Neighborhood Watch

  Jeremy has said the whole sleepwalking defense was a ridiculous gamble no right-minded lawyer should have taken. My defense should have pointed out the almost entirely circumstantial evidence against me. Yes, my fingerprints were in Linda Sue’s bedroom, but I had been in her house on the afternoon of her murder. She had given me a tour of the upstairs, taken me into her bedroom. Other than the bloody nightgown stain (untestable because I had washed it so quickly), no physical evidence except the fingerprints directly connected me to the crime.

  The weapon had been washed (“with such care for a sleepwalker,” the prosecutor at my trial enjoyed pointing out). I’d also left no footprints anywhere in the blood, showing more foresight than O.J. had, they said. What clinched my innocence in Jeremy’s mind were the photographs of the nightgown and the solid, oval stain of blood. There were no spatter marks at all, which, given the manner of death (head bludgeoned three times), would have been impossible. “How do you bludgeon someone and get a stain like that? I don’t understand what they were thinking, frankly. There was spatter on the floor and on the walls and none on your nightgown? It’s ridiculous.”

  Jeremy is a sweet man, not young enough to be my son, though now that seems to be the tenor of our relationship. In the three years since he began working on my behalf, he has gotten married and fathered a child. I’ve seen baby pictures, one including his wife, Laura, looking ashen and weary, propped up in bed, a blanketed baby at her side. Beyond that one picture (which, I have to admit, I have a hard time forgetting), I can’t imagine what his home life is like. I don’t know if he’s a hands-on father who changes diapers or a distracted one who eats quick dinners and returns to work. Judging by the amount of time he’s devoted to my case, I’d have to guess the latter.

  In the beginning the careful attention Jeremy paid to the details of my trial embarrassed me enough to wish I’d been more present at it. If I’d paid better attention, would things have gone differently? Jeremy has called Franklin Mayhew, my first lawyer, an idiot and has cited incompetent representation as the basis for my habeas corpus appeal. I certainly see his point, but at the time, we honestly thought we had the best lawyer money could buy. My husband, Paul’s, boss had recommended him, saying he’d gotten his son off a third DUI arrest. “Miracle worker,” he said. We dialed the number because we needed a miracle. We liked Franklin’s small and unpretentious office—and the fact that he rode his bike to work. If the helmet sitting on his desk seemed odd, we chalked it up to absentmindedness for unimportant details. That he worked on his own, with an answering machine for a receptionist, might have been a red flag, but he waved away any doubt by saying, “Low overhead is my secret. I take no case just for money.”

  Though he took a lot of our money, almost all of it in fact, we still stood by him. After the verdict was announced, I squeezed his hand and told him not to feel bad, he’d done his best.

  By that point Paul had developed an edge I hadn’t. It was through thin lips and a stiff handshake that he thanked Franklin, just before I was led away in handcuffs.

  As I’ve reminded Jeremy, it wasn’t entirely Franklin’s fault: I confessed, after all. Any defense lawyer would have had a steep hill to climb clearing me. “Who confesses to a murder they didn’t commit?” the handsome DA asked. The jury nodded in unison like a dozen marionettes, woodenly agreeing with their puppeteer. “You’d have to be either crazy or guilty. And since we’ve established the defendant wasn’t the former, that leaves only one possibility.”

  After I started working with Jeremy, I understood that there are lots of reasons innocent people make confessions. Developmentally disabled people are more inclined to confess once they understand what the interrogator wants to hear. Juveniles and people with mental illness, ditto. I don’t include myself in these groups, but I can relate to them. I know how it feels to sit alone in a room with detectives who insist on one version of events. In my case, one of the detectives, an older man named Don Fenlon, spoke gently, saying he wanted only to help me. He had a sister named with my name—Betsy—and no children either. I believed him when he said that most people in my situation agree to some part of the charge. “Here’s the trick,” he whispered. “Start showing remorse right away. That always helps. Play your cards right, you might get away with involuntary manslaughter. I can’t promise anything, but I have a feeling these guys like you.”

