The Red Parts Read online

I don’t know how long we stayed at his house, but eventually we drove back to my mother’s and stepfather’s. Once there my mother fumbled around in a storage closet looking for a board game for us to play. She said that she and her family had played a board game the night after Jane was killed, and that it had helped.

  I don’t remember playing the game, nor do I remember it helping.

  I do remember Emily swearing to me before going to sleep that night that she would never shed a single tear for our father, whom she had absolutely adored. So had I. I remember thinking at the time that her idea did not sound like a good one.

  AFTER THIS night Emily and I moved in with my mother and her new husband “full time.” The house they had recently purchased was perched so high up on a hill and so deep into the redwoods that in my dreams now it always appears as a fortress comprised solely of shadows and vines. It was perpetually damp and moldy, perpetually shrouded in fog. It was not unusual for my mother and I to spend an entire day chasing a single sunbeam throughout the house to sit in, then an entire evening hovering over the single heater, reading our books side by side, our clothes tented by hot air.

  Emily and I shared the basement of this house for about a year, although we each had our separate rooms. Until our stepfather remodeled it the basement retained the hippie remnants of the Doobie Brothers and Santana, both of whom had allegedly passed through the house before we got there: wooden-beaded doorways, floor-to-ceiling acoustic tiling. I fought to keep one of their leftover waterbeds, a goofy, jiggly thing I slept on until I left home.

  Not long after we moved in “full time,” the house was burglarized, which gave it an aura of imminent danger that never diminished. The burglars came in the late afternoon, a time of day when Emily and I were usually at home alone but on this day happened to stay late at school. Conversely our stepfather had happened to come home early, and he got a good look at the guy waiting in the get-away car at the bottom of our impossibly steep and long driveway. He never saw the face of the man inside, the one who yelled from upstairs, I have a gun, get out now. My stepfather ended up testifying against the getaway driver in court, and was enraged when, a few months down the line, we found ourselves seated at a booth next to him at an Italian restaurant down the street.

  After that, whenever I came home alone to the empty house I walked up its driveway in a slow zigzag with a deepening sense of dread. Once at the top I would let myself in with the spare key that hung on a nail on the back of a redwood post, then undertake a brief but thorough search of the house to make sure there were no intruders or dead bodies in it. This ritual involved arming myself with a butcher knife and checking the closets, beds, and bathtubs for bodies before settling in and starting my homework. Often I talked aloud during the search, telling the invisible intruder that I was onto him, that I knew he was there, that I wasn’t afraid of him, not one bit.

  One night out at dinner during Leiterman’s trial, my mother tells me offhandedly that she has never liked hiking because she has always been afraid that she’ll come across a dead body along the trail. At first I think she’s completely bonkers. Then I remember this butcher-knife ritual. Then I fast-forward to my years working at a bar off the Bowery in New York’s East Village, and remember how undone I felt whenever the bathroom door was locked for a significant period of time, and an annoyed customer needing to pee would ask me to deal with it. After the obligatory loud knocking and shouts of Hello, anybody in there, I would unlock the door and swing it open quickly, fully expecting to find a dead body slumped over the toilet.

  Ninety-five percent of the time, the door had jammed from the inside, and the bathroom would be empty, just a tiny cubicle lit by a bulb wrapped in lavender cellophane, the kind of light that makes the space look hip and also too dark to find a vein. But the other 5 percent there would be a body, of someone who had OD’d or passed out. I knew that at least one person had died of a heroin overdose in there, and while I hadn’t been working that night it was enough to make the whole thing feel like Russian roulette. I dreaded breaking into the bathroom each night of the five years I worked there.

  I still dream about this dim lavender bathroom. Just the other night a woman slit her wrists in there—a woman we, as bar employees, were somehow supposed to be taking care of, making sure she didn’t pass out, shoot up, or hurt herself. But we fucked up, we let her get hold of a razor blade, and she locked herself in the little bathroom to die. The bathroom floor was made of metal grates; below the grates lay the molten center of the universe. She stretched out against the metal and let her blood spill down to the earth’s core, spraying the churning underworld with her fluids. As a courtesy she had wadded cotton into the porous parts of the brick walls beforehand. When we pulled the cotton out, torrents of her blood flooded the bar.

