Laura appeared to recover from the initial shock and was already jumping on her horse and riding off in all directions. “I need to go to him today,” she said.
Raiford is a five-hour drive north of Palm Beach and would take the whole day. I thought about Mom and Dad. But for now I focused on Hench instead. “Do you really think you can stop this?” I asked, not voicing my personal opinion.
“How the hell should I know?” he snarled, and then shook his head as if trying to get the useless anger out. “Sorry, but I can tell from your face you’re thinking we’re idiots. It’s par for you people. But that’s how it is. It’s defense. We try to see justice done. Sometimes we succeed.” He glared at me as if he anticipated my response and got to it ahead of me. “Or maybe we are all just idiots. But the world has to be made aware that forensics is not infallible. We need to show that some cases are built on forensic mistakes and flawed witness testimony.”
Laura had re-coiled her arms and started to pace like we were wasting daylight and her next move would be out the door. It nearly was until Hench stopped her.
“Just wait a second, Laura. We know what the evidence is. We have less time to line it up, and right now we only need enough to make a case for a stay of execution. We can do this.” His eyes gleamed with spirit and maybe the excitement of the chase as he slurped his coffee. “And I’ve got a possible ace. I’ve got a TV interview scheduled.”
“Local station?” Laura asked, turning back into the room and leaning across Hench’s desk.
“National. It’s a tremendous opportunity,” he said to both of us. “Maybe the publicity will give us a little more leverage.” He made a brave gesture of giving a one-two punch. “Can’t hurt,” he said, and to Laura, “But don’t let up on what you’re doing. Any bit of evidence, an excluding fingerprint, the phone records, will support the stay. Best case is I have something to offer on-air.”
“How much time do we have?” Laura asked.
“The TV slot I was offered is day after tomorrow, airing on the six o’clock news, filming in the morning at a local studio. Apparently it’s a hot topic because it will be the first execution following the passage of that law. If we can make it public, we can make it political. Our chances are better that they’ll back down.”
Laura didn’t say anything but tucked her thumbs into her blazer pockets, which to someone trained in body language said everything about whether she gave this idea a thumbs-up.
Will said, “They would have been willing to schedule it for tomorrow, but the other person they want to get can’t make it until the next day.”
“Who’s the other person?” Laura asked.
“Alison Samuels.”
“Well, isn’t that just the most idiotic thing you could do,” Laura said, taking her hands out of her pockets and throwing them in the air.
“It’s that controversy thing they do now where they’re hoping we start to yell at each other,” Hench said, more to me than to Laura. “It’s the only way they’d agree to the interview.”
“Who’s Alison Samuels?” I asked.
Will shuffled some papers around on his desk, but tentatively, as if he feared the woman was hiding under the pile and would jump out at him. “I’m on my way up to Tallahassee,” he said. “Laura, would you please tell Brigid about Madame Defarge?”
Nine
We’d gotten into the car before I finally murmured something vague about the drive to Raiford and my promise to go back to the hospital.
Laura tried not to look like she was asking for anything as she said, “He’s not in Raiford. They built a new prison for the overflow. It’s just about forty-five minutes from here, west of Jupiter.”
When I didn’t say oh, well, then immediately, she said with hardly any ice in her tone, “But no problem. Really. Just take me back to Pompano to get my car.”
That would have added two hours to her trip, and I got the sense those two hours were precious to her today. I declined and headed north instead.
On the road I had Laura call the hospital so I could tell Mom I’d be a teensy bit late getting back. Laura was able to get to the room, but no one answered. Mom definitely needed a cell phone. I had Laura call her apartment at Weeping Willow and, with no answer there either, left a message that I’d be back in the afternoon and reminded her of my cell phone number.
What with thinking about my parents, I forgot to ask Laura about Madame Defarge.
Jefferson State Penitentiary was much more high-tech than I remembered Raiford being. There weren’t fenced runs staffed by guard dogs, for one thing. They had been replaced with higher-tech surveillance.
I might point out that Florida is ahead of Texas in the number of prisoners on death row, more than four hundred at last count, and only trails behind California. However you look at it, the statistics aren’t happy ones for convicted felons. But no one has been able to come up with a better way to warehouse them.
The warden had received my preclearance request from Will, and approval from Marcus Creighton. We got through the first checkpoint with Laura’s ID, parked in visitor parking, signed in (Laura grunted as she did so), handed over our weapons, and were shown into a waiting room preparatory to meeting Marcus Creighton in a private room. We didn’t have to do the glass partition thing.
A guard, who Laura introduced as Wally, came to meet us, said hello to me, and turned back to Laura. “You were just here,” he said.
Laura’s face flushed. Flushing is odd in a woman who owns brass knuckles. “I don’t think—” she started.
“Yeah, just a few days ago. You’d been coming about once a week,” Wally said.
Laura was silent, so Wally turned to lead the way. We followed behind him. We walked through clanging door after clanging door that, even in the short time the prison had been around, had all been painted layer upon layer until the surfaces of the bars looked deceptively malleable.
