“‘Her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment.'”
“What?”
“The second line of the poem,” Teresa said.
“Holy shit. It's a real poem?” Several jurors turned his way; he'd raised his voice. Victoria looked toward him and pursed her lips, as if to say, “Shush.”
“‘Edge' by Sylvia Plath,” Teresa said.
Steve's knowledge of poetry was minimal. There was Olaf and the shit he would not eat. There were some brawny verses by Carl Sandburg he'd learned in college. “Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Gary, they make their steel with men.” And there were little ditties that began: “There once was a girl from Red China.” He could not name one of Plath's poems, but he knew about her, mainly from seeing the Gwyneth Paltrow movie.
“Sylvia Plath committed suicide, didn't she?” he said.
“Just a few days after writing ‘Edge.'”
“Wow,” he said. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together. He'd assumed Barksdale had written the line himself. But no. He'd stolen a real poem, then created multiple anagrams. Now Steve remembered the note Barksdale sent his wife the day before his death. Victoria had called it “quaint.”
“Teresa, do you know this line? Something like, ‘Dearest. Nobody could have been so good, from the beginning to the end'?”
She gave him a kind smile, a patient teacher to a slow student. “‘Dearest… No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now.'”
“That's it! Did Plath write that, too?”
Hoping now. A defense forming.
“No. Sylvia Plath didn't write it.”
“Damn.” Steve instantly deflated. He thought he'd been onto something. Suicide. But if the “Dearest” line didn't come from Plath, where did that leave him?
“Virginia Woolf wrote it,” Teresa said. “It was her suicide note to her husband.”
“Yes!” Steve gave her a hug. “You're beautiful, Teresa!”
She laughed. “You are a crazy man, but if I were forty years younger…”
“I can answer your question now.”
She cocked her head, not quite knowing where he was going.
“I'm going to get the puta off,” Steve said.
Forty-three
THE MEANING OF SYNERGY
“Charles discovers Katrina's affair, so he kills himself?” Victoria said. “What sense does that make?”
“Victoria's right,” Katrina said. “If he was gonna kill anybody, it would have been me.”
“Are you two listening to me?” Steve said. “This is a great defense.”
They were sitting in the empty courtroom. Minutes earlier, the jury had been sworn, standing at attention with hands raised, good little Scouts, promising to determine the case solely on the evidence and the judge's instructions. Steve had taken a peek to see if they had their fingers crossed.
Then Judge Hiram Thornberry cleared his throat and said: “Noting the lateness of the hour, we'll stand in recess until tomorrow morning.”
Steve noted the hour was only three-thirty P.M. but His Honor liked to beat the traffic home and play nine holes before dark. After the courtroom emptied, Steve told Victoria and Katrina that Charles had committed suicide. The two women spent the next ten minutes trashing his theory.
“Charlie never did anything without help,” Katrina said, “including jerk off.”
“You're basing all this on the poem?” Victoria shook her head.
“Charles was a literary guy,” Steve argued. “He collected books. He sponsored seminars: ‘Women Poets, Tortured Souls.'”
“Extremely flimsy evidence,” Victoria said.
“C'mon, Vic. What's the first thing you told me about Charles?”
“That he always had to prove he was the smartest guy at the table.”
“Exactly. Don't you see how it all fits together? Charles makes an anagram out of a line Sylvia Plath wrote just days before she took her own life. He quotes Virginia Woolf's suicide note, then strangles himself in a contraption where he could control the pressure on his throat.”
Victoria was biting her lower lip, thinking it through. “It doesn't make sense. Charles is furious with Katrina. If he dies while they're still married, she inherits her share of the estate.”
“Not if she's convicted of murder,” Steve said.
“So Charlie framed me?” Katrina said. Her head was swiveling back and forth watching her lawyers' tennis match.
“That's my guess,” Steve said. “Some murderers try to disguise their crimes as suicide. Charles flipped it around. He committed suicide and disguised it as murder.”
“Then why write a note that might give it all away?” Victoria said.
“He doesn't exactly give it away. Three anagrams that lead to a source gram that still has to be connected to a poem. Who would figure it out?”
“Not me,” Katrina said with a shrug.
“One last chance to prove he was smarter than everyone else,” Steve said. “He's laughing from the grave.”
“I'm still not buying it,” Victoria said. “No man ends his life just to cheat his wife out of some money.”
“That's not why he did it. That's just the cream cheese on the bagel.”
“And the lox? What's that?”
“Once Katrina broke his heart, Charles had nothing to live for,” Steve said. Sending up a trial balloon.
“Charlie wasn't like that,” Katrina said, bursting it. “I mean, he'd just divorce me and find someone else.”
“Okay, he was suicidal for another reason,” Steve said, refusing to give up. “But as long as he was gonna do it, he was gonna nail you.”
“What reason?” Victoria demanded. “We keep coming back to the same place.”
“I don't know! I just know he did it.”
“We'll never prove it without a reason he'd kill himself,” Victoria said.
“Mental illness, maybe,” Steve said. “Bipolar disorder. Depression.”
“No way.” Katrina shook her head, her dark tresses swaying. “Not good-time Charlie.”
“Financial reasons,” Steve suggested.
“He was stinking rich,” Katrina pointed out.
“Medical problems.”
“Not once they invented Viagra.”
“Did he abuse drugs?”
Another shake, another hair swoosh. “Nothing without a doctor's prescription, and that includes the painkillers.”
“What painkillers?” Victoria said.
“Vicodin. A couple of others. I don't remember their names.”
“Why was Charles taking them?”
“A couple of weeks before he died, he came down with a stomach virus.”
“They don't give you painkillers for a stomach virus,” Victoria said.
Katrina wrinkled her forehead. “That's what Charlie brought home from the doctor. I'm sure of it.”
“What doctor?” Steve asked.
