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De
"Do you know Miss Deborah Gardner?" asked Chief Inspector Faka'ilo Penitani.
"No."
"Was she a friend of yours?" "I have nothing to say."
Two days later, Emile brought Deb's body home to the United States. Deb's parents were divorced, her mother living in Tacoma, her father in Anchorage. They came together at the funeral for the first time in years, and though they were disturbed when a Peace Corps official said that the government would have to pay for De
In the weeks to come, the Peace Corps threw itself completely behind De
Nelson Rockefeller so that he could send condolence letters to the Gardners, the message was oblique. "She died shortly after her arrival at the hospital." Nothing about a murder. And though policy called for immediate a
Over the next three months, the Peace Corps did all it could to make the nightmare in Tonga go away. It brought in Tonga's most famous lawyer from New Zealand to represent him. It summoned a psychiatrist from Hawaii who testified that De
There was no counterexpert. There wasn't a psychiatrist in all the kingdom, and the Tongan government could not afford to bring one in. And though the prosecution tried to demonstrate that the murder grew out of a jealous triangle, Peace Corps witnesses proved elusive on this score. Even Emile said that his relationship with Deb was "brother-sister." The jury went out for twenty-six minutes before rendering an insanity verdict, and Crown solicitor Tevita Tupou complained bitterly to the king: "It appeared to me that all pity was with Priven and none was shown to the dead girl. The Peace Corps effort may have been made to try and save the name of the movement from the embarrassment of one of their members being convicted of murder. I find this very strange justice if this was the case."
The worst was yet to come. The Tongan police minister was for keeping De
At last, under pressure from the Peace Corps, his parents, and the two friends who had brought him back, De
After the case ended in 1977, a story went out among teachers and doctors and policemen and schoolchildren back in Tonga: De
But De
His family came apart. Miriam, his sickly mother, died a year after his return. Sidney, his printer father, moved to Florida with a new wife.
De
He married a Hispanic woman in the early nineties. By 1996, he was divorced, still living in the apartment he had grown up in. He worked at Social Security, as a top computer manager: area systems coordinator. He made $78,000 a year.
I'd spent years thinking about De
Workmen were eviscerating Broadway at Prince. The jack-hammers were going, girls walked by in their slip dresses. From the coffee bar at the front of Dean and DeLuca, I saw a girl whose lace underwear showed above her wrap skirt and thought about how these women would have seemed to the kids in Deb's Peace Corps group, Tonga sixteen, with their long dresses to wear in a conservative, Christian society.
I'd spent years preparing to meet De
De
Brooklyn a few days before, with dark glasses and a fixed, lowered, oxlike expression.
We shook hands, and Dean and DeLuca suddenly felt tight as a closet. He gave a tilt of his head, and we went out.
"Do you go by the standard journalistic ethics?" he said, turning onto Prince.
"Yes, why?"
"So…everything I tell you is going to be offthe record."
"Okay."
And I interpreted that in the strictest way. "Everything I tell you." Not anything he asked me, or showed me.