Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “But,” Jorgensen protested, “the alternative-”

  “The alternative,” said Jessica, “is simply to wait.”

  “Until?”

  “Until after. If we do that, the state will have the blood of an innocent man on its hands, in full view of the rest of the nation.”

  “The rest of the world,” added Davidson.

  “What’s more,” explained Jessica, her eyes brightening with the fire of a true believer, “the timing couldn’t be better. People are worried like never before about innocent men being executed. A moratorium’s been declared in Illinois, by a Republican governor, no less. Other states are considering similar measures. Look at the polls, study the statistics, examine the trends. Every indicator shows an erosion of support for the death penalty. Don’t you see? Years from now, historians will look back and point to this case as the pivotal moment, the turning point, when America was forced to face the fact that we’d killed an incontrovertibly innocent man. Don’t you see? If we pull this off, we can bring the whole system crashing down, once and for all.”

  Jorgensen shook his head, trying to clear it, trying to push away the fog. “So all we’ve got to do is play God,” he said, “and sacrifice one of his children.”

  “We’re not sacrificing anyone,” said Jessica. “The Commonwealth of Virginia is doing that. All we’re doing is the math. Boyd Davies dies, in order that hundreds of others won’t.”

  “Thousands,” said Davidson.

  “So what’s the purpose of the videotape?” Jorgensen asked. “If you’re not going to use it.”

  “Oh, we’re going to use it,” said Jessica. “After.”

  “But people will be outraged that you sat on it.”

  “People,” said Jessica, “aren’t going to know.”

  The date, Jorgensen realized. Of course: They’ll simply change the date on the video and make it look like they found Kurt Meisner too late to save Boyd. “You’ve got it all figured out,” he told them. “Don’t you?”

  “We thought we did,” said Davidson. “Until you had to go and play detective.”

  Jorgensen allowed himself a smile. “I guess I wasn’t supposed to find Kurt Meisner, was I? I was supposed to be a good boy, sit home, and stay out of trouble.”

  Several of them returned the smile.

  “And now I’ve rather complicated things for you, haven’t I?”

  “I certainly hope not,” said Brandon Davidson. “I’d like very much to think you’re with us. As a matter of fact, I’d like your promise.”

  In the days and weeks following the barn-burning incident, young Augie Jorgensen had tried to figure out where he’d gone wrong. Had he declined to assure the older boys that he could be trusted with their secret, they simply would have gone ahead and set the fire without ever telling him. On the other hand, once he’d promised not to tell, wasn’t he bound by his oath? The dilemma had bothered him so much that finally he’d disguised the story as best as he could, removing himself from it, and presented it to his father as a theoretical problem.

  “What would you do, Papa? Keep your promise, or break it?”

  Nils Jorgensen was a master shipbuilder, a no-nonsense man to whom there was black and white, but precious room for gray. For once, however, he was given pause. “A promise is a very solemn thing,” said Nils. “But sometimes there are worse things than lying, or breaking one’s word.” Then he’d put Augie over his knee, told him to watch whom he was hanging out with, and given his bottom a good tanning, just in case the story hadn’t been quite so theoretical, after all.

  Years later, when Marge’s doctors had confided to Jorgensen that the cancer had come back and spread throughout her body, he’d looked her in the eye and assured her that the latest round of tests had come back negative and that she was going to be just fine. And at the very end, when the sores and blisters had covered her face and he’d had to hide her mirror, he told her she looked more beautiful than ever.

  “You’re lying,” she’d said to that.

  “No, I’m not,” he’d insisted.

  “Promise?”

  And he’d promised. And in doing so, he’d lied to Marge - to him the single most important person on the face of the earth - deliberately promised her that something was true, when he knew full well it wasn’t. Now he was being asked to make a promise he knew he wasn’t going to keep. Only this time the person doing the asking wasn’t Marge, it was Brandon Davidson. Brandon Davidson was nobody to Jorgensen, absolutely nobody.

