Snake Eyes

  “—is trying to begin a new life, to redeem—”

  “They don’t put a man in prison, and they don’t sentence a man to death, for doing nothing, I know that.”

  Michael drew breath to speak, but Mrs. Sutter added, puckishly, “Anyway, it’s no excuse for committing obscenities. That’s what I say.”

  “But the issue isn’t so clear-cut, Mrs. Sutter—Julia. Under our law, federal and state—”

  “Oh, nonsense! I know, and you know, and everybody with any sense knows, what obscenities are. That’s all!”

  The word obscenities rolled off Mrs. Sutter’s tongue with a harsh and somehow sensuous sibilance. Clearly, it was a word the elderly woman enjoyed.

  Michael set his tea cup carefully down. He said, as firmly as he could manage under these trying circumstances, meaning to establish a space in which he could speak, “Excuse me, Julia, but—there truly are differences of opinion on this—”

  “Well, I hope so!” Mrs. Sutter said brightly. “There is your opinion, Michael O’Meara, and there is mine!”

  “—issue. And the artist himself, in his eyes, his art isn’t—”

  “‘Obscene’—? But of course it is: why else would he do it? Like one of these ghastly serial murderers who kill women, hack up their bodies, and when they’re caught act as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths!—and their attorneys are just as bad.”

  “Mrs. Sutter, surely not!—you don’t mean—”

  “Oh, everybody knows this! It’s hardly a secret.”

  Michael gazed at this astonishing old woman. A hot flash of anger irradiated his nerves but was dissipated by the tranquilizer before it could take flame. How stubborn, how opinionated, how obdurate!—how unshakable! On the mantel, the antique clock was chiming a smug, throaty sound.

  He smiled, and said, as if nothing were wrong, as if he might simply take up their discussion again, “As I was saying, in Lee Roy Sears’s eyes, his art is not ‘obscene.’ It is—”

  “Oh, what do we care what he claims! More tea?”

  “N-No, thank—”

  “They’re all alike, anyway!”

  “Who?”

  “Them.”

  Michael tried to smile. His heart was beating very quickly.

  “Who is ‘them,’ Mrs. Sutter?”

  “You know them when you see them,” Mrs. Sutter said. “Won’t you have more tea? It’s had a while to steep.”

  “I’m afraid I really don’t—”

  “Another biscuit, then? You do look distracted.”

  Michael saw his hand reach for one of the rock-hard cookies, which he did not want. Another clock, on an ornate ivory-inlaid table some feet away, had begun a sequence of peremptory chimes.

  “I find,” Mrs. Sutter said, wiping crumbs off her bosom, “that people know what others mean when they say self-evident things; people know a damn sight more than they let on.” The word damn was uttered with zest. Mrs. Sutter was smiling. “Even you, Mr. Michael O’Meara! (I do like that name: so melodic!) Even you.”

  Michael, seeing that he had failed in his mission, that he had let Lee Roy Sears down, and that, had this been a courtroom hearing, he would have been thoroughly routed, eviscerated, suddenly laughed—sat back in the hard-cushioned chair, and laughed.

  He said, shaking his head, boyish in surrender, “Well, Julia, you may be right.”

  “Hmmm! Michael O’Meara, I know I am.”

  The remainder of the visit went quickly and affably. Seeing Michael to the front door, Julia Sutter linked her thin but strong arm through his, and said, warmly, “You will come see me again, will you?—and bring that lovely wife of yours?”

  Michael said, “I’d be delighted to, Julia.”

  As if Michael were a boy, and she a doting grandmother, Mrs. Sutter pursed her lips and tapped his wrist with a forefinger, saying, almost coquettishly, “Promise—?”

  “Promise.”

  Twenty-six days later, Julia Sutter was dead.

  When Michael O’Meara heard the news, he felt as if he’d been struck in the stomach. His knees seemed to dissolve; he had to lean against a doorway. It was Gina who told him, speaking in a low, breathless voice. At this point she knew only that Julia Sutter had been killed by an intruder, a robber—she knew none of the bloody details. Her eyes were wide and damp and her manner urgent, as always when she had shocking news, or scandal, to tell Michael.

  “What!—Julia Sutter!—my God! When?” Michael cried.

