Plea of Insanity (42 page)

93

A Home Sweet Home mat greeted visitors outside her front door on the second-floor landing; a wreath of dried flowers blocked the peephole. He’d have to talk to her about that. That wasn’t safe. Lat rang the bell again and waited, tapping his palm impatiently against the door.

‘Julia,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘It’s me, Lat. Come on, I know you’re home.’

Still no answer. Then he started to knock. Hard. A few dried petals fluttered to the cement floor.

‘Listen, I saw your car across the street. I know you’re in. I need to talk to you. Come on, open up.’

Still nothing. He walked back down the stairs a bit to see the window in her apartment that faced the parking lot. He didn’t see any lights on whatsoever. And that’s when John Latarrino started to worry. He’d checked JetBlue and knew she’d come back on her flight this afternoon. Her car was parked across the street in another apartment-complex lot, but she wasn’t answering her phone and she wasn’t answering her door. She’d been acting so strange lately, and after what he’d found out this past week, he knew that anything was possible. Even the worst anything.

‘Julia,’ he said again, louder this time. To hell with her neighbors. He banged on the door now. He hoped his voice sounded steady, devoid of the raw fear that he now felt gripping his belly. Graphic, horrifying images popped into his head and he pushed them aside. ‘I’m going to take the door if you don’t open—’ he started, but the knob suddenly twisted in his hand.

She stood in the front hall of her pitch-black apartment. The moonlight that filtered in through the living-room windows behind her backlit her petite frame in silhouette. He couldn’t make out the features of her face.

‘You scared me,’ Lat said, feeling the relief wash over him.

She said nothing and she didn’t move.

‘Julia,’ Lat said, ignoring her body language and instead moving past her, into the dark apartment. He looked around the living room. He could make out the shadows of clothes and boxes that were strewn everywhere. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked after a moment, reaching out to touch her shoulder.

She pulled away from his touch. ‘You checked up on me.’

He took a deep breath and looked straight at her. God, he wished he could see her eyes. Did she hate him? Maybe he shouldn’t have sent the flowers.

‘Yes. I checked up on you,’ he said finally, because there was nothing else he could say. He looked around the hall for a light switch. ‘Why are you sitting in the dark? Where are the lights in this place? ’Cause we have to talk—’

‘I don’t want the lights on and I don’t want to talk. I want you to go. That’s what I want.’

‘Julia, I’m sorry about your brother. I’m really sorry. I wish you had told me—’

‘Told you what?’

‘Told me about him.’

‘I don’t know exactly what you know, Lat, so I don’t know what it is you’d wished I’d told you. That my brother was a murderer but he couldn’t help himself? That he was just sick and inside he was really a great person and a warm human being who was misunderstood by everyone, including me?’ She turned her head away, crying.

‘I want to see you, Julia. Where the hell are the lights?’ That feeling of panic was grabbing at his throat once again.

She didn’t want him to see her like this. When things were fracturing right in front of her, slipping out of reach. ‘No, just go, please,’ she pleaded.

He grasped her hand in his and moved her further into the apartment with him, closing the door behind him with his foot. He felt along the wall until his fingers finally found a switch. A living-room light snapped on.

She had her head down, her long black hair draped over her face. Her whole body was shaking, and he knew she was trying to control the sobs. He didn’t know exactly what to say, but he knew bullshit wouldn’t work on her.

‘Listen, Julia, I’ve read the newspaper articles. I … I talked to the DA in New York. He read me the file. I know what happened to your mom and dad that night.’ He paused, wondering how far he should go. ‘Dr Mynks told me about Andy. And I’m sorry, Julia. I’m so sorry for your loss – your losses.’ He blew out another breath and looked around the apartment. He wasn’t very good at these things. He sucked at funerals and awkward moments. ‘You were acting really strange. Things weren’t adding up and then, well, you burned Dr Barakat in court and … you just took off in the middle of trial. And you haven’t been back. It all makes sense now … I just … Why didn’t you tell me? Maybe I could’ve done something.’

