Perfect Poison (27 page)

While Plante made his way east on the Mass Pike to go home for the weekend, his new toy sitting securely in a bag next to him on the front seat, James Perrault was finishing up making his first two-hour sweep of the VAMC grounds. It was Friday night. For Perrault, the work week would be over in about six hours.

When he finally sat down at the security desk to man the phones, it was just after five o'clock. Perrault was tired. It had been an emotionally draining couple of days.

As soon as he got comfortable in his chair, the phone rang.

This time, Perrault was prepared. NYNEX had been informed there might be more calls, so it was waiting to run a trace.

“VA Officer Perrault speaking. How may I help you?”

“You did very well during last night's trial run,” the caller said, and hung up.

There was no doubt in Perrault's mind it was the same caller as the previous night. But this time he heard something familiar in the voice that hadn't really dawned on him the day before. Earlier that morning, he had come to the conclusion it was probably Gilbert who had made the calls. Who else could it have been? Still, there was that one problem: It was a man's voice. If it had been Gilbert, he figured, she had to have been using some sort of device that changed the tone of her very distinctive voice.

At 6:38, one more call came in: “The next time you won't get so long,” the caller threatened.

Perrault phoned NYNEX to see if someone had been successful in “trapping” the call.

“Sorry,” the operator said. The calls weren't long enough.

 

 

When Perrault returned to work on Monday afternoon, after having the weekend off, he wasn't surprised to learn that the VAMC hadn't received one strange phone call in his absence.

Over the weekend, a kid playing with his friends out in the center courtyard of 182 Northampton Street kicked his ball into the bushes, reached down to grab it, and noticed a familiar-looking toy just sitting there.

It was a voice-changing device—a pink Talkgirl—just like the one Plante had bought at Toys-R-Us.

Samantha Harris, when she later found out that the kid had found the toy, asked him where.

“Over there,” the kid said, pointing to the bushes.

Gilbert's window was directly above where the kid was pointing.

A day later, something clicked in Harris's mind. So she went to the boy's mother and told her to call Plante or Murphy. “It could mean something,” she said. “Kristen's window is right above where he found it.”

The woman said she didn't want to get involved. It was a kid's toy. What kind of trouble could Gilbert get herself into with a child's toy?

Harris decided to call Plante and Murphy herself, just to make sure the toy didn't hold any significance.

The day the kid found the toy, he played with it, but couldn't get it to work. It kept malfunctioning.

On Monday morning, the boy took it to school and showed it off to some friends. They were impressed. They passed it around all morning—that is, until the teacher took it away because it was disrupting her class.

She, in turn, handed it over to the principal.

By the time Harris had gotten hold of Plante and Murphy and they tracked down the boy's mother and went to the school, the Talkgirl had gone through so many different hands that it was impossible to extract any fingerprints from it.

 

 

On Monday night, September 30, around six o'clock, Gilbert returned to the Holyoke Mall and walked into the Toys-R-Us for the second time in four days.

Combing the aisles, she found what she was looking for within minutes and headed up to the cash register.

“Will you take a check?” Gilbert asked the clerk, Stephanie Lussier, as she placed her one item, this time a Talkboy, Jr., on the counter.

The only noticeable differences between the Talkgirl and Talkboy are the size and color: The Talkboy is about the size of a paperback book and comes in more masculine colors of gray and blue; the Talkgirl, a little bit bigger than a pack of cigarettes, comes in pink and lavender.

“As long as you have some ID,” Lussier said.

“I'm concerned about the size of the batteries this thing takes,” Gilbert said. “What size batteries do I need?”

The box clearly stated that the toy took four double-A batteries. Gilbert, undoubtedly worried that she might purchase the wrong size batteries and waste time returning them, asked Lussier to open the box to make sure. She wanted the toy to be in working condition the minute she walked out of the store.

While she tore open the box, Lussier turned the carton over and pointed out to Gilbert that the toy took four double-A batteries.

“See,” she said. “Right there. It says four double-A batteries. Those you have in your hand will do the job.”

“Are you sure? I don't want to get home and find out they don't fit,” Gilbert said. She seemed frustrated. “Open it and make sure.”

“They'll fit, ma'am. I'm positive.”

Lussier then placed the batteries in the toy.

“See.”

“Nice toy, huh?” Gilbert said, holding it up in the air, staring at it. She was a bit more relaxed now that she knew the toy was in working condition.