  “Shhh!” Gina warned, pressing a forefinger against her lips.

  (She did not want the twins, elsewhere in the house, to overhear. They had become, in the past several months, increasingly susceptible to disturbing dreams, which woke them both at the same moment, terrified and gasping for air; and led them to flee to their parents’ bedroom for comfort. Nightmares of struggle, drowning, giant snakes?—Michael and Gina were dismayed, but could find no specific cause for the dreams. Michael thought it particularly ironic, and sad, that, now that he seemed at last to have grown out of his own guilt-ridden dreams, his young sons should be victims of their own.)

  Gina was looking at Michael in such a way, clearly anxious, dreading, as to suggest that the identical thought had come to her, as came to Michael immediately: had Lee Roy Sears killed Julia, to revenge himself upon her?

  Yet neither uttered his name. As, shortly before, having heard of the death of Mal Bishop, in what the Newark News described as a “flaming holocaust,” they had not spoken his name aloud either.

  In the first shock of Julia Sutter’s death, Michael O’Meara relived the visit he’d had with her in that beautifully preserved if rather airless house. Shutting his eyes, calling back the drawing room, the drafty fireplace, the mantel—seeing with eidetic clarity the carved antique clock firmly chiming its inaccurate time; the china vase (Wedgwood?) of dried wildflowers (asters?) beside it. He tasted again the bitter tea and the stale, sugary, cloying yet delicious cookies. (Why did the English call cookies “biscuits”?—was it Anglo perversity?)

  He saw Julia Sutter, ramrod straight on the settee, a teacup in her very slightly palsied hand, gazing at him, her naive, audacious petitioner, with her air of kindly bemusement. Twice Michael O’Meara’s age, how must she have viewed him?—from what lofty perspective of Time? She had reminded him, not of his detached, evasive mother, who seemed so rarely capable of, or willing to, look into his eyes, but of his paternal grandmother, now long dead. She had liked him, hadn’t she?—had seemed to forgive him.

  Michael thought it a melancholy irony, that, having visited the prominent Mount Orion dowager for the first time, and having been invited back, he would never return. And poor Gina—she would never visit the house at all.

  Ironic too, that, that Sunday afternoon, Julia Sutter could not have known she would die soon. She might have thus set aside her vindictiveness and out of the bounty of her Christian heart forgiven Lee Roy Sears.

  Then there was the matter, the utterly baffling matter, of Janet O’Meara.

  Though Michael had seen his sister in the company of Lee Roy Sears on the evening of October 18, she categorically denied it. Standing in Michael’s study, in his house, a glass of Bloody Mary mix, sans gin, in her hand, Janet absolutely denied it—“My God, Michael, if you’re spying on Sears, at least don’t involve me!” Janet spoke incredulously, with an air of indignation that grated against Michael’s sensitive nerves.

  Michael smiled, or tried to smile. Saying, in a reasonable voice, “I’m not accusing you, Janet. I’m just stating what I saw. Expressing my concern—I think it’s a legitimate concern!—that my sister is involved with a man of problematic character. However persecuted he himself has been, however victimized, Lee Roy is—”

  “But I wasn’t with him that night, Michael. I was in New York: I was home. Are you spying on him?”

  “Janet, I’m sure I saw you. The two of you, Lee Roy looking a bit unsteady, entering his rooming house on Eighth Avenue, Putnam. It was only a few hours after th
e blowup at the Center, and you appeared to be comforting him; you seemed on very close terms.” Michael spoke quietly, regarding Janet with the patient, slightly reproachful air of a lawyer of good character who knows a witness is lying under oath: knows, and knows that the witness knows he knows. Yet the protocol of the courtoom, as of all civilized discourse, forbids direct accusation, let alone denunciation. “And I’m not spying on the man. Hardly!”

  “Sitting there in your car, waiting for him?—for hours?”

  “I’ve explained, I was anxious to—”

  “And, when he appeared, not talking to him after all?”

  “Because, Janet, you were with him. I was”—Michael paused; did he want to say “shocked”?—“appalled”?—such reactions Janet might find amusing, as symptomatic of her older brother’s stolid, unimaginative bourgeois life—“concerned. Just too taken by surprise to react. And then—the two of you were gone.”

