Criminal Behavior
1
In the beginning, the fatal beating is just a local news story. A curiosity to follow. Terrible behavior reported in a newspaper circulated through small towns and rural communities within an hour’s drive.
Alleged, the articles always acknowledge, when the names and actions of the two men who are about to stand trial for murder seventeen years after the killing occurred are mentioned. Alleged in print, but assumed in local talk, even among the educated professionals I work with at a small university in Central Pennsylvania.
What is known: A large party outdoors in a remote area twenty miles miles west of where I live in the rural, college town of Selinsgrove. Long hours of partying, mostly heavy beer drinking. An argument over a woman. A man badly beaten. His inert, but living body transported to a back country road and deposited along the shoulder. The man dead when discovered hours later.
Everything else has been in dispute for seventeen years. The severity of the beating. Whether it seemed life threatening. Exactly who landed the blows. How disabled the victim was. Whether the accused wanted him to appear to be the victim of a hit and run or simply somewhere else besides the party. Whether he could have lived and recovered if taken to the hospital rather than the shoulder of a back road.
Yet, it is only now that the district attorney believes he has enough evidence and sufficient witnesses to bring charges against the men who, for much of those seventeen years, have been the principle suspects. And though I paid little attention seventeen years ago, my life busy with teaching and writing and the imminent adulthood of three children, I now welcome the likelihood of contradictions and complexity surrounding miserable behavior on all sides.
2
When I show my younger son the suspects’ pictures in the newspaper, he says, “Seventeen years is a long time to wait.”
“Way too long,” I say, and he nods as if we’ve both cast our votes for a mistrial. “Those old photos make them look brutal,” I add.
“You can’t go altogether by looks,” he says. “You’ve shaken hands with a guy who’s been arrested for more than one murder. I bet you don’t even remember.”
For the past fifteen years, my son has played guitar in several rock bands, one of them successful enough to earn him one gold and three platinum albums. I’ve gone to watch him play about sixty times, shaking hands with fans so often I have to wait for him to give me more clues. When he doesn’t add anything, I say “Who?” and “How long ago?”
“Way back,” he says. “He’s always been a fan. “You’ve been in the same room with him more times than once.” He mentions the name, and I recognize it at once from northeast Pennsylvania news during the past few years. Two bodies had been found buried on his property. Drugs were suspected of being involved. The trial has been delayed for a long time. “You know what else?” my son goes on, “Milken (not his real name) is watching that guy’s dog while everything is going down.”
“Milken? Really?”
My son doesn’t give up any sort of expression. “Small world,” he says. “Right?”
3
Before the trial begins, the story of the beating case is rehashed in the local newspaper. The victim is talked about as if he’s been dug up and getting the once over, but it’s the accused who have to wait to see if somebody on a jury won’t believe they kicked and beat the life out of him during a long-ago twenty-first birthday party. Work boots have been mentioned, weapons that can inflict fatal damage. And a ball bat, one of those metal ones that colleges and high schools are thinking of banning because they put fielders in harm’s way.
There are variations on this story, so many that it begins to sound like the accused could beat this thing and be able, if inclined, to pay visits to those who present a side that puts them in a bad light. It seems as if there are only two things everybody remembers the same way — the long line of beer kegs and the victim coming on to the girl friend of one of the accused men, even with him knowing that man was the jealous type and had been drinking heavily in the late afternoon sun. The victim saying things with people around that you keep to yourself until you close a door behind you. His hand on her arm, her sweating like everybody that day, even in her sleeveless top, but turning heads with his hand running along her bare flesh like that, like he was fixing to move his fingers to where there was no going back. The girl not squirming away, maybe even enjoying somebody paying attention to her instead of the beer. The victim acting like he might soon have his hands on all of her body.
4
I can’t get the images my son has given me out of my head. Shaking hands with a murder suspect seems odd, but my son’s friend babysitting the suspect’s dog feels eerie. I’ve been a visitor in the dogsitter’s apartment a few times; I’ve sat and talked with him and shared barbecue and beer. I run into him several times a year, and the dog has never come up, neither has the case of the suspected murderer.
“Were you close with the murder suspect?” I ask my son.
“What’s that mean — close?” he says.
“Was he a friend?”
My son grimaces. “No,” he says, but I press on.
“How about Milken?”
“What about him?” my son says, near anger now. “He’s watching the dog. It’s something you do for a friend.”
