The Red Parts Page 9

  When you find the guy, Phil told the police after they were through with him, I hope you respect his civil rights more than you’ve respected mine.

  The police could not believe that someone who was planning to marry Jane would speak this way about her killer, so they hauled him back in for more questioning.

  Now he bounds out of the motel looking great—an academic version of Richard Gere, wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. He says he wants to drive by his old house in Ann Arbor, and before long we find ourselves sitting on a brick patio under an umbrella, drinking margaritas, facing the house he used to inhabit, which is now a gay bookstore flanked by this outdoor bar and a Thai restaurant.

  For a while Phil stares incredulously at his old house—at the rainbow flag hanging over its door, the customers milling about in its living room—and tells us what it used to look like inside, how it was to be there with Jane. Then his tone suddenly swerves out of the nostalgic and into the interrogatory. He wants to know why my mother and I have committed to attending the whole trial. Why, and for whom, exactly, we think we’re there.

  We’re here for Jane, my mother says plaintively, as if this should be obvious.

  I nod in support, even though something about it doesn’t ring true. Jane is, after all, quite dead. We’re talking about what the living need, or what the living imagine the dead need, or what the living imagine the dead would have wanted were they not dead. But the dead are the dead. Presumably they have finished with wanting.

  “To the living we owe respect, / To the dead we owe the truth.” ~Voltaire.~ Violent Crimes Unit/Michigan State Police, reads the tagline under each e-mail we receive from Schroeder.

  I know I speak for my family in saying we concur with the Voltaire quotation ending your message, my mother writes him back.

  It’s the state’s case, Phil now says, with no small portion of disgust. It doesn’t have anything to do with Jane. In fact, she would have hated it.

  My mother and I fidget with the paper umbrellas in our drinks, feeling unexpectedly chastised. He’s right: it is not, thankfully, Jane Louise Mixer v. Gary Earl Leiterman. Nor is it Jane Louise Mixer’s surviving family v. Gary Earl Leiterman. It is the State of Michigan v. Gary Earl Leiterman. Sitting in court you never forget this fact: you sit squarely facing the judge, who hunkers down in his great black robe in front of a green and white marble wall, an enormous bronze seal of Michigan mounted behind him. The seal consists of an elk and a moose on their hind legs in bas relief, leaning against a crest, which, in turn, depicts a man holding a long gun, beholding a sunrise, underneath the word TUEBOR: I will defend. Then, wrapped around the bottom of the seal, the state motto: Si Quaeris Peninsulum Amoenam Circumspice. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.

  But would Jane have hated the trial? She herself was studying to become a lawyer—not a criminal lawyer, but a lawyer nonetheless. As long as I knew her, she talked about being a lawyer, her high school teacher told the Detroit News a few days after her death. It was her one ambition. In 1969 Jane was one of thirty-seven female law students in a class of 420. She spent the last few years of her life working on political campaigns and educating herself about civil rights litigation. In the wake of her death, the law school established the Jane L. Mixer Memorial Award to honor students who demonstrate the most profound commitment to social justice and civil rights. Growing up I always assumed my grandparents set up this award, but I should have known better. In my research for Jane I learned that friends of hers set it up in 1970 and have maintained it ever since. Before her case was reopened, initial online searches for “Jane Mixer” mostly conjured up information about former law students who had won this award and later included it on their online CVs. Jane may not have lived long enough to leave behind any “legacy,” but if she began one at all, this constellation of political activists, public interest lawyers, and social workers, linked together by her name in cyberspace, might be part of it.

  Eventually I break the silence by mumbling something to the effect of, Maybe Jane would have hated it, but if I were murdered and no one came to the trial, I think I’d feel a little hurt. The strangeness, the childishness, of this remark is apparent as soon as it leaves my mouth. Of course I wouldn’t feel any such thing. I would be dead.

  THERE WAS a time in my life, around age sixteen, when I became unsure if women actually died. I mean, I knew that they did, but I became confused as to whether or not they shared in the same existential quandary on the planet that men did. This confusion arose during a summer class I took at UC Berkeley, a lecture course titled “Existentialism in Literature and Film.” I had sought out this class for intellectual reasons, but secretly I also hoped it would help me with the panic attacks about death and dying that had beset me in the years immediately following my father’s death. His bedroom demise had catapulted the And if I die before I wake bedtime prayer from the speculative to the plausible, and though I was but eleven, then twelve, then thirteen, I was often terrified to fall asleep at night lest I would not awaken. For neurological reasons that remain opaque to me, these panic attacks were often accompanied by a certain greenish tint that rinsed my vision. When I felt one coming on I would get out of bed and pace the basement of my mother’s house until the furniture and the sky outside and my skin lost this sickly green hue, which, I learned years later on a trip to Kentucky, closely resembles the pall of the air before a tornado.

