Chapter 13 Goodfellas
Goodfellas
You believe my obsession with magical thinking and conflating my affair with Theo Catton with the death of Kenny Foster is madness. Probably true. But…
But hear me out.
First of all, karma is a concept far older than me. People have taken karma for granted for millennia.
Second, on March 17, 2020, I had a novel go on sale and a two-week U.S.
book tour scheduled to commence the night of March 16.
You’ll recall, of course, that a pandemic would have other plans for our world.
Baseball and basketball stopped, Broadway went dark, and most of us went into quarantine.
My publisher and I canceled the book tour on March 13.
But on March 4, thirteen days before the book was going to arrive, I drove to a theater in New Jersey to see my daughter in a play called Toast of the Town, and I stopped at a convenience store for a Red Bull on the way there.
The woman behind the counter had a weak, croaky voice.
We all knew that a virus was out there, and my deeply selfish concern was this: I could not get sick before the book tour.
And this woman taking my plastic to pay for my Red Bull seemed very sick to me, based on her voice and demeanor, and I was worried that I would catch whatever she had.
“That a cold?” I asked her, and I know I sounded judgmental and wary that she was spreading something that might compromise my book tour.
She shook her head. “Throat cancer,” she answered.
Recall the prince who becomes a monster in the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, a story of a callous young man who is punished for treating an old woman horribly.
Well, I was that prince. I would get COVID weeks later and lose my voice.
Not for a week or a month or even a season.
I’d be mute for most of 2020 and cope for the rest of my life with precisely the weak and croaky voice of that woman at the convenience store, the infirmity a rare long-haul COVID side effect.
So, to the doubters, I say, take that. Mirror Land or Mira Land (your choice) was always a real enough destination for a head case like me.
I was at the travel magazine the spring day the police came with a search warrant and dismantled much of our home in Tallmadge, ransacking it—according to my mother—as if they were drug dealers in search of heroin.
It was the sort of degrading violation that she supposed would always be reserved for others.
That was also the day the police searched Harry Fallows’s place and the Tallmadge Country Club, especially the pro shop, the sheds with the mowers and maintenance equipment, and the locker rooms. They did not find the target at the pro’s house or anywhere at the club.
The four investigators arrived at our house a little after nine in the morning and moved methodically through our four-bedroom brick Georgian, my mother on the phone with my father and Mr. Barker, begging them to come and intercede.
To stop the madness. But there is no stopping a search warrant.
My mother insisted she spewed neither outrage nor venom: she had been raised too well for that.
But I could tell by the way she recounted what had occurred that her condescension and ire were withering.
Eventually, they searched the large first-floor closet where we all kept our golf bags, even Spencer.
My brother’s and my bags, by then, had migrated to the back, since they weren’t used anymore.
A little before noon, the police took everything out of my parents’ bags first, the clubs and balls (and ball markers) and tees and towels and pencils, laying them out on the living room floor.
Then they did the same with Spencer’s bag and, finally, with mine.
A golf bag then had fewer pockets than a golf bag now, and some were very large.
My golf bag had five pockets, including a large one toward the bottom I rarely used.
I had wedged a thin red cardigan sweater into it last year back in May and hadn’t opened that pocket since: if I had thought about my golf bag at all, I likely would have thought simply, Oh, there’s a sweater in there if I need one.
But I really hadn’t thought about it in the last five months of 1978 or the first five months of 1979.
None of the police officers yelled, “Eureka!” But soon after pulling my bag from the closet, my mother recalled one cop crying out, “Whoa, Jerry, come here!” Jerry Corbin looked up from the detritus he had removed from my brother’s bag to see what had been found in mine.
And there, in the plastic-glove-covered hands of that other officer, was the leather target from the driving range net.
It had been wadded into a ball and now was creased from its months wedged into my golf bag pocket, buried beside my sweater.
I was adamant that I had not put it there and had no idea how it had gotten there.
Both of those things were true.
As I said, you can trust me as a narrator. I am telling you the truth.