  I was an innocent back then, a child when it came to the judicial system. I thought he meant like in the social sense. I didn’t know like also meant: They’re pretty sure you did this crime. I thought being liked would help, that telling the truth—I didn’t know what happened, didn’t remember the night—wouldn’t be a mistake. According to the transcript, I asked twice about speaking with a lawyer and was told both times that it was “a little early for that.” Once, someone said, presumably as a joke, “Do you have any idea what those guys charge?”

  Was I naïve to believe for so long that the detectives meant me no harm? That we were all working together to get to the bottom of what happened? Yes, I told them, Linda Sue and I were acquaintances who had been spending more time together. She’d invited me into her house, where she admitted some surprising things to me.

  “Like what?” Detective Weaver asked. He was the younger detective and unattractive in the extreme, digging for earwax one minute and propping his dirty shoes up on the table the next. “Sexual stuff? Was that it?”

  “No,” I said. He stared at me and waited. “She had recently developed a new friendship with one of our male neighbors. We talked about that.”

  He looked down at his notes. “This is Geoff you’re talking about, right?” He folded a piece of paper and used it to dig some dirt out from under his fingernails.

  “Geoffrey, that’s right.” No one called him Geoff.

  “Friend of yours, too?”

  “An old friend of my husband’s. They grew up together.” To my everlasting regret, I kept going when he rolled his hand in a gesture I interpreted as encouragement. “We all like Geoffrey. He’s an author, quite a successful one. Not that his book was still a best seller, but I suppose just writing one seems glamorous.”

  He sat up and lowered his filthy shoes to the floor. “To you, you mean.”

  Now I understand that those detectives had written their story before they asked me a single question. I was a lovelorn librarian, crazed with jealousy over my neighbor’s good luck. “Everyone loved Geoffrey,” I insisted, a quote that got repeated at the trial more times than I can count.

  In recent years, the most famous false confessions came from the Harlem Five—the teenagers convicted of the Central Park Jogger assault who served thirteen years in prison until another man confessed to the crime. After DNA confirmed their innocence, all five were exonerated and released from jail along with their sad stories: one had an IQ of 87, and another, 73. None could read above a second-grade level. Though we don’t share these numbers, we share the same mistakes and believed the same lies. We’ve sat across from police officers and told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Without getting my hopes up, I’ve started reading a little more about exonerees freed since that Phil Donohue Show. Most of them have been black men, victimized by a mistaken eyewitness, their crime nothing more than walking down the wrong street wearing the same gray sweatshirt or blue baseball cap a victim described to police a few hours earlier. Overeager police have a hard time letting go of wardrobe coincidences, I’ve learned. If anything, these men are more innocent than I. Most were nowhere near the crime, never knew the victim, and had no idea why they were brought to a police station for questioning.

  I knew the victim. I had become an unreliable confidante and repository of her secrets. I participated in “neighborly” efforts to help Linda Sue that I see now only isolated her further and sealed her fate. If I didn’t leave my hair in a pool of blood beside her body, I am not without some culpability. Though I still don’t remember what happened that night, I remember all too well what happened in th
e weeks and days before Linda Sue’s death. And what I can remember from that night—what we talked about in her living room, what I saw upstairs—made me wish her, if not dead, then eradicated somehow. Gone from our lives. No, whatever the DNA tests show, I’m not wholly innocent.

  I suspect none of us is.

  Three weeks ago, Jeremy got the results of the test on the hair found in the blood beside the body. It wasn’t mine or the victim’s. Traditional DNA testing on hair is a fallible science—hair is not composed of living material and therefore has no genetic markers. But as luck would have it, the follicle, still attached, contained enough markers for three out of four experts to conclude it wasn’t mine. Enough evidence for a sympathetic judge to rule in my favor, a judge who is on record as having opposed the death penalty and mandatory sentencing. For once in this whole process I got lucky. The judge wanted to make an example of the flaws in the judicial system he’ll be retiring from soon. “Everyone wants to leave a mark,” Jeremy told me. “You’re his.”

