“You didn’t know about Carlos?” She jotted something else on her yellow pad. “They found him last week floating in San Juan Harbor. At least they think it’s him. The body is not real pretty.” She tapped the bridge of her nose. “Ten gauge, probably sawed off, in the face, from close up. Didn’t leave much to identify, especially after a couple weeks in the water.” Redpath sat, expressionless. “So Carlos has no worries, and Pepe has nobody to protect.”
“He’s still lying,” Redpath said. “He started out with one crackpot story. Now I take it he’s cooked up a new one that probably makes even less sense.”
“I think he’s finally managed to bring himself around to telling the whole truth. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t put him on the stand.” She reached down into a drawer and pulled out a bundle of stapled pages. “Actually, before I forget, I’ve got a revised FBI-302 for you here. Pepe’s been filling in a few more details about his dear departed uncle Carlos and your guy.”
She handed the new witness statement over to Redpath, who took it, folded it lengthwise, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
“So he’s getting his memory refreshed,” Redpath said. “I hear you and Captain Daley have been seeing a lot of him. And paying a few visits to his mom, too.”
“He’s a kid, Bill. He’s scared. It’s natural.”
“Flags wouldn’t hire an ex-Flag, especially an African-American, to do their shooting. You know that as well as I do. Hudson’s had no involvement with La Bandera since he got out of prison the last time.”
Gomez-Larsen broke in, “That’s what you say. We know different.”
“Even your cop,” Redpath continued, “the Italian guy, says the shooter was Hispanic.”
“An easy mistake. And he said possibly Hispanic.” She leaned forward, tapping with the point of her pencil on the desktop. “Let’s be honest. It’s only my opinion, but I think I could win this case blindfolded, wearing nothing but Mickey Mouse ears and my Maidenform bra, right? I have the driver, I have a reliable third party who saw Clarence running down the alley right afterward with the gun under his sweatshirt, and I have all kinds of folks who will say Clarence had a grudge against Delgado. Plus, I have two people who saw Carlos give your guy drugs two days before the drive-by, and I have Clarence magically in possession of large amounts of pot, coke, and cash right after the shooting. Now maybe I’m wrong, and of course you never know what Norcross might do to us, but I really doubt Clarence’s trial will be all that tough.” She paused, continuing the tappity-tap with her pencil on the desktop. “So. I have a lot of stuff on my plate today, Bill. What do you want from me?”
Redpath’s fingers involuntarily strayed toward the inside pocket of his old hound’s-tooth jacket, where his treasure of Luckies lay nestled. The whiff of tobacco from the jacket’s lining was making him ravenous for a cigarette. He pulled his hand away, brushed his lapel self-consciously, and sighed.
“Oh, go ahead and smoke if you have to,” Gomez-Larsen said. “Breathe a little my way. I only quit two years ago. Hold on.”
She dug down into a lower drawer and pulled out a smoke eater. Perched on her desk and plugged in, the little chrome machine made a swishing noise like a discreet vacuum cleaner. Redpath immediately lit up and inhaled deliciously.
“Thanks,” he grunted in his deep voice. “Now maybe I can think.” He cleared his throat and pulled on the sagging flesh under his chin. “I’ve been trying to come up with a way to ask this question that doesn’t seem condescending, or …”
A troubled look passed over the folds of Redpath’s face.
“Doesn’t it seem funny to you that, in five decades, Moon Hudson is the first person in this state to deserve the death penalty, and he also just happens to be a black man who supposedly killed a white woman?”
“He didn’t just kill a white woman.”
“Okay,” Redpath said. “How many black and Puerto Rican males have died in drive-bys in Holyoke and Springfield in the last few years? And how many of their killers faced the death penalty? Do you have an ashtray? I’m worried about your carpet.”
“What are you saying?” She pointed at herself. “I’m part of some racist conspiracy?” She pulled out a lavender seashell and pushed it toward Redpath.
“No, but I’m wondering, coming from your background …”
“Oh, I see, as a Latina, I’m supposed to feel bad for Clarence?”
