Chapter 38.
38.
Spoliation (n.)
when someone intentionally alters, destroys, conceals, or otherwise tampers with evidence that may be relevant to a legal proceeding, investigation, or potential litigation
not applicable here
D urrant Hammerstead continues, “Your father said you returned home after those seven days and didn’t remember what had happened. Is that true?”
“Not entirely, no.”
The room buzzes. It seems this bit of unanswered history has captivated the gallery, too.
“Can you tell us what happened back then?”
Margot is thoughtful before she speaks, a rarity from the woman I’ve seen on the show. She is typically quick-witted, sharply intelligent, and can often devise a scathing retort so fast the other women on the show can’t hold their own against her. She looks to the ground and then sort of rolls upright in a wave, as if working up the courage to say whatever comes next. “I was... bullied quite a bit in school. I never told my parents. It all became too much. Right before the week in question, this group of girls—the worst of the lot—cut a chunk of my hair off while I sat in class. A big chunk, right out of the back.” She touches the back of her head for emphasis. “I never reported it. That next week, fed up, I decided to meet up with a friend in Minneapolis. We holed up in this cheap motel, watching TV, sleeping in, and living off of pinto beans and Fruit Roll-Ups just... taking a break from it all.”
The whisper of the room swells, and I see the confusion in each individual face. They don’t know whether to be sympathetic or distrustful. Is Margot lying? I used to view her as abrasively honest. It would explain a lot. Why she left home and moved so far away. How distrustful Margot is of the other women on the show. How hard she has worked to make a name for herself. Something gnaws at me, though, a thought inching to the tip of clarity but not quite there. It tells me there’s some connection I should be making but am not. I work to ignore the prodding notion, knowing if I reach too forcefully for it, I’ll push it further away.
“Margot,” Durrant Hammerstead says, his voice cradling. “Why didn’t you tell your parents, or anyone, that you were taking off for a week?”
Margot looks to the jury. “I didn’t think. I just needed to get away. I regret that. In hindsight, I know it was foolish.”
Durrant Hammerstead allows us to stew on this new information before he clears his throat and refocuses. “Let’s talk about GotMar, your lingerie business. Why did you embark on this particular endeavor?”
“I wanted to build something, have a legacy.”
“But you were married to a successful Hollywood executive, had two beautiful children, were doing good in the community through your charitable activities. Why more?”
I work to ignore the misogyny in his question.
Margot pauses. “I can’t imagine a world where we don’t try to be more than we currently are. I had a vision, and Joe helped me achieve my goal of launching this business. I never dreamed it would see the success it has.” Her smile is humble but proud.
I ponder on this as Durrant Hammerstead goes over many of the details of the day Joe died, Margot reiterating much of what we already know. That she was at Alizay’s house, with witnesses, when it happened. She didn’t have a smoothie that morning, nor had Ms. Pembrooke even begun preparing one by the time she left. She verifies the just-under-thirteen-minute call from Ms. Pembrooke was about returning mismatched shoes.
Soon, it’s D.A. Stern’s turn, and on cross-examination, he is authoritarian. Harsh, even. His intention is clear. He is irritated by Margot and her crocodile tears, and we should be, too. To ensure no room for empathy, his time with her is surprisingly short. But there is one point he insists we focus upon.
“Your husband of twenty-four years dies unexpectedly, and you somehow manage to have him cremated in three days.” D.A. Stern pauses. Margot’s eyebrows press together. “I just can’t imagine having the wherewithal to do that, to make all those arrangements so quickly. When my father died, my mother lay in a heap in their bed for nearly a week and was barely capable of eating, let alone working out the particulars of what to do with his body.”
Durrant Hammerstead objects, and there’s no hesitation in Judge Gillespy’s warning to D.A. Stern to stay on track. I’m like one of Pavlov’s dogs, immediately drooling at the word objection because I know it will mean body contact from Damon. He delivers, marking the tally, eyes on mine as he does, his arm pressing into my left side. He’s testing me, and I don’t particularly mind.
Margot answers the question he has not asked. “I was fortunate enough to have Gloria on hand to sort it all. She had been with Joe and me long enough to know what our preferences would be when it comes to such matters.” There’s a murmur across the courtroom, and I huff in annoyance. There’s a headline that will feed the “housekeeper helps murder husband” stories. She continues. “The kids were devastated. I wanted to let them have the opportunity to say goodbye as soon as possible.”
“Why cremation?”
“Joe and I had talked about it.” She looks down at her lap and smiles. “We were in the Maldives, seven years ago now, in one of those over-the-water bungalows. We were lying in bed, staring out at the water, and out of nowhere he said, ‘Bring me here when I die.’ I laughed, made a joke about how logistically that would be challenging, and he said, ‘Cremate me.’ So simply, so... assuredly. And then he said, ‘I mean it.’ ” There’s a waver in her voice as she recounts his words. “I’m just a girl who grew up in Minnesota in the nineties. I had never thought of the Maldives or Hollywood or cremation. So many of these things were foreign to me until I met Joe.”
Something clicks into place. That buzzing fly I’ve been trying to swat away finally lands.
The nineties. Minnesota.
