“In fact, for eighteen months leading up to this, and these are your words”—he paused for effect—“ ‘My dick stopped working.’ ”
In the press gallery, journalists collectively picked up their pens, ready to capture the outburst that seemed sure to follow from Charlie. They’d read the transcripts of his confession and knew how mortified he seemed to be by the idea of other people knowing his bedroom problems.
But an explosion didn’t come. “Yeah,” Charlie said.
“And you were concerned about that, weren’t you?” said the younger Zaleski. “Because you knew if you couldn’t satisfy her she was going to look elsewhere?”
“Yes, sir,” Charlie said sadly.
Christopher let that hang in the air before moving on. When Charlie had confessed to the sheriff, he’d talked about a broad manner of things, Zaleski prompted, pacing the floor. “Talked about your demons. Your drugs. Your relapse, your history, your work in the fire department, getting kicked out of the fire department.”
“I never talked about getting kicked out of the fire department,” Charlie answered, which was true.
Charlie offering this sort of specific correction wasn’t good for Tonya, because it made Charlie look like a man who not only told the truth but told it exactingly. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter whether Charlie had talked about being kicked out of the fire department. He was a readily admitted forger and drug user and arsonist with erectile dysfunction. But when he bothered to correct Christopher Zaleski about whether he’d specifically talked about being kicked out of the fire department, he came across as a person who wanted to be helpful and make sure the story was told right.
Christopher was getting visibly agitated. It seemed, he pointed out, that Charlie was really good at blaming other people for things. He was now blaming Tonya for his lighting the fires. But hadn’t Charlie, in fact, enjoyed those fires? “You set some of them for revenge, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked, and Christopher brought up the fire that Charlie had lit because an acquaintance was hitting on Tonya on Facebook.
“Those weren’t instances where you guys were having a bad day and riding around and decided to set the place on fire. You did those on your own, right?”
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked again. “By myself?”
“Yes.”
“No sir, I didn’t.”
“You told the sheriff you did those by yourself.”
“I mean I lit them by myself,” Charlie explained. He had held the lighter; Tonya was waiting in the van.
Gary Agar kept his redirect brief. Christopher Zaleski had touched on Charlie’s sense of inadequacy in the relationship, specifically the problems of his impotence. Agar was looking for a little clarification.
“How, if at all, did that relate to these fires?” he asked.
“I didn’t have no clue. Just, I did whatever it took to make her happy. Because they kept telling me at the [doctors’ offices] that it was all in my head, that I thought she was too good for me that that’s why I couldn’t perform, and I didn’t want to lose her.”
“Why would a fire improve a situation where you had no sex?” Agar asked.
Allan Zaleski rose. “I object to that, judge. Calls for speculation.”
“Sustained,” the judge said.
CHAPTER 25
“THEY CAME OUT OF EVERYWHERE”
IT WAS ALLAN ZALESKI’S BELIEF that when you had a client whose defense was that they were innocent, then you had nothing to lose by putting them on the stand. Tonya wanted to testify. She wanted to tell her story. On the second day of the trial, she got her chance.
The courtroom was quiet as she was called to the stand. Even her walk was divisive: some of the watchers in the gallery thought that her languid stroll was a sign that she considered herself to be above the proceedings, that she was treating the affair like a red carpet walk instead of a felony trial. Others saw not defiance, but dignity, an admirable refusal to be dehumanized by the seediness of the situation. She reached the stand and slowly took a seat, a cat settling itself. Her voice in the courtroom was soft and lilting as she repeated her name to the bailiff; there was an air of gentility that people who hadn’t heard her speak before weren’t expecting.
She was forty years old, she told the elder Zaleski, Allan, as he began her questioning with basic biographical details. She was the mother of two children. She had lived with Charlie in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house, and he had done auto-body work, and she had been a certified nursing assistant until she left that job to take care of her son. She had been in jail from April to September of the previous year, and then she had made bail, and then she had been arrested again in December. Charlie always had bad self-esteem when they were together. “It was like I constantly had to reassure him why I was with him, why I loved him, what I saw in him,” she said. She’d known he had drug problems. That’s why she’d asked him to take a drug test after they’d been dating a little while; she wanted to make sure he hadn’t relapsed, because sometimes his actions were “sporadic.” She might call him and ask him to pick up a loaf of bread on the way home, and he’d get home and there would be no bread. That’s what she meant by sporadic. He was forgetful. He acted funny.
Allan nodded thoughtfully to all of her responses, and then said he wanted to steer her attention to April 1. Did she remember that night?
“I do,” she said. It was the night she was arrested while driving Charlie’s van, and Zaleski was careful to underscore that point—that Tonya owned two vehicles, but on the night of April 1 they weren’t even in her car. They were in Charlie’s van as they drove north to Maryland for a shopping trip.