But when I asked the question, he didn’t respond with his usual annoyance about how people didn’t understand the need to give everybody the best defense. The legal system — aside, of course, from its divorce laws — was apparently the last thing on his heavily weighted mind. First he looked surprised, then goofy and relieved, and then he nodded and sighed.
This was a man about to spill his guts. True Confessions were imminent, and I didn’t want any part. I didn’t want to hear about it because I was positive that this time, the word “divorce” would emerge from his lips and that one word would shatter my life’s work, this creation I’d built and maintained — my marriage. We would become one more statistic, one more broken home. I could not allow that to happen. Can you blame me? I pretended I had something to do in another room, and I prevented his saying anything at all.
And what I did in that other room was think. I needed a plan. Another plan so that Gorgeous Gina didn’t destroy what I had built with, yes, my sweat and my tears.
I’m a thrifty woman. A good housekeeper who likes everything in its place. Even George admits that. Waste not, want not could be my motto through good times and bad. I salvage what is salvageable and recycle the rest, and that includes a perfectly fine husband and marriage.
I thought briefly again about “planting” Gina in the garden. It had been a flawless maneuver and would undoubtedly work again. But it felt redundant to murder another woman, and it made me nervous — I didn’t want that sort of thing to become a bad habit.
So instead, I recycled Lili.
Don’t take that literally. I didn’t destroy my glorious flower beds by digging her up. But I reused her all the same.
Time had passed. I couldn’t say then, or now, whether I’d planned this all along, but maybe the idea was squirreled away — saved for a rainy day, in case of emergency. As I said, I’m a thrifty woman, despite the luxury in which I live.
I spent a lot of time thinking it through, weighing the pros and cons, looking for booby traps, and waiting till I was sure it would work.
It had been a long time since I’d acted, not since before my marriage. Except, of course, for acting like I didn’t know what was going on too much of the time.
I decided a vaguely Slavic accent would work. I rented Ninotchka and listened to Garbo pretend to be a Russian. I’d been told her accent was laughably bad, but if it worked for her, why not for me? By the end of the movie, I was close enough for my purposes. I made the call from one of the phones near the restrooms at the city’s finest hotel. “Is police?” I asked. “I have need talk police about crime. Bad crime. A killing.”
That got their interest. “No,” I said. “Not now. Crime happen five years, April ten. I know day. I visiting my cousin that day, and I see it and do nothing. Too afraid. Is how it is from Russia. Now I feel bad. I think maybe, is forgot, is long ago, but then I see on TV, the old cases — the cold, yes? I see the cold police in U.S.A. still care, so now I tell you. I saw man kill lady and bury her in yard. I tell you where.”
I explained that back then, my cousin worked for a lady in the neighborhood, and it was so nice out, we’d gone for a walk. My cousin knew a shortcut to a small stream, and we were crossing it when we heard a noise. We didn’t know what it was, but we crept closer and saw him bury a woman. We were too afraid to say anything at the time, sure we’d be deported — or killed by the same crazy man.
I did quite a fine shudder and stammer as I said this.
“My cousin did not know dead lady,” I continued. “Me, of course not, how could I? But she knows man who owns house. Alexander is last name. Important man, she say.”
They asked my name. “First name, Roazyczka,” I said. “R-o-a-z-y-c-z-” Three times, I reached that point, and the man asked me to start over. And to tell him my last name. “No, no. I can’t. I—”
“You won’t get in trouble,” he said. “I need it for the form. And your cousin’s name, too.”
“She goes back to Russia. Not here no more. I hang up now, mister. I am not… I am not legal. Maybe you don’t hurt me, but the INS—”
He sighed. I knew he would. He wanted the address more than my name, and I gave it to him. “Now is flowers on top,” I said. “I have looked since then.”
I hung up. Quick, efficient, and Roazyczka turned back into an expensively dressed, buffed, and maintained middle-aged suburbanite.
Poor George. They got that warrant together faster than I could have imagined. There went my perennial bed, after all, but the flowers were sacrificed in the name of the sanctity of marriage.
Of course he couldn’t say where he’d been that week. His appointment book showed no trips, and he didn’t have proof of having been away. His lifelong expertise at leaving no trail or traces was effective, though not in the way he might have wished.
It didn’t help that they could immediately identify the human remains, because the remains of Lili Beth’s purse were there as well. As was, alas, George’s gun. The prints on it were pretty messed up at this point, but they surely weren’t mine. Garden gloves don’t leave prints.
Turned out, others had known about the affair. Lili Beth hadn’t been discreet. This time, this wife really had been the last to know.
The prosecution made it clear that George had had a string of women — even I was surprised by the variety of entries on the list they produced — and he’d dropped each in turn. Lili Beth was, then, one in a series, but the scenario they constructed was that she hadn’t accepted her walking papers and wasn’t about to be dropped.
I had to admire the way the prosecution put together a story that made a lot of sense. Apparently, Lili Beth had come to the house for a confrontation when George was there alone, and then, with pressure and conflict and fear that the wife — I — would return at any moment, it became an all-too-predictable crime of passion.
Of course George pleaded innocent. But you could almost see how happy the D.A.’s office was to have him in deep trouble — the same deep trouble most of George’s clients had been in. Unfortunately, George did not have George as his lawyer, so George was pretty much doomed.
I was given permission to replant my perennial bed, and I must say making the garden lovely again helped me handle my tension over this terrible mess.
Throughout the trial, I stood by my man. Humiliated as I might have been with the public revelations of George’s extramarital adventures, I remained steadfast, and the truth was, I wasn’t acting. I was sad my husband had wound up being tried, but I preferred that to my marriage being tried to its limits.
Gina, I must say, attended the trial on its first day. That must have been enough for her, because she never came back.
George was given a life sentence. Even if he is granted a parole in fifteen or twenty years, by then he’ll be beyond much more than wishful thinking. I will never again be the last to know, because there won’t be anything to know.
There’s comfort in that.
I’m sleeping better than I ever did, now that I have no worries about where and with whom my husband may have strayed.
There’s comfort in that, too.
These days, we understand and accept each other. That’s one of the pluses of a long and solid marriage. It came about during one of my first visits to the prison, when he insisted, as always, that he was innocent.
“Yes, George,” I said calmly. I looked him in the eye. “I know that. I of all people on earth, I, your wife, absolutely, with all my heart and soul, know that you did not commit that crime.”