“Sure is,” Lussier said politely, placing it in a bag.

“You know . . . it's a gift for my nephew,” Gilbert offered, smiling.

“I'm sure he'll love it, ma'am,” Lussier said as Gilbert left.

For some reason, Gilbert felt the need to lie; she didn't have a nephew.

An hour or so later, when Gilbert stopped at her apartment for a moment, she ran into Samantha Harris, who was sitting outside watching her son play with some of the other children who lived nearby.

Harris didn't even want to bump into Gilbert anymore. And she didn't feel like participating in Plante and Murphy's version of
Murder, She Wrote
much longer. It was dangerous. Gilbert was still calling her three and four times a day, and showing up at her door unannounced. Sooner or later, she was going to catch on to what Harris had been doing.

“Hello,” Harris said as Gilbert walked up to her. She seemed to be in a really good mood, Harris noticed. It was odd.

“You'll never guess where I was today,” Gilbert said.

“I give up. Where, Kristen?”

“I went to the Holyoke Mall. You know they have an Internet coffee shop up there now?” Smiling, she seemed thrilled at the prospect. Harris, on the other hand, was unimpressed. She just wanted Gilbert to go away.

“So I've heard,” Harris said, nodding her head.

“The Internet is amazing. I mean, do you know how easy it was for me to download a bomb recipe?”

“That's nice, Kristen,” Harris said. “But I have to go inside and get dinner started.”

“I'll call you later then.”

Later that same night, after Harris had readied her son for bed and began to wind down herself, Gilbert made good on her promise. And as soon as Harris picked up the phone, she knew immediately something had happened.

“Did Jim call? Did he check up on me today?” Gilbert asked.

It had been the second time that day Gilbert had asked the same question. She was forever preoccupied with Perrault's inquiries as to where she was and what she was doing.

“It was almost as if she wasn't able to function,” Harris later recalled, “without knowing that Jim had inquired about her.” But at the same time, because she was following him around and vandalizing his car so much, she was also worried that Perrault might have seen her and told Harris and her husband what she had done.

“Not that I know of,” Harris said.

“Well, ask Phillip,” Gilbert insisted.

Harris's husband had indeed spoken to Perrault earlier that day. Perrault told him that his car had been damaged again, and he knew Gilbert had done it.

The reason Perrault had called right after he found out about the vandalism was because he wanted to know if Phillip had seen Gilbert or her car. “No,” Phillip told him.

Harris held her hand over the receiver so Gilbert couldn't hear what was being said. She debated for a moment if she should lie and tell her that Perrault hadn't called, or just tell her the truth. Her choices weren't exactly welcoming: Either Gilbert was going to catch Harris in a lie or realize that Perrault had lied to her and that Phillip was covering for him. It was obvious Perrault had called Gilbert already and given her hell for vandalizing his car. Besides, Perrault and Harris had decided not to let Gilbert know that they were conferring with each other.

To avoid any fuss, Harris said,
“Yes,
Jim
did
call! He asked Phillip where you were. What time you had gone out and what time you got home.”

Gilbert didn't say anything.

“Kristen, you there?”

After a moment, Gilbert dropped her voice down real low and said, “Twit . . . fucking twit!”

“What did you say, Kristen?”

“Okay . . . okay . . . Sami, I have to go.”

Harris went into her bedroom, and made the day's entry in her diary. The following morning, she woke to find her car had been vandalized.

“I guess it was my payback,” she later said, “for talking to Jim.”

Karen Abderhalden was sitting at the VAMC Admissions desk at 6:40
P.M.
, on Monday, September 30, 1996, when the phone rang.

Using the same disguise, the caller said, “Pay close attention to this message. . . .”

“Excuse me?” Abderhalden said.

“Remember the bomb scare a week ago?” the caller asked.

“Yes!” Abderhalden answered.

The caller hung up.

By this time, there wasn't anyone at the VAMC who didn't think it was Gilbert making the calls. In fact, Abderhalden recognized the voice immediately as being Gilbert's because she knew it so well. The two had recently lived together for three weeks. Gilbert would phone Abderhalden every day and ask her what was going on at the hospital. “Are people talking about me? What are they saying? Are the investigators asking a lot of questions?” One time, Gilbert even put the blame on her old boss, Melodie Turner, telling Abderhalden, “I think they ought to investigate Melodie.”

Now, though, with the caller using a disguise, something else occurred to Abderhalden when she heard the voice for the first time.

