by David R. Dow
I said, Sure.
She said, Signing a death warrant makes things real to me. When the jury comes back and I announce a death sentence, I feel like a spectator. But when I sign the warrant… Her voice trailed off. She said, Quaker’s jury was out for a long time. We thought they were going to acquit him.
I said, Why are you telling me this, Judge?
She said, I’m not exactly sure.
Then she said, In a hundred years, people are going to look back, and they are going to wonder what on earth we were doing. She drank some tea.
I said, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.
She said, Take care of that eye.
RICHARD FEYNMAN KEPT a list of the things he didn’t know. I’ve often wondered how much you have to know to know what you don’t know. I could make a list of things I want to know but don’t, but it would depress me. I myself don’t understand just about everything, a detail of which I’m reminded whenever I go to death row, especially when I go on Fridays. I was there to see Green, and to say hello to Quaker.
I pulled into the Exxon a couple of miles down the road from the prison. Inside, changing $10 bills for fists full of quarters, were three twenty-something-year-old women from France. A tall redhead, Monique, recognized me, said hello, and introduced me to her friends. They were in Texas to visit murderers. Monique was there to visit her husband, a Honduran who, along with three other drug dealers, had raped and murdered two high-school students who made a disastrously wrong turn down a dead-end street on the day that the older girl got her driver’s license. The Honduran testified at his trial and said the murder was a mistake. He probably meant to say unplanned, in that it is hard to characterize as a mistake a murder that is accomplished by stabbing the victims thirteen times. I was less unforgiving before I became a dad. Monique met the guy after he arrived on death row. A year, four visits, and sixteen letters later, they got married by proxy. She had never touched him, and wouldn’t, until he was dead.
I know two dozen murderers whose European wives fly over to see them three or four times a year, staying at cheap hotels near the prison and surviving on fast food and vending machines. The prison doesn’t allow visitors to bring in reading material, so the women sit and twiddle their thumbs for an hour waiting for guards to bring out their spouses, then hold a grimy phone to their ears and talk to their mates through the Plexiglas for four hours more. They do not want to be U.S. citizens, so it might not be love, but it isn’t expediency, either.
Monique asked me who I was going to see. I told her, and she told me that Green’s wife was with him at that very moment. I had not known that Green had a wife. Monique told me her name was Destiny. She was Irish. I thought to myself, Who names their kid Destiny? Then I thought, How drunk would a woman have to be to get married to a guy who beat his previous wife to death?
Monique and her friends followed me to the prison. Outside the prison gates on Fridays, the parking lot is like a carnival. Vans and RVs and pickup trucks with campers fill all the visitor spaces. Because death row has visiting hours on Saturdays, families can see their loved ones two days in a row without missing two days of work. Wives come to see their husbands. Mothers and fathers come to see their sons. Sons and daughters come to see their dads. Death row on Fridays is living proof of how many families murderers ruin.
Before buzzing me through the gate, the guard reminded me that I could not wear sunglasses inside. I took them off so she could see my eye, the white of which was still the color of a fine chianti, three weeks after my surgery. She said, I think I’ll let you wear them today, counselor.
Inside, Monique introduced me to Destiny. She couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall, but she weighed, I would estimate, close to 300 pounds. Green weighed maybe 120. He was eating fried pork rinds and drinking a Pepsi. Destiny looked up at me when I walked over but didn’t say a word. I said, Nice to meet you. She bit off a fingernail. Her skin was the color of liquid paper. She had put on lipstick, red as a candied apple. Half her ass fit on the folding metal chair. I picked up the other phone and told Green I’d talk to him in an attorney booth when he and his wife were finished visiting.
She said, I’m planning on being here all day, sweets. I told her that the prison would only let her visit for two more hours.
Green said, Introduce yourself to my new lawyer, Destiny. Then he winked at me.
I went and sat in the attorney booth and waited for the guards to bring Green in.