If the General Population cell block was a zoo, with a thousand animals all shouting at the same time, and the only place on earth where you could smell communal bad breath, let alone the expected urine stench, death row was something else. “Row” didn’t begin to describe it. The number of prisoners housed here needed much more than a single row.
We walked down a wide hallway that looked up to a ceiling forty feet above, where fluorescent lights, some flickering, cast a blue-white glow over the pale green cinder-block walls. Solid metal doors with slots in them just big enough for a food tray spanned the three stories of cells above us. If the cells weren’t full, somebody was planning for a future boom in the prison industry.
And yet it was quieter than General Population. Here the prisoners didn’t need to do subhuman things like make shit bombs out of their own feces and lob them at the guards. No, this was where the worst were housed, men who no longer had to prove how bad they were in order to survive. The metal doors that kept these men contained didn’t ease my feeling that I was breathing in evil, that I was being coated with it. This might not be the lowest level of hell, because I’d already been there and I knew what it looked like. But this was easily the vestibule.
“How is Marcus Creighton getting on?” I asked Wally, to provide a sound other than that of his slightly out-turned feet in rubber-soled shoes squeaking like a mallard on the glossy linoleum.
“I’ve liked him,” Wally said. “He’s educated. Refined. And you know, who hasn’t thought of buying that ticket to Bali, wiping the slate clean, and flying off the next day?”
I felt myself controlling my eyeballs so they wouldn’t roll.
A few more steps and then, “Is there extradition from Bali?” Wally asked no one in particular without turning around.
No, I thought.
“Sure there is,” Laura said.
Wally thought about that some. “Mr. Creighton had a bad attack today,” Wally said.
“I noticed Alison Samuels was here. She has a dog.” Laura turned to me. “Sometimes the inhaler works and sometimes it doesn’
t.” And back to Wally. “How bad was it?”
“We had to take him to the clinic and get him a shot of epinephrine. You’re right, it was when that Samuels woman came to visit. God awmighty, I don’t know what zone that woman lives in, but he was still wheezing like he couldn’t get the air out of his lungs in order to take the next breath, and she just sat there asking him questions like he could answer if he really wanted to. Like maybe she thought he was pretending to be sick. She even stayed till after he came back from the clinic.”
We got to the interviewing room, where Creighton was seated at the far end of a rectangular table. His wrists were cuffed. His hair was wet, which meant this was shower day. Was that the last time he would shower before his death? He wore an orange T-shirt over blue pants. Regular prisoners wore blue shirts. At this prison it was the orange T-shirt that said you were a death row prisoner.
“Hey, Marcus.”
“Wally,” Marcus wheezed. He sounded worse than Dad had the night before.
“You’re a popular guy today,” Wally said.
“Guesso,” Creighton said. He forced his breath out with some difficulty, drew in another with the same effort, and asked, “Howz daught’s gradu … wheez?”
“She was pretty hungover but managed to make it up to the stage. I’m about done with this crap.”
I do not think that the fact that Wally was expressing his familial dissatisfaction to someone who had been convicted of wiping out his own was lost on anyone but, apparently, Wally.
Marcus let the subject drop. Laboring over another breath in preparation for the next few words, he said more clearly than before, “Please. Bring inhaler? And that thing?”
“Are you allowed to use it again so soon after the shot?”
Marcus gave Wally a thin smile, and we all acknowledged the absurdity of keeping a man safe on death row, and Wally left us alone.
Laura sat down on the side of the table, and I sat at the other end to have the best vantage point to see them at the same time. Creighton nodded politely at me, seemed curious, but then focused on Laura. That left me the freedom to observe him.
Pale as sandstone, either from lack of sunlight or his asthma attack, he reminded me of a splendid ruin, its surface crumbled by time and the winds of fortune, but showing all its former glory through the wreckage. He still had all of his hair, thick and wavy but totally gray, like mine. Besides the shower, he had shaved, in preparation for either us or another guest. His prison attire looked clean and hardly wrinkled. That’s about all he had to work with, but he was one of those men whose handsomeness survived no matter what, so you could understand how at least two women had once been in love with him. He seemed to be aware of all this, and ran his fingers through his hair because that was the only part of him he could do anything about. With every gesture his hands moved in tandem because of the wrist cuffs.
“I’m due for a haircut,” he said, his breathing beginning to normalize. “Did you get a chance to bring that book?”
“I’m sorry, I forgot it in the car. Distracted,” Laura said, her head tilting to the side and her voice sounding softer than I’d ever heard it before. “I could—”
“Never mind, next time,” he said, shaking his head.
Laura’s hand almost went to her throat but then passed over the birthmark on her face instead. This may have been her most honest expression of the confidence she had in Creighton’s case. If the man realized the irony in what he said, that there might not be time to read another book, he ignored it.
“I still have a ways to go with…” he said, trailing off. Laura would know which book he meant because she had brought it to him. They could speak in the half sentences of intimates. Creighton took off his wire-rimmed prison glasses and pinched his shirt around them to rub them clean. The cuffs made this awkward, but he managed.
I asked, “Do you like to read?”
He seemed pleased to talk about anything but his case, and said, “I didn’t use to, but I find it makes the time bearable.”
