by David R. Dow
I thought to myself, Zeke? She calls him Zeke?
She was waiting for an answer. I hadn’t known that Green already had an execution date, or whether his lawyer was fighting it. Had Green kept from me the fact that he had a date on purpose, or did he just assume that I already knew? It had to be the latter. My office keeps track of all executions. His name was probably on a document lost on my desk. He would assume that I knew before he had that his execution had been scheduled. But that didn’t answer my primary question: Was his claim of responsibility just a ploy to get a stay? He had to have figured that I would want a stay for him so I could help Quaker with whatever he knew, and he was right about that. He was proving to be a skilled manipulator, and I was feeling good about myself for disliking him from the get-go. I needed to know when the date was, but I didn’t want to ask her.
I said, I hope so. I’m guessing that he will. She stuck out her hand and I shook it. She held on a little too long then spun around like a fashion model and wordlessly walked away.
QUAKER WAS JOKING with the guards when they brought him into the visiting booth. I read a story about a cop who investigated serial killings. He would spend hours and hours interviewing notorious serial killers, getting close to them, revealing secrets in order to be trusted, and they would reward him by reporting the details of their crimes—grisly, horrific details, details that would keep me awake for a week, maybe forever. But the cop couldn’t be a cop if he was like that. The cop told the author that he put these conversations in a compartment of his brain and locked them away immediately, so that by the time he got out to his car, he was thinking about which Mexican restaurant he’d go to for lunch. Were Quaker’s jailers like that? Would they be able to wall off their relationship with him and numbly escort him to the gurney? I knew their numbers and addresses, and I was going to have to find out. It might not help, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt, for the guards to say that they thought Quaker was innocent, for them at least to say that he shouldn’t die.
He rubbed his wrists where they had been cuffed. He leaned toward me and looked at my eye. Man, he said, you look like ET.
I said, You know a guy on the row named Ezekiel Green?
He said, I know of him.
I said, What do you know?
Why’s it matter?
I’m just curious.
He said, The guys in here who ain’t too bright think he’s like a prophet or something.
Yeah.
The other guys think he’s insane.
I said, Which group are you in?
He smiled. Hey, I’m no genius like you, but I’m on your side of the bell curve.
I said, So you think he’s insane.
He said, It’s just based on what I heard. Like I said, I ain’t never had much of a conversation with the guy. He’s next to me on the pod, and I hear him talking on the phone and shit, and he doesn’t seem crazy. The words make sense, you know what I mean? I nodded. Quaker said, Why you wanna know?
I said, He just told me who murdered Dorris and your kids. He said it was a case of mistaken identity.
ON THE WAY back to my office I called Katya. She asked, What did he say?
I told her that his mouth literally fell open. His chest sagged, his chin jutted forward, and his lower jaw just fell. I thought it was just a figure of speech. But it was an actual physical reaction. His jaw really dropped. He started to say something, I think his lips actually moved, but no sound came out. Then he rubbed his eyes, using the knuckles on his index fingers. Finally he said, Why?
I didn’t know whether he was asking me why Green had told me, or whether it was a more Job-like question. I told him everything Green had said, including about hearing Quaker talking to himself in a foreign language. My voice was flat, like maybe I believed him, maybe I didn’t. Quaker said, It ain’t no foreign language. I got a book of Wallace Stevens poems and I read them out loud. I don’t know what half the words mean but I like the way they sound.
He started crying. The only reason I could tell at first was that his chest was heaving, like he was out of breath from sprinting. Then I saw the tears. He kept saying, My poor babies, my poor babies, my love. Over and over. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there.
He said, After the explosion, my company sent me to someplace near New Braunfels. The shrink said I had PTSD. But you already know that, right? It was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You seen that movie? All these old people walking around. They were mostly German, I think. I couldn’t understand nothing they were saying. Anyway, one night I was sitting on the balcony smoking some weed and thinking about how I could just disappear in that town, it’s beautiful there, maybe walk off into the mountains, and nobody would ever miss me. You ever feel like that? That you could die and no one would even know? They’d probably look for me for a while, but they’d stop eventually. Then it was like Dorris and Danny and Charisse was standing there. I could feel ’em there, actually feel ’em. They’d miss me. It saved me to be thinking that. I swear to God it did. I wanted to watch Danny and Charisse graduate, be a grandpa, get old with Dorris.
