The Stand-In

  The jury had been sworn in; the commentator explained that they had undergone the voir dire process of questioning. The camera panned over their faces, brown, white, old, young, like horses lined up at the starting post. The opening statements had been made by the prosecution and defence. The first witness was in the stand. It was Lt. Frank Gozzoli, of the 97th Precinct.

  He described how he had arrived on the scene at 1.10 hours. He described the position of the body and the absence of a murder weapon. As he spoke the camera panned across the spectators in the public benches. I saw Roly. I saw Irma’s stony, sallow face. She sat there, motionless. I saw Lila’s mother, dressed in black as if for a funeral. I saw some familiar faces: an actor from Bump; somebody who looked like Norman Mailer. Members of the public craned round, celebrity-spotting. Even on the TV I could feel the buzz in the air, like a first night.

  ‘There was no sign of a struggle,’ said Gozzoli.

  There was a break for ads. A freckle-faced boy clapped his hands in the sunshine and the screen rained Cornflakes.

  Then the painter Joseph Carillo took the stand. He was a small, meaty man who looked both awed and excited by his surroundings. He told the court how, on the morning of 25 April, at 8.30, he and his two colleagues had arrived at Mr Parsons’s apartment.

  ‘I rang the bell but nothin’ happened. We thought, maybe he’s gone out to the coffee shop to get some breakfast so we go back to the office. At 9.30 we called him on the phone but nothin’ happened again. We had a set of his keys in the office so we took those, picked up some more items on the way and got to his apartment at 12.30.’

  ‘Can you tell the court what happened then?’ asked the prosecutor, a tall, loose-limbed man whose name I hadn’t caught.

  ‘So we open the door. I call out, in case he’s in the shower or someplace, but there’s no reply. So we go into the big room and he’s just sitting there. No question, he’s dead. This big bloodstain on his chest.’

  ‘So what did you do then?’

  ‘What did we do? We get the hell out of that place, fast, and we tell the doorman to phone the cops.’

  ‘One more question, Mr Carillo. You and your colleagues from Lotus Design Studio had been painting the lobby of his apartment the day before, is that right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Would the woodwork still be wet?’

  He nodded. ‘Kind of sticky, yep.’

  The camera panned to an elderly, gnome-like couple sitting close together. They looked familiar, but it took me a moment to recognise them. My heart stopped. They were Trevor’s parents, Ida and George. I wished they hadn’t come.

  As in any long-running soap, characters began to emerge. The prosecutor was called Rubinsky. His mobile, rubbery face reminded me of Walter Matthau. He wandered around in a casual manner – the whole process was surprisingly casual, compared to a British court. He wore a shirt, with the sleeves rolled up; he perched on tables, wrapping one long leg over the other, pushing his hands through his crinkly hair and suddenly jumping down and approaching the jury, his finger jabbing. I watched him with tense solicitude. Little did he know his vital importance to me, and how I urged on his performance with the proprietorial air of a playwright whose drama is being staged. Or, to be precise, whose drama might be changed by new characters, unexpected improvisations and alarming twists of plot.

  A forensic expert was speaking. He listed the results of fibre tests, confirming that hairs found in the victim’s apartment matched hairs on the defendant’s sable coat. He listed some other items. Lipstick traces found on cigarette butts in the victim’s garbage pail matched a lipstick found in the defendant’s apartment.

  ‘Is that all, Dr Zimmerman?’

  ‘We found traces of dried paint on the defendant’s sable coat. When taken away for analysis, these matched the paint on the woodwork of the victim’s apartment. The lobby.’

  ‘Which was still wet, I believe, at the time in question,’ said Rubinsky.

  A fingerprint expert – a small, colourless man who himself looked like a mass murderer – confirmed that though the drinking glasses in both apartments had been wiped, the defendant’s prints had been found on countless surfaces in the victim’s apartment, and that hers alone had been found on the murder weapon.

  The defence attorney climbed to his feet and cross-examined him.

  ‘Mr Thomas,’ he said, ‘would it surprise you if the defendant’s prints weren’t found in her fiancé’s apartment? And, indeed, on her own property that she carried in her purse?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and sat down.

