The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  Those were the two opposing views of the case as summer began. There were no shades of gray. Dennis Smith, Bill Peterson, the Haraways, the Lyons saw on the hands of Ward and Fontenot the bright red of bloody violence. Tricia and Bud, Miz Ward, and the others saw just as clearly, around their necks, the dark purple of injustice.

  The only middle position was held by those in the town who admitted that they didn’t know. Among these were the two defense attorneys. George Butner did not know, in early summer, if his client, Karl Fontenot, was guilty or innocent. He suspected he was innocent; but the tapes certainly bothered him, especially the matching descriptions of the blouse. He did not want to bring himself to believe that the police, or the OSBI, had knowingly and willfully framed his client by feeding him Tommy’s description of the blouse. And yet, the rest of the tapes, almost everything proven false…He didn’t know what to believe. He certainly didn’t know how he was going to prove that Karl was innocent. And in this case, it seemed likely, that’s what his task would come down to: a task that obliterated a thousand years of the evolution of criminal law. In this case, in the face of the confession tapes, his client and Don Wyatt’s would likely be considered guilty until proven innocent.

  Wyatt, too, did not know what to make of the case. He believed that Karl Fontenot had had nothing to do with Denice Haraway’s disappearance. About his own client, Tommy Ward, he was uncertain. He felt that if Tommy had been involved, one or more others had been as well: others who had been the masterminds, who had had the truck, who had disposed of the truck and the body. He sometimes felt that Tommy himself did not know if he had been involved. On a scale of one to ten, one being that Tommy was totally innocent, ten being that he was guilty, Don Wyatt’s feeling in late spring was about a five. He simply didn’t know.

  Then he received the first of Richard Kerner’s reports about Rogers, Sparcino…callers not questioned by the police. Ever so slightly, the needle on the guilt meter in his mind began to shift; ever so slightly it nudged toward innocent.

  He called the private investigator to his office once again, and put him back to work on the case.

  The house at 730 West Twelfth Street was an old frame building that had not been painted in many years; on a dirt plot beside it stood an abandoned car. This was the home address that Willie Barnett had given to Richard Kerner. The investigator at first suspected it would not be a real address; the first time he went there it seemed vacant. But he came across a note from the family in the lawyer’s office stating that Willie did live on Twelfth Street. On June 17 he went there again, parked in the street, walked up to the front door. The door, behind a screen door, was open. The screen door was latched.

  Kerner knocked. A woman came to the door. When Kerner asked if he could talk to Willie, the woman yelled to the rear of the house. A man’s voice asked who it was. But the man did not come to the door. Kerner said again he wanted to talk to Willie. The woman yelled that someone wanted to talk to him. The man yelled back. He did not want to be interviewed. For several minutes this continued: the investigator asking questions of the woman; the woman relaying the questions inside; Willie answering through the woman, without ever making himself visible. Kerner grew increasingly frustrated. He knew how crucial Willie Barnett might be to Tommy Ward’s defense: he might be the only alibi witness who was not a member of the family. If the screen door had not been latched, Kerner felt, he could have got his foot in the door, as any good investigator would, talked his way inside, and confronted Willie, perhaps got him to talk. But the door remained latched. Kerner remained on the outside. Willie refused to come out.

  Stymied, Kerner moved on to other areas he had been instructed by Wyatt to investigate. He traced the yellow truck that Joel Ward had seen in Broken Arrow, a suburb of Tulsa. Joel had thought it might be linked to Jay Dicus, and might recently have been painted yellow, over gray. Kerner inspected traffic records, conducted numerous interviews, made a visit to Broken Arrow. The investigation took many hours of many days; like many other trails Kerner would follow, it turned out to be irrelevant. He traced the truck to a man who spoke to him willingly, who said the truck had been yellow for four years. Other people he interviewed confirmed this. The truck and its owner were not involved in the case.

