The Murder House

AFTER MATTY drives away, I throw on a baseball cap and head to my car. I don’t feel like being around here, smelling his lingering cologne, thinking of him. My nerves are still rattled, but I know, in my heart, that I wasn’t going anywhere with him. It was going to happen sooner or later.

  I try to avoid the knowledge, also buried deep within, that I’m probably not going anywhere with any guy, that I’m not cut out for a relationship. I always rolled my eyes at the cliché of the cop who’s married to the job, but now I can see the merits of the stereotype. It’s not that I don’t care about anything besides my job—it’s that the job doesn’t let you leave. You see death and misery and suffering, and you don’t just click that off when you go home; it doesn’t wash off in the shower or vanish with a lover’s embrace. You are polluted, toxic, and so you hold back so you don’t infect someone else with the poison. You keep part of yourself segregated, hidden.

  And as long as I’m being brutally honest with myself: The truth is I’ve always felt alone, long before I was a cop. Always different. The “red sheep” of my family, I always called myself, because of my shiny red hair contrasted with the blond hair of Ryan and my parents. (I’m told my red locks came from a great-grandmother I never knew; I’ve only seen a black-and-white photo of her.) I was tall and athletic, while Ryan was stout and bookish. I was a restless troublemaker, while Ryan was calm and content. I was a rebel without a clue, in a loving, happy family, as if I somehow missed out on the one gene that allowed me to just fit in like everyone else.

  I drive to Uncle Lang’s cottage on North Sea Road. The shrubbery remains well maintained, courtesy of the Realtor who’s listing it. The door is locked, but I have a key. The house has been cleaned, the rugs shampooed, the kitchen scrubbed, the fridge emptied of perishables. It feels weird being here without the clothes strewn about, the smell of dirty socks and fried food—the house as it became after Chloe left Lang.

  Chloe, Lang said to me, when I saw him before he was wheeled into surgery. Look up Chloe. One of his last thoughts was the love of his life. But even they couldn’t maintain a relationship. What chance do I have?

  This is the question I pose as I unscrew the bottle of Beefeater gin. I decide to be an optimist and view the bottle as half full, and thus available for my consumption.

  Oh, look at me. I’m a cop with an attitude on her last chance, in a town that gives her sweaty, breathless nightmares almost every night, who drinks too much and can’t connect with members of the male species, and with an acting police chief who’s no fan of mine, who’s probably hoping to run me out by boring me to death with lousy assignments. I’m surprised Matty only walked out on me, instead of sprinting.

  I find a stray coffee cup in the cupboard, pour myself some gin, and head into Lang’s second bedroom, where his remaining effects have been boxed up. A roomful of boxes is so lonely. His desktop computer still sits on a simple wood desk, with the keyboard on a lower shelf that slides out. I boot up the computer and stare at the screen as it requests a password. I feel a pang in my heart as I type the password—JENNAROSE—and watch the computer come to life.

  Lang kept copies of his “murder books”—police reports, investigators’ notes, crime-scene photos, autopsy reports, interview summaries for a given case—in his home office; they’re packed up now and sitting in his garage. He also wrote up summaries of each of these cases in individual word-processing documents, narrative versions of the events from crime to conviction. He’d talked for years about writing his memoirs when he retired, hoping for a boost to his nest egg and also a way of looking back on his tenure, recording it for posterity. If they made it into a TV series, I could live with that, too, he used to joke.

  There are over fifty files in his CASES folder, going back decades. I look for the one from 1995, the BB gun shooting at Bridgehampton School, but there’s no entry for it. I don’t know why I want to understand what happened there. Matty, asshole that he is, did have a point. But that’s me in a nutshell, the kind of cop I am—I have to fit every piece of the puzzle together. And no matter how minor a detail a school shooting from almost seventeen years ago may have been, it’s still a piece that doesn’t fit.

  I stare at the home screen of the computer, the icons for the antivirus and the recycle bin, the Microsoft Word file folder. One small file sits in the corner, not in any folder, a Word document entitled CHLOE.

