Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (11 page)

“Why are you so interested?” he said.

“It's a good subject,” I said. “I've been making a pile of material having to do with murder in New Haven. Obviously somebody who worked in that office was thinking about it, because there's a lot of stuff, and I know I could find more—I mean, when you think about some of the murders that have taken place here, just in the years I've lived here. And their importance. What happened on account of them. Alex Rackley. Penney Serra. Christian Prince. Malik Jones.”

“Malik Jones wasn't murdered.”

“Technically, no.”

“He wasn't murdered.”

“I read the police report on Malik Jones the other day,” I said.

“What are you up to?” Pekko said tensely, turning in his seat, angrier than I'd seen him in a long time.

I was interested in his anger, not afraid of it, almost amused. I don't know what I should have done, but I pretended I was alone, monologuing in the shower. “Marie Valenti,” I said. “Marie Valenti. The one nobody can forget. Oh, God, and Suzanne Jovin.”

The truth is that except for Nepaumuck's victim, nobody can forget any of the abovementioned people (and quite a few others), all murdered or at least killed in New Haven. Alex Rackley, a Black Panther, was executed by the Black Panthers in 1969. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were accused of conspiracy leading to the murder, and the trial, in 1970, was the occasion of rallies and riots. Penney Serra, a young New Haven woman, was murdered in a big downtown garage in the summer of 1973. Marie Valenti was eigh-teen years old, an honor student, when she was found dead on the New Haven Green in 1976. Christian Prince was the Yale student whose death Gordon remembered, killed by New Haven kids who robbed him. Malik Jones was a black New Haven boy who was shot by an East Haven cop after a car chase. Suzanne Jovin was a Yalie killed on a December evening on a residential street—the street where Ellen lived—in 1998. A professor was suspected of the crime, but he's never been charged.

Penney Serra's death, in the garage, increased the public's loss of faith in the safety and bustle of downtown, which grew less bustly and less safe after she was killed. The murder was unsolved for decades. A Waterbury man, identified by DNA, has just been convicted of her murder—in the spring of 2002, as I write this. But the murder of Marie Valenti—unsolved after almost as many years—might make people feel even worse. She was the granddaughter of a New Haven grocer, and hundreds of people had watched her playing with her little brother in the aisles of the Italian market. People who hadn't seen her decided after she died that maybe they had. Marie Valenti had been a student at Wilbur Cross, a reporter on the school paper—and she'd just been accepted at Yale. Her body was found on the green at nine on a Tuesday evening, a couple of weeks before she'd have graduated from high school. I'd lived in town just a few years then. I hadn't seen Marie Valenti playing on the floor of the grocery store—which had closed when the highway cut through its neighborhood—but I remember the headlines.

I said much of the above as I drove, talking more to myself than to Pekko. In my peripheral vision I saw Pekko holding himself tightly next to me, as if gathering his strength to strike—or keep what he gathered. He became more solid, more compact. He didn't speak.

I knew it made no sense to find him funny, yet I coaxed, as if he were four, “
What?
”

He shook his head. When I slowed, driving into the park I remembered—a wooded nature preserve—Arthur whined. In the parking lot, I opened the back door for Arthur, reaching past him to take hold of his leash. But Pekko had detached it when we left Watertown, so now the dog bounded out of the car and took off across a meadow.

Young and disobedient, Arthur ignored my shouts, cantering toward the nearby woods. I couldn't help delighting in his poodle, squared-off directness, his pleasure in motion. I hurried after him, and Pekko followed me at a steady pace, snapping the folded leash against his leg. Pekko is the sort of powerful man who looks more natural on a ladder than walking in a forest.

A family with children and a small white dog came out of the woods, and Arthur and the dog ran off together. I called Arthur once more, but on his way to me, he veered off and put a paw on the shoulder of a little child, who fell down and began to wail. Pekko came puffing up behind me, shouting, “You damned dog, get your ass over here!”

The father of the child had picked him or her up—it was one of those indefinite stubby children, recently a baby—but didn't look concerned. I rushed to apologize, but the people were untroubled. Now Arthur let himself be put on the leash, and we walked into the woods, where the trees were evergreens but the undergrowth on either side was all but ready to leaf out. In the oxygenated quiet, I began to calm down. I'd been afraid the family would be angry, and I might have become angry myself in response, though the mishap was my fault. As I grew calmer, I remembered that Pekko had been angry with me, and I'd laughed at him. I didn't know why he was angry.

It was new for us to walk like this. Ordinarily one of us walked Arthur alone. “So why don't you want me to be curious about murder?” I said. “Are you afraid I'll become a murderer?” I felt tender toward him, ready to get along with him, to compromise, as if that relaxed family had argued his case.

“You don't know why?” he said.

“I don't know why.”

“New Haven,” he said, gesturing at the woods that were not New Haven, apparently imagining New Haven superimposed on them. “I've been there longer than you have. I was born there.”

“That's why I married you,” I said. “I was bored with people who complain about New Haven.”

“Then why spread bad news? Penney Serra. Christian Prince. Haven't we been criticized enough?”

“By
we
you mean the citizens of New Haven?”

“What else would I mean?”

“Why would my curiosity make people criticize us?”

“Next thing you'll be on the radio again, talking about New Haven murders.”

I hadn't had such a specific idea yet. “It's a thought,” I said, “but wouldn't it be possible to present it in a such a way that—”

“No, it wouldn't. You presented prostitution with all sorts of do-gooder, scholarly fuss, and the message was, New Haven is a city of whores.”

“
No.
”

“That's how it sounded to me.” His stubborn bulk moved beside me.

“You barely heard any of it,” I said.