She had a fourteen-year-old son who had a tiny tape recorder he used to go around the house and tape everyone with. She also owned the movie
Home Alone II
and had seen it more times than she wanted to admit. When she heard the caller's voice, it immediately reminded her of the movie and her son's zany antics.

So Abderhalden called Perrault after the caller hung up on her and explained to him what had just happened.

“Thanks, Karen,” he said. “It'll probably continue . . . just let me know if you receive any more calls.”

Shortly after hanging up with Abderhalden, at 6:44, the security desk phone rang.

“Officer Perrault speaking . . .”

There was silence. Then the caller hung up.

A few moments later, however, the caller called back.

“Is this Officer Perrault?” the caller asked.

“Yes, this is Officer Perrault.”

“I've been watching you, boy.” This time it sounded like a woman trying desperately to disguise her voice as a man's.

“Sir, uh . . .” Perrault tried explaining before the line went dead.

It occurred to Perrault that beside the fact that he was being addressed now by name, there was something noticeably different about the caller's voice from the previous times. Whoever it was had gotten pretty comfortable with what he or she was saying. The only difference Perrault noticed tonight was that the caller had tried, as Perrault later described it, to put a “Southern drawl” into his speech and sounded as if he was drunk.

Gilbert's imitation of a drunken Southerner, however, failed. Perrault, the first time he heard the new voice, did everything he could not to laugh.

Ironically, not a minute after Gilbert, posing as the mysterious caller, called and hung up, the security phone rang once again. Perrault thought for sure it was going to be another threatening call.

But it wasn't. Instead, it was Gilbert calling as herself. She was curious about something.

“What do you think about the bomb threats?” Gilbert asked. She explained that she had read about them in the newspaper.

“I don't know, Kris. I'm real busy right now.”

“What about those newspaper articles? They said there were only four calls.”

“Yeah . . . so?”

“Hadn't there been more calls than that?”

“I can't talk about it, Kris. I have to go now,” Perrault said before hanging up.

About a half hour went by without another call. Then, at 7:42, the phone rang again at Karen Abderhalden's desk.

“Don't transfer this call. I was paid by a police officer a week ago, in Northampton, to make the threatening call,” Gilbert said, sounding halfheartedly distressed, in the same drunken Southern drawl, referring to the calls on September 26 and 27.

Almost immediately afterward, the Ward C nurse's station upstairs took a call.

“Hello, I met a police officer in a bar last Saturday night, and he paid me fifty dollars to make the bomb threat.”

Two hours later, Perrault picked up the phone at the security desk, and the caller simply said, “Officer Perrault?”

“Yes?”

Silence.

“Hello . . . ?”

Then she breathed heavily and hung up.

Ten minutes later: “VA Police Officer Perrault speaking, how may I help you?”

“What makes you think my problem is personal?” Gilbert asked in her Southern voice.

Perrault heard some clicking in the background. It sounded to him as if someone were pounding on a computer keyboard, as if maybe Gilbert were taking notes as they spoke.

“Well, sir,” Perrault said, “you seem to be directing it toward me, sir. I don't know if it's personal or not. I'm a Gulf War veteran, and you used my name, so I tend to think you're directing it toward me.”

There was a long pause.

“What do you think?” Perrault asked when he got no response.

“Do you think that I am stupid?” Gilbert said, her voice bellowing a long, drawn-out Southern drawl as if she were speaking in slow motion.

“No, I don't think you're stupid, sir. I just think that we have a problem that we have to work out.”

Another long pause.

“Are you there?”

The line was dead.

For the remainder of his shift, Perrault and the VAMC staff waited, anticipating more calls. By this time, he had been schooled by Plante and Murphy enough to know that he somehow had to keep Gilbert on the line if they were going to prove it was, in fact, her making the calls. They wanted her to reveal something substantial. Maybe a town. A street sign. A piece of information that only someone who had worked at the VAMC could have known—a smoking gun: Gilbert, on tape, admitting it had been her the entire time. They thought that if Perrault provoked her enough, she might become enraged, drop the Talkboy, and lash out at him in real time, in her own voice. Besides, there was still that sixty-four-thousand-dollar question that nearly everyone wanted an answer to: “If you're innocent of the crimes you're being investigated for, why, then, are you phoning bomb threats into a federal institution?”

Gilbert must have sensed they were on to her, because after the “Do you think that I am stupid?” call, she didn't call back.