She turned again toward the wall, wiping her eyes with the palms of her hands. ‘What is it you wanted me to tell you? And when? Maybe over a motorcycle ride on the beach I could whisper in your ear that my brother’s a schizophrenic? Oh, and by the way, he killed my family one night while I was at a sleepover? What do you really think you would have done with that information, Lat? But that’s not all. There’s more to the story,’ she said, her voice rising with anger. ‘See, it wasn’t actually his fault because he was
made
that way.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That wasn’t in the court file, Lat? It
must
have been. ’Cause it turns out my dad was sick, too. And my grandfather, we think. We
think
, ’cause no one wants to talk about these things. No one should’ve ever thought about having a kid. They knew what it was like. My mother, she knew, too. She
watched
him struggle with it. They both knew hell, right here on earth. My dad lived it.’ She struggled to find her breath, backing up further against the wall, ‘They knew the odds, that we could get it. Like blond hair or a cleft chin. They knew they could
give
it to us. But they did it anyway. They still had us, Lat. It was the most selfish thing in the world they could have done – to bring us into it. But they did it anyway …’

He moved toward her. ‘Julia …’

But she held her arms up in front of her, keeping him away. ‘I don’t want your pity, John. I don’t want anyone’s pity. No, no, no, no. No pity.’

‘Is that why you never said anything?’ he said, his voice rising in frustration. ‘You’re so damn strong you think you can handle all this alone? You’re gonna prove yourself to everyone watching? That you can take on bad judges, and you can take on the criminals and you can take on the system? This case – Marquette – it’s so close … I can see that now. It’s unreasonable to think it wouldn’t have gotten to you.’

‘I read the paper this morning on the plane. The
New York Post
. A little girl watched her momma’s boyfriend kill her and then kill himself. Then this little girl, she sat in the house for two days next to the bodies before someone finally came and rang the bell and found her. And I felt bad, Lat. I felt
pity
for her – for what her life is now, and for what it will be like for her, growing up, so different from everyone else. But tomorrow there’ll be another tragedy to read about. Maybe it will even be worse. And in a week or two, I’ll forget all about the little girl who was found with the dead bodies. Right? I mean, we all do. We forget about the tragedies that are bad enough to make the paper. There’s too many of them, and they always happen to someone else, don’t they?

‘But the headline makers, you know, they grow up, John. They ride the bus next to you, they work in the next cubicle over. They’re people whose tragedies define who they are to everyone who meets them. You’re not the nice girl in algebra anymore – you’re the girl whose parents were murdered by her crazy brother. You’re not the secretary with the terrific laugh – you’re the chick whose family died in a house fire. And I’m … I’m just so tired of being defined. I’m tired of being different. Of being the girl in the headlines.’

‘Julia …’

‘So I don’t tell anyone, and maybe I do try and prove myself everyday. Maybe I have to. Prove that I can get through life, that I won’t be swallowed up by my tragedy, by memories that never, ever go away, no matter how much I wish them or lie about them.’

He was next to her now, his arms wrapped around her shaking body. She tried to break out, but he just held her until the fight was finally gone and she collapsed crying against his chest. He smoothed her hair back off her face, stroking it, his fingers running against her wet cheek and down her neck.

A long, long while passed until he finally spoke. ‘I still think you’re the hot prosecutor with the great laugh and the nice chest,’ he whispered softly in her ear.

He felt her body shake up against his and he knew she was laughing. He moved his hand gently under her chin, cupping it in his hand. She tried to move away, not wanting him to look at her. ‘Sshh, sshh,’ he said, bringing her face up toward his own.

Her fiery green eyes were red and swollen. She must have been crying for days. Longer, maybe. He wiped her cheeks with his thumbs. Funny, she looked so beautiful. So defiant. So vulnerable. So strong. So scared. He bent down, close to her face.

‘You said no rebounds,’ she whispered. But she didn’t move away.

‘This,’ he said, pulling her even closer to him, ‘
this
is no rebound.’ Then he did what his body and soul had ached to do for so long, and he kissed her.

I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –
I tried to match it – Seam by Seam –
But could not make it fit

The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before –
But Sequence raveled out of Sound
Like Balls – upon a Floor.

Emily Dickinson

94

‘Mr Bellido?’ Farley grumbled as he swept to the bench on Tuesday morning. Jefferson had once again missed his cue but this time the judge didn’t care. He waved off the bailiff and motioned for the packed courtroom to sit. He was already three days past his promise and his deadline, and only four short days away from missing his boat to the Caribbean. The antics and delays of the past few days had worn him thin. ‘Are you ready to proceed with closing?’

