The Dead Room

by Robert Ellis

  “Think it over,” he said to Andrews as he stood up. “How many people’s lives have you wasted and ruined? And for what? Just so that you could climb onto the pile and stand on top.”

  Teddy walked out of the visiting room. Glancing at his watch, he noticed the date. Even though it was Christmas Eve, he couldn’t turn the other cheek or dig any compassion out of an empty hole. He couldn’t help it. He hoped the motherfucker would burn.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  Teddy could see the judge pounding his gavel on the bench, the jury pronouncing their verdict, the turmoil that followed in the press, six years of appeals in a case too bizarre not to be real. District Attorney Alan Andrews had been convicted of the murder of Edward Trisco III, a serial killer whom authorities estimated had tortured and brutally murdered more than two dozen people.

  It defied the imagination. Ate at a person’s soul, leaving the gristle behind. At a certain point, Andrews withdrew from the courts and finally gave up.

  Teddy glanced at Nash sitting beside the pilot, then gazed out the window at the ground, watching the world sweep by in the darkness. They were making the short flight from West Chester to State College. Teddy had made arrangements for the twin-engine plane. Once they landed, a car and driver would be waiting to take them to the execution complex at Rockview Prison. Alan Andrews was due to make his exit by lethal injection in less than two hours and they were running late.

  It had been a tumultuous six years.

  Andrews had also been convicted for two separate attempts on Teddy’s life. When Detective Michael Jackson was confronted with both the payments he’d received from Andrews and his shoe prints found in the snow out at the lake, he copped a deal and admitted cutting the brake lines on Teddy’s car. He’d been following orders from Andrews, he said. Although Andrews denied it, and there were suspicions Jackson might be lying to save his own skin, the detective had enough experience in court to appear like a reliable witness and sell his side of the story to the jury. When confronted with hitting Teddy over the head and running Barnett over with his car, Jackson swore he knew nothing about it, took a lie detector test, and passed.

  On the second count, not even Andrews denied that he’d pointed a gun at Teddy and fired. His fingerprints were found on the weapon. Gunshot residue had been detected on his right hand. His story that he considered Teddy frightening, that Teddy was armed with a shotgun and wouldn’t put the weapon down, that under the circumstances he’d panicked—just didn’t gel.

  Unlike Michael Jackson, the forensic scientist working in the police lab, Vera Handover, wasn’t offered a deal at all. Although Teddy was disappointed that Handover’s voice didn’t match his memory of Dawn Bingle’s, and how he was led to the boathouse remained in question to this day, the investigators didn’t need her to talk in order to figure out exactly what she had done. Nash and his students participating in his legal workshop pointed the way with their research. What they couldn’t resolve, Detective Jackson did as part of his agreement. The forensic scientist had taken payments from Andrews which had been recorded in the notebook found in his townhouse. In return for those payments she’d manufactured evidence and given false testimony in some of his most high-profile cases. She’d acted as part of the team responsible for sending a total of six innocent men to their deaths. In her defense, she said that she thought they were guilty, and at the time, thought she’d been doing the right thing by putting them away. The money amounted to gifts and bonuses from Andrews for a job well done. She hadn’t lied in court, she said. Her opinions, particularly in fingerprint analysis, were open to interpretation and she’d done the best she could. As the investigation against her deepened, twelve more bogus cases turned up. Nine men and three women were pulled off death row and set free, while Vera Handover went to jail.

  Alan Andrews was about to be executed for a single murder. But everyone knew his death was a result of his professional life in toto. The decisions he’d made along the way. His knack for setting aside the truth in favor of a winning record. Terrorizing a city so that he could score points and look like a hero.

  The plane landed smoothly, the drive to Rockview taking less than twenty minutes. Teddy spotted the line of protestors waving hand-painted signs in the air and chanting outside the prison walls. As the driver pulled through the gate, Teddy’s eyes stopped on a strange-looking man who stood off to the side. He was holding a flashlight to his Bible and reading the words aloud to anyone who might be listening. It didn’t appear that anyone was.

