The Hour I First Believed

  The other eyewitness was the victim’s older brother, Jesse Seaberry. It had been a strange night, Jesse told Rosalie Rand—the strangest night of his life. His mom, his brother and sister, and he had arrived the night before at the Comfort Inn. They’d checked in and, on the recommendation of the desk clerk, had gone to the Chinese buffet in the mall, rather than to the Mickey D’s across the road. The food had sucked, Jesse said; he and his mother had finally agreed on something.

  When the four of them got back to the motel, Jesse told Rosalie Rand, his mother said she was going to arrange 6:45 a.m. wakeup calls for both rooms—hers and Alyssa’s and his and Morgan’s. She’d given a twenty-dollar bill to Morgan (not Jesse) so that they could buy some breakfast at McDonald’s the next morning, if they got ready early enough. She said she wanted them outside, at the car, by seven thirty sharp. She wasn’t quite sure where to go when they got to campus, and she didn’t want to be still driving around when the thing was already starting. She was a typical Type A, she told them for the billionth time, and liked to arrive a little early to avoid stress.

  Morgan and he had gone to their room, flopped on their beds, and agreed that the motel their mother had picked out was a shithole: burned-out lightbulbs, a broken lock on the bathroom door, cigarette burns in the drapes. And if those weren’t cum stains on the carpet, it sure looked like it. Jesse told Morgan about a reality crime show he’d seen where the detectives had solved a rape-murder by bringing this special light to a hotel room, and turning off all the other lights, and the spots where there were body fluids had fucking glowed, and that was how they’d matched the dude’s DNA or whatever. Morgan fell asleep listening to him, Jesse said, but he, Jesse, couldn’t sleep, so he watched some pay-per-view and smoked a little of the weed he’d brought along to make the trip bearable. Then he’d gotten nice and mellow and fallen asleep, too.

  The weirdness began later, at about four in the morning, Jesse said, when he woke up with some serious cotton mouth and needing to take a leak.

  He didn’t think to look over and see if Morgan was in his bed, which he wasn’t. Morgan was in the bathroom with the broken lock, sitting on the toilet, butt-naked, and cutting slits in his pecs with a single-edge razor. “Get out!” Morgan had screamed, and Jesse was about to when he noticed these pictures on the floor around the toilet, which Morgan started snatching up, fast as he could—these computer printouts, skin pictures that, at first, Jesse assumed, were women, but then he realized were dudes. Muscle guys with stiffs. And Jesse had said to Morgan, who’d begun to cry, “Holy shit, you’re gay? Mr. Perfect is gay?”

  Morgan went at him, Jesse said, throwing punches, pretty fierce ones, too. Then Jesse got Morgan in a headlock and squeezed his neck so hard that Morgan said, “Okay! Stop! Please stop!” And after they’d both calmed down and caught their breath, they’d started talking.

  They talked for a long time, an hour maybe, about everything: the divorce, their lives before their dad left, their mom’s cancer. It was weird, Jesse said, but in a way, it was the best talk they’d ever had. The most real talk they’d ever had. Morgan told Jesse he cut himself to relieve the pressure. “What pressure?” Jesse had asked. “Everything in your whole fucking life’s come super easy.” Morgan said it was hard always trying to live up to their mother’s expectations. To be the one person in the family who wasn’t going to disappoint her. It was hard to explain, but sometimes, he said, his skin felt too tight from having to hold in his real self. Constricted, like, and it hurt. So he’d cut himself to relieve the pressure, and it would feel, not good, but better.

  “Like when you pop a zit?” Jesse had asked, and Morgan had said no, not really, but kind of. Yeah.

  Jesse wanted to know if Morgan had ever made it with a dude, and Morgan said he had, once, with one of the other actors in Of Mice and Men—this kid named Danny, who played one of the ranch hands. He’d almost had sex with this other guy, he said—this guy he’d met in a chat room. Morgan had driven to Asbury Park to meet him, but the guy had turned out to be in his forties, not twenty-two like he’d said, so Morgan had decided not to get in his car, and the guy had kept going, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Jesse said Morgan begged him not to tell their mother. She’d been through so much already: getting dumped by their dad, getting cancer. Instead of saying whether he would or wouldn’t tell, Jesse had suggested they smoke together. Morgan said he couldn’t, because the open house was in, like, three hours, and because weed was illegal. Jesse’d laughed at that. “You cut yourself, have sex with guys, and you won’t smoke a blunt with your own brother?”

