BECAUSE JANE’S boyfriend Phil was the last person to see Jane alive on March 20, 1969, the state has subpoenaed him to appear at the trial. But that’s not quite right: the state has asked him to appear, but it did not subpoena him, because you cannot subpoena someone who lives outside the United States. He agrees to come testify, and I find myself feeling a little guilty—I know he doesn’t want to, and I was the one who passed information about his whereabouts along to Schroeder back in November. At the time Schroeder joked that I should consider becoming a detective myself, as they’d been looking for Phil for some time with no luck. This perplexed me, as I had found him with one phone call and one overseas letter.
In the time since, Phil and I have met twice for breakfast in Brooklyn, where he keeps an apartment; my mother and I have also flown to see him in London, where we visited for a week with him and his longtime partner, a healthcare activist named Henie. Seeing my mother and Phil greet each other at the London airport after more than thirty years apart made the whole psychotic enterprise of Jane seem momentarily worthwhile—restorative, even, albeit in a jagged sort of way.
Phil arrives in Ann Arbor the night before he is to testify, and the state puts him up in the same motel in which my grandfather is staying the night. My mother and I plan to have dinner with Phil alone, partly to catch up, but partly to strategize his encounter with my grandfather. They haven’t seen each other since Jane’s funeral, and Phil knew then that her father did not approve of him or the relationship. And then there was the icy fact that for some time Phil was also considered a prime suspect in Jane’s death, so not only did he suffer the loss of the woman he loved, but he also had to suffer through police interrogations, suspicion from all quarters, searches of his home and car, etc.
When you find the guy, Phil told the police after they were through with him, I hope you respect his civil rights more than you’ve respected mine.
The police could not believe that someone who was planning to marry Jane would speak this way about her killer, so they hauled him back in for more questioning.
Now he bounds out of the motel looking great—an academic version of Richard Gere, wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. He says he wants to drive by his old house in Ann Arbor, and before long we find ourselves sitting on a brick patio under an umbrella, drinking margaritas, facing the house he used to inhabit, which is now a gay bookstore flanked by this outdoor bar and a Thai restaurant.
For a while Phil stares incredulously at his old house—at the rainbow flag hanging over its door, the customers milling about in its living room—and tells us what it used to look like inside, how it was to be there with Jane. Then his tone suddenly swerves out of the nostalgic and into the interrogatory. He wants to know why my mother and I have committed to attending the whole trial. Why, and for whom, exactly, we think we’re there.
We’re here for Jane, my mother says plaintively, as if this should be obvious.
I nod in support, even though something about it doesn’t ring true. Jane is, after all, quite dead. We’re talking about what the living need, or what the living imagine the dead need, or what the living imagine the dead would have wanted were they not dead. But the dead are the dead. Presumably they have finished with wanting.
“To the living we owe respect, / To the dead we owe the truth.” ~Voltaire.~ Violent Crimes Unit/Michigan State Police, reads the tagline under each e-mail we receive from Schroeder.
I know I speak for my family in saying we concur with the Voltaire quotation ending your message, my mother writes him back.
It’s the state’s case, Phil now says, with no small portion of disgust. It doesn’t have anything to do with Jane. In fact, she would have hated it.
My mother and I fidget with the paper umbrellas in our drinks, feeling unexpectedly chastised. He’s right: it is not, thankfully, Jane Louise Mixer v. Gary Earl Leiterman. Nor is it Jane Louise Mixer’s surviving family v. Gary Earl Leiterman. It is the State of Michigan v. Gary Earl Leiterman. Sitting in court you never forget this fact: you sit squarely facing the judge, who hunkers down in his great black robe in front of a green and white marble wall, an enormous bronze seal of Michigan mounted behind him. The seal consists of an elk and a moose on their hind legs in bas relief, leaning against a crest, which, in turn, depicts a man holding a long gun, beholding a sunrise, underneath the word TUEBOR: I will defend. Then, wrapped around the bottom of the seal, the state motto: Si Quaeris Peninsulum Amoenam Circumspice. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.
But would Jane have hated the trial? She herself was studying to become a lawyer—not a criminal lawyer, but a lawyer nonetheless. As long as I knew her, she talked about being a lawyer, her high school teacher told the Detroit News a few days after her death. It was her one ambition. In 1969 Jane was one of thirty-seven female law students in a class of 420. She spent the last few years of her life working on political campaigns and educating herself about civil rights litigation. In the wake of her death, the law school established the Jane L. Mixer Memorial Award to honor students who demonstrate the most profound commitment to social justice and civil rights. Growing up I always assumed my grandparents set up this award, but I should have known better. In my research for Jane I learned that friends of hers set it up in 1970 and have maintained it ever since. Before her case was reopened, initial online searches for “Jane Mixer” mostly conjured up information about former law students who had won this award and later included it on their online CVs. Jane may not have lived long enough to leave behind any “legacy,” but if she began one at all, this constellation of political activists, public interest lawyers, and social workers, linked together by her name in cyberspace, might be part of it.
Eventually I break the silence by mumbling something to the effect of, Maybe Jane would have hated it, but if I were murdered and no one came to the trial, I think I’d feel a little hurt. The strangeness, the childishness, of this remark is apparent as soon as it leaves my mouth. Of course I wouldn’t feel any such thing. I would be dead.