Death row has two types of attorney booths. One is a full-contact room. In this room, lawyers sit across a table from their clients. If you want to, you can shake your client’s manacled hand or pat him on the shoulder. The room is usually used for psychological or psychiatric examinations. Next to it is the other kind of booth, a six-foot-by-four-foot box, that’s divided down the middle by a concrete wall with a reinforced Plexiglas window. There’s a padlocked mail slot that can be used to pass papers back and forth. You have to use a phone to converse. When they enter their half of the cage, inmates meticulously wipe off the mouth and ear pieces of the receiver with their white cloth jumpsuits. Death-row inmates are often obsessed with germs.
The main difference between an attorney area and a regular visiting cubicle is that, like those old-fashioned corner telephone booths, the attorney space is fully enclosed. The idea is to intimate the idea of privacy, and to prevent guards and others in the visiting area from hearing the conversation. Prison officials surreptitiously record visits between inmates and their nonlawyer visitors. They are not supposed to record attorney visits, but I wouldn’t bet that they don’t.
Green and I were conversing in a noncontact booth.
While he was squatting on his haunches, waiting for the guard to reach through a slot in the door and remove his handcuffs, Green said, What happened to you? I had forgotten how bad my eye looked. I told him nothing. Over the years I’ve had three or four clients I was actually fond of. Johnny Martinez was one of them. Green said, Did you know that Johnny Martinez and me were tight?
Death-row inmates live alone, sleep alone, shower alone. Once when I was in graduate school, I performed an experiment to see how long I could go without speaking another word to another human being. I made it eight days. I couldn’t go to restaurants, and the grocery store was tough. At fast-food restaurants I would hold up fingers to place my order and nod when the worker handed me my food and thanked me. It’s harder than you might think for a hardwired social animal to live without any human interaction. But death row hasn’t always been that way. Until the late 1990s, death-row inmates could work outside their cells, in the prison laundry, for example, or fabricating license plates. They also had group exercise, so inmates could play basketball or handball, or lift weights together. Martinez was gay. For the gay inmates, or the temporarily gay, the old death row afforded social opportunities, so to speak. The implementation of total isolation was hard on Martinez. He told me, after the new regulations were put in place, that he never dreamed of escaping; he dreamed of being touched by a human being who wasn’t a guard. I said, Yeah, Johnny, but the guys who aren’t guards are murderers.
He said, Not all of them.
I said, I know. I was kidding.
He said, What do you dream about? I often didn’t know what to say when Martinez asked me questions. I was useless to him as a lawyer. His case had been screwed up beyond repair by his previous attorneys. I told him that the first time we met. He didn’t care. He wanted me to be his father, and his friend. I didn’t want to be his friend just so I could feel better about the fact that, as his lawyer, I wasn’t going to be able to save him. So I didn’t say anything.
Johnny said, You do dream, right? He looked at me like I knew the answers to the big questions. I wrote a note on my pad so I had an excuse to look down. He twisted his head, trying to read it. He smiled. He said, I guess you can’t dream if you don’t sleep. Do you ever sleep?
When Quaker asked me that same question years later, he sounded curio
us. When Johnny asked, the question felt intimate. I didn’t answer. He said, I bet you don’t.
He said, I’d like to sleep, but it’s loud up on level two.
Death row has three levels. Level 1 is where the well-behaved inmates live. Level 3 is for the troublemakers. Level 2 is in between. If Johnny was on level 2, he’d been doing something disruptive. That made no sense to me. He was meek and obedient. I said, What did you do to get moved?
He rubbed his face twice. His right thumb stroking one cheek two times, his other four fingers caressing the other. He had a wisp of scattered facial hair, like a teenager just starting to shave. He said, I wouldn’t shave when the captain told me to. I asked him why not. He said, I’m not allowed to shave during Ramadan.
Johnny was raised a Catholic. He’d been an altar boy. His parish priest told me that he wanted to do whatever he could to help Johnny get off death row. He had already written the Pope, requesting papal intervention. I said, You’re Catholic, aren’t you?
He said, Not anymore. I’m Muslim now.
I said, Since when?
He smiled. It’s who I am, Señor Abogado, he said to me.