  So they’d smoked. And the more Jesse thought about it—that his Mr. Perfect little brother was more fucked-up than he was—the freer he felt and the harder he laughed. But Morgan was one of those guys who smokes and, instead of kicking back and enjoying the ride, gets all paranoid. He started whimpering, thinking the cops were going to storm their room. He begged Jesse again not to say anything, and Jesse said he hadn’t decided yet what he was or wasn’t going to say, and then, all of a sudden, Morgan bolted.

  Jesse ran after him, down the hallway, and out into the dim daylight. And Morgan, without looking, started across the road just as that woman’s silver Tercel came out of nowhere and plowed into him without even tapping her brakes. And then the Tercel had jumped the curb and crashed into the sign, “Billions and Billions Sold” or whatever, and there was his brother, lying there in the road, not moving, and Jesse knew he was dead.

  Carole Alderman told Rosalie Rand that Jesse was hateful—that he had been “pathologically jealous” of Morgan his whole life, and now, unforgivably, he had concocted this whole malicious story to discredit Morgan in death. Morgan had not ever cut himself intentionally, Carole said—he would never, ever do something self-destructive like that; Jesse was the self-destructive one. And Morgan was certainly not a homosexual; that was simply ridiculous. Morgan had been a normal, kindhearted boy whom everybody loved, and he had been the biggest blessing of her whole life. He had started across the road that morning to go to McDonald’s and get himself some breakfast, just as they had planned the night before, and that woman, that Quirk person, had come along and murdered him. And, Carole said, she was sure, beyond the shadow of a slightest doubt, that Morgan had looked both ways before he ventured across.

  WHEN MORGAN SEABERRY WAS STRUCK and killed, Officer Gatchek was just across the road, coasting slowly through the mall parking lot, front and back, checking on things to make sure everything looked “copacetic.” He had recently learned that word, he told Rand, and he usually tried to use new words once he discovered them. He loved words. Kept a pocket dictionary in his cruiser and, when things were slow, would open to a random page, stick his finger somewhere on the page and, more often than not, increase his vocabulary. It helped him out when he played Scrabble with his wife and his in-laws. Sometimes, but not always. He couldn’t, for instance, use “copacetic” because the word had three c’s in it and there were only two “c” tiles in the Scrabble game. Well, unless he had a blank tile. “This probably sounds screwy,” he told Rand, “but for me there’s a correlation between police work and Scrabble. You stare at what you got in front of you. At first you don’t see anything much. Then, boom, you do.”

  He was at the scene in two minutes, max. He called immediately for an ambulance, but it was just a formality; the kid was already gone. Later, in his report, he would estimate that Mo had hit him while traveling at an approximate speed of fifty-five miles per hour in a thirty-five-mile zone.

  Officer Gatchek called for backup—someone to direct traffic, someone else to talk to the brother, who said he’d seen it happen, but who, Officer Gatchek had observed, looked and smelled like he’d been smoking cannabis. He’d smelled cannabis in the victim’s hair, too, but would probably keep that information to himself, at least for now. The victim’s mother had arrived on the scene by then and was hysterical. He decided he’d send her off in the ambulance; let the EMTs deal wi
th her, maybe get one of the ER docs to give her something to calm her down. He told Maureen to just sit on the grass near her car. To not get back into the car. Could she just get her purse? He said no. She should just wait right where she was. “Oh, my God,” she kept saying, over and over, like a chant. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

