Chapter 22 An Impetuous Girl
An Impetuous Girl
I spoke to Ethan nightly, and I imagined him standing in the cinder-block hallway of his dorm at Amherst, the phone outside the resident adviser’s room in his hand.
The calls were cathartic, a lifeline: he wanted to know how it was going and I needed someone to talk to.
Sometimes, such as the Thursday night after Harry Fallows had been on the stand, I vented, not raising my voice but giving air to my frustration as if it were a fire in need of the bellows.
“I know my lawyer can’t ask him if he planted the target in my bag because he’d just deny it,” I said at one point. “But I’d still be interested in how his face changed when he was lying under oath.”
“It might change. It might not. Some people are very good liars,” he told me.
Cleon Barker’s theory was clear, but how much he shared in our defense would be determined by how successful he thought the state had been when they rested.
He, too, thought it most likely that Harry had cut the target off the netting early on the Tuesday morning of the week I killed Kenny—doing it, yes, because he thought he was doing a member a favor—and thrown it away in a wastepaper basket in his office, the locker room, or the clubhouse.
On Thursday, after I killed Kenny Foster, he realized that he had damaged the net and there would be dire consequences for whoever had removed the target.
So, he had retrieved it from the trash and hidden it in my golf bag, where either I would find it or I wouldn’t.
Didn’t matter. If I found it and came forward, I would look suspicious.
If I found it and threw it away, the evidence was still gone.
If the police found it before I did, I would look guilty.
No matter what, he had deflected the blame away from himself.
“Well, he’s a coward. A horrible man,” I said to Ethan.
“The world is filled with cowards and horrible men.”
“You saw that a lot in Vietnam, I suppose.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant…everywhere.”
“See anyone as awful as Harry Fallows? I bet you did.”
“Oh, the stakes of the blame game in a war zone? Very high. Especially when it’s not going well.
So, yes. But most of us were too scared of becoming cowards to actually become one.
And we were all pretty equally scared to death.
I think my point was that you can be a coward and horrible even when no one’s shooting at you or asking you to climb down into some skinny tunnel that has more booby traps than rats. ”
“You ever do that?”
“Twice. But neither time was I the first one in. A guy like your club pro? If he were in country, he might have done something unbelievably shitty there like he did to you right here. Again, that blame game. But the idea he did it here shows that even in a comfortable little place like Tallmadge, it’s easy to lose your moral compass. ”
I had never heard the term moral compass before. But I liked it, and diligent readers will recall it would become the title of my first novel.
“Just keep reminding yourself, Mira: people do things for lots of reasons,” he added. “Harry is no different.”
Ethan was the friend I needed most that spring.
And, at the time, that’s what we were: friends.
Or, perhaps, he was like a somewhat older adviser and confidant.
(Note my careful use of the word somewhat.) But I could sense that he did not want to be yet another man with years on me trying to take advantage of flesh that is taut and hair that is full and a body that is still adolescent.
He knew my fragility and had witnessed more than anyone how close I had come to killing myself.
Never did he take advantage of any of that.
Only later—and it would be years later, when I was finally a college graduate—would he allow our friendship to morph slowly into the relationship we have now.
Lovers and friends and (forgive my sentimentality) soulmates.
And that, as much as anything, suggests the accuracy and precision of Ethan Pomerleau’s moral compass.
On Friday morning, the state brought to the stand a scientist who studied (among other things) the speed and trajectory of golf balls, a representative from the company that manufactured the particular driving range net that we used at Tallmadge, and an engineer who designed (again, among other things) home practice nets.
The company rep testified that the firm sold two models of that net, one with a target and one without one.
He acknowledged that they had shipped the incorrect net to the club, but his principal purpose on the stand was to make it clear that no one ever should have tampered with the target or removed it.
The assembly instructions and warning label were entered into evidence as Exhibit A.
