In the Company of Liars (13 page)

“When did you see your mother?”

“I went upstairs at about noon. She is—she's usually an early riser, so—I was wondering, I guess, if something—if she was sick or something.”

“And when—”

“She was in her room. She said she didn't feel very well. She said she was still feeling sick and wanted to be left alone.”

“And what did you do?”

Jessica pauses. She has not looked in Allison's direction yet. She is concentrating on something other than the question, to the point that Roger Ogren steps forward to ask the question again.

“I went into her bedroom. I offered to make her something to eat. Get her some aspirin.”

“Where was she at this time?”

“She was—still in bed.”

“Did she respond to you?”

“She said—” Jessica clears her throat. “She said that she wanted to tell me something. She said that I might be hearing—”

Allison closes her hands into fists as her daughter breaks down quietly on the witness stand. Her lawyer, Ron McGaffrey, begins to move out of his seat, but Allison takes his hand.

“Let her get it over with,” Allison whispers to her lawyer.

An uncommon quiet falls over the courtroom as Jessica struggles to control herself. She finally raises her head again, her eyes dark and wet, a shade of red coloring her face. She inhales deeply and continues.

“She said that I might be hearing things about her. She told me that she had been having an affair with Sam Dillon. She said she was sorry she had done it and she wanted me to hear it from her first.”

“Your mother said that she had an affair with Sam Dillon?”

“Yes.”

“And how did you respond?”

“I . . . walked out. I was very mad. I . . . had always hoped my parents would reconcile, I guess. I . . . didn't like hearing about another—” Her eyes fall. “I left the house and went back to campus.”

Roger Ogren asks Jessica questions about what came next, after Sam Dillon's death. Jessica had read about his death in the papers, like everyone else, she says, the following Monday, one day after Sam was found dead and a day and a half after he was murdered.

“Did you discuss this with your mother, Jessica? The murder of Sam Dillon?”

“I called her. I left a message on her voice mail.”

“This was Tuesday, February the tenth.”

“Yes.”

“Did she call you back?”

“She came to see me,” Jessica says. “At my dorm at the college.”

Allison stood outside her daughter's dorm room. She had knocked, several times, to no avail. Jessica wasn't there. She didn't know how long she would be gone. Allison didn't know her class schedule, which was unusual. This was the first semester since Jessica had enrolled at Mansbury that Allison couldn't recite the title, professor, and time of each class. She had been like that with her only daughter, twenty questions all the time, trying to involve herself wherever possible in the life of a child who had slowly grown independent of her mother, trying to keep the bird who had flown from the nest on the radar screen, at least.

But that had changed this year. Jessica had blamed Allison for the breakup of the marriage. She had left no room for doubt on that subject. It was terribly unfair, in Allison's eyes; Jessica was focusing only on the result, not the cause. Allison had raised the subject, had wanted the divorce, and that was all that mattered to Jess. Her daughter did not know the details of why, and Allison wouldn't supply them, at least not in a way that placed all the blame on Mat. She didn't want it that way; she didn't want Jessica in the middle of a he-said, she-said.
We drifted apart,
was all she told her daughter, unsure of what, exactly, Mat had told her.

She didn't know when Jessica would return to her dorm room. She didn't know Jessica's classes, the friends she was making, any boys she might be interested in. She couldn't even be sure she had the right room anymore. She had to ask a young girl who emerged from a neighboring room, who was waking at a little before noon, if this was where Jessica Pagone lived.

She stood in the hallway for more than an hour, watched students return from class, heard them talking on the phones in their rooms. She couldn't entirely relate; she hadn't gone to college like other girls her age. Allison had gotten pregnant as a senior in high school and hadn't started taking classes until Jessica was in grade school. She had desperately wanted Jessica to have this experience, the college life.

Her daughter walked down the hallway just after one o'clock, a backpack slung over her shoulder, her eyes down, frowning. When she saw her mother, she went blank, face turned ghostly white. She became immediately aware of her surroundings, of two other young women walking through the hallway, to whom Jessica offered a perfunctory smile.

She didn't address her mother in any way, simply unlocked her dorm room and let Allison follow her in.

“This was Tuesday, the tenth of February,” the prosecutor clarifies. “Two days after Sam Dillon was found dead. A little after one in the afternoon.”

“Right.” Jessica breathes out of her mouth.

“Tell us what happened, Jessica. What you said. What your mother said.”

Jessica clears her throat, grimaces. “She told me I shouldn't call her on the phone.”

“You never know who might be listening,” Allison had told her daughter. “And they can record the fact that you called. They can look at that later.”

“She didn't explain why,” Jessica continues. “She just said, don't use the phone.”

“And what else, Jessica?” Ogren places his hands behind his back.

“She told me that she had been sick yesterday and the night before.”

The prosecutor nods along. “She came all the way down to your college campus to emphasize to you that her behavior that weekend could be explained by the fact that she had been feeling ill?”

“Objection,” says Ron McGaffrey. “Argumentative.”

“Sustained.”

“Other than telling you not to call her on the phone, and the fact that she had been ill the previous weekend, what else did your mother say to you, or you to her?”

“It's—” Jessica brings a hand to her face. “It was a while ago.”