  Even so, he felt compelled to take a deep breath. Then he looked Brandon Davidson squarely in the eye and said, “I’m with you. I promise.”

  The meeting had broken up for good at that point, and Jorgensen, still without a hotel room, had decided his business in New York was done.

  “Is there by any chance a phone I might use, to call a taxi?” he asked. “To take me to the airport?”

  Davidson smiled. “We don’t call taxis here,” he explained. “We step into traffic and dare them to run us over. But don’t worry. I’ll have one of our drivers meet you downstairs, right in front of the building.”

  “That’s hardly necessary.”

  “It’ll be my pleasure,” said Davidson, and they shook hands.

  But the moment Jorgensen was out of earshot, Davidson pulled Jessica aside. “Better get hold of the Duke,” he told her.

  It remained for Jorgensen to use the restroom (an activity his seniority required him to repeat at regular intervals, and occasionally at irregular ones, as well), and to retrace his steps to the room he’d first entered when the elevator had deposited him on the fiftieth floor. The room where he’d left his bag.

  The large black man who’d been manning the desk earlier was no longer there. He’d been relieved by a white woman, younger but equally large, and wearing an identical military-type uniform. The thought occurred to Jorgensen that there might, in fact, be only one such uniform, which got passed on with the changing of the guard. Trial TVs version of equal-opportunity employment, perhaps.

  HELP WANTED

  SECURITY GUARD - Applicants may be male or female, white or black, young or old, but must be able to fit into a size 52 uniform.

  He dismissed the thought, wondering again if his recent fall might have affected his thinking. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I left a bag with the gentleman who was here earlier. That looks like it, right over there.”

  The woman rose from her chair and ambled over to a table, where Jorgensen’s overnight bag shared space with several other items. But instead of picking up his bag, she reached for a clear plastic one, containing several boxes marked Sony.

  “This one here?” she asked.

  In the days to follow, August Jorgensen would wonder about fate, and marvel at fortune. He would also congratulate himself more than once on what was for him, at least, an exercise of extremely quick thinking.

  “That’s the one,” he replied. “Oh, and that larger brown one next to it, as well.”

  The car that drove Jorgensen to the airport turned out to be a shiny black limousine, about a block and half long. He leaned back against - no, into - soft padded leather, watched the city go by through tinted windows, and had to use a telephone just to talk with the driver. But they seemed to make pretty good time, arriving at LaGuardia at quarter of five, in plenty of time for Jorgensen to catch the 5:31 flight to Charleston.

  Or so he would have thought.

  “If you hurry,” said a ticket agent, handing him a boarding pass, “you can still catch it. Gate Nineteen. Run!”

  So he ran, his bag tucked under one arm like a football, his lanky frame racing down the corridor, dodging people, golf carts, and other obstacles. Sweating and out of breath, he made it to Gate 19 just in time to notice an overhead sign indicating that departure time wasn’t 5:31 at all, but actually 5:01. The attendant smiled tolerantly at his tardiness, took his boarding pass, tore off the end of it and handed it back to him, and - as soon as Jorgensen had stepped into t
he tunnel leading to the plane - swung the door closed behind him.

  He located his assigned seat, shoved his bag under the one in front of it, collapsed in a heap, and buckled himself in. Less than a minute later, the plane was being pushed back from the gate, and Jorgensen was listening to instructions on what to do in the unlikely event of a sudden loss in cabin pressure. By the time the pilot’s voice came on over the intercom a few minutes later, to wish him and his fellow passengers a pleasant flight to Charlotte, August Jorgensen was fast asleep.

  There was something about the airport that looked decidedly unfamiliar. He’d been there that very morning; there was no way they could have remodeled the whole damn thing in his absence. Yet everything about it seemed different.

  Not only that, but his truck was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t simply a matter of its not being in the section of the parking lot where he’d left it, either; the whole parking lot wasn’t where it was supposed to be. They’d moved it clear over to the far end of the building, and even changed the way it was laid out.