Katya said, He didn’t do it, you know. I don’t know whether Green was telling you the truth, but your client didn’t kill his family.
I said, I know. I am sorry to say that I know that.
TWO MORNINGS LATER Lincoln came into our room at five. I was still sleeping. He said, Dada, can I get up now?
I said, Linco, it’s Sunday. I want to sleep a little longer. He said he wasn’t tired. I told him he could stay up if he’d go with me for a run when it got light.
He said, But Dada, I’m too big for the stroller thing, and it’s too far for me to ride my bike.
He had me there, so I got up, got dressed, and went out while it was still night, just the dog and me, and told Linco not to bother his mama unless it was an emergency.
From the time Lincoln could hold his head up until he was five, I would take him with me in the stroller when I would go jogging on weekends. I hate jogging. When I’m swimming or rowing, my mind wanders, and solutions to problems come to me, at least sometimes. When I’m jogging, all I’m thinking about is finishing. Jogging with Lincoln changed all that. I would tell him stories before he could talk, and listen to his stories later. He and Winona and I would run around a mile-and-a-half loop. We’d usually run three laps, and I wouldn’t even notice how much my knees were hurting. Some days, when I felt fresh and it wasn’t too hot, I’d say to Lincoln, as we were finishing up lap number three, Hey, amigo, how about another circle today?
One morning he asked, Dada, why do you like running so much?
I said, Actually, Linco, I hate running. But I like hanging out with you.
He said, But you can hang out with me at the house.
I said, Yeah, that’s true, but I want to hang out with you for a lot more years, and if I jog, I think I’ll have more years with you.
He said, Okay, then. Let’s run one more loop. But faster this time, okay? I’d sprint for as long as I could manage, and he’d say, Wheeeee.
He and Katya would be leaving for the beach later that day. I had the Quaker hearing coming up, a looming execution date for O’Neill, and the possibility that Green would get executed before I could learn whether he was lying or telling the truth, or whether he knew any more truth, or, for that matter, any truth at all, that could help me. I felt myself sinking. There was nothing I could do about anything. Three people were going to die in a month because I was completely out of ideas. I thought to myself, I should have gone rowing.
KATYA HAS A CHILDHOOD FRIEND who grew up to be an artist you’ve probably heard of. They’re like college roommates. They talk and text and e-mail every day. Sometimes I’m jealous of their closeness. I don’t have any friends like that, except Katya and Lincoln, and the dog. Ten years ago, we were in New York at my law-school reunion, and the artist invited us to dinner at her fancy apartment. Katya had told her that I like to cook. Almost as soon as we were introduced, the arti
st asked me to make a pitcher of martinis, and after I mixed them and poured three glasses, she told me how to light the grill, where the salad ingredients were, and that she liked her steak so rare that it would still moo. (I did not hold this against her; Katya likes hers the same way.) The two of them went one way, carrying their glasses and the pitcher, and I stayed in the kitchen, looking for the tools I needed to make dinner. By the time I brought the food to the living room, where we ate off a coffee table while sitting on the floor and watching America’s Next Top Model, Katya and the artist were drunk as skunks.
I mention the point about inebriation solely for the sake of lending credibility to what I am about to say: This artist is a detestable human being. My experience is that drunk people don’t lie, and in her drunken state, she was racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, narcissistic, and altogether unlikable. Twenty years before, while she was involved in a relationship with two other people (who might or might not have known about one another), she got pregnant by a third—well, at least she thinks it was the third. You might consider it a sign of redemption that she agreed to marry the probable father, except that she started cheating again a month after their kid was born.
I’m a libertarian. If people want to be married to lecherous spouses, let them. But my own life is too short to waste even the briefest moment with people like her, and that would be true no matter how long my life happens to be.
