The Cocktail Waitress

33

Of the drive to the station in their squad car I remember nothing at all, except for the heavy metal grill that separated the front seat, where they were, from the rear, where they’d put me. Sergeant Young helped me out of the car when we arrived, assistance I needed because I couldn’t use my hands, and then kindly stood between me and the flashbulbs exploding as we made our way into the building. Once inside, I was booked and stripped bare and issued a prison outfit of some heavy, uncomfortable fabric softened only slightly, and scented harshly, by a thousand rugged launderings. They didn’t have a brassiere in my size, so I did without, a decision I swiftly regretted as my nipples were soon rubbed raw against the inside of the shirt.

They stuck me in a cell, and there I waited, alone, with nothing to see or to do, except for taking trips from the bunk that was attached to one wall to the sink that was attached to another. It wasn’t cold, but I was shivering. I wrapped the thin blanket with which the bunk came supplied around my shoulders, and I sat, and I thought about what was in store for me.

I’d known Private Church was out for blood-he’d made that plain. But what he could possibly have found from Sunday to Tuesday that would have justified arresting me in connection with Earl’s death, I couldn’t imagine. I wished now that I’d used the car ride to ask them. Though probably they wouldn’t have said, they might, and at least then I’d have been less completely in the dark.

But I hadn’t. I’d been too shocked, too dumbfounded, even to speak in my own defense. I’d sat then as I sat now, staring straight ahead and wondering what my life would be from this point forward. I heard Ethel’s cruel words echo in my head-As long as you’re not in jail, Joan. I’d focus on that if I were you-and wondered whether I would ever see my son again.

Some time later a guard unlocked the cell door and walked me down a corridor to a gray-walled room. We didn’t pass a window to the outside, so I couldn’t have said if it was day or night. The room held three chairs and the guard guided me to one, where I sat.

Church and Young came through the door a few minutes later. They each took one of the remaining seats. Church was holding a sheaf of papers in a folder and he launched in without preamble: “Why’d you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kill him.”

“I already told you, I didn’t touch his medicine-”

“Not your husband, Mrs. White. Tom Barclay.”

I’d thought I knew what it was to be stunned, to be staggered- but this was one blow too many and I found myself reeling. “Tom? But Tom’s not dead.”

They exchanged a glance. “I’d say we know a dead body when we see one.”

“… What happened?”

“Why don’t you tell us? You were there this morning.”

“How-”

Sergeant Young said: “Your car. It was seen outside his house. We have people going over both right now.”

“Tom was alive when I left-asleep-”

“In the bath?” asked Private Church.

“No, in bed, naturally. Why, was he in the bath when-”

He got up from his chair and stepped closer to me. I knew somehow that I was supposed to stay seated, and I did, but looking up at him looming over me, clenched fist on one hip, put my heart into my throat-as no doubt it was mean to. “Yes. In the bath, with an empty bottle by him on the floor and both wrists cut.” He turned a black-and-white photograph to face me. It was Tom, beautiful Tom, only not beautiful any longer. I bent double and vomited on the floor.

Sergeant Young handed me a folded handkerchief so I could wipe my mouth. I think I thanked him. I can’t remember. I know I tried to say something to Private Church, something to push back against his accusations, but all that came out was, “I didn’t-We didn’t-”

“Mrs. White,” he said, “you were seen together at your husband’s funeral. You were seen driving off with him after. You spent the night with him.”

“That’s so, but-”

“In celebration of your husband’s death, you started drinking-”

“We didn’t! Give me any test you want, you’ll see. I don’t drink. I never drink.”

“Well, he drank, anyway, and not just whiskey.” He waved another sheet of paper in front of me. “You want to read me what else his body was full of when he died?”

It was the coroner’s report, and typed onto a line by his thumb I saw a long scientific term: alpha-phthalimidoglutarimide. I shook my head.

“You put him in the tub-”

“He’s six foot tall!”

“You’re strong, you told us so yourself. You lifted your husband off that stairway to the chair, when he had one of his attacks.”

“That was just ten feet away.”

“And this was twenty-five, and you did it.”

“You can’t think-”

“You cut his wrists with one of his razor blades-sliced up the tips of his fingers a bit too, a nice touch-”

I let my eyes slide shut, let his voice wash over me.

“-and then you drove home and went to sleep like an innocent lamb. A three-time murderess, but do you have any of the deaths you caused on your conscience? Not Joan White, no. You’re ready for number four!”

Then came Sergeant Young’s voice: “Enough.”

“No, it’s not enough, she’s still sitting there calm as anything-”

“It’s enough.”

Silence, for a time. Then, Private Church, in a cooler voice, said: “Take her back to her cell.” And I felt a hand at my elbow, raising me from the chair.

I opened my eyes. Both men were staring at me intently. The guard who’d led me into the room was by my side, ready to lead me out again. Before he could, I spoke, more calmly than I thought myself capable of: “Yes we were together-Tom and I. Once before I married Earl, and then last night was the second time. In between we never saw each other. Not once. We never spoke. Not once. Ask Liz, where I worked. Ask Bianca. You know them both, Sergeant, they’ll tell you the truth. I walked out on him the first time, to get married, and I meant it. He knew I meant it. As long as Earl was my husband, I’d have kept on meaning it, and he knew that too. The only thing that put me back in his arms was Earl’s death, and the funeral, and you, Private Church, the way you were hounding me-it was too much to bear alone, and I needed to escape it, all of it, for just one night.”

“Just one,” Private Church said. “And then you killed him.”

“No! No. Why in the world would I kill him? Especially when I knew you were watching me eagle-eyed and already suspected the worst-but forget that, why would I want to? I wasn’t married to Tom, he had no claim on me. Leaving him was simple. I just walked out again, as I did the last time. Only difference was I didn’t leave a note this time. But he’d have known what it meant.” My voice caught. “That I wasn’t coming back. That this was the end.”

