The Weatherman (42 page)

Stacy Dvorchak was zeroing in on key pieces of evidence, having waited until her client was more relaxed. ‘Then, Dixon, how do you explain your fingerprint being found at the first murder scene?”

“Simple. It’s not my fingerprint.”

Stacy let it go at that. She flipped a page in her legal pad.

Jim Fury raised an eyebrow of admiration. The woman knew how to score points. He could see how impressed the jurors were with the way this quadriplegic lawyer handled herself.

Stacy adjusted the braces on her hands. “Somebody once said that only in our old age can we look back and say who we loved and who we didn’t. The Lisa Beauregard we’ve all come to know through your diary testified before this court. You hadn’t seen her in more than twenty-five years. Looking back now, can you say whether or not you were really in love with her?”

“I’ve thought about that a lot since my outburst in this court, for which I am truly sorry. I know now in my heart of hearts that if I live to be a hundred years old I will look back and say that I was in love with Lisa Beauregard, and that her rejection of my love set the course for the rest of my life. I have nobody to blame for that but myself.”

“In your diary you also wrote of your love for Andrea Labore, a newswoman many of us have come to know through television. Are you really in love with her?”

“Sometimes I would think Lisa was just a high-school infatuation … that my love for Andrea was real love. But now I know there’s no difference in the way I feel. Yes, I love Andrea Labore. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her. I’m sorry that love has caused her so much trouble.”

“Dixon, you never dated either one of these women. Never kissed them, slept with them, fought the fights people falling in love fight. How can you say you loved them?”

“It was a higher love. Almost spiritual. I didn’t fall in love with their bodies, I fell in love with the woman.”

“No, you just fell in love with a pretty face, and it didn’t matter what was behind that face.”

“That’s not true.”

“Then why did you twice fall madly in love with women you simply could not have?”

“Just bum luck, I guess. Or maybe I watched too much television when I was a kid, I don’t know. We can control who we date, who we sleep with, but I’m not sure we can control who we fall in love with.”

“Did you love these two women enough to kill for them?”

“No.”

“To kill to spite them?”

“No.”

“To kill others to hurt them?”

“No.”

“Did you love Lisa enough to kill her if you couldn’t have her?”

“No.”

“To kill Andrea if you couldn’t have her?”

“No.”

“But you wrote in your diary, ‘Now I’d like to strangle her. Put my hands around her pretty little neck and choke the life out of her. No more Andrea.’ ”

“I was writing figuratively. I was frustrated. Humiliated.”

“And was it this frustration and humiliation that led you to kill seven women?”

“I can’t believe you asked me that, Stacy. I’ve never killed anybody. I’ve never killed anybody.”

Day three. Wednesday, May third. An upper-air disturbance sent clouds back-pedaling out of Wisconsin and into Minnesota, bringing off-and-on showers. A dreary start to a dreary day. The day before, Judge Lutoslawski had dismissed court early instead of letting the state start in on a weary and agitated Dixon Bell. But now the Weatherman was back on the stand, and it was Prosecutor Jim Fury’s turn to ask the questions. “I hold in my hands your diary. In it you write, ‘I am going insane. I’m hanging from the cliff of reality by a rope and the strands are breaking one by one. You see, we mentally ill know we are ill. We do not act crazy, we go out of our way to act normal. At times it’s a hell of an act.’ So are you insane, Mr. Bell?”

“Those words were written in the late hours of the night after an exhausting day. That diary was the last thing I did before I went home at night. Don’t tell me that a person’s attitude at the end of the day is the same as at the beginning of the day. It’s not.”

“So this diary simply reflects a bad attitude, is that it? A man who has had a bad day?”

“Those words were never meant to be read by anybody but me. They are my most precious memories. They are my most intimate thoughts, my fears and fantasies. Things I would never even mumble aloud to myself. Why don’t you read the part about the people I helped in Vietnam, the lives I saved? The good I did in Memphis, and all of the lives I saved right here in the Twin Cities? Why don’t you read those parts?”

“I ask you again, Mr. Bell, are you mad? Insane?”

“No, I am not.”

“When you worked at Channel 7, where did you park your car?”