When we were back in Houston, and enough time had passed, I told Katya I was amazed that she could be friends with this terrible person. She said, She’s been my friend since she was eight years old, which is way before she was a terrible person. What am I supposed to do? Abandon her? There are beautiful things about her I know about that you don’t, because you are too judgmental to see them. If you have a friend, you have to take them as they are.
There’s not really anything I could say to that. I am judgmental. I’ve already admitted as much. We agreed to disagree about the artist. The next time we were in New York, I stayed at the hotel bar while Katya and she went to dinner.
I have a theory about great artists, which is that they are ordinarily awful human beings. To be a great artist, you have to be so self-centered, so indifferent to everything but your own artistic sensibility, that the whole world, including the people who love you, are just means to your end. Too bad it doesn’t work in reverse. Wouldn’t it be terrific if you could become a great writer or painter or musician by being a shitty person? And don’t write me with a list of exceptions; I am aware that there are some. All I am saying is that in general, my advice to you is that if you should meet a famous artist, do not go to her house for dinner.
But clichés are clichés for a reason, and that dark cloud too had its silver lining. Dinner at the famous artist’s house changed me as a death-penalty lawyer. Until I met her, my focus was on the law, on why some legal rule or principle meant that my client should get a new trial. I’d do exhaustive research, write a powerful legal argument, and then watch no one pay it any heed. The problem with this lawyerly approach is that nobody cares about rules or principles when they’re dealing with a murderer. The lawyer says that the Constitution was violated every which way, and the judge says, Yeah, but your client killed somebody, right? For all our so-called progress, the tribal vengefulness that we think of as limited to backward African countries is still how our legal system works. Deuteronomy trumps the Sixth Amendment every time. Prosecutors and judges kowtow to family members of murder victims who demand an eye for an eye, and the lonely lawyer declaiming about proper procedures is a shouting lunatic in the asylum whom people look at curiously and then walk on by.
Then (if I might say so myself) I had a perfectly cooked piece of grass-fed sirloin while sitting on the floor of the racist artist’s brownstone, and my entire focus changed. My clients were better people than this piece of garbage, and they even killed somebody. That was the magic moment my focus changed. My clients did a terrible, sometimes unforgivable, thing, but most of them were worth saving. It was a moral realization, not a legal epiphany. Sometimes the most immoral, detestable person you’ve ever met can teach you an ethical lesson worth knowing. That’s a lesson, too.
LINCOLN AND KATYA had gone to Galveston. They even took the dog, which was good for the three of them but bad for me, because it meant that when I talked to myself, the dog was not in the room, so I could not pretend that I wasn’t.
It was January 5. On the wall calendar in my office, I had four dates circled in red. O’Neill was scheduled to be executed in one week, on January 12. Green was scheduled to get executed three days later, on January 15. Quaker was scheduled for execution on February 4, and we had his hearing in the trial court on January 27. A typical month had three or four dates with marks-a-lot circles. It was a fairly ordinary agenda for a death-penalty lawyer in Texas.
I took two chocolate glazed donuts out of the Shipley’s box. Kassie said, Two donuts? That’s a record.
I said, Katya and Lincoln took all our food to Galveston. All I’ve got at home are oranges, coffee, ice cream, beer, peanuts, and bourbon. And I’m pacing myself.
Kassie said that she would try to locate Tricia Cummings, the woman that Green said was supposed to have been killed by Cantu. Gary was going to try to find Cantu and take another run at him. I told him that he needed to take Melissa Harmon with him. I was going to call Melissa to tell her about the story that Cantu had left a gun at the scene, and to see whether she could have a chat with Detective Wyatt.
Jerome said, What about me?
I didn’t want him doing anything that couldn’t be interrupted, because I had a feeling that O’Neill was going to cause some interruptions. I said I thought he had his hands full with O’Neill. He said there was nothing left to do but wait. I said, Fine, help Kassie track down Cummings. He looked at me like I had just asked him to rinse out the coffee mugs, but he didn’t say anything. I said, All right, fine. Can you also follow up on the blood? The lab never did call me back. He nodded and almost smiled, slightly mollified.
