by David R. Dow
I said, No you don’t, just like I don’t have to be talking to you.
He said, Then get the hell out of here, motherfucker.
I have a confession to make. I had a pocket full of quarters. I do not like all my clients, and I did not like Green. He made the same mistake that death-penalty supporters routinely make. He assumed that because I represent guys like him, I must like guys like him. He assumed that because I am against the death penalty and don’t think he should be executed, that I forgive him for what he did. Well, it isn’t my place to forgive people like Green, and if it were, I probably wouldn’t. I’m a judgmental and not-very-forgiving guy. You can ask my wife. I would have left midway through his tirade, except I wanted to know what he knew. It appeared he wasn’t going to tell me, so I didn’t have any more reason to stay. I stood up. I said, Have a nice life, asshole.
ON SEPTEMBER 1, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, Katya and I got married at the Doubletree Hotel near the Houston Galleria. Three months earlier, we sat with the executive chef in his kitchen, sampling wines and tasting tuna, halibut, and loin of lamb. While we were deciding on our celebratory meal, the Quaker family was dying on the other side of town.
Dorris Quaker worked the third shift at Ben Taub General Hospital. That night, she made fried chicken and biscuits for her two children, twelve-year-old Daniel and Charisse, who was eight. Their next-door neighbor, Sandra Blue, sat at the table drinking sweet tea while the Quakers ate. Sandra said that she left at nine, when Dorris started getting the kids ready for bed. A few minutes later, Dorris called Sandra and told her she was going to take a short nap and leave for the hospital in an hour. She’d get home at seven thirty the next morning, just as the kids were waking up. Daniel knew to call Sandra if he needed anything, and Sandra knew to call Dorris. This had been their routine since Dorris and Henry had separated three months before.
At eight the next morning, Sandra went outside to pick up the newspaper. Dorris’s car was in the driveway. The house was quiet. Sandra thought that the kids were watching TV and that Dorris was asleep. It was Labor Day. There wasn’t any school. At eleven, she noticed the quiet again. No one answered when she knocked. The door was unlocked.
As soon as she saw Dorris lying on the sofa she dialed 911, then she walked into the back bedroom and found the children. When police arrived, Sandra was sitting on the floor in the children’s bedroom, hugging her knees to her chest. A detective took her statement and sent her home.
ON THE DRIVE back to Houston from the prison after seeing Green, my cell phone rang. It was Jeremy Winston’s wife, Marie. Her voice was as thin as he was fat. She was calling to thank me for trying to help her husband. That was it, no other agenda. I’ve noticed that if you do the tiniest little thing for someone who has never received even the slightest kindness, you get rewarded with ridiculously effusive gratitude.
Katya handed me a glass of bourbon when I walked in the door. Happy anniversary, she said.
Shouldn’t we be drinking champagne?
Yes, but taste that. It’s a present.
I drank a swallow. Wow, I said. What did you pay for this?
Is it good?
Yes, I said. Amazing.
Then it was a steal. Come on, Lincoln’s already in bed, waiting for his story. I told him we were going to dinner and that Nana was staying with him.
Lincoln was in bed reading Amelia Bedelia. His nanny, Maria, has been with us since Lincoln was six weeks old. He calls her Nana. He said, Hi, Dada. Do you know what a pun is?
I said, Yes, amigo. I love puns.
He said, Me too. Puns are fun, get it? He said, Tell me a real-life story, okay?
I said, Okay. When I was a little boy, just about your age, I read an Amelia Bedelia book. In the book I read, she cooked an egg on top of a car. I asked my dada whether you could really cook an egg on a car, and he said that you might be able to do it if it was hot enough outside. So the next Saturday, after my dada got home from playing tennis, I went outside, and while he was swimming I cracked an egg on the hood of his car.
What happened? Lincoln asked.
I said, It was a big mess. The egg got hard and stuck to the car. I had to clean it off, and my dada made me clean the whole car.
Even the inside?
Yep, even the inside. I didn’t ever do that again.
Lincoln said, That’s a funny story.
I said, Good night, amigo.
WE ASKED FOR A TABLE in the back at Café Annie. I told Katya about my day. She said, You have to write him and apologize.
Apologize for what?
You told a man on death row to have a nice life.
The guy’s an asshole. I’m not going to apologize.
The waiter brought our appetizers and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. We ordered a coffee-roasted sirloin and grilled redfish. I lifted my champagne glass to make a toast. Katya’s eyes were wet.
What’s the matter, K?
She said, The guy is totally messed up. He can’t help the way he is. It’s really bad karma for you to say that to him.
Bad karma? Are you serious? Can I tell you what the guy did?
I said, Green beat his pregnant wife to death with his fists. He had his five-year-old son with him watching while he did it. Then he drove with his son to his mother-in-law’s house and strangled her, again with his little boy watching.
Katya started to say something. I said, Wait, I’m not finished. He drove to a motel, and when his boy fell asleep he left him there. Just left him. The next morning the kid woke up alone in the room and wandered outside looking for his dad. A maid found him. Green was arrested watching TV in his trailer at nine in the morning. He was on his sixth beer.
