You Think You Know Me Pretty Well

by David Kessler

  Like Esther Olsen, Alex was Jewish and, although he had long ceased to practice the religion of his childhood, he still remembered much of what he had learned about it in the first fourteen years of his life. He knew about the meaning of his name, or rather the Hebrew word ‘tsedaka’, from which the family name Sedaka was derived.

  “I am dying, Mr. Sedaka. I have cancer of the pancreas and the doctors have told me that I have at most a few months left to live. I was estranged from my daughter, for reasons too complicated to go into. One of my biggest regrets is that we never got the chance to make it up.”

  “Was this disagreement shortly before she died?”

  Alex didn’t know why he had asked it. But he knew that it was more than just idle curiosity.

  “No, this was several years before she died. I always thought – I always hoped – that the passage of time would heal the wounds. But it was not to be. We were never reconciled.”

  She took a deep breath, struggling to speak.

  “To outlive one’s own child is a terrible thing, Mr. Sedaka. But if there is one thing worse than to outlive one’s child, it is to part from those we love on bad terms. And that is the pain that I will carry with me to my grave.”

  Her eyes were welling up with tears now and Alex felt a lump in his own throat.

  “It is too late for me now to be reconciled with my daughter and I do not know if we will be at peace with each other in the next life, because I do not know if there is a next life. But there is one thing that I want to do in this life and that is to give her a proper burial … or … at least to know where she is buried.”

  Now, at last, it was all falling in to place.

  Alex turned to the governor.

  “So let me see if I’ve understood this correctly. You want me to get my client to reveal where he has dispo— where he has buried the body. And in return for this, you have asked for Burrow to get clemency and to serve a sentence of … what?” He turned to the governor.

  “Life without parole?”

  Dusenbury nodded. Obviously the governor wasn’t going to give Burrow a complete amnesty. Alex turned to Esther Olsen.

  “That is all I ask, Mr. Sedaka. That is a mother’s dying wish.”

  Alex lowered his eyes, overwhelmed by his own emotions. How, he asked himself, could his client have been so evil as to do what he did? How could he be so cruel as to put a mother through this?

  But he quickly cut off the thought. It was not for him to judge his client. It was not even for him to believe that his client was guilty as long as Burrow maintained his innocence. Of course he had a duty to put the offer to his client. Maybe now at last Burrow would come clean. Alex had never really believed that Burrow was anything other than guilty. Of course as a lawyer, Alex had a professional duty to act on his client’s instructions and to argue that his client was innocent as long as that was what the client maintained. But there was no authority on earth that could issue a formal ruling that is binding on human nature, much less on human thought.

  Alex had assumed that Burrow was guilty before he had even taken on the case, if only from the news coverage when the original trial took place and through the long and tortuous appeals process. By the time he was asked to take the case, he was pre-disposed toward the idea of Burrow’s guilt. But he was persuaded to take the case by the pleading of his ambitious legal intern and by the formal personal request of Burrow himself, for reasons which Alex had never quite understood.

  Although Alex had speedread the trial transcript, working in an intense pressure-cooker atmosphere as the execution date loomed up ahead, nothing he had read had in any way changed his mind. Although the case was too complicated to be described as “open and shut” it was certainly sufficiently overwhelming. There was no doubt in Alex’s mind: Clayton Burrow had murdered Dorothy Olsen.

  The only question was, would he now come clean, now that he had a chance to save his miserable life in exchange for something so small? There was no chance of him being re-tried and acquitted, no chance of him being released from prison, so it would cost him nothing to tell the truth. And if there was a God, it might even save his soul.

  Alex knew better than to approach the matter with anything so presumptuous as expectation. He would approach it, instead, with cautious hope. But first he had to be sure that he had understood the terms of the deal correctly. He turned toward the governor.

  “So let me get this straight. The deal is, if Clayton Burrow reveals where the body is buried, he gets clemency and will serve a sentence of life without parole.”

  “That’s right,” Dusenbury responded with a nod of his patrician head.

  Alex considered for a moment asking to have the terms set in writing. But from the look on Esther Olsen’s face he knew that this would be needlessly cruel. And, from the governor’s firm handshake, it was also unnecessary.

  10:03 PDT

  “Life without parole,” Alex had said. The man in the car couldn’t believe it.

  There was no doubt. The offer was on the table.

  The man’s mind was reeling. When the governor had invited Alex to come early for the meeting, he had wondered about what was going down. He had known that it was likely to be something unusual. But he hadn’t expected that.

  He kept running over the conversation in his mind.

  Nathaniel Anderson was not a G-man. Neither was he a cop, nor a journalist, nor a hired assassin. He had recently graduated from law school and was working as a legal intern while preparing for his bar exams. He had done a lot of Public Defender work in his final year of law school, helping indigent clients plea bargain down their sentences in the proverbial meat-grinder that was the criminal law system.

  It had taken time to win their respect. They saw him as a stuck-up white boy, like most lawyers. But he had worked like a dog and won them over through his sheer tenacity and hard work. And because he worked for the Public Defender he had also built up a powerful list of contacts in the criminal community. It was a list that had come in very useful.