“No, I mean, in your own life, as a Puerto Rican woman, you must have experienced …”
“Look, I don’t want to keep interrupting, but can I tell you a story, Bill? First of all, I’m not Puerto Rican, I’m Cuban, okay? It’s a small point, but I do get sick of having to tell people fifty times a day. My parents came over on the boat. After they got here, they had me and my brother, so let’s get that out of the way.”
Redpath nodded and scratched the back of his neck. “Sorry.”
“No problem. I grew up in Miami, okay? And I had a lot of boyfriends, mostly nice Cuban guys. Some not so nice. Now, back in those days, my mother is happy because she thinks I’m not going to have any trouble finding a handsome Cuban husband with major bucks. Then I come home from law school with this Norwegian geek from Iowa named Greg. That’s a name with a real hot Latin swing, huh? Greg.” She looked down at her desk. “My dad won’t talk to me, and my mother starts making noises like she’s giving birth to a Volkswagen. My brother, Carlos—same name as the Flag floater—wants to take my fiancé for a walk in mom’s herb garden and snip off his kazoo with the hedge trimmer. You think I’m kidding? This was not a joke.”
“Just enjoying the kazoo bit,” Redpath said, pulling back a smile.
“Then Greg and I graduate and move to Springfield for Greg’s residency, where his Anglo friends patronize me because they think it’s cute that somebody named Dr. Larsen has this enchilada for a wife. That’s okay, but most of the Spanish speakers in town are Puerto Rican, and a lot of them think I am a stuck-up Cuban bitch who talks funny. Now I have this death penalty case and, it’s terrific, the whole community has come together at last: They all hate me. Greg’s Doctors Without Borders friends don’t invite us to dinner anymore. Our anti-death-penalty governor is probably never going to touch me for a judicial appointment, which, to be honest, I was sort of hoping for. Plus, my own kids think I’m Dracula. So don’t talk to me about wondering how I can do this, okay? I’m starting to wonder myself. Can I bum a cigarette? Even the nuns are giving me looks.”
Redpath held out his crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes and shook one toward her. Gomez-Larsen’s selection had a twenty-degree bend in the middle, which she pulled straight.
“I need a light.”
Redpath handed over his Bic, and they puffed away for some time, while the smoke eater filled the room with its swishing sound. Muffled footsteps came down the hall, paused in front of Gomez-Larsen’s door, then returned in the original direction. Redpath stared at the carpet looking like an old bloodhound. Gomez-Larsen tapped her cigarette on the lavender seashell and waited.
“You told me a story,” he said finally in his cavernous voice. “Now I’ll tell you one.” Ash fell on his knees, and he brushed it off. “When I was seventeen, I joined the marines and got sent to Korea. My parents wanted me to go to college, but I wanted an adventure, and I was afraid if I didn’t sign up right away I’d miss the war.”
Gomez-Larsen turned her head to pick a piece of tobacco out of her mouth.
Redpath continued. “Things were a mess. By the time I arrived, the North Koreans had grabbed practically the whole peninsula. I got to see a lot of fighting.”
He inhaled deeply and blew out a stream of pale gray smoke. “I had my adventure but good. Now I can’t stand listening to people talk about how we have to kill this person or execute that person, people who’ve never seen anyone die, or even seen a body outside a funeral home. People who will be sitting home watching TV, ea
ting Cheese Nips when we put the needle in.” He mashed out his cigarette in the shell. After one more puff, Gomez-Larsen did the same.
“So here we are,” he said.
“Right, and what are you saying we should do?”
“I don’t know.” He couldn’t tell her his real fear, the one that tightened the hole in his stomach: that he could blow this case somehow, stupidly, and end up killing Moon. That with some bad decision he’d lose the chance to save his client and bring one of those dead Chinese boys back to life.
“What do you think of the death penalty, Lydia?”
“None of your business.”
The sun had moved around and was now shining right into the prosecutor’s window, darkening her silhouette and making her features dim. The voice that emerged from this obscurity was so steady and careful it sounded depersonalized, as if it were coming from a telephone answering machine.
