I don’t know what Mitch was able to do on redirect, because Wes Pendergraph tapped me on the shoulder and said they needed me upstairs. But the vote of the press and the lobby gossip was that the prosecution hadn’t been able to do much, and that the Moonfoot Butler round went solidly to Rosethorn.
That afternoon, the State produced the former, now retired, HPD medical examiner, who testified that at his arrest George had had nitric stains on his hands, evidence that he’d fired a gun, and that he hadn’t been drunk when he’d done it, evidence that he was in full possession of his faculties. Isaac asked the M.E. if he had checked George's eyesight. No, he hadn’t, the old doctor replied querulously; no one had asked him to. The State then produced a man George had beaten up in a ballpark fight a year before the shooting; the man said George had a violent temper. Under cross-examination, the man admitted he’d dumped his beer on George's head. Two former employers of George's testified that they’d fired him for being abusive and intractable. Under Isaac's questioning, they sounded like they’d fired him for being an uppity black man. The State attempted to produce the audiotape of Pym's dying words made in the ambulance. Isaac objected to its presentation as inflammatory and was sustained. He tried to keep out the photographs of Pym's corpse for the same reason, but was overruled. He took exception to the ruling. And so it went, with Bazemore heaping wood on the pyre, Rosethorn pouring water on the flames, and the jury watching the show from the safety of their box.
Bubba Percy, who described the afternoon's events to me, said he scored the jurors at this stage as six convictions, two acquittals, and four undecideds. He didn’t explain his betting system, and I didn’t have time to ask him about it because I was calling him from University Hospital. I called to pay off “the big one” he’d said I owed him.
I told him we had Purley Newsome in custody, and that Justin was going to make a statement about that news tomorrow, which gave the Star a morning's advantages. Bubba demanded to know if we were holding our suspect at HPD. I said no, we were holding Purley in the intensive care unit at University Hospital because he was suffering from acute bronchial pneumonia.
chapter 21
Zackery Carpenter, warden of Dollard Prison, didn’t have much time to give me. He supervised, after all, more boarders than there were in all of Haver University; kept more farmers out in his fields than were hanging on in some entire Piedmont counties; bossed more assembly-line workers in his factory (making all the linens, sewing all the uniforms for every state institution in North Carolina—from the insane asylum to the school for the blind) than Cadmean Textiles had employed at the peak of its productivity. It was probable that George Hall was now sleeping in the county jail on a mattress and pillow made at Dollard; in pants and a shirt made at Dollard, and being guarded by a deputy wearing a Dollard-made hat.
Like that out-of-the-way baron's castle it reminded me of, Dollard Prison was medievally self-sufficient—grew its own crops, made its own clothes, mortared its own bricks, tended its own sick, buried its own dead. Or maybe it was really more like one of those nineteenth-century utopian farms; only Dollard had even less tolerance for criticism of its imperfections. Stepping out of line at Dollard led to solitary (sometimes naked) lock-up in the hole (without water, without a toilet); protest led to Thorazine. Dollard laborers were not exactly competing on the free market, and they weren’t unionized, and their earning power ($25 a month) was less of an inducement than the two days taken off their sentences for each day on the line. They didn’t have the option of declining the jobs either, and what they produced belonged to the state. The left hand of the state sold their products to the right hand of the state, and rumor was that along the way, considerable change got left in some personal pockets. In fact, Warden Carpenter's predecessor at the prison was thought to have died a wealthy man, though not a popular one: inmates kept repeating the old prison joke that the man was mean enough to sprinkle thumbtacks on the electric chair.
An elderly hillbilly trusty who worked there was telling me about the difference between Carpenter and his predecessor as we waited in the warden's office for him to return from settling a shouting fracas on death row over which station to turn the communal radio to. The trusty said, “Mr. Carpenter now, he's a hard, honest man. You can take a hate to him, and some folk may have cause, but I’ve been doing life here, one day at a time, Captain, and the man, well, he won’t cheat you, and he won’t tell you a lie.” It was an interesting preamble to what Carpenter had to tell me himself when he finally came back to his office—which, like him, was big and gray and homely—and sat down in his (prison-built) rocking chair. No small talk except, from him, “Turning hot,” and from me, “Yeah, I think God's dropped spring and fall from the line- up; going for a two-season year. You notice that lately?”