  So the governor was offering Burrow clemency in return for revealing where the body was located. He wondered how the public would react to that – not that the governor or Alex would reveal the offer until it was a done deal.

  Nathaniel looked round at the traffic on Golden Gate Avenue. Parked a few cars down the road was a limousine. He looked up. The sun was higher now: the day was wearing on. Just under fourteen hours till Burrow was due for the lethal injection – unless Alex could save him.

  He looked back at the limousine and wondered if it was the vehicle that had brought Mrs. Olsen here. His proximity to the mother of the victim left him feeling uneasy. But that was all right. He knew that they would both be gone in a minute.

  Keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror, he waited while the next couple of minutes went by. Finally there was activity from the entrance to the building and several people emerged at the same time: Mrs. Olsen, the limo driver and Alex Sedaka. Alex watched while the limo driver led Mrs. Olsen back to the car, opened the door to let her in, closed it behind her and went to the driver’s seat. He continued watching while the limo drove off past him, heading east toward Larkin Street.

  As Alex turned away from the limo, Nathaniel strained to see the look on his face in the rearview mirror. As Alex approached, Nathaniel pulled out the earpiece and put it away in the glove compartment. He reached forward for the ignition key as Alex opened the front passenger door and got in.

  “I assume you got all that, Nat?” said Alex, pointing to Nat’s cell phone.

  “Every word. So what’s it to be? The office?”

  “No, I think we’ll go direct to San Quentin.”

  10:05 PDT

  A shrine.

  That was the only way you could describe it: a shrine that radiated outward from the mantelpiece above the mock fireplace.

  The picture sat there in the center of the mantelpiece – a teenage girl smiling at the camera, or at least trying to smile. With
Dorothy you could never tell if the smile was real, because she had learned from an early age to wear her face like a mask. Was it a smile of joy? Or the painted greasepaint smile of the clown who had to go on and perform even when she was grieving on the inside?

  The picture was flanked by a pair of candles and the surrounding area of the wall was adorned by her tennis certificates and poems. Round the room trophies were liberally distributed across several coffee tables and glass-fronted cabinets. Apart from the memorabilia, the only furniture in the room was an armchair and a small TV set.

  The young man stood before the picture, staring into Dorothy’s eyes, trying to decipher the enigma. Were they happy? Had she ever been happy? Had she ever had the chance to be?

  She had always treated him with love and kindness, however badly she was treated herself. He felt the tears in his eyes. Why couldn’t they have loved her as she loved him?

  He felt himself choking and he switched on the TV to distract himself. There was bound to be rolling news about the impending execution of Clayton Burrow. He looked at his watch. It would all be over in less than fourteen hours.

  10:08 PDT

  “Do you think he’ll bite?” asked Nat, keeping his eyes on the road. He had just taken the first left at Larkin Street and was about to take another at Turk.

  “I don’t see why not. He wants to live … I think.”

  “Even if it’s behind bars? For the rest of his life?”

  “He’s a narcissist,” Alex explained. “He likes to be the center of attention and to be told what a great guy he is. He wants to be The Fonz.”

  “The Fonz?”

  “Fonzie … from Happy Days.”

  “Happy Days?” echoed Nat, as if betraying his youth, as they hung a right at Van Ness.

  Nat was half-pretending. In truth, he enjoyed watching the re-runs of it and he knew perfectly well who ‘The Fonz’ was. But he still didn’t see what the Fonz had to do with his question about Burrow taking the deal.

  “The Fonz was the local school drop-out who didn’t care about anything except being cool. That was his trademark phrase. The thing was, everybody liked him, the guys and the dolls.”

  “And this is relevant because…?”

  “Because that’s what Clayton Burrow always wanted to be. Cool. A hit with the clique. Numero Uno. Mister Popularity. In with the in-crowd. Like I said – a classic narcissist.”

  “I know that type. But I still don’t see what that’s got to do with taking the deal.”

  Alex smiled. Nat may have got top grades in law school, but he had a lot to learn about the real world.

  “The thing is, Nat, that what a narcissist wants most is attention. But the next best thing is to live. He wants to live – even if it is behind bars. He’ll still be the center of attention for a while, with the press … and the public … until the novelty wears off.”

  Nat thought about this for a moment.

  “He’s never admitted it … killing the Olsen girl, I mean.”

  “I know. But until now he’s never had a reason to. In fact he had every reason not to.”

  They were taking a left into Lombard Street now and a tense silence settled over them. Strangely, Alex found himself thinking not about Burrow, but about Nat. The truth was that he hadn’t originally planned on hiring a legal intern, his law practice was just too tiny to warrant one. But Nat had badgered his way into Alex’s professional life with an enviable dedication and tenacity. He had started off the campaign while still a student, with an impressive résumé and a series of letters praising Alex’s work. At the time, Nat was doing a pre-graduation internship with the Public Defender’s office.

