by David R. Dow
The house I hoped was Cantu’s looked like a sharecropper’s cabin. It had peeling white paint and a shattered window. From inside I could hear Spanish television and canned laughter. I knocked and a man wearing jockey shorts and a hooded sweatshirt opened the door. I introduced myself and said, Yo quiero hacerle unas preguntas. Usted preferie que hablar en Ingles or Espanol? My plan was to go ahead and assume he was Cantu until he corrected me.
He said, You talk Spanish like the Unabomber writes. I speak English. What do you want?
He didn’t invite me in. I asked him whether he knew someone named Henry Quaker. He said no. I told him that someone I knew on death row told me he had some information that might help my client. I asked whether he knew why someone might say that. He said no. I asked him whether he knew Ezekiel Green. He said no, but he delayed a brief second, and his eyes changed. He knew him. I asked whether he knew who had killed Quaker’s family. He said, I already told the other guy I don’t know nothing about it. That was a slip. Green’s name had rattled him. As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t. I bluffed and asked him what was the detective’s name. He cocked his head to the side and didn’t answer, but I knew. Some cop had talked to him. I asked him how long they had talked. He narrowed his eyes and looked at me like he was trying to figure out whether I was actually stupid or just pretending. He said, How long? Are you loco? I don’t remember, man, it was a long time ago. He relaxed again, no longer nervous. I asked like how long. Days? Weeks? Months? He said, Nah, I’m talking about years ago, right after your client killed his family.
I said, A detective asked you these questions years ago?
He said, What’s the matter? You don’t hear so good? While I was thinking of what else to ask, he said, Adios, abogado, and he closed the door. I stood there awhile and thought about knocking, but he probably wouldn’t have answered, and besides, I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. So I bought a lemon aqua fresca at a taco cart that had set up in the church parking lot and headed back to town.
On the drive back I called the office and told Jerome to file a new appeal. I thought we had learned enough to entitle us to a hearing in state court. We had Green saying he knew Cantu committed the crime, and we had Cantu saying that he had been interrogated, and we had Lomax recanting and saying he incriminated Henry because a police officer pressured him to. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and even though it didn’t answer very many questions, it raised quite a few, which was all I could realistically hope to do at that point. It seemed likely that the cops talked to Cantu around the time of the crime, and that detail should have been in the police reports, and therefore known to Quaker’s trial lawyers, but it must not have been, or Quaker’s lawyer, bad as he was, would have at least talked to him. We had police testing Dorris’s hands for gunpowder residue, but also no mention of a gun in police reports. Lots of dogs weren’t barking. There were several threads in the case that Quaker’s trial lawyer had ignored, and we needed to pull on them to see what unraveled. But the first thing I needed to do was have another conversation with Henry.
I WAS MEETING KATYA for dinner at La Griglia, and I got there a few minutes early. I ordered a martini at the bar. Jocelyn Truesdale was sitting at the end of the counter. She motioned me over. She said, You drinking alone, counselor?
I said, Hi, Judge. I’m waiting for my wife.
She said, Have I met her? The answer was no, but I did not want to be talking to Judge Truesdale about my wife. She caught the bartender’s eye and pointed at her empty glass. She said, Want to buy me a drink?
I didn’t. I said, Sure.
She said, I hear rumors you are going to ask me to reopen the Quaker case. Is that true? When she said rumors she pronounced it rur-mors.
I tried to think of some way that this conversation was not highly inappropriate. I lied and said, We haven’t decided what we are going to do. We might ask for a new hearing.
She said, I remember that case. It’s always bothered me a little. She was drinking scotch on ice. She took a swallow and chewed a piece of ice.
Katya arrived. She saw me and took a step toward the bar. I stood up before she could walk over. I said, I’ll let you know, though. I’ve got to go. It’s been nice talking to you, Judge. I practically jogged toward Katya and steered her to our table. She asked me whom I had been talking to. I said, The judge in the Quaker case. I might need an expert opinion here, but I think she might have been coming on to me.
After we ordered, I told Katya about my conversation. She said, It’s possible she was hitting on you, but she might have just been drunk. Your track record of accurately perceiving women, frankly, isn’t all that great.
I told Katya the story: Truesdale had been married to a cop. She sold real estate by day and went to law school at night. Early one morning her husband pulled over a driver for drunk driving. He asked the driver to get out of the car. He didn’t know it, but the driver had just robbed a gas station. The driver came out firing. Truesdale’s husband was hit twice in the chest and once in the head. He died at the scene. The driver jumped back into the car and sped off. Police tracked him down the next day, but there was no video of the stop, and they couldn’t find the gun. So they did what cops sometimes do when another cop gets killed. They beat the guy until he told them where he had thrown it. They found the gun in the bayou, just where he said it would be.
The case got assigned to Judge Dan Steele. Steele was a former marine. He served two tours in Vietnam before he went to law school. His law-and-order credentials were like early Clint Eastwood. But he had integrity. He ruled that the only reason the police found the gun was because they had beaten the suspect. So he concluded that the prosecutor couldn’t use the gun as evidence. Without the gun, there was no case. The shooter walked. Everybody was livid, especially the victims’-rights crowd. They made it their mission to defeat Steele in the next election, and they convinced Truesdale to run against him. She crushed him. Six months after she took the bar exam, she was a criminal court judge.
