The Autobiography of an Execution

by David R. Dow

  His flamboyant predictions were spectacularly wrong. By some estimates, he was wrong more than 95 percent of the time. But that too did not stop juries from believing him. Juries would even sentence people to death who had not committed any crime. In one famous case, Grigson testified that Randall Dale Adams would commit more violence if not executed. Adams had been convicted of murdering a state trooper outside of Dallas. Errol Morris made a documentary about the debacle of the trial. As it happened, Adams did not actually kill the officer; someone else did. Adams was released from prison after his innocence was established. He had not committed any crimes prior to his wrongful conviction, and he has not committed any since. But Grigson was nothing if not charming. His avuncular demeanor and white lab coat endeared him to juries. They did what he asked them to. He told them that Henry Quaker would be dangerous if they did not send him to the execution chamber, and the jury obliged.

  When it was time for Quaker’s trial lawyer to cross-examine the doctor, perhaps to ask him about the inconsistency in his numbers, or his expulsion from professional societies, or the many cases where his prognostications had proven so unsound, Jack Gatling stood up at the defense table and said, I have no questions for this witness. Gatling had been so convinced he would win an acquittal that he had not prepared even for the single witness that even he could have discredited.

  Quaker had a spotless prison record. Part of our narrative would emphasize that Grigson had also been wrong in his case, and testimony from Nicole and other guards would help us there. But the problem we had was that this first theme in the narrative ultimately pivoted on the fact that Quaker’s trial lawyer had been so inept, and even though he had been, it was too late for us to raise that claim. Some people think that law is about truth. It isn’t, exactly. It is about timing. The time to prove that Henry Quaker did not kill anyone was years ago, at his trial, not now, a week and a half ahead of his scheduled execution.

  But we also had a second strand to our narrative. We could identify the murderer. His name was Ruben Cantu, and the proof that Cantu did it was the sworn words of Ezekiel Green.

  Kassie said, It sure would be nice to know why Wyatt interviewed Cantu.

  I said, I agree. Why don’t you ask him?

  Kassie said, Me? I’ve never met the guy. What makes you think he’ll talk to me?

  I said, Melissa Harmon told me that he got divorced six months ago, that he drinks every night at El Tiempo, and that he’s a skirt hound. I’ll pay for dinner if you get him to talk.

  Gary said, You buying dinner for all of us?

  I said, If she gets something useful from Wyatt, sure, why not.

  Gary said, Hey Kass, be sure to wear something nice.

  I said, That’s my line, man.

  Kassie said, Yeah, and it’s just as clever, no matter who says it.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, we were all sitting at El Tiempo, with a platter of mariscos a la parilla and beef fajitas. The amount this dinner was costing me was out of proportion to how hard Kassie had to work. She told Wyatt who she was and what she wanted to know, and he bought her a drink and told her. The neighbor who had seen the strange pickup truck parked in the street had remembered the last three numbers of the license plate. Wyatt did a computer search and came up with Cantu. He had arrested Cantu before for drug possession and decided he was worth talking to. Kassie asked why he hadn’t arrested him, and Wyatt told her because he had no physical evidence, because Cantu had no motive, and because there was no evidence that Cantu even knew Dorris Quaker or her kids.

  I asked Kassie whether she had asked him about the gun they found on the floor next to Dorris. She said, I’m not a moron.

  And?

  He looked right at me and said that he had no earthly idea what I was talking about.

  Now I do not mean any disrespect by this, but police officers are some of the best liars in the world. Their philosophy seems to be, so far as I can tell, that they are the good guys fighting the forces of death and darkness, and that entitles them to break the rules when they think they need to and lie about it later when they deem it necessary. Wyatt would have sworn a lie on his dead mother’s grave if he thought it would help him convict someone he was certain was guilty. If I knew anything, I knew that. But knowing means nothing. Proof is what matters, and I had no proof, and no prospects of getting any. Wyatt was not going to bare his soul, not to Kassie and certainly not to me, and every second I spent fantasizing that he would was another second I might as well have spent in prayer, for all the good it was going to do Quaker.