  But the coup de grâce was an impromptu visit to Alex’s office. When Alex had politely offered a referral to another firm, Nat replied that he didn’t want to work for the “whores and heathens” of the legal profession. He wanted to work only for a true believer in justice. Alex wasn’t sure if the student was a genuine meshigena or just a younger incarnation of himself, with the ideals still intact. But the clincher came when Nat silenced Alex’s attempted rebuff by saying that he wanted to play St Peter to Alex’s Jesus. It was the kind of killer line that a lawyer would give his Rolex – if not his Rolodex – to come up with. And it caught Alex from left of field.

  Nat’s arrival at the firm had been most opportune in terms of the caseload. Alex had been getting a lot more business in the wake of a major success in the appeal of a drug baron’s girlfriend on accessory charges. And this heavy workload had culminated in Alex’s biggest case of all when the California v. Burrow file landed on his desk. There had been so much material to read through, so much ground to cover. Alex still wasn’t sure that he had truly come to grips with the facts of the case.

  But the execution date had been set and the court had refused to give him any more time.

  “You want me to copy the recording?”

  Nat’s voice punctured Alex’s cogitation. They were on Doyle Drive, heading north toward the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “Oh, er … yes. Upload a copy on the mail server and lodge a CD copy with the bank. Get Juanita to do a transcript. We’ll compare it to the official transcript when we get it.”

  Throughout Alex’s meeting with the governor, they had maintained an open cell phone connection, with Alex’s brand new iPhone on silent and Nat listening in and recording the conversation.

  Originally the plan had been for Alex and Nat to go into the governor’s office together. But Nat had suggested that Alex might be more effective alone. Two on one would seem like bullying and might serve only to harden the governor’s attitude. One on one and it would come over more like a genuine plea for mercy. Alex would be like a stand-in for Burrow, making a straightforward appeal from the heart.

  Alex liked the way Nat thought. He had the knack for bringing a fresh perspective to the situation.

  10:17 PDT (18:17 BST)

  “Are you all right, Sue?”

  Susan White had been daydreaming. She was barely into the first hour of her shift and her mind was a million miles away. She became aware of a young nurse looking at her.

  “Oh yes. I’m fine. I was just thinking about something.”

  The young nurse was dark-haired and pretty, with a smile that reminded Susan of some young British actress who had made it big in Hollywood after several appearances in British movies. She couldn’t remember the name of the actress. It was all she could do to remember the name of the nurse.

  Danielle. Yes, that was it. Danielle Michaels.

  “You sure?”

  Susan White could sense Danielle was genuinely concerned.

  “Yes, I’m fine. Don’t worry. Really I am.”

  Danielle smiled again and walked off, glancing back over her shoulder briefly, with a look of concern. But right now, the thing that was uppermost on Susan’s mind was that news report about the man who was due to be executed.

  The first thing she did was head for the records room. The room was unlocked but the cabinets were not. It was out of hours and the records manager wasn’t there. Then she realized that she didn’t actually need the whole file, just the index. The hard copy files were filed by consecutive number and physically stored by date. But every file had a matching card in the card index and these were arranged alphabetically. The index card would have the date.

  She found it in less than a minute and a chill went up her spine. The file had been opened on May 25,1998.

  10:36 PDT

  When they arrived at San Quentin, Alex again went in alone, while Nat waited in the car. Nat had been in many prisons before, but never on death row – not even the relatively calm North Segregation block.

  “It’s just too depressing,” was all he had offered by way of explanation, the first time they had come here.

  “What are you talking about?” Alex had responded. “It’s just like the rest of the prison.”

  “No, it isn’t. Not to me. It has … I can’t explain it. It’s like the place
has the smell of death about it.”

  Alex had found this attitude incomprehensible.

  “How do you expect to work as a lawyer on cases of your own if you can’t compartmentalize your emotions?”

  Nat had just shaken his head and turned away, as if struggling to contain those emotions. Alex remained mystified but realized that he had to accept it. So on this case at least, Nat was functioning as little more than a driver. It was hardly a way to get ahead in his chosen profession. But in fairness to Nat, he had done a lot of background research. You couldn’t fault him for effort or enthusiasm.

  It took a few minutes to process Alex through security. But it seemed to be getting quicker, relative to his previous visits. They knew Alex now and he knew the drill, so less had to be explained to him about what he could and couldn’t bring in. Also, as the execution date drew near, they realized the urgency of these meetings and there was an element of sympathy for even the basest and most evil of murderers. Years on death row humbled and mellowed a man and even those prison guards who believed most strongly in capital punishment were ready to admit that by the time the condemned man is about to meet his maker, he is a very different man to the one who was sentenced to that fate.

  Whatever they said about capital punishment being the ultimate individual deterrent, it was a punishment that did it’s work before the final stage was complete. It was living in the shadow of death that reformed a man’s character, not death itself. But for collective deterrence, the death penalty served no purpose, in Alex’s opinion. There were others however who were all too ready and eager to argue the point.

  When Alex was finally in the cell with Clayton Burrow, the condemned man appeared to be struggling to read the lawyer’s face.

  “What did he say?” asked Burrow, a tremor of fear creeping into his voice.

  “It’s kind of complicated,” Alex replied hesitantly.