5
Preparations for the trial drag on, and the newspaper retrieves old information about the case to supplement the pre-trial maneuvering. There have been other suspects. There have been rumors of witnesses being coerced to keep quiet. When I mention the upcoming trial in conjunction with how I’m thinking about driving to the location of the party to get a clearer sense of location for what seems like a possible short story, a friend from the university says, “It’s different out that way.”
6
A few days after I talk with my son, I begin writing a story that I title “The Killer’s Dog.” It occurs to me that the jailed suspect might be angered if it gets published and so might the dogsitter, though the character in the story who watches the dog is a woman, and there is nothing about her that resembles my son’s friend. It wouldn’t matter that the story isn’t about the crime or the suspect. It would be enough that the main character is a man whose sister takes care of a dog that belongs to a man who is widely believed to be guilty of two murders. The situation would look so much like his own he might want to get as close to me as he had when we shook hands.
7
Weeks later, an early witness in the beating trial testifies that the victim didn’t do anything others didn’t do — flirting, what men do and women enjoy, the drinking helping things along. His comment seems like a good start on the victim’s behalf, but then, speaking for the prosecution no less, he swears he didn’t see the victim touched. “I seen everything” is his way of bragging, making the district attorney look like a sap.
A second witness says the victim took a few licks, but then he makes it clear the victim had all his senses after. “Lucid” is what the newspaper article quotes him as saying. “The man was lucid. That’s what he was — lucid,” as if the witness has studied on that word like he might impress the jury more that way. I imagine him looking straight at the jury with pride.
8
While writing “The Killer’s Dog,” I learn that the double murder suspect owns six acres, a large enough spread that nobody lives anywhere close to him. The house, when I see it on the news, surprises me. The wooden siding appears to be newly stained, and so does the deck that runs the length of the backside of the house. There is a suggestion of meticulous landscaping that surrounds the house. It looks like something to photograph. Something that reminds me of an enormous, poisonous flower.
The details are a gift. That house is more interesting than one with a collapsed deck and a door off its hinges, the area flooded by a field of burdock and milkweed. None of what is “real” suggests that farther into the forest is where yellow crime-scene tape flutters like an obscene flag.
A few days later, I finish “The Killer’s Dog” and submit it to a journal I admire.
9
The mystery of the fatal beating no longer sounds like an open-and-shut case even though a half-sister to one of the accused men ends one trial day in tears while she testifies the victim was assaulted hard-core while people watched, testimony that should have a powerful influence on a jury. “I feel bad for the guy not getting his justice” is how she explains her talking after so long, quick to add her half-brother and the victim had been best friends, a claim that must have puzzled the jury as much as it does me. The defense lawyer doesn’t question that. What he does do is persuade her to admit her boyfriend at the time was an original suspect.
Regardless, the newspaper seems to have its own mind made up. The headline reads Conspiracy of Silence. Down farther on the page, in the pictures that rerun each day, both of the accused men are shown in hunting gear with the sort of scruffy beards and overgrown mustaches a man who’s been in camp a week would carry when he posed with a trophy buck the paper cropped out. The victim’s photograph shows him decked out in a coat and tie, and every day his name underneath is followed by the Roman numeral IV, as if he was from royalty instead of from a rural family that has simply repeated the father’s name for a hundred years.
My wife reminds me that if you tell the story more than one way, each version becomes a lie to everybody who is listening. I nod, but I’m half distracted by looking at a current photograph of the girl who had been flirted with that day. Though far heavier than she was at that long-ago party, she has been married to one of the accused men for thirteen years, sleeping beside him night after night while the truth dimmed and, it looked like, was about to go totally dark.
It barely registers with me that a cousin, half-removed, of one of the accused men testifies there was plenty of chaos, what’s expected when up to a hundred congregate to partying. When a woman who announces herself as a cousin to the other accused man says nobody raised a hand to stop anything, it’s more an accusation against the rest of the partiers than anything that would convict the accused.
10
My son tells me it’s expected to be hard to find a jury for the long-delayed double murder trial. “I bet nobody wants to sit on this guy’s case,” he says. “Word has it that he has people on the outside.”
I don’t tell him that “The Killer’s Dog” has been accepted for publication. I don’t even mention that I’ve written it.
He tells me there are rumors of more bodies buried on the suspect’s property. Indications that there might be a national mass murder story in the making, though so far there’s been nothing confirmed except the familiar story of a drug deal gone bad.
