Dru Perry wrote a brief story about Georgette Grove’s memorial service, turned it in to her boss at the Star-Ledger, and then went back to work on the “Story Behind the Story” feature. It was her favorite kind of reporting, and by now she was thoroughly intrigued with the prospect of taking a fresh look at the Liza Barton/Little Lizzie Borden case.
She had left a message on the answering machine of Benjamin Fletcher, the lawyer who had defended Liza at her trial. He finally called her back on her cell phone as she was walking up the steps of the Hilltop Church on her way to the service. They had arranged that she would come to his office in Chester at four o’clock.
She intended to ask him about Diane Wesley, Ted Cartwright’s one-time girlfriend, who, as the trial began, had called the press and given an interview. She said that she’d been at dinner with Ted the night before the tragedy, and he had told her that Liza’s hatred of him was the reason for the separation.
Dru had also found an interview that had come out in one of the trashy tabloids, on the second anniversary of the tragedy. In that one, a scantily clad Julie Brett, another of Ted’s girlfriends, revealed that she had been subpoenaed by the defense to refute Ted’s claim that he had never physically abused a woman. “I got on the witness stand in court,” she had told the reporter, “and I made it clear to them that when Ted Cartwright gets drunk, he’s a mean, vicious guy. He starts talking about people he hates and works himself into a fury. Then he’ll get it out of his system by throwing something or by taking a swing at the nearest person. Believe me, if I’d had a gun the night he roughed me up, he wouldn’t be here right now.”
Too bad she didn’t tell the media that at the time of the trial, Dru thought wryly, but the judge probably had a gag order on her at the time.
Benjamin Fletcher, Diane Wesley, and Julie Brett—she wanted to talk to all three of them. After that, she intended to find people who had been friends of Audrey Barton at the Peapack Riding Club both before and after she married Will Barton.
From all the reports I’ve read, that marriage was very happy, Dru thought, but I’ve heard that song before. She thought about her close friends who had split after forty-two years of marriage. Afterward, Natalie, the wife, had confided to her, “Dru, I knew as I was walking down the aisle that I was making a mistake. It’s taken me all this time to have the courage to do something about it.”
At one thirty, Dru picked up a ham and cheese sandwich and a container of black coffee from the cafeteria. Having noticed that Ken Sharkey was in line ahead of her, she carried the bag with her lunch back to his desk. “Would my editor be pleased if I have lunch with him?” she asked.
“What? Oh, sure, Dru.”
From Ken’s expression, Dru was not convinced that he welcomed her company, but she liked to bounce ideas off Ken, and this seemed like a good time to do it. “Paul Walsh was at the service today,” she began.
Ken shrugged. “I’m not surprised. He’s heading up the investigation into the Grove homicide.”
“Am I wrong, or do I detect a little friction between him and Jeff?” Dru asked.
Sharkey, a beanpole of a man whose quizzical expression seemed permanently etched on his features, frowned. “Of course you detected it, because it’s there. Walsh is jealous of Jeff. He’d like to be the one shooting for the gubernatorial spot. Failing that, he’s eligible to retire soon and wouldn’t mind a nice, plush job as head of security somewhere. Obviously it would help if he grabbed some notoriety by solving a big case, and now he’s got one. But whatever is going on behind the scenes, the rumors are that he and MacKingsley are close to being on the outs, and that the split is becoming fairly open.”
“I’ll have to have a talk with Jeff’s secretary,” Dru said. “She doesn’t mean to gossip, but she has a way of saying things that allow me to read between the lines.” She took several healthy bites of her sandwich and sipped her coffee, then continued to think out loud: “Ken, I’ve been keeping in touch with Marcella Williams, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that she’s been keeping in touch with me. She’s the one who lives in the house next to the Nolans on Old Mill Lane, and had so much to say to the media when the vandalism was discovered. She told me that she saw Jeff MacKingsley drive past her place last Wednesday. Then, being Marcella, she walked up the road and saw his car parked in the Nolans’ driveway. Isn’t it kind of unusual for the Morris County prosecutor to get involved in a vandalism case? I mean, that was before Georgette was murdered.”