I said to Katya, There is no way this case has bothered her. Nothing bothers her. We once proved that a guy who had been convicted of rape in her court couldn’t have committed the crime, because the DNA didn’t match. You know that she said? She said, Maybe he did it and used a condom. She figures that even if the guy didn’t do what he was convicted of, he probably did something. There’s not a sympathetic bone in her body. I don’t buy it.
Katya said, You don’t know how you would react if I got murdered. You might think you do, but you don’t. Maybe her nephew is a delinquent. Maybe she found dope in her kids’ clothes. Maybe she found religion. Maybe she read a good book. Maybe she started listening to Bob Dylan. Maybe she had a dream. Maybe she just spent some time meditating. Maybe she finally met someone else. Who knows? But people do change their minds, you know. I bet it really did bother her. It’s a strange case.
Our food arrived. I waited until the waiter had left, then I said, Well. I still think she was just hitting on me.
Katya smiled. She said, The ego on you.
QUAKER WAS ALREADY in the cage when I got to the prison. He was eating a ham sandwich and a bag of tortilla chips. I asked him where he got the food. I was assuming he must have had a visitor I didn’t know about. He said, Nicole got it for me.
Nicole is a guard on death row. She’s notoriously tough. I didn’t think Quaker meant her. I said, Nicole the guard?
He said, Uh-huh. I looked at him. He said, She ain’t that bad. Got a tough reputation, that’s all. But you act right, she treats you right. I asked whether she buys him food very often. He said, Only when I ask her. I don’t ask too often. This is maybe the third time. I give her the money from my commissary; it ain’t like it’s her treat. I asked him whether there was anything he wanted to talk about. He said, Not really. You wanted to see me, right? He was in a sour mood. As someone who is in sour moods quite a lot, I am expert at recognizing them. Of course, he had a better excuse than I ever do. He lived
twenty-three hours a day in a sixty-square-foot cell that had a cot and a stainless-steel toilet and a strip of clouded Plexiglas for a window. Guards passed him his meals through a slot in the solid-steel door. Breakfast at four, lunch at ten thirty, dinner at four. He had no television. His radio got two stations—a country music station in Huntsville and a Christian talk station in Livingston. For one hour a day, guards moved him from his cell into the so-called day area, a ten-by-ten-foot caged area where he got to exercise by himself, while another inmate exercised in an adjacent cage.
People think death-row inmates have it great, that they lift weights all morning and watch TV all night, with three square meals a day, access to computers and books, and an endless series of appeals. I’m not sure whether the people who constructed this myth are ignorant, or just cynical. Either way, it’s wrong in every respect. Death row is a cage at the pound. You might not have any problem with that. You might say that someone who kills someone should be kept in a cage. I don’t agree with that viewpoint, but I do understand it. One day we can have the debate where I take the position that a great nation built upon the rule of law ought not to treat prisoners the way the Iranians or the Chinese do. But that wasn’t the topic that day with Quaker. Instead, I needed to remember that at some point in the small remainder of every inmate’s life, the exterior cage becomes interior, too. Once that happens, your client reacts to stimuli that you cannot see. It’s like watching a musical without the sound. So much seems inappropriate, or inexplicable, and that makes me mad—well, not mad, exactly; impatient might be a better word.
I asked him whether he knew Ruben Cantu. He said he didn’t. I told him what Green had told us and about my conversation with Cantu. He said, I know Green. I wouldn’t believe a word he says. Anyway, I’m no lawyer, but it sounds to me like you don’t have that much, just a bunch of questions, not much else. I told him I agreed with him. He said, They kill dudes in here every day who have a hundred questions. A thousand, maybe.
I couldn’t argue with him about that. I said, Was Dorris depressed?
He didn’t answer right away. After a moment he said, If you were married to a guy who had secrets he couldn’t share and woke up every night drenched with sweat and sat around like a zombie and pushed you away when you tried to help, wouldn’t you be depressed?
I said, Was she depressed enough to kill herself ?
He shook his head violently. He leaned toward me. He said, She’d light herself on fire before she’d hurt those kids. I nodded.
He said, I got no interest in trying to help myself by making Dorris look bad, you understand what I’m saying? I told him I did. He said, A bunch of questions don’t prove that I’m innocent.
He dropped his eyes, looking at his fingers. He was strumming them on the table, like he was playing the piano. His face softened and his eyes got wet. I had this thought: I do not want to like this man. He said, I don’t know how you do what you do. Do you ever sleep?
I thought, My client Johnny Martinez asked me that very question. I said, What tune were you playing there?
Quaker played piano for the church from the time he was eight years old until the fire where he worked. On one of our earlier visits he had said to me, I ain’t too religious, but I do love the music. He smiled and his eyes lit up. I told him he reminded me a little bit of Bud Powell. He said, Yeah, Dorris told me that. And I talk to myself when I’m playin’, too, just like ole Bud.
