Free The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

of the general journalistic case. An abyss lies between the journalist’s experience of being out in the world talking to people and his experience ofbeing alone in a room writing. When the interviews are over and the journalist first faces the labor of writing, he feels no less resentful than the subject will feel when he reads the finished text. Sometimes the labor seems particularly hard. In 1985, in answer to an interrogatory by the plaintiff, McGinniss wrote of “too many sleepless nights, too many terrible dreams, too many blank, dull, empty mornings spent staring out the back window of my house, cold coffee in hand, postponing for another minute, another five, another ten, the dreadful task of going back upstairs and again confronting the chilling realization which, against my will, was forming itself.…” The realization was that MacDonald had murdered his wife and children; but no writer can read this passage without recognizing in it the feeling of not wanting to get to work on something that may not come out well—and McGinniss had special reason to feel anxious about how
Fatal Vision
would come out.
    But now, as I waited for Bostwick, the problem of writing was for me, as it had been for McGinniss in the early days of his encounter with MacDonald, like the problem of death: it did not interfere with the pleasures of the present. From Bostwick’s repeated references to his mother in the trial transcript and from the sound of his friendly, Plains States voice on the telephone, I had formed an image of him as a distinctly salt-of-the-earth type, and had imagined his office as being fittingly unpretentious: a couple of amiably seedy rooms, say, over a diving-equipment-rental shop on a commercial drag. The actual Bostwick office, in a building at the westernmost end of Wilshire Boulevard, was a place of the most advanced and sleekly expensive design. Beyond a reception room where Mozart was playing on a tape deck and anelegantly dressed receptionist sat at a light-gray counter, a conference room furnished with a lacquer table and ten chairs of a vaguely Oriental design was visible through a glass wall, and beyond that was a breathtaking view of the Pacific, which looked as if it, too, had come from an authoritative postmodern design firm.
    Bostwick had put a room at my disposal, where I could peruse a looseleaf book of trial exhibits, which were not yet in the public domain, and had assigned an assistant to look after me. Toward noon, he called in to say that the case was settled. That evening, Bostwick, his wife, Janette (a pretty, delicately boned, soft-spoken woman, who is a Gestalt therapist), and I went out to dinner together at a restaurant near the office. The occasion had a light, celebratory atmosphere. Bostwick reminisced about the early days of the case. “When MacDonald first came to us, we told him that his libel case was worthless because he was libel-proof,” he said. “How can you damage the reputation of someone who has been convicted of murder? But when MacDonald gave us his letters from McGinniss, immediately on reading them—since we already had the news articles in which McGinniss told reporters he had decided MacDonald was guilty during the trial—we said, ‘This is a classic case of fraud.’ I took a deposition from McGinniss in 1985, and after an hour in the room with him I knew we had him. I just rubbed my hands with glee from that day forward, because I knew what I could do on cross-examination. It wouldn’t even have to be a very good cross-examination.
    “That first deposition was in New York,” Bostwick went on, “and then, a year later, I followed it up with another, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which is close to Williamstown. McGinniss had refused to come to NewYork for the second part of his deposition. He said, ‘Last time, I was courteous to you and came to New York. This time, you’re going to have to do it in Massachusetts.’ The law says that you can’t drag a