by Safran, John
“ERS is ‘Early Release System.’ It’s something they do in the prison system. That means that you get out early, and if you don’t pay fifty-two dollars on time a month, they’ll lock you back up.”
“Wow,” I say. So that’s why Vincent took up Richard’s offer of work, despite having been ripped off before. And Richard almost certainly knew denying him the measly amount he’d earned could push him back in prison. I thought I’d been desensitized to Richard’s scumbaggery, but there’s an anger rising in me. “And it’s just because Vincent’s quite extreme, so if he gets into a fight it can get pretty aggressive?”
“Yes,” Michael says. “The whole thing of Vincent getting moved to another prison . . . I was telling him I feel like I’m locked up for nothing. That’s how I feel. You know, I ain’t really a part of the damn Richard Barrett thing. I ain’t killed anyone and I’m locked up. And I told him that and he got mad. He busted the windows out.”
Vincent might feel guilty about what happened to Michael. Doesn’t this mean he’s capable of empathy?
“What about the night he came to meet you? Just after he killed Richard Barrett. Did he threaten you or force you to help him out?”
“When Vincent came to my house, I didn’t know he killed the man until the next day, and that’s when I seen him on the news. I thought something was funny, because when his stepdad, Alfred, dropped him off, he left automatically. He didn’t say Hey. He just left. I was outside, and Vincent talked and talked and talked about females and stuff; he really didn’t go into killing a man.”
“One of the stories the investigators told me was that Vincent burned Richard Barrett’s wallet in your backyard.”
“I didn’t ever see no wallet!” Michael protests. “My momma had called me back to the house and she was like, ‘What is Vincent doing there?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ My momma don’t really like Vincent being around me because he always get in trouble, and I told my momma, I said, ‘I don’t know.’”
“The investigators said he brought an old-fashioned gun with him.”
“He did have a gun,” Michael says. “But he didn’t tell me where the damn gun came from. He pointed the gun at me, putting it in my face. He pointed the gun at me, and I said, ‘Whoa, man. Get the gun down.’ I was scared to death. I ain’t ever had a gun pointed at my face, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Vincent spent the night under a blanket on the Dents’ couch. The next morning Michael’s mother, Vicky, sped the young men back toward the McGee home. She wanted him far away, and quickly.
Vincent told Vicky to pull over at a gas station. Vincent said he wanted gas for the mower, to cut the lawn for a party. In three days’ time, Michael’s sister was to host her twentieth birthday at the McGees’ home.
“He told me to get some gas, to buy him a shirt, and get some cigarettes,” Michael says.
Michael walked into the store and handed over money for a red gas can. Michael walked to a pump and filled the can. He twisted on the lid.
Michael, Vicky, Vincent, and the red gas can pulled into the driveway at the McGees’.
“Now, who was there?” Michael says. “My momma was in the house talking to Tina. And I was talking to my uncle Stanley in the yard out back about a job, because he was doing details on eighteen-wheeler trucks.”
Uncle Stanley noticed Vincent jump the wire back fence and drift into the woods.
“I asked my uncle, ‘What the hell did he go to the woods for?’ The first thing that came to mind is his brother, Justin, has some dogs in the woods. I thought, Okay, maybe he’s going out there to see the dogs.”
Not long afterward, an alarm started wailing somewhere in the distance. The wail shot up through the woods into the McGees’ yard.
“Vincent came out of the woods screaming,” Michael says. “It wasn’t even screaming, it was more like a hysterical thing. It was more like panic and breathing hard. He called my name from the woods. He goes, ‘Oh, take me away! Take me away from here!’ My momma came rushing outside and said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I said, ‘I don’t know!’ He jumped in the truck with his stepdad, Alfred, and took off.” Vincent hid at his sister Daphne’s mobile home, where he was arrested.
“The investigators said that you were a good person. They said that you were different from Vincent. So why do you think they locked you up?”
“Man, I don’t know why. To this day I really don’t know how the hell I got locked up. I told them what they wanted to know. I told them I bought the gas, and that’s what got me locked up. I didn’t know what the gas was being used for at that time. I see Alfred as a bitch-ass dude, man, because of a simple thing. He knew what the hell happened before and he still brought that Vincent to my house. And then he told the police that when Vincent got out the truck, I said, ‘Vincent, did you kill that white man?’ I didn’t say anything like that. I didn’t say any goddamn thing like that. I don’t want anybody locked up. But hell, if anybody should be locked up, I feel like it should have been Alfred and Vincent.”
Michael Dent’s teddy-bear face was already in a file at the Rankin County sheriff’s department. He had served two years and two months in Pearl MDOC for grand larceny (not connected to Vincent McGee’s grand larceny case). Michael was released forty-five days before Alfred dropped Vincent (who himself had been out of jail only two months) on his doorstep.
The investigators pulled Michael into the interrogation room. Did Vincent kill Richard because he was in the Klan? Did Vincent kill Richard because they were lovers? Michael wept and said he didn’t know anything.