“I had contract parking at the Sky High parking ramp.”

“That’s directly below the newsroom, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Could you see the roof of the ramp from the newsroom?”

“I don’t know. I never went looking for it.”

Jim Fury laid the diary back on the evidence table. “Three years back. A stormy July evening. Record rainfall. Do you remember it?”

“Yes. A perfect deluge. Eight inches of rain. I issued a flash flood warning.”

“What time did you leave the newsroom that night?”

“I don’t remember.”

The prosecutor picked up a printout from the table. “According to the security computer you slid your ID card into the exit door at 11:33 P.M. What time that night was teenager Sis Hayne reported dead atop the Metrodome parking ramp?”

Dixon Bell could see Andrea Labore flipping frantically through her notebook at the back of the courtroom. She had been in the newsroom late that night, in the office of Jack Napoleon. “I don’t know.”

“Eleven-fifty-eight p.m.,” Jim Fury told him. “How far is Channel 7 from the Metrodome ramp?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never parked there.”

“It’s about ten minutes.” The prosecutor moved on to the state’s third murder charge. “Christmas Eve, three years back. A freezing ice storm. Do you remember it?”

“Yes, I accurately forecast the storm.”

“Did you take a station vehicle home that night?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did you sometimes take a station vehicle home when you worked at Channel 7?”

“A couple of times, maybe.”

“Did you ever drive a station vehicle through Como Park in St. Paul?”

“I’ve done some weather broadcasts from the park. I don’t remember doing the driving.”

“Do you remember Lieutenant Donnell Redmond, who testified at the opening of this trial?”

“He questioned me on several occasions. I was sorry to read of his death.”

“And did you see the lieutenant that icy morning in Como Park?”

“I wasn’t in Como Park that morning.”

Jim Fury’s voice was rising in intensity with every question. “Tell me, Weatherman … Tamara Livingston, your victim Christmas Eve, your winter kill… ?”

Stacy was livid. “I object, Your Honor.”

“Did you sneak up on her that night, or did you drive right up to her in that Channel 7 News van, introduce yourself as the famous TV weatherman, and ask her if she needed a ride?”

“Your Honor, I object, this is outrageous.”

“I can just hear how you did it,” Jim Fury went on over the objection. “In that smooth southern accent of yours you said, ‘Get in out of the freezing rain, girl, you’ll catch your death.’ ”

“The objection is sustained. The jury will disregard Mr. Fury’s speculation, and in the future Mr. Fury will wait until I rule on an objection before he continues his questioning.”

Jim Fury arrogantly ignored the judge. “Mr. Bell, where were you on the Fourth of July?”

“What year?”

“You know damn well what year.”

“I was doing a live broadcast from the raceway in Lake Country.”

“Did you attend a wet-T-shirt contest?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember a wet-T-shirt contest?”

There were too many bodies in the courtroom. The temperature was reaching the uncomfortable level. Dixon Bell wanted to loosen the knot in his tie, but he knew that would look bad. “There was record-breaking heat and humidity that day. After my last broadcast all I remember is downing beers and watching fireworks.”

“Did you ever get a letter from a young girl who lived in Afton?”

“I receive too much mail to remember every letter.”

“Oh, you would have remembered this letter, Weatherman. She wrote, ‘I saw you on TV. I know you are the killer.’ Does that lift the fog from your memory?”

“I never got such a letter.”

“Have you ever been to Afton?”

“Yes. There’s an elementary school out there I’ve visited. And there’s a good restaurant on the river.”

“What size tennis shoes do you wear?”

“Fourteen.”

“Those are big feet.”

“I’m a big man.”

“Where did you live before your arrest?”

“I have a town house in Edina.”

“And how far is that town house from the spot where Officer Shelly Sumter was strangled to death by a large man with size fourteen tennis shoes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Two and a half blocks.”

“I can’t possibly be the only person with big feet who lives in Edina.”

Jim Fury stormed back to the evidence table and grabbed the diary. He waved it in the air. “This book I hold in my hands is not a diary. This is a road map to the murders of seven women, maybe more. A map drawn in code by the mind of a psychopath and then followed to the last inch. The sick, demented mind of Dixon Graham Bell. A schizophrenic, clairvoyant weatherman.”