  Look up Chloe, Lang said to me in the trauma center before he died. “Look up” Chloe? I assumed he meant contact her, let her know what had happened, ask her to come to the hospital.

  Look up…Chloe, the document?

  I double-click on the icon and wait for the document to pop up. A handful of seconds later, it appears. It’s a letter, dated two days before his death.

  My dearest Chloe, it begins. I have to tell someone, and even now, with you gone from me forever, I want that someone to be you.

  “Oh my God,” I say to the empty room as I read the letter. “Oh my God.”

  41

  “L-7.” THE guard taps on the cell door with his pen. He gets no answer. “L-7,” he says again. “I’m doing the go-round.”

  Noah raises his head out of his hands, blinks into the light.

  “Where you gonna be after lunch, L-7?”

  Noah shakes his head. He’s been back in A-Block for three weeks now, after spending over a month in the prison hospital and having multiple surgeries at Phelps Memorial, where he was kept under heavy security and cuffed at the ankles to his bed. Since returning to A-Block, Gallery L, cell number 7, he has only left his cell for required trips—the mess hall, classes, and the occasional psych visit. He doesn’t have a job, still not having regained a sufficient range of motion in his hands to do much of anything, and won’t go to the prison yard or the gym. So even though inmates are allowed out of their cells in the afternoon, after lunch, he has stayed within this cramped, dreary space, staring at the walls, for almost the entire day. He sleeps, he supposes, but in the zombie-like daze in which he finds himself, it’s hard to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness, between dream and reality. His life has become a meaningless fog. There is no hope or despair, no fear or happiness.

  “L-7?” It’s one of the “white shirts,” the senior correctional officers, joining the other CO. “You in pain, L-7? You know we have meds for you. All you have to do is tell us who did this to you.”

  The warden cut off pain medication as soon as Noah was released from the prison hospital, trying to get Noah to implicate the Aryan Brotherhood in the attack. Everyone knows who attacked Noah, but they can’t prosecute them or even write up a disciplinary ticket without Noah’s cooperation.

  Noah’s no snitch. He’d like nothing more than to stick it to Eric Wheaton and his buddies, but it’s just not in him to rat someone out. Growing up with his buddies, that was the one rule you didn’t break. You might bend the law or outright fracture it; you might fail to do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but you never snitched.

  “That’s your choice, L-7.” The lieutenant and the other CO leave.

  Time passes in slow motion. Noah goes to the mess hall for lunch but doesn’t touch his food; he’s lost almost twenty pounds since the attack.

  Later in the afternoon, another CO shows up at his cell. “Mail, L-7,” he says, and he reaches through the bars and drops a single envelope into the small bucket reserved for such things. “Sorry for your troubles.”

  He’s sorry? Noah looks up at the CO, who gives a grim shake of the head and moves down to the next cell. They read the inmates’ mail in Sing Sing, unless it bears the seal of an attorney-client communication, so the sorry must pertain to the mail he just received.

  How, he thinks, could things possibly get worse?

  Noah’s limbs are stiff when he gets up; he’s sat in the same position for almost three hours straight. He reaches into the bucket and grabs the envelope, perforated at the top by whoever read it. When he opens it, there is a Post-it that simply says Sorry and then a n
ewspaper article, folded up. He unfolds it with a knot in his stomach and reads the headline: MANHATTAN SOCIALITE’S DROWNING RULED SUICIDE. Along with the article is a photo of Paige Sulzman in a sundress at some fancy gala.

  “No!” he cries out. “No!” He forces himself to read a bit of the article, enough to know that Paige was found dead in her pool, before he grabs hold of the prison bars and shakes them. “No!” His bandaged hands start to bleed through the gauze and pads, but he doesn’t care, doesn’t even feel the pain. He screams until he has no voice, hundreds of other inmates hearing his cries and joining in with shouts and catcalls of their own.

  Finally, exhausted, Noah crumples to the floor, leaning against the cell door. “Not her,” he whispers. “Not Paige.” She was supposed to move on. She was supposed to forget about him and get on with her life. She was supposed to leave John Sulzman and start the interior design business she’d always dreamed of having. She was supposed to have a life. She promised him. He made her promise she’d do that.