  Again the thought came back to him that he must have hurt himself back in New York far more seriously than he’d realized at the time. He could have sustained a concussion, maybe even a fractured skull. He could be bleeding inside his brain right now, for all he knew. That could account for his confusion.

  Wandering back into the terminal for assistance, he happened to look up. Large block letters on the outside of the building welcomed him to the CHARLOTTE-DOUGLAS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.

  Charlotte?

  He was supposed to be in Charleston. Had the pilot been forced to divert the plane because of bad weather? Jorgensen looked up again, this time at a clear blue sky. The last clouds he’d seen, in fact, had been over New York City. He remembered his rush through the airport, and the surprising departure time posted at the gate. He reached into his pocket, found the stub of his boarding pass, and looked at it.

  FLIGHT: 856

  DEP: NEW YORK (LGA) 5:01 p.m.

  ARR: CHARLOTTE, NC 6:56 p.m.

  He and Marge had once come across an item in the newspaper about an old man found sitting in a wheelchair at a dog track in Florida. It seemed the poor fellow had been in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and couldn’t remember his name or explain where he was from. A nationwide search revealed that his sister, unable to care for him any longer, had abandoned him there. It became one of Marge’s standing jokes: Every time Jorgensen suffered a lapse of memory (a “senior moment,” Marge liked to call them), she’d threaten to pack up his things and ship him off to Florida.

  “Jesus,” Jorgensen said now. “I think I’m finally ready for the dog track.”

  Jessica Woodruff picked up the phone on the first ring, and said, “Hello?”

  “My guy sez he didden’ get off the plane.”

  She recognized the Duke’s voice.

  “What do you mean, he didn’t get off the plane?”

  “He sez he waited till they took off all the bags, started takin’ off the fuckin’ gawbage, for Chrissakes. I’m tellin’ ya, he wasn’t on it.”

  “Shit.”

  “Whaddawe do now?”

  “Are there any later arrivals?”

  “Only from Kennedy an’ Newak.”

  “No,” said Jessica. “We know he was dropped off at LaGuardia. Shit” she said again. “How about the other thing?”

  “Took care of that myself,” said the Duke.

  “All right,” she told him. “Stay in touch, will you?”

  “You goddit.”

  The agent at the Hertz counter insisted on knowing both Jorgensen’s age and date of birth, looking him up and down and examining his driver’s license for what seemed like a very long time. He was obviously having some misgivings about trusting such a disheveled-looking octogenarian with one of the company’s rental cars.

  He should only know, thought Jorgensen, about my thinking they remodeled the entire airport in six hours. Not to mention my searching for my truck in the wrong state.

  In the end, he got his car, a little blue thing called a Ford Focus. Focus? Whatever happened to animal names, like Mustang, Thunderbird, or Pinto? Since when did they name cars after functions performed by eyeballs?

  The Focus turned out to be long on special features, but seriously short on legroom. It came equipped with air conditioning, power steering, antilock brakes, power windows and doorlocks, and a strange odor reminiscent of bubble gum. In the glove compartment were an ice scraper, a blank form to describe any motor vehicle accidents encountered, and several road maps. The maps were what caught Jorgensen’s attention.

  It was getting dark, and he needed a place to stay. If he turned right, he could see, he’d soon pick up Interstate 77 south, which would start him off in the direction of Charleston, South Carolina, and - hopefully - his truck. On the other hand, he could turn left, toward 77 north. To the north was Virginia. In fact, as he studied the map, it occurred to him that were he to continue on 77 north for a couple of hours, he’d cross the Virginia border, and an hour later he’d run smack into two places he’d visited not too long ago.

  The first was Brushy Mountain.

  The second was Roanoke.

  Back home, Jake was in good hands. Jorgensen had told his neighbor not to expect him back from New York for several days. It seemed like a long time that he’d been gone, but the fact was, he’d only left that very morning.

  He turned left.