“In the Rankin County Jail, I asked Vincent, ‘Now, what the hell happened? Why did you do it? The investigators are saying the Klan.’ But what he told me was the only reason that he went back down to the man’s house was because to get some money, to pay his ERS lady. I asked Vincent, ‘Was he gay?’ and he said no, and I left it alone because I knew where the conversation was going to lead to.”
An inmate or guard screams in the background at Pearl MDOC.
“I’m trying to think what else I’ve heard,” I say. “One thing that Peter Holmes told me when I spoke to him—you know, Vincent’s brother-in-law—was when Vincent was in jail he was on medication to keep him calm.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Do you know what kind of medication?”
“Risperdal. They give it to the inmates up here. It calms you down and really puts you to sleep; you won’t be so hyper, so energetic, or anything like that.”
“Peter Holmes said that maybe when he came out of prison, and straightaway he had those drugs cut off, that might have been why he was so angry. It must be hard when they release someone from prison. Because how can they monitor the person to make sure they’re still taking the drugs?”
“Right,” says Michael. “That’s a good question. You’ll have to ask Christopher Epps.”
“Who?”
“Christopher Epps. He’s the commissioner of the prisons,” Michael says.
My head fumbles about for what to say next.
“I’ll tell you a little secret, you hear?” Michael says. “You know when Vincent was in Walnut?” Vincent served his grand larceny term in a prison in Walnut Grove, Mississippi. “There was a rumor going around that he raped his roommate. I asked him about it, and he said he didn’t do it.”
My chest stings.
“What do you mean? His roommate in prison?”
“Right.”
“But who told you that?”
“Inmates. It was all over the prison.”
“Wow!” I say. “Everything is really strange, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is,” says Michael.
For months I’ve been burrowing, trying to find a story that reveals Richard as a gay sexual aggressor. Now Michael drops in my lap a story where Vincent is one. How does this impact on what went on i
n the crummy little house that night?
“I noticed his mother and his family didn’t turn up to the court when he was being sentenced to sixty-five years’ jail,” I try. “No one from his family was there.”
“Like I said, man, when you grow up living with poverty all your life, attacked by the system, the legal system, and when you’re scared of the police, you really don’t want to be around the police. So I really don’t know what to say about that. I really don’t know.”
“What do you think is going to happen to Vincent now? Because he’s talking about trying to get another trial.”
“I don’t know. The crime happened in Rankin County, and everybody knows Rankin County to be racist. When I was in the back of the police car coming to Rankin County Jail when I got picked up in the morning, the police told me, ‘I ought to kill you now.’ He actually stopped the car. He said, ‘I ought to kill your nigger ass right now.’ The exact words. Everybody knows Rankin County is racist. Everybody knows that. They shouldn’t have taken our pleas or anything else in Rankin County. Everything should have been moved to a different court.”
“I guess the killing happened in Rankin County so it had to be there?”
“Not really. You can have a change of venue when you’ve got a case with a white supremacist.”
Something clangs in the background at Pearl MDOC.
“Hey listen, I call you right back,” Michael says, and hangs up.
I write Rape on my yellow notepad on the coffee table. I collapse into the couch.
One Hour Later
One hour later, my laptop is opened on my belly, showing the Wikipedia page covering Risperdal:
“Risperidone (trade name Risperdal, and generics) is a potent antipsychotic drug which is mainly used to treat schizophrenia (including adolescent schizophrenia), schizoaffective disorder, the mixed and manic states associated with bipolar disorder, and irritability in people with autism.”
There is an insect buzz in my pocket. I pull out my phone. Michael has sent a text:
Is Vincent gay? Yes. Did he hurt that man over some gay shit? Maybe. But I know the truth and I will tell you if you help me today.
Me: How did you know that he was gay?
Michael: Help me and I’ll give you a story everyone would want to read.
Me: How do you know he was gay? Do you know if he slept with Richard Barrett?
Michael: Listen for the last time I will give you the whole story. You should name the book “Sex, lies and murder.” Today the truth will come out.
I leave it a few minutes. The insect buzzes again.
Michael: Did you know Vincent got raped by a relative when he was a kid? You help me this last time and you won’t need to again because I’m tell you the whole story. Did Tina tell you she had trouble taking care of her kids and that’s the reason Vincent got so much built up madness?
Me: How much needed?
Michael: $300
I claw the car keys off the floor and head out to Walmart.
Soon After
“Tell me about the relative,” I say to Michael, unplugging the fridge, snapping closed the window, and flicking off the fan.
“Okay. Well, since he were little, like I said, it seemed to me like his momma couldn’t really take care of him. I remember Vincent used to break into people’s houses stealing food. She used to go to parties and drink and stay away from the house. So when Vincent was little, he got sexually assaulted by this relative. And, um, the whole family knows this. They know. They kept it secret. I think he was about eight or nine at the time. And, um, that relative, he is definitely gay. I mean he’s a homosexual. So I guess that probably had a big effect on Vincent to this day, and what he did when he was locked up at Walnut, when he raped his roommate.”
“Okay, wow. So he must have been a bit upset with his mother because his mother didn’t stand up for him.”