  The car pulled to a stop and they got out, following their escort toward the execution complex. As they climbed the steps, Teddy noticed that Nash was walking with a slight limp. When he asked about it, Nash told him he’d slipped on the floor at his gym.

  “It’s nothing, Teddy. Nothing that won’t heal with a little time.”

  Their escort showed them into the building. After they checked in, they were taken down the hall to the witness room on the first floor. As they entered, only a few seats remained. Although the seats were together, they were in the front row, and Teddy hesitated a moment before following Nash down the aisle and taking his seat.

  The witness room was fairly small. Enough seats to keep twenty-five people on edge for the rest of their lives. He turned and looked at the faces. Some he recognized as members of Andrews’s family. His mother and sister sitting beside their spiritual advisor. Andrews had never married and wasn’t leaving any children behind. Others he’d seen in the paper from the families of Andrews’s victims. Wives mostly, who claimed on the news on a nightly basis that they needed to see the man die just the way their husbands did. The rest of the audience was filled out with official witnesses and reporters. The young woman dressed in an Armani suit with big hair was a new face on one of the local TV stations. She’d replaced the woman before her who wore the same clothing, even the same hair, but refused to get a face lift when she began to look experienced and slightly middle-aged. As Teddy looked at the young replacement, he noticed her eyes were a little wider than usual tonight. Maybe she’d stepped into more than she could handle. Maybe life was more important than reading what she was told to read before the cameras just for the money.

  He turned back in his seat and peered through the windows into the dead room. He was calling it the dead room, even though Nash had told him more than once that it was still called an execution chamber. As his eyes roamed back and forth, it felt more like a stage. More like an operating room with its tiled walls than a room that had been renovated and might once have housed a gas chamber or electric chair. In fact, Teddy had read somewhere over the past few weeks that the execution complex at Rockview had once been a field hospital.

  He looked back through the bulletproof glass. A single chair was bolted into the floor, its design much like that of an airline seat reserved for first class. An electrical cord ran from a control box attached to the chair and was plugged into the wall. Teddy had expected to see a simple gurney. Instead, someone had built the padded chair specifically for the purpose of killing people. It looked cold and sterile and ultra modern—perhaps the work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ghost. Beside a door on the far wall, a small shelf had been bolted into the tiles just large enough to hold a desk phone.

  Why a desk phone? Why not a simple phone mounted to the wall?

  A man entered the room. An older man dressed like a surgeon who might even double as a medical examiner. A face mask hung about his neck and he carried a pair of latex gloves. He stepped up to the chair, his eyes avoiding the twenty-five faces staring at him through the windows along the near wall. Then he pressed a button on the console. The chair tilted back and flattened into a lounge. When he pressed a second button, the curtains behind the windows closed.

  “They’re bringing Andrews out,” Nash whispered. “It’ll only be a few minutes now.”

  Teddy shivered in his seat, wondering if he could remain in the audience and watch the man die. He dug his hand into his pocket, pulling a small photogra
ph out. It was a picture of his father. He’d taken it himself with a 35mm camera as they walked through the open field across the street from the house, rooting out pheasants hidden in the tall grass and watching the birds take flight. He looked into his father’s eyes and stroked his face with his finger. This is how he remembered him. Wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up. The carefree smile on his face with the afternoon sun whisking through his windblown hair.

  Teddy had found some degree of closure over the past six years. On a weekend during Andrews’s first trial, he’d removed the accordion file from his mother’s closet and taken it into his bedroom. He’d always known she had kept a record of what happened to his father, saved the stories that appeared in the newspapers, but he could never look at them before. As he read about his father’s arrest and eventual death in prison, questions remained. He sought out the prosecutor, an ADA named Stephen Faulk, but couldn’t find him. From what he’d read, his mother had been right. Faulk was young and trying to make a name for himself in Chester County. Teddy’s father had been a man of good reputation and looked like a big prize. When Teddy asked her about it, she said that the prosecutor died a long time ago. He saw the look in her eyes, the hurt flaring up again, and didn’t want to press her for details unless he had to.