  That night, as he tried to find a comfortable position for his 6’4” body on a 6’ motel mattress, August Jorgensen recapped the day’s events. He’d been up by five o’clock, in order to catch the first flight from Charleston to New York; he’d slipped into that viewing room just in time to watch the videotape of Kurt Meisner, and see how the folks at Trial TV were able to manipulate the date on it; he’d nearly killed himself tripping over his own two feet; he’d listened politely as a bunch of true believers explained how they were willing to sacrifice Boyd Davies in order to put an end to the death penalty; he’d committed larceny; he’d ridden in a limousine the size of Tennessee; he’d raced through an airport like a madman, just so he could get onto the wrong plane; he’d landed in the wrong city in the wrong state; he’d lost his truck; he’d convinced a rental agent to give him the keys to a car he couldn’t fit into; and he’d ended up driving away from home instead of toward it, only this time on purpose.

  “You never do anything,” Marge used to complain to him. Well, baby, look at me now!

  Still, sleep wouldn’t come easily to Jorgensen. Thoughts spun wildly in his head. Was Kurt Meisner’s confession among the videotapes he’d stolen? Or were they going to turn out to be nothing but beer commercials or promotionals of some sort, or Johnnie Cochran’s life story? Did it make sense to go back to Brushy Mountain, to see how Boyd Davies was holding up? Or to Roanoke, on the chance that Kurt Meisner might be ready to talk to again?

  But what kept Jorgensen awake the most, the thing that kept coming back to him over and over again, was the grand scheme that Brandon Davidson, Jessica Woodruff, and the others sitting around the table in Conference Room One had shared with him. His knee-jerk reaction had been that they were all crazy, that the notion of permitting an innocent man to die - particularly a man they’d taken on as a client, under the guise of saving his life - was so misguided as to be truly insane. Even as he’d promised them he’d go along with them, he’d mentally crossed his fingers, knowing that as soon as he got out of there, he was going to do everything in his power to stop them.

  But now, lying in the darkness of his room, listening to the trucks roar by outside on the interstate, he forced himself to think about it. Suppose they were right? Suppose the nation was increasingly uncomfortable about the death penalty, and all it would take to tip the balance of public opinion was the execution of a single man who later turned out to be demonstrably innocent? Jorgensen hadn’t kept up on the debate in the last few years, but he’d read enough to know that, Timothy McVeigh
notwithstanding, there was, indeed, a growing trend against capital punishment. If it wasn’t yet a sea change, it was certainly a groundswell. The Supreme Court wasn’t part of it, of course, and with a Republican back in the White House to appoint right-wing judges, that wasn’t likely to change in a hurry. Nor could politicians be expected to jump on the bandwagon; every one of them positively cringed at the thought of being labeled “soft on crime.”

  But could the execution of one man make the difference? It hadn’t seemed to in the past. Oh, there’d been periodic outcries each time they put a retarded man to death, or someone whom the pope spoke out for, or on the rare occasion when the defendant was a woman, instead of a man. But in each of those cases, innocence had never been an issue; the proponents of capital punishment had always been able to say, “Yes, but look at the horrible crime he (or she) committed. Think of the victim, who was shown no mercy. Think of the victim’s family. Aren’t they entitled to some closure?”

  Death, the Great Healer.

  And when the people sitting around the table said the pro-death forces would spin a last-minute reprieve for Boyd Davies to their advantage, they were right. If Trial TV were to run the story now, Boyd would be freed; but the opposition would sit back smugly and cite the case as proof that the system had worked once again, weeding out any injustices.

  Yet even if Davidson and Woodruff and the rest of them were right, who’d bestowed upon them the power to decide whether Boyd Davies lived or died? Even if their motives were pure - and Jorgensen was willing to believe that they were - didn’t it still come down to playing God?

  And suppose they were wrong. Suppose they did nothing, and let Boyd die. And then they went public with Kurt Meisner and his videotape, and people realized that a mistake had been made. What made them so sure anyone would care? Maybe the rest of the country would react precisely the same way they had - figuring that Boyd Davies had no life to begin with, that he was no better off than some dumb animal in a cage, and that when it came right down to it, he was no worse off dead than alive? Then they’d have stood by and let him die, and for what?