  By the third day the trial had taken on a certain rhythm, a life of its own. I watched it with the compulsive regularity, with the growing loyalties and dislikes, of a soap-opera addict. It began to feel as if it had nothing to do with me, not personally. I was a Hollywood screenwriter whose concept had been taken over by the machinery of production.

  Lila was acting a murderess, so she must have done it. I felt a spurious intimacy with these characters, denatured by the TV screen and transformed into performers. What was reality? Rambo, or shootings in the streets of Beirut? None of it threatened me as I sat there, chain-smoking.

  Until I was jerked to my senses. I switched on the TV. A couple was being interviewed on the steps of the Criminal Court. It was Ida and George. Ida, a dumpy woman in her Sunday best, leaned forward and spoke into the microphone.

  ‘He was a lovely boy. Bit of a tearaway but everybody loved him. His life was just beginning.’ She stopped, and began to sob.

  I sat there, frozen. Was she going to mention my name? But she hardly knew I existed. I had never met her. I only recognised her from a photograph.

  George put his arm around his wife and stared belligerently at the camera. ‘If he hadn’t met that woman . . .’ He meant Lila, not me.

  ‘Nothing can bring our boy back to us,’ sobbed his wife. ‘We’re just taking one day at a time.’

  The state’s next witnesses were the various doormen who had seen Lila enter and leave the two apartment buildings. The night captain of the 73rd Street Building, Donald O’Reilly, confirmed that Miss Dune had entered at around 10.15, the night in question, and left the building around 11.35.

  ‘Did Mr Parsons have any other visitors that evening, the night of April 24?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  Then the coffee-coloured guy took the stand. I sat, watching him. My heart thumped. He gave his name, Courtney Wilson, and his home address. He said that the evening in question, April 24, it was his second night of duty in the job.

  Rubinsky ambled up to him. ‘I ask you to look around the court room and see if there’s anyone you recognise?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, and pointed to Lila. Then he added, ‘Don’t everyone?’

  There was a murmur of laughter. Courtney Wilson seemed remarkably unintimidated by his surroundings; this was his moment of fame. Maybe some film producer would spot him.

  ‘Just answer the question,’ said the judge.

  Courtney confirmed that Lila had entered the building that night, at around 11.45.

  ‘Did you notice anything unusual?’ asked Rubinsky.

  He nodded. For a moment Courtney turned to the camera and looked at me. I shrank back in my chair. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I smelt liquor on her breath.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  He nodded.

  ‘How close were you?’ asked Rubinsky.

  ‘Like this close.’ He demonstrated, with his hands. ‘She signed her autograph for me, see. Least I said it was for me, but it was for my Dad. Laurie.’

  The court tittered. He looked around, grinning. ‘I’m not such a fan of her pictures. But I didn’t tell her that. I said it was for me. So she’s signing her name for me and I see that her hands are trembling. She seemed like she was upset –’

  ‘Objection!’ The defence attorney got to his feet.

  ‘Sustained,’ said the judge. H
e turned to Courtney. ‘Just keep to the facts, Mr Wilson.’

  I went for a walk. Down in the streets the air felt like damp cotton wool. It clogged my throat; I could hardly breathe. My t-shirt stuck to me.

  I wandered sluggishly along the sidewalk. All these months Lila had been performing, instead of me. Now she was doing it for real. And I believed her too! Wasn’t it just like Lila to be so damned brainless as to march out, in front of a whole bunch of witnesses, and shoot her lover dead? I always knew she was an airhead.

  I passed a black guy, slumped in a doorway. He had white powder smeared on his cheeks and his hair was encrusted with what looked like dried spinach. He was giggling.

  He turned to me and said something like, ‘Wannabanabill-krannyman?’

  I paused, and said to him quite distinctly, ‘Six months ago I shot a man dead.’

  He was still giggling. ‘Howdyaganjang, man?’ he said. He lay back and closed his eyes.

  See? He didn’t believe me either! I told you it hadn’t happened.

  That evening I switched on the TV and watched The Best People. I watched myself strolling across a tennis court, pulling my sweatband off and shaking my chestnut hair.