  In late June and early July the investigator spent thirty-seven and a half hours checking that lead and others, mostly tracking down people in the running crowd who were mentioned in Tommy Ward’s long essay to his lawyer, young men who Tommy said owned old pickup trucks. Sometimes it took five or six interviews to establish the whereabouts of the person he was looking for.

  One young man he interviewed, Larry Jett (name changed), was at his job in a yard ornaments shop. Rows of plaster-of-Paris elephants, birds, Bambi-like fawns, roosters surrounded them as they talked. Jett conceded that he knew Tommy Ward, but claimed he had never owned a 1970s Chevy pickup, as Ward had told his lawyer. Jett volunteered that at the time of Denice Haraway’s disappearance, he (Jett) had been living in Kansas with a roommate, Melvin Harden. The investigator noticed a quickness with which Jett mentioned where he’d been living at the time; Kerner hadn’t asked. Jett mentioned the names of other people Ward ran with, who did own old pickups. Kerner noted the names as possible areas for further probing.

  Wyatt had asked him to interview Marty Ashley, of Tommy’s “kiss-and-run” story. The investigator talked to half a dozen people merely to find out where Ashley was now residing: in Paul’s Valley, thirty miles west. He marked that down for a future visit.

  Tricia, nearly five months pregnant, was at the kitchen stove, frying up a mess of catfish steaks; catfish was their favorite treat, and Bud had found them on sale at the Dicus Supermarket on Fourth Street. He stood beside her now, cooking vegetables. When the food was ready they sat with the three kids at the table in the dining room.

  David and Lisa, the foster kids, were gone; Tricia, often weary, with her belly getting bigger and the days getting hotter, with all the kids out of school, had decided it was getting too hard to handle all five of them, that in July she might tell the social worker to find them another home. But before she had a chance to do that, David came down with measles; the doctor thought they might be German measles, which could endanger Tricia’s unborn child; he told her to keep away from David. Bud spent a frantic time on the telephone with the social worker as she tried to locate someone to take in the kids immediately; she finally found a foster parent who lived only a block away. The woman took David and Lisa, and agreed to keep them even after David recovered; she would bring them by sometimes to visit Bud and Tricia and the kids.

  The family ate the catfish and talked. The day before, at the jail, Tommy had told them Don Wyatt had visited, had said things were looking good; Bud and Tricia were not sure what he meant; the lawyer had not yet informed them of the investigator’s findings.

  After dinner, in the small living room, Laura Sue was idly turning the pages of a 1980 Ada school yearbook; it had pictures of all the grades in it, including a picture of Rhonda. Bud began to turn the pages with her; then he stopped. He was struck by a picture of one of the high school boys: it looked exactly like the composite drawing in the Haraway case that was supposed to be Tommy.

  Ever since the drawings had appeared, Bud had had the feeling that he knew someone who looked like that, and it wasn’t Tommy. Here was the boy. He read the name under the picture. They knew the family slightly; he was a good kid, a good student.

  “I’m not saying he did it,” Bud said. “But I think we should show this to Wyatt.”

  “What for?” Tricia asked.

  “To show he’s a lookalike. To show that an identification through a composite drawing is useless.”

  “He knows that,” Tricia said. “Wyatt isn’t the one who needs convincing.”

  On Thursday morning, June 20, Tommy Ward had an experience he had never had before. He was lying on the bunk in his cell. He was not sure if he was awake or dreaming; he seemed to be somewhere in between
. Suddenly he had the strong sensation that his spirit was about to leave his body, that his spirit was about to go out and hover over the land, and find out who had committed the crime: who had done what to Denice Haraway. At first it was a good feeling, very powerful. Then he had another, frightening thought: “If my spirit leaves my body, I will be dead.” With a willful effort he shook himself back to consciousness, so that his spirit would not depart.

  Bill Peterson, in his office in the courthouse, was preparing for the trial, though it was still more than two months away; he’d been doing so on and off ever since the preliminary hearing. Now he was going through the transcript of the hearing, preparing his list of witnesses, noting the important testimony he would need from each one. He was planning to take a vacation with his wife in August; they would visit relatives in Florida. He would take his work along.