The engineer who finished the morning had done a forensic examination of the actual net through which I had driven the golf ball—now Exhibit B of the state’s case—and corroborated what Kathleen O’Brien had explained to me in a conference room in Cleon Barker’s law firm: whoever had cut off the target had ruined the net.
It was inevitable that eventually someone was going to hit a golf ball through the ragged threads that remained in any one of twelve different spots where the target had been attached to the nylon.
Twelve different spots. Think of the face of a clock. It was only a matter of time.
Right after lunch, we had a brief appearance from the medical examiner, a pale fellow with a Viking’s blue eyes and a mortician’s black suit. The pathologist had done the autopsy on Kenny Foster and was there to confirm that, if anyone could possibly have had any doubts, I had killed the poor boy.
It was the only time during the trial they had to recess on account of me.
He was discussing the precise cause of death—far more specific than “golf ball to the head”—which was the epidural hematoma.
The concussive force of the golf ball had cracked his skull, rupturing the middle meningeal artery adjacent to Kenny Foster’s temporal lobe, and the torrent of blood had flooded into the skull, pushing the brain against bone and finishing him off in somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes.
As the ME was explaining this, using massive autopsy photos of Kenny’s postmortem brain, I realized I was going to be sick, just as I had that day long ago at the pisky church the afternoon when Kenny was buried.
I glanced over at Kenny’s parents, and Mrs. Foster was pale as an onion and had a wad of Kleenex in her hands.
Mr. Foster had an arm around her shoulders and was pulling her into him.
He was staring at the images, transfixed: here was his boy’s brain.
It seemed to me, making them see this was too high a price to convict me: it was an egregious, unfair toll they had to pay.
We adjourned in time for Mr. Barker to hand me the wastepaper can beneath our table, but easily half the jury got to see the defendant puking like a fire hose into what was, essentially, a metal bucket.
Moreover, the metal amplified the sounds I was making and caused them to echo.
I sounded, in my head, like Frankenstein facing fire for the very first time.
The pathologist admitted during the cross that Kenny Foster’s death was a one-in-a-million shot, which would lead a tone-deaf columnist in a White Plains newspaper to liken it to a hole in one.
Still, the testimony made me seem less reckless.
Or, at least, it was elicited to make me seem less reckless.
I have no idea what the jurors made of his observation.
And that might have been it for the week.
It was three o’clock on a Friday afternoon.
But the state had the chance to really twist the knife by sending the jurors home for the weekend with an appearance from the real star of their case, Exhibit C, the target itself.
There it was, the circle awash in white crinkles, even now, from its months wedged beneath a sweater in my golf bag.
And there on the stand to talk about its discovery and what that discovery meant was Detective Richie Marino.
“We had warrants from the judge to search the country club, Harry Fallows’s house, and Mira Winston’s home,” said the detective, in response to a question from Eric Lindley. “We searched all three locations at the same time.”
“Were you looking specifically for the target?” the district attorney asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It was clear that its removal had been a factor in Kenny Foster’s death.”
“Did you expect to find it?”
He shrugged. “You don’t know what you’re going to find. But the judge agreed we had grounds for the search, since everyone was saying someone else removed it, and it was really very likely that the culprit was either Harry Fallows or Miss Winston.”
Yes, even the esteemed detective referred to me as Miss Winston and the pro as Harry Fallows. In 1980, no one was exempt from the exigencies of class and the roles assigned to us in a criminal trial.
“Tell us, please, about where and when you found the target.”
And Marino did, relishing the tale of its discovery as if he had found slivers of wood from the one true cross.
(In the interest of full disclosure, it’s worth noting that the search also unearthed a bong and my little pot pipe, but neither mattered because the police did not, thank God, find any weed or cocaine.)
“Were you surprised it wasn’t hidden better?” asked Mr. Lindley.
“Nah. It was really buried in that golf bag. It was smushed into the size of a cantaloupe. And it was sort of wrapped in her sweater.”