  The professor of Existentialism had told us at the outset that whenever he said “man” he really meant “human.” But my brain did not make this substitution easily. I enjoyed the class, but as it went on I felt as though it were an anthropological survey, with this “modern man” as its central object of inquiry—a man whose noirish perambulations and perpetual unease about his mortality were fascinating and familiar to me but nonetheless distinct, and somehow not directly transferable. One of the films we watched in this class was Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and I remember feeling disconcerted by the way Kim Novak’s character seems stranded between ghost and flesh, whereas Jimmy Stewart’s seems the “real,” incarnate. I wanted to ask my professor afterward whether women were somehow always already dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist, but I could not find a way to formulate this question without sounding, or without feeling, more or less insane.

  JANE ASIDE, Phil says, the state’s case strikes me as astonishingly weak.

  My mother and I know a great deal about the state’s case, but Phil has a law degree—maybe he knows something we don’t?

  That may be so, says my mother. But we’re not here because we’re hoping “to win.” I’m not even sure if we’re “after justice.” We’re here to bear witness.

  I nod again in agreement—and it’s a good thing that we’re not “after justice,” because I doubt if any one of us sitting at this table could articulate exactly what that might mean.

  We are only after justice if this person is guilty, my grandfather told the Kalamazoo Gazette on November 30, 2004. I just hope we have the right person and that justice is rendered.

  Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice—how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility—I find the grammar of justice maddening. It’s always “rendered,” “served,” or “done.” It always swoops down from on high—from God, from the state—like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth’s final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one other, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia “justice” has meant both “retribution” and “equality,” as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.

  If you really want to know what justice is, don’t only ask questions and then score off anyone who answers, and refute him, roars Thrasymachus to Socrates in The Republic. You know very well that it is mu
ch easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself and tell us what you say justice is.

  When justice is done, writes Anne Carson, the world drops away. This does not seem to me a happy thought. I am not yet sure I want the world to drop away.

  Regardless of what happens at the trial, Phil shrugs, as if shaking himself free of the whole mess, I “processed” this years ago. I dealt with it then, and I moved on. It’s over for me now.

  Fair enough, I want to say, but then why are the three of us sitting in front of your old house in Ann Arbor, talking about what Jane would or wouldn’t have wanted over margaritas the night before you voluntarily testify at her murder trial? I can’t judge the veracity of Phil’s pronouncement; I know I shouldn’t even try. But I find myself believing it about as much as I believe Sylvia Plath when she writes, Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through, in conclusion of a poem utterly sodden with grief and vitriol for her father. Besides, I am beginning to think that there are some events that simply cannot be “processed,” some things one never gets “over” or “through.”

  We drive Phil back to the motel, where we accompany him up to my grandfather’s room. They have a perfectly pleasant, if brief, exchange—several notches above civil, a few notches below warm.

  Phil’s testimony the next morning is stellar. He wears a great suit and is very patient, even with Hiller’s final, awful question:

  Mr. Weitzman, did you kill Jane Mixer?

  No, Phil answers evenly, I did not.

  I wince, however, when certain photographs of Jane pop up on the big screen—not the autopsy photos, thank God, but some snapshots that Phil took years ago, which he had kept stored in a safety deposit box before handing them over to me in an envelope in a café in Brooklyn the first time we met, in service of Jane. I considered including them in my book but did not. They never felt like mine to reprint—it was more like I’d become their guardian.

  But whatever delicacy of intent I may have entertained while writing Jane somehow got bungled once Schroeder started calling. Schroeder read the descriptions of these photos in Jane and called me right away to ask if I could send him copies of them so that he could have more recent photos to show people during his investigation. I wanted the investigation to go as well as possible—indeed, I felt some sort of ethical imperative to help it go as well as possible—so I quickly made copies of Phil’s photos and sent them along. And that is how Phil and I and everyone else came to find ourselves watching them on this large screen, a screen that is being filmed and broadcast live on TV. A guardian of their privacy, indeed.

  On the street outside the courthouse, as we wait for a car from the Michigan State Police to bring him back to the airport, Phil tells me he did not sleep well the night before his testimony. He wasn’t jet-lagged, nor was he nervous about appearing in court. Rather, he did not sleep well because he had stayed up late in his motel room reading the copy of Jane I’d given him at dinner. Before the book went to print I’d asked his permission to use some of our correspondence—permission he had granted, albeit in a diffuse way, by saying that he “trusted me to do the right thing.” Nonetheless, now he says he feels quite freaked out by seeing his words in print. (And here I’d been so anxious about the slide show in the courtroom, which he never even mentions, that I’d entirely forgotten to be anxious about his reading Jane.) He says that he also noticed that in my “Acknowledgments” I thank him for his friendship. That’s nice, he says, but he doesn’t really consider what we have a friendship. As he says this I feel my stomach start to curdle, my blood race to my face. But, he winks in parting, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be honored to have one.

  The Book of Shells

  ON THE FOURTH day of the trial a young forensic scientist named Julie French walks briskly into the courtroom in a blue skirt-suit, raises her right hand and swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (the “so help me God” part is no longer), and unknowingly bursts the all-male bubble. French is but the first of many female forensic scientists to testify, some of whom were not even alive in 1969. The youngest of these women—a peppy DNA analyst in her twenties who looks startlingly young to be deemed an “expert”—estimates that in her work on the World Trade Center attack of Sept. 11, 2001, and the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, she and her forensic team may have processed hundreds of thousands of individual genetic samples. The 21st century has entered the house.

