Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 29

The doctor saw my panic. "Don't worry," he said, offering me a spoonful of compa.s.sion. "It could be a mistake. We'll need to do more tests."

His rea.s.surance struck me as hollow, as if he were just trying to postpone my inevitable anguish. I thought my head would explode from anxiety. I was in prison for a crime I hadn't committed, and now I might be infected with HIV?

Argir was standing a foot behind me when I got the news. "Maybe you should have thought about that before you slept with lots of people," he chided.

I spun around. "I didn't have s.e.x with anyone who had AIDS," I snapped, though it was possible that one of the men I'd hooked up with, or even Raffaele, was HIV-positive.

"You should think about who you slept with and who you got it from."

Maybe he was trying to comfort me or to make a joke, or maybe he saw an opening he thought he could use to his advantage. Whatever the reason, as we were walking back upstairs to my cell, Argir said, "Don't worry. I'd still have s.e.x with you right now. Promise me you'll have s.e.x with me."

I was too undone to react.

Sitting on my bed, I wondered if I would die in prison. I didn't know then that people live with HIV for a long time due to improved meds. Please, please, let it be a mistake. Please let it be wrong. I don't want to die. I want to get married and have children. I want to be able to grow old. I want my time. I want my life.

I didn't know how to tell Mom or Dad. I desperately wanted to talk to them, but their next visit wasn't for two more days. I miserably reasoned that I'd had such a fortunate life that all my bad luck was catching up to me now.

I was aware that there were consequences to being careless about s.e.x. I thought I'd been careful enough. But what had I really known about my s.e.xual partners? Why hadn't I seriously considered the risk? I'd been trapped by prison; now I felt trapped by my own body, trapped by my stupidity, trapped because bad things happened to people for no reason, with no way of antic.i.p.ating them. Thinking about the life I might have had instead of the one I was living made me understand for the first time how people in mourning tear their clothes or rip out handfuls of hair. I wanted to undo everything-to be out of my body, out of this prison, out of this life that had caved in on me. I buried my face in my pillow so no one could hear me and wailed.

So much had happened that I didn't know how to handle emotionally or practically: Meredith's death; my interrogation, arrest, and imprisonment; HIV. Any one of them would have been a hard burden for a twenty-year-old. To have them all at once was devastating. Every problem put before me was foreign, and the tools I had-stubbornness, optimism, the support of my family, and the certainty of my innocence-weren't nearly enough for the situation.

Part of me couldn't believe I really had HIV. Even though the media were portraying me as a wh.o.r.e, I knew I wasn't one. It seemed too ironic, too overwhelming that all this was happening at once. Just breathe. Write down that you're freaking out and then stop. You're not going to make anything better by going crazy over it. Relax. The doctor said they don't know that you have it for sure.

I got out my diary to think this over rationally, imagining who could have infected me, replaying my s.e.xual experiences in my mind to see where I could have slipped up. I wondered if a condom had broken, and if so, whose. If it had, did he know?

I'd had s.e.x with seven guys-four in Seattle and three in Italy. I tried to be logical, writing down the name of each person I'd slept with and the protection we'd used.

Writing made me feel a little better. I knew I needed to get out of prison and get checked by someone I trusted before I started thinking and acting as if my life were over. I forced myself not to antic.i.p.ate the worst.

That Sat.u.r.day, I told my parents what the doctor had said. My mom started crying immediately. "But I haven't had unprotected s.e.x," I said, trying to rea.s.sure her. "I'm sure it's going to be fine."

My dad was skeptical. He asked, "Do you even think they're telling you the truth?"

That possibility hadn't occurred to me. But when I told them, Luciano and Carlo seconded that idea. "It could be a ploy by the prosecution to scare you into an even more vulnerable emotional state so they can take advantage of you," Carlo said. "You need to stay alert, Amanda, and don't let anyone bully you."

In the end, I don't know if they made up the HIV diagnosis. It wasn't the doctor who said I should think about whom I'd had s.e.x with, but Argir. It might have been that the test was faulty, or Argir could have put the medical staff up to it so he could ask me questions and pa.s.s the answers along to the police.

It was nearly two months before the doctors let me know that the HIV test had come out negative. When they did, I thought, Oh, thank G.o.d! But I was still seeing the doctors twice a day, and it had been a long time since anyone had even brought it up. The possibility no longer scared me as much, and I'd begun to a.s.sume everything was okay.

A week after I got the original HIV news, a guard took me down to the offices on the main floor, where three police officers were waiting for me. "We have a warrant to search your cell," they said. "We'll give you a five-minute head start to destroy whatever you'd like, or you can let us go up immediately."

"You can come now and look through whatever you want," I said.

I wondered what they were hoping to find. Did they want to search my clothing for traces of Meredith's blood? I felt almost smug, because I knew they wouldn't find anything incriminating, and I hoped it might convince them that I truly had nothing to hide.

The cops spread out all my papers and doc.u.ments on my bed. They confiscated anything with my handwriting on it-my grammar exercises, unfinished letters, notes, my prison diary-and left everything else. That's when I understood. They wanted to see what I was thinking.