  I’ve tried to keep this a secret, but I’m not sure it’s worked. I’ve learned that women in prison can be extraordinarily generous, especially in hard times. I’ve watched my fellow inmates nurse one another through sickness and spend their last commissary dollar on Christmas presents they hand out wrapped in toilet paper. I’ve also seen the wall of silence that goes up around anyone who gets special treatment. I fear it’s already started. At lunch, when I asked Taneesha to pass the salt, she said I was a bitch if I thought I could get whatever I wanted around here. Everyone’s been prickly, even Wanda, who says she doesn’t want to know when I get the news. She’s not around when the guard finds me in the library and tells me my lawyer is here.

  I walk into the small, beige-colored conference room, where we’re allowed to sit, unshackled, alone with our lawyers, and I already know what he’s going to say. Jeremy can’t control his facial expressions or his body. He’s a foot tapper, a finger drummer. His body talks for him. This time, though, there’s none of that. He simply leans forward beaming like a child. “There’s no match!” he whispers. “We’re getting you out of here!”

  CHAPTER 2

  When I first came to CCI, I spent four days being asked so repeatedly about my feelings for events I didn’t remember that I started giving the answers they seemed to want. What difference did it make, I thought. My trial is over, my fate decided. “Yes, I probably did love Geoffrey Steadman,” I said, sighing. “Everyone did. He was that kind of man.”

  The intake therapist looked at me. “Manipulative?”

  “Charming. Smart. Funny in those unexpected ways.” I smiled and held her eye. She had short gray hair and looked maybe sixty, but I thought she recognized what I was saying. Did I sound crazy? Like those poor Manson girls with their tattooed foreheads and unwashed hair? Surely not. Surely people could recognize what I would still—even then, in spite of everything—characterize as a relatively normal, married person’s crush.

  By the time I got my cell block assignment, I was already something of a celebrity. Not that people welcomed my arrival, just that they were aware of it. They assumed I was crazy and rich, and for a while I let them believe both things. With so few ways to differentiate ourselves, I took advantage of silly ones. I used expensive tea bags and washed my underthings every night. I medicated myself into a stupor by doubling the doses of the Elavil I’d been prescribed by the psychologist, who didn’t know I had two other prescriptions in my bag. For months I moved through my new world in a gray fog I couldn’t taste or feel. I slept fourteen hours a night and shuffled through days, exhausted and yawning. I have very few memories of the time before Wanda arrived and became my first cell mate to ask if I knew what the rules were about nail polish in here. “Someone told me you can have one color only, someone else said three.”

  I lifted my head off the pillow and grunted. I knew she was in for murder, a long-termer like me, looking at thirty years, and she was thinking about nail polish? “It’s not me I’m worried about, it’s everyone else,” she said. “I like to offer choices.”

  Within a week she’d begun an exercise program of sit-ups and weight lifting using cinder blocks she found outside in the yard. She tacked up a daily activity schedule including time for work, self-improvement, and isometric exercises. She asked me for advice on the self-improvement portion, and then, after I threw her a book from my side of the cell, she said that what she really wanted to do in here was meet some men. I wondered if she was taking the opposite drugs I was. Uppers of some kind. “In a women’s prison?”

  She pointed out the window at the medium-security men’s prison across the way and flicked her hair. “There’s Riverside over there.”

  We were about the same age I guessed, in our mid-thirties. She had thick, long brown hair, skin the color of honey, and cheekbones you could roll a marble around in. She walked over to the window as if she might catch a lineup of prospects along the fence. “You see them sometimes, right?”

  “I guess,” I said. We had a maintenance crew of inmates from the men’s prison that came through occasionally to fix a toilet or a broken light. I knew girls who put on makeup and changed their clothes before they came. “If you’re interested in that type.”

  “What?” Wanda laughed. It was her second week and already she was laughing, full-throated and deep. “Like we’re better than them?”

