A Season in Purgatory (42 page)

I saw Kitt one more time after our parting in Southampton. I could not, after what had happened between us, go through with what I was about to do without letting her know of my intentions. I couldn’t do that to her. I had by then been to see Luanne Utley. I had also been to see Captain Riordan, now reared. From him I learned what the next steps would have to be. I left a message on her machine, saying it was important that I see her on a most urgent matter. She left a breezy message on mine: “Come to lunch Tuesday. Tuna fish.” With Bridey always in her life, she had never learned to cook, but she often bragged about her tuna fish casserole, which she called her one culinary accomplishment.

Our meeting was brief. She lived in a small but stylish suite of rooms, with its own kitchen, in the Rhinelander Hotel. The Rhinelander was, is, an elegant place on the Upper East Side of New York where many fashionable women live between marriages. I had been there during our affair, but she had preferred coming to my Spartan apartment for our afternoon meetings. “It’s more erotic,” she had said more than once. She liked arriving before me and changing the sheets and putting the wine in the refrigerator and arranging flowers she bought at a Korean market on the corner. She hated my one vase. “Tacky,” she said. She hated my two glasses.
“Tackier,” she said. She bought a new vase and two new glasses. Sometimes, when I unlocked the door of my apartment, she was already undressed, prepared for what she called the frolic to follow, wearing only my dressing gown. As long as I had known her, she could make me laugh. I missed her.

She answered the door that Tuesday, the tuna fish Tuesday, and then stepped back, watching me. She was wearing the glasses she sometimes wore when she read, but she pulled them off and held them in her hand as she smiled nervously, in the way that lovers do when they meet again after their first fight. I entered. I stood inside her door, looking at her looking at me. I believe, to my shame, that she thought the urgency of my call to her had had to do with sexual desire. A quickie, which she would have gone through with if that had been my intention. She had been to the hairdresser. She was dressed as if for lunch at “21.” The suit, the pearls, the gold pin. Behind her, I could see that a table was set for two, with plates and glasses and silver and napkins and a bottle of wine. The bottle was open, and she had poured herself a glass, perhaps even two. From the kitchen, I could smell her tuna fish casserole.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was almost a whisper.

“Hello, Kitt.”

“Oh, Harrison. I was so excited when I heard from you. I couldn’t stop thinking that you were coming. I only stayed for two acts of the opera last night and left. I wanted everything to be perfect today. How do I look?”

“Kitt, I’m not going to stay. You must listen to me. You must let me talk. You must not interrupt me. Something terrible is going to happen, and I cannot bear that you find it out from someone other than me, as I am the one who is responsible. Constant is going to be arrested for the murder of Winifred Utley in 1973. No, no, don’t disagree with me. I
was there that night. I saw. I helped him carry her body from the place where he killed her to the place where she was found under the pine tree. Your father knew. All your brothers knew. Your mother didn’t, of course. Nor any of your sisters. I could not live with this secret another moment. That is why Johnny Fuselli tried to drown me. I have gone to the police in Scarborough Hill and told everything I know. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. I am sorry to hurt you like this, and your mother. I loved you, Kitt. I want you to know that. But I had to do what I have done.”

She stared at me, unbelieving. Her face looked as if I had struck her. Her mouth hung slack. Then, as if her chin were too heavy for her face, her head fell forward to her chest. Her glasses dropped out of her hand. As she turned to walk to a chair, she stepped on her glasses with her high heel and broke a lens. Uncaring, she fell into the chair. Her hands went to her face and covered it. Then I turned, opened the door, and left her. Outside her door, in the hall of the Rhinelander Hotel, I could hear a moan coming from her, like a lamentation for the dead. I wanted to go back. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for having inflicted pain on her. I didn’t. I walked quickly to the elevator and pushed the Down button.

It is not uncommon for crazies to confess to crimes they did not commit, or for people to pretend that they have knowledge of a crime that they do not have. For that reason, the police always withhold some information from the media, something vital, that only the killer could know, or someone who has actually witnessed the killing. Look back at those old newspapers from 1973. You will read that Winifred Utley was wearing a pink party dress, that her white panties were on, and that she had not been raped. What I knew was that her panties were down by her ankles.
I had seen that when I lifted her. I had seen her pubic hair. It was the one bit of information I needed to establish my credibility. They already knew my whereabouts that night. It was in the files. What I suspected but did not actually know was that rape had been the intention, but penetration had not taken place. I had a theory about Constant, but I kept that to myself.