“Yeah, I would have been upset with my momma, too. I’m pretty sure you would have been upset, too, right?”
“Yeah, definitely—absolutely.”
“Listen, my phone is going dead. I can call you back later, but my phone is going dead.”
What was the drug they gave Vincent? If I were some other writer, this story could be about pharmaceutical multinationals and drugs they sell to the prison-industrial complex. But I’ve already forgotten the name of the drug they fed Vincent. Instead, my head’s returned to where it always returns. Family is everything. And, boy, what meat I have to support that proposition after hearing out Michael Dent.
The Mother Lode
I snap on the lights and squint. For months, while in bed, I’ve been churning through the thousands of pages of Richard’s files, from the FBI, local law enforcement, and Mississippi’s spy agency, the Sovereignty Commission. I’ve struck the mother lode. In a bad photocopy of a Sovereignty Commission report, a woman purports to tell the story of Richard’s childhood.
That woman is Richard Barrett’s mother.
The Ballad of Young Richard Barrett, as Told by Richard’s Mother to Mississippi’s Spy Agency
Report of Conversation with Mrs. A. J. (Eleanor) Barrett
June 22, 1968
Richard Barrett grew up in Orange, New Jersey. At age six he was taken to a psychiatrist for examination and treatment, and again at age twelve.
The psychiatrist concluded that there was nothing further that could be done, that Barrett was a borderline violence case. The psychiatrist told the Barretts that Richard hated them both intensely.
In the few months before he left home, at age seventeen, never to return, Mrs. Barrett said she became afraid that Richard “may do bodily harm to her.”
He had been expelled from high school several times for distributing hate literature, but the precipitating event for him leaving home was his father’s refusal to let him hang a Nazi flag on the house.
Richard then resided with his maternal aunt while attending Rutgers University. He “stole money” from the aunt, according to Mrs. Barrett, and was asked to leave.
Mrs. Barrett reports she had heard of similar incidents of theft from people all over the country, especially the South.
Richard claims he is an orphan. On the contrary, his mother says she and his father love him very much and have tried to help him. His father went to Mississippi about six months ago to see Richard and was ordered by him to leave or he would call the police. Mrs. Barrett says that her husband returned from Jackson “with tears in his eyes.” They have repeatedly written to him and the only reply from him was a letter saying he hated them and wanted nothing to do with them.
His parents have received numerous calls from ministers, members and officers of various organizations complaining of embarrassing incidents including theft, lying, fraud, and exhibitionism. Mrs. Barrett reports that they can do nothing about this, but she is willing to go anywhere at any time to see him if it would help him, but says he would refuse to see her. In fact, she says that she fears if Richard had a suspicion that anyone had talked to her about him, he “might do anything!”
Mrs. Barrett says that “the boy is mentally sick,” “continues to lie,” and has “caused great heartsick.” “Any time he is crossed he will go over the edge!”
Another Sovereignty Commission file repeats some of this information, with a little extra color.
His father and mother were contacted by phone and said Richard had left home to live with an aunt in New Jersey. He reportedly had an argument with this aunt and beat her up, leaving her for dead, and stole her car.
So here is the woman Richard beat up—his own aunt. And stole her car. This paragraph from the Sovereignty Commission could just as easily have been written about Vincent.
Richard may have been a klutz and a fantasist, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been dangerous.
Money
Cornelius is a bla
ck bail bondsman. I see him at the Rankin County clerk’s office sometimes, pecking on the database computer. He’s like a lizard trying to blend into the tree trunk. Hat pulled down, no sudden moves. Cornelius has been able to get me information that I can’t find elsewhere. That James Rankin is in prison in Pennsylvania, for instance. Addresses mainly, although not even he can find Richard’s sister or Vincent’s father. I’m in his big white truck in the parking lot of the courthouse, facing out to the street.
“Vincent McGee, he’s not the sharpest tool in the woodshed,” Cornelius softly creaks. “But he probably didn’t have enough money for a private attorney. A lot of the times, these public attorneys, they’re not really going to do a lot of work for you. They will get you a plea, but . . . they work with the district attorney, Michael Guest’s office, every day.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’ve got to realize these public defenders have grown up with Michael Guest. When they were younger, they went to law school with him and all of that. They take an oath to have their clients’ interests at hand, but I don’t think, when you get down to the real nuts and bolts of it, they do.”
Cornelius points out of the parking lot, past the Confederate soldier statue, and across the street to a small office.
“Like that lawyer over there. I know him. He does public defender work for Rankin County. The thing is, once he disposes of your case, he’s going to have to do work in the future with Michael Guest’s office.”
Cornelius repoints his finger.
“So it’s not like hiring Ed Rainer, a private attorney down the street here. The police don’t like him, and he doesn’t like them. He goes to war with them in the courtroom, but he costs a lot of money.”
“What do you reckon happened with Precious?” I ask.
“Precious Martin, he’s one of a set of triplets. They’ve been on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and all of that.”
I picture three otters in vests whooshing about the Martin family rumpus room, bumping into one another. It occurs to me now I’m never going to see that Precious isn’t an otter.