“Dru, figure it out,” Sharkey said. “Jeff’s ambitious, and soon he’s going to be beating the drums about how safe he’s kept Morris County for the four years he’s been prosecutor. That latest vandalism case made front-page news. That’s why he was there. From what I understand, people are starting to believe that some nut who’s fixated on the story of Little Lizzie defaced the house, then murdered Georgette because she was involved with it. Jeff’s naturally taking a special interest in seeing that both cases are solved quickly. I hope that happens. If he does get to run for governor, I’ll vote for him.”
Sharkey finished his sandwich. “I don’t like Paul Walsh. He’s contemptuous of the media, but at the same time he’ll use us to float stories about imminent arrests, just to squeeze people he thinks are hiding something. Remember the Hartford case? When Jim Hartford’s wife disappeared, Walsh did everything except accuse him of being an axe murderer. Turns out the poor woman must have pulled her car off the road because she didn’t feel well. Autopsy showed she died of a massive heart attack. But until someone finally spotted that car, Hartford wasn’t just dealing with his wife of forty years being missing; he was reading every day in the paper that the police suspected she had been the victim of foul play, and that he was ‘a person of interest,’ meaning, they thought he had killed her.”
Sharkey folded up the paper his sandwich had been wrapped in and tossed it into the basket at his feet. “Walsh is a smart guy, but he doesn’t play fair with anyone—not with innocent people, not with the media, and not even with his own team. If I were Jeff MacKingsley, I’d have sent him packing long ago.”
Dru stood up. “Well, I’m going to send myself packing,” she said. “I’ve got some calls to make, then, at four o’clock, I have an appointment with Benjamin Fletcher, the lawyer who defended Liza Barton at her trial.”
Sharkey’s face registered surprise. “That was twenty-four years ago, and from what I remember, Fletcher was in his fifties then. Is he still practicing law?”
“He’s seventy-five now, and he’s still practicing law, but he’s no Clarence Darrow. His Web site doesn’t offer his services as an expert in criminal defense.”
“Keep me posted,” Sharkey told her.
Dru smiled to herself as she walked across the news room. I wonder if Ken has ever said, “See you later,” or “Take it easy,” or “Have fun,” or even “Goodbye” to anyone. I bet when he leaves his house in the morning, he kisses his wife, then says to her, “Keep me posted.”
* * *
Two hours later, Dru was sitting in Benjamin Fletcher’s cubbyhole office, staring at him across a desk that was a jumble of files and family pictures. She didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t that he’d be a giant of a man, six feet three or four, and at least a hundred pounds overweight. His few remaining strands of hair were damp with perspiration, and his forehead glistened as if he were ready to break into a sweat.
His jacket was hung over the back of his chair, and he had opened the top button of his shirt and pulled down his tie. Rimless glasses magnified his already wide gray-green eyes. “Do you have any idea how many times over the years some reporter has called me about the Barton case?” he asked Dru. “Don’t know what you people think you’re going to find to write about that hasn’t been written before. Liza thought her mother was in danger. She got her father’s pistol. She told Cartwright to let go of her mother, and the rest is history.”
“I guess we all know the basic facts of the case,” Dru agreed. “But I’d like to talk about your relationship with Liza.”
“I was her lawyer.”
“I mean, she didn’t have close relatives. Did she bond with you? In those months after you were appointed by the court to defend her, how much did you see of her? Is it true that she never spoke to anyone?”
“From the time she thanked that cop for putting a blanket around her in the squad car, she didn’t say a single word for at least two months. Even after that, the psychiatrists couldn’t get much out of her, and what she did tell them didn’t help her case any. She mentioned her father’s riding teacher and got all upset. They asked her about her stepfather, and she said, ‘I hate him.’ ”
“Isn’t that understandable, since she blamed him for her mother’s death?”
Fletcher pulled a wrinkled handkerchief out of his pocket and rubbed his face with it. “New medicine I’m on causes me to perspire as if I’m in a steam bath,” he said matter-of-factly. “Goes with the territory. Since I turned seventy, I’ve been a walking drugstore. But listen, I’m still around, which is more than I can say about a lot of people my age.”