  She said, He seems like a nice guy. He played football at LSU.

  I said, Started dumb, finished dumb, too.

  Jerome said, I know that one. It’s Randy Newman, sort of.

  When people start to get your references, it can be because you have become obvious and transparent. It can also be because they are learning.

  That night at home I put on a Tony Bennett–Bill Evans CD and carried a snifter of cognac out to the patio. Bennett was singing My Foolish Heart and I was thinking about lines. Wyatt didn’t care that he was lying and probably didn’t even acknowledge that he was lying, because in the world where he lived, Quaker was guilty of a triple murder, and any facts that got in the way of that conclusion weren’t facts at all. He used one set of concepts to make sense of the world. I use another. Why is that? I wondered. Why do some people care about ends and others care about means?

  Last August we sat on the beach and watched the Perseid meteor shower. Hundreds of them fired across the sky. Lincoln kept saying, Look, there goes another one. I explained to him that we see them because the earth itself moves through the Perseid cloud. He said, It reminds me of dodgeball, Dada. It’s lucky they don’t hit us.

  I looked up and found Orion. The hunter. I was just drunk enough to feel insightful, and the sky felt ominous. Our case hinged on a murderer we couldn’t locate who had been identified by a murderer who was dead. Quaker was in big trouble. A part of me hoped he did it. A big part.

  A WEEK BEFORE the hearing we got the results of the blood testing. The drops leading from Dorris’s body to the spot where the kids were killed all belonged to Dorris. So unless she shot herself, went into the other room, murdered her two children, then walked back to the sofa, lay down, and died, she too had been murdered. It would be a lie to try to save Henry by pointing the finger at his wife.

  Then again, there are only so many truths I can accommodate. Our finite lives have only so much capacity. You can’t let every little truth exert an equal hold on you. It’s called prioritization. My central truth was that Henry Quaker did not kill anyone. That truth and no other staked a claim on me. If I had to be less faithful to some other ancillary truths in order to demonstrate that fact, who could fault me? Who was even around to blame me? Dorris’s dad was dead, and her mom was not exactly standing by Henry, but she wasn’t blaming him, either. She seemed unsure what to think, and I didn’t see her blowing any gaskets if I implied that Dorris killed herself. I don’t think I could be an army general and send teenaged kids to their certain deaths. But Dorris was already dead. I didn’t see the harm of killing her again.

  Jerome thought it was a terrible idea, though, and he was right. At a trial, a lawyer can throw the whole platter of spaghetti at the wall and hope that a strand or two sticks. That’s all it takes, one juror with one reasonable doubt. If Quaker’s trial lawyer had not been comatose, he could have pursued that strategy. Point to Dorris, point to an intruder, point anywhere that was away from Henry. But it was too late for us to do that. At a trial, the defendant wins if it’s a tie. At the stage we were at, a death-row inmate doesn’t win unless it’s a blowout. We had to prove that Quaker was innocent, and if we were going to succeed, we needed a single story. Our story was that Ruben Cantu was the murderer. That was our story, and we were sticking to it.

  What did we have? We would go over all the evidence of Gatling’s incompetence. We would point out that the neighbor had seen a strange pickup
in the driveway. We could suggest that the truck belonged to Cantu. (Suggest being a euphemism that meant we could not prove a damn thing.) We could prove that Wyatt had interviewed Ruben Cantu. And, for the coup de grace, we would pull out Green’s declaration, stating that Cantu had murdered the Quaker family in a case of mistaken identity.

  Gary said, Why do you even think the judge will let us put on any evidence of attorney incompetence?

  Jerome added, And everything from Green is hearsay. She might not let in any of that evidence, either.

  I said, It might be a short hearing.