Captain Riordan came with me on that day. Although retired, he had never been able to forget the case, about which he had always had very strong suspicions. Through the years, he had checked in with Luanne Utley several times a year and had established a warm relationship with her. Things had happened after I had gone to Europe that I knew nothing about. Captain Riordan told me that a cardinal and several priests had interceded for the family. He told me that the cardinal had told Gerald in front of him that he should not let Constant submit to certain tests that Riordan wanted. He said they would do more harm than good, although what that meant no one knew, but no one was about to question a cardinal, and the cardinal knew that.

The new police chief, Homer Dundee, had come to Scarborough Hill after Captain Riordan’s retirement. He resented Captain Riordan’s involvement. He said that he was quite capable of handling the case himself. He said that he did not want any interference from Captain Riordan. Captain Riordan left. Thereafter I met him only in private, or with Luanne Utley.

Homer Dundee asked me if I knew why Winifred’s chin, nose, and forehead were marked with cuts unrelated to the blows on her head from the bat. I said that I assumed the cuts were made by Constant when he tried to drag her by the hair across the path before he came to get me to help him lift her. Homer Dundee nodded.

“Are there any people who might be able to corroborate any of what you have told me?” he asked.

“There is a cook in the family called Bridey. I don’t know her last name. She has been with the family since the children were small. She is devoted to Mrs. Bradley,” I said.

“What about her?”

“She woke up that night, when Constant and I returned to the house and were getting out of our clothes in the kitchen. Her room was off the kitchen. She called out to us. It was two in the morning.”

Homer Dundee wrote down her name. “Anyone else?”

“There was a maid called Colleen. It is a different Colleen from the Colleen who works for the family now.”

“What about her?”

“The next day I overheard her tell Bridey that she had heard Constant and me talking outside the house in the night. Her room was on the top floor, and she said our voices traveled up there. Bridey told her to forget what she heard.”

“Do you know her last name?”

“No.”

“Anyone else?”

“There is a real-estate broker in New York called Eloise Brazen. She is listed in the book. She lives on Park Avenue. At the time she was having an affair with Gerald Bradley. Constant called his father at her apartment that night to tell him something terrible had happened and to come home at once. I know for a fact, from someone she knew who has since died, that she remembers the night.”

“What happened to the bat?” he asked, suddenly. “The other part of the bat?”

I told him Constant placed the bat in a garbage bag. I told him about taking off our shirts and trousers and undershorts and shoes. I told him about Johnny Fuselli driving off
with the bag in the back of Bridey’s car. I told him what Johnny told me before he drowned.

Following my visit with Kitt, news of my intentions traveled fast. My wife was harassed by anonymous telephone calls. When I say my wife, I am still referring to Claire, from whom I am separated but not divorced. Initially the calls were relatively harmless. “You will not get into the club you have applied for,” said the voice. She had in fact applied for membership in a small beach club in Black Point, where there were many children for our boys to play with. Or, “Your children will not get into the school in which you are trying to enter them.” The school was no more than a playschool. The point of the calls was for her to use her influence on me to not go forward with the trial. Claire is a strong woman, not easily frightened. Once, she engaged her tormentor in conversation. She said later to me, “I think I know who that is.” I, of course, thought it might be Jerry, or even Des. But Claire felt quite sure it was Freddy Tierney, the husband of Maureen Bradley, whom she had known years ago in Palm Beach, before he married into the Bradley family. Once she confronted him. “Is this you, Freddy Tierney? You asshole,” she said. The caller hung up. The calls stopped. Freddy had apparently been indoctrinated into the Bradley machine, but flunked his first assignment. Like poor drowned Johnny Fuselli, his heart probably wasn’t in it. Recently, the calls have started again, but with a different voice. They are hideously vulgar anonymous hate calls. Claire has stopped answering her telephone, letting the machine pick up on the first ring and taking the call only if she recognizes the caller. Twice she has been fooled, but she taped those calls and turned the tapes over to the police. The calls have stopped.

