Workmen were eviscerating Broadway at Prince. The jack-hammers were going, girls walked by in their slip dresses. From the coffee bar at the front of Dean and DeLuca, I saw a girl whose lace underwear showed above her wrap skirt and thought about how these women would have seemed to the kids in Deb's Peace Corps group, Tonga sixteen, with their long dresses to wear in a conservative, Christian society.
I'd spent years preparing to meet Dennis. In my knapsack I had documents from New Zealand, the analyses the government had done for the Tongans on Deb and Dennis's clothing twenty-six years before. I wanted to be ready if he said he was innocent.
Dennis arrived promptly at noon. He was the man I'd seen in
Brooklyn a few days before, with dark glasses and a fixed, lowered, oxlike expression.
We shook hands, and Dean and DeLuca suddenly felt tight as a closet. He gave a tilt of his head, and we went out.
"Do you go by the standard journalistic ethics?" he said, turning onto Prince.
"Yes, why?"
"So…everything I tell you is going to be offthe record."
"Okay."
And I interpreted that in the strictest way. "Everything I tell you." Not anything he asked me, or showed me.
We spent the afternoon together. As we talked, we walked up and down lower Manhattan, sticking to the big avenues. In some ways he was the most important person in the story, and I didn't understand who he was.
There were two theories about him. One was the anybody-can-snap theory that an old colleague of his, Gay Roberts, had told me in New Zealand. In his second year in Tonga, Dennis was isolated and unhappy, and one bad thing after another had happened, till he'd snapped, Gay said-it might happen to anyone. Then there was the evil-genius theory that the Tongan police minister, 'Akau'ola, and Deb's former boyfriend Frank Bevacqua, subscribed to. Dennis was a poker player. He'd planned this to a fare-thee-well, playing lawyers and governments and shrinks off each other.
Dennis walked beside me, now and then giving the faintest smile. The same untelling mug that people had watched during his nine-day trial. He stared straight ahead through dark-brown Armani glasses, but now and then I got a glimpse of his eyes: deep-set, dark, big, liquid holes. I couldn't say what he was thinking, though when I told him the Gay Roberts theory he went to a plate-glass window and traced a big circle on it with his finger and then stuck his finger in the middle of the circle.
His beard was shaved neatly around his mouth and cheeks, but his shoulders in a cutoff Champion T-shirt were hairy, and he had a funny walk in his jeans shorts. His manner was so sensitive that it sometimes seemed feminine. There was that tenderness Barbara Williams had seen. Now and then he reached out and grabbed me, to stop me from walking into traffic, and the sense his friends had had in Tonga, that he would do anything for you, was mine. A couple of times he stopped me in a brotherly way to tug the zipper up on my knapsack. It was his mind that was most interesting. It was strange, and it could go anywhere. And he was funny.
When we hit Union Square, he pulled out a folded piece of paper and read me a proposal. He said I could convey his terms to my editors, so I will report its fuzzy outline here: Dennis had no interest in my book coming out, but if I waited a few years to publish he would tell me everything.
I should have anticipated such a gambit. Emile had described to me a chilling visit to Dennis in jail after the murder when Dennis had unfolded a grand double-jeopardy scheme in which Emile wouldcomeforwardatthelastminuteofthetrialandtaketherap, freeing Dennis-after which Dennis would come forward during Emile's trial. In this way, Dennis had theorized, they would both go free.
What I told Dennis was that he should come forward because of the havoc the case had left in the minds of a hundred or so people who knew about it, the idea that a person could kill someone and walk away from it. I reminded him of what Tongans had said to him many times, that he must apologize to the girl's family and ask their forgiveness. I reminded him of the scene in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya the prostitute and says, What should I do? and Sonya says, Go to the crossroads and kiss the ground in four directions and say I have sinned, and God will give you life again.
It was my own form of bluff. The Gardners didn't want to talk to Dennis. If Dennis went to Deborah's mother in Idaho on bended knee, Wayne would know what to do with him and it wasn't listen. Wayne wanted Dennis imprisoned, or hanged back in Tonga. He wanted justice.
I didn't tell Dennis that. What was his idea of justice, anyway? I'd learned that he was too interior a person to believe in justice, his imagination too crazy and elaborate. He lacked any superego. This was just some misunderstanding that had happened between a couple of people. "She deserved it," he had said in Tonga, and maybe he still believed that, and in that sense he seemed to me evil. He had treated the murder and his release as a form of accomplishment, not something to be regretted.
He'd maintained a poker face for three months in Tonga. He had almost killed himself with hunger strikes two or three times so as to be kept in the jail in downtown Nuku'alofa, near his friends, rather than at the isolated prison farm. And while Emile had refused to play the double-jeopardy game, other friends had helped him. He'd made a kind of confession to Barbara Williams, in order to gain admission back into the human family, but Barbara's loving expectation that he would be incarcerated in a mental hospital meant nothing to him. Another friend had given him a Bible that he had read thoroughly in jail, and he had then told Dr. Stojanovich that he was Deb's Jesus Christ and savior and she was possessed by the devil-or he had allowed Stojanovich to say as much on the stand. Then, in the States, Dennis had told Dr. Lebensohn that Deb had led him on and crushed him. Two different stories, each the key to its respective legal doorway.
Believing it pointless to cite a larger social good, I appealed to Dennis's grandiosity. I said that what he had pulled off was actually a stunning addition to the annals of crime. There was a brilliance to it, a negative brilliance, for sure, but most surprisingly, the story was unsung.
I was going to change that; didn't he want to help?
"Okay, if I'm as smart as you say I am, then how come it's not me with the big house by the lake in Seattle?"
"You're as smart as Bill Gates, you just care about different things," I said.
I'd pictured this encounter for years, and always with explosive scenes. He did get angry a couple of times, and I had the underlying sense that he was deeply dissociated, but all in all it was a civilized meeting. He was a free man in Soho. We were two middle-aged cerebral New Yorkers, lost in conversation, tied together by intense feelings about a beautiful loner of a woman whom he had prevented from ever growing old, and whose crystalline girlhood had trapped me, too, in seventies amber.
We went back to Dean and DeLuca. I got a bottle of juice and he got a lemonade, and we walked south. "I want to show you my pictures," I said.
We sat on a rusted iron stoop on Grand Street and I showed him one hundred or so of the images I'd collected. He flipped impassively through the pictures of Deb, broke down when he saw a picture of his old friend Paul Boucher, lost it for a few minutes, had to walk off down the street. The narcissistic monster, only thinking about his own bloody life.
Then he carefully drew something from his knapsack he'd brought along, a stiff card with a blue edge, his membership in the Royal Nuku'alofa Martini Club, a group founded by expatriates in 1975. It was an artifact from before Deborah, before his life had fallen apart.