  “You say you saw my face?”

  “I may not have seen your actual face—I mean, clearly. But I saw you, and I saw your car. I recognized your car at once, even out of context like that.”

  “What does my car look like, then?—tell me!”

  “It’s a nineteen eighty-nine Volvo, a darkish color, blue, I think—very dark blue. And there were the New York State license plates.”

  “And do you know the license number, too?” Janet asked ironically.

  “In fact, no. Of course not.”

  “You recognized me, with Lee Roy Sears, on the evening of October eighteenth, in Putnam, New Jersey!—that long ago!—and you recognized my car! How amazing!” Janet stared belligerently at Michael. Her skin, flushed with indignation, was coarse-pored; her eyes, damp, blinking, were smaller than Michael recalled. “But why haven’t you mentioned it, until now? If you were so concerned, why did you postpone inviting me out, like this, to show your brotherly concern?”

  Michael winced at the loudness of Janet’s voice: Gina was in another part of the house, and, knowing that Michael and Janet had something crucial to discuss, something presumably between them, she was keeping her distance, tactful, not wanting to become involved; yet Janet’s voice rose to an adolescent pitch, and Michael judged it too late to shut the door. He did not want to antagonize her further.

  He heard again that defiant whining note of adolescence he’d virtually forgotten, in Janet. Over the years, encountering her as a fully mature adult, he’d gradually lost his memory of her behavior at home, her willful, somehow seemingly involuntary, tormenting of their mother.

  Janet was one of those who had come of age in the early 1970s: when rebellion was so frequently flaunted for its own sake, in the children of affluent suburbanites; an aftereffect of the more legitimate rebellions of the 1960s, when Michael had come of age.

  Janet repeated her question and swallowed a large mouthful of her tart red drink.

  Michael was thinking how to answer—for he did not want to say what was uppermost in his mind, that it was now, so crucially now, with Julia Sutter dead and her murderer not yet discovered, that he most worried about Janet and Sears; that, earlier, he had not liked the situation, but had been determined to tolerate it—for his sister was after all a grown woman, hardly dependent upon his counsel. He did not want to explain any of this since, in fact, he did not seriously believe that Lee Roy Sears had killed Mrs. Sutter.

  (“You believe me, Mr. O’Meara, don’t you?” Lee Roy had begged; and Michael had said, “Yes, yes, yes.” He had given up trying to get Lee Roy to call him by his first name.)

  Janet glanced over her shoulder and said, her voice dipping, “I will admit I’ve seen him a few times, since June. I’ve told you—there’s nothing secret about it. I’ve been researching a story on him, in depth.” She paused. Belatedly, she shut Michael’s study door; she appeared less certain of herself, evasive, and yet appealing to Michael, with childlike directness. “I will admit too that I find—I did find—him attractive, in that way of his. That way that’s so difficult to—explain.”

  Michael said, embarrassed, “Yes, I’d suspected so.”

  “But there hasn’t been anything serious between us.”

  “I see.”

  “—I mean, I haven’t”—Janet spoke slowly, frowning, not meeting Michael’s eye—“slept with him.” She paused, and, blushing fiercely, added, “Not that it’s anyone’s business but my own.”

  “Janet, I know.”

  “I’m thirty-five years old—my life is my own business.”

  Michael took Janet’s hand, a bit awkwardly. He found it surprisingly cool, the fingertips cold—as his own.

  “I’m not in love with him.”

  It was so bold and impetuous a statement, Michael did not know how to reply.

  He said, “I wasn’t spying on you, Janet, that night. If I happened to see—”

  “But you didn’t! Not me, not that night!”

  “Have you been with him, other nights?”

  Janet politely withdrew her hand from Michael’s. She seemed not to have heard his question. “It must have been some other woman, that night,” she said, as if indifferently. “Lee Roy has other women—I know.”

  Michael felt a stab of pain, somewhere behind his eyes. He said, evenly, “Does he!”

  He would have liked the conversation to end, now. They were at an impasse—Janet would not tell the truth, and Michael had no heart to force it out of her. What does it matter, so long as I know.