He strummed his fingers some more. He said, I miss having a piano. I used to sleep good in here. It’s always noisy, but I slept okay, ten or eleven hours. Lately I ain’t been sleepin’ at all. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I filled out a form to get some medicine, something to knock me out. I nodded. From nowhere he smiled. He said, You don’t seem too interested in my problems.
I said, Most of your problems I can’t do anything about.
He said, I know. That’s okay.
I thought of a Zbigniew Herbert poem I’d been reading: I imagined your fingers / had faith in your eyes / the unstrung instrument / the arms without hands.
And many verses later: heroes did not return from the expedition / there were no heroes / the unworthy survived.
I said, I might not be able to do anything about any of your problems, but we have raised a lot of questions, and I think we can maybe get a stay.
It was the first time I had used the word stay, and it was electric, an acknowledgment of the proximity of death. No stay meant Quaker would die in a few weeks. A stay meant he would survive to fight on. Survive, not thrive. Someone who thrives looks forward to tomorrow. Tomorrow for someone who only survives is just one day closer to the end.
I think all the time about what I would do if I knew how many weeks, how many days, how many hours I had left. I’d circle the date on a calendar. That’s all I know. Everything else is a question. Would I sleep a lot, or not at all? Would I eat a lot, or would I have no appetite? If I ate, would I eat new foods I’d never tried, or gorge myself on my favorites? Would I watch TV or movies? Would I read books? Would I be able to concentrate? Would I exercise? What would be the point? Would I travel? Would I jump out of an airplane again, kayak huge white water, fly a jet? Would I call everyone I know and say good-bye? Would I spend every waking moment with my family, the people I love the most, or would that be too painful to withstand?
Doesn’t everybody think about these things?
I didn’t want Quaker not to think about these things. I didn’t want to give him hope. Like I said before, I’m always hopeful, but never optimistic.
Most of my clients nod their heads at that point. Some just bow their heads. They perceive my hope like a vanishing scent. They breathe it in and memorize its smell. They cling to it when they visit their parents or their children, because it is the only reason they have to think they will visit again. They don’t want to give me a chance to say anything else, anything else that might reveal how slender the reed happens to be. Not Quaker. He said, Why?
I didn’t answer right away. I thought to myself, Katya is right. A sliver of belief had crept into my head and I couldn’t stamp it out. It was like the aroma of baking bread. How could twelve jurors have looked at him and seen a killer? I said, Because none of this adds up.
He said, In case you’re wondering, I didn’t kill my family.
I almost said, I know, but I was not ready to surrender. I nodded.
He said, I don’t know what happened to that gun, I really don’t.
I wanted to nod again. I wanted to straddle the line. I wanted to support him and to protect myself. He exhaled through his nose.
I said, I know. I know you didn’t.
Instantly his eyes filled with tears. His lips parted then closed. He covered his mouth and nose with his left hand. He lowered his head and lifted it. My heart was so loud I could hear it. I thought, Where do we go from here?
I said, The plan is to get some judge to believe that, too.
I wanted to run out of there. I stood up. He said, Thank you. Thank you. We touched our hands to the glass between us.
Nicole was the guard operating the electronic door that day. She asked me how my Thanksgiving had been, and I wished her a merry Christmas. I told her I’d see her after the first of the year. She said, Quaker’s all right. He never causes no trouble. If you need any kind of statements from me or anyone else, you tell me, okay? There’s lots of guys in here who want to help him.
I emerged from death row onto the asphalt yard at two in the afternoon. I don’t believe in omens, but that didn’t change the fact that the sky was turning from ochre to black. I smelled sulfur in the air. I started to hurry across the prison yard, wanting to beat the rain to my truck. Maybe the guard didn’t want me to make it. While I was waiting for him to buzz me through the third of three gates, rain drops as fat as grapes began to fall. The sky crackled with lightning. Thunder like a sonic boom made me think of the night that Tim Robbins escaped from Shawshank. By the time I reached my truck, I was shivering
hard and so soaked I squeaked.
THAT NIGHT I had a dream. I was driving home from seeing Quaker, down the twisting two-lane farm road that slices through fecund farmland just north of death row. The rain was pouring down, and the creek that runs along the east side of the prison was rising fast. Across from Florida’s restaurant the road doglegs to the left. A canoe usually tied up at the dock behind the restaurant floated into the road. I swerved to miss it and my truck skidded into the creek. It bobbed like a cork, then pointed nosedown and started to sink. Water began to leak into the cab. I took off my seat belt and fell against the windshield. Legal papers and CDs were sliding all around me. I reached for a rock hammer I keep in my truck for just this emergency, but of course it wasn’t there. Muddy water was two-thirds of the way up the door. I found the hammer and I swung it at the driver’s-side window. It shattered and looked like a spider web. Instead of swinging again, I used my fist. Shards of glass pierced my wrist like a bracelet. I squeezed through the window and breaststroked upward, following the bubbles as I exhaled. I ran out of air and sucked down a greedy breath a moment too soon, so when I broke through the surface a moment later I was gagging. The rain had stopped. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. A young boy wearing overalls and rubber boots was standing ankle-deep on the side of the creek fishing with a bamboo pole. He looked at me with no surprise and said, Hey mister, what are you doing?