  It was the dazed look in her eyes, he said later. The fact that her pupils were dilated. Maybe she was in shock, or maybe she was just exhausted after her shift, like she said. Dozing a little, maybe, though she hadn’t copped to that. Or maybe, just maybe, she was DUI. People’s pupils dilated when they were stoned, and also when they were lying about something, and hers were as round as saucers. The victim’s brother said she hadn’t put the brakes on after she hit him, let alone before. And he, Gatchek, hadn’t heard any brakes, either, which he would have over in the mall parking lot. Hadn’t seen any rubber in the road. Overtired or not, it was instinct, even if you were dozing: you felt your car hit something, you braked. But instinct, when you were DUI, could betray you. Liquor? A belt or two out in the parking lot before she took off? He didn’t think so; he hadn’t smelled it on her. Drugs? Downers, maybe? That was more likely. An RN would have the key to the candy store. She was wearing a wedding ring, he noticed, but she hadn’t said anything about calling a husband. That was usually the first thing a wife in her situation would do. Maybe her marriage was in trouble and, to cope, she was swiping happy pills. There were things you had to do when there was a fatality—procedures you had to follow. Legalities you had to be cognizant of. But as he was following these procedures, he was fiddling with his observations like they were Scrabble tiles. And his instincts kept spelling out DUI.

  He caught a break when he noticed that Maureen’s hands had gotten burned by the detonated air bag—and that there was a small amount of blood oozing from the cut in her left eyebrow. “Ma’am, I think, to be on the safe side, we’re going to call you an ambulance. Get you to the hospital and have them look you over.” She told him she didn’t need to go; her injuries were superficial. “Just to be on the safe side, ma’am,” he repeated. He knew they’d take a blood sample when they examined her, and later on, if he could convince a judge to sign off on probable cause, he could get at that blood. Have her serum levels analyzed by the toxicologists at the State Police lab.

  He caught a second break when the ambulance got there and Maureen complied. The EMTs strapped her onto the stretcher and hauled her up and in.

  Officer Gatchek nodded in satisfaction as the ambulance pulled away. She hadn’t said anything more about getting her purse. It was in the car, on its side on the floor of the passenger’s seat. By rights, he couldn’t look in it, not without probable cause. But he could certainly pick it up and put it back on the seat for her. And when he did, he felt something in the purse’s side pocket. Damned if it didn’t feel like a syringe.

  He called for a tow. Her car was evidence, so they’d have to inventory everything in it when it got to the impound lot. That wasn’t breaking any search and seizure rules: doing a standard inventory. And meanwhile, he’d have bought himself some time to write up the affidavit, go after probable cause. Once the judge had signed off—he’d ask Judge Douville, who never refused if it was a suspected DUI—then he could execute the search warrants. He wanted her blood tested. He wanted her medical records. He wanted a look at her employment history. And he wanted to talk to her coworkers, too—see if there were any issues there. Nurses covered for each other, he knew that. But even if it was inadmissable later on, he’d have another piece of the whole picture. Maureen Quirk: Who was she? He’d figure it out. He owed that to the hysterical mother, and to her lifeless son, splayed facedown in the middle of Route 32 and now heading off to the morgue.

  WE HIRED LENA LOVECCHIO, MY Aunt Lolly’s pal and pallbearer—the lawyer who’d helped me out with the Paul Hay debacle. Lena had an associate now, her cousin Nicholas Benevento.

  The four of us—Lena, Nick, Maureen, and I—sat at Lena’s conference table. It was after hours, at Mo’s request. She was too ashamed to go out in daylight. “Guys, I hate to be the one to tell you, but there’s no sense bullcrapping you, either,” Lena said. “In terms of an acquittal, we’ve got the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell.”

  Mo nodded, resigned. She was on a pretty powerful antidepressant at that point, and it tended to stupor her out. The upside was that she was finally able to grab three or four hours of uninterrupted sleep, and she had stopped talking about suicide.

  “A snowball’s chance why?” I asked.

  “Because they’ve got her on the blood serum, and they’ve got the second eyewitness who corroborates what the brother says. And, most of all, because she coughed it up to Gatchek about injecting herself before she left the parking lot. That’s the real nail in the coffin.”

  “He told me it would be better if I cooperated with him,” Mo said.

  “Better for him, yeah. Not for you.”

  The bitter irony was that I’d been upstairs on the phone, arranging for Lena to represent her while, downstairs, Gatchek was knocking at the back door, wanting to know if she could answer a few questions.

  “He didn’t read her her rights,” I reminded them.

  “Didn’t have to because she wasn’t in custody,” Nick said. “You’re not required to Miranda-ize someone if you’re just having a chat at their kitchen table. She handed it to him voluntarily.”

