“We’re not staying,” I said. “We just have to pick up some more things before we go back to Mrs. McCall’s house. She’s an alumna of the sorority.”
“How will you get there, though?”
“The police will take us.” I opened the car door. “Thank you for the ride.”
Tina stamped her hand on my knee. “Pamela? Can you hang back a moment?” I had no fight left in me, so I gave my sisters a half wave. Go ahead. I’ll meet you inside.
Tina and I sat in silence, watching Bernadette and the others link arms and approach the guard at the next barricade, who was asking for IDs. The girls rooted around inside their purses for their wallets.
“Is the school providing you with any kind of support?” Tina asked, regarding me with what felt like parental concern. “Professionals to talk to about this?”
“You mean like a shrink?”
Tina smiled at the way I said shrink. “I mean like a shrink, yes.”
“No. I don’t know. It’s barely been two days.”
“Okay, well. I have names of people, if you or anyone you know needs them.”
“Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“It’s not, but I do want you to know that.” She let the offer stand as she drew her mohair coat tighter against the creeping cold. It was an expensive-looking piece, the material burnished of lint and pills. Denise would have offered to take it from her so she could peep at the label and see who she was up against.
“You’re the one who saw him, right? That’s what the paper said.”
I swallowed queasily. “I can’t believe the Democrat printed that.” At that point in time, I thought I was only local news.
“Pamela,” Tina said starkly, “it’s in the New York Times.”
I was poleaxed. I imagined the paper—I imagined my picture—on every stoop in our neighborhood, just thirty minutes south of the city. “They can do that? They’re allowed to just do that?”
“It’s unethical but not illegal.” Tina reached for the pack of menthols she kept on her dashboard at all times. One in the car and one in her purse, I’d soon learn.
“You burned that guy,” I said, remembering his yelp, the smell of singed body hair.
“I branded him,” Tina corrected me, jiggling loose a cigarette and offering the pack to me. I shook my head and she shrugged. Suit yourself. “Make anyone who wants to interview you roll up his sleeve first. Do not give that guy a quote, whatever you do. You should have heard the way he was talking about you and your friends before you came outside.” There was the catch of her lighter, and she went cross-eyed as she tried to match the flame to the tip of her cigarette.
“What was he saying?”
“That you shouldn’t have made yourselves so known.”
“Known,” I repeated, confused. “What does that mean?”
“That if you’d been tucked in bed at ten p.m., none of this would have happened to you.”
That touched a live wire in me. “Every last one of us was tucked into bed,” I snarled.
“Can you tell me what he looked like?” Tina faced me with worried, bloodshot eyes. “I promise to explain myself. I just need to hear what he looked like from you.”
I’d been asked to go over it so many times already that I was starting to feel like certain aspects of my story were more hindrance than help, that I ought to simplify it, either leave out the half second when I’d thought it was Roger or make a full-throated accusation. No one tells you that the truest stories are the messy, unwieldy ones, that you will be tempted to trim in the places that make people scratch their heads and pad the parts where they lean in closer. It takes fortitude to remain a true and constant witness, and I did.
“I mistook him for this guy, Roger,” I told Tina. “He dated Denise. Used to. Not just her either. He had a thing with a few of the girls, I’m learning.” I shook my head; I didn’t have the energy to get into all of it. “But I realized pretty quickly it wasn’t Roger. The man I saw was a lot smaller than Roger.”
Tina drew quickly on her cigarette with bulging, I’m-choking eyes. “What else? Do you remember anything else?”
“His nose.” I brought my fingertips to my own, demonstrating. “It was like a beak. Really sharp and straight. And he had thin lips.”
Tina seemed to need a moment with this. She closed her eyes. The corners of her mouth lifted into a not-quite-smile. “I knew it,” she whispered to herself, almost happy.
Tina opened her eyes and leaned across me, cigarette balanced between her teeth. I held my cough in my chest until my eyes watered. I liked being in that car with her, and I didn’t want to give her any indication that I couldn’t handle who she was and what she was telling me.
“This is why I came,” Tina said. “I got on a plane immediately when I heard what happened here. Because I knew it.”
She unfolded a piece of paper, smoothing out the creases with the heel of her hand. I was reminded of the flyers the fraternities would post for their charity parties until she offered it to me. No. Not a flyer for a party.
I read his rather prosaic-sounding name for the first time in that moment, but some years ago I vowed to stop using it. This is no symbolic abstinence on my part—his name has been said enough and ours forgotten, yada yada. I mean, sure, fine, that can be a part of it, but who I want you to remember, every time I say The Defendant, is not him but the twenty-two-year-old court reporter dressed for success in a pussy-bow blouse. She was the one who recorded him in the official transcripts not by his government name, like the licensed attorneys on the case, but by the two most honest letter combinations her sensitive ear and flying fingers could produce: The Defendant.
What people forget, or rather what the media decided muddied the narrative, is that although The Defendant would go on to represent himself at his murder trial, he was never a lawyer. Any Joe off the street can fly pro se, litigate their own case, without graduating from law school or passing the bar. But it made for a more salable story if he was portrayed as someone who did not have to kill to get his kicks, who had prospects in his romantic life and his career. To this day, I revere that scrubbed-faced court reporter, younger than me by only a year, because she is one of the sacred few who did her job without so much as a sliver of an agenda. The truth of what happened lies in those transcripts, where he is The Defendant and he is full of bullshit.
On the Wanted poster I held in my hands that dingy afternoon in Tina’s rental car, The Defendant peered back at me with black vacant eyes. They are scary eyes, don’t get me wrong, but what frightens me, what infuriates me, is that there isn’t anything exceptionally clever going on behind them. A series of national ineptitudes and a parsimonious attitude toward crimes against women created a kind of secret tunnel through which a college dropout with severe emotional disturbances moved with impunity for the better part of the seventies. Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.
“That’s the man you saw,” Tina said. “Four years ago, he killed my friend Ruth.”
RUTH
Issaquah, Washington
Winter 1974
I don’t like the idea of you going to a stranger’s house,” my mother said when I pointed out the advertisement in the post office. The Complex Grief Group met every Thursday evening, six to eight, out of a counselor’s home in the Squak Mountain neighborhood of Issaquah. No Men was underlined twice in red ink.
“It’s all women, though,” I said somewhat longingly.