Before the proofs of “The Killer’s Dog” arrive for me to examine, I reread it carefully. Although the magazine is a well-respected one subsidized by a university, its circulation is small. Nevertheless, I imagine it finding its way to the prisoner. Even so, I tell myself, there’s nothing demeaning about the suspect on any of the pages. It’s just inference. It’s fiction. Still, I consider upon passages like this one:
Fawcett recognizes the suspect’s name because within the past week two bodies have been found buried on Hutch’s property, alleged drug dealers missing for nearly three weeks when they were dug up. “You’ll have the dog until it dies then,” he tells his sister.
“He might get off with a light sentence,” she says. “The dead people were scum. It was self-defense.”
“He buried them.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Maureen says. “No matter how it happened, dead people are hard to explain.” She glances at the window, and for a moment Fawcett imagines somebody evil following her, somebody obsessed with revenge and settling on Maureen as a surrogate.
11
The day after the owner of the property on which the party and the subsequent beating took place testifies, the newspaper carries more than the usual amount of direct testimony. “I drove off to the convenience about the time it was looking to get dark,” the woman declared. “I needed bread and milk and the like, and there was that boy face down in the middle of the Beech Hollow Road. I didn’t need anybody to tell me I should get right to the convenience and call 911. I stopped and tugged on that boy’s arm, and he opened his eyes. I figured he’d stay right there until the experts came to take care of him.”
On the way back home, she claimed she saw the two accused men beside the body. “He looked through me,” she said, meaning the jealous boy friend. “I knew what that meant.” The defense lawyer objected, but it was too late to scratch out that small, telling item from the jury’s memory, so he had done the next best thing. He pointed out that she hadn’t told that story seventeen years earlier. Her excuse? That she had been told by the police what they thought had happened, that it was “another pair back then that done this to that boy.” She explained that she didn’t need to be told twice the police would let her be if they could tell the story their way.
12
Each time the double murder story is reported, the television station shows the same photographs behind the news anchor, the suspect over the right shoulder, the dead man and woman over the left while the anchor begins with a summary of the case. When my wife watches with me, she’s impatient. “It’s like they think nobody has watched the news for two weeks the way they give this recap of the grave and how long they think the bodies were in it,” she says.
My wife sitting there makes me recognize that the report needs only three or four new sentences to be featured, that regardless of what I hear, I still keep my eyes on the photo of the supposed executioner and the indecipherable tattoo on the side of his thick, defensive lineman’s neck. Absolutely, the reports suggest, the suspect had to have been stunned that the husband and wife tried to steal from him, that they believed him somehow vulnerable to the threat of a gun in his own house. That such a realization drove a fury through him.
I decide to begin a story about the seventeen year-old beating case. The syntax and the idioms from the trial transcripts seem ready-made for characterization. All the testimony suggests a situation with no possible conclusive outcome, but I want to be well into the story before a verdict is handed down. The decision I have to make is about point of view. Who will tell this story?
A new witness testifies that the accused kicked and punched the victim maybe a hundred times before they stopped. That one urinated on the victim lying there senseless in the field. The DA has him go through the details a second time, making sure the jury understands he is the bearer of the true story. “Why did you keep quiet back then?” the DA asks, prepared, this time, for the defense lawyer’s rebuttal.
The witness explains that one of the accused men punched him in the head the summer the police were originally investigating. The DA has him repeat himself as if the witness’ shame will show how honest he is. According to the witness, a punch in the head, right above the temple, is the blow of a man giving a lesson, and he was made more helpless because he was holding his three-year-old daughter in his arms and had to settle for keeping his balance and not dropping her.
The punch, however, is shown by the defense to have occurred several months after the party, long after the witness had told his story to the police. The witness is forced to admit he was on probation for DUI. Questioned further, the witness reveals he had “three DUIs on my sheet.” I reread the newspaper article with excitement. Here is my story teller, the man who learns his desire for justice isn’t as strong as his desire for safety. The man who tells the truth when it no longer matters.
“Be careful,” my wife says when I tell her my plan. “You never know with these people.”
My son shrugs. “You do what you think’s best,” he says.
“I’m keeping an open mind here,” I say.
My son stares at me. “Dad,” he says, “You absolutely know that those guys on trial wouldn’t see it that way.”