“What do you like to read?” I asked.
“Long books.”
“Alison Samuels was here,” Laura said, forcing him toward business.
“That’s right,” he said, wheezing less with each breath, and better able to speak as long as he breathed after every few words. “I’m in demand. Like that show. Wally told me about. The Bachelor. It’s still on, right?” Trying to engage Laura on a topic that would make him appear he had much more time than five days.
For the first time I noticed he had a white five-by-seven card before him on the table. In an absentminded way the fingers of his right hand curled and straightened so that they moved the card up and down, up and down.
Laura’s voice took back its usual edge. “Why do you see Alison Samuels, Marcus? Even if she didn’t upset you so much, she’s got a dog. They should never let people in to see you if they have pets. Just refuse to see her.” Laura turned to me and said, “Marcus reacts to animals the way some people react to peanuts. It’s a real problem for him.”
Thinking of Al and Peg at home, and whether I might have some Pug residue on me the way killers have gunshot residue on them, I drew back in my chair.
“Is she still telling you she’s looking for your children?” Laura asked.
Creighton looked like he was forming his lips to repeat That’s right, and then, maybe thinking too much repetition might make him sound crazy, he nodded and smiled to reassure us that he was not. “She’s working very hard,” he said. He moved the card up and down, up and down, in front of him.
“Marcus,” Laura said, “is that another picture you’ve got there?”
For a second he looked like a child caught passing a note in school. His eyes drifted to the side and his hand went flat over the card, though he couldn’t possibly hide it. I looked at the hands at rest. Though the knuckles were somewhat swollen with stress arthritis, the hands were still that combination of elegance and masculinity. I thought of Carlo and wished I could be away from here, sitting on our TV room sofa with his hand resting lightly on my leg, listening to him talk about a book I didn’t understand.
Laura’s own fingers crept forward over the table toward the card. “Could I see it?”
He shook his head no, and besides the refusal it communicated, the shake seemed to bring him back from the person most of us succeed in hiding most of the time. “I’d really rather not, Laura,” he said. He slapped his hand on the card like it would win the jackpot and smiled. “You tend to be a little discouraging.”
“Marcus, that’s just cruel.” Laura looked at me again. “Samuels brings him photographs of exploited children who might be his. She thinks if he didn’t kill them, he got rid of them somehow, sold them or something. You know you can say you don’t want to see someone,” Laura said, turning back to him. “Why talk to someone who doesn’t have your interest at heart?”
“My interest,” he said. “Sometimes I think she’s the only person who cares. She knows my children are alive. She’s looking for them. I have reason to believe she’ll look for them even after I’m dead.” His hand pulled the photograph closer to him. An expression, sad and disappointed, slid down his face. “You don’t even think they’re alive.”
“Marcus. We’ve gone over this. I don’t have any opinion at all about your children. My job is to find the evidence that will get you a new trial.”
He rubbed his mouth with his hand and was contrite. “I’m sorry, Laura. Of course you are, and you’re doing everything you can for me. I’m so sorry.”
Putting aside talk of the children’s survival, a talk they must have had before, Laura said, “I’m here today because I wanted to reassure you face-to-face that we, Will and I, we haven’t given up. I’ve got good news. The same cell phone company still owns the service you used in 1999.”
He seemed to read the look on her face and responded with cautious excitement. “Is that good? You look like this is good news. I could use some.”
L
aura explained the significance of the phone records and how I was there to help get the hair dryers. “This is Brigid Quinn, and she’s going to help us. She has some connections.”
Now he really saw me, and the man who had mastered calculus put two and two together. Ran his fingers through his hair again. “I usually don’t look this hopeless,” he said to me, trying for a small laugh and almost getting there. “It’s the asthma attack. And the somewhat disappointing news about my upcoming execution. I promise you, most of the time I look like someone worth saving.”
“It’s okay. I’ve seen worse,” I said, trying to observe him with all I had. I’ve been caught by liars when I wasn’t expecting it, but this was one of those times when I thought a person was lying and I was just looking for proof. It would make this part of my trip so easy.
“Do you think you can help?” Creighton asked, and to disguise any real hope that might have crept into his question, he added a flippant “I’d really prefer not to die.”
A voice came over the loudspeaker: “Counting time. Counting time.” Wally interrupted us just then by poking his head in the door. We all looked up. “Just counting,” he said.
“Here,” Creighton said, and Wally seemed to enjoy the little joke that Creighton delivered without humor. Then Wally’s face lit up with a remembered thing, and he took an inhaler out of his pocket, as well as something that looked like a small book. Wally left both within Creighton’s reach. When Wally left, Creighton took a hit off the inhaler.
He was silent after the “here.” No matter how much you learn, when you spend twenty-three hours a day in a cell, and the twenty-fourth standing in line for the phone to talk to your attorney, counting time, and using the inhaler, having conversations with more than one person may overwhelm. Creighton looked momentarily fatigued, and let his head drop slightly like that of a mechanical toy whose crank had run out. Then he lifted it for another go.
A Twist of the Knife Page 6