Suddenly Winnie appeared, tugging on Marcus’s arm in an eager, excited way, like a little kid. All three of them were seventeen, but Winnie seemed younger. Maybe because she was a girl. Or because she was so skinny. She had no body to speak of, certainly not the way some of the girls at Cardozo had bodies-with huge tits like balloons under their sweaters and curvy asses. Winnie was a stick person-right now she was wearing jean shorts that showed two Popsicle-stick legs, and her torso was swimming in her sweatshirt. She had blond hair like her mother and she was cute in a way that elves are cute. But not womanly. Even Marcus’s twelve-year-old sister LaTisha had more action going on than Winnie.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you your bedroom.”
“In a minute,” Marcus said. He wanted to finish with Garrett, although he could see that the moment had passed. Garrett walked by them with his load of luggage and Marcus slung his bag over his shoulder and reached for another box. He needed to catch up.
“Come on,” Winnie said. “Please?”
Marcus managed to stave her off until he and Garrett had unloaded most of the car. In silence, except for the squeaky complaints of Marcus’s shoes.
“Come on, Marcus,” Winnie said.
Marcus picked up his leather duffel, which looked nothing but ugly compared to the Newtons’ luggage, and followed Winnie up the stairs.
“This is your room,” Winnie announced. She could feel herself gushing but she didn’t know how to stop. Ever since Marcus appeared at their apartment at, like, five that morning, it was as if Winnie were wearing some kind of electric bracelet that sent shocks up her arm to her heart. She’d had a crush on him since the minute she knew of his existence. More than six months ago now, since the morning that Arch took her to EJ’s Luncheonette to have breakfast (she and her father both loved the red flannel hash). They were supposed to be talking about grades, school, her prospects for college (he wanted her to apply to Princeton; she wanted to stay in the city-NYU, Barnard), but instead they got on the topic of Constance Tyler’s case and once Arch was on that topic, he couldn’t stop.
He’d read about the murders in the New York Times the day after they were committed. That was a second morning emblazoned in Winnie’s memory. Her father so engrossed in the frontpage story and the photograph of the dead girl wearing black party shoes, that he held his hand up for quiet when Beth asked him what his schedule looked like that day. He drank the story in, and then hurried with the newspaper into the living room where he plucked his Princeton face book off the shelf and rifled through it, holding up the paper for comparison-because next to the picture of the dead girl in the Mary Janes was a picture of the suspected murderer, Constance Bennett Tyler, a public school teacher.
“Bingo!” Arch shouted. “Constance Bennett, Queens, New York. I went to school with this woman.” He held the face book up. “Nineteen-seventy-five freshman class, Princeton University.” Then his expression crumbled. “Well, she killed someone.”
“That’s Dad for you,” Garrett said. “He loves all things Princeton. Even the murderers.”
“Did you know her, Dad?” Winnie asked.
“Never seen her before in my life,” Arch said. He tucked the paper into his briefcase and Winnie forgot all about it.
But not Arch. Although he didn’t generally handle criminal cases, he made a few phone calls that day, and discovered that the woman’s case had been taken by a P.D.-no real surprise- and the D.A.’s office had already announced it was seeking the death penalty. They wanted Constance Bennett Tyler to be the first woman to die of lethal injection in the state of New York. Arch decided to go to Rikers where Connie was being held and talk to her. She had been indicted for the murder of her sister-in-law and her sister-in-law’s nine-year-old daughter. She explained the whole story to Arch, and he was so intrigued by the circumstances and by Connie herself that he took the case and refused to be paid a penny.
Arch told Winnie all this as he sat across from her in EJ’s, moving hash around his plate, but not eating because he was too nervous to eat. If I save this woman, he said my life will have been worthwhile. Trent Trammelman, the managing partner at Arch’s firm, discouraged Arch from taking the case. It would bring too much unwanted publicity-every time the damn case was written up in the papers, the name of their firm would be mentioned. Arch countered that no publicity was unwanted, that the majority of New Yorkers were against the death penalty anyway. He was taking the case and that was final. Trent knows that when I say final, I mean final, Arch had said. Winnie understood that her father had power. He was a full partner and a top earner, and yet when he was with her, he was just a dad, motioning to the waitress for more coffee for both of them. Then he said, Connie has a son, you know. A son your age.
Does she?
She does, and that’s another reason I took her case. She has a son who’s on the swim team at Cardozo High School. You’d like him, Winnie. You two have a lot in common.
Winnie wasn’t sure what sparked her interest. It was everything, probably, in combination. She liked swimmers. Her last and, truth be told, only boyfriend, Charlie Hess, was on the swim team with her at Danforth. Charlie was all arms and legs, lean, muscular, pale. She liked the way he looked when his goggles were on top of his head and his wet eyelashes stuck together. But she hadn’t been serious about Charlie Hess. When swim season ended, they broke up.
Winnie also saw Marcus as her ticket into her father’s new, consuming passion. She championed this boy whose circumstances were so dire. When her father got home from work at night, she asked about Marcus as though he were an old, dear friend.
Winnie had loved him before she ever laid eyes on him.
His actual person won her over permanently. Marcus was six feet tall with gorgeous brown skin and hair shaved close to his head. He was a man, not at all like the boys she went to school with. He had dimples when he smiled, although Winnie had only seen him smile once-when Winnie and Garrett went with their father to Marcus’s apartment. As they were leaving, Arch made a joke and Marcus smiled, thus the dimples, which had now taken on the fleeting, mystical properties of, say, a rainbow. One of the reasons Winnie was thrilled to learn that Arch had invited Marcus for the summer was that she might, with good luck, get to see his dimples again. And yet every time she was around him she felt stupid and talked too much and couldn’t locate her sense of humor.
Not only was Marcus beautiful, but he was kind. He escorted his younger sister to the memorial service and they sat in the row behind Winnie and her family. Winnie heard Marcus crying. When she turned around to peek, she saw Marcus with his arm around his sister, wiping his sister’s tears. She decided right then that Marcus was a person to whom goodness came naturally. Unlike Winnie herself, who was selfish and mean-spirited at times, and petty. She tried to be good, but again and again she failed. There was a nagging part of her that suspected these flaws had caused her father’s death. That she somehow deserved it.
Marcus dropped his black bag on the floor. That was all he’d brought, just one bag. “The room’s fine,” he said. “It’s good.”
“You have your own bathroom,” Winnie said. “Well, toilet and sink. The bathroom with the shower’s down the hall. And there’s a shower outside. Actually, this used to be my room.”