The security expert was accompanied by Leonard Gideon, a bald white man with enough hair on his lip to make up for what was missing up top. He was bursting with energy that teetered on the verge of rage. Gideon was my lawyer. He shook my hand and asked a few questions, then he smiled under that bale of mustache, saying, “We’re gonna kick their asses, Arna, all the way from here back to the Rocky Mountains.”
Accompanying Cass and the lawyer was Charles Milford. Milford worked for the federal government in some capacity that was not clear to me. But Cass assured me that no city or state entity could arrest me if Milford objected.
Meeks’s suite was on the ninth floor. It should have been called an apartment it was so big. There were seven people waiting for us: the stenographer, two Colorado marshals, two female assistants from Meeks’s office, and the lie detector expert. The machine itself was set up on a table next to a plain pine chair. For some reason the setup brought to mind the electric chair. That made real the worry that I could be executed for the crime Star Knowland said I committed.
Gideon started the conversation. He presented Meeks with a stack of papers to sign. Whenever the Western D.A. balked, Gideon threatened to leave with his client, me.
After the preliminaries were done, Meeks and I sat across from each other surrounded by our seconds.
“Did you kill Sean Messier?”
“No,” I said, thinking, not to my knowledge.
“Did you know him?”
“No.” Again with the sentence finished in my mind.
“Did you hit him with a heavy metal object?”
“I just told you that I didn’t know him,” I said. “How could I have hit him if I didn’t know him?”
I could make out Gideon’s smile through the thatch of his mustache.
“Do you mind taking a lie detector test?”
“No. But I want to know something first.”
“What’s that?”
“That machine scares me. This whole thing is very anxiety provoking. How can you tell the difference between me being scared and me lying?”
The lie detector expert, who had been introduced to me as Roger, spoke up then. He was a short guy with bright eyes and facial hair that failed to become either a proper beard or mustache.
“We screen your emotions with test questions distributed throughout the interrogation,” Roger told me. “In other words, we factor in your fear quotient.”
“How accurate is it?”
“If you’re a sociopath or a deranged psychotic, it won’t work, but otherwise it’s a hell of a lot better than an eyewitness.”
I liked Roger. He was objective. A week before we could have been friends.
I was attached to the machine by my arms and one hand, my jugular, left armpit, and temple. They took my blood pressure beforehand and then attached a thimblelike cap to my left index finger to keep track of my heart.
They started with simple questions about my name, my marital status, my job. They asked me did I love my wife and I said no. They asked did I want to hurt her and I said no. They asked me if I had ever committed a crime and I said, not to my knowledge.
We went through preparatory questions like these for twenty minutes by the digital clock that sat on a table to my right.
After that the serious questions started.
“Did you kill Sean Messier?”
“No.”
“Did you strike him with a crowbar?”
“No.”
“Do you know Barbara Knowland?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember?”
“That’s right.”
“How long ago did you meet her?”
“Probably more than twenty years ago, back in Colorado.”
“Have you ever been to Sean Messier’s house with her?”
“Not to my knowledge. You see, I only have one fleeting memory of her lying on a sofa. It seems real enough, but that’s all I can remember.”
When the lie detector test was over, Meeks came back at me. He asked me about Harvard Rollins.
“Why does he have such a hard-on for you in this thing?” Meeks asked.
“He’s having an affair with my wife.”
“Did you go to Knowland’s hotel room?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To ask her to explain what was happening. She claims that I killed someone and I have absolutely no knowledge of that.”
“What did she tell you?”
I repeated what she said word for word.
When I was through, the room went silent. For long moments we just sat there, eleven men and women communing with some external force.
“Is that all you need, Mr. Meeks?” Leonard Gideon asked at last. “I’d like to know how to keep in touch with your client, Mr. Gideon.”
“You have my card.”
“He lives with you?”
The lawyer smiled and stood up.
“I could still have Mr. Dibbuk arrested as a material witness,” Meeks exclaimed.
“At the Brown Palace maybe,” Gideon said. “But the Plaza is in New York state and you couldn’t arrest a cockroach here.”
I took all my money out of the various accounts I owned and gave most of it to Cass.
“Put it someplace safe,” I said to him.
I quit my job and moved permanently into Svetlana’s studio. She seemed very happy to have me there. She got a job at a bookstore and told me to take at least six months off.
“You need to rest,” Svetlana told me. “Take it easy for a while and then, later on, you can do something else and I will finish my school.”
We made love every night, and in the morning I’d sit in my chair trying to remember Star and what we had done, or not, that long ago day.
I was still in therapy too. I paid Dr. Shriver in cash and he gave me a discount.
Six weeks after my deposition Leonard Gideon called me.
“They decided that there wasn’t enough of a case to prosecute,” he told me. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t plan any ski vacations in Aspen anytime soon.”
“How much do I owe you, Mr. Gideon?”
“I was happy to help a fiend, Ben,” he said.
I knew that I was not the fiend he was helping but I was grateful anyway.
Svetlana got pregnant and Mona moved in with, then broke up with, Harvard Yard. Since I was without a job, our lawyer told us that I could ask for alimony but I demurred.
Seela hates me now. Dr. Shriver found her a therapist who uncovered all the damage I had done to her. She sees the divorce as me abandoning her — that, and she can’t stand the idea of me with a woman as young as Svetlana.
They arrested Barbara Knowland after questioning her sister about the car they junked back in the late seventies. In her attempt to save herself from me, she put herself on trial. It seems that when her sister was deposed, she said things about the murder that were never in the news.
I get together with Cass on Thursday evenings at Joey’s Steak House. We never talk about anything important or emotional. I still don’t know a thing about sports, and talking about sex is definitely a no-no. But we seem to have a good time anyway.
I had been slipping back into my old ways with Svetlana. The numbness and the distance were always threatening to descend. And then one day I saw a news clip online as I was looking around for a new job.
AUTHOR BARBARA KNOWLAND FOUND GUILTY OF 1979 MURDER AND CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE, SENTENCED TO LIFE PLUS 30 YEARS
At the trial Barbara maintained that I had been the killer. The defense and the prosecution wanted me to testify but I kept telling them that I had no knowledge of the murder, the man, or even of Star herself. Whatever she thought had nothing at all to do with me.