  ‘I’m jolly well exhausted, Tourmaline,’ I said in the Home Counties accent I had been instructed to use. ‘Let’s have ourselves a drink and a chin-wag.’

  I gazed at this preposterous apparition. She wore a flirty white shirt. Who on earth was that?

  The case was going badly for Lila. As the days passed the prosecution produced witness after witness to testify against her. A tearful Fidelia confirmed that she had found State’s Exhibit 8, the letter from Trevor, and had thrown it into the garbage. Prodded by Rubinsky, she confirmed a series of jealous rows, in one case violent, between Miss Dune and Mr Parsons, though adding that they’d been so happy too, didn’t every couple have arguments, she did with her husband Mario, she couldn’t believe that her employer would be capable of real violence.

  ‘They were so much in love. They were going to get married! She was going to have a baby!’

  A Dr Schluss from the Betty Ford Clinic explained the schizoid personality disorder that afflicted people with a drug or alcohol dependency. In a thick German accent he explained to the jury, as if they were children: ‘They have a split personality, they are always two people. The one lies dormant within the other; it is only released by chemical stimulus. This hidden person then takes over . . .’ He turned to look at me, through the TV screen. I gazed at him through my cigarette smoke. ‘It makes the shy person bold, it makes the depressed person happy.’ He paused, still staring at me. ‘It makes the unaggressive person capable of great violence.’

  I got up, abruptly, and went into the kitchen to make myself some coffee.

  A middle-aged insurance salesman, Kirk Cooper, took the stand. He confirmed that in May 1987 he had met the defendant in a bar in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was filming the country-and-western picture Cry Your Heart Out.

  ‘Sure she was loaded,’ he said. ‘She was smashed. So we had a few more drinks and she came back to my hotel room.’ He paused, smiling smugly. ‘I knew what happened next, but did she? No, sir. The next morning she wakes up and she says, “Who the fuck” – pardon me, “Who the hell are you? Where the hell am I?” I was kind of offended.’ He looked at the jury, raising his hands helplessly. ‘Kind of knocks a man’s self-esteem, know what I mean? And who believed me, when I told them I’d had sex with Lila Dune?’ Laughter rippled through the court. ‘They said, “Oh sure you did.”’ He winked. ‘Except I’d kept her cigarette lighter. See, she’d left it behind.’

  ‘Objection!’ Ralph Kahn, the defence attorney stood up. He was small and unprepossessing. ‘Your Honour, what’s the relevance of this? If my client chose to forget, as she indeed might, a moment of indiscretion . . .’ He gazed witheringly at Kirk Cooper. ‘What does this prove, except that maybe she had taste?’

  But Lila was slowly being dismantled in front of our eyes. Papers reported the events with ill-concealed relish. Much as they loved building up icons, it was even more fun to watch them tumble down. They hadn’t had such a good time since the Trump split-up.

  As Lila’s background emerged it was revealed that, to put it kindly, she had a somewhat elastic view of the truth. She had invented some facts and falsified others. It was discovered, for instance, that she had lied about her age. She wasn’t 39, but 43. Kahn stormed: ‘So what woman doesn’t? Isn’t that her prerogative – especially if she’s a star? What’re we going to hear next? Testimony from her hairdresser that she lightens her hair? So that makes her a murderess?’

  On the fifth day of the trial we were all in for a surprise. Fidelia had sobbed, ‘She’s going to have a baby!’

  A police doctor, Dr Daniel Feinstein, was called to the witness stand. He confirmed that he had examined the defendant.

  ‘What information did she give you, before the examination?’ asked Rubinsky.

  ‘She told me she was seven weeks pregnant.’

  ‘And what did you discover, during your routine internal examination?’

  He shook his head. ‘That this was not the case.’

  ‘Could you repeat that?’

  ‘She wasn’t pregnant.’ He turned to the jury. ‘She wasn’t carrying a child.’

  There was a hiss of indrawn breath, then a stunned silence. Lila sat there, her face wooden. Irma turned to stare at her.

  I sat there, thinking hard. So she had pretended she was going to have a baby, the oldest trick in the book. My trick, in a sense, except I had planned to carry it through. She had feigned pregnancy to get Trevor to marry her. How sad!