Melissa Harmon and I met for breakfast the next morning at the Buffalo Grille. I was eating oatmeal. She was eating chicken-fried steak and fried eggs. I said, You’re a real health freak.
She said, Steak and eggs is a classic. You want some?
I shook my head. I told her about my conversation with Green and asked her if she would be willing to talk to Wyatt about the gun. She slowly chewed a piece of meat. After she swallowed it she said, Can you think of a way for me to have that conversation without accusing him of something unethical?
I said, If I could think of that, I’d have the conversation with him myself instead of paying your exorbitant rates.
She smiled. She said, So what’s it like always representing the bad guys?
I said, I’m pretty sure that one of my guys isn’t actually bad.
GARY CALLED. He and Harmon had gone to the house where I talked to Cantu. Gary said that the house was empty. There was a mattress on the bedroom floor, half a roll of toilet paper on the bathroom floor, two slices of leftover sausage pizza in the refrigerator, and a half-gallon carton of Tropicana orange juice, two-thirds gone, on the counter. That’s it. No clothes, nothing to read, no TV or radio, no towels, no beer. Cantu was gone.
While Gary looked through the house and took inventory, Melissa talked to the neighbors. No one knew his name. No one had any idea where he’d gone. I asked Gary to take the orange juice. Maybe Cantu drank from the carton. Maybe we could get some DNA. I didn’t have any idea what good it would do us, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
As I was hanging up, Jerome, ever the meticulous one, came into my office waving a single piece of paper. I said, What’s that? He said he had been going through the file of Quaker’s trial lawyer. It was a page from Detective Wyatt’s report. I wondered how I had missed it. Probably because I read through the file before I knew who Cantu was. Either way, it was not exactly a confidence booster. The report indicated that Wyatt had interviewed Cantu. I
t didn’t say why. In the report Wyatt had noted that Cantu had an alibi. But it didn’t say what the alibi was, or why Wyatt had even bothered interviewing Cantu in the first place.
Most important of all, though, the fact that the report was in the trial lawyer’s file meant that the trial lawyer had it, and that meant we could not accuse the state of withholding relevant evidence. One of our legal claims had just disappeared.
I told Jerome what Gary had learned at Cantu’s former house.
He said, That’s too bad, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s not like he was all of a sudden going to admit to killing three people.
Jerome is also the guy in the office who can be counted on to remind me that the way our lives actually work is not how death-penalty cases get portrayed on TV. I said, I’ve got a story that ain’t got no moral. He looked at me oddly. I said, You know, let the bad guy win every once in a while? His look didn’t change. I said, It’s Billy Preston, man.
Jerome has an iPod that has something like fifteen thousand songs on it. He plays guitar in a garage band. He said, Who’s that?
I shook my head. He put the piece of paper on my desk and walked out.
GREEN’S LAWYER WAS Mark Roberts, one of the smartest, most aggressive death-penalty lawyers around. When Green first wrote asking to see me, I called Roberts to make sure it was okay with him. The fact that Green didn’t like him was yet another fact that made me feel better about my first instinct. I called Roberts and told him about Green’s claim of responsibility. I knew what he would say if I asked him to allow me to get a written statement from Green. He’d say no. The reason is that he had asked the parole board to commute Green’s sentence to life in prison, and he had filed another writ with the Supreme Court. Logically and legally speaking, whether Green did or did not tell Cantu to kill Tricia Cummings had no bearing on either one of those last-ditch efforts. Realistically speaking, it mattered a lot. If there was some parole-board member who was inclined toward leniency, or if there was some Supreme Court justice who was intrigued by Mark’s legal argument, the inclination and intrigue would give way to disgust and abhorrence if Green was connected to three more murders, especially when two of them were children. I asked him anyway. He said, Green is a piece of shit. I’m tempted. But sorry, Doc, no can do. I told him thanks anyway.