Chapter 21 I Fear You Don’t Like Me
I Fear You Don’t Like Me
My brother Spencer called home the night after the opening arguments and told me something my parents hadn’t.
“They were thinking of moving last fall,” he said. “They were looking at houses in Scarsdale and Bronxville. They even considered moving into the city.”
I confessed that I’d had no idea.
“Yeah,” he went on, “when you were at Smith. They thought maybe it was time to get out of Dodge.”
“Why didn’t they?”
“I guess they didn’t find a house they loved.”
Or, perhaps, their daughter tried to kill herself, and they became otherwise engaged.
“Or, maybe,” Spencer went on, “they just decided they weren’t, after all, personae non gratae in Tallmadge.”
“They still have their friends,” I agreed. “I didn’t cost them that, at least.”
“Nope. You most assuredly did not. None of this nightmare was your fault,” he said, trying to comfort me. “Tell me, how crazy was the media scrum at the courthouse?”
“It wasn’t as bad as Mr. Barker worried it might be.
Five or six reporters were there, all newspapers, and none of the writers were that much older than you.
Maybe one was even younger than you. God, she might have been younger than me.
The only one who really pressed Mr. Barker for a comment on our way out was a guy from the Associated Press. ”
“Did you offer the photographers your I’m-a-Modest-Golf-Superstar smile?
” he teased me. For years, he had given me the sort of grief an older sibling will invariably give a younger one about the perky grin I used to plaster onto my face for the cameras after winning a tournament. He said I looked like a Kewpie doll.
“No,” I countered, “I made sure I looked like the sort of surly young person who does whatever the hell she wants, even if it’s going to get someone killed.”
“You—”
“Yes, Spencer,” I reassured him, “I made sure I looked like a good person who’d never vandalize country club property.”
“And you looked upset, right?”
An earlier incarnation of me might have snapped. But, in all fairness, I was growing up. “Sure,” I said. “In one smile, I hit the perfect balance between kindness and devastation. I sunk a thirty-foot putt on a rolling green.”
The DA began his case with the critical history that preceded the day Kenny Foster died.
They brought to the stand a caddy named Justin Bollet, a handsome guy who had graduated the previous May from that little nearby college where some of the caddies went to school.
Now he worked as an assistant manager at an electrical supply warehouse in New Rochelle.
He’d been among the caddies who carried bags for the men with whom I sometimes played, and he was close enough to my age that I always cringed a little inside when he called me Miss Winston.
“You don’t recall the date,” Mr. Lindley, the DA, was saying as he paced before Bollet, whose posture was impressive as he sat in the witness box, “but you believe it was early July, yes?”
“Yes, sir. It was a weekday, but it was that week after the Fourth of July, so a lot of the members had taken the week off, and the course was more crowded than usual on a weekday.”
“That Wednesday or Thursday, maybe?”
“Possibly.”
“Fine. Please tell us where you were and what you witnessed.”
“Well, sir, I was under the caddy pergola. In the shade. I was expecting I’d get an afternoon loop. It was lunchtime, and pretty soon there’d be all the early afternoon tee times. And Miss Winston was at the practice net with a bucket of balls, and she was pretty annoyed.”
Instantly my lawyer objected that Bollet was suggesting he knew my state of mind. The judge sustained the objection, but, obviously, the jury had heard the word. They knew I was—cue the euphemism—frustrated.
“Just tell us what you saw,” suggested the district attorney calmly.
“Well, the net was close to the caddies,” Bollet said. “And so we could see and hear her. She kept shaking her head, she said, ‘Damn it!’ at least a couple of times, and she’d address the ball and then back away without hitting it. She was wearing a visor, and once she threw it onto the mat.”
“She threw her hat?”
“Her visor, yes, sir.”
“Do you know why she was acting this way—having a tantrum?”
Again, my lawyer objected, arguing that the word tantrum was an inflammatory exaggeration. This objection, too, was sustained. But I saw what the DA was doing.
“Mr. Fallows—the club pro—came over to her, and they had a pretty heated exchange. She was complaining about the net. That’s why she was so upset. She was saying the target was a problem, because it caused you to lift your head, and it just made your game worse.”
“Was she shouting?”
“Not at first.”
