WE HURRIED BACK to the East Side, unluckily getting a taxi driver with a good memory, who recognized us and asked for our autographs on the bill printed out from his meter. We obliged rather than argue, and asked him not to tell anyone he’d seen us. Thankfully, I’d asked him to drop us at the corner of 85th and York instead of at the hotel. At the hotel we met with Matt and a real estate broker connection of his whom he’d chosen to handle the sale of our apartment. Neither of us could ever live there again. We agreed not to go by the apartment. Before I’d left for India I’d packed up many of my belongings which I didn’t take with me, and left them sitting in the apartment. The broker knew someone we could hire to put them in storage. The few mementos I wanted could be saved or sent to me. Sarah, who, for the moment, had decided to stay at Kugliani’s house in the Hamptons while she prepared for the show, had time to decide when she could go back inside the apartment. Maybe she’d go with Romey after the apartment sold but before the final closing date.
Then came the meeting with the lawyers. There were over nine ongoing lawsuits surrounding the massacre. We had refused to take part in any of them, although we were considering joining the one against the gun manufacturers.
Everyone in the antiseptic Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street office of Grubman, Green, Lint, and MacAlister looked TV-commercial scrubbed clean. All the furniture, carpet and painted walls seemed newly varnished. I wished I had some Delhi dust to sprinkle like the anti–Tinker Bell.
A receptionist asked us to sit briefly in the waiting room.
Ludovicci-Lint, not at all as I pictured her, overweight with big bones and older, over fifty, wearing a gray suit, short, cropped hair, a weathered, hard face, and a slow earnest gait came out to meet us. “Dr. Downs and Ms. Roberts, please come this way.” Gravity, rather than pleasantness, eked from her voice. We followed her into the conference room. John Linscombe sat at one end of the hockey-rink-sized table where magazines, blue binders, folders, reams of papers, and law books filled half the table. He sniffed and wiped his nose with a handkerchief before he shook our hands. “Sorry, allergies.” He stood over six-foot four, with tortoiseshell glasses and prematurely gray curly hair, framing youthful facial features; he could’ve been anywhere from twenty-seven to forty. He had perfect white teeth, too many of them.
On top of one stack I spotted the newest issue of Teen People, with a cover headline, “The Stuyvesant Massacre: Beyond the Tragedy.” I felt a perverse compulsion to look inside. I picked it up. There were interviews with kids who survived. I came to a one-page essay written by Mary Sweedlow, the girl who Castor pushed to the ground and covered up. I read the blurbs, “I know why I am writing this, I don’t know why so many people care. It feels so invasive.” “In the night when I go to bed, I keep the light on because I still see Castor’s kind face and I touch the scars where two bullets passed through his body and into mine.”
Mary had written a letter to us saying she’d wanted to come to the funeral but understood our desire for privacy. I’d sent her a brief note of thanks. After scanning her story, I asked for her phone number, which they had, and placed the magazine back on top of its stack.
“OK, why is it so essential for me to be here?” I was in no mood for lawyerly dissembling.
Linscombe poured us each a glass of bottled water while Ludovicci-Lint spoke with measured calculation. “Aside from a desire, because personal contact helps, we have offers from “60 Minutes” and “Dateline” for you to appear, which might be helpful.”
“No. Never.”
“OK.” Ludovicci-Lint shifted her left shoulder back and her right shoulder forward and then reversed the shoulder positions as if she were cracking her back. “The Skirpans are not the finest caliber of people and it’s important you know who we’re dealing with.”
Linscombe handed us each a red binder.
Ed and Nicky Skirpan, who’d divorced five years earlier, found new togetherness in this lawsuit. She had taught in the New York public school system for twenty years before being reprimanded for the fifth time. The last for calling her black students “lows and prims,” a code for lowlifes or low IQ. After that incident, the Board of Education transferred her to work in their offices in downtown Brooklyn. Ed Skirpan, an alcoholic, had owned a plumbing business in Howard Beach, Queens. It’d gone bust and he now worked odd jobs.
Ludovicci-Lint had compiled pages and pages of information on the killers; I stopped reading.
“What’s the point of all this? I don’t care about these people.”
Ludovicci-Lint and Linscombe flashed one of those quick, silent-movie ominous glances while Ludovicci-Lint did the talking. “The Skirpans are after only money.”