  The irony of this fear was that my apartment on the Lower East Side was itself a dope pit. When I got home from work late at night I had to check my roommate’s room for nodded-out, dopesick girls whose cigarettes might be burning holes in his furniture before I could go to sleep. More than once I’d wiped up weird white crud foaming out of his insensate mouth. Since I didn’t use, I never really knew what to do—I just wiped up the crud, made sure all the cigarettes were out, checked that everyone was breathing, and went to sleep.

  The truth was that my bed was a dope pit as well. In it I had come across the overdosed body of my junkie boyfriend on more than one occasion. The last of these times, after I had called 911 and hauled him to St. Vincent’s, I realized—at long last—that I might be in over my head. After getting him admitted I went outside in the pouring rain and called my mother from a pay phone. I was mortified but didn’t know what else to do. I hadn’t told her anything about the situation, hadn’t told her about finding his blue-gray body over and over again like so much dead meat in my bed, hadn’t told her about the nights of getting alcoholic hives and hyperventilating in the bathroom while he packed powder against the finger-nail of his pinky, saying This is the perfect amount for you, for small you.

  In the ambulance, when he came to, he said, I think I’ve killed my tongue, as if speaking through a cord of foam.

  I’m outside a hospital, I told her. It’s pouring. I think I have to get out of here.

  She listened for a while, then said, Well, what would Jesus do?

  She wasn’t kidding. She’s not even religious. She was probably just influenced by something she was reading.

  Jesus wouldn’t walk away, she said. Try to see the evening through.

  He’s going to die this time, I said.

  All the more reason.

  I was a complete fool then, but not so complete of a fool that I didn’t know, on some level, what I was doing. As the doctor attached electrodes to his chest, got his heartbeat to stabilize, and pronounced, He’s going to be fine, I felt an outsized relief flood through my body, along with a swell of pride. Ten years meant nothing. It was the night of my father’s death, but this time I’d arrived at his house in time, this time I was an adult and had all the skills to make it right.

  But “making it right” did not bring my father back. It just had me signing hospital release papers for a terrible junkie, who staggered home with me like a brain-dead puppy, confessed an affair with some dumb fellow junkie in the middle of the night, then went out to score at a gas station on Houston and Avenue C.

  The morning after this night I stayed in bed all day. I pretended I was one of those children with that disease where their bones shatter into a million pieces if they move too quickly or come into contact with anyone. I was sick, like the-boy-in-the-bubble. I took a medium-sized bottle of Jim Beam and drank from it under the covers while reading No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton.

  Without God, we are no longer persons. We become dumb animals under pain, happy if we can behave at least like quiet animals and die without too much confusion.

  For the first time in my life I felt paralyzed thinking about Christ. I dragged the phone into the nest of my bed and
called an old writing teacher who was famous for being a religious zealot. A Christian intellectual, she said. I told her I had seen an article she had recently published about Luke, I couldn’t remember where, could she send it to me, could she at least tell me what it had said?

  Why not just read the red parts on your own? she said.

  OK, I told her, hanging up. I’ll do that.

  I had no idea what she meant. I felt stupid then, but nearly everyone I’ve asked since hasn’t known either. In graduate school years later I even asked a professor of “textual scholarship” at a lecture and he just shrugged. At the time I imagined slitting a body from chin to genitals, spreading apart its internal organs and trying to read them like tea leaves.

