“This is blackmail,” Susan said.
“Nonetheless, what’s your answer? Does she come to Mexico with me, or to Tampa with you? Or do you stay right here in Calusa this weekend? I’m sure your friend can find someone to take those football tickets off his—”
“You are a son of a bitch,” she said.
“Decide, Susan.”
“Take her to Mexico.”
“Thank you.”
“A rotten son of a bitch,” she said, and hung up.
I felt as if I’d just successfully pleaded a case before the Supreme Court of the land.
Oddly and surprisingly, it was my daughter Joanna who helped me make up my mind about George N. Harper. Her reaction to the news that her mother had “reconsidered” the stand she’d taken on Mexico was completely ecstatic, but she fell almost immediately into a blue funk that indicated to me she had something more important on her mind. I have learned over the years that it’s never wise to pry when Joanna is mulling a problem. If she wants to tell me about it, if she wants my advice or my solace, she’ll eventually spill it all out, often quite suddenly, as she did that night after dinner.
In Calusa, the temperatures at night sometimes drop alarmingly, even in the best of months. November is not one of the better months, although we’d been blessed these past few weeks with benign temperatures and sunny skies while my partner Frank’s pals back in New York were suffering through ten-below-zero temperatures. The house was chilly tonight. I had set fire to one of those fake logs you buy in a drugstore, and I was pouring myself a cognac when Joanna said, without preamble, “Do you think Heather is a slut?”
For a moment, I had difficulty remembering just who Heather was. Ever since Joanna first entered nursery school, there had been a constant parade of young girls in the house, all of them with chic, sophisticated names like Kim, Darcy, Greer, Alyce (with a y), Candace, Erica, Stacey, Crystal, and yes, Heather. I sometimes wondered what had happened to all those good old-fashioned names like Mary, Jean, Joan, Nancy, Alice (with an i), and Betty.
“Heather?” I said.
“Yeah, Heather.”
I dimly recalled a plump little girl with mousy brown hair and dark brown eyes who — at the age of six, anyway — had an alarming habit of bursting into tears whenever she was supposed to spend the night at our house. I could not reconcile this sobbing little tyke with the image Joanna’s word had conjured: a slut was somebody who stood on a street corner in Frank’s beloved New York City, swinging a satin handbag, skirt slit to her thigh, winking at passing strangers and asking them if they’d like to have a good time.
“Everybody’s saying she’s a slut,” Joanna said.
“Who’s everybody?”
“Everybody.”
In Joanna’s lexicon, “everybody” meant all the girls in the eighth grade.
“Do you think she is?” I asked.
“Well, she may be fooling around a little, but who cares? So’s everybody else.”
In Joanna’s lexicon, “fooling around” meant being intimate with a member of the opposite sex; “everybody else” meant a handful of girls who were precocious.
“Not me,” she said quickly, and grinned, and then became immediately sober again. “That’s not the point,” she said, “whether she is or she isn’t. I just don’t like them saying she is without knowing for sure, I mean.”
“Is she a close friend of yours?”
“No, not close.”
“But a friend?”
“Not even a friend, really. I mean, I know her to say hello to, that’s all. I mean, she’s not a very attractive person, Dad. She’s fat, and... well, she’s sort of dumb for a place like Saint Mark’s, which is pretty hard to get into, even if it isn’t Bedloe. And her language... well, she curses a lot, even more than any of the other girls do — that’s normal for Saint Mark’s, cursing a lot, the whole ‘shit, piss, cunt, fuck’ routine, you know? But Heather really goes over board with it, like she’s trying to prove how mature she is, you know what I mean?”
I was still reeling over the string of profanities my fourteen year-old daughter had casually dropped into the conversation.
“Dad?” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“You know what I mean?”
“Sure, she—”
“Sort of shows off, you know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But that doesn’t make her a slut, does it?”
“Not necessarily.”
“I mean, even if she is fooling around a little. Which nobody knows for sure.”
“What’s a little?”
“Well... with more than one boy. More than the boy you’re going steady with. Maybe two or three boys. Or maybe four.”
“Uh-huh.” I was afraid to ask what “a lot” might be.
“Dad? Are you okay?”
“Yes, fine,” I said.
“So everybody’s giving her the cold shoulder, as if she’s some kind of... pariah? Is that a word?”
“That’s a word.”
“Yeah, pariah. Which, even if she isn’t as gorgeous as some of the other kids, and curses a lot, or whatever, that’s no reason to treat her as if she doesn’t exist, is it? Or calling her a slut behind her back, even sometimes to her face? Garland called her a slut to her face today.”
“Garland.”
“Yeah, Garland McGregor. You know Garland, she slept over once.”
“Right, Garland.”
“Who, I mean, was only fooling around when she was thirteen. Garland, I mean. With this boy from Bedloe, even if he was stunning. I almost burst into tears when it happened today, when Garland called her a slut to her face. I mean, she’s got feelings, too, hasn’t she? Heather, I mean. Hasn’t she got feelings, too?”
“Yes, darling, she has feelings, too,” I said.
“I’m going to go up to her on Monday and tell her to ignore what all those assholes are saying.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Do you think that’s the right thing to do? I mean, Dad, I don’t even like her. And suppose... well... suppose she really is a slut, like everybody’s saying she is?”
“But you don’t know that for sure, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“And neither do the others.”
“No, they don’t know it for sure, Dad.”
“Then, yes, it’s the right thing to do.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Joanna said.
I had already decided I would try to defend George N. Harper.
4
Section 905.17 of the Florida Statutes, in describing who may be present during a grand jury session, unequivocally states: “No person shall be present at the sessions of the grand jury except the witness under examination, the state attorney and his assistant state attorneys, designated assistants as provided for in s. 27.18, the court reporter or stenographer, and the interpreter.”
This may seem to be loading the dice against the defendant, but such is not the case. He does not have to testify if he chooses not to, but when he is invited to testify, and assuming he accepts the invitation, he will once again be read his rights and he may at any time interrupt the questioning to consult with his attorney, who is waiting just outside the door to the sealed chamber.
On Monday morning, November 23, I was waiting in the courthouse corridor while George Harper was inside listening to the testimony of the doctor who had done the autopsy on Michelle Harper, and the garage attendant who had sold him the empty five-gallon gasoline can and subsequently filled it for him, and the laboratory technician who had lifted Harper’s prints from the can, and the police officer who swore that he had taken Michelle’s criminal complaint on the morning of November 16, and the fisherman who had positively identified Harper as the man he’d seen struggling with a white woman on Whisper Key beach that same night. Harper did not once come out to the hallway to summon me for assistance or advice; that was because I’d told him to decline any invitation to testify.