“No. I don’t get outside enough to tell one month from the next.” Rocking forward, he used a kitchen match to light a large pipe with a charred black bowl, then frowned at me. “Listen, you asked me something back a while, and I dodged it. It's been on my mind.”
“You dodged two questions, Zack.” I sat down in a plain wood chair across from him. “One about Winston Russell. One about Julian Lewis.”
He nodded, sucking on the pipe. “You wanted to know, when Winston was in here, about his visitors. Okay, I gave you a list, but not the full one.”
“Oh? Somebody didn’t want his visit recorded?”
“Yeah.” Reaching into his gray bagged-out jacket, he handed me a sheet of paper; on it were typed dates and names. I saw the name Otis Newsome three times—the last time, the day before Russell had been released. The first time, very near the beginning of the list, back when Winston first went in, Otis had been accompanied on his visit by William Slidell. While I was thinking about this, Carpenter's desk intercom buzzed to say that a prisoner on East 7 had tried to cut his own throat in the showers and was on his way to the hospital in Raleigh. Carpenter settled back in his rocking chair with a soft groan. “Poor stupid, dumb kid,” he sighed, and was quiet for a minute.
“One more question, Zack.” I held up the page from the visitors’ log. “Why’re you giving me this now?”
He scratched his pipe stem against the burn scar that spread to the gray cheek stubble and changed the subject. “Other thing was, why’d Julian Lewis come over here personally that night to stop the Hall execution.”
“Because of Briggs Cadmean's death, right?”
“Well, they might’ve used that for a cover, I guess. But Lewis came because the governor made him come. Lewis was madder’n hell about that reprieve, and madder’n hell at Wollston for granting it. Seemed to me, he took it all a little too personal, whether George lived or died. Oughtn’t to be personal, I don’t figure.” Carpenter rocked quietly and talked, while around us buzzes and phones and machines and raised voices clattered. I watched him pausing to pick his words with a tight slowness, as if looking for the least distasteful ones to use to say things he didn’t like saying. “Oughtn’t be political either. Now, the governor's always been real strong pro–death penalty. He feels that it's the will of the people of this state.”
“Well, executions do seem to be getting more and more fashionable these days, don’t they? Especially here in the South. So why be unpopular and reprieve Hall?”
Carpenter looked out the window. “The governor figured if something could make this fellow Andrew Brookside take a public stand against the death penalty, well, they could count him out of the election. George Hall's case was where most of the pressure was getting put on Mr. Brookside to take that stand. But he hadn’t done it. And George's time was getting close. So—” Carpenter tapped his pipe ash out in an ugly metal bowl. “So, I guess the governor thought he’d slow things up awhile. Give the Hall supporters time to push Brookside out on a limb.…That's why the reprieve.”
“Jesus, Zack. Who told you this?”
He said, “The governor told me.”
“Governor Wollston himself told you he stayed an ex
ecution for campaign reasons?” The sad fact is, it wasn’t the doing it that surprised me so much, as the talking about it.
“Bob Wollston and I go back a lot of years. Been friends for a lot of years.” Carpenter looked at me, his jaw stiff. “That wasn’t even the point of the story he was telling me. His point was, he’d wondered what the hell the matter with Lewis was, fighting him so hard on it, when getting Lewis elected was the whole purpose of the stay. Then, afterwards, he hears Lewis has got links to people who may be in some kind of trouble that's connected to George. But he says he doesn’t know anything about it, and he told Lewis he damn well better never tell him anything about it.” A tiny sad crack of a smile opened Carpenter's thin lips. “’Course, it's all backfired now, with that Roseberg lawyer hopping on the bandwagon, getting George his retrial. I guess if you let things get political, they can jump both ways.”
“Rosethorn,” I said.