  FRUGALITY IS the mother of all virtues. Ben Jonson wrote that in 1598, in his play Every Man in His Humour, and the line is inscribed above the lintel of the twelve-story downtown office building where I sometimes work. My father is the cheapest—or, as he would say, the most frugal—man that I know. Once when we grilled hamburgers, someone in the group preferred his sandwich open-faced, so we were left at the end of dinner with the bottom half of a toasted bun. My father neatly wrapped it in wax paper and placed it in the freezer, next to a tub of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream, where it remained for nearly eight months, until I gained the confidence that he would not miss it and dared to throw it away. For his seventy-fifth birthday, Katya took a picture of Lincoln and me, standing beneath the lintel, pointing up to it with our right hands, and holding half a burger bun in our lefts.

  Some months later, I saw my brothers admiring the photograph I thought I had given to my dad. As it happened, they were in fact looking at a photograph of the building where I work, but it was not the picture taken by Katya of Lincoln and me. It was a picture that my grandfather took of the building in 1924, when he opened his law practice in the very same building where I now have an office on floor eleven. Visible on the third-floor window facing Main Street were the words Harry Dow, Lawyer, and the six-digit number of his office phone. No one in my family had any idea. The building is in decrepit disrepair and ought to be condemned, and we’ve been looking for new space for the past two years, but at that moment, I believed I belonged there.

  My philosophy is: live well, love others, and hope that someone loves you. We live one life on this earth and then we return to dust. We have our bodies and our brains but nothing I would call a soul. I have no faith in higher powers, and I believe that there is no fate, but coincidence is nonetheless a real and curious thing. I keep the 1924 photograph hanging on my office wall, right next to a copy of the picture that Katya and I gave to my dad eighty years later. I touched my finger to it and decided to take a walk around the block. The day was cool and crisp. It made me not want to smoke. I found myself at Treebeard’s, where I had not aimed to be. I was not hungry. I walked inside, scanning the tables for Judge Truesdale. I bought a bowl of crabmeat gumbo and a bottle of Dixie beer and sat near the cash register, where I could see everyone who came through the line. I finished the first bottle and bought a second. I sat there for two hours wondering if she’d come in, wondering why I was wondering, until the manager locked the door, and the busboys ate leftover links of boudin sausage standing in the kitchen and began wiping down the tables and stacking the chairs.

  SEVEN-EIGHTHS OF THE TIME, in the week leading up to the hearing, I was a monk. Lights out at eleven. Up at four. A forty-five-minute run, a half-hour swim, an orange, a banana, a bowl of Grape-Nuts and a pot of coffee, and at the office by seven. For twelve hours I’d cram like a medical student, memorizing every line on every document in every one of the dozen banker’s boxes on the floor of my office. My plan was to be so busy that I had no time to appreciate how hopeless it was, but even hyperactivity cannot keep hopelessness at bay.

  At precisely eight every night that week, like Swiss clockwork, my heart would start to race and my vision would blur and I would feel flushed even though my office window was open to the chilly air. I saw Quaker strapped down and his mother, Evelina, sitting in a wheelchair, watching through one-way glass, a canister of oxygen in her lap, plastic tubing running up her nose. I’d see flashing lights—my eye doctor calls them floaters—and I’d have to stand up and shake my head like a boxer beating the count to chase the image away. I’d walk two blocks to McElroy’s and sit at the bar with a double Jack and a cigar. I’d call Lincoln to tell him a story before bed and then Katya would get on the phone and for the first time that day I quit pretending that I believed that everything was going to be all right. She and Lincoln would get on the phone together and tell me what they had done that day, about Schlitterbahn Waterpark or the Harry Potter movie or the long walk with Winona. In the mirror behind the bar I could see myself smile.

  I’d drive home and make a sandwich. I thought, I wonder if Quaker is sleeping now? On our last visit, he told me that if he did not go to sleep, tomorrow would never come. I’d turn on the TV and drink just enough bourbon to keep Henry from visiting me again until the following day.

