by Greg Iles
“He’s Livy’s father.”
“God, it’s so incestuous down here.”
“Like Boston?”
“Worse.”
Caitlin calls the flight attendant and orders a gimlet, but this is beyond the resources of the galley. There seems to be a nationwide shortage of Rose’s Lime Juice. She orders a martini instead.
“So,” she says, “what made her so special?”
“How many people were in your graduating class?”
“About three hundred.”
“Mine had thirty-two. And most of those had been together since nursery school. It was like an extended family. We watched each other grow up for fourteen years. And those thirty-two people did some extraordinary things.”
“Such as?”
“Well, there’s high school, and then there’s life. Out of thirty-two people we had six doctors, ten lawyers, a photographer who won the Pulitzer last year—”
“And you,” she finishes. “Best-selling novelist and legal eagle.”
“Every class thinks it’s special, of course. But in a town as small as Natchez, and a school as small as St. Stephens, you have to have something like a genetic accident to get a class like ours. Our football team had eighteen people on it. Everyone played both ways. And we were ranked in the top ten in the state in the rankings of public schools. That’s ranked against schools like yours, with seventy players on the squad. Our baseball team was the first single-A team in the history of Mississippi to win the overall state title.”
She rolls her eyes. “So you were big-time in Mississippi sports. Let’s call CNN.”
“Sports means a lot in high school.”
“What about academics?”
“Second-highest SATs in the state.”
“When do we get to Miss Perfect?”
“Livy was the center of all that. The star everyone revolved around. Homecoming queen, head cheerleader, valedictorian . . . you name it, she was it.”
Caitlin groans. “Gag me with a soup ladle.”
“If you plop most high school queens down at a major university, they’ll disappear like daisies at a flower show. Not Livy. She was head cheerleader at Virginia, president of the Tri-Delts, and made law review at the UVA law school.”
“She sounds schizophrenic.”
“She probably is. She was born to a man who wanted sons, in a decade when the cultural dynamic of the fifties was still alive and kicking in the South. She was a brilliant and beautiful girl with a mother who thought in terms of her marrying well and a father who wanted her to be president. She killed a ten-point buck when she was eleven years old, just to prove she could do anything a boy could.”
“Spare me the body count. I suppose she graduated, won the Nobel prize, and raised two-point-five perfect kids?”
I can’t help but laugh at the animosity Livy has inspired in Caitlin; it can only be based on the degree to which Livy has intimidated her. “Actually, she sold out.”
Caitlin cringes in mock horror. “Not the head cheerleader of the law review?”
“She took the biggest offer right out of law school and never looked back. Chased money and power all the way.”
“Who did she marry?”
“This is the part I like. She had this Howard Roark fixation. You know, the architect from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead? She wanted the absolute alpha male, an artist-logician who wouldn’t take any shit off her or compromise once in his life.”
“Did she find him?”
“She married an entertainment lawyer in Atlanta. He represents athletes and rap singers.”
“There is justice,” Caitlin says, laughing. “Though I guess he made a lot more money than a Houston prosecutor.”
“Twenty times more, at least.”
“Why did you stay in the D.A.’s office so long? I thought most lawyers only did that for a couple of years to prep themselves for private defense work.”
“That’s true. Most people who stay are very different from me. Zealots, moralists. Jesuits, I call them. Military types who like to punish criminals. My boss was a lot like that.”
“So, why did you stay?”
“I was accomplishing something. I felt I was a moral counterweight to those people. Some liberals even said I had an overdeveloped sense of justice. And that may be true. I convicted a lot of killers, and I don’t apologize for it. I believe evil should be held accountable.”
“Whoa, that was Evil with a capital E.”
“It’s out there. Take my word for it.”
“An overdeveloped sense of justice. Is that why you’re investigating the Payton case?”
“No. I’m doing that because of Livy Marston.”
Caitlin looks like I hit her in the head with a hammer. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I lean into the aisle and signal the flight attendant; it’s time for a Scotch. “Twenty years ago Livy’s father used very bit of his power to try to destroy my father. He didn’t succeed, but he separated Livy and me forever. And I never knew why.”
“And you think Marston is involved in the Payton murder?”
“Yes.”
“God, I’m trapped in a Southern gothic novel.”
“You asked for it.”
She finishes off her martini in a gulp. “I hope nobody’s going to ask me to squeal like a pig.”
I laugh as she orders another martini, amazed by how quickly the age difference between us has become irrelevant. I wonder how far apart we really are. Does she know that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the greatest songwriters who ever lived? That the pseudo-nihilism of Generation X was merely frustrated narcissism? That I, at thirty-eight years old, am as trapped in my own era as a septuagenarian humming “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me” and dreaming of the agony of Anzio is trapped in his?
“Back up,” Caitlin says. “You and Livy were high school sweethearts?”