‘I am, Your Honor,’ said Rick, as he rose from his seat at the State’s table. He carefully buttoned his jacket and walked over to the jury box. ‘David Marquette is a murderer. On October eighth, two thousand five, at approximately four thirty a.m., the man who had taken an oath to save lives, the man who had made a promise to love, honor and cherish his wife and their children, grabbed a baseball bat and crept into the bedroom where his wife, Jennifer, slept peacefully in their bed. Then he struck her over the head with that bat so forcefully, she was
probably
rendered unconscious after the first blow. I stress probably, ladies and gentlemen, because the ME can’t say for certain and we don’t really know. We all
hope
that she was, though. Because that’s when Dr David Marquette took out his knife and he stabbed her. Not once. Not twice, but
thirty-seven times.
Over and over and over again. With such force, he went through her body and into the mattress.’ He paused again for a long moment, not taking his eyes off Marquette, who still sat expressionless. ‘Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen of the jury– he
is
a murderer.’

Rick walked slowly over to where the smiling portraits of the Marquette victims had been mounted on easels across from the jury box. Beside each portrait was a graphic crime-scene photo of each victim. He knew that the jury hated looking at the pictures. He had watched them cringe when he had first introduced them at trial. Even for him, they were disturbing and difficult to look at, and he knew that particularly the women wanted to turn away. But they could not. He would not let them. Like a skilled hypnotist, he held them there – fast in their seats while he took them back in time.

‘David Marquette then left his wife, dead on their bed in the master bedroom, and he walked down the hall to the rooms where his three children lay sleeping. Little Danny, baby Sophie, big-girl Emma. And with that same bloodied baseball bat and that same knife, he
intended
to deliver that very same fate to his own small children.

‘But something went wrong. Something David Marquette had not anticipated, ladies and gentlemen. His daughter woke up. What woke her, we will never know – maybe it was the cry of the baby or the screams of her brother – but she woke up and she found Danny, either dead or dying in his bed. And that little girl – who was all of six – was smart enough to call nine-one-one for help. Smart enough to make sure she named the man who would go on to murder her with that knife. “Oh no, no,” we know she cried out in terror when he called her name in that dark bedroom. “No, Daddy!” was what she said.’

Rick stepped aside and let the jury look over at the defendant. He let them take the image he had so artfully and vividly painted for them and put the expressionless man with the new suit just ten feet across from them into the disturbing picture. The courtroom was completely still. It was almost as if people were afraid to breathe, lest they miss something.

‘That’s when the plans changed, ladies and gentlemen,’ he continued. ‘That’s when David Marquette – who had been smart enough to plan his own alibi – realized there would be no escape back to a comfy hotel room in Disney World, where he could feign surprise and shock in the morning when someone called with the horrible news about his family. That’s when David Marquette needed to think of a way out. And he needed to think fast, because he now knew that within a matter of minutes the police would be knocking on his front door downstairs. The plans
had
to change.’ He paused. ‘There was someone else. An intruder.

‘He had driven down from Orlando earlier that night to be with his family because he missed them so. He had been away for a couple of days already at this medical conference and he just couldn’t wait another night to spend time with Jennifer, to hold the baby and kiss the kids. Because he was such a great father, a great husband, just like everybody always said he was. One of the many faces we know David Marquette wore.

‘At four thirty in the morning, he was in the bathroom taking a shower, getting ready to head back up to his conference, when his wife – his beautiful wife, Jennifer – was murdered in her sleep by an intruder. A would-be rapist. An intruder, or maybe even intruders for all he knew, who then took a bat and a knife and slaughtered his whole family, like Charles Manson. He stepped out of the bathroom into a dark bedroom to find his wife dead, and his daughter, Emma, screaming his name. He ran to her room,
to her aid
, surprising this intruder, and that’s when he had been attacked himself, stabbed brutally in the stomach.

‘The reason he wasn’t stabbed thirty-seven times, like his wife, or twenty times, like his daughter? The reason he was still alive? The intruder didn’t have the time. Thanks to Emma, he knew the police were coming now, and he fled out into the night, leaving his murder weapon behind, carefully placed right in our poor, destroyed defendant’s stomach. Carefully, I say, because, as you all know, the very knife that had butchered David Marquette’s entire family somehow missed all of his vital organs. Conveniently, loaded with only the good doctor’s prints, because, of course, this intruder must have worn gloves. It was a horrible, dramatic wound that the defendant knew would bleed a lot and would seem serious and life-threatening on scene, but wouldn’t be if you knew how to place it – if you’d had the surgical training – if you got the proper medical attention right away. Medical training, of course, we know David Marquette did have. Medical attention he knew was on the way, because he’d heard his daughter make that call.’

