Then again, people died, people were hurt, however indirectly, because of those decisions.
You can argue people died because of my decisions. Some people blame me for Rudy Drysdale’s death. But I regret his death only because I will never know exactly what happened, despite my best efforts. To be clear: Rudy Drysdale was guilty of murder and he killed himself. He hit his head against the wall of his cell over and over again. Do you know how determined you have to be to kill yourself that way? Determined and stoic. And stealthy. He beat his own brains out with a steady, persistent drumming on the wall. If he had miscalculated, he might have ended up in a coma. Maybe he wouldn’t have minded that. And maybe you’re a step ahead of me, or have been all along, but I understood, when I got that phone call, why Rudy had attacked me in court. He was counting on being shot. Suicide by cop is a glib term, but it’s real, it happens. That’s why Rudy hesitated at the courthouse doors. It wasn’t my imagination or a case of blurred vision brought on by being slammed to the floor. He wanted to be shot. Yearned to be shot. It was April 2015. Police were obligingly shooting young men everywhere. Four weeks later, Baltimore would burn in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, his body broken on a classic Baltimore bounce, an unsecured rough ride in a police van.
But Howard County is not Baltimore. Or Ferguson or North Charleston or Cleveland or—you get the point. Rudy Drysdale was a middle-aged white man in a suit that his mother had bought from JCPenney only a week earlier. Now she would bury him in it. Did that mean I got the win, even if I never made it to opening statements? I decided it did.
It was a victory that cost me almost everything I hold dear.
PART THREE
APRIL 7
Lu debates visiting the funeral home where Rudy Drysdale’s body was taken after the autopsy. Pro: She will appear magnanimous. Con: She will seem calculated and insincere. It is hard to know how such a move will play and she is—at heart, in her marrow, in her DNA—a politician. If you don’t care about what people think about you, then don’t run for public office.
So far, the media attention has helped her more than harmed her, raising her profile considerably. One Beacon-Light columnist tried to make hay out of Drysdale’s mental illness, harping on the absence of a competency hearing. “I think that’s for his attorney to speak to,” Lu demurred. “My office was open to discussing a plea of not criminally responsible.”
She then sat back and gritted her teeth as the columnist spun his story out of the most convenient details, whipping up something with about as much structural integrity as cotton candy. The piece, published two days ago, allowed Fred to suggest that Rudy’s suicide was a desperate reaction to his severe claustrophobia. So what would the columnist do with claustrophobic killers? Construct prisons with vast parks, like the fake savannahs of more progressive zoos? Seriously, Lu harrumphs to herself. But only to herself. Her father would commiserate, maybe even AJ, who is more upset about the attack than anyone. In this case, she does get a kick out of his protective big-brother side. Plus, he seems to feel a retroactive guilt about ever suggesting that Drysdale deserved more compassionate treatment.
But the column makes her feel it’s obligatory to visit the funeral home. “Paying one’s respects” is the correct and felicitous phrase. I have victim status, too, Lu reminds herself. She is still sore from that initial hit. Strange—that night, when Drysdale was still alive as far as she knew, she wasn’t particularly traumatized by the incident. It is only since his death that she sees his face whenever she closes her eyes. Expressionless, utterly impersonal. Did she really see him or is the memory manufactured, the usual attempt to project meaning backward onto a moment that made no sense at the time? And even if she did see his face, did it really tell her anything? No, he was impassive. He was doing what he had to do to achieve an end. It was about as detached as an attack could be.
Why me? But she knows why he chose her. Because she was the smallest, because he wanted to trigger the protective impulses of the armed men who might then shoot him. In that room, it had to be her or the judge, and the judge was too far away. Rudy Drysdale was trying to commit suicide by cop. When he failed, he did the job himself.