THERE WAS a time in my life, around age sixteen, when I became unsure if women actually died. I mean, I knew that they did, but I became confused as to whether or not they shared in the same existential quandary on the planet that men did. This confusion arose during a summer class I took at UC Berkeley, a lecture course titled “Existentialism in Literature and Film.” I had sought out this class for intellectual reasons, but secretly I also hoped it would help me with the panic attacks about death and dying that had beset me in the years immediately following my father’s death. His bedroom demise had catapulted the And if I die before I wake bedtime prayer from the speculative to the plausible, and though I was but eleven, then twelve, then thirteen, I was often terrified to fall asleep at night lest I would not awaken. For neurological reasons that remain opaque to me, these panic attacks were often accompanied by a certain greenish tint that rinsed my vision. When I felt one coming on I would get out of bed and pace the basement of my mother’s house until the furniture and the sky outside and my skin lost this sickly green hue, which, I learned years later on a trip to Kentucky, closely resembles the pall of the air before a tornado.
The professor of Existentialism had told us at the outset that whenever he said “man” he really meant “human.” But my brain did not make this substitution easily. I enjoyed the class, but as it went on I felt as though it were an anthropological survey, with this “modern man” as its central object of inquiry—a man whose noirish perambulations and perpetual unease about his mortality were fascinating and familiar to me but nonetheless distinct, and somehow not directly transferable. One of the films we watched in this class was Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and I remember feeling disconcerted by the way Kim Novak’s character seems stranded between ghost and flesh, whereas Jimmy Stewart’s seems the “real,” incarnate. I wanted to ask my professor afterward whether women were somehow always already dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist, but I could not find a way to formulate this question without sounding, or without feeling, more or less insane.
JANE ASIDE, Phil says, the state’s case strikes me as astonishingly weak.
My mother and I know a great deal about the state’s case, but Phil has a law degree—maybe he knows something we don’t?
That may be so, says my mother. But we’re not here because we’re hoping “to win.” I’m not even sure if we’re “after justice.” We’re here to bear witness.
I nod again in agreement—and it’s a good thing that we’re not “after justice,” because I doubt if any one of us sitting at this table could articulate exactly what that might mean.
We are only after justice if this person is guilty, my grandfather told the Kalamazoo Gazette on November 30, 2004. I just hope we have the right person and that justice is rendered.
Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice—how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility—I find the grammar of justice maddening. It’s always “rendered,” “served,” or “done.” It always swoops down from on high—from God, from the state—like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth’s final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one other, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia “justice” has meant both “retribution” and “equality,” as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.
If you really want to know what justice is, don’t only ask questions and then score off anyone who answers, and refute him, roars Thrasymachus to Socrates in The Republic. You know very well that it is much easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself and tell us what you say justice is.
When justice is done, writes Anne Carson, the world drops away. This does not seem to me a happy thought. I am not yet sure I want the world to drop away.
Regardless of what happens at the trial, Phil shrugs, as if shaking himself free of the whole mess, I “processed” this years ago. I dealt with it then, and I moved on. It’s over for me now.
Fair enough, I want to say, but then why are the three of us sitting in front of your old house in Ann Arbor, talking about what Jane would or wouldn’t have wanted over margaritas the night before you voluntarily testify at her murder trial? I can’t judge the veracity of Phil’s pronouncement; I know I shouldn’t even try. But I find myself believing it about as much as I believe Sylvia Plath when she writes, Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through, in conclusion of a poem utterly sodden with grief and vitriol for her father. Besides, I am beginning to think that there are some events that simply cannot be “processed,” some things one never gets “over” or “through.”
We drive Phil back to the motel, where we accompany him up to my grandfather’s room. They have a perfectly pleasant, if brief, exchange—several notches above civil, a few notches below warm.
Phil’s testimony the next morning is stellar. He wears a great suit and is very patient, even with Hiller’s final, awful question:
Mr. Weitzman, did you kill Jane Mixer?
No, Phil answers evenly, I did not.
I wince, however, when certain photographs of Jane pop up on the big screen—not the autopsy photos, thank God, but some snapshots that Phil took years ago, which he had kept stored in a safety deposit box before handing them over to me in an envelope in a café in Brooklyn the first time we met, in service of Jane. I considered including them in my book but did not. They never felt like mine to reprint—it was more like I’d become their guardian.
But whatever delicacy of intent I may have entertained while writing Jane somehow got bungled once Schroeder started calling. Schroeder read the descriptions of these photos in Jane and called me right away to ask if I could send him copies of them so that he could have more recent photos to show people during his investigation. I wanted the investigation to go as well as possible—indeed, I felt some sort of ethical imperative to help it go as well as possible—so I quickly made copies of Phil’s photos and sent them along. And that is how Phil and I and everyone else came to find ourselves watching them on this large screen, a screen that is being filmed and broadcast live on TV. A guardian of their privacy, indeed.
On the street outside the courthouse, as we wait for a car from the Michigan State Police to bring him back to the airport, Phil tells me he did not sleep well the night before his testimony. He wasn’t jet-lagged, nor was he nervous about appearing in court. Rather, he did not sleep well because he had stayed up late in his motel room reading the copy of Jane I’d given him at dinner. Before the book went to print I’d asked his permission to use some of our correspondence—permission he had granted, albeit in a diffuse way, by saying that he “trusted me to do the right thing.” Nonetheless, now he says he feels quite freaked out by seeing his words in print. (And here I’d been so anxious about the slide show in the courtroom, which he never even mentions, that I’d entirely forgotten to be anxious about his reading Jane.) He says that he also noticed that in my “Acknowledgments” I thank him for his friendship. That’s nice, he says, but he doesn’t really consider what we have a friendship. As he says this I feel my stomach start to curdle, my blood race to my face. But, he winks in parting, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be honored to have one.