  And so he began searching out what had happened to Stephen Faulk on his own. He started with the local police department, but no one could tell him anymore than what his mother had. Faces changed with the passage of time, and those who remained didn’t appear very interested or talkative. This surprised Teddy. For almost half his life, every time he’d seen a cop pass the house, he thought the story was the only thing on their minds. After several weeks of getting nowhere, Teddy went to the library and spent a day going through microfilm archives from the Daily Local News, a newspaper based in the county. His mother had stopped saving press clippings on the day of his father’s death. But it was the next two weeks that told the story. Faulk had pressed the detectives working the case for an arrest. He’d held press conferences on a daily basis, and used every opportunity to try the case in the papers before a court date was even set. It was obvious to Teddy that Faulk had a chip on his shoulder, and one reporter described his voice as shrill. But after his father died, everything changed. The accountant came forward, overcome with guilt, admitting that he was the real murderer, not Teddy’s father. Faulk actually tried to discount the confession, but local and county detectives took issue with the prosecutor and fought back. The controversy went on for a week or so, spilling into the press until the county decided they’d had enough and fired the man. Three days after that, Faulk’s body was found behind the wheel of his car with the garage door closed and the engine running. The piece of shit took the easy way out and ate the pipe.

  Teddy’s nightmares seemed to vanish after he found out what actually happened. He threw himself into his career, looking after Oscar Holmes’s interests, but spending most of his time in the courtroom as a criminal defense attorney. Small cases at first, with Nash guiding him through the process. As his experience grew, his practice began to flourish. Often times Nash would take a day off from teaching to sit in the courtroom and watch. After each trial, particularly in the beginning, Nash would offer his detailed critique over a pot of hot coffee in the office. When Teddy began to hit his stride a year or so ago, they switched to fine wines and broadened the discussion.

  As he gazed at the photograph, he wished his father was here to see how things had turned out. He wished his father could see that he was on his own and doing okay. He was managing his debt, living in an apartment in the woods in Radnor on County Line Road—a large house built well over a hundred years ago that had been cut into apartments, couldn’t pass the zoning laws, but no one in the neighborhood talked about. His mother seemed to have come into her own as well. She and Quint had someone new to paint with. A new friend in Oscar Holmes. Often times when Teddy stopped by for a visit, he’d find them in the studio painting together. Holmes had married his neighbor and adopted her daughter. Although he was managing to make a small living from his art work, he remained psychologically damaged from his ordeals with Alan Andrews and Eddie Trisco. Even worse, people still pointed at him on the street at times and called him the Veggie Butcher. Teddy’s mother was perhaps the only person on earth who understood what he was going through, and his frequent visits to the house seemed to help both of them.

  * * *

  The curtain opened to the dead room.

  Teddy closed his hand around the photograph and slipped it into his pocket. As he looked at Andrews through the window, he realized his seat was too close. Less than three feet away.

  Andrews had lost weight since the last time he saw him, and his skin was considerably more pale. He was strapped down to the chair, but seemed to be resting comfortably beneath a sheet. The doctor was wearing eye protection now, and the face mask was drawn tight over his mouth. The two appeared to be speaking as the doctor rolled the electrocardiogram closer and checked the wires attached to Andrews’s chest.

  Teddy’s eyes flicked down to Andrews’s arms. A single IV was attached to each just above his wrists. Curiously, the plastic tubes connected to the needles snaked around the chair into a small opening on the far wall. Above the opening was another window, but the curtains remained drawn.

  The lights dimmed in the witness room. Teddy’s focus shifted to the reflections on the glass. He could see the people sitting behind him, their faces taught and still. Some were wiping their eyes with handkerchiefs. Others looked defiant. A woman in the back row, perhaps the reporter, started coughing and couldn’t seem to stop.