Roger Ogren looks at the judge. He waits a beat to see if Jessica will continue.

“Did you ask your mother if she had murdered Sam Dillon?” he asks.

Allison stood against the window, overlooking the courtyard surrounded on all sides by the dormitories. Jessica sat on her bed, not looking at her mother, hands on each side of her head.

“You can't say one way or the other whether I killed Sam Dillon,” Allison said.

“You didn't kill him, Mother. You couldn't possibly—”

“Jess, they'll expect you to say that.” Her delivery was gentle. “They'll expect you to defend your mother. What matters to them are the facts. And the fact is, you couldn't say one way or the other whether I killed him. Right?”

“She said people might be saying a lot of things. She said I shouldn't believe them.”

“Saying a lot of things about Sam Dillon's death?” Ogren's tone suggests impatience. He knows the answers to his questions, and Jessica isn't delivering. “Saying things about her involvement in his death?”

“Yes.”

“But did you ask your mother if she had murdered Sam—”

“She said that we shouldn't talk about that. That it would be a bad idea to discuss it.”

“Okay.” Roger Ogren takes a step. “But I want to ask you whether you asked a specific question. Ms. Pagone”—the prosecutor allows for an intake of air; as much as
Jessica has fought him, he has been allowed to repeat this question several times, and her lack of cooperation only helps his cause here—“did you specifically ask your mother whether she killed Sam—”

“Yes.”
A flash of anger—frustration, probably, and regret—colors Jessica's face.

“And how did your mother react to that specific question? Whether or not she had killed Sam Dillon?”

Jessica swallows hard and lifts her chin. Allison holds her breath. This should be it. This should be the end. In a few moments, Jessica will be allowed to put this behind her. She will not let her attorney cross-examine her daughter.

“She didn't,” Jessica answers. “She wouldn't answer that question. We never discussed it again.”

J
ane McCoy turns down the car radio as Harrick reviews his notes from the trial today. She likes to think of herself as hip to today's music, but she is having difficulty enjoying the violent lyrics and the thrash guitars filling the airwaves these days. That, she figures, is exactly how her parents felt. She is getting old. Forty years old this July and she's a dinosaur. She's got hair clips older than these idiots on the radio, spouting about “bitches” and “forties.”

“Okay,” says Harrick. “She said she got to Allison's at about eight-thirty that night. She was studying and doing laundry.”

“And what time did she say Allison came home?”

“Two in the morning, give or take.” Harrick flips through his notes. “She said mom threw up when she walked in. She was a mess. She had dirt all over her.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and she said that her mom admitted having an affair with Sam. That's pretty much it, more or less.”

McCoy laughs. “Try ‘less.' What did Allison's lawyer do with her?”

“Nothing. Didn't ask a single question.”

“Interesting. Did she get tripped up at all?”

“No.”

“She's lucky,” says McCoy.

“Oh, I don't know about ‘lucky.' That girl knew exactly what to say.”

“Woman,” McCoy corrects.

“What?”

“Woman. Jessica Pagone's a woman, not a girl.”

“Oh, well pardon me.” Harrick chews on his ever-present toothpick. “That ‘young woman' knew exactly what to say and how to say it. She may have left the puzzle half-finished, but that's not the same thing as perjury. I didn't hear a single thing in there that could be proven false.”

McCoy switches to talk radio, which is buzzing about the Pagone murder trial.

“Yeah, well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree,” McCoy says.

T
he university library is the perfect cover for a graduate student preparing for final exams. Ram Haroon gets very little done in the way of studying. Few do at this place. Most people are surfing the internet in the computer rooms or sitting on couches and talking over steaming cups of coffee.

Haroon heads over to the book stacks on the top floor of the library. West side, third from the end. He pretends to mull over a series of books about northern Africa. He pulls three books down and places two of them on the next shelf below, opens the other one and begins to peruse it.

A moment later, through the space created by removing the books, a note passes through from the other side. Haroon's eyes move about; no one is watching. No one would bother. He takes the note and reads it.

Things are looking bad for her. Trial starts tomorrow and their case is in chaos. Prosecution's case is
strong and she has nothing to point away from her. She knows she will be convicted.

She doesn't know about us. There's no way. I would know if she did.

Haroon rolls his head on his neck casually, then removes a pen from his pocket and scribbles on the sheet of paper, passes it through.

I still don't like it. She might know but not want to tell. She might wait to testify at trial to spring it.

The note comes back with new words written beneath his message.

She won't testify. Too much at stake from her end. She would rather die. Her words, a direct quote. She's on edge.

She would rather die.
Haroon smiles. He takes the paper and places it in the book he has open. He waits two minutes or so before writing his response and sending it through:

A person looking at the death penalty might find it more appealing to end things on her own terms. I think it is time for Mrs. Allison Pagone to commit suicide. I will need your help on timing, of course. Will she continue to speak freely?

A long moment passes. Probably his partner is just being careful. In all likelihood not a single person is paying them any attention, standing in the corner stacks as they are. Still, the notes cannot pass too closely together, too many times. Finally, the response arrives:

Of course. If you can't trust your ex-husband, who can you trust?