...And Never Let HerGo

happiness.”
    It was obvious now to all of the men who were about to prosecute Tom that he had always sought happiness for himself and never worried how he degraded other people in his headlong pursuit of pleasure.
    When asked about Tom’s sexual practices, Debby said, “He was never rough during sex. He was very gentle—loving.”
    But denied sexual satisfaction and complete control over the women in his life, Tom appeared capable of extreme violence. If that trait had been part of his lovemaking, his prosecutors would have recognized the man they were dealing with sooner.

Chapter Thirty-five
    T OM DIDN ’ T REALLY KNOW why nothing came of his plan to have Debby’s house burglarized. Perillo wasn’t in the cell next to him any longer, and Tom could talk to him only if Perillo was out in the yard for a smoke during his rec hour and came close enough to Tom’s window, or if Perillo sidled over the red line on the floor when the guards weren’t looking.
    When the burglary didn’t happen, Tom began a number of other plans on many fronts. And oddly—or perhaps not oddly—he continued to look to the women in his life to provide alibis for him.
    Susan Louth had written back to him and seemed to be totally in his corner. In his reply to her letter, he said that his cousin Loretta Farkas had been surprisingly supportive. “She also told me,” he wrote, “that she saw Debby MacIntyre’s picture in the paper and that she looks like a shrew and a backstabber. Pretty perceptive.”
    Tom added a paragraph of ugly descriptions of Debby’s sexualproclivities. And then he asked Susan to drum up some “word of mouth support” for him, suggesting that she start rumors about Debby that would reach his “jury pool.”
    But he had a more specific request. In thinking about his case, he had realized that it would be necessary to show that he didn’t have the physical strength to carry a cooler with a body in it down the back stairs at the North Grant Avenue house and lift it into the back of the Suburban. Gerry had already told prosecutors that he hadn’t helped Tom do that, so he needed a witness who would testify that he wasn’t a strong man.
    Toward that end, he suggested a “memory” to Susan about the day he had lent her a dining room table and chairs. He reminded her that she had to help him carry the table because he was too weak to handle it alone.
    “I do remember how heavy the dining room table was,” she wrote back. “I remember coming to your house and helping you move the table and chairs. . . . I was sore for a week.”
    Tom’s letters to Susan were rife with sexual references, reminding her of how intimate their relationship had been. For the moment, she was a member of his team.
    There were Tom’s daughters, too. They adored their father, and he told everyone what a hard time they were having with him locked up. He had tried to claim that the blood found in his house had come from them—and then raged when the prosecutors attempted to get blood samples. Some closely tied to the case believed that Tom might call his girls as alibi witnesses if he had to.
    Indeed, Tom, who often bragged about what an overprotective father he was, had given his daughters’ address and phone number to a fellow inmate. Harry Fusco didn’t have anyone to call and he had traded his phone time to Tom for commissary money and certain favors. Harry, a sex offender, called the girls with messages from Tom, wrote to them, and treasured the letters they wrote back. He had pictures of some of the beautiful teenagers in his cell.
    E VEN as he seethed over Debby’s defection, Tom suspected that he might never be acquitted of murder without her. And he still could not believe that there wasn’t some way to summon her back. He had cajoled, promised, threatened, and groveled, but Debby hadn’t responded as he fully expected she would. He had always believed that he fulfilled her sexual needs completely. He suspected that she might be suffering from a kind of sexual starvation. If he could provide a solution—albeit once removed—she might be more pliable.
    Tom considered his choices of a surrogate lover and thought of Tom Shopa. A longtime friend, Shopa was tall and handsome, and he was divorced. The two Toms had gone to school together at Archmere. Shopa was a C.P.A., and he had written to him soon after he was arrested, a kind and concerned letter. On the last Sunday in March, Shopa and another old friend accompanied