“So, you want me to pay them to go away? Will that make me culpable in some manner? I won’t sign off on anything like that—”
She didn’t even let me finish. “The hospital wants to make a settlement. The Skirpans are willing to take $100,000. We think we can get them down even lower. It’s peanuts.”
“No.” I’d sign nothing that gave any implication that I’d acted improperly. “This is insane. How the hell did I become the guy on trial?”
“It’s not only you they’re going to put on trial.” She clenched her left hand around a pencil. A massive diamond ring glistened on her forefinger. “It’s going to be damn dirty.”
“What?”
She hesitated. Linscombe tapped his feet on the carpeted floor.
“G’head, gimme the worst,” I said as I saw Sarah’s neck begin to spasm. “No, wait.”
I leaned over to Sarah and asked if she wanted to leave the room. If I should stop them right there.
“No. Tell us what you think you know,” she ordered.
Linscombe spoke in a monotone voice while staring at me. “We have verified Ms. Roberts visited the office of Dr. Julie Stone on the morning of the shooting. Later that day,” he moved his gaze to Sarah, “after being out of phone contact for hours, you made a call from the loft of Jeremy Riegle.”
I felt sick. Sarah looked sick. Unsure if they knew what occurred in Stone’s office, her neck twitched and constricted so deeply that I thought she might have trouble breathing.
Ludovicci-Lint took over. “We can only presume if we know this, so will Corricelli of Karpstein, Forman. We need to know if there was something going on, if they can prove that all those calls made to find Ms. Roberts, that her visit to Stone’s office and Ms. Roberts’ absence distracted you, Dr. Downs.”
“They have a chance?”
“Not to win. But it might not get thrown out, which before I was sure it would be, as frivolous. Which means it will go to trial. Depositions. Money. Investigations. It will get ugly. The Skirpans, Corricelli and his partners at KFC deserve each other.”
These two worked for the hospital and insurance company and would sell me out in a second. My stern refusal to admit any guilt reversed itself suddenly and entirely. “Settle.”
“No, Neil. You said you’d never ever give in and you’ll be forever tainted.”
Ludovicci-Lint stood up, “Should we leave you two alone?”
“No,” I stood up. My knees buckling. “We’re done. Settle the damn thing. I want all of this over.” I placed my hands flat on the table to calm myself. “But if I read the merest hint of any bullshit that has no basis in fact about my wife in any paper, even The Enquirer, I’m coming after all of you somehow. Slander. Libel. Breach of attorney–client privilege. Let me tell you, I will be one sympathetic witness. Somehow you fix it that whatever you think you know stays inside this room.”
“We can’t guarantee that. We need to know certain facts.” Linscombe squinted at me. I wasn’t sure what he was trying to convey. “People like the Skirpans and KFC are completely immoral.”
I didn’t look at Linscombe. Ludovicci-Lint was the partner, the big cheese sniffer.
“This is the only fact you need to know: I acted as a doctor without any prejudice or knowledge that Bobby Skirpan killed my son until after that day was over.” I glanced at Linscombe who paled and drank a sip of water. “They want their money. You manage it. You want me to cooperate? I can do that. One of the best decisions I ever made was paying an extra out-of-pocket premium for supplementary malpractice insurance aside from what the hospital paid, so you need me to sign off on any payment or agreement. So far I have not hired a separate lawyer and I’ve asked my insurance company to cooperate with you. That can all change.”
Linscombe let out a discernible, “Oh, shit.” He knew how much trouble I could cause them. That anything they agreed to would be flawed, maybe useless without my cooperation and the cooperation of my personal insurance company. When Matt had negotiated my settlement with the hospital he made sure I retained that right.
“Now, do it. Please.”
I despised them although they were only doing their jobs. I despised Karpstein, Forman and the Skirpans. I despised myself. My black hole of hate felt insatiable, sucking in all my good air. Except for Sarah. Right then, I didn’t hate her at all. In the elevator, I looked at her. I ached for her sadness. I put my arm around her and hugged her close to me.
“Neil, I want you to think about this. You only gave in so I wouldn’t be humiliated.”
“Sarah, I don’t give a damn about humiliation. I want you and me to be left in peace. That’s how we decide. We’ll never get beyond all of this until this bullshit is over.”
I understood why the families of the others who were murdered kept on with these lawsuits, magazine articles, books, and TV programs. Some for greed. Most because this kept their children alive. I couldn’t exist that way. Castor was dead. For me to go on, I needed to let my son die. Again.