His easygoing manner vanished. “Ms. Perry, I’m going to tell you something. That little girl was very, very smart. She never intended to kill her mother. Far as I’m concerned, that’s a given. But Ted Cartwright, the stepfather, is something else. I was always surprised that the press didn’t dig a little more into Audrey Barton’s relationship with him. Oh, sure they knew she’d been engaged to him, then broke it off when she married Will Barton, and that the old flame got rekindled after she was widowed. What they all missed was what went on during that marriage. Barton was an intellectual, a fine architect, but not a particularly successful one. There wasn’t much money in that house, and what there was came from Audrey. She came from money. From the time she was a child, Audrey rode every day. She still was riding every day after she married Barton, and guess who was in that Peapack club riding with her? Ted Cartwright. And her husband never went with her because he was terrified of horses.”
“Are you saying that Audrey was having an affair with him while she was married?” Dru asked quickly.
“No, I’m not saying that, because I don’t know if it’s true. I am saying that she saw him at the club practically every day, that they’d often go on the trails together or take the jumps together. At the time, Ted was expanding his construction business and starting to make lots of money.”
“You’re suggesting that Audrey may have regretted her marriage to Will Barton?”
“I’m not suggesting it. I’m saying it. I heard that from a half-dozen people at the club when I was preparing for the trial. If it was such an open secret, wouldn’t a smart kid like Liza have caught on to it, too?”
Fletcher picked up the unlit cigar from the ashtray at his elbow, put it between his lips and took it out again. “Trying to break the habit,” he remarked, then continued his explanation to Dru. “From the time Audrey buried her husband, she was seeing Ted Cartwright. She waited a couple of years to marry him because the kid resented him from the get-go.”
“Then why did Audrey file for divorce? Why was she so afraid of him?”
“We’ll never know for sure, but my guess is that life with the three of them under the same roof was unbearable, and obviously Audrey couldn’t dump her child. But don’t forget one more point that kept coming up.” Benjamin Fletcher looked sharply at Dru, challenging her scholarship on the Barton case.
“I understand there was a question about the alarm system,” Dru suggested.
“That’s right, the alarm, Ms. Perry. One of the things we managed to get out of Liza was that her mother set the alarm that night before the two of them went upstairs. But when the cops came, the alarm was turned off. Cartwright didn’t break in. If he’d disconnected the alarm from the outside, there’d be a record of a malfunction. I believed him when he said Audrey had called him and invited him over to discuss a reconciliation. And now, Ms. Perry, I have to tell you I’m planning to leave a little early today.”
“Just one more thing, Mr. Fletcher. I read an article that was printed in one of those trashy tabloids about two years after the trial. It was an interview with Julie Brett. She testified at the trial that Ted Cartwright physically abused her.”
Fletcher chuckled. “She sure did, but the abuse she got from Cartwright was that he dropped her for another woman. Don’t get me wrong. That guy has an explosive temper and has been known to swing a punch, but not at Julie.”
“You mean she was lying?”
“Now I didn’t say that, did I? I think the real truth is that they’d had an argument. He was on his way out. She grabbed him and he shoved her. But in sympathy for Liza, Julie dressed up her story a little. She’s got a good heart. That’s off the record, of course.”
Dru looked at Fletcher. The elderly lawyer had a satisfied smile on his face. Clearly he was amused by his memory of Julie Brett. Then his face became stern. “Ms. Perry, Julie made a big impression on the judge. Trust me, if it wasn’t for her, Liza Barton would have been confined in a juvenile detention center until she was twenty-one.”
“What about Diane Wesley, another of Cartwright’s girlfriends?” Dru asked quickly. “She told the media that Ted had dinner with her the night before the tragedy, during which he blamed Liza for the problem he was having with Audrey.”
“She told that to the press, but she didn’t get to say it in court. But anyhow, she was just another voice confirming that Liza caused the rift.” Fletcher stood up and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Perry. When you write up your article, have some kind words for this former underpaid public defender. That little girl got one hell of a good defense from me.”
Dru shook his hand. “Many thanks for your time, Mr. Fletcher. Have you any idea where Liza is now?”
“No. I wonder about her from time to time. I just hope she got the psychiatric help she needed. If she didn’t, I wouldn’t put it past her to sneak back around here someday and blow Ted’s brains out. Good luck to you, Ms. Perry.”