“No. For most of high school we were competitors. She only dated older guys, and no one steadily. She was her own person. She never wore a boy’s letter jacket or class ring. She needed nothing external to define her or make her feel accepted. But at some point we both realized we were destined for bigger futures than most people we knew. We were going to leave that town far behind. That awareness inevitably pulled us together. We both loved literature and music, both excelled in all our classes. We dated for four months at the end of our senior year. We were both going to Ole Miss in the fall, but she was going to Radcliffe for the summer—”
“Oh, my God,” Caitlin exclaims. “That magnolia blossom actually darkened the door of Radcliffe?”
“Aced every class, I’m sure. She wouldn’t let Yankees feel superior to her for a second.”
Caitlin makes a wry face, then sips her martini and looks out her window. “Was she good in bed?”
“A gentleman never tells.”
She turns and punches my shoulder. “Jerk.”
“What would you guess?”
“Probably. She has the intensity for it.”
Yes. . .
“How did her father split you up?”
“He took a malpractice case against my father and pressed it to the wall. My dad was exonerated, but the trial was so brutal it nearly broke him. There was no way Livy and I could work through that.”
Caitlin is watching me intently. “You’re leaving a lot out, aren’t you?”
Of course I am. How do we explain the abiding mysteries of our lives? “Livy never showed up at Ole Miss,” I say softly. “She disappeared. Fell off the face of the planet. Her parents told people she’d gone to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, but I called to check, and they had no record of her. A year later word filtered out that she’d just entered the University of Virginia as a freshman. I have no idea where she spent the previous year, and neither does anyone else.”
“Maybe she got pregnant. Went off and had the baby somewhere.”
“I thought about that. But this was the late s
eventies, not the fifties. Her older sister had gotten pregnant a few years before, and she had an abortion, even though they were Catholic. Livy would have done the same thing. She wouldn’t have let anything slow down her career.” There’s another reason I’m sure pregnancy is not the answer, but there’s no point in getting clinical about it.
“Why did she go to the University of Virginia?”
“I think because it was far from Mississippi but still the South. She got an unlisted number, cut herself off from her old friends. By the time my father’s trial got going, I didn’t care anymore.”
“You didn’t ask her why her father was going after yours?”
This memory is one of my worst. “I flew up to Charlottesville a week before the trial, to try to get her to make Leo drop the case. My dad had already had a heart attack from the stress. She said she thought it was just a normal case, and that her father wouldn’t listen to her opinion anyway. She was back in her high school queen mode, winning hearts and minds at UVA. It was like talking to a stranger.” I take a burning sip of Scotch. “I wanted to kill her.”
“Yes, but you loved her. You’re still in love with her.”
“No.”
Caitlin smiles, not without empathy. “You are. You always will be.”
“That’s a depressing thought.”
“No. Just recognize it and move on. Livy’s not the person you think she is. Nobody could be. And you’d better be careful. She just separated from her husband, and you’re still grieving over your wife. She could really mess you up.”
“I’m no babe in the woods, Caitlin.”
Her smile is timeless. All men are babes in the woods, it says. “You’re trying to destroy her father now. How do you think she’ll react to that?”
“I don’t know. She has a love-hate relationship with him. It’s like something out of Aeschylus. She knows he’s done terrible things, but in some ways she’s just like him.”
“You should try very hard to keep that in mind.”
“Why?”
She takes a pair of headphones from her lap, plugs them into the seat jack, and starts flipping through her channel guide. “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”
“She came to my wife’s funeral. We only spoke for a moment, though.”
“Before that.”
“A long time. Maybe seventeen years.”
“You pull the lid off something that might get her father charged with capital murder, and suddenly she shows up like magic?”
“What are you saying? That her father called her to Natchez to . . . to influence me somehow? Because of your newspaper story?”
Caitlin shrugs. “I don’t want to upset you, but that’s what I’m saying.”
She gives me a sad smile and puts on the headphones.
CHAPTER 20
I thought I was the last person to arrive in the witness room at Huntsville Prison until FBI Director John Portman walked in, flanked by two field agents who shadowed him like centurions guarding an emperor. Up to that point the preparations for the execution had proceeded with the tense banality that characterizes them all.
I had arrived to find the room nearly full. My old boss, Joe Cantor, motioned me to the empty chair beside Mrs. Givens, the closest relative of the victims. The curtain was drawn over the window of the extermination chamber, but I knew Arthur Lee Hanratty was already strapped to the gurney behind it, while a technician searched for veins good enough to take large-bore IV lines.
I hadn’t seen Mrs. Givens for eight years, but the smell of cigarettes on her clothes brought back everything, a nervous woman who chain-smoked through every pretrial meeting and rushed for the courthouse door at every recess. She had a Bible in her lap tonight, open to Job. When I touched her hand, she clenched my wrist and asked if I’d seen many executions before, and if they were difficult to watch. In a quiet voice, I explained the procedure: sodium thiopental to shut down Hanratty’s brain; Pavulon to paralyze him and stop his breathing; potassium chloride to stop his heart.
“You mean they put him to sleep before they give the bad chemicals?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Will he be able to say anything?”
“I’m afraid so. He’ll be allowed to make a final statement for the record.”
She patted the leather-bound book in her lap. “I’m not going to listen. I’m going to read the Good Book then.”