The physical chaos they left behind was nothing compared to the chaos in my head. They'd penetrated my innermost s.p.a.ce, demonstrating to me that nothing was safe from them.

A few months after that, they released my prison journal to the media, where instead of reporting that I'd had seven lovers altogether, some newspapers wrote that Foxy Knoxy had slept with seven men in her six weeks in Perugia.

Chapter 19

November 1829, 2007

I was stunned one morning when I looked up at the TV and noticed a breaking news report. There was now a fourth suspect, and an international manhunt for him had been launched.

The police didn't say who the suspect was or how this person fit into the murder scenario they'd imagined, only that they'd found a b.l.o.o.d.y handprint on Meredith's pillowcase that wasn't mine, Patrick's, or Raffaele's.

The news rattled me, but it also gave me hope. Maybe this meant the police hadn't completely given up trying to find the truth. For the next twenty-four hours I was consumed by the question Who is this unnamed person?

I, and everyone else watching TV, found out the next day. His name was Rudy Guede. The police had his fingerprints on file because he was an immigrant with a green card.

The name didn't click until I saw his mug shot.

Oh my G.o.d, it's him.

I thought back to November 5, when I was sitting in the hall at the questura, a.s.suming I was just waiting for Raffaele, and talking to the silver-haired cop. As I'd been doing for days, I was trying to recall all the men who had ever visited our villa, when I suddenly remembered one of Giacomo and Marco's friends. It had annoyed me that I couldn't remember his name. "I think he's South African," I told the detective. "All I know is that he played basketball with the guys downstairs. They introduced him to Meredith and me in Piazza IV Novembre in mid-October. We all walked to the villa together, and then Meredith and I went to their apartment for a few minutes."

I'd seen Guede just one time after that. He'd shown up at Le Chic, and I had taken his drink order. Those few words were the only ones we ever exchanged.

I was still living in semi-isolation, meaning that I wasn't allowed to partic.i.p.ate in group activities or speak to other prisoners. But when I'd asked to be moved from Gufa's cell, I'd really hoped that meant they would put me by myself again. Instead I'd been moved into a cell with three older women. And just as with Gufa, the TV in Cell No. 10 was on all the time.

The only difference was that with the announcement about Guede, now I couldn't watch the news enough.

I learned that Guede was twenty and originally from Ivory Coast. He'd been abandoned by his parents and taken in by a rich Perugian family who treated him like a son. He was a talented basketball player who'd made a lot of friends on the court. But over time, he'd been more inclined to loaf than to work, and his surrogate family disowned him. He'd lost his job in the fall of 2007, before Meredith and I met him. Guede had been caught breaking into offices and homes and stealing electronics and cash.

Another report said that in mid-October he'd thrown a large rock through a window at a Perugian law office to get inside. A broken window and a rock on the floor? Exactly what we'd found in Filomena's room. He'd stolen a laptop and a cell phone from the firm.

I couldn't believe that none of us had picked up on how shady Guede was. Just a few days before Meredith was killed, the director of a Milan kindergarten arrived in the morning and caught Guede coming out of her office. When the police got there, they found one of the kindergarten's kitchen knives in his backpack, along with the laptop from the law office, a set of keys, a woman's gold watch, and a small hammer he'd used to break gla.s.s. The police were on the verge of arresting him for that crime but released him without giving a reason. I couldn't understand how they'd let Guede slip through their fingers. All I could think was that if he'd been put behind bars then, Meredith would still be alive.

It didn't make sense to me that they had let him go but had leapt to arrest me.

I'd met but didn't know Rudy Guede. I didn't know if he was capable of murder. I couldn't imagine why he might do something so brutal. But I believed that he was guilty, that the evidence could only be interpreted one way. Finally the police could stop using me as the scapegoat for some phantom killer whom no one could name-a phantom whose place I'd been filling.

For nearly three weeks I'd been unable to think of anyone, however distant, who could have stabbed Meredith to death. Now there was a face and a name. It was awful, but it was a relief.

Still, I was surprised it was Guede who had been named, because the two times I'd met him were under such ordinary circ.u.mstances. There was nothing distinguishable about him. He'd seemed interchangeable with almost every guy I'd met in Perugia-confident, bordering on arrogant. Not threatening. Not like a down-and-out thief. Not even odd.

The next day the same police officer who'd mocked my reaction to the DNA evidence the prosecution claimed was found on the knife brought doc.u.ments to Capanne for me to sign. This happened regularly during the investigation phase-they had to notify me whenever they confiscated anything from the villa, a.n.a.lyzed forensic evidence that pertained to me, or, unbelievably, were billing me for investigative expenses. I became used to the bureaucracy. But I was never prepared for the cop's cruelty. He was talking so fast that I caught only one word: "Rudy."

"Rudy?" I asked, repeating his name to make sure I'd heard correctly. "You mean the guy who police are calling 'the fourth person'?"