13
By the time “The Killer’s Dog” is scheduled for publication, I decide to include it in a new collection I’m preparing and use it as the title story. The double murder trial, postponed for so long, looks finally to be imminent, but there may be further delays. I watch the news and see videos of the accused coming in and out of court. With his shaved head and muscular build, he looks like a dozen men I remember shaking hands with at shows in venues in northeastern Pennsylvania. I make a point to ask my son if the dog is still alive after all this time. When Milken comes to a show by my son’s new band, I don’t ask him about the dog, and I don’t mention my story.
14
What’s worse? To be a killer or the one who lies for him? I work fast because I want the story to reveal that to me, not the trial’s conclusion. Four witnesses in a row swear there was no fight. “That truck never left,” one says. I could pick it out from a hundred same make and model.”
A woman declares that a previous prosecution witness was drunk and sleeping it off in their truck when “that little bitty squabble came and went.” The DA makes it clear that the woman is the man’s ex-wife.
“Your lies will follow you,” the victim’s father is reported to have yelled as she stepped down, and I ponder on that. The truth seems to have been slung into a truck bed and dumped so deep in the woods it would die there, and nobody could ever prove anything ever again.
I write a first draft in three days. On the fourth day, the two accused men are acquitted.
15
“The Killer’s Dog” ends with the dogsitter’s brother walking the superbly trained animal along a riverfront walk:
When two attractive women approach, Fawcett pauses and says, “Sit,” as if he needs to insure their safety as they pass.
Marlow sits, and Fawcett lets the chain leash go slack. When the women get within what might be striking distance, the dog doesn’t move. “Wow,” one of the women says. “How does that ever happen?” She kneels in front of Marlow, her skirt tight against her thighs, and rubs him under his chin. “You’re such a good dog,” she says as if she could fall in love with obedience.
He watches them walk away and waits for the woman who hadn’t knelt to look back, a sign the kneeling woman has mentioned him. When neither turns, Fawcett wonders what command for “attack” Hutch has taught the dog. Whether Marlow has learned another command that overrides anything said in anger or fear. For now, Marlow sits beside him until the women are so far away they could turn around for any number of reasons than evaluating a man and his dog.
16
A few months later, I take my visiting young granddaughters, ages six and nine, to a local parade. The parade is small, the route short. They live in Los Angeles and have access to the annual Rose Bowl Parade, but here there are farm animals up close and children their age walking by and waving in Brownie uniforms and dance outfits. Both girls are paying attention.
There is a rumor that the recently acquitted are driving their red truck in this parade, and before too long I notice the Ford F-150 I’d read about for weeks approaching, slotted between the Cub Scouts and the Gym Starz in sparkling uniforms, the truck as polished as the fire trucks and the horns of the high school band. From both windows, they throw Tootsie Rolls and hard candy wrapped in cellophane to scrambling children, then wave like the mayor and the Farm Show Princess who follow the Civil War re-enactors and their hoop-skirted wives. All of us along the parade route can read their sign that says, “Our trial wasted $17,000 of your money” beside a poster of the District Attorney stuffed into a garbage can. The acquitted, I think, might have passed the victim’s family. I concentrate on their mouths to read their words. I watch their gestures for tells.
Right away, I realize that like my neighbors and colleagues at work, I’d expected a guilty verdict even though many of the witnesses seemed unreliable. I’m nearly certain that every adult here must remember the most explicit descriptions of the beating. A half-sister to one of the acquitted saying the victim was “assaulted hard core while people watched.” Another witness claiming the victim took a few licks, but “just a little knock around, nobody falling down or like that.”
For sure, all of us must remember the farm’s owner repeating the advice she claimed to have given the acquitted that day: “You want to kill somebody, you move that body off my property.” Which, according to some, they did in the bed of that Ford F-150. Which, according to others, they did not.
My granddaughters love the rabbits in their cages and the tethered calf led by a girl who looks to be about ten years old. I grip their hands to keep them from lunging for the candy, but neither one tugs to free herself.
After the acquitted pass, a nearby woman unwraps one of their butterscotch candies. She sucks on it, her mouth working as if she is delivering a curse. I think of how likely it is that some of the spectators are armed. Whether the news of the acquitted in their shiny truck has reached a relative or close friend of the murdered man.
Half a block down, a man raises a fist in rage. Or in solidarity. Either way, I’m relieved to see his hand is empty. One more block and the acquitted turn left, accelerate, and disappear like the gods.