  He cries, for the first time that he can remember. The tears pour out until he is gasping for air, coughing and gagging.

  And then he has nothing left. He lies flat on his cell floor, oblivious to the dust, to the insect that crawls past his face. He stares into nothingness. He finds consolation in one and only one thing.

  That the first chance he gets, he’ll see Paige again, this time in another world.

  “L-7?” a CO calls out. “Everything okay?”

  Noah raises his head, turns to the guard.

  “Hey, CO,” he says. “I want to go into the yard.”

  “There’s less than an hour left of yard time,” the CO replies.

  But that’s okay. Noah won’t need longer than that.

  42

  THE PRISON yard for A-block is a large swath of concrete and dead grass, plus a full basketball court, all of it surrounded by fence and razor wire. It is unseasonably mild in late February, but most of the inmates still wear the allotted jacket and cap.

  Noah Walker moves into the yard with a purpose, turning in the direction of the basketball court. He is not wearing either the jacket or the cap, because he doesn’t plan to be out here very long.

  Beyond the basketball court, on a set of low wooden bleachers, Eric Wheaton and four of his Aryan brothers sit, smoking cigarettes and engaging in animated banter. They snap to attention when they see Noah Walker heading their way. For a moment, they look amused, even pleased, but the closer Noah gets, his body tensed, his fists closed tightly, the more they sense this is not a social call.

  Two of the biggest Aryans—the bodyguards, they call themselves—jump to their feet and approach Noah. They aren’t looking for a fight, but they won’t back down from one, either.

  “Well, well,” says Eric Wheaton, getting to his feet as well.

  “How are the hands?” calls out one of the bodyguards.

  Noah slows. His hands are not fully healed. A couple of the tendons were damaged badly, and a couple of the fingers on his left hand do not fully close into a grip.

  Luckily, Noah is right-handed.

  Noah looks to his right, then spins left and lands his right fist on the jaw of one of the bodyguards, feeling a satisfying crunch. The other two goons with Wheaton, plus the other bodyguard, converge on Noah, but he lowers his head and plows through the center of them like a halfback running for daylight. Prepared for a fistfight, and not expecting his evasive move, the Aryan brothers are unable to stop him.

  “No!” Eric Wheaton calls out, raising his arms and trying in vain to move along the bleachers to avoid Noah’s charge. Noah bears down on Wheaton and leaves his feet, tackling Wheaton in midair and knocking him over the back of the wood supports. They both fall hard to the ground, but Wheaton gets the worst of it, hitting his head with a wicked thud. Noah turns him over on his back and puts his hands on Wheaton’s neck, pressing his thumbs on his throat with all his might. He hears the calls of the other Aryans; the roar of the other inmates enjoying the show; the whistles of the COs; the voice over the loudspeaker calling for the inmates to retreat to the far corner, like a referee moving a boxer during a ten-count.

  Someone knocks him off Wheaton with a force that feels like a truck. It could be an Aryan. Could be a CO. He doesn’t care. Several bodies fall on top of him. He hears utter chaos around him and closes his eyes and his mind to it. He takes several hits to the back of the head, and then his hands are zip-tied behind his back and he is lifted off his feet, facedown, blood dripping from his nose and mouth. He doesn’t care about this, either. He doesn’t care if he killed Eric Wheaton or just gave him a very, very sore throat. Either way, the ultimate result will be the same for Noah.

  “You’re going to the Box, tough guy,” one of the COs grunts at him. The Box, officially the Special Housing Unit—solitary confinement—is a short, wide building separated from A-Block. The upper floors are reserved for inmates in protective custody because they are rats or because they are believed to be on the verge of violence, usually attack victims expected to retaliate when they return to general pop. But the bottom floor is where Noah will be sent. In a prison known to house the worst of the worst criminals, the lower level of the Box is for the worst of the worst of the worst—humans by designation, but closer to animals, violent predators, locked in small cells with tiny windows and low ceilings.