  If the court was in an uproar then, it was as nothing to what followed. After the lunch-time recess the court reconvened at 2.00. As the World Turns had been interrupted, so that the trial could be transmitted. Something was up.

  I switched on the TV set. A balding man stood in the witness box. He had a drooping moustache, a Western shirt and a bootlace tie. He gave his name as Albert Standing. He ran a video store in Portland, Oregon.

  ‘Can you describe your relationship to the defendant?’ asked Rubinsky.

  He looked across at Lila. She was staring at him, her mouth open.

  He nodded. ‘She was my wife.’

  The spectators gasped.

  ‘We were married in June 1963,’ he said. ‘She was 16, and I was near enough 18.’

  There was a hush, while this information was digested by the court. The rows of reporters had their heads down, they were scribbling. I sat there, trying to work it out. Lila had two ex-husbands – Vince Quinn, the dragster-racer, and Bobby Del Ray, the night-club owner. I didn’t understand. I gazed at the faces in the public benches. They were murmuring and whispering to each other; the hum rose to a roar.

  ‘Silence in court!’ snapped the judge.

  Rubinsky said, ‘The defendant was expecting a baby at the time, is that right?’

  Standing nodded. ‘We’d been dating a coupla months. She was still in school. So she quit, and we got married.’

  He paused. People were craning their necks to look at Lila. She had bent her head; all that was visible was her blonde hair. I could see its dark roots.

  ‘The labour was real bad,’ he said. ‘Both of them, they nearly died. Then the little girl was born. We called her Jasmine.’ He paused, and looked across at Lila. She didn’t raise her head. ‘We knew right away something was wrong. That she wasn’t like the other babies.’ He fell silent again. He was curiously dignified. The court waited. Someone cleared his throat. ‘It was the oxygen, see. The cord had gotten around her neck, it had damaged her brain.’ Suddenly he looked up and spoke to the public benches; he didn’t know about addressing the jury. ‘She was so young! It wasn’t her fault!’

  Rubinsky asked, ‘Could you tell us about the events of December 3, 1963?’

  ‘We were both of us just kids! Her friends, they were hanging out, going to parties. That’s what she should’ve bee
n doing. She was the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen.’

  He stopped. He looked across at Lila; she lifted her face, briefly. He turned to the judge.

  ‘You shouldn’t have brought me here, sir,’ he said. ‘It was a long time ago. It don’t make no sense to talk about it now.’

  Rubinsky asked, ‘Could you tell us what happened, that night?’

  Standing paused, then he started speaking. He spoke softly, as if he were talking to himself. ‘She yelled all the time, see. On and on. Like it was a chainsaw. Nothing stopped her, it drove us crazy. She didn’t recognise us. Nothing. She just yelled.’ He stopped.

  The judge asked him gently, ‘What happened?’

  It came out hesitantly, the whole story. Lila had gone out for the evening, while he stayed home with their daughter. She had gone out with a bunch of guys and come home drunk. That night, when the baby had woken up, yelling, she had filled the basin and tried to drown her.

  The baby survived. Lila wasn’t convicted. In fact, she denied the whole thing. She simply couldn’t remember doing it. She was put under psychiatric supervision for three years.

  Jasmine was now aged 27. She had spent her life in a state mental institution; she wasn’t even marginally well enough to be let loose, like most of her fellow-inmates, onto the streets of American cities. Lila had never visited her daughter. A few months after the incident she and Albert Standing had parted and finally divorced. He crossed the country, to Oregon, married again and started another life.

  Below me, on one of the rooftops, a naked man was punching the air. He wore a blindfold; his body glistened. He was overshadowed by the rear of an apartment building. It was a menacing tangle of fire-escapes, rusting window frames and air-conditioners that jutted like teeth. Have you ever noticed how sinister New York buildings are, from the back? Beyond came the hooting of cars, stuck in some traffic jam.

  I desperately needed a drink; I drained the vermouth bottle into a glass. A mile away, surgeons were slicing Lila open and I knew I should be running there shouting: Don’t! Stop it! Put away your knives!