Wilde Lake(16)

The woman returned home, made her husband’s favorite dinner, let him have all the beer he wanted. She gave him steak and french fries, despite his cholesterol. She sat at the kitchen table and asked him gentle, probing questions. She told him about the shoe. He demanded to see it. “Oh, I threw it away.”

Where? he demanded. Where? We’ve got to be careful. If they find that shoe—

“Honey, what’s wrong?” the woman said. “You can trust me.”

The story poured out of her husband. He had seen a hitchhiker, given her a ride. It had been the girl’s idea to pay him with sex, he swore to this. But the girl had hurt him, bit him. (This part was mysterious to me when I was six. I knew vaguely how babies were made, but I didn’t know how someone could bite you during the act. I assume she bit him while they were kissing.) All he did was try to make her stop. Was that so wrong, trying to make a girl stop? When she was hurting him?

They never found the girl’s body, but the shoe was used, Cinderella-like, to identify her. Sheila Compson, sixteen, from New Jersey, had decided to hitchhike to a concert in Largo, Maryland, after a fight with her father. I think it was a Styx concert. She never came home. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.

The odd thing was that everyone hated the wife. While it is true that spouses cannot be compelled to testify against each other, they have always been free to do so willingly. Yet people treated this woman as if she had violated some natural law. She was cold-blooded, with no real concern for the girl who had died, only anger toward the husband who had betrayed her. My father had to coach her to call Sheila Compson something other than that slut or trollop.

Meanwhile, the husband became bizarrely pitiable. His defense was that he had told his wife the story he thought she wanted to hear at the time. The truth was that he had a pleasant consensual encounter with the girl at the truck stop near 216, then let her out just north of the Montgomery County line, where he assumed she caught one more ride.

“And she left with only one shoe?” my father asked him when the defendant took the stand.

He held up his hands and shrugged, as if to say Women! Under redirect from his own attorney, he said that the shoe had been in a rucksack the girl was carrying, that she was wearing something more substantial on her feet and the shoe had rolled out from her bag while they were in the backseat “enjoying each other.”

He would come to regret that turn of phrase. My father used it over and over in his final arguments. “And that blood, on the shoe—I guess, that, too, happened while they were—enjoying each other. A sixteen-year-old girl, trying to get to a concert. A twenty-four-year-old man. He certainly enjoyed himself. Did she?”

Final arguments were held the week before school started. AJ and I were allowed to attend, and Noel tagged along. Standing in front of the jury, my father cradled that shoe in his hand. He told the jurors a story about the girl, who, he reminded them, was not there to speak for herself, whose body was still missing. This shoe was all that was left of her, all we would ever know of her. This shoe and her parents and her room back in New Jersey, where she had a poster of a cat hanging from a chin-up bar and a pink-flowered bedspread and a drawer of T-shirts from national parks, purchased on a trip she had taken cross-country with her family just two years ago. My father had driven up there to meet Sheila’s parents, studied her bedroom, learned everything he could about her. Sheila had bought these shoes with money saved up from her job at Baskin-Robbins. He told the jurors how much she made an hour, how hard it was to scoop certain flavors like Jamoca Almond Fudge. But Sheila never complained. The platforms were difficult shoes to walk distances in, but they were her best shoes, and when she decided to go see her favorite band in Largo, they were the obvious ones to wear, even if the chill of autumn had arrived. Those were the kind of decisions a sixteen-year-old girl made. Impractical, heartfelt. She had on overalls, a peasant blouse, and a peacoat when she left school that afternoon. Her parents thought she was going to work, then sleeping over at a friend’s house, so they did not worry when she did not return that night. No one mentioned a rucksack. Her parents swore that she carried her books tight to her chest, a small purse slung over her arm. No rucksack.

My father reminded the jury that at least two other men had given Sheila Compson rides that day. They had testified at the trial. They had described a bright, lovely girl, full of excitement. “They enjoyed—her conversation,” my father said. “Nothing more.” Yes, she had quarreled with her parents. Yes, she had defied them, lied to them. She was not a perfect girl by any means. And, yes, she might have chosen to have sex with this man. Here, my father cast an incredulous look at the defendant, who was not particularly attractive.

“She’s out there somewhere,” he said. “We may never find her. Her parents have been denied the ritual of burial, which is no small thing in our culture. How we treat our dead is central to our humanity. There is no doubt in my mind that Sheila Compson is dead. The defense would have you believe that she is a runaway. But, really, how far could she have run?”

He placed the lone shoe, size seven, on the flat rail of the jury box.

The jury came back in less than two hours. Guilty of murder in the first degree, life in prison. The death penalty in Maryland had been temporarily suspended because of constitutional challenges or this man certainly would have been sentenced to die.

We went out for a celebratory dinner at the Magic Pan—Noel somehow got invited to that, too—and toasted, as was our private tradition, Hamilton Burger, the beleaguered D.A. on Perry Mason. Most people rooted for Mason, but my family knew who the real hero was, who stood for justice and the community, not just his client.