I felt a piece of the wall crumble, and I said, I think you’re the first Muslim I’ve met named Martinez. What does your family think? He tilted back his head and laughed. He seemed almost happy.
That was the image of him I tried to hold on to.
Green said, You remember Martinez, right? He told me you’re a heretic.
Martinez did use to call me a heretic. He teased me. I had conversations with him that weren’t about his case or the law. We talked about religion. I said it was bad, along with nationalism, the most regressive force in human society. He shook his head, respectful but adamant. He told me I might find myself praying every day if I was where he was. I told him he might be right, but that would just prove that I’m a hypocrite, not that I’m wrong. It was a running theme for us. If Green knew that Martinez called me a heretic, Martinez must have told him. But I didn’t see Martinez and Green as friends.
I sat and waited. He said, Destiny doesn’t trust you. I thought to myself, Destiny doesn’t trust me? You’ve got to be kidding. She is a curious collection of DNA. She romanticizes murderers. She was attracted to you when the only thing she knew about you is that you’re a murderer who beat your wife to death in front of your son. You might be something besides that—although I am not yet convinced—but Destiny didn’t know that when she got your name and photograph and mailing address off an abolitionist Web site and decided to write you some sappy lovesick letter. So if Destiny doesn’t trust me, partner, tell her the feeling’s mutual.
My interior rant apparently amused me. I smirked. Green said, What’s funny? I shook my head.
He said, So let’s get to it. My wife is waiting. I took a pad out of my briefcase and licked the eraser on my pencil. But I didn’t write anything down. There was no way I could forget what Green told me.
HE SAID, HENRY QUAKER didn’t kill no one. I asked him how he knew that. He said, I told that girl who works for you that Ruben did it. I just didn’t exactly tell her how I know it. I know he killed that family, ’cause I paid him to.
Green was not the first person to tell me he had gotten away with murder. I’ve had several clients over the years who, as their executions became imminent, made all sorts of exaggerated claims. Billy Vickers went to his death taking credit for at least a dozen murders. Henry Lee Lucas claimed hundreds. The inaptly named Angel Resendiz, known to law-enforcement officials as the railway killer, rode the train from Kentucky to Texas to California and back again, killing as many as fifteen people, he said. Were these inmates clearing their consciences or trying to be memorable? My vote was for option two. I said nothing. Green said, What? You don’t believe me? Go talk to Cantu. Tell him you know about the gun he left there.
He bit off a fingernail and said to me, Bring any change today, counselor?
Shit, I forgot again.
He spit the nail into his palm and looked at it. I said, You shouldn’t have told Destiny that I’m your lawyer. I can’t be your lawyer. There’s a conflict of interest.
He nodded, put the nail back on his tongue and moved it around in his mouth. He looked over my shoulder and nodded his head toward my left. I turned around, but there was nobody there. When I looked back at him, he was grinning.
He said, They taping this conversation? I told him they weren’t supposed to listen in on lawyers, but that they might be doing it anyway. He said, Uh-huh. I waited for him to go on. I wanted to look at my watch, but fought it off, like not scratching an itch.
I thought to myself, He could be playing with me. If he is, I want to say nothing and seem uninterested. Then I thought, Or he could be telling the truth. If he is, I need to say nothing and figure out what to ask him. So I sat there, head swimming, saying nothing.
He said, Cantu is a dumb fuck. He killed the wrong person.
His story was not incredible. I’m not saying I believed him. I’m just saying he had hooked me. According to Green, Cantu sold drugs for him and occasionally threatened people who owed Green money. Green said that Cantu had claimed to have killed two dealers who stole from him, but Green did not know their names or whether it was true. He said that a woman named Tricia Cummings had been selling Ecstasy for him in a mixed neighborhood of blacks and Chicanos. She had been stealing from him. He didn’t say how he knew that, and I didn’t ask. He paused, like the rest would be obvious to me. I said, And?
He said, So I paid Cantu to kill her.