  “Therein lies our problem, kids,” Lena added. “You never, ever talk to the cops without your lawyer there.”

  The fact that it was a high-profile case didn’t help us either, Nick explained. The accident had caught the attention of the national media because of the Columbine angle. That had generated op-eds in both the Daily Record and the Courant, which had in turn generated over a dozen letters to the editor. “The public cares about this case,” Lena said. “So the chief state’s attorney is bound to take an active interest. As in, stick his finger into the wind to see which way it’s blowing. And so far, it’s blowing pretty hard against us. But I talked to that New Yorker writer today, and we may be able to use her to our advantage. Not sure yet; she and I are continuing our discussion. Maureen, I may want you to talk to her. We’ll see. Of course, the New Yorker’s national. What we need more right now is a sympathetic in-state press.”

  “In terms of potential jurors?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “We probably won’t go the jury route. Too risky. Their case is just too damn strong. So we want to avoid a trial if we can. See if they’re in the mood for some charge-bargaining.”

  Nick went over the chronology of what was coming. First, the arrest, probably sometime the following week. “I talked to a guy in the state’s attorney’s office and asked for a heads-up,” he said. “Better for us, Mrs. Quirk, if you turn yourself in, rather than they take you in in handcuffs. Makes great theater for the cops and the TV guys, but it’s bad for our side. People see a perp walk on TV, and ‘innocent until proven guilty’ goes flying out the window. We want to be able to control as much of the imagery as we can.”

  Maureen would be arraigned within twenty-four hours after they arrested her, Nick said. “They’ll read the charge, we’ll enter her plea. They’ll give her a court date and set her bail. I’m guessing a hundred thou. I think we can get a reduction, though. She’s got no priors. She’s not really a flight risk.”

  “What we’ll do is post a surety bond,” Lena interjected. “Use the farm as security, if you’re comfortable with that.” I nodded. “Okay, now about her plea. I think our best bet is to have her plead guilty under the Alford doctrine. That’ll open up a ‘let’s make a deal’ situation.”

  “What’s the Alford Doctrine?” I asked.

  “It’s when the defendant says, ‘I’m not admitting actual guilt, but based on the state’s evidence, I am conceding that, in all likelihood, I will be convicted. Therefore, I plead guilty.’ Doesn’t change the criminal penalties, but it gives you guys some leverage later on
if the Seaberrys decide to file a civil suit. The insurance companies love it when their clients use the Alford. Makes it harder for the plaintiff to win a civil case.”

  “So is that what you’re going to do? Use this Alford thing?”

  “Yeah. Because, defense-wise, we just don’t have much to work with. I’ll argue that it was the non-Xanax circumstances that led to the accident. There’d been a death on her shift that night, and a shouting match between the two aides that Maureen had to put a stop to before it broke out into a fistfight. So Maureen was upset. Distracted. And since Columbine, she deteriorates when there’s any threat of violence.” She turned to Mo. “And I’m also going to emphasize that you’ve tried in earnest to wrestle with your demons, hon: psychotherapy, NarcAnon. I’m going to play Columbine for all it’s worth. If we have an ace to play, that’s it: the fact that you’re a victim, too. That’s what I think’s going to bring them to the bargaining table.”

  “But why would they bargain, if their case is so strong?” I asked.

  “Expediency, mainly. They get a conviction, which makes the public happy, but they don’t have to put the manpower into it that a trial would require. And conviction’s another notch on their belt that they can point to at reappointment time. These guys are politicians, first and foremost, okay? Now, they’ve also got to keep the Seaberrys happy. The last thing they want is for the victim’s mother, say, to start spouting off in the papers and on the nightly news about how Maureen got off with just a slap on her wrist.”

  “It’s a dance,” Nick said. “First, they’ll hit Mrs. Quirk with the toughest charge they can: manslaughter in the second degree with a motor vehicle. That’s a class-C felony, which means that they could put her in prison for up to ten years. So we start charge-bargaining. Offer them the guilty plea in exchange for a lesser charge: misconduct with a motor vehicle. That’s a class D. Carries a prison term of five years tops.”