by Marti Green
The crystal-blue skies of New York were nowhere to be seen when the plane landed at Indianapolis International Airport. The drenching rain that kept the plane circling for almost an hour before landing had stopped, but deep puddles permeated the roadways. They piled into their rented car, airport map in hand, and made their way downtown to the Indianapolis Women’s Prison. If Sallie had been convicted later, it’s likely she’d have been sent to the newer women’s prison in Rockville. Most of the women incarcerated now in Indianapolis had special needs: some elderly, some mentally ill, some even pregnant. Sallie didn’t seem to fit into those categories, but Dani could be wrong. Maybe she was mentally ill. She’d get a better sense when she met her.
“Ladies, what say we stop for lunch first?” Tommy always had food on his mind, but he had a point. They didn’t know how long they’d be at the prison.
“I’m up for that,” both women answered in unison.
They parked near the prison and began walking. Almost immediately, Tommy spotted a coffee shop just a block from the parking garage. They strolled over, checked the menu in the front window and peeked inside. It looked clean and homey, so they went in. The tufted benches in their booth were faded and cracked, with strands of cotton wadding sticking out from the red vinyl fabric. The waitress, a pretty young woman with rouged cheeks and dirty blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, came over to the table to take their order.
Flying always revved up Dani’s appetite. She didn’t know why. Doug was the opposite. On family vacations, she and Jonah would fight over Doug’s airplane snack. “I’ll have a hamburger, rare, no mayonnaise, just ketchup on the roll.”
“You want fries with that?”
She hesitated. Fries were diet killers.
“It’s only a dollar more and they’re real good here. Everybody says so,” the waitress said with an inviting smile.
Dani shrugged. It was hard enough to eat well at home. On the road it was impossible. “Sure, add the fries.”
“And anything to drink?” she asked like Lucifer drawing her into the inferno. She knew she should just have water, especially after flying, but she’d already blown the diet with a hamburger and fries.
“Do you have milkshakes?” Dani asked, dropping her voice so Tommy and Melanie wouldn’t hear.
“Sure do,” the waitress said loudly enough for the next table to hear. “Chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, but chocolate’s definitely the best.”
“Make it a chocolate shake,” Dani mumbled.
She leaned back and let her thoughts wander, drifting away from Tommy and Melanie’s conversation. Each city she traveled to when she argued an appeal seemed both different and the same as New York City. No place was like Manhattan, of course. No place had the mass humanity on its city streets. No place had the crowded skyscrapers or bustling energy or unending streams of neon lights. She supposed people living in Chicago or Los Angeles or maybe even Houston or Atlanta might argue with that. But they were wrong. Manhattan was unique. Yet despite its uniqueness, every city, large or small, shared common characteristics. Every city had paved roads heading to its center; every city had its office buildings and restaurants, gas stations and pharmacies, doctors’ offices and schools; every city had its residents trudging off to work to earn a living. Some worked to support themselves—Dani guessed that was the case with their waitress. Maybe she was a college student, working part-time to pay her tuition. Or maybe she’d forgone college and worked to pay her rent and have a little fun on the weekends. Or perhaps she didn’t work to support only herself. Maybe, like the woman Dani would meet within a few hours, she worked to support her child. What would make a woman, a woman like this young waitress with her cheery smile and warm eyes, stand by and watch her child being murdered? Horribly murdered—burned beyond recognition and tossed away like a chewed-over turkey bone. And then say nothing for two years?
Sallie Calhoun had been a young waitress once, working nights so she could be home with her baby during the daytime. Neighbors described her as a devoted mother. They never heard her yell at Angelina, never even heard her raise her voice. They never saw her plopped in front of the television while Angelina ran about on her own. No, she showered attention on her daughter, hugging her and covering her with kisses every chance she got. What had happened to that adoring mother who now sat in a cell at Indiana State Women’s Prison?
Dani didn’t know if she’d find any answers to this riddle when she sat down with Sallie, but all thoughts of the interview disappeared as the waitress delivered their lunch. The hamburger was blood rare, just as Dani liked it. She managed to finish every last french fry and her milkshake—which tasted as good as promised—before it was time to leave. It took them just five minutes to walk to the prison gate. The building dated back to 1873, when it became the first correctional facility in the nation to incarcerate only women and the first maximum-security prison for female prisoners.
They each showed their identification at the prison gate and were marshaled into the waiting area.
“What do you think she’s going to tell us?” Melanie asked. “Does she realize how close the execution date is?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ve been communicating with each other since the trial. I mean, her testimony got him the death sentence. I would certainly understand if he wanted nothing to do with her after that.”
“Still, they were married a good number of years. And had a child together. Doesn’t that mean something?”
Dani suppressed a smile. Despite her intelligence and top legal skills, Melanie’s naiveté sometimes surprised Dani. Melanie had grown up in a loving, intact family and didn’t yet appreciate how hurtful married couples could get with each other. Maybe Sallie and George continued to write each other from their respective prisons. Maybe they even used their hoarded telephone calls to see how each fared. It was just as likely, though, that the poison that led to the death of their daughter had destroyed their marriage as well. Dani didn’t expect Sallie to be of much help to them, but she held out hope anyway.