  But Janet had more to say. She fumblingly set down her glass on Michael’s desk and gazed at him, not defensively now, but with searching eyes. “I don’t love him, but—there’s a weakness in me that draws me to him. When I’m with him, I believe in him utterly; it’s only when I’m away from him, I’m not so sure. I don’t think he could have had anything to do with that poor old woman’s death, but, in Hartford, I’ve made some inquiries, with people who knew him back in nineteen seventy-eight, or claimed to—and it’s all very—confused.”

  Michael said guardedly, “What have you learned?”

  “I don’t know if I’ve ‘learned’ anything. I’ve studied the trial transcripts, as I guess you did, but so much is left out, the trial turns out to be a sort of simulacrum of what might have happened. Is courtroom procedure always like that?—my God! Outside the court, you can learn more, a lot more, but one ‘fact’ tends to cancel out another. For instance, something you probably didn’t know, since you restricted yourself to the trial records—at the time Lee Roy Sears was arrested for killing the drug dealer (if the man was a dealer: even that wasn’t one hundred percent clear), he’d also been charged with two other killings. These charges were later dropped, so, who knows, maybe they were fabricated, by police, to force him into plea bargaining. At the trial, there was evidence the prosecution wanted to present that was ruled inadmissible by the judge—the police claimed to have had a list of ‘hits’ in Lee Roy Sears’s handwriting, the names of men who had already been killed, and the names of others still living. I know, Michael, I know,” Janet said quickly, laying her hand on Michael’s arm to prevent his interrupting, “the evidence was inadmissible, and that must have been for a reason. What most upset me, though—and this I got from a woman who was a friend of the victims, or said she was—was the way Lee Roy kidnapped a woman and her twelve-year-old daughter, trying to escape Hartford. According to this account, Lee Roy held a gun to the woman’s head, made her stop outside town, raped her, beat and abused her daughter, all the while high on cocaine. He—”

  Michael interrupted, “Janet, none of that was ever proven, it’s impossible to know if it happened or not. In the trial—”

  “—he threatened to kill them both, which is why, I was told, the woman decided not to testify against him, and the charges were dropped.”

  “—in the trial, the charge was murder, and the evidence was problematic, the police witnesses obviously lying—which is why, eventually—”

  “Eventually, the woman committed suicide; the daughter beca
me a drug addict, and—”

  “—the capital sentence was set aside, and—”

  “—and disappeared. Probably died.”

  “—he’s alive today. His life saved.”

  Janet and Michael had been speaking quickly, hotly.

  Michael regarded his hands, which were trembling. Something monstrous was happening, but he did not know what.

  In a less impassioned tone, Janet said, “All right. It’s ‘hearsay.’ The charges were dropped. But did you and the others in The Coalition investigate?—did you care? Or, because these were female victims, did they not seem to count, in your zeal to get justice for Lee Roy Sears?”

  Michael rubbed his face vigorously with both hands. He did not want to say, This happened a long time ago. Nor did he want to say, I meant only well. He said, instead, quietly, “But why have you seen Lee Roy, if he’s a rapist and murderer?”

  “I haven’t seen him since finding out this information.”

  “Of course you have.”

  “I have not.”

  “You’ve spoken with him on the phone, then.”

  Janet’s gaze wavered, irresolutely. But she said, “No. I’m afraid of him.”

  “How will you write your story, then?”

  “I’ll talk with him one more time,” Janet said. “I owe him that much—to hear his side.”

  “But why?” Michael asked ironically. “If the man’s a rapist, a murderer—would you expect him to tell the truth?”

  Quite seriously, with no apparent sense of the egotism of her remark, Janet said, “Oh, I’m sure Lee Roy has always told the truth to me.”

  And to me, Michael O’Meara thought.

  Feeling wonderfully vindicated, and relieved, when, a few days later, he learned that Mount Orion police had arrested a suspect in the Sutter case—a former lawn-crew worker employed by Julia, who answered descriptions of a prowler seen by neighbors in the vicinity of Julia Sutter’s house the day before the murder; and who, most damningly, had household items and credit cards belonging to Julia in his possession when police picked him up.

  “Someone Julia knew,” Gina said, frowning over the newspaper article, shivering, “someone she trusted. From Newark, and he’s black—isn’t that just what you’d expect?”