  THE HEARING WAS SCHEDULED to begin at eight thirty. We got there at eight. Judge Truesdale’s clerk came up to me when we walked into the courtroom and said the judge wanted to see me for a moment in her chambers. Kassie cocked her head. Gary said, That’s interesting.

  She was wearing a short V-neck gray dress. Her legs were crossed and the bottom of the dress reached barely to the middle of her thigh. She had on a necklace of what I think were diamonds that brushed the tops of her breasts. If she was aiming for sexy, she had definitely nailed it.

  Here I should probably confess what is probably obvious, which is that I find women completely inscrutable. When I was a young lawyer in Washington, there was another lawyer at the firm, two or so years senior to me, who was my friend. Our offices were adjacent, so we would see each other every day and talk about ordinary things. A group of us would go out for a beer after work most evenings. Jane and I worked for the same boss. We’d talk about him and our work. Once, after I bought three dollars’ worth of tunes from the jukebox, we discovered that we both played jazz piano just well enough to entertain ourselves and that neither one of us really understood Ornette Coleman. I said, You know the line in Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise is at Renee Zellweger’s house and she puts on a Miles Davis record and he says, What is this music? That’s what I think about when I hear Ornette.

  She said, People think it’s a Miles Davis record, but it’s actually Charlie Mingus. Anyway, don’t tell anybody, but I feel that way, too.

  Possibly she mistook my expression of surprise for something else. Our apartments were a block away from one another. As we were walking home from the bar, she grasped my hand in both of hers and said, What is going on between the two of us?

  Later I would admire her forthrightness. But at the time, I was completely nonplussed. I didn’t know what to say. I was impressed with her, not in love. I considered her just my friend and was pretty sure there was no good way to say that under the circumstances in a nonhurtful way. So I stood there, mute as an idiot. I had no earthly idea what I had done or said that would even make her question conceivable. How could she apparently be thinking something that had not even crossed within a thousand miles of my mind? Was she delusional, or was I? If you ponder that question for a moment or two, you realize that it has no good answer.

  Subsequent evidence would indicate that I may have been the one with problems of perception. During my first year as a law professor, I was assigned the job of sitting in on a course taught by a practicing attorney. She was a trial lawyer, and the course was a practical one. We would visit briefly before each class. Afterward, while a group of students clustered around her to ask her more questions, I would wave and drive home. After the last class of the semester, we walked out to the parking lot together, and I told her how much I had enjoyed the class. It was not a line. I had enjoyed it. We got in our cars, but I had left my lights on, and the battery was dead. She offered to drive me home. When we pulled into my driveway, she asked if she could come inside and use the toilet. I was standing at the kitchen counter, sorting through the mail, when she walked out of t
he bathroom, wearing nothing.

  At some point, when you think you see the world one way, but the rest of the world apparently sees it another, then, no matter how big your own ego happens to be, you need to acknowledge the numbers and concede that the world must be right, and that you are therefore wrong. That idea is what leapt into my brain as I sat there in Judge Truesdale’s office. But Henry Quaker crowded her away. He was in a holding cell next to the courtroom, less than a hundred feet from where we were. He popped into a cartoon bubble, just like in Annie Hall, and whispered to me, Kiss her, man. Kiss her.

  A prosecutor in a different case walked in with an order she wanted the judge to sign and leaned against the door frame. I told her hello. Judge Truesdale reached out her hand to take the order, but she kept her eyes on me. She said, I just wanted to tell you off the record that I’ve read everything you’ve written, or your associates have written, and I have real reservations about this case, but I am not sure there is anything I can do. From the corner of my eye I saw the prosecutor nod.

  I said, Well, Judge, I think there is.

  She said, We’re off the record here. I’m Jocelyn.

  I said, Jocelyn. We are going to ask you to withdraw the execution warrant.