The Defendant would be the one to depose me. That was the only thing it could mean—because traditionally, depositions take place in a courthouse or law office by licensed attorneys who do not harbor a penchant for bludgeoning dozens of women to death.
It felt like the old brick dormitory on Amsterdam Avenue was swaying. I put my hand to the wall, feeling the pulse of its pipes, the vibrations of the new album from the Cars. A guy upstairs listened to it on repeat every day that spring quarter. “Does that mean Farmer’s out?”
“That is the good news,” Mr. Pearl said more buoyantly.
The famed Millard Farmer of Atlanta had a federal charge of contempt on his record. He’d had to file a special request to represent The Defendant in an out-of-state trial, and Mr. Pearl was calling to tell me that the judge had denied it. The Defendant would go on to accept and reject the same team of public defenders right up until the first day of the pretrial. People talk about him representing himself like he was the only one on his side of the counsel table. But if that had been the case, I would have had nothing to worry about. He would have drowned in his own ignorant hubris.
“Listen,” Mr. Pearl said, “whatever you’re hearing about The Defendant’s capabilities as an attorney, they’ve been grossly exaggerated. I watched the same display as your journalist friend, and frankly”—he laughed cynically—“I’m wondering if we attended the same hearing.”
The Defendant Making Judicial Gains had been Carl’s headline in the Tallahassee Democrat, to which I must have been the only New Yorker who subscribed. Carl was in the courtroom to cover The Defendant’s request for a delay to the trial, better lighting in his cell, and more hours of exercise. The Defendant was photographed with one ass cheek on the counsel table, wearing a tan suit and glancing down at his notes while he made his argument. Carl wrote that he “appeared relaxed and confident in his own defense—asking articulate, well-contemplated legal questions in a calm, deliberate voice.” The “fit young man,” Carl noted, had “succeeded in putting the prosecution on the defense.”
I’d called Carl while I was still reading his article, teetering between tears and rage. I’d succumbed to both when he didn’t answer, slamming the phone into the receiver again and again like a caricature of a scorned woman. For months, Carl had fed me countless excuses about why the Colorado story still hadn’t run, and then he’d stopped answering my calls and letters entirely.
“I’m going to meet you in Florida,” Tina said when I hung up with Mr. Pearl and called her to tell her about the upcoming deposition. Tina had moved back to Seattle after I graduated from FSU, around the time the second capital indictment was handed down for the murder of twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. My father kept reminding me: even if they couldn’t nail him for Denise’s and Robbie’s murders—the evidence in our case was almost entirely circumstantial—the state would get him for what he’d done to Kimberly Leach, for which they had hair and fibers and even soil from the national park where she was killed, found in the stolen van he was driving.
“What for?” I asked Tina, forcing a smile for a cluster of my hallmates as they emerged into the lobby. One of them saw me and mouthed, Lunch? I pointed to the mouthpiece and shook my head. I had to take this call. She shrugged. Caught up with the others. I watched them go, a sharp pang in my chest. I was eight months into my first year at Columbia Law, and I had not gone on a single date. If anyone asked whether I’d made any new friends, I could say yes. Technically, my father was a new friend to me. I was mired in this bullshit, and he was the only one willing to discuss it with me ad nauseam. I was angry then. Angry that over a year had passed since I’d held my dying best friend in my arms and insisted she wake up and get dressed, and that there was still no end in sight.
“We’re going to knock on Carl’s door!” Tina cried as though the answer were obvious. “Tell him to stop writing this drivel and poisoning people’s minds. Remind him that he told you the guy who did this to Denise should burn.”
He won’t get out of Florida alive, my father kept assuring me. But when he fried, I wanted it to be for what he’d done under my roof.
* * *
The state of Florida paid for my travel, accommodations, and three days of meals. It cost them more to fund a face-to-face with the man who’d raped my best friend with a hair spray bottle than it would have to cover the damages he’d inflicted on The House. In the end, alumnae took care of the cost, but it’s outrageous that they had to, simply because Denise had once been intimate with a man briefly suspected of harming her.
Tina got a room next to mine, but she ended up using it only to shower. Back then most hotel rooms featured two beds, and we stayed up late into the night, the digital clock on the nightstand between us illuminating the time in that old phosphorous green, talking until we fell asleep.
The first morning back in Tallahassee, we woke early, arriving on Carl’s doorstep before he would leave for work. Tina knocked, looked over at me, and asked, “Ready?” I was nodding when Carl opened the door.
“Pamela,” Carl said, the blood draining from his face. I am known to have that effect on people. “What are you… How do you know where I live?”
I gave him a strange look. “You gave me your address so we could write. Though only one of us seems to be doing that these days.”
“Right.” Carl patted his hair into place, damp from the shower. “It’s been a busy time. Sorry about that.”
“I’m in town for the deposition,” I said. “Thought I’d pop by, see how the Colorado story was coming along.”
“Can we come in for a moment?” Tina asked.
Carl glanced over his shoulder in a clandestine manner. “Well, the place is a mess.”
“We don’t judge,” Tina said. Speak for yourself, I thought.
“Uh, sure. Just give me a minute.” Carl closed the door in our faces.
I turned to Tina. The hair that was growing back was inscrutably textured—not straight, like it was everywhere else, but not exactly curly either. Crimped, I’d realize when the style became a trend in the next decade. For the rest of her life, Tina would sport two unruly stripes on either side of her head, like an electrocuted skunk.
“He doesn’t seem guilty at all,” she said, deadpan.
“Not in the least,” I agreed.
We waited on the front stoop for several minutes, made to feel like traveling evangelicals, lifting our hands and waving sheepishly at a neighbor who ambled by on a morning walk with her dog. It was one of those archetypally perfect family dogs, a yellow smiling thing, and I watched as it took a hard left into Carl’s yard, where it hunched up and deposited a runny shit next to the azalea bushes. I was about to tell the neighbor not to worry about cleaning it up when a woman driving a white convertible turned into Carl’s driveway and climbed out of the car. The neighbor and the driver exchanged greetings and exclaimed over the dog together, who awaooed and pawed at the driver’s thighs as though he had missed her terribly.
The woman crossed the lawn, picking animal hair out of her clothing and smiling. “Hello?” she said to us curiously. She was older than Carl by about ten years, pretty in a faded kind of way, or maybe that was just my competitive side talking.
“We’re friends of Carl’s,” Tina explained curtly.
The woman wiped her shoes on the welcome mat and opened the door, calling, “Carl! You have guests.” She held the door for us. Tina hooked her arm through mine and took me inside with her just as Carl came jogging down the stairs. The house was cramped but lovingly maintained, and though the couch cushions needed fluffing and there were several pairs of shoes heaped in a pile next to the coat rack, the place was hardly a mess, even by my standards.