  Noah is thrown inside one of those cells, the floor sticky and reeking of urine and feces. His fellow inmates howl like hyenas and scratch and claw at their cell bars. Noah’s zip-ties are cut, the COs make a hasty retreat, and the door slams him into darkness.

  It will come now. It won’t take long. A correctional officer, probably, aligned with the Brotherhood. The saying in Sing Sing is The only difference between an inmate and a CO is the color of the uniform. But it doesn’t matter to Noah. It doesn’t matter if it’s a shank in the mess hall or an assault in the yard, or a visit from a CO late in the night. It will come soon now.

  Time passes. He can’t measure it, doesn’t even try. But at some point, the outside door to the Box opens, and then he hears footsteps. One, two, three COs, wearing full inmate-extraction gear—hats and bats, they call it: helmets with face shields, heavy boots and gloves, vests, pads on their knees and elbows, thick batons. In the darkness of his cell, he can’t see their faces, only their silhouettes from the light streaming in behind them: The men are as big as houses, more muscular than the Aryan bodyguards, and prepared for action.

  “On your feet, hands backward through the bars,” one of them says. “You give us any trouble and we’ll beat you down.”

  He complies. He won’t give them any trouble. They walk him through the open air and he lifts his face up to the stars, feeling the cool air on his skin for the last time, as he takes his final walk—the waltz, they used to call it, when there was an electric chair, the walk from Death Row to the execution chamber.

  They take him through another door, walk him down a hall, footsteps echoing on the hard surface. He is disoriented, thinking of Paige, humming symphonic music fit for a waltz, ready now, however it will come.

  Then his feet are on carpet, a surface they have not touched for many months. He doesn’t understand. He looks up at a door that says WARDEN’S OFFICE.

  Two COs see Noah and give him a smirk. Then they open the double doors, and Noah is pushed into the warden’s office. So this is how it happens? Right here in the warden’s office?

  Then he sees the warden, a lean, aging black man. Standing next to him is…

  No.

  “What…what is this?” he says.

  Detective Jenna Murphy says, “I’m having you transferred, Noah. We’re sending you back to Suffolk County Jail, pending a postconviction hearing.”

  “A…hearing on what?”

  “You were framed, Noah,” she says. “And I can prove it.”

  43

  THE COURTROOM is wall-to-wall with spectators and media, cops and prosecutors, people from the community, standin
g room only once again. The room is so quiet that you can actually hear that ringing sound that absolute silence produces, everyone craning forward, eagerly awaiting the next words that will come from the mouth of this witness—even the judge, peering over his glasses at the witness stand, his brow furrowed, his lips pursed.

  The news leaked out yesterday—CNN picked it up first—but not the details. The details are for today. For this hearing. For this moment.

  Detective Jenna Murphy, dressed in a blue suit, has testified for over an hour thus far, setting the table for what will come next. Noah’s defense lawyer, Joshua Brody, has proceeded methodically, establishing her credentials, her minor role in the investigation, and going through a lot of technical questions and answers that the court needs to establish the “authenticity” of the letter found on her uncle’s computer. Ultimately, the judge decided that the letter could be admitted into evidence, which paved the way for Brody to cut to the heart of this hearing.

  “My uncle was the chief, so he could take over any crime scene he wanted,” says Detective Murphy. “He took over the investigation of the crime scene at 7 Ocean Drive, and he removed the bloody knife and Melanie’s charm necklace before any investigators arrived. Then he controlled the search of Mr. Walker’s house after his arrest.” She shrugs. “He could do whatever he wanted. Nobody would know.”

  Joshua Brody nods. “So you’re telling us—”

  “I’m telling you that my uncle taped the knife and necklace under the heating duct and pretended to ‘discover’ them there,” she says. “I’m telling you that my uncle planted the evidence in Noah Walker’s kitchen.”

  A release throughout the courtroom, a collective gasp. Behind him, footsteps—reporters, prohibited from using smartphones in the courtroom, rushing out to send off a text message, a tweet, a quick phone call. That courtroom exit is probably like a revolving door right now, journalists stepping out for the breaking news, then returning to hear if there’s anything more.