Last Dance, Last Chance

visitor, hovering next to his wife’s bed.
    Rose Gardner was surprised to find Anthony at her door the Thursday after Debbie was admitted to the hospital. He asked her if she had a Bible. Of course she had a Bible.
    “Anthony said he needed to look up a certain passage of scripture. It was the part about ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth…’ I knew it was in the Old Testament—probably in Exodus. I loaned him a Bible.”
    Anthony talked somewhat obscurely about people who might want to wreak revenge upon him because they blamed him for something he had done. Rose, of course, had read about Sarah Smith’s death in Anthony’s surgery. Anyone who read the papers or watched television in Buffalo knew about that. Later, when Rose thought about it, she sensed that Anthony was hinting that Sarah’s husband or family might be plotting against him. But, for the moment, he didn’t seem all that worried about Debbie’s being in the hospital. He seemed more focused on his own fears.
    “I asked him how Debbie was doing, and he said, ‘Aww—she’ll be all right.’ That same lack of concern he always had.”
    Rose asked if she could see Debbie, and Anthony said he’d see what he could do.
    “And he did. He called and said I could go and see her the next day—Friday. My husband came home early so I could go visit her.”
    In retrospect, Anthony’s odd request of Rose Gardner may have been one of his initial steps to create a defense if suspicion should fall upon him. He knew what Debbie’s diagnosis was; most people didn’t—not yet. After that, without fail, his top suspect in Debbie’s poisoning was Dan Smith. Wasn’t it ironic, he would ask, that Debbie had gone to the hospital in August—the same month Sarah Smith died?
    Rose prayed for Debbie, and she prayed for Anthony, too. But there was a niggling, stabbing doubt in her mind. “I did pray for him—I still do,” she recalled. “But there was something…my gut feeling about him was that he was evil. I’ve never been aware of evil like that before. I’ve known people with psychiatric problems, but it wasn’t that; it was almost that he was diabolical.”
    Rose went with Anthony on Friday, August 13, to see Debbie. He went ahead of her and pointed to the room in the intensive care unit where Debbie was. Rose was surprised to see the guard at the door. She wondered why. They had to wait, and she tried to make small talk with Anthony. She asked him how things were going.
    “It was all ‘woe is me,’” Rose said. “Nothing about Debbie, but his difficulties in finding a job and all the bad luck he was having. And then I went into the room after the guard cleared me, and I talked to Debbie, and she said, ‘Rose, I’ve been poisoned.’”
    “ Poisoned?” Rose echoed, her voice full of shock. “Oh, Debbie…poisoned?”
    All Rose could think was that Anthony had done it, but she couldn’t say that to Debbie. It was clear that that possibility had never occurred to Debbie.
    “It was very difficult for me,” Rose said. “I knew Debbie, I knew the kids, and we were so connected. What do you say? It wasn’t something I ever thought would happen to someone I knew so well.”
    Like several of their other neighbors, Rose noticed that Anthony seemed to be “on something.” She didn’t know if it was alcohol or some kind of drug, but he seemed so disconnected, and his affect was all wrong.
    Caroline Rago was staying with Ralph and Lauren. She would remember the moment her daughter called to tell her she’d been poisoned. “I was in the basement, and Anthony was doing something with his fax machine. Debbie told me what they found out—about her being poisoned, and I go ‘What?’ and when I got off the phone, I said to Anthony, ‘She’s been poisoned. She’s actually been poisoned,’ and he says, ‘Now, don’t go telling everybody. Don’t tell the family, because they’re gonna be pointing the finger at me.’”
    But Caroline told Carmine, her son. They had both been so frightened for Debbie.
     
    “Anthony would take my hand,” Debbie remembered, “and he kept telling me, ‘You know I didn’t do this, and I know you didn’t do it, so we’ll get through this—we just have to stick together. Remember that, Debbie, we have to stick together.’”
    Anthony moved out of their duplex in West Seneca while Debbie was in the hospital, saying that he couldn’t bear to be there without her. He and Polo went to live with