Neighborhood Watch Read Free Page A

a miracle. We liked Franklin’s small and unpretentious office—and the fact that he rode his bike to work. If the helmet sitting on his desk seemed odd, we chalked it up to absentmindedness for unimportant details. That he worked on his own, with an answering machine for a receptionist, might have been a red flag, but he waved away any doubt by saying, “Low overhead is my secret. I take no case just for money.”
    Though he took a lot of our money, almost all of it in fact, we still stood by him. After the verdict was announced, I squeezed his hand and told him not to feel bad, he’d done his best.
    By that point Paul had developed an edge I hadn’t. It was through thin lips and a stiff handshake that he thanked Franklin, just before I was led away in handcuffs.
    As I’ve reminded Jeremy, it wasn’t entirely Franklin’s fault: I confessed, after all. Any defense lawyer would have had a steep hill to climb clearing me. “Who confesses to a murder they didn’t commit?” the handsome DA asked. The jury nodded in unison like a dozen marionettes, woodenly agreeing with their puppeteer. “You’d have to be either crazy or guilty. And since we’ve established the defendant wasn’t the former, that leaves only one possibility.”
    After I started working with Jeremy, I understood that there are lots of reasons innocent people make confessions. Developmentally disabled people are more inclined to confess once they understand what the interrogator wants to hear. Juveniles and people with mental illness, ditto. I don’t include myself in these groups, but I can relate to them. I know how it feels to sit alone in a room with detectives who insist on one version of events. In my case, one of the detectives, an older man named Don Fenlon, spoke gently, saying he wanted only to help me. He had a sister named with my name—Betsy—and no children either. I believed him when he said that most people in my situation agree to some part of the charge. “Here’s the trick,” he whispered. “Start showing remorse right away. That always helps. Play your cards right, you might get away with involuntary manslaughter. I can’t promise anything, but I have a feeling these guys like you.”
    I was an innocent back then, a child when it came to the judicial system. I thought he meant like in the social sense. I didn’t know like also meant: They’re pretty sure you did this crime . I thought being liked would help, that telling the truth—I didn’t know what happened, didn’t remember the night—wouldn’t be a mistake. According to the transcript, I asked twice about speaking with a lawyer and was told both times that it was “a little early for that.” Once, someone said, presumably as a joke, “Do you have any idea what those guys charge?”
    Was I naïve to believe for so long that the detectives meant me no harm? That we were all working together to get to the bottom of what happened? Yes, I told them, Linda Sue and I were acquaintances who had been spending more time together. She’d invited me into her house, where she admitted some surprising things to me.
    “Like what?” Detective Weaver asked. He was the younger detective and unattractive in the extreme, digging for earwax one minute and propping his dirty shoes up on the table the next. “Sexual stuff? Was that it?”
    “No , ” I said. He stared at me and waited. “She had recently developed a new friendship with one of our male neighbors. We talked about that.”
    He looked down at his notes. “This is Geoff you’re talking about, right?” He folded a piece of paper and used it to dig some dirt out from under his fingernails.
    “Geoffrey, that’s right.” No one called him Geoff.
    “Friend of yours, too?”
    “An old friend of my husband’s. They grew up together.” To my everlasting regret, I kept going when he rolled his hand in a gesture I interpreted as encouragement. “We all like Geoffrey. He’s an author, quite a successful one. Not