Katya ran her finger around the rim of her champagne glass. She said, I don’t know how he got to be that way. But he was reaching out to you because he respects you. You can’t leave it like that.
I said, I’m not going to apologize to him.
We sat silently. Our food arrived. I cut the steak and the fish in half, put some on each of our plates, and ate a piece of the meat. This is great, I said. Katya smiled. Sad and happy, all at once. I’m either in a good mood or, more often, a bad one. She is more complicated than I am. She can be in both. I said, I’ll write him and thank him for seeing me. I won’t apologize, but I’ll write him. Okay?
Okay, she said. Thank you. And the sadness was gone, just like that.
I said, What was that bourbon, anyway?
Pappy Van Winkle. Twenty years old. I’m glad you liked it.
How many bottles did you buy?
Just one. It wasn’t cheap.
I figured that. I guess I’ll drink it slow.
We had coffee and cognac. I was remembering how Green looked at me as I was leaving. She said, Where did you go?
I told her I was thinking about what it would be like to live the rest of my life in a windowless space the size of my closet. I said, It might be a little easier if it was your closet.
Hah hah.
Katya practiced law for seven years. She was good at it, but she’s too artistic, and too sincere, to be happy as a lawyer. So she went to art school and started teaching high-school photography. If it weren’t for Lincoln, that’s probably what she’d still be doing. But when our son arrived, she devoted herself with an intensity I had not seen before to being a mom and, far more daunting, to making me into a dad.
I was feeling sentimental, and when I’m feeling sentimental I am triter than normal. I had never gotten around to my toast. I lifted my cognac glass. I said, You and our son are the best things in my life. Thank you.
Katya had heard this toast before. I had heard her response before. She said, It sure took you long enough to decide.
When you don’t get married until late in life, the list of qualities you expect your wife to have can grow to be specific and long.
Katya is a competitive ballroom dancer. I bump into our piano walking from the kitchen to the library. She could have been a concert fl
utist, but her parents were practical Germans who saw no prospects in earning a living as a musician. My great-grandparents died in the Holocaust. The first time I met Katya’s mom and dad I wondered where their parents had been.
I said, You were pretty much the exact opposite of the person my list described. It took me a little while to realize that maybe the list was wrong.
She said, Maybe?
I smiled. I said, A little while to realize that the list was definitely wrong.
She said, Maybe you should stop keeping lists.
THE NEXT MORNING I woke up before dawn and went for a run with the dog. I came home and brewed a pot of coffee for myself and a cup of tea for Katya. I made breakfast for Lincoln while Katya fixed his lunch and helped him get dressed. I showered and shaved and put on a suit. I usually wear blue jeans and a T-shirt to the office, so Lincoln asked me why I was dressed funny. I told him I had to go to a meeting. Katya said, Hey Linco, it’s time to go to school. I kissed them both good-bye then drove to the courthouse.
I walked into the courtroom for the 175th Harris County District Court and chatted with Loretta, one of the clerks. I hadn’t seen her since August, when my client Leroy Winter had been executed. Winter had been serving a prison sentence for sexual assault of a minor when he killed a guard. His defense was that the guard had been raping him. It might have been true, but it’s still not a good idea to kill a guard. Loretta said she was sorry about Winter. She was lying. Her friends are cops. She was just being polite. I appreciated it. I said, Thanks, Loretta. She told me that my wife must have picked out my shirt and tie, because they matched. I smiled and told her that she knows me pretty well. I asked her to please call the prosecutor to let her know that I was there.
A few minutes later, the prosecutor came into the court. While we waited for the judge to arrive, we talked about our upcoming vacations. My wife and I are going white-water kayaking, I told her. Shirley told me that she and her husband were going to the Pacific Northwest. She asked how long I’ve been kayaking, and I asked her whether she’d been to Seattle before. Most of my colleagues don’t like her, but Shirley and I get along just fine. Because I used to support the death penalty, it’s not so hard for me to have sympathy for the misguided souls who still do.
I saw two former students of mine, now assistant district attorneys. They asked how things were going at the law school where I teach, and we chatted about their careers. The judge walked in, and a bailiff shouted for us all to rise. Defense lawyers and prosecutors milled around, trying to work out deals with each other, or just engaging in courthouse gossip. Criminal courtrooms, when there isn’t a trial going on, are a lot like a Middle Eastern bazaar.
A man charged with drug possession stood before the judge, in between the prosecutor and his own lawyer, whom he had met less than five minutes earlier, and pleaded guilty. He had been through this ritual before. He was as calm as you would be if you were standing in line to pay a parking ticket. The judge sentenced him to time already served. The prosecutor and I asked the judge if we could approach the bench, and she told us we could. The prosecutor said that she and I had compared calendars, and we wanted to see if she planned to be in town on February 4. The judge glanced down at her calendar and said that she did. Shirley handed the judge an order. Without looking down, the judge signed it.
The order the judge signed is called a death warrant. Shirley and I had picked the day that my client would die. We planned the execution around our vacations. The warrant commanded the director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to place Henry Quaker, on February 4, “in a room arranged for the purpose of execution” and then to inject him with “a substance or substances in lethal quantity sufficient to cause [his] death” and to continue with the injection “until the said HENRY QUAKER is dead.”