“But she did eventually?”
“Yes. Mr. Fallows told her to just ignore the target if it bothered her. He told her it was just there for the sound. The image was just decoration. And that was when she yelled at him.”
It was clear to me that the district attorney and his witness had rehearsed this moment. It was brilliant in the way that it demonized me.
“She yelled at the club pro?” Mr. Lindley asked, as if he were incredulous.
“Yes, sir. She screamed at him. She screamed at him to take the target down. Take the target off the netting. Kind of demanded it. Said it was ruining her game and it had to go.”
“Were you surprised by Miss Winston’s behavior?”
“No, sir. We—the caddies—knew that Miss Winston was a very good golfer. Probably the best golfer Tallmadge had ever produced. And so she could be kind of intense.”
“Intense?”
“Demanding.”
“So, just to be clear, she was shouting now at a grown man? A grown man in authority? Not just raising her voice? She was actually shouting?”
“Yes, sir.”
“At a man more than twice her age…”
“Yes.”
He rolled his eyes at me, exasperated. “Did Mr. Fallows say he would take the target down?”
“No.”
“Did he give a reason?”
“He said he thought Miss Winston was overreacting and to just concentrate on her swing and keep her head down.”
“And how did she respond?”
“She said there was a reason he was a club pro and not a PGA champ.”
I had not said that, but I could feel the jury’s disgust with me.
(Also, just for the record, I hadn’t shouted or screamed like a banshee.) What I had said was this: You’re a club pro.
Come on, help me out here, I want to be an LPGA champ someday.
This was a big difference, and I wrote the words down for my lawyer.
“Were you embarrassed as you watched this?”
“A little.”
“Why?”
“Well, she was humiliating Mr. Fallows, it seemed to me. And she was kind of loud.”
Lindley let this land, and then asked the witness, “Tell us, did you ever hear her say anything about the target before that day?”
Bollet nodded. “On a Saturday in May, I was one of two caddies with a morning foursome. Three men and Miss Winston. And on the seventh hole, she sliced her tee shot into the rough. It wasn’t deep in the rough.
But it wasn’t a typical Mira Winston drive, either.
Usually, she plunked her tee shots smack in the middle of the fairway.
And one of the men said something to her about her swing and a correction he could help her with at the practice net after their round.
And she said the problem was the practice net.
The net with the target. She said it was the stupidest thing she’d ever seen and just defied all logic. ”
After the district attorney thanked him, my lawyer began his cross. “Did Mira say she would take the target down herself if Mr. Fallows refused?” Barker asked.
“I didn’t hear that, no, sir.”
“Did she threaten him?”
“Threaten him?”
“Well, bully him: club member to club staff?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Did you ever see Mira be dismissive or rude to the caddies?”
“No, sir.”
“That day in May when you were caddying for the foursome that included Mira. When the older male golfer offered to give her a tip at the driving range: Did you think he was coming on to her?”
This time it was the district attorney’s turn to object, which he did, in a heartbeat.
It was sustained. Still, my lawyer had started making a point that would never be foundational to my defense but would, we believed, certainly help: I was a young girl surrounded by what, today, we would call predatory men.
Because I was.
Then the state moved forward to the day that I killed Kenny Foster.
Most of their first witnesses were on the stand briefly, some for no more than forty-five minutes.
But, invariably, that was long enough to cause my mother on the bench behind Mr. Barker and me to sigh as if she were Atlas shouldering the weight of the world, and my father to curse softly under his breath.
I must admit: their angst made me feel loved.
In any event, there was the caddy master, Dom Gorski, testifying that he called out the boy’s name on August third, offering him the eighteen holes.
(A question from the DA: “I’m just curious, Mr. Gorski.
When Kenny Foster was hit by the golf ball and collapsed, did Miss Winston laugh?
” A response from the caddy master: “Yes, she did.”) There was Brendan Bedford, the golfer who, along with his wife, would have been Kenny’s loop, sharing what he witnessed: Mira Winston driving a golf ball through the net, Kenny Foster falling over.
There was another caddy who saw it happen, and then the lead EMT who spoke of how the boy wasn’t breathing when they arrived and they were incapable of restarting his heart.
And then there was Harry Fallows.