  I let myself get swept up in Wanda’s campaigns for longer exercise times, more nail polish, and eventually a real library. She was the one who pointed to the shelf of water-damaged books and said, “I bet you could do better.” She got me going again, thinking about the rest of my life. “Look,” she said one night after lights-out. We were lying in our beds, like two girls at camp. “I spent seventeen years coming home every night to a terrible man. Being here, it’s like I’m free.”

  I think of Wanda as the best friend I’ve ever had, which might be a surprise to my old neighbor, Marianne, who has made a duty out of visiting me twice a month for the last five years. Though nothing is official—we’re awaiting judge’s orders, which means paperwork and bureaucracy—she’s heard the news from Jeremy. “I just can’t believe it,” she says, beaming and shaking her head. “You’re coming to stay with me when you get out. That’s all arranged.”

  I’m surprised by this and also grateful because I don’t have too many other options. Or, if I’m being honest, any.

  “Jeremy’s a little worried about you moving back on the block where everything happened.” She means the murder, of course. “But I told him it’s all new people now. Everyone you knew has moved away. Really, Bets. I think it’ll be fine.”

  Her face tells me she’s less sure. I know that visiting has been one thing, but living together might be different. I reach a hand across the table and squeeze hers.

  In the last two years, we haven’t been required to wear handcuffs for these visits, which means that before every visiting day, Wanda paints our fingernails and we sit in this room doing everything we can think of with our hands: waving broadly, gesturing like mimes. Though full body hugs are allowed only at the end of a visit (and Marianne and I generally pass on this), I’ve come to appreciate the simple pleasure of a hand squeeze. “Thank you,” I say.

  I give Marianne credit for her loyalty over the years. On Christmas, she brings me chocolate and on my birthday, a present, though I do sometimes wonder if she’s wrapped something she found around the house. Last year she gave me a clear plastic desk organizer. “For paper clips and staples,” she said. I didn’t know what to say. It’s been twelve years since I’ve seen a staple.

  I appreciate her good intentions, even if our visits can be awkward. We pick our subjects carefully. She asks very little about my life inside, and we no longer mention her daughter, Trish, or her husband, Roland. I don’t know what he thinks about my staying in their house or if he’s even still there to offer his opinion. It’s possible he’s left and Marianne has never mentioned it to me, because I know how her min
d works. She believes my life is hard enough and I shouldn’t have to hear bad news. When I’ve asked about Trish, she’s said only that “she chooses not to share her life with us,” which I now realize means they don’t talk at all. She doesn’t know where her daughter lives, or what she does. I know Marianne visits me in part to fill in the holes she doesn’t like to think about too much. At one time she helped me adapt to our neighborhood life of surfaces and veneers, and now—as unlikely as it sounds from my spot here in prison—I help her maintain it.

  When we first moved onto the block, Paul and I were twenty-five-year-old newlyweds who’d never cared for a houseplant, much less a house with a garden in front. We were beginners at everything, our ignorance on display every weekend as we stooped over chores we’d never done before—sealing a driveway, edging a flower bed, cleaning the gutters. Marianne and Roland were older than we were and experienced in these matters. They talked us through the basics of replacing storm windows and laying new grass seed over a half-dead lawn. She was patient and nonjudgmental, a maternal figure, though she was only ten years older. I imagined our life might look like theirs down the line, with two bookish children and oddball interests, like the solar panels they’d stretched across their roof.

  Now with only twenty minutes left, Marianne pulls her hand free and remembers something she brought in her purse. I’m allowed to accept nothing from visitors except the quarters that must be used in the vending machines before the hour is over. Even a magazine article is contraband, as Marianne must know because she shouts at the guard as she pulls it out, “I’m just showing her something, for God’s sake.”

  I’m grateful she doesn’t scream, Plus she’s innocent, to add to my problems.

  “Wait’ll you see this,” she says, unfolding the article. “It’s about Geoffrey.”