“That sounds like a good idea.” Killers often asked forgiveness at the end, but that wasn’t Hanratty’s style.
That was the moment that the door at the back of the room opened. Some reporters in front of me turned around, and recognition and amazement lit their faces. I turned and froze, confronted by the most unlikely vision I thought I would see at midnight in Texas.
John Portman looks like a walking advertisement for Brooks Brothers: thin and strong but a bit stiff, handsome with a longish face framed by hair gone gracefully gray. He was fifty-five when he and I crossed swords over Arthur Lee Hanratty, but he looked forty. He scarcely looks older now. I’ve always sensed a Dorian Gray aura about him, as though he were committing secret sins that never registered on his countenance.
I can’t imagine what he’s doing here. There’s no upside for him. None that I can see, anyway. Maybe it’s as simple as revenge. His experience with Hanratty almost derailed his juggernaut career, and Portman definitely knows how to carry a grudge. Watching Hanratty die might give him a great deal of satisfaction.
While his guards take up positions against the wall, he walks straight to the front row and sits in the empty chair next to Joe Cantor, who looks as surprised as the rest of us. I half expect Portman to turn and give me a grim smile, but he stares straight ahead at the curtain beyond which Arthur Lee Hanratty will soon take his last breath.
As we wait in silence, I realize I’m listening for the ring of a telephone. Conditioned by movies—and by a couple of real-life experiences—I run through the dramatic possibilities: the last-minute pardon, the hard-won stay courtesy of some crusading young lawyer from the ACLU. But that won’t happen tonight. Even the mob of placard-bearing demonstrators outside the walls looked smaller and more subdued than usual as I passed through it. A few hundred people chanting dispiritedly in the Texas rain. Arthur Lee Hanratty is a poster boy for capital punishment.
Suddenly the curtain is drawn back, revealing a man in an orange jumpsuit on an execution gurney, which looks like a medical exam table that has been welded to the floor. Strapped to the gurney with IV lines running saline into his arms, Hanratty doesn’t look much like the madman I remember—a killer with the bunched and corded muscles of the convict weightlifter—but like every other man I’ve seen on that table. Helpless. Doomed. He reminds me of Ray Presley, though Hanratty has the lamplike eyes of the fanatic, not the cold rattlesnake beads of Presley.
The warden retained a good venipuncturist tonight—or else Hanratty has good veins—because the execution is proceeding on schedule. The warden stands with two guards against the wall behind the gurney. At 11:58 he steps forward and asks Hanratty if he has any final words. I once watched a man sing “Jesus Loves Me” with tears in his eyes at this point, and die with the song on his lips. But I don’t think that’s what’s coming now.
Hanratty cranks his neck around and searches our eyes one witness at a time, like a brimstone preacher trying to put the fear of Hell into his congregation. I’ve always felt that the window here should be one-way glass, to prevent the killer from making eye contact with the spectators. But the families of murder victims don’t want it that way. Many of them want their faces to be the last thing the condemned sees before he dies. When Hanratty finds my eyes, I give him nothing.
“Well, well, well,” he croons from the gurney, “everybody’s here tonight. We got Mr. Penn Cage, who got famous killing my brother and convicting my ass. We got Joe Cantor, who got reelected off Mr. Cage convicting my ass. And we got former U.S. Attorney Portman, head of the FBI. I’m flattered you ca
me to see me off, Port. Ironic, ain’t it? If you could have covered up me killing that Compton nigger like you wanted to, none of us would have to be here tonight.”
The reporters devour this unexpected windfall like starving jackals. Surely, Portman must have known something like this could happen. The warden takes a step closer to the gurney. The word “nigger” has got him thinking about gagging Hanratty, though legally the condemned man is allowed to speak freely.
“After tonight,” Hanratty goes on, “there’ll only be one of us Hanrattys left. But that’s all right. My brother knows what to do. Some of you folks are gonna get a visit real soon. Some warm night when you least expect it, a deer slug’s gonna plow right through your brain. Or maybe through your kid’s brain—”
The warden motions to his guards.
“I got a right to speak!” Hanratty shouts, neck muscles straining.
The warden raises his hand, stopping the guards. He’d like to avoid being branded a fascist by the media if he can avoid it.
“Evening, Mrs. Givens,” Hanratty says in a syrupy voice. “I’ll be thinking ’bout your sister and your niece when they send me off to Jesus. I’ve thought about them many a night when I’m falling asleep. Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Givens’s shivering hand clenches my wrist like a claw.
“The black man is a mongrel creature,” Hanratty says with a tone of regret. “But the good Lord knows a nigger wench is heaven between the sheets.”
“Gag the prisoner,” orders the warden.
“All you motherfuckers gonna die worse than me!” Hanratty shouts. “This ain’t nothing! Nothing!”
Two guards seize Hanratty’s head and fasten a black leather restraining device over his mouth and chin. The warden checks his watch and motions for the guards to follow him out of the room. Mrs. Givens isn’t reading her Bible anymore. She’s gripping my left wrist like it is the handrail on a cliff, her eyes riveted to the gurney.
“Are the chemicals going in?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am. He’s got about five minutes to live.”