After a half-hour wait, they were ushered into a windowless five-by-seven interview room. The walls were barren and the floor showed scuff marks. Sallie sat at the bare table and a female guard stood positioned outside the door. Dani looked her over before making introductions. She was a slight woman, severely underweight, with prominent neck bones and pencil-thin arms. The dark circles under her eyes looked painted on. Her chestnut-brown hair hung in limp strands framing an oval face. Her eyes focused on the table, and she made no acknowledgment of their presence.
“Sallie, my name is Dani Trumball, and these are my associates, Melanie Quinn and Tom Noorland. We’re with the Help Innocent Prisoners Project in New York City. We’re trying to help your husband.”
Sallie’s gaze lingered on the wooden table and she remained silent.
“Do you know where George is now?” Dani asked.
Sallie lifted her head. “He’s in hell.” The words spit out of her mouth like a hot ball shot from a cannon, and then, as if spent from the energy it took to speak, her head dropped down to the table again.
“Sallie, would you look at me, please?”
Slowly, she lifted her eyes and stared at Dani’s face.
“Sallie, George is in prison, just like you. Do you know why he’s there?”
Her voice was quiet now. She spoke barely above a whisper. “Because of Angelina.”
“Yes, that’s right. Because of Angelina. Do you know what he did to Angelina?”
“I know. I saw it.”
“Would you tell me, please?”
Sallie shook her head. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Nineteen years had passed, but Dani could see that it remained as fresh as yesterday to her. A struggle took place within Dani. Should she back off? She didn’t want to frighten Sallie into withdrawal. Although her responses had been terse, at least she was
talking to them. Dani knew Sallie held the key to George’s fate, but she didn’t know how to turn it. Should she go more slowly, try to gain her trust first? Or just forge ahead? That’s what she wanted to do—jump right in and pull the answers from Sallie’s mouth, force the truth from her locked-up mind. But she sensed she’d lose any chance at answers if she pushed too hard.
“How are you being treated here, Sallie? Is there anything we can do for you?”
“They leave me alone, the other women. They don’t bother me.”
“Is that the way you want it?”
No answer.
“How do you keep busy?”
No answer.
“Do you have a job here?”
“In the kitchen—that’s what I do. I clean up the dishes.”
“You worked in a restaurant before—before you came here, right?”
“I shouldn’t of worked. A mother should be home with her baby. If I’d been home with Angelina, I could of taken care of her. It’s his fault. He made me go to work.”
“Do you mean George?” Dani asked. She was just trying to make conversation now.
Sallie nodded.
Dani understood her conflict. Doug had pushed her to go back to work when Jonah was seven. “Did George do something to Angelina while you were at work? Did he abuse her?”
Sallie shook her head. At the risk of the guard’s barging into the room and pulling them apart, Dani took Sallie’s hands in hers. Physical contact was frowned on, but this woman seated across from her seemed to be in desperate need of someone to care about her.
“I know how hard it is for you to talk about Angelina, but it’s very important for us to know what happened. Can you tell me? Can you tell us what happened to Angelina?”
“She’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know.”
The answer Dani had hoped to find, the reason she had taken on the case, seemed just as elusive now as it had yesterday in New York. If the dead child found in the Indiana woods was not George and Sallie’s daughter, what had happened to her? “You testified at George’s trial that he beat Angelina, that he killed her and disposed of her body. Is that what happened?”
For the first time, Sallie displayed agitation. “Didn’t I say what I was supposed to say? Didn’t I do it right? Am I going to be hanged too?” she asked with a plaintive wail.
Dani squeezed Sallie’s hand. “No one’s going to hurt you. Did someone tell you to say those things? It’s okay to talk about it.”
Sallie buried her face in her hands and her body heaved with deep sobs. It took only a few minutes for her cries to subside, but it felt much longer.
When she calmed down, Dani asked again. “Please, Sallie, tell me what happened.”
“George made me do it.”
“Made you do what, Sallie?”
Sallie didn’t answer. She wrapped her arms around her body and began swaying back and forth.
“Did George make you hurt Angelina?”
A nod.
“How, Sallie? How did you hurt her?”
“I didn’t stop him.”
“Stop him from doing what? What did you watch George do?”
Sallie continued swaying. Her lips were clenched shut, as if she were fighting to keep the words locked inside her.
Dani put her hand on Sallie’s arm, a gesture she hoped would comfort Sallie. “Did George kill your daughter?” she asked quietly.
Sallie stopped her swaying and stared into space. Then, as she slowly rose from her chair, she said, “We both killed our daughter. That’s what happened. We killed our daughter.” She turned and walked to the door that led to the prison cells and knocked. One last time she turned to face Dani. Her eyes were dry and her mouth set. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Do you understand? I can’t talk about it. George is in hell, and I’m in hell, and we both belong there.”