“Bill, listen to me. I’m going to take a chance here. Maybe, just maybe, we can settle it in this room, right now, just you and me. Let’s put us both out of our miseries and plead this loser. I’ll ask Washington for permission to drop the capital designation. Assuming they agree, Hudson gets life without parole. It’s over. We go home.”
Redpath just looked at her for a moment. “I don’t know if I can do that,” he said, in the same almost automatic cadence.
“Why not?”
“The problem is,” Redpath said with a sigh, “I’m worried Moon isn’t guilty. I don’t see how I can plead him to a life sentence without parole for a crime he never committed.”
“Oh, give me strength!” Gomez-Larsen exploded. “You know he’s guilty!” The low orange sunlight was making the air in the small office too warm. She rose and turned her back on Redpath to drop the blinds. The result when she faced him again with the sun blocked out was to return her clothing and body to full Technicolor. Her bright coral blouse, her animated face, and her long, black hair jumped into the foreground like a billboard. She stretched out her arms and looked up at the ceiling.
“That is such crap!” she exclaimed. Then more softly, almost to herself, as she turned to sit down again: “Such crap. You know he’s guilty, and you’re pretending! This is a waste of my time.”
“Well, it’s my worst nightmare.” Redpath ran his hands through his hair gloomily. “If I have an innocent client. It’s impossible to …”
“Oh, pass me a hankie!” Gomez-Larsen had picked up her pencil again and was tapping it furiously. She leaned toward Redpath; her intensity seemed to increase the size of her eyes and mouth.
“Is that what he’s told you? And you supposedly believe him? I don’t know who’s playing games now, you or him. I took a chance; I made the offer. I didn’t make you beg. I didn’t even make you bring it up. But your guy killed two people, okay? And now he wants to play around here, or maybe you do. If you want to run the string out, fine, but don’t expect me to hold back when we get to the penalty phase. To be honest, I’m not all that hot to send him off to his doctor’s appointment in Indiana—I’ve got reasons of my own I don’t need to get into, plus I doubt my children would ever speak to me again—but this is my job, Bill. This is my job, and if you and Hudson force me to do it, well, then I’ll be like the sneaker ad. I’ll just do it.”
There was another long silence, with only the sound of the smoke eater and Gomez-Larsen’s breathing.
“But just remember, Bill, when the time comes.” She looked at him steadily. “It didn’t have to be this way. I offered. You passed.”
“If he were guilty, Lydia, don’t you think I would plead him? That’s my …”
“I don’t know if I would plead, if I were him. Frankly? I bet he feels bad about Ginger, but he tells himself that was just bad luck—his, not hers. From his point of view, even if he gets convicted, he probably thinks it’s less than fifty-fifty that a western Massachusetts jury will give him the death penalty. So it’s life in prison anyway. And if he’s got a ten percent chance of beating the charges completely—maybe twenty percent with a really good lawyer like you—why plead and tear up his lottery ticket? He’s hoping to walk. Kill two people in cold blood and live to brag about it. Great guy. That’s his plan.”
“Please, no compliments,” Redpath said in his gravelly voice, looking more disconsolate than ever. “This is hard enough.”
“So why are we talking?” Gomez-Larsen tossed the pencil on her desk and leaned back. “You want me to recommend probation? This was a long way for you to come to dump a load of confetti on me, Bill.” She looked at her watch, which hung from her wrist on a delicate gold bracelet. “I had a meeting ten minutes ago. We better wrap up.”
Redpath ignored the last comment and spoke deliberately. “The best I could do, given the situation, is to try to convince him to plead to three hundred and sixty months, or even a longer sentence if it held out any possibility that he might be released eventually, some day before he dies. I honestly don’t know if he would take it, but that’s what I was thinking. I’d like him to have some hope, that’s all.”
“No chance, and no way,” Gomez-Larsen said. She straightened up and ran her fingers back through her hair without looking at him. “Now we both know where we are. Call me if you want to talk seriously.”
