physically ill yet dared give no sign; they were watching him too closely. “I loved my wife,” he said.

  “Excuse me, Dr. McCullough? What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you say?”

  He sat mute, sick, sullen, staring at the tabletop. He thought, I will never forgive Glynnis for what she has done to me.

  “Your name has been linked with a young woman named Sigrid Hunt,” the detective said, with a schoolmasterly sternness, “yet you claim not to know her??
??

  Ian shook his head as if the question gave him pain.

  “A young woman who resides in Poughkeepsie, a former dance instructor at Vassar College, her current whereabouts unknown. . . . Are you aware, Dr. McCullough, that Miss Hunt is missing, that a male friend of hers has reported her missing, and that the last time he spoke with her was on the very day of Mrs. McCullough’s death?”

  Ian looked up. “How is she missing? What do you mean?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “I . . . know of her,” Ian said.

  “Were you having an affair with her?”

  “Where is she? What happened to her?”

  “Were you having an affair with her, Dr. McCullough?”

  “Excuse me,” Ottinger interrupted, laying a restraining hand on Ian’s arm. “My client has nothing further to say on the subject.”

  He cast Ian a fierce sidelong look; Ian had told him nothing about Sigrid Hunt.

  Ian removed his glasses and rubbed, hard, at his eyes; he could not now recall a time when his eyes were not sore and when their soreness, with its acidic feel, did not give a kind of pleasure. The satisfaction of the penitent: I have cried my eyes out, what more do you want of me? While Ottinger and the white-haired detective spoke together, interrupting each other, two practiced professionals whose quarrel, Ian thought, did not interest him in the slightest, he thought of Sigrid, of how, so very oddly, he had not been thinking of her, in weeks: had not dared to think of her.

  And so she was missing? And had her lover murdered her? And would Ian be blamed, too, for that?

  He said quietly, “Sigrid Hunt was my wife’s friend before she was my friend. I knew her, yes, but I didn’t know her well. . . . I was not having a love affair with her.” He paused, put his glasses back on, did not meet the detective’s ironic look. “I was not having a love affair with her. And that’s all I have to say on the subject.”

  “You have no idea, Dr. McCullough, where Miss Hunt is? You aren’t concerned?”

  Ottinger said sharply, “My client has nothing more to say on the subject.”

  THOUGH IN HIS own estimation Ian had betrayed himself, provoked to agitation before witnesses, and for the record—the interrogation, of course, had been taped—the police did not arrest him that morning. He and Ottinger left the station shortly before noon. In sheer nervous reaction Ian skipped down the steps and laughed. “I’m a free man!”

  Ottinger said grimly, “You’d better tell me about this woman.”

  Ian, who had not yet eaten that day, drew a slow, deep, tremulous breath. It puzzled him that traffic passing in the street had the look of objects seen through water. He laughed again, and amended, “Temporarily. I’m a free man temporarily.”

  In as neutral a tone as possible, with exquisite tact, Nicholas Ottinger asked, “This woman, Sigrid Hunt—is she your lover?”

  Ian said, “I have no lover.”

  “You’ll have to tell me, you’ll have to be frank with me,” Ottinger said.

  Ian said quietly, “I have no lover. I have not seen Sigrid Hunt in months. I know nothing of her being missing, and I know nothing of where she might be, and I know nothing of her, I assure you. Beyond that, it’s really none of your business.”

  Ottinger said, “I see.”

  “My private life is none of your business, any more than it’s their business, the goddamned police,” Ian said, less quietly, beginning to get excited. “Intruding into our lives, putting us on public display. Poor Glynnis: she never meant all this! Never, never would she have meant all this!”

  He could not bear another minute, another second, of Nicholas Ottinger’s company; so shook hands with the man and walked off. The sunlight was dazzling: blinding. He was thinking he must call Bianca to warn her: Your father is being investigated in your mother’s death. He must call Roberta Grinnell, whom he had not meant to frighten. And Sigrid Hunt, what of Sigrid Hunt? . . . He never wanted to see the woman again, or even speak with her, but he must know if something had happened to her; he must know where she was.

  He went into a pub on South Street, sat at the bar, ordered a sandwich, beer, another beer, feeling, so very oddly, a measure of elation: he was free for the remainder of the day; hours opened up before him. He was free as anyone in Hazelton was free; that fact impressed him profoundly. He told himself, in Ottinger’s well-chosen words, that the investigation was not serious, was merely a form of harassment, would come to nothing in the end: no one could prove it was not an accident. For there were no witnesses, and there was no motive. There were no witnesses, and there was no motive.

  He told himself, swallowing down the last of his beer, Of course you are guilty; and of course you will be punished.

  6.

