Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  “Okay,” Cowart said helplessly. Any thought of trying to explain what had happened had dissipated in the waves of enthusiasm Will poured over the phone line. Cowart realized if Martin was this way—a man dedicated to a slow, thoughtful, editorial-page-consideration pace of events—the city desk was probably frantic with excitement. A big story has a universal impact on the staff of a newspaper. It catches hold of everyone, sucks them in, makes them feel as if they’re a part of the events. He took a deep breath. “I’m on my way,” he said quietly. “But how do I get past the camera crews?”

  “No problem. You know where the downtown Marriott Hotel sorta hides behind the Omni Mall? On that little back street by the bay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, a home-delivery truck will pick you up, right on the corner, in twenty minutes. Just jump in and come in the freight entrance.”

  “Cloak and dagger, huh?” Cowart was forced to smile.

  “These are dangerous times, my son, demanding unique efforts. It was the best we could come up with on short notice. Now, I suppose the CIA or the KGB could think of something better, but who’s got the time? And anyway, outwitting a bunch of television reporters shouldn’t be the hardest damn thing in the world.”

  “I’m on my way.” Then suddenly, he thought of the tapes in his briefcase containing the confession and the truth about Joanie Shriver’s murder. He couldn’t let anyone hear those words. Not until things had settled, and he’d sorted out what he was going to do. He scrambled. “Look, I need to shower first. Hold the pickup for, say, forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour.”

  “Not a chance. You don’t need to be clean to write.”

  “I’ve got to collect my thoughts.”

  “You want me to tell the city editor you’re thinking?”

  “No, no, just say I’m on my way, I’m just getting my notes together. Thirty minutes, Will. Half an hour. Promise.”

  “No more. Got to move, son. Got to move.” Will Martin made slapping sounds to punctuate the urgency of the moment.

  “A half hour. No more.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell the city editor. Man’s gonna have a heart attack and it’s only ten A.M. The truck will be waiting for you. Just hurry. Keep the poor guy alive another day, huh?” Martin laughed at his joke and hung up.

  Cowart’s head spun. He knew he was running out of choices, that the detectives would arrive at his office momentarily. Things were moving too rapidly for him to contain. He had to go in and write something. Things were expected of him.

  But instead of grabbing his jacket, he seized his briefcase and pulled out the tapes. It only took him a second to locate the last tape; he’d been careful to number them as each was completed. For a moment he held the tape in his hand and considered destroying it, but instead, he took it over to his own stereo system and plugged it into the tape deck. He wound the tape through to the end, then backtracked it a few feet and punched the Play button. Blair Sullivan’s gravel voice burst through the speakers, filling the small apartment with its acid message. Cowart waited until he heard the words: “. . . Now I will tell you the truth about little Joanie Shriver.”

  He stopped the tape and rewound it a few feet, to where Blair Sullivan said, “That’s all thirty-nine. Some story, huh?” And he’d responded, “Mr. Sullivan, there’s not much time.” The killer had shouted then, “Haven’t you paid any attention, boy?” before continuing with, “Now it’s time for one more story . . .”

  He rewound the tape again, backing it up to “Some story, huh?”

  He went to his record and tape collection and found a cassette he’d recorded some years back of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. It was an older tape, frequently played, with a faded label. He knew that there were a few feet of blank tape on the end of that recording. He put the tape in the player and found the end of the music. Then he removed the tape and placed it in his portable machine, put the small portable directly in front of his stereo speakers, and replaced Blair Sullivan’s confession in the larger unit. He punched the Play button on the Sullivan recording and the Record button on the Miles Davis.

  Cowart listened to the words boil around him, trying to blank them from his imagination.

  When the tape was finished, he shut both machines off. He played the Sullivan section on the end of the Miles Davis tape. The clarity of the voice speaking was diminished—but still brutally audible. Then he took the tape and replaced it on the shelf with the rest of his records and tapes.

  For a moment he stared at the original Sullivan tape. Then he rewound it to the spot he’d duplicated on the Davis, punched the Record button and obliterated Sullivan’s words with a breathless silence.