A few minutes later, Redpath was descending the elevator. It was okay, he told himself; he’d had to try it, and now he knew a little more about the person he’d be facing. Anyway, he wasn’t sure Moon Hudson would ever plead to anything. The poor bastard really might be innocent. Horrible.
Meanwhile, upstairs in her office, Gomez-Larsen was reading an email from Washington with explicit instructions: no deal for Hudson under any circumstances. The prosecution was part of the attorney general’s initiative to bring the death penalty to states without their own capital punishment laws. It was a definite trial.
15
The man’s voice was deliberately casual, but persistent.
“So, you kill that white bitch, or what?”
Four black men sat at the end of a long Formica table in the nearly deserted C-pod dining hall. Powerful fluorescent lights blazed off the linoleum floor and cream-colored cinder-block walls, creating an atmosphere of unnatural brightness and sterility. The smell of overcooked broccoli hung in the damp air. In the corner, a fat white man wearing a do-rag was collecting trays on a pushcart. Occasional shouts and clangs from the unseen kitchen staff reverberated in the distance.
“You talking to me?”
“You know I’m talking to you, nigger. And I’m asking you whether you killed that white bitch like everybody says.” The questioner, an undersize man with reddish black hair, folded his arms, changing to a tone of faint mockery. “Or, you going to tell me and my friends here you’re just another sad-ass, innocent black boy?”
Moon Hudson set down his plastic knife and fork and rested his fingers on the edge of the table. He pulled his legs up underneath him and let his eyes drift briefly from the wiry little interrogator to the two men seated to his right. One was six seven at least, with a close-cropped gray-and-white beard and glasses. His name was Deshawn Santana, but he was known in the jail as Satan. The other was shorter, but broader across the shoulders with heavy upper arms; he clearly spent a lot of time in the weight room. Moon hadn’t been around long enough to learn what he was called.
Both these strangers were finishing their meals, eating slowly and keeping their eyes on their trays. The bigger one wiped his mouth on a paper napkin and looked from Moon to the questioner without changing expression. The broad-shouldered prisoner stabbed a piece of pineapple out of his fruit cup and chewed ruminatively, staring down as though he were deaf.
The room had gotten very quiet. Moon slid his chair back a few inches and glanced up into the reflection in the windows facing him. No one coming up from behind. No corrections officers around. The white guy pushed his squeaking steel cart off into the s
hadowy kitchen, whistling “Danny Boy” under his breath.
Moon finished his mouthful of boiled chicken and swallowed.
“Why don’t you tell me what you want me to say, peckerbutt? That way you’ll be sure to like my answer.”
The small man leaned forward, putting his face so close Moon could see a strand of spit between his lips.
“Listen up,” he began, “I asked you a civil question, and I’d …”
But as the man spoke, Moon leaned back and kicked out hard with his foot under the table against the front of his questioner’s chair, so that it shot backward and dumped the man over with a clatter onto the floor. Before he could scramble up, Moon leaped behind his own chair, ready for the other two men.
Neither one moved. As the little man crouched to come at Moon, the bearded prisoner said in an authoritative voice, without looking up from his tray: “Squash it, Pinball. This ain’t the time, nor the place, for that.”
Pinball, still on his hands and knees, glared at the big man indignantly.
“Goddammit, Satan, you told me to ask him, and I asked him. You said you wanted to know.”
“Yeah, and now I know. I know enough.” Satan pushed his tray away and gestured at Moon. “Sit down, man.”
“Motherfucker punking me down like that.” Pinball grumbled, picking up his chair up. Moon noticed that the broad shoulders of the third man were jiggling; short spurts of high-pitched laughter were hissing out of him.
He spoke in spasms. “Man, they got your name right. I haven’t,” he paused and his shoulders shook. “I haven’t seen anybody move so fast since Dingo sat on the hotplate.” He put down his fork and wiped a napkin over his face. “Satan and me’re going to take you to the North Carolina State Fair. Sign you up for human cannonball.”
“Sit down, man,” Satan said again, looking up at Moon and pointing at his chair.
But Moon still hesitated, hands at his sides, ready.
The Hanging Judge Page 10