  He was estimating that the jury selection, plus the prosecution case, would take two weeks; he did not know how long the defense would take. “I’ve heard they’re saying they’ll have as many witnesses as we will. I don’t see how they can do that, but maybe they will.”

  He was not looking forward to such a long, pressurized ordeal; he had never tried a case that lasted more than a week.

  Across town, in his offices on Arlington, Don Wyatt, too, was preparing for the case. He was elated by Richard Kerner’s initial findings, and planned to keep him in the field most of the summer to see what he could turn up. He knew the police and the district attorney were aware of Kerner’s activities; some of the people Kerner talked to had been visited soon after by the police, who wanted to know what he had asked them. That did not bother Wyatt. He wanted “to keep the pot boiling” all summer, if possible. Perhaps, he thought, if the police kept on the case, instead of sitting back waiting for the trial, they might turn up something that would clear Tommy Ward.

  In his mind the defense was taking shape. He might call as many as fifty witnesses: all those who had called in to the police names other than Tommy’s that fit the composite drawings, the people who had seen two possible suspects out at the trailer park, the alibi witnesses in the family, and Willie Barnett if possible. One idea he’d had pleased him immensely. He was going to subpoena from the college the skull and bones the detectives had taken to the jail to frighten Tommy. Every day of the trial he was going to enter the courtroom and set on the defense table a large paper bag. At the end of each day he would carry it out again; it would get the attention of the jury. At a dramatic moment during the defense, he would open the bag and whip out the skull and bones. If it startled the people sitting on the jury, he reasoned, they might understand how much more frightening it had been when shown to a young man locked in a cell; and yet it still had not obtained any additional information for the police.

  In his mind, too, a powerful opening statement was forming, which he hoped Richard Kerner’s investigations through the summer would justify. “Not only are we going to prove to you that Tommy Ward did not commit this crime!” he envisioned himself telling the jury. “We are also going to tell you who did do it!”

  Wyatt was thinking that he probably would have to put Ward on the stand. This was unusual in a criminal case, he knew, but he felt he might have to do it so Tommy could explain away the tapes. He had obtained permission from the judge to have a psychiatrist or psychologist examine Tommy at the jail, to explain “how anyone could be so stupid as to make up all those lies and think that was going to get them out of trouble.” If that turned out to be strong testimony, he might not have to put Tommy on; he would thus avoid the likelihood that the D.A. could hang Tommy’s lies around his neck. Wyatt knew that the tapes were deadly; but he saw some points in their favor: Odell Titsworth and all the other things on the tapes that had proved false.

  For the first time, Wyatt was beginning to feel he could win the case. He was planning a vacation in July, to go hunting and fishing in the Northwest; then he would return to prepare the case. In a courtroom, preparation was everything, he believed. And he believed he could outprepare Bill Peterson.

  In his cell in the county jail, Tommy Ward was becoming concerned about Karl Fontenot over in the city jail, about the “crazy things” Karl was saying. They’d had a chance to talk during the ride to the hospital at Vinita; they had talked again while in the courtroom together on June 11, the day the trial date had been set. Tommy voiced his concerns one Sunday during the visiting hour: “In court the other day,” Tommy said, “he sits there, he says, ‘Man,’ he goes, ‘I have a good mind to just go in there and plead guilty.’ He goes, ‘They’re gonna convict us of it anyway.’ I said, ‘Bull!’ I said, ‘When you get your witnesses up…’He goes, ‘Well, my lawyer ain’t gonna do nothing about it!’ I said, ‘Bull! Your lawyer is fightin’ for you just like he was a hired lawyer.’”