A uniformed woman stuck her head in the door with messages: the fire in the kitchen was out, a prisoner had had a bad epileptic seizure in the visitors room, and the chaplain was waiting outside. Carpenter thanked her, then when she left, went on talking to me with his same slow carefulness. He said, “I don’t know exactly how to put this. But lately I’ve been asking myself, what are these ulcers for?” His thick hard fingers pushed in on his stomach. “I’ve walked men to their deaths right here in this building, just the way I was set to walk George. Walked a woman too. Whole time all of us waiting for that phone to ring and stop us. Some I took that walk with, they went singing hymns. Even whistling, one fellow, sure the governor's call was coming. Some we dragged sobbing through the door. Some said they were guilty as sin, some died swearing their innocence, and some, well, we’ll never know.”
Carpenter shoved himself out of his rocker and walked over to the thick-glassed window. Down below, convicts were mowing grass, weeding flowers, raking gravel. He nodded his head to someone. Then he sighed. “And you know what, Cuddy, it doesn’t make a difference after that door clangs shut. They all shit their pants the same, all drool the same color blood, fists grab at the chair just the same. And watching, there's always some witness who pukes and runs off. And I always feel like doing it too.” He turned back around toward me. “I got a black boy slated to die next month. There's no fancy committees fighting to free Joe Bonder. Won’t be any either. He’ll die right on schedule. Liquor store holdup; the other guy turned state's evidence, said Joe pulled the trigger. Maybe he did. I don’t think so. But maybe he did. Other guy played the system. He’ll be out in four years. Joe's got an I.Q. about seventy-five. He smiles at me when I tell him the date of his death; says, ‘Yes, sir. I understand.’ Next day he's asking me when he can go home and see his mama.…Well, I guess I’m getting sick of it.”
I asked him if he meant he was quitting. He glanced around the large somber room, then finally he shrugged. “Maybe I won’t have a choice.” The buzzer sounded again. So I stood up while I said, “Are you saying you’ll back me if I use what you’ve given me?”
He told the voice nagging him on the intercom to hold off the chaplain and send in the parole board member. Then he pointed at the photo of Governor Wollston on the wall. “Bob Wollston gave me this job.” His lips thinned to a gray line. “Yeah. I’ll repeat what I told you if you need me to.”
“You know what I think now, Zack? I think Bobby Pym and Winston were sent to Smoke's that night to kill George.”
He rubbed the ugly face burn. “I never go into a man's personal case, unless he brings it to me, and George Hall never did. How much he was mixed in with, or knew about, what those rotten cops of yours were up to, or your city comptroller and his buddies were up to—well, I don’t know the answer. My business was, the State convicted and sentenced George. My business was, carry out the sentence for the State.” The warden's pale blue eyes had a puzzled grief in them, as he turned to face me. “But if there's no such thing as the ‘State’ that's better than you and me and Bob Wollston, then…what in God's heaven am I killing this poor dumb boy Joe Bonder for?”
As planned, Justin had met Purley at Catawba Mall, where he’d found him huddled on a bench by the “rainbow fountain,” looking as filthy, scrawny, and sick as the Raleigh waitress had portrayed him. He was almost dead from pneumonia. His skin was papery and bright hot, his breath ragged, and he was shaking so badly Justin had to get help walking him to the car. Purley passed out before he could be raced to University Hospital, but not before telling at least some of his “side of the story,” in what Justin described as nonstop delirious self-pity, the theme of which was that Winston Russell was crazy. That he used to look up to Winston, but now he knew: Winston was crazy. That Winston had put him through hell, running and hiding, hiding and running. Thanks to the newspapers and TV, the police were looking for them even in Georgia and Alabama. Winston wouldn’t let them stay in motels or buy groceries or even drive into towns. He stole them cars and food in out-of-the-way places. He made them hole up in three different abandoned cabins in wilderness areas, the last one in a national forest near Pisgah in the Appalachian Mountains. There, a hiker had stumbled on their camp, and Winston had shot him and buried him. He was crazy. Purley had tried to run away that night, but Winston had beaten him up. Winston was the meanest man that ever lived; he didn’t care that Purley was hungry and sick and scared out of his mind. He took all Purley's money. He told Purley he’d blow him away if he tried to turn himself in, just like he’d blown away Willie Slidell. Winston didn’t care about anything. He didn’t care that Purley kept getting sicker and sicker. He didn’t even care that Otis had killed himself; when they’d read the news, he’d called Otis a “chickenshit.” Winston had abandoned Purley weak and helpless in the cabin one day, barring the door while he drove off to steal food. He never thought Purley would be strong enough, with his high fever, to break through a window, or tough enough to walk thirty miles out of the mountainous forest, or smart enough to find his way to a road. But Purley had showed him, hadn’t he? And Purley was going to talk, because none of it was his fault, and nobody had told him it would be this bad, and all he’d done was go along, and he was just tired, too tired to run anymore, and Winston was crazy.