I paced in the hall while Shirley made me a copy of the order. I have been reading these boilerplate warrants for close to twenty years, but they still take my breath away. I called Jerome, who had left the office and was on the way to the prison to see Henry. Jerome would deliver the news in person. I don’t like for my clients to learn from a letter or even by phone that a date has been chosen for their deaths. I realize that it’s absurd. What difference does it make how you’re told when you’re going to die? None, probably. But we all have our little idiosyncrasies.
I got in my truck to drive to my office at the law school. You don’t see many homeless people in Houston. They’re there, of course, but unlike New York or San Francisco, where you have to hurdle them on the sidewalks, you can pretend like they aren’t here, because they aren’t in my neighborhood. But I see them when I’m at the courthouse. So I keep a stack of twenty or thirty one-dollar bills in my truck. The experts say that they’re just going to buy booze. For all I know the experts are right, but I’ve never figured out why that means I shouldn’t hand out the money. If I’d been alive five hundred years ago, and been a Catholic, of course, I’d have been one of the sinners buying indulgences.
There’s one homeless guy, Stan, who lives with his three dogs and a grocery cart under the freeway where I turn left. How can you turn a blind eye to a man who shares the food he scavenges from Dumpsters with his dogs? He has a squeegee in his cart. I usually give him a dollar not to clean my windshield and Milk-Bones for the dogs. The first time I gave him money he asked me my name. I told him my friends call me Doc. He said, Cool, then I’ll call you Doc. Some days I give him cans of tuna, or crackers and cheese. He says, This is nice, but I’d prefer some beer. Last Christmas I gave him a six-pack of Shiner. He said, Whoa. The good stuff. Thanks, Doc.
I saw Stan on the day the judge signed Quaker’s death warrant. He said, Hey Doc, you’ve looked better. I nodded and gave him the whole stack of ones.
HENRY QUAKER’S STORY was treacly sweet. He and Dorris had been sweethearts at Yates High School. He carried her books to school, literally, and held her hand in the halls. They got married a week after they graduated, in 1983. Their son Daniel was born seven months later. Henry felt like he had to do something dramatic. He had a son on the way. He intended to support his wife and child, but he had been only a mediocre student. Although he loved to read, he had no skills and no prospects. So he enlisted in the army. It would be a living, and he figured he would get the job skills he needed to take care of his family. Dorris went to pharmacy school while they lived on the base, learning how to mix IVs. Henry learned heavy-machine maintenance and read a lot of books. They were a charming cliché. Charisse was born four years later. Henry served his time, became a reservist, and started welding in Houston. The pay was twice what he made as a soldier. He said he was deliriously happy. He would drink a beer after work with his buddies, but he was home in time to bathe the kids and put them to bed. On Saturday nights, he and Dorris paid a neighborhood kid to babysit, and they would go out to dinner and to the movies.
Then, in 1989, Henry was working at a chemical plant in Pasadena. Leaking gas ignited an explosion that measured over 3.0 on the Richter scale. You could feel the ground shake for miles. Henry escaped with barely a scratch, but his two best friends burned to death in a massive fire that took half a day to contain. Henry heard them screaming, first for help, then in agony. Their bodies were literally consumed by the flames.
A week later he was back on the job. Between the day he returned and the day his family was killed, Henry did not miss even a single day of work. But he stopped reading books and stopped going out for a beer after his shift. His coworkers described him as sullen and withdrawn. They said he did his work like he was hypnotized. No one could remember the last time Henry laughed or even smiled.
When police arrived at the Quaker house following the 911 call, Sandra Blue told them that Dorris and Henry had been separated for a few months. She said she didn’t know him very well. He was quiet. When Sandra would see him in the mornings before he moved out, he was always polite, waved, said good morning, asked her how she was doing. He still spent a lot of time with the kids, shoot
ing baskets, playing catch, going for ice cream. Even after they split, Henry came over to the house twice a week to pick up the kids. He adored them. Sandra had never seen or heard him yell at either of them, and she’d never seen or heard Henry and Dorris fighting.
She said there was no chance that Dorris was seeing someone else. Henry was the love of her life.
Police found Henry at a construction site in the medical center. He was sitting astraddle a beam eleven stories up, welding. He was a suspect because the spouse is always a suspect. When police told him why they were there, he started to shriek.
He made more than $30,000 a year. He had good health insurance. When it looked like they were headed for divorce, he told Dorris that they should stay married until she found someone else just so she and the kids could still be covered under his insurance, which was much better than the coverage Dorris had. The police asked Henry whether they could look inside his truck. He said that sure they could. A detective saw what he thought was blood. He read Henry his rights. A day later, the DNA lab reported that the blood was Daniel’s.
AFTER WE CHOSE the date for Quaker’s death I left the courthouse and drove to my office at the law school. I asked my assistant to send an e-mail to my students saying I was canceling class. I closed my door and sat down to play poker. I entered a $2 tournament online. It took four and a half hours. I won $37. I poured myself a small Knob Creek and drove home.