  They arrested Ian on the morning of May 30, eighteen days after Glynnis’s death. And informed him, in words that had the solemn ring of antiquity, that anything he said “can and will be used against you.”

  THE FORMAL CHARGE was second-degree murder, not manslaughter as he and Ottinger had expected.

  Preposterous, Ottinger said.

  The grand jury will never indict, Ottinger said. He seemed to take the arrest as a personal insult; as, perhaps, it was intended.

  Ian was served the warrant not in his home, or at the Institute—where, if they meant to be cruel, they might have surprised him—but in the Cattaraugus County courthouse, where Ottinger had arranged to “surrender” him privately: see him through the arraignment, post his bail bond, and get him released in a matter of minutes. Ottinger’s strategy was to bring his client into the courthouse by way of a rear dock used for loading and unloading prisoners, that Ian might be spared a more public entry, and take him out, take him quickly out, the same way. As Ottinger told Ian, “You never know what sort of gauntlet you might have to run, in a case like this.”

  “Like this?”

  “So much local publicity, rumors.”

  “Ah,” said Ian humbly, with the air of a man who has a great deal to learn, “I hadn’t known.”

  Before the arraignment, Ottinger telephoned the justice of the peace who had issued the arrest warrant, objecting strenuously to the $75,000 bonding fee, which he saw to be both excessive and insulting—“My client is hardly a man who would run away”; but the fee remained $75,000. Ian said, “Does it matter? Why does it matter?” The great shock was the charge itself, murder, that astonishing accusation murder; what did the rest of it matter? He had no difficulty meeting the 10 percent bail; $7,500 seemed a fair sum to him; after all, they were accusing him of having murdered his own wife.

  Ottinger looked at his client, as he would, in the months to come, so frequently look at him: with patience, pity, some measure of sympathy, yet a measure too of contempt. You fool, he seemed to be saying. You asshole. “Of course it matters, everything matters; you must know you’re fighting for your life,” he said.

  Startled, Ian laughed and said, “My life? Surely not.”

  THREE

  THE GAME

  How could he give it up, for even penitential reasons? The squash court was quite simply one of his sacred places.

  He warned Denis, when they resumed playing again, that he was badly out of condition but did not want to be humored. “My pleasure,” Denis said happily. The men, near evenly matched, though Ian was by nature a methodical player given to spurts of sudden inspiration and Denis an impulsive, aggressive, even at times rather manic player, given to inexplicable lapses of skill and attention, had been playing together, or with others, for a decade: to think of squash, for Ian, was to think of Denis Grinnell.

  For a season, years ago, their wives had tried to play too but soon gave it up; they much preferred tennis. Glynnis objected that squash is noisy, nervous, claustrophobic, and surely conducive to paranoia; what on earth attracts people to it? And Ian, or was it Denis, naturally replied, The fact that it is noisy, nervous, claustrophobic, and conducive to paranoia. Of course.

  It was an unremittingly fast game, leavin
g little time for thinking, let alone reflection, always, in Ian’s imagination, a shadowless game, performed at high velocity within a space so brightly, if artificially, lit it resembled an overexposed photograph. It was even, to a degree, a dangerous game, the ball flying against the walls and sometimes, though it was out of bounds, the very ceiling, spinning, ricocheting, rebounding, a small dark sphere that seemed to carry a luminous life within it, rock hard and malevolent. And the racquets, foreshortened, wicked, swinging past one’s head, grazing an ear, clipping a forehead, crashing into an eye—one memorable time Ian lunged for a tricky shot and struck Denis on the bridge of his nose, nearly breaking it and causing a good deal of bleeding; another time Denis in a desperate swing had sent Ian’s glasses flying twenty feet to crack against a wall: “Oh shit!” Denis screamed. “Look what you made me do!”

  It was the frenetic pace, the heart’s acceleration, the pitiless present tense that so drew Ian to the sport, erratic player as he was and, by even local standards, hardly more than average; he liked risking hurt, even injury, at the hands of a friend. He liked, of course, winning: that stab of childlike triumph in the face of another’s defeat; yet he liked, in a way, losing too, in such quarters, among friends, abashed, embarrassed, temporarily angered, having only (and surely this was crucial?) himself to blame.

  If another man is the vehicle of my defeat, Ian thought, bemused, I am its cause. On the squash court at least.

  He also liked the game because it was a game, and not life: it had a beginning, and an end; it was played in a specific place, as on a game board large enough to accommodate human beings; it had its rules, regulations, and customs, and even, should one be interested, its history. (Ian McCullough was not, much. The epistemology of games was not his field.) Its dimensions were so scaled down, its skills so specialized, one could not speak of it as a metaphor for life . . . unless everything in which human beings involve themselves with an unreasoned intensity is a metaphor for life.