The jury stared at David Marquette. One woman shook her head and looked down at her lap, crying.

‘A perfect back-up plan, wasn’t it, folks?’ Rick continued. ‘Not so bad for thinking on the spot. For someone who had only minutes to rinse off all his family’s blood in the shower and then delicately perform surgery on himself with the very same murder weapon. Not bad at all. In fact, some might say thought processes made under such pressure were brilliant, not disorganized. Cunning, not illogical. Maybe even genius. But there was one problem. Dr David Marquette had forgotten one minor detail in that perfect plan, or we might not be here today as he enjoyed the proceeds of his wife’s multi-million-dollar life insurance policy and a life free of kids and responsibilities. Free to do what he wants, when he wants, with any one of the many girlfriends colleagues have testified he’d been fond of entertaining.’ Rick paused again. ‘He forgot to unset the alarm, ladies and gentlemen.’

The courtroom murmured.

‘Objection!’ Mel Levenson said, rising to his feet. He knew the way this was turning out. He could smell it in the courtroom, the change in the air. He had to break the spell. ‘This is all conjecture, Your Honor.’

‘This is closing argument. Overruled,’ said Farley, motioning with his hand for Mel to sit back down.

‘The damn alarm,’ Rick continued, shaking his head. ‘Out of habit, David Marquette had unset it and then reset it when he snuck home that night. When he came home to murder his family and begin his new life. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans …

‘When David Marquette lay on the floor of his bathroom – the knife already in his stomach, the plan already in motion – he heard the alarm go off as the officers made entry into his house. As he listened to them race up the stairs and scream at the sight of the dead bodies of his wife and three children – he was smart enough to realize that there had to be some other explanation. The plans had to change once again.

‘So in a hospital bed in Jackson Memorial, he turned to the familiar. The only disease that could offer an explanation for the unimaginable carnage he could no longer deny he had committed. Schizophrenia. His own identical twin suffers from it. Mimicking the bizarre symptoms he had watched unfold in a mirror image of himself over the years would not be that difficult a task. Especially not when you’re a doctor and you’ve done a rotation on a psych ward. Let’s face it, ladies and gentlemen, Dr David Marquette knew the symptoms to manifest, the voices to offer up to the psychiatrists that would examine him. He knew enough not to claim it was little green men he saw, but the devil. He knew enough to flatten his emotions, to feign catatonia. He even knew how to compensate for the physical and mental effects of the antipsychotic drugs they would be sure to give him. The stint he’d done in a private rehab for
cocaine psychosis
during his second year in college could now be considered his first misdiagnosed psychotic “break.” The young man whom a caseworker had noted during that
very stay
as, and I quote, “manipulative and deceitful, superficial in thought and speech, with egocentric and grandiose ideals that are not grounded in current reality”. The man who had demonstrated, as far back as fifteen years ago, evidence of a psychopathic personality, was really a misdiagnosed schizophrenic. Just like his twin brother.

‘It was this horrible disease that had corrupted his brain with sick thoughts. That had made him believe his family would be forever damned if he did not save their souls. That had made him try to kill himself, to save himself from possession, too. That knife wound was a half-hearted attempt at
hara-kiri
, he wants us to believe. A horrible suicide attempt so that he could join his family in the hereafter.

‘Don’t buy it, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t believe any of it. Dr Barakat, a forensic psychiatrist with sixteen years of experience in the field, didn’t. Neither did Dr Hindlin. See the cunning pattern of behavior. See the brilliant thought processes that are actually involved here.’ He looked over at the defendant once again. ‘Truly brilliant, I have to admit.’ But Marquette did not look up.

Rick turned back to face the jury. He waited a few moments until all of their eyes were focused back on him. Even the criers. ‘David Marquette has fooled some people with his story and his act, but he hasn’t fooled us all. The facts are the facts. They speak for themselves, and he can’t get out of them. David Marquette hasn’t fooled the seasoned homicide detectives or the State’s psychiatrists, and he hasn’t fooled me. Don’t let him fool you. He’s not a man whose illness manipulated him to commit murder; he’s a man who’s using an illness to manipulate the system into exonerating him. He’s not a schizophrenic, ladies and gentlemen. He’s a cold-blooded psychopath. And he needs to pay for what he’s done.’