  Just a few days later I witnessed from the window of this apartment the only murder I’ve yet to see. I woke up at 5 A.M. to the sound of a man running and a car screeching and looked out just in time to see three Chinese gang members whack the running man in the head with a baseball bat, then jump in their car and drive away. They had whacked him hard. A minute later an old Chinese woman in her nightgown ran down the block screaming, the thin plastic soles of her shoes flapping against the cobblestones, echoing. All of this happened in purplish morning light, the light that grows before dawn between the blackened tenements and the East River. The woman knelt down by his body, which was lying at a strange angle in the gutter, and cradled him. The amount of blood leaving his head was tremendous. I called 911 and they said, Were the assailants black or Hispanic. Neither, I said, and didn’t give my name. By 8 A.M. people were opening up their stores along Orchard Street, walking over the rust-colored stain on the sidewalk without seeing it, without knowing anything had ever happened there. By midafternoon the stain was gone.

  Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be, hereafter. A red part.

  Addendum

  AS JANE WAS going to print in the winter of 2004, I pondered writing an addendum that would announce the developments in her case. Schroeder had suggested it jokingly when we first spoke on the phone. My mother had told him about my forthcoming book, and, while he was intrigued by it, he wanted to make sure that I didn’t say anything in public about it before Leiterman had been arrested. I assured him that the book wouldn’t be out for months, and that poetry wasn’t a mass-market kind of a thing.

  Even so, he said, you’d better get ready to write an addendum. An addendum that explains everything.

  On November 12, 2004, I sat down at my desk in the Ponderosa Room, took out a piece of paper, and wrote at the top of the page:

  FIRST ATTEMPT AT AN ADDENDUM THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING

  The addendum took the form of a list:

  In 2001, around the time I started writing this book, unbeknownst to me, the box of evidence pertaining to Jane’s murder was removed from its storage locker and sent to the state crime lab in Lansing, Michigan, for genetic testing.

  Much of the genetic material found on the objects in the box—such as a large bloodstain on a yellow-and-white striped towel left at the crime scene, for example—presumably came from Jane herself. But certain pieces of evidence yielded foreign DNA, primarily in the form of cellular deposits found on several sites on Jane’s pantyhose.

  These cellular deposits were not from blood, semen, urine, or feces. They came from an unidentifiable source—the lab analyst is currently guessing it’s sweat. Wherever they came from, the analyst says there are copious amounts of them. “A mother lode.”

  On July 7, 2004, CODIS—the Combined DNA Index System, a computer database overseen by the FBI which compares DNA samples from convicted felons against evidentiary samples submitted by labs around the country—notified Lansing that foreign DNA cells from sampled sites #1–3 on Jane’s pantyhose had returned a cold hit, to a man by the name of Gary Earl Leiterman.

  Gary Earl Leiterman is a retired nurse who lives with his wife of many years, Solly, in a lakeside home in Pine Grove Township near Gobles, Michigan. He and Solly have two grown, adopted children, who are his wife’s sister’s children, both from the Philippines.

  Leiterman’s DNA entered CODIS due to a 2001 felony charge for forging narcotics prescriptions. He was arrested for using blank prescription forms from Borgess Medical Center, the hospital where he worked for many years, to obtain the painkiller Vicodin from a local Meijer’s. He was sentenced to drug rehab. Beyond this, he has no criminal record.

  Putting aside, for the moment, the many factors that can complicate statistical inferences, the odds that the “mother lode” of cellular material on Jane’s pantyhose could have come from someone other than Leiterman are roughly 171.7 trillion to one.

  The list could have ended there, and perhaps explained something. But it went on:

  8. On December 9, 2003, about eight months before the hit to Leiterman came in, CODIS returned a different hit in Jane’s case—this one to a man by the name of John David Ruelas.

  9. The Ruelas match came not from Jane’s pantyhose, but from a perfectly formed droplet of blood that was found on the back of the left hand of Jane’s dead body back in 1969. This droplet stood out to a cop at the time because it was not smeared, as was all other blood found on her. At her autopsy an examiner scraped this droplet into a miniature manila envelope, where it sat for the next thirty-odd years.

  10. After the CODIS match to Ruelas came in, the police immediately set out to find him. They found a thirty-seven-year-old man in prison, serving out a twenty- to forty-year sentence for beating his mother, Margaret Ruelas, to death on January 25, 2002.