  He checked his watch. 6:58 p.m. A man in a uniform whom Teddy guessed was the warden entered the dead room and stood by the telephone. It seemed like a formality because everyone knew that the governor had presidential aspirations. Executions were an image consultant’s dream and an important step if you were going to make a run as president of the free world. Odds were that the governor wouldn’t be making any calls from his mansion in Harrisburg tonight.

  Teddy’s eyes drifted to the left and he noticed another window. Another witness room. He saw Detectives Vega and Ellwood behind the glass, along with District Attorney Carolyn Powell. She seemed edgy and vulnerable, but most of all, she looked tired. Teddy hadn’t seen her for a couple of years. Their relationship hadn’t survived his decision to practice criminal law as a defense attorney, or her promotion and election to the new job. For Carolyn, the prosecution of Andrews seemed to draw her into a cocoon and tighten her up. For Teddy, the trial had been a release. They still checked in with each other every couple of months or so, but never mentioned getting together for another round of martinis. It had become his drink of choice now. And he hadn’t ordered one in six years without thinking of her or remembering that night they’d spent together.

  A light mounted on the far wall started blinking, and the speakers on the wall were switched on.

  The warden glanced at the doctor, then asked Andrews if he would like to make a statement. Andrews declined with a simple shake of the head. As the two men left the room and the door closed, Andrews settled in beneath his restraints and took a deep breath. He was alone. Ready for the deepest of sleeps to begin.

  Then the curtain opened in the window on the far wall, revealing three men wearing black hoods. As Teddy noticed them, he tried to remind himself that he was living in a civilized world. Still, the image of their eyes peering out from beneath their hoods in the anteroom behind Andrews was horrifying. He knew what they were doing. He was well aware of the process. The execution team was comprised of three prison employees. Two would be feeding Andrews a drug cocktail that would lead to an overdose and wash away the spark of life. The third would be feeding a dummy bag with the lethal brew. In the end, no one would be certain exactly who wiped out Andrews’s life.

  Teddy thought he knew when the sodium Pentothal hit the man’s arm and made the big push. Andrews was fighting the ane
sthetic, but at fifty times the dosage in a normal operation, his eyes finally wavered and became lazy. Drifting across the ceiling, they floated down the wall until they passed over the window and penetrated the glass. He was searching out the faces in the audience, moving from one to the next in the dim light. He was lingering on some and passing over others until his eyes found Teddy in the front row and slid to a sleepy stop.

  Teddy flinched. A wave of fear buzz-touched his spine, rattling across the back of his neck. The seconds ticked by in shivers. Almost a full minute. Andrews was staring at him. Giving him a last look before he let go and said good-bye to the witness who did him in. The expression on his face wasn’t hard, but unexpectedly gentle and relaxed. It seemed to last forever, and in a sense, it was.

  When his eyes finally smoked out like a candle, Teddy thought he was dead and checked the monitor. To his surprise, Andrews’s heart continued beating. It took ten minutes for the pancuronium bromide to paralyze his diaphragm and collapse his lungs. A few minutes more before the potassium chloride reached his heart and pulled the last switch. Then the glint in his eyes shifted and faded and rolled off to the side, becoming lost in the distance of forever.

  The chaos was over. The battle lost. The decision final.

  After a moment, the doctor entered the room and walked over to the chair without glancing at Andrews’s corpse or the faces staring at him through the window. Teddy watched his hand drop to the console. When he pressed the button, the curtain closed.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  In spite of its length, most of the trip back to Philadelphia was spent in silence. As they drove from the airport into the city in Nash’s new Jaguar, Teddy noticed the crowds on the sidewalks and wondered what was going on at midnight. Then Nash pointed at a man on the corner waving a sign. ALAN ANDREWS IS DEAD. They were partying. Celebrating. Dancing in the streets.