That movie of Joe’s that Mel and I watched, one of his obscure first films that nobody saw except for us and maybe a few hundred others. Hustle and Grace . For most of that movie, the main character was in her hometown, a small port city on Lake Superior, in Minnesota near the northern Wisconsin border. I remember this because Mel and I kept commenting on how charming the town was, one of the few highlights of the film.
Pinto beans and Fruit Roll-Ups. Just like in Joe’s movie. Details so random they are specific.
Doing the quick math in my head, that movie would have been filmed around the same time Margot went missing, in the same year at least. Meaning Joe was likely in Minnesota when Margot disappeared for a week when she was sixteen.
Is this confirmation that she was with Joe when she disappeared at sixteen? Or perhaps they met innocently, only to reconnect again years later in L.A.? Or is she making a game of it, taking one of the plots from Joe’s early films and trying it on for size?
Joe has filmed movies all over the country, all over the world. But the idea Joe and Margot could have met back then, that there could have been more to their story... that he was a grown man and she was sixteen ...
It tilts the axis of their lives—and this case—completely.
I have no way to fact-check any of this, of course. I have no phone, no access to the internet. I can’t bring it to Judge Gillespy or the attorneys because it’s something I know outside of the trial. And even if it is true, that they were both in the same state at the same time, it doesn’t prove that they ever met, let alone that she was with him when she disappeared. Perhaps it’s far-fetched. Still, my mind fuses both situations into one. And this information, this secret, burns a hole in my pocket and lights a flame of tension in my gut at once.
Having nothing to do with this information, this theory, this... whatever it is... I sit on it. Frustrated, I press my hands under my thighs and tuck it away, knowing I likely won’t ever know if there’s any truth to be had here.
I’ve missed some of Margot’s testimony, though I catch that they are still discussing Joe’s cremation. I force myself to refocus.
“If Mr. Kitsch made this request to be cremated, why was it never noted to Mr. Windham, his business manager? Or anyone, for that matter?”
“He told me . I was his wife. There was no reason to have to do more than that.” Margot tries but fails to hide her consternation, her tone clipped, and it’s a glimpse of who she is on the show.
D.A. Stern turns his back to Margot and looks instead to the jury box as he asks his next question. “Have you fulfilled this alleged wish of Joe’s? To take his ashes back to the Maldives?”
“No, I haven’t,” Margot says, eyeing his back. I half expect her to pull a knife from some secret compartment under her clothes and fling it between his shoulder blades based on her scowl alone.
D.A. Stern turns back to her. “Why not?” he says with forced incredulity.
“I’ve been a bit busy,” she states, and there’s a caustic chuckle from the gallery.
D.A. Stern and Margot stare at each other in a loaded exchange, and I can’t quite determine either’s aim in the silence. Margot, still fixated on D.A. Stern, softens, as if remembering something or someone’s whispered a directive in her ear. She releases her shoulders, her lips, her eyebrows. Her eyes round. She speaks before D.A. Stern can stop her. “I miss him.” Her voice cracks. “I miss his touch. I miss feeling his hand against mine. I miss the charge of it. I miss his kiss. I wish for his touch more than anything.” Her voice is trembling, an unsteady wobble. A plaintive cry.
D.A. Stern calls out, “No further questions,” over Margot’s words, but she’s the one with the mic.
I watch Margot before me as she seemingly breaks. Her perfect posture slumps and her eyes look more wilted than anything.
Durrant Hammerstead redirects, as I imagined he would. He wants the last impression with this his most important witness.
“Margot,” he says, his tone noticeably smoother, carrying an added layer of something delicate. “After everything Joe put you through, did you still love him?”
I lean forward, eyes fixed on Margot’s, though I catch the line of a deep swallow in her throat. She presses her eyes shut before realigning her attention to her attorney. “Joe and I were married for twenty-four years. It’s a long time. I loved him, I hated him, and felt everything in between during our time together. That’s marriage.” She looks at the jury, and my pulse quickens when we make eye contact. Her words strike me as ruefully honest. It would have been easy for her to take the stand as the weeping widow who made her husband perfect in death. Instead, she is... subtle.
She speaks to me as if we were seated beside each other. “After you’ve been with someone awhile, you tend not to see them anymore. They can become this bodily mass that exists around you. But every once in a while, I’d look up and catch sight of him just as he was entering a room or telling a joke at a party, and for the briefest instant I’d forget who he was and think... Wow, look at that charming, mysterious guy. Those were the moments when I remembered why I loved this man, why I married him.” She turns her attention back to Durrant Hammerstead. “He was with me in every best moment of my life. The ones I will always look back on with tenderness. So yes, I still very much loved him. Despite it all.” She swipes at the outer corner of her left eye with the length of her pointer finger. “And I have missed him every single day since he left.”
I turn to Damon, and he looks down at me, his eyes pulsing like a kaleidoscope. The intensity of his gaze causes a chill across every inch of my body.
Damon’s leg touches mine and it doesn’t feel accidental. There is a spurt of electricity—the attraction of a positive and negative charge. The surge of our undeniable connection.
I have missed him every single day since he left.
Before us sits a woman who can never experience her lover’s touch again, despite a desperate desire for it. All the while, I’ve been fighting against the feel of the man beside me. I do have a second chance.
The defense rests its case.