With that, the guard opened the door and Sallie, their best hope, walked away.
CHAPTER
6
The Holiday Inn was like every other Holiday Inn Dani had stayed in: clean and simple. No luxury towels or perfumed bath soaps or terry-cloth bathrobe in the closet. Before Jonah had arrived, she and Doug stayed in hotels with all the extra touches. Travel was their reward for hard work fifty weeks of the year. Those days were gone. Now, on the rare occasions when they traveled, they headed to kid-friendly destinations: Disney World, Lake George in upstate New York, or Montauk Point at the tip of Long Island. They’d gone camping a few times with Jonah, as well. But no luxury hotels anymore.
Dani took the elevator to the lobby and headed to the hotel bar. She spotted Tommy and Melanie and slid into a seat at their table. They hadn’t discussed the interview with Sallie since leaving the prison. Dani usually preferred to let an interview rumble around in her head and settle into place before discussing it.
“What are you guys drinking?”
“Apple martini,” Melanie said. Tommy just held up his glass. He always drank scotch and water.
“Any good?” she asked Melanie.
“Decent.”
Dani followed her lead and ordered the same. “So, is she crazy or sane?”
“Calhoun’s lawyer never pushed for a psych evaluation of her,” Melanie said.
“And there’s been no need to do one since. I spoke to the assistant warden. She’s a decent prisoner. Keeps to herself most of the time. She does her work, doesn’t cause any trouble, so she pretty much flies under the radar.”
“She seemed pretty emphatic this afternoon that they both killed their daughter,” Tommy said.
“That’s not what she said in her testimony. There she said she stood by and watched George kill Angelina,” Melanie said.
Heading up this investigation was new turf for Dani. Before, the facts had been handed to her and she stirred them up into a legal argument. For it to be a winning argument, though, she had to analyze the facts, something she excelled at. Her analysis of the facts so far didn’t add up. “You’re right, Melanie. When they questioned her at her home, she said, ‘We killed her.’ Her story changed when she testified at George’s trial. Now she’s back to her original statement: ‘We killed her.’ But she said something else today that throws everything in her testimony into question. Remember when she asked if she’d said what she was supposed to say? If she’d done it right?”
Tommy shook his head. “Let’s go over it again. The police knocked on her door, asked questions, and she fingers herself and her husband. I assume they took her down to the station, she went over the details, and she realizes she’s in big trouble. She figures they’ll go easier on her if she was just a watcher, so her story changes. Then they ask her to do it again for the trial. Don’t you think that’s what she was referring to, doing it right at the trial?”
“It could be that. Or maybe she was told to say something different.”
Melanie looked puzzled. “Why would the prosecutor have her change her story? Her immediate confession was enough to convict George. How would it help them if she’d only been a bystander?”
“I don’t know. But if the police or the prosecutor asked her to change her story, there must be a reason. Maybe her version didn’t match the details of the crime, so they fed her a story. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened.”
They sipped their drinks silently for a moment. Before flying to Indianapolis, Dani had held on to a slim hope that they’d know after interviewing Sallie whether her version of the events was real or a delusion. Instead, the truth seemed even more distant.
The clouds had drifted away and Dani rummaged through her pocketbook for her sunglasses. They headed north on Interstate 65 to Michigan City, less than three hours away. Melanie drove while Tommy continued to track down leads with his cell phone and Dani studied the file. They
hadn’t advanced any further in their understanding of the case since finishing dinner last night. Today they’d meet first with Warden Coates and then with their client. They traveled in silence, all of them aware of the limited time and the stakes at hand.
As they drove, the realization struck Dani that never before had she met with a death-row inmate in a case where the decision for HIPP to represent him resided with her. She must decide whether she believed in his innocence. She must decide whether he got one more chance to try to escape the sentence he’d lived with for seventeen years. The heaviness of this responsibility weighed on her, and she wondered if she’d made the right choice in her career path. As an associate editor of the Harvard Law Review, graduating with honors, she could have gone anywhere. She’d been handed offers on silver platters, from obscenely well-paying positions with white-glove Wall Street firms to federal judicial clerkships with some of the brightest legal minds on the bench. She’d chosen the US Attorney’s Office. Assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York. That’s where she met Doug. Those were heady days while they lasted, but then Jonah came along. They could have turned him over to day care and kept going in the fast lane, but really, they couldn’t. Not after his diagnosis. Jonah deserved his chance in life, whatever that might be, and they both wanted to make sure he got it. Dani dropped out of law for about seven years, and Doug accepted an associate-professor position at Columbia Law School. And four years ago she’d signed on with HIPP. Now that Doug taught criminal law, specializing in death-penalty law, she guessed you could say she practiced and he preached. A bad lecture didn’t condemn a prisoner to a lethal injection, but she didn’t have it so easy. If she couldn’t sort through the facts and figure out what really happened, her client would die. And that scared her.