...And Never Let HerGo

the beginning of Letterman. We were winding down the evening.”
    Tom went on for some time about the golf game he had hoped to play on Friday and some in the gallery sighed. What did that have to do with anything?
    “You said you stretched out on the love seat?” Oteri asked, bringing Tom back to the vital night.
    “No. Well, we didn’t lie down next to each other. I don’t mean to give that impression. We were sitting right next to each other . . . our legs were stretched out straight.” He explained that Anne Marie was to his left, and “adjacent to my body.”
    “Any parts of her body touch your body?”
    “Pretty much her entire right side.”
    “Were you engaged in any form of—”
    “No, no.”
    “—kissing or anything?”
    “No. No. Not that way.” There was, at times, a certain prissiness about Tom; it was hard to picture him as the man who had bragged about having so many mistresses. When he was disturbed with a question, he bubbled out a string of “No, no, no, no, no, no, no’s,” as if he were truly shocked.
    “All right,” Oteri said, “what happened next, sir?”
    “Well, the next thing I knew,” Tom answered in a rush, “Debby MacIntyre was in the room. She must have entered the front door. She had a key to my house and I had a key to her house. I even had a garage door opener for her house. And she was pretty ballistic at the time.”
    The courtroom buzzed. Although Gene Maurer had hinted at it when he cross-examined Debby, this was the first outright testimony that put her in Tom’s house on the last night Anne Marie was seen.
    Tom testified that Debby had used her key to come through his front door. She would have to have entered at his front door, walked down a few steps, turned left through a narrow hallway to the kitchen. A few steps more and she was in the great room.
    “We didn’t hear her come in because of the noise of the air conditioner,” Tom said. “And Debby also has a very soft tread. She’s a very small lady, and we didn’t realize she was there until she started yelling. I heard her before I saw her. She was yelling as she got closer to the love seat. And then I saw her standing more or less at the end of the love seat. And yelling.”
    Tom said Debby had been on the right side of the love seat, awoman furious. “She was yelling, ‘Who’s this? What is this all about? Is this why you couldn’t see me?’ ”
    And suddenly, Tom detoured to editorialize on Debby’s work pressures, his “red flags” when the Tatnall School was mentioned. He wanted the jurors to know that it was not strange that Debby had snapped.
    “As far as she was concerned, basically I was spending all my romantic time with her. So all of this is sort of coming out and I’m trying to say, ‘Relax. Let’s slow down. I mean, Anne Marie and I are friends—’ ”
    Oteri interrupted to ask what Debby had been wearing.
    “I know she had on a T-shirt and some kind of shorts and carrying a little something—”
    “Was that ‘something’ a purse—or do you know what it was?”
    “Something a woman might carry around in the summertime for personal stuff.”
    Tom testified that he had been caught between two angry women. “I was listening to Anne Marie saying, ‘Capano, what the hell is this?’ And I was turning to Anne Marie to try to explain, to say, you know, ‘Hold up,’ ” Tom said, speaking faster with remembered emotion. “And I got up. I stood up to face Debby. And Anne Marie is in the background muttering, ‘I don’t want to put up with garbage like this.’ And she actually had gotten her panty hose from wherever she had thrown them or put them on the table, and she said, ‘I want to go and I want to go now.’
    “And she started to put—I was glancing back and forth between Anne Marie and Debby. And Annie was in the process of pulling her panty hose up and getting her shoes—”
    “You were standing?” Oteri rushed to say.
    “Yes.”
    “And Annie was—”
    Colm Connolly objected to the leading question. Oteri was trying desperately to help Tom get his story out in a way that made some kind of sense. Judge Lee sustained the objection.
    “I was standing.”
    “Where was Anne Marie in relation to you?”
    “. . . to my right, and Debby was more or less in front of me. As I said, Anne Marie was pulling on her panty hose, and you know, she wasn’t screaming at me but she was making it quite clear whatever was going on here was ridiculous and [she]