  It would seem an abrupt ending, but it would have to do. He didn’t know if the tape would stand up to any professional scrutiny by a police lab, but it would buy him some time.

  Cowart looked up briefly from the computer screen and saw the two detectives moving through the newsroom. They maneuvered between the desks, zigzagging toward him, ignoring the dozens of other reporters in the room, whose heads rose and whose eyes followed their path, so that by the time they arrived at his desk, everyone was watching them.

  “All right, Mr. Cowart,” Andrea Shaeffer said briskly. “Our turn.”

  The words on the screen in front of him seemed to shimmer. “I’ll be finished in a second,” he replied, keeping his eyes on the computer.

  “You’re finished now,” Michael Weiss interjected.

  Cowart ignored the detectives. In a moment, the city editor had rushed up and positioned himself between the two policemen and the reporter.

  “We want to take a full statement, right now. We’ve been trying to do that for days and we’re getting tired of the runaround,” Shaeffer explained.

  The city editor nodded. “When he finishes.”

  “That’s what you guys said the other day, after he found the bodies. Then he had to talk to Sullivan. Then because of what Sullivan says to him, he has to be alone. Now he’s got to write it all up. Hell, we don’t need a statement, all we have to do is buy a damn subscription to your paper.” Exasperation filled her voice.

  “He’ll be right there,” said the city editor, shielding Cowart from the two detectives, trying to steer them away from his desk.

  “Now,” she repeated stubbornly.

  “When he finishes,” the editor repeated.

  “Do you want to get arrested for obstruction?” Weiss said. “I’m really getting tired of waiting for you jerks to finish your job so that we can do ours.”

  “I’ll call that bluff,” the city editor replied. “We’ll get a nice picture of you two handcuffing me to run on the front page tomorrow. I’m sure the sheriff in Monroe County will love seeing that.” He held out his hands angrily.

  “Look.” Shaeffer stepped in. “He has information pertinent to a murder investigation. How goddamn unreasonable is it to ask him for a little cooperation?”

  “It’s not unreasonable,” the city editor answered, glaring at her. “He also has a first-edition deadline staring him in the face. First things first.”

  “That’s right,” Weiss said angrily. “First things first. We’ve just got a problem with what you guys think comes first. Like selling papers instead of solving murders.”

  “Matt, how much longer?” the city editor asked. Neither side had moved much.

  “A few minutes,” Cowart replied.

  “Where are the tapes?” Shaeffer asked.

  “Being transcribed. Almost finished.” The city editor seemed to think for an instant. “Look, how about you read what Sullivan told our man while you’re waiting?”

  The detectives nodded. The editor guided them away from Cowart’s desk, giving the reporter a single “get going” glance as he led the detectives into a conference room where three typists wearing headset
s were working hard on the tapes.

  Cowart breathed in deeply. He had worked his way through a description of the execution and maneuvered through the substance of Sullivan’s confession. He’d listed out all the crimes that Sullivan had confessed to.

  The only remaining element was the deaths that concerned the two Keys detectives. Cowart felt stymied. It was a crucial part of the story, items that would occupy a prominence in the first few paragraphs. But it was the element that threatened him the most. He couldn’t tell the police—or write in the newspaper—that Ferguson had been involved with the crimes without opening up the question why. And the only answer to why those killings had taken place went back to the murder of Joanie Shriver and the agreement the dead man claimed had been struck between the two men on Death Row.

  Matthew Cowart sat frozen at his computer screen. The only way he could protect himself, his reputation, and his career, was to conceal Ferguson’s role.

  He thought, Hide a killer?

  His imagination echoed with Sullivan’s words. “Have I killed you?”

  For a single instant, he considered simply telling the truth about everything, but, in the same instant, he wondered, What was the truth? Everything pivoted on the words of the executed man. A lover of lies, right to his death.

  He looked up and saw the city editor watching him. The man spread his arms and made a circling gesture with both hands. Wind it up, the movement said. Cowart looked back at the story he was writing, knowing that it would parade into the paper untouched.

  As he wavered, he heard a voice over his shoulder.

  “I don’t buy it.”

  It was Edna McGee. Her blonde hair flounced about her face as she shook her head from side to side. She was staring down at some pages of typed paper. Sullivan’s confession.