  Tommy said he told Karl they would have Jannette Roberts as a witness. “He goes, ‘I didn’t think anybody would want to witness for me.’ I says, ‘Well,’ I says, ‘it’s just you not caring about anybody. You don’t care about nobody, so nobody’s caring about you, you know.’” Tommy laughed. “He’s gone plumb crazy. He was telling me about this girl that was one of the disc jockeys over there at the police department. He told her that if she didn’t come up there and let him screw her through the bars, that he was gonna kill her just like he killed that girl. That’s what he told her. I said, ‘You saying things like that, they’re gonna get up there and testify against you.’ I said, I told him, ‘First, I know you didn’t have nothing to do with it.’ I said, ‘I still know you didn’t have nothing to do with it.’ His hair was short and he was working up there at Wendy’s. But I told him, I said, ‘Now I’m starting to doubt. The way you been acting, I’m starting to think you mighta had something to do with it.’ He said, ‘No, I didn’t have nothing to do with it.’ I said, ‘Well, then keep your mouth shut then.’” Tommy laughed. “He’s crazy.”

  Tommy spoke, too, of his own situation: “I don’t know why they didn’t drop it in the first place. They ain’t got no evidence…I’m just wanting to laugh it off and laugh it off as much as I can, you know. I can’t believe it that my own hometown is doing this to me. I’ve lived here; I was born and raised here all my life. There wouldn’t be no reason I would want to go and do something like that, especially in my own hometown, you know…They say moneywise, is the reason why, ’cause I was short of money. Any time I needed any money, my mom would give it to me. And if mom didn’t have it, my brothers and sisters would. And if they didn’t have it, you’d see me on the side of the road picking up beer cans. I told the truth. I said, don’t you think my mom, my brother, and them would rather give me this money than give it to them lawyers and everything, instead of having to go through this. That’s when they started coming up with the drug deal, you know, saying I was all doped up on drugs and just don’t remember doing it. I said, Bull! I said, Man, I don’t think there’s any kind of dope in the world to get somebody to go out and do something like that and everything and not remember it.”

  There was a knock on the door of the visiting room; Tommy’s time was up.

  Five days later, on June 28, Karl Fontenot was led from his cell in the city jail across the street to a cell in the county jail. Initially the suspects had been placed in separate jails so that they could not communicate, could not coordinate their stories. As the months passed, that simply became the way it was; no one thought of changing the arrangement. The reason the move was made now was vague, even to Dennis Smith; there was some hope that by putting them together, letting them talk about the case, some new clue would be overheard by a jailer or another inmate that might lead the police to the body; partly it was because Karl was not being prosecuted by the city; the county jail was where he belonged, and there was nothing more to be gained by keeping the suspects apart. As he was led across Townsend Street, Fontenot left behind in the city jail what was undoubtedly an Ada record: eight months and ten days in a cell without a visitor other than his lawyer, without a wo
rd of support from anyone he knew.

  As he entered the county jail, Karl would not have quarreled with Tommy’s assessment of him. He knew it was true that he did not trust anyone, did not let anyone get close to him. He was introspective enough to understand some of the reasons why: because all those whom a child learns to trust had deserted him: his mother frequently disappearing when he was little, because she was being abused by his father, then coming back because she had no place else to go; his father disappearing for good when Karl was twelve; his mother getting herself killed by a car when he was sixteen; his sisters and brothers turning him out into the street, saying he was old enough to take care of himself. If his life so far had taught him anything, it was to mistrust the very concept of trust. And his time in jail was only reinforcing that: not a call, a letter, a visit from his family in all those months.

  At times, the outward shield he adopted against further wounds was the persona of a wiseguy, a smart aleck, an operator. Don Wyatt, for one, felt Karl had more “street smarts” than Tommy. Others, looking at Karl, saw a wounded puppy.

  In a different jail now, with new inmates totalk to, Karl went around saying that he might plead guilty, might say he had been there and that Tommy had done it; that way, he figured, he’d get twenty years in jail, maybe, but they wouldn’t kill him. Tommy heard this talk and got even more nervous than usual. Tommy trusted, perhaps to a fault; he trusted his family, he trusted that at the trial he and Karl would be found not guilty. Watching Karl “talking crazy,” he thought, “When we are freed, they may have to put Karl in an institution.”