Cantu killed the wrong person. Green realized it as soon as Cantu told him that he also had to kill two kids because they saw him after he had killed the woman. Green didn’t think Cummings had any kids and he knew she lived alone. He said he’d been to her house and slept with her, though he didn’t say it quite like that.
If Green was telling the truth, Dorris Quaker died because she lived exactly two blocks east of someone who had been stealing from Green, and her kids had died because they were there, too.
His story made just enough sense for me to believe it. He said, You don’t have to believe me. Ain’t you the big DNA expert? I bet Cantu’s DNA was all over the place.
I tried to think what evidence police had recovered that might have Cantu’s DNA on it. The police report said that Dorris had been lying down or asleep when she was shot. There was no evidence she had struggled with anyone. So Cantu’s skin wouldn’t be under her fingernails. And unless Cantu had been injured, he wouldn’t have left any blood. I doubted he pulled a beer out of the fridge when he was done, so I didn’t expect to find his saliva on a beer bottle. Green said, Plus, Cantu’s a talker. He probably told his old lady that he did it. I asked Green the name of Cantu’s girlfriend. He said, I don’t know, man. I don’t even know if he has a girl. I’m just saying that if he does, he probably told her.
This conversation was becoming worthless to me. Then Green said, He left a gun there, like he was gonna trick the cops into thinking the bitch killed herself. Dumb fuck didn’t leave the gun he used ’cause he said it was a good-luck charm. Left a piece he said was cold. What a dumb fuckin’ Mexican.
I could feel myself losing the battle to beat back my need to believe him. I modified my goal. Instead of aspiring to nonchalance, I’d settle for exterior serenity. I said, And why are you telling me this now?
His face flexed and his lips made an O, like a fish in a tank breathing at the surface. I thought to myself, Be still. I was aiming for blankness. I didn’t want Green to know what I was thinking before I knew myself. He said, What? You don’t believe me?
I said, Thanks for the help, Green. I’ll look into it.
He said, It’s ’cause I like Quaker. He’s next door to my house. I hear him reading words in there I don’t understand, like it ain’t even English. He might be going loco. His eye twitched into what I’m pretty sure was an involuntary wink. He said, You need me to sign something? I’ll sign it.
I told him I’
d talk to his lawyer and get back to him. He said, Come on, man. You know I ain’t got that kind of time. I want you as my lawyer. My court-appointed lawyer’s a piece of shit. His face changed and he suddenly looked angry. He said, Fuck this, man. He looked over my shoulder. I turned around. Destiny had gone. He said, Tell the guard I’m ready to go back to my house. I told him that I would. He said, And don’t forget money next time.
WHEN I WAS in third grade, I stayed in the classroom to finish the book I was reading while everyone else lined up to go to the bathroom. Twenty minutes later, I had to go. I asked Mrs. Pittman for permission, and she told me I should have gone when the rest of the class did. I told her it was an emergency. She said that maybe next time I would not insist on playing by my own rules. I sat down at my desk and relieved myself through my pants. Half an hour later, the principal came in to check on our class. She walked around the room, looking over our shoulders at whatever we were working on. She got to my desk, paused, and then went and whispered something to Mrs. Pittman. Mrs. Pittman grabbed me roughly by my elbow, and practically carried me to an empty desk next to Tommy Petite. He asked why I was there, and I told him there was something the matter with my chair. I looked back at my desk. There was a puddle of yellow under my seat.
That night after dinner I told my dad what had happened. He said, Sometimes it can be easy to confuse relief with revenge. Do you understand what I mean?
No, I don’t think so.
He said, You need to make sure before you do anything that you can live with the consequences.
I said, I get it.
Green stood up to wait for the guards. I saw a stain of wetness around his crotch. I shook my head. I was looking forward to telling Kassie.
I GOT UP TO STRETCH my legs and clear my head while the guards took Green out and brought Quaker in. The door to the unisex bathroom swung open and Destiny walked out. She waved to Green as the guards were taking him away, then walked over to me, suddenly friendly. She said, Do you think Zeke will get his stay?