  11. Ruelas had apparently beaten his mother for many years; his final assault left her with eleven broken ribs and her face “pounded purple.”

  12. On March 20, 1969, the night of Jane’s murder, John David Ruelas would have been four years old.

  13. From prison, Ruelas tells the police that he knows things about Jane’s murder—things he will share with them if they will bargain over his sentence. But since Ruelas was only four at the time and is now desperate to plea-bargain, no one trusts a word he says. As far as getting information from his caretakers in 1969 goes, his mother is (obviously) dead; it turns out that his father, David Ruelas, was also murdered, in a separate incident, back in the ‘70s. His father was killed with a hammer, rolled up in a carpet doused with gasoline, set on fire, and tossed into a dumpster. That case also remains unsolved.

  14. In a conference call with my family, the detectives admit that the match to John Ruelas is bizarre and disturbing. But, given the science, they say they have no choice but to believe that the little boy somehow “came into contact” with Jane’s body on the night of her murder. In 1969 the Ruelas family was living in downtown Detroit—about thirty-five miles from Denton Cemetery, i.e., not exactly around the corner. (Leiterman, on the other hand, was living nearby.) But the detectives say that the idea that “little Johnny” might have been involved in Jane’s murder in some way isn’t as far-fetched as it might initially sound, given the “circumstances of his home life.” They do not elaborate, except to say that they know that Johnny was a childhood nosebleeder.

  Looking over this list, I realize I cannot include it in Jane. In fact, I can barely share it with my friends, much less with strangers. I learn quickly that it does not make good cocktail conversation. Not only that, but it explains virtually nothing.

  In all the permutations of murder mind that I had experienced, I had never imagined a scenario involving a child. Now I found myself pacing the Ponderosa Room in my bathrobe late at night with my thoughts swirling strangely and dreadfully around the question of how a four-year-old boy might have “come into contact” with Jane’s body. Or more specifically, how a drop of his blood could have ended up on the back of her hand.

  I read this story yesterday and I’m still banging my head against the wall, writes a blogger on a criminal law Web site, responding to an article announcing the double DNA match in Jane’s case.

  At a hearing in
May 2005, a judge will ask Hiller how the state plans on explaining the presence of Ruelas’s blood in trial.

  There’s a world of possibilities, Hiller will say.

  Name one, the judge will snap back.

  THE BIG MOVIE playing all season at the theater in downtown Middletown is Seed of Chucky, the fifth installment of a string of slasher comedies about a killer doll. Daily I pass by its poster, which features a bloodstained toddler in a striped shirt and white overalls, his demented face held together by stitches. I almost want to go see it.

  EVENTUALLY other bloggers, some as far away as Australia or the U.K., start to weigh in:

  Perhaps the 4 year old was indeed at the crime scene somehow. Or, perhaps the profile identification is a false hit. In the former case, it is spooky and tragic; in the latter it is, perhaps, a crack in the idea that DNA (done right) is infallible.

  Interesting, and ultimately depressing, story … As for what could be an apparent 4 year old co-murderer, that might almost make an interesting anthology. Here’s the scenario, what is each writer’s solution? The fact that it’s twisted enough for me to even have that thought depresses me even more.

  Something does not seem right in this reopening of her murder.

  The defense agrees. It will argue that the reason why there is no discernible link between Leiterman, Ruelas, and Jane is that there is none—save the fact that genetic samples from all three people were being processed in the same DNA laboratory over the same period of time in early 2002. It’s true: bloody clothing from Ruelas’s 2002 murder of his mother was being tested in the Lansing lab on at least one of the same days that an analyst was working on the blood droplet scraped off Jane’s hand in 1969. And individual samples from Leiterman and Ruelas were both brought into the lab in early 2002 under a new Michigan law that went into effect on January 1, 2002, which required all convicted felons—violent and nonviolent alike—to provide DNA samples to CODIS.