  “What?” Cowart spun in his seat, facing his friend.

  She frowned and grimaced as her eyes ate words. “Hey, Matt, I think there’s a problem here.”

  “What?” he asked again.

  “Well, I’m just going through these quick, you know, and sure, well, I know he’s telling you straight about some of these crimes. Got to be, I mean, with the details and everything. But, well, look here, he told you he killed this kid who was working in a combination convenience store and Indian souvenir stand on the Tamiami Trail a couple of years back. He says he stopped for a Coke or something and shot the kid in the back and took the register contents before heading down to Miami. Well, shit, I remember that crime. I covered it. Remember, I started out doing a piece about all the businesses that have sprung up around the Miccosukkee Reservation, and I did a sidebar on some of the crime that has plagued the folks out there in the ’Glades? Remember?”

  He gripped the desk.

  “Matt, you okay?”

  “I remember the stories,” Cowart replied slowly.

  Edna looked at him closely. “Well, they were mostly about people getting mugged on their way to the bingo games, and how the Indians have established an additional security patrol because of all these cash businesses they’ve got.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I did a bit of research on that shooting. I mean, it happened pretty much the way Sullivan says it did. And it sounds like he was inside that store at some point. And sure, the kid got shot in the back. That was in all the papers. . . .” She waved the sheaf of typed conversation in the air. “I mean, he’s got it all right, in a sort of superficial way. But, he didn’t do it. No way. They busted three teenagers from South Dade for the crime. Forensics matched up the weapon with the bullet in the kid’s back and everything. Got a confession from one and testimony against the shooter by the wheelman. Open and shut, as they say. Two of those kids are doing a mandatory twenty-five for first-degree. The other got a deal. But there ain’t no doubt who did the crime.”

  “Sullivan . . .”

  “Well, hell, I don’t know. He was in South Florida then. No doubt. I mean, I got to check the dates and everything, but sure. He probably passed right by, right about the time that crime hit the front page of the paper. The murdered kid was the nephew of one of the Indian elders, so it made a splash all over the local pages. TV was all over it, too. Remember?”

  He did, vaguely, and wondered why he hadn’t when Sullivan was talking to him. He nodded.

  Edna shook the pile of papers in her hand. “Hell, Matt, I’m sure he was probably telling the truth about most of these crimes. But all of them? Who knows? There’s one that doesn’t wash. How many others?”

  Cowart felt sick to his stomach. The words, “probably telling the truth” punished him. What does it mean if he lied once? Twice? A dozen times? Who did he kill? Who didn’t he kill? When was he telling the truth and when wasn’t he?

  Maybe it was all a lie and Ferguson was telling the truth. His image of Ferguson suddenly flip-flopped from a twisted, murderous gargoyle back to the angry man trapped by injustice. Sullivan’s lies, half-truths, and misinformation all rolled together in an impossible mess.

  Innocent? Cowart thought.

  He stared at the computer screen but remembered Sullivan’s words.

  Guilty?

  He did.

  He didn’t.

  Edna flapped the sheaf of papers in her hand. “There’s a couple of others here that may not wash. I’m just guessing, though. I mean, why? Huh? Why would he claim some murders that he didn’t do?”

  She paused and answered her own question. “. . . Because he was one weird guy, right up to the end. And all those mass murderers seem to get off on being the biggest or the toughest or the worst. You remember that guy Henley in Texas? Helped do twenty-eight with that other guy. So, there he is, sitting in prison, when word comes out that John Gacy in Chicago has done thirty-three. So Henley calls up a detective in Houston and tells him, ‘I can get the record back . . .’ I mean, weird doesn’t really describe it, does it?”

  “No,” replied Cowart, his insides collapsing in a turmoil of doubt.

  Edna leaned over to look at the lead to his article. “At least thirty-nine crimes. Well, that’s what he said. But you better qualify it.”

  “I will.”

  “Good. Did he give you any real details about the killings in the Keys?”

  “No,” Cowart answered quickly. “He just said he’d managed to arrange for them to be done.”

  “Well, he had to tell you something . . .”

  Cowart scrambled. “He talked