  French’s testimony lets loose the flood, and a deluge of complicated DNA testimony follows. We hear so much of it that my mother and I get slaphappy back at Jill’s, charting the traces of our bodily fluids throughout the house. We imagine them like invisible Post-it notes, the kind that people put up when they’re trying to learn a new language. Sputum from a sneeze on the kitchen faucet. Sweat deposits on our sheets. Blood from used Tampax in the bathroom wastepaper baskets. Tears in our wadded-up balls of Kleenex, and on our sleeves.

  In court we learn that some people are “sloughers,” meaning that they slough off dead skin cells at a greater rate than others, thus leaving more DNA in their wake. We learn that “sloughing” depends on many things—when you last showered, how much you sweat. We wonder if we are sloughers. We learn that Jane was probably not a big slougher, as very few of her own skin cells show up on her clothing. But Leiterman apparently was, or is, a big slougher.

  We learn that Leiterman’s DNA was first discovered on Jane’s pantyhose in a dark laboratory, by an analyst who laid out each piece of clothing she had been wearing on the night of her murder on a table covered with a sheet of clean brown butcher paper. He then exposed each item to forensic lighting, which “excites biological material.” Under UV light certain spots on Jane’s pantyhose started to glow, and the analyst bored teeny samples out from these areas and placed them into test tubes. From these samples—each no bigger than a pinprick—he was eventually able to generate a profile, a “DNA fingerprint,” that matched that of one man out of 171.7 trillion: Gary Earl Leiterman, of Gobles, Michigan.

  We also learn that a third DNA profile was found on Jane’s dead body: Phil’s. His profile was generated from a mass of cells found on the stomach of her wool jumper, as well as on the paperback copy of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 that was found beside her dead body. It was Phil’s book. He had lent it to her the last time he saw her.

  As the stream of analysts testify, I close my eyes and try to imagine what the whole dark laboratory of the world would look like if it were suddenly illuminated by a light, a light whose wavelength “excited” the paths of our bodies through it, and all of our exchanges. If all the blood, shit, cum, sweat, spit, hairs, and tears we have ever shed—onto objects, or onto one another—suddenly started to glow. Phil’s skin cells would light up across the belly of Jane’s jumper in a streak; Leiterman’s would make white pools of light around her ankles, by which she was most likely dragged into the cemetery.

  If preserved well these bodily traces can last—and remain identifiable—for decades. For millennia, even, and longer. DNA is robust, an analyst explains on the stand. It can be lost, but it cannot be changed. Because there is currently no way to date DNA, under the right light, cells from thousands of years ago would glow right alongside the cells we are leaving in our wake today. Under the right light, the present and the past are indistinguishable.

  This is bad news for someone hoping to “get away with murder,” especially if his or her DNA has somehow made its way into CODIS. I have no plans to murder anyone, but nonetheless I am glad that Schroeder does not ask me to provide a sample of my DNA to the state, as he does my mother, grandfather, and uncle. The state wants genetic profiles related to Jane’s on file, so as to eliminate her as a possible contributor to DNA found at the crime scene. (My grandfather doesn’t say it, but I imagine he must be thinking: if this is the alternative to exhuming her body, so be it.) There’s nothing to worry about if you haven’t done anything wrong, advocates of more expansive DNA databases and dragnets say, a refrain Sch
roeder invokes with a wink as he swabs skin cells from my family’s inner cheeks with a fibrous toothbrush, then pulls a special sheath over the samples to protect them until they get to the lab. I can’t help remembering that “sheath” bears an etymological relation to “vagina.” I’m reminded of this all the more when my mother voices some skepticism about the powers of DNA testing, and Schroeder reassures her, Look, we had a gang-bang case last weekend, and from the DNA we could even tell which order the guys did her in.

  A SUDDEN DEATH is one way—a terrible way, I suppose—of freezing the details of a life. While writing Jane I became amazed by the way that one act of violence had transformed an array of everyday items—a raincoat, a pair of pantyhose, a paperback book, a wool jumper—into numbered pieces of evidence, into talismans that threatened at every turn to take on allegorical proportions. I wanted Jane to name these items. I went to great lengths to try to determine whether the raincoat covering Jane’s corpse was beige or yellow, for example, as I’d heard both. When I couldn’t find out I forced myself to call it “a long raincoat” instead of giving it a color, even though I very much wanted it to have a color. Accuracy felt like a weapon, one means of battling “fate.” Jane had been reading Catch-22, but it could have been otherwise. Things can always be otherwise.

  During my research I had occasionally come across references to a yellow-and-white striped towel used to catch or wipe up Jane’s blood. For reasons that remain unknown to me, detectives have always assumed this towel did not belong to Jane; like the stocking used to strangle her, it is considered an “import into the scene.” Some accounts mention it, but others do not. Part of me doubted whether it had ever existed. I included it in Jane, but only with a question mark.