Dixon Bell made no attempt to match Jim Fury in volume, but he more than made up for it in raw intensity. “Go ahead and start a diary, Mr. Fury. Write down what you truly think of your wife, or your neighbors, or your boss. Put into words your real politics, believing in your heart that nobody will ever see these words. Then I’ll take your words and I’ll leak them to the newspapers one page at a time. I’ll read your words with a sarcastic voice on national television and we’ll see if you don’t sound like a madman. Let’s see how long you keep your job. You’ve perverted my diary. You’ve used my words in a way that should be illegal. People don’t read books anymore. They watch television.” He pointed at the camera, the red light glowing like a warning. “The words you read from my diary are probably the only reading most of these couch potatoes will get all year.” He turned his attention to the jury box. “If you jurors are going to judge me by what I wrote in my diary, for God’s sake read the whole book. Read it yourself. Crawl into bed with it at night and turn the pages. That’s how books are meant to be read. That’s the spirit I wrote it in.”

A cloudy day later, in his closing argument, Prosecutor Jim Fury told the jury, “Dixon Graham Bell came north to our state and used his knowledge of meteorology and his hatred of women to turn our theater of changing seasons into theater of the macabre.”

In her defense of the Weatherman Stacy Dvorchak told the jury the state’s case was like bad journalism. “First you reach a conclusion. Then you go out and find the facts to support that conclusion. The facts that don’t fit, you simply ignore.”

Judge Stephen Z. Lutoslawski then gave the jury their final instructions. The alternate jurors were excused and seven men and five women were ushered out of the courtroom to begin their deliberations.

They stayed out longer than any jury in the state’s history.

Rick Beanblossom sat alone in the seductive spring sun on the north portico steps of the oldest county courthouse in Minnesota. Constructed shortly after the Civil War in the popular Italianate style of the day, the proud building of red brick and graceful arches stood amid the Victorian homes on Stillwater’s South Hill overlooking the picturesque St. Croix River. In the old days a weather flag was flown just beneath the American flag from the pole atop the dome. A red flag meant thunderstorms likely. A black flag meant a tornado had been spotted. But flags no longer flew over the South Hill. Justice was administered at the modern suburban courthouse up the highway, and the Old County Courthouse had come within one commissioner’s vote of the wrecking ball.

If it had been the old days a fair-weather white flag would be flapping in the breeze on this day. The sky was perfect. The oaks and ashes were springing to life before the man in the mask. Thick, weedless grass rolled down the hill to Pine Street. The mid-May temperature was 75°. It had been ten days now. The jury was still out. As the weather turned toward summer, Dixon Bell was returned to the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul to await his fate. A thousand trial watchers were running around town with beepers fastened to their belts. Rick again checked the battery, seeing no good coming out of any verdict, as if somehow the Weatherman were his own evil twin.

The parents of Harlan Wakefield vehemently denied that they had known all along how their son had died. The state attorney general promised an investigation into the investigation. Keenan Wakefield was once again in therapy. Rick Beanblossom shuddered at the thought of a twelve-year-old boy dumping his twin brother into the river and then watching his own face disappear beneath the water. His parents had developed in him an intellect no boy should possess at that age, an intellect that left him void of love and emotion. Rick wrote and produced the story of the boy genius gone mad, including the media’s own dubious role. Andrea Labore gave his words voice and a face.

Rick brought her down to Stillwater, to the banks of the river where the body had been dumped. She did a stand-up in Pioneer Park overlooking the town. She did live reports from the river’s edge with the still-intact iron lift bridge serving as a dramatic backdrop. They worked well together, and Andrea ended up getting a lot more credit for the Wakefield story than she thought she deserved. But her anchor job was secured.

Although he was happy for Andrea, the masked producer no longer cared about news credits. A week out of the coma he cracked the Wakefield case. The next week he got the publisher’s letter from New York. This week Andrea invited him to dinner. It was like being born again. So when he was done typing up the sorry truth about Harlan Wakefield, Rick Beanblossom typed up his resignation to Clancy Communications.