Closely Akin to Murder Read Free Page B

a swimming pool and wanted to change clothes—and busted up the party. Fran managed to slip away. Oliver discovered me in his bed, and was attempting to rape me when I grabbed the knife and stabbed him. I kept stabbing him until he collapsed. I still have nightmares in which I’m screaming silently as my arm goes up and down and blood splatters my face. What I did was a monstrous thing. Oliver was too drunk to know what he was doing. He was a hero in Hollywood, and everybody worshipped him.”
    â€œEarlier you said that his body was on the balcony. If he assaulted you in the bedroom, how did you and he end up out there?”
    â€œI fought my way out of the bedroom, but he came after me. I grabbed a knife off the bar as I backed toward the balcony. Afterward, I stumbled to the bedroom and passed out again, I suppose this time from the trauma of realizing what I’d done. Fran’s scream wakened me. She’d started worrying about leaving me behind, and had Jorge bring her back to the hotel. She was clear-headed enough to point out that I had no scratches or bruises to back up my accusation of rape,and the police would believe I’d been in his bed to seduce him when he returned. It was such a sick idea that I was ready to throw myself off the balcony.”
    â€œBut surely the police would have believed you. You were only seventeen, and as you said, unsophisticated. He had to have been at least twenty years older. He’d been drinking, and he was angry about the party. It seems reasonable to assume he might have turned this anger on you, since you were vulnerable.”
    â€œAnd very frightened and confused,” she said in a low voice. “Fran convinced me that my only hope was for his body to be discovered at the base of the cliff. Once we’d done that, I wiped up the blood while she disposed of my clothes and the evidence of the party. Then she gave me a sleeping pill, and I went back to my room.”
    â€œBut the police arrested you?”
    â€œThe body was found the next morning, and at first it was assumed that he’d fallen. My parents, Debbie D’Avril, and Chad Warmeyer all admitted they’d been drinking heavily at various parties, and that Oliver could barely walk. Fran went into shock. Her mother arrived that day and arranged for her to be sedated and kept in bed. Then my bloodied shirt was found in a garbage can behind the hotel restaurant. Details came out about the party, and Fran was forced to admit I remained there when everyone else left. The police searched my bedroom at the bungalow and found my diary. It was filled with accounts of sexual encounters, but the police refused to believe they were only the fantasies of an unhappy teenaged girl who’d never been kissed. I finally broke down and confessed. After that, everything was a hideous blur of interrogation rooms, a filthy cell, hearings held in Spanish with nointerpreters, and a mockery of a trial in front of a disapproving judge. I was not allowed to testify, and I don’t know if my lawyer believed me, either. I’m not even sure my parents did after they were shown my diary, but at that point I was too depressed to care.”
    â€œWhere was Fran during all this?” I asked.
    â€œI wasn’t allowed to see her until the trial, when we were both found guilty. She was glassy-eyed and unwilling to speak to me, and I never saw her again after we were transported to the prison. I tried without success to find out what happened to her. She could have been transferred, released, or buried in the paupers’ cemetery just outside the prison wall. Dysentery and tuberculosis were rampant. I had pneumonia numerous times because my cell was so damp. Someone sent me packages of food and medicine every month; without them, I would have starved.”
    Ronnie’s recitation had been unemotional and devoid of details, but it evoked such repugnant images that I felt nauseous. At seventeen,