...And Never Let HerGo

his state of shock, and Debby’s. “So you got two people in a state of shock—and one dead,” he said, drawing a breath.
    “Did you call nine-one-one or anybody else?” Oteri asked.
    “No,” Tom said with regret in his voice. “Most cowardly, horrible thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was like my whole life flashed before me.”
    What was a man to do? Tom looked at the jury imploringly. Debby was sobbing and hysterical, his life was flashing before his eyes. “I always thought I was a guy with some guts, and I wasn’t.And I’m just being selfish, too, to protect myself and also to protect Debby. And so, since I knew the paramedics could not do anything—I knew Anne Marie was dead—I chose not to call the paramedics or the police but to protect myself and, to the extent I could, to protect Debby.”
    Oteri asked Tom what he had done then—at eleven-thirty at night, with Anne Marie dead on the floor before him.
    He had tried to comfort Debby first, he said, telling her it had been an accident and not her fault. “If I had been honest with her and told her I was seeing Anne Marie and on what basis, she would not have had reason to snap.”
    Then Tom said he had put Debby in her car and sent her home. He would take care of what had to be done.
    “After Debby has left. What do you do?” Oteri asked quietly.
    “I break down,” Tom recalled. “I fell apart and I cried and I screamed at myself and I punched the wall, and after about five minutes of that, I did something I’m capable of doing. I compartmentalized. And then I just said, I have to do something. What am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
And the first thing I have to do is take care of Anne Marie’s body.”
    And then Tom said he’d remembered that he had some things downstairs that he had a choice of using. He had a brand-new garbage can—“I couldn’t bring myself to think that we’re talking about a corpse.” He couldn’t put her in a garbage can, he said, not even a brand-new one. So that left the cooler.
    “I brought the cooler upstairs,” he said. “I put Anne Marie in the cooler and I wrapped her in one of the cotton blankets from the guest room.”
    “What was she wearing?” Oteri asked.
    “The same outfit she had worn to dinner. And she and her shoes were in there, and eventually I put the gun in there.”
    If Anne Marie was wearing her flowered dress, then where had the flowered dress come from that ended up back on the settee in her apartment? People in the gallery had read about that and looked confused.
    Tom testified that he had eventually left his house on Grand Avenue that evening. And he remembered that—for some insane reason—he still had the gun with him. “I put the gun underneath the front seat of my car.”
    And then he remembered that he had forgotten to mention something that he wanted the jury to know. “Despite what was said from the witness stand,” Tom testified, “Anne Marie had seen thegift from Talbot’s. Once she saw the box, she knew exactly what it was. She was very happy. And she opened it up and she didn’t break the gold seal. She
never
broke the gold seal. She looked and confirmed what it was and just gave me a very big smile. Showed she was very happy. And I imposed one condition on her . . .”
    His voice trailed off. “But I guess I’m beyond that . . .”
    Oteri asked Tom to speak up and he explained he had been on automatic pilot by then. “I felt as though I had to go to her apartment and bring over the gift and bring over the perishables that were in my refrigerator—like strawberries and bananas. Anyway, I had something else that I thought to bring over with me.” He could not remember what it had been.
    Now, Tom admitted a number of things he had done, all on “automatic pilot.”
    “I did make that star-six-nine call. I wanted to find out if I was the last one she had spoken to. And I heard a man’s voice answer that I didn’t recognize, so I realized I was not the last one. . . .
    “I did go to her room. I did turn her air conditioner on. I did not touch her bed. I did not go through her closet.”
    Tom offered his guess that it had been Anne Marie herself who had left a jumble of shoes and a mess in her closet because she had been in such a hurry to take a shower and change before going to dinner with him.

Chapter Forty-three
    A FTER THREE DAYS OF LISTENING to Tom, everyone in the courtroom wondered how long it would take him to finish his seemingly