* * *

Stories were circulated that Gerald was making a remarkable recovery. It was not true. He had aged greatly since his stroke. Visitors to the house, mostly priests and close family friends, who complimented him on his remarkable recovery, reported later that he had a tendency to fall asleep, that he was forgetful of recent happenings but remembered remote events with clarity, and that he cried frequently and was given to bouts of irritability. A paralysis had set in. The left side of his face was distorted, and he was unable to speak intelligibly. He made sounds that he thought made sense but made sense to no one else. When those closest to him failed to understand his orders and desires, he became enraged. Only Sis Malloy was able to interpret his sounds. “Make sure Sis is in the room,” a family member would say, warning the others of his possible wrath.

Although Grace rarely came face-to-face with Gerald, she tended to his needs through her daily contact with Sis Malloy and Miss Toomey, the head nurse.

Every day Sis read the newspapers to him, the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
. She had become expert in reading the stock-market quotations, and sometimes took telephone calls from Gerald’s traders, passing on the information to him and calling back with his reply. His skills at making money had not left him. It was the happiest time of day for Gerald. She bought every tabloid paper and read him every detail of the scandal involving his son that was riveting the country.

“What is he saying, Sis? I cannot understand him,” said Jerry impatiently.

“He said that Constant must not be handcuffed, under any circumstances,” said Sis.

“Yes, of course,” said Jerry. “He will turn himself in, and we will post bail immediately. The bail is set for a million.”

In the meantime, Bradley family life went on as if there was not a dark cloud overhead. The public pose was to treat the charge of murder as no more than an inconvenience, a mad person’s revenge which would soon be straightened out in a court of law, at which time they could go about the business of their lives again. It was a family trait never to mention their scandals or adversities. Agnes’s madness, Jerry’s crippling accident, Des’s marriage to a maid, and Gerald’s mistresses were things never mentioned. In the face of the terrible publicity, the Bradley public relations apparatus was constantly at work. Sandro gave a rousing and widely praised speech in the Senate, opposing a presidential nomination for an appointment to the Supreme Court. Maureen gave birth to twins, her eighth and ninth children. Grace’s seventy-second birthday was celebrated with great fanfare, and a new white rose was named in her honor, the Grace Bradley rose. Constant was photographed wheeling his father to the garden. I knew Gerald was unwell, but I was unprepared for the sight of him. The man I had seen only eleven months earlier in Southampton had diminished in size. Slack-jawed, unheeding, he sat in his wheelchair, playing his part in the family playlet, watching Constant dig the hole to plant the rose bush. Earlier on that same Sunday, Maureen’s fifth child, Eugenie, made her First Communion. The entire family attended, except for Gerald.

“It will be a wonderful look for Constant, holding little Eugenie’s hand, with her in her veil and her lovely white dress that Ma bought her in Paris,” said Maureen. “After all, he is her godfather.”

“But he’s not her godfather,” said Freddy Tierney. “My brother Tom is.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Freddy. Who the hell is going to know? And some godfather your brother is, by the way. He
hasn’t remembered Eugenie’s birthday for the last three years.”

Freddy, cowed, retreated. “He does have cancer, darling.”

“Even so.”

In private, tales of Kitt’s drinking circulated. People who loved her said, “What a shame.” Publicly, she traveled to Paris to visit her sister Mary Pat, the Countess de Trafford.

The book that Gerald had wanted me to write in Constant’s name, the chronicle of a great American Catholic family, was written in short order, and anonymously, by a Mrs. Goldberg, who had written books for a former cabinet member’s wife, a famous hairdresser’s ex-wife, a former president’s daughter, and a film star, all in their names. She wanted no glory and was content to remain discreetly in the background while Constant took bows as the author. She was paid, I was told by Claire, who always knew the publishing news, a half million dollars up front. Speed was of the essence in her assignment. If the book made the best-sellers list, she was to receive another quarter of a million dollars. Called simply
Family
, Constant Bradley’s book proved to be amazingly popular. Denials were issued by the publisher of a rumor that Bradley representatives around the country purchased thousands of copies of the book from the key bookstores that reported their sales figures to the compilers of best-sellers lists. There was an elaborate publicity campaign, with television appearances on every chat show of consequence by Constant, as the author of the family memoir, and even, on occasion, by Grace, as the mother of the author. On television, Grace, who had always been in the background of the family, proved to be an immensely popular figure, beloved by the audiences.