“People will be reluctant.”
“That, and I want to ask questions that go really deep. How do you do that? You’re the wiz with human communication.”
“The thing to do when you interview someone is to listen to everything, not just what they say but what they don’t say,” Ross told me. “You’ve heard this before but really think about it. It’s not just what people say, it’s how they say it. Like a politician who got caught in a scandal. He’s saying, ‘I’m innocent, I’m innocent, this is all a lie,’ but what is he really saying?”
“You mean body language.”
“I mean that but content too. Right? Is somebody saying way more than he needs to say? Sixty words when ten would do? You watch for that.” That was how I started to train myself to listen for hesitations and gaps in the answers I heard, and especially answers that didn’t come, but instead silences, to measure how long those silences lasted and how comfortable the person was during them.
“But is there a technique for asking questions, one way that’s better than another way?”
“You have to be patient. You ask and then wait. You resist the temptation to jump in and sort of help the person along.”
Ross was entirely correct. I learned just how strong was the impulse to coach people. Waiting is difficult, but silence is a powerful tool. It’s accommodating and inviting. A direct answer requires the kind of confidence that somebody with something to hide might lack. I learned to let the froth of their words bubble forth until it ran out. I tried to read the silences. Sometimes silence is its own story.
We hugged goodbye. Ross was looking forward to getting home early to his Amira.
No one waited for me.
That night, I lay awake wondering why I was alone, why I’d had only about a dozen dates since college graduation. Was it down to ambition? Fear? An odd repellent odor? Were my eyes spaced too far apart? Was my mouth too big, in both senses of the word? Was I simply engineered to be lonely?
Or was I alone because I was a bad person, even though no one knew it? Did other human animals instinctively detect something malign and avoid me?
These were the kind of night thoughts that crept out to scratch at the fabric of your pillow. Once one is loose, in scuttle more of them: How would I even write this story?
Yes, I’d gone to one of the best journalism schools on earth. Yes, I’d done straight news... but only during summer internships. And even then, what I covered wasn’t exactly being embedded with the Eighth Marines in Kabul; it was just how nasty and personal the infighting got on the mayor’s office staff, with one man posting photos of his colleague’s ass crack on Instagram. Now I wrote whipped-cream prose. I could overlay threesquare feet of silk, muslin, hemp, linen, copper, indigo dye, nylon, mesh, rubber, steel alloy, and brass with magic. “Sassy but secure, dramatic yet durable, class made comfortable, the Sensational Sandrine sets the standard for satchels and then raises it to the stars.” It wasn’t wrong, and it was what I was paid to do—convert the unruly details into something scintillating (“We give you the secret lowdown on...” “We take you behind the golden doors of the most exclusive...” “Why you may gasp at the price before you gasp at the gorgeous...”). My painted-on drama allowed readers to leap over the stumbling block of goods made by the hands of children in China.
Would I be tempted to embellish Felicity like a pricey Burberry square? Would I convert the narrative to portray her as much victim as predator? Of course, she was, but only in the strictest sociological sense. And further, I was a romantic. Even if I could keep all the questions in the strike zone, could I later steer clear of tricky tropes and melted melodrama? (Okay, yes, alliteration addiction admitted...) By its very nature, any story is the thing itself but also not the thing itself. The event or the issue is framed by somebody else’s vision. The descriptions, the quoted speech, the beginning, the conclusion, those are all someone else’s choices, not the actual participants’ actions. Despite the goal of objectivity, the reporter’s own history and personality is folded in, like raisins in a batter.
Long after, I would see how I came to believe my own version of events, then doubt it, then believe it again.
I’d jetted from Chicago to Miami to Honolulu to Rome to cover the debut of the newest microclutch or sculptural cross-body from Alberto or Roberto or Kimiko. But this turned out to be a much longer journey, especially after things combusted between Sam Damiano and me. As the long fingers of night stretched out to tow in the gold morning ribbons through thewindow of the bed-and-breakfast inn on Lake Michigan, I had yet even to speak his name.
The first time I did was the next day. Tucked up gratefully under a quilt, as exhausted as if the long hours of the previous night were villains I’d outrun, I called his office and asked for him, expecting to leave a message or four or six, shocked when he immediately took the call, his voice a sweet bass, calm and comforting as tea with honey. He offered to meet me that afternoon, but I wanted to reach out to the families of the victims before I got ever more involved with the defendant. I also wanted to talk to Felicity’s mother, to the hometown crowd. There was no particular hurry, so we agreed on the following week, after I returned from my visit to Sheboygan. All day long, and into the next night, I thought of the sound of that voice greeting me, telling me, “Hello, Reenie! I’ve been expecting you to call.” I told him that I just couldn’t be comfortable with what he’d said during that first conversation—he’d go into detail about his client’s version of the deaths if he could. “I would be happy to share her version of those events, if she had ever shared that with me.”
“The more I think about this, the more trouble I have believing you.”
“Believe me or not, I’m telling you that she won’t talk about that at all. I’m not being a crafty lawyer. This is the absolute truth. But she did talk about you. She said it meant a lot to her that you showed up at the arraignment and came to try to speak to her at the jail.”
“But she acted like she hates me! She told me to go away!”
“Yes, that’s what she wants.”
“Well, the trial isn’t for a couple of months. Do you think she’ll change her mind? Do you think she really wants me to leave her alone? Am I supposed to do that? Is that your advice to her?”
He said, “I’m not sure.”
Four
Sandhill Crane
Antigone canadensis.Cranes symbolize luck but also retribution and are often used as a metaphor for witnessing crimes and bringing culprits to justice. Large water birds, they are long-lived, the oldest on record first banded in Florida in 1982, then found in Wisconsin in 2019. Cranes are famed for the leaping, dipping energy of their courtship dances. The naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote of their “nobility, won in the march of aeons,” and indeed, a sandhill crane fossil found in Florida was dated at 2.5 million years old. The genus name is shared with the title character of the play by Sophocles about a brave, loyal, doomed young woman.
I always thought I had a vocation for true crime—writing about it, that is, not living it. When you’ve had a lucky life, with no significant bad fortune inside or outside the fence, it’s tempting to think you could ace something big and dangerous, no problem. Now it was freaky to think of meeting people like no rep from Prada or Burberry ever was.
I knew fuck all about the dark side.
Looking back, I would rather spend eighteen months writing personality profiles of every plumber in the city of Chicago than ever again talk to the family of a murder victim. The reason most crime stories are about the murderer is not just becausethe personality of someone who does wrong is more fascinating than the mind of someone who gets done wrong (which is almost everyone, at some point, to a greater or lesser degree). It’s because the victim of a crime is usually innocent, sometimes unbearably innocent. Everything is sad.