“And killed himself in despair?”

“Don’t mock him,” I snapped, some of my old temper coming back. “If he did as you say, then yes, I think we must assume he felt despair.”

“Over losing you,” Church muttered. “The poor fool, he should have celebrated.”

Without thinking I raised my hand to slap him, but found it caught by the guard at my side, and thank goodness. I had enough laid at my feet already without adding a charge of assaulting an officer.

But he backed off a step or two, so I felt I’d accomplished something.

A knock came at the door then, and Sergeant Young went to answer it. He stood speaking to someone I couldn’t see on the other side, and returned a moment later with a slip of paper in his hand. He spoke a few words into Private Church’s ear and handed over the paper. As Church read it, I could see the muscles of his jaw tighten.

“Put her back in her goddam cell,” he said.

I’d never seen him so rattled before. I asked: “What is it? Is it something about my case? Tell me-” All the while, being shepherded none-too-gently toward the door and on into the hall. “Please,” I said, directing a last look at Sergeant Young. “Is it something-”

“Yes,” he said, drawing an angry stare from his partner for answering me. “It’s something, all right.”

It took another 36 hours before I found out what.

In the cabinet beneath the sink in Tom’s half-bath-the very place I had changed my clothes that morning, the very spot-the policemen searching his house had turned up a battered satchel containing, under a pair of paint-stained trousers and a leather tool belt, a used syringe, along with a small tin box. The box was empty except for some powder in the corners, but in the hands of the police chemists those grains of powder were enough to establish what it had once held.

And the syringe had traces of Thalidomide in it as well. How he’d gained access to our home I never learned. Private Church, of course, asserted that I’d let him in, but it isn’t true. As far as I knew, Tom Barclay had never even set foot on the grounds before the day of Earl’s funeral, much less inside the mansion itself. And yet, he must have-because how else could one of Earl’s syringes have found its way into his possession? And how else could the drug have been introduced into Earl’s intravenous bottle …?

Liz had warned me that Tom was not a patient boy-but I could never have imagined that his impatience would carry him this far, to craft a scheme of eliminating my husband to get me back. Armed with the information Liz had given him about the true nature of our marriage and the reasons for it, he’d hatched this elaborate plot to make one of Earl’s attacks fatal. Of any other man I wouldn’t have believed it-but Tom had been the one to hatch, and to believe in, a plan to irradiate the nettles in Chesapeake Bay to improve the swimming.

And then-

And then, having carried out his plan, having killed a man for me, and having had me again for a night, he’d woken without me there, without even a word of farewell. He must have been consumed with memories of my last parting from him, and of the utter silence that followed. Did he feel angry at me? Toyed with? Despairing? I’ll never know. But in the cold of dawn he’d gotten drunk again-hopelessly, terribly drunk-with what consequence you already know.

They meant to keep me locked up, but I called Bill Dennison in on it and he found me an outstanding courtroom man, a Mr. R. Harry Hoopes, Esquire, expensive as anything but worth every penny, Bill claimed. And watching him work on my behalf before the judge at my hearing gave me confidence, as clearly the man was competent, although he unfortunately reminded me strongly of my father, and so any good feelings were mitigated. And for all his promises of getting the case against me thrown out, he got to go home every night while night after night I returned to my cell.

But he made the case I needed him to make. He pointed out the many times I could have let Earl die, and chose to save him instead. He pointed out the fact that I’d given away most of Earl’s money, when I didn’t have to, to Earl’s stepchildren. The argument was made that there was still a good deal left, by the standards of a woman who’d had no electricity, gas, or phone not so long ago, as well as an investment company still operating that would generate more, as I was now a part owner; but Mr. Hoopes, Esquire, countered with the joint accounts, which eliminated any need I might otherwise have had for my husband to die before I could get my hands on his money.

The other lawyer was no slouch himself, ingratiating himself with the judge and sounding oh so reasonable as he worked to tie the noose around my neck-yes, Your Honor, maybe it’s so that she had access already to her husband’s money, but faced with the choice between the money and an old, sick husband or the same money and a young, handsome one, what does Your Honor think a beautiful young woman like the accused would choose? To which my lawyer volleyed back, “… Then why would she kill him?” The reply being, “She’d conspired in a murder, sir, and knew the police were closing in, she needed to pin the crime on him so it would not get pinned on her.” And back and forth it went.

The newspapers got hold of it, as I later learned, and ran story after story, with photographs of Earl from their files and of me from the day of my arrest, Sergeant Young’s body only partly blocking me from view. They’d even got one somehow of me in my uniform from the Garden, how I don’t know, and they ran it over and over, with black bars to cover up what they deemed indecent. Of course this made it appear more indecent than it actually was.

Inevitably, the headline writers, knowing of my job and faced with three deaths in which I was alleged to have served the men in my life a lethal concoction, or anyway one that facilitated their deaths, took to calling me “the Cocktail Waitress”-just like that, with capital letters, one for each capital charge against me. It was a sobriquet that caught on, and one that has dogged me ever since. It is why I finally began taping this, so that my name might be cleared, and my children not be saddled with a shame and notoriety that I never deserved and they certainly do not.

Children-yes. But I’ve leapt ahead of myself.

Mr. Hoopes made his last impassioned statement to the judge late in the afternoon two weeks to the day from the date of my arrest, and I had the night that followed to stew and to wonder what the outcome would be. Would my case proceed to trial, and from there, if I were to lose, on to sentencing? I could practically feel the restraints closing on my wrists and ankles, the metal cap lowering over my brow, and if I slept a wink all night I didn’t know it. But in the morning, word came down of the judge’s decision: two words, Insufficient Evidence. And I was free.