...And Never Let HerGo

explained to her husband and the all-male prosecuting team that very few women would be able to turn off overnight a love that had lasted two decades. Often to their own detriment, she said, women cling to memories of how they perceived their relationship. For the moment, Debby was fragile, but she was doing her best to break free of Tom.
    “We don’t wake up one morning,” Dee told them, “and just say, ‘I don’t love him anymore.’ ”
    U SING ANOTHER PRISONER ’ S SBI number, Nick Perillo had to try five times before he managed to get through to Debby. He was completely unaware that calls from Gander Hill to her home were now being recorded. “I’m right next to Tom,” he told her. “He wanted me to call you to see what your schedule was—and [to tell you] that he misses you. Well, of course, he misses you.”
    “Ah, God. Doesn’t he know it’s past that for me?”
    “OK.”
    “You can tell him that for me . . . I’m past missing him.”
    Perillo’s words were mixed up and he sounded unsure. He told Debby that Tom had given him a letter with a number of questions to ask her, but the guards had caught him as he crossed the red line and taken it. He was doing this from memory. “He wants to know if the rumor is true?” he said. “I don’t know what that means.”
    “I don’t know,” Debby said carefully.
    Perillo asked her if what was in the paper that day—about Tom asking her to get the gun—was true, and she said it was. He hemmed and hawed and hung up without really saying anything, and then called back to ask if she’d gotten “the delivery.” She said she had. He was talking about Tom’s letter insisting that she fire her attorney.
    The very fact that Tom was worried enough to have another inmate—a stranger with a rough voice—call to nudge her only confirmed what she had decided.
    Debby had agreed to tape Tom’s calls, although she hated doing it. “I couldn’t do it for long,” she recalled. “It was too difficult for me to take the calls and not be truthful, and when I told them I couldn’t stand it any longer, they took the device off. I really wanted the phone blocked. It was torturous to hear it ring and not pick it up.”
    Wharton arranged for her phone to be blocked to all calls from Gander Hill. It was easier for her. But from about February 27 to March 3, Debby did record Tom’s calls. Although he was somewhat out of the loop—or rather, late in the loop—he knew now that Debby had caved in about the gun and admitted that she had bought it at his request.
    His voice, questioning, jabbing, accusing, incredulous, and ugly, filled up most of the tapes. He wanted to know everything she had told Connolly and the other prosecutors. He kept asking why she had told them she bought the gun.
    “I told them the truth,” she said. “I told them I bought it and gave it to you. You wanted it and I gave it to you.”
    “Why did you
say
such a thing?”
    “Because you did.”
    She kept repeating that she had only told the truth.
    “Don’t say that. Just tell me what you said.”
    There was such loathing in his voice that when Debby listened to the tapes a long time later, she had to ask Bob Donovan again and again to turn them off. “They made me ill,” she said. “I heard things in his voice then that I’d never noticed before.”
    “Do you know what you’ve done to us?”
Tom hissed.
    She leaned her head against the wall, knowing now that it was not
she
who had destroyed their relationship. Impossible as it seemed, impossible to explain, she still loved the man she remembered. It was as if there were
two
men: the Tom she had loved for seventeen years and the Tom in Gander Hill.
    From that point on, Debby didn’t read his letters. “Bob Donovan came and picked them up,” she remembered. “He was very kind, very understanding. He took them away, unopened. It was easier for me not to have to read them.”
    Although Debby didn’t send Tom any more letters, she wrote them. It was only an exercise in trying to understand her own feelings. She typed her letters to Tom on her computer, letters with no place to go. Sometimes she hoped it would all turn out to be a terrible mistake. But she knew better.
    N ICK P ERILLO had received $25 for making his call to Debby; following Tom’s orders and without asking why, Kay Capano had deposited the money into Nick’s commissary account. He accepted it, but Nick had made another move the day before. He’d written a