Good God, why in the world would I lie now, nearly a half century later?
I was told I was going to be charged with involuntary manslaughter on Wednesday, August 22, 1979, less than two weeks before I was planning to leave for Smith College, and would need to go to the police station the next day to turn myself in and be officially and formally booked.
The Westchester County district attorney was a tall guy in his early forties named Eric Lindley.
I would learn later that he had an eight handicap, but after the police had found the target in my golf bag, his lie got considerably easier.
How do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I had cut away the target on the net when there is no witness?
The answer was going to lie in the law of reasonable inference: even if the sun is shining at seven a.m. when you go outside to climb into your car, if the windshield is soaked, the driveway is sopping wet, and the asphalt has puddles, you can infer that it rained overnight.
Well, I was the one who had complained about the target, I was the one with a motive, and I was there at the club on that infamous Caddy Day Monday.
And now the target was found in my golf bag.
That was damning. Oh, my fingerprints weren’t on it.
But neither were Harry Fallows’s. After nearly a year wadded up and wedged into my golf bag, the few traces of prints that remained were insufficient to be entered into the system or used as evidence.
But the fact was, it had been moldering beside my sweater.
Moreover, I had “history,” though how much of that would be allowed in a trial if I didn’t plead out to a lesser charge remained to be seen.
But there had been the “incidents” with Frank Pendleton’s car window and my crashing into a stop sign.
It’s possible that my removal of the target was, in the eyes of the DA, the last straw, and it was time to make an example of me.
Maybe if I hadn’t taken a nine iron to a Ford Maverick or dinged my mother’s sporty little Camaro against Tallmadge town property, Eric Lindley wouldn’t have gotten a judge to sign off on a search warrant and tried to climb that mountain.
But, then again, maybe he would have. Though he would deny it had entered into his decision, he had gone to Skidmore with Theo Catton’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Eleanor, and the two of them were still friends nearly two and a half decades later.
Now I was not going to be the sole defendant in the civil lawsuit.
Harry Fallows and the country club were being sued as well, given that they had placed the net in a spot that was dangerous to the caddies (at Harry’s suggestion), and Harry had not checked the net’s structural integrity when he noticed the target was missing.
Nor was the practice net manufacturer off the hook: apparently, the DA’s office had an engineer who was going to contend that an accident like this with that net was inevitable, and they had failed to suggest in their installation instructions that it be set in a safe location—i.e. , one with a wall behind it.
Ah, but I would be the only defendant in the criminal trial. That was going to be my show and my show alone.
My parents were trying to shield me as much as they could in those days before I left for Smith, but still I was part of one lengthy phone conversation with Mr. Barker and my father a few days before I left Tallmadge.
My lawyer told me—believing I would find this a comfort—that the jury would never be allowed to hear that I had had an affair with a married member of the country club.
They wouldn’t hear that throughout high school I had done a “little” marijuana.
(A little? Imagine if the adults around me had known how much, or knew about the long lines of cocaine I was snorting, or that I had dabbled with quaaludes and LSD.)
“Why would it matter if they did hear that?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want the jury to see you as a stoner or loose cannon. As reckless. The word reckless is even in the statute.”
“You don’t want me to be the girl who does crazy shit,” I said.
My father was on the line in the kitchen and I was on the phone in my parents’ bedroom, but in my mind I could see my father wincing when I said the word shit.
“Precisely,” said Mr. Barker.
“Mira insists she didn’t take the target off the net and stick it in her golf bag,” my father said, and I cut him off.
“Because I didn’t!” I reminded him. “And even if I did, why wouldn’t I have thrown it away months ago? If I were hiding something, why wouldn’t I have gotten rid of it?”
“I understand,” said my father. “But we still need an explanation for how it got there.”
“Yes, we do,” agreed Mr. Barker. “Any ideas, Mira?”
“No.”
“But someone framed you?”
“Framed makes this all sound like a criminal conspiracy,” my father said.
“Fair point. But everyone is going to be throwing around a lot of mud.”