Carolyn's Diaphragm

Carolyn's Diaphragm is an offstage but consequential object in the investigation and trial of Carolyn Polhemus's murder. The book gives no physical description of it; instead, its importance emerges through a chain of searches, Rusty's admission that he took it, and the prosecution's inability to account for it. Its absence becomes evidence in its own right, linking Rusty's private access to Carolyn's apartment with questions about what investigators found and what they missed.

Identity and Investigative Context

The diaphragm is identified as one of the birth-control accessories Jamie Kemp wants to look for in Carolyn's apartment. His search is practical and specific: he checks for contraceptive supplies, while Rusty Sabich directs him toward the bathroom and says he will search the bedroom. The object is not presented as a piece of medical history or described in material detail. Its relevance is established by its expected place among items used for birth control and by the fact that it is missing from the apartment search.

The apartment contains other things the search can count and inspect. Rusty pauses at the bar to count twelve tumblers, checking the household glasses against the police photographs because his fingerprints have been identified on one of them. By contrast, the diaphragm cannot be located. This juxtaposition makes the search attentive to ordinary objects while also exposing how unevenly the apartment's evidence can be accounted for: the glasses are present in a countable set, but the contraceptive device is an absence that prompts further questions.

Removal and the Search

Kemp reports that he has found no foam, cream, or case for a diaphragm. Rusty answers that Barbara keeps her own birth-control supplies in a dresser drawer, but he cannot say where someone else would keep them. The exchange distinguishes his knowledge of his wife's domestic habits from any reliable knowledge of Carolyn's. It also establishes that the search is not simply failing to find one object: the expected accessories and their possible storage place are missing as well.

When Kemp points out that a chemist has identified contraceptive cream but that the police did not seize it from the apartment, Rusty says he thinks he took it when he grabbed the diaphragm. He then considers whether taking the cream might have concealed the fact that he had taken the device. The wording is tentative: he offers a possible explanation rather than a settled account of his purpose. Still, the admission places both objects in a consequential sequence. Rusty says he grabbed the diaphragm and thinks he also took the cream; neither is available to the investigators conducting the search.

That account gives the missing diaphragm a double status. It is an item sought as part of determining what birth-control accessories were present, and it is also an object Rusty says he removed. The evidence does not describe where he put it, what happened to it afterward, or whether it was recovered. Its narrative function rests on that limit: the removal is acknowledged, but the object's later whereabouts remain unresolved in these scenes.

The Object at Trial

The prosecution returns to the missing diaphragm when Tommy Molto questions detective Harold Greer. Greer says a thorough search of Carolyn's apartment found no contraceptive device. Molto raises the removed diaphragm alongside the other items the police discovered and inventoried, making its absence part of the evidentiary account of the scene. The prosecution's presentation depends not only on what the search produced but also on what it did not produce.

During cross-examination, Sandy Stern revisits the search and pauses when he reaches the diaphragm. He asks whether it was the only item the officers failed to find, then narrows the point: they found neither a diaphragm nor cream, jelly, or another substance that could be expected to be used with one. Greer initially hesitates, then confirms the absence of those accompanying materials. The device and the cream thus return together, not as recovered objects but as a gap in the police inventory.

Evidentiary Significance

The diaphragm acquires force through competing forms of knowledge. Rusty has personal knowledge of taking it, while the detectives' search establishes that no device was found in the apartment; at trial, Greer's testimony confirms that the associated cream or jelly was missing too. Those facts do not, by themselves, explain the precise circumstances of the removal or establish what the missing items prove. Instead, they make the limits of the physical record visible and give both sides a concrete point around which to question the search and Rusty's conduct.

The object also makes a private action legible within a public proceeding. What begins as a search for Carolyn's birth-control accessories becomes a question for a homicide detective under examination: why did a thorough search yield neither the device nor substances expected to accompany it? The diaphragm is therefore consequential precisely because it is not produced. Its absence preserves an unresolved gap between the apartment as investigators searched it, Rusty's account of what he took, and the evidence the jury can actually inspect.