“I heard enough.”

Now I was angry. “You're acting as if I arrived three days ago, determined to destroy the place.”

“You and your Yale friends.”

“Oh, come on! Yale barely tolerates Gordon, because he cares about the stuff
you
care about!”

To my surprise, Pekko bent and released the snap on Arthur's leash. We hadn't seen any people or dogs for a long time. Arthur had been sniffing and peeing, behaving as politely as he ever did on a walk. Of course he bounded away again. Pekko watched with satisfaction, standing still and nodding, so his beard rose and fell. “It's time to turn back,” he said.

As we turned, he brushed my shoulder with his arm, a rough, apologetic gesture of amity. I turned toward him and took his white-bearded face in my hands. “Let's not fight,” I said. “I won't do anything without telling you all about it.”

“Well, there
have
been murders,” he said gruffly. Then he took my shoulders in his hands and almost harshly thrust his tongue into my mouth. When he pulled away, he said, “I can't bear it.”

“I know,” I said, and we set off, while Arthur followed us, running ahead, then turning to look for us, staying away from other people, behaving—after all—like a dog who didn't need to be restrained. The air was cooler, and the light jacket I wore was no longer enough. I zipped it and wound my arm around Pekko's, drawing warmth from his body.

We were silent a long time. Then Pekko said quietly, “Look. I know something about Marie Valenti.”

“About her?”

“About how she was killed.”

I said, “You mean New Haven killed her. Unidentified poor black kids with unstable home environments killed her. You mean that if I start talking about murder, some of the time I'm inevitably talking about poor blacks killing middle-class whites. You mean I ought to publicize something else about New Haven. Successful black middle class. Integrated neighborhoods. Falling crime rate.”

I stopped and sighed and tried to gather my thoughts. New Haven does have a successful black middle class, some integrated neighborhoods, and a falling crime rate. I had no impulse to study those subjects. Death had seized my imagination, which has always gone where it wants to go. Surely there was a way to make a public presentation on murder in New Haven—whether I was talking about radio or something else—that would not just encourage the city's critics. I suddenly remembered a short, obnoxious woman who thrust herself in front of me at a gathering I once attended in Philadelphia. “
How
can you live in New Haven?” she said.

Pekko didn't reply to my account of the causes of Marie Valenti's death, so I kept talking, trying to explain that something about murder intrigued me, and it wasn't the sensationalism. “I wanted to think about prostitution for the same reason,” I said. “Honestly, it isn't just sex and violence.” We approached the parking lot again, and I crouched to call Arthur, who thrust his hard head into my breasts as he did at home, letting me snap the leash on once more. “I want to know,” I said, rising and understanding myself a little better than I had—entranced with what I now understood—“I want to know what it's like to be someone else. And it seems easier to find out if I can think about someone going to bed with a stranger than if I think about someone cooking a chicken.” I asked myself what about murder interested me. Not the moment of being murdered but the moment of murdering. I thought if I could fasten on that second—the second of pulling the trigger, pushing in the knife—then I'd know someone. I'd know someone just when everything came apart for him, when he did something terrible, secret, and amazing.

I didn't want it to sound as if murder was good. “I'm not saying,” I said, as I put Arthur into the car, then got into the driver's seat and waited for Pekko—who hadn't spoken for a while—to walk around to his side. “I'm not saying prostitution and murder are good. I'm not saying it's fine to have them in New Haven because they're great!” I drove out of the parking lot. Wasn't that what I was saying? Wasn't my defense that prostitution and murder were so inherently interesting that a city was all but enhanced by their existence within its borders? Well, if that was the case, I'd better deny it, I thought, turning the car toward home. Eventually I'd figure out something more plausible and less shocking. “I'm definitely not saying that,” I finished and was finally silenced by my inability to make sense of my feelings.

We drove without speaking for most of the hour it took us to get home. Without consulting Pekko, I stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts and brought containers of coffee to the car. He took his and drank it.

As we crossed the New Haven line, making our way through the trafficky western edge of the city, with its shopping centers and strip development, Pekko seemed to come to himself again, studying his fellow New Haveners on Whalley Avenue. He no longer seemed angry or impassive. The people on the street were indeed different from anybody we might have noticed up north in Litchfield County. It was late Saturday afternoon by now, and Orthodox Jews in black hats, leading big families, were walking near a synagogue. Two black teenage girls in shorts, intent on their conversation, waited to cross Whalley, not seeming to mind the evening chill. A small child lingered behind them, one finger in mouth, eyes on the passing cars, looking just about to figure everything out. I stopped for a red light. Pekko said, “I know who killed Marie Valenti. I've been alone with this. I want to tell you. Can you listen? Can I trust you?”

“Trust me?”

“I know if I tell you something in confidence, you'll keep it a secret. I want you also to forget this plan to find out about murder
in New Haven. It's not a good plan. You have to trust me, and I'll trust you.”

“Sweetie, I don't know what you're talking about, but you can trust me.”

“Marie Valenti was not killed by a black teenager or a group of black teenagers. She was killed by a white kid she'd known in middle school. Nobody knew he was here that night. He'd moved away.”

“How do
you
know?” For a moment I thought he was just pretending to know something, something he'd somehow deduced. “What paper do you read?”

“I don't live like the rest of you, speculating from headlines. There are people in this town who know what's going on, and I'm one of them.”

“But how?”

“I knew them both. I was a sub when they were at Fair Haven Middle School. I made friends with the boy. He'd come to see me now and then when he was in high school. Two, three years after she died, he came and told me. By then he came to New Haven occasionally, to see his grandparents. Nobody thought anything.”