Standing by the foot of the bed in the intensive care unit at University Hospital, I whispered to Justin, “Okay, go on.” We’d agreed that I’d keep out of the interrogation, because of Purley's strong (and reciprocated) feelings about me. Except it was (almost) hard to despise the jerk as he lay there, flushed, pupils shrunk to scared dots, the once pink beefy limbs now lank and gray, tubes in his arms and his nose. Pulling a chair up close, Justin punched on his tape cassette as he crooned, “Purley? You tell me if I’ve got it right.” There was a nod that didn’t lift the head from the pillow. Justin gave him a friendly pat, as he said, “Okay. Winston shot Cooper Hall. You weren’t there. He told you he’d done it. Right?”
Purley tried to wet his lips so he could speak; his voice sounded like someone talking long distance. “Willie Slidell told me. Willie was driving.”
Justin nodded. “Now back up a second. You’d followed Andrew Brookside to Lake Road Airport; you were keeping tabs on him for Otis. And when you saw Brookside meet up with Cooper Hall, you called Otis right away because you figured—”
With weary impatience, Purley interrupted in a low hurried voice. “I didn’t figure nothing. I told Otis I saw them, and he called up the farm, and talked to Winston. Winston comes and says Otis told him, ‘Take Hall out right now.’”
Justin nodded. “Now, you said in the car that Cooper Hall had phoned Otis early that morning and told him he’d found out about this videotape of Andrew Brookside. That he claimed he’d seen a copy. And that he also had information about Lewis's past affiliations that the press would be interested in. That he wanted Otis to set up a meeting with Lewis. Is that right?”
I looked over at Justin, surprised. So Cooper Hall had been going for a double squeeze, leaning on the left and the right, on the Brookside cre
w and the Lewis crew both, to grab as many guarantees for his people as he could. Christ, the man had the tactics of a ward boss and the guts of a saint.
Justin went on. “Otis was scared that Hall was really working for Brookside. Scared he’d gotten to somebody inside your group. Scared maybe somebody was leaking him stuff.”
“Winston said Otis was scared. Give me some water, Say-ville. I’m burning up….”
When Justin took the paper cup away, Purley weakly spread the spilled water from his lips up over his flushed cheeks. “Listen, Otis never gave any go-ahead to get rid of Hall. He never said it to me, and I was his brother. And Willie didn’t know about it neither. Willie fucking freaked when Winston shot Hall. He thought they were just tailing Hall. He tells me Winston just yells, ‘PASS HIM!,’ then he plugs Hall right out the window. Winston is crazy, Say-ville.”
“That's right, you’re right. Just lie back.” Justin got Purley's head back down on the pillow. “But Winston hated Cooper Hall, didn’t he, like you told me in the car? I mean, Cooper's brother had killed Bobby Pym, and Bobby was Winston's partner.”
Shaking his head, Purley mumbled, “I guess. I don’t know. Everything got messed up. It was the money. You know, in Raleigh? Somebody’d got it.”
Justin said, yes, we knew that. “So when Winston got out of Dollard, he went to check the locker at the bus station. Bobby had had the key to the locker in his wallet and Winston had never been able to track it down.”
“Winston went straight to Lana—”
“Did he think Bobby's widow was holding out on him? Did he think she had the money?”
Purley's breath was getting shallow, broken by a hacking gasp. “At first.…But he was paying a guy in baggage at the bus station. To, you know, watch the locker for him. And…this baggage guy calls Winston at the farm…says this little bum that's been around a lot— we find out it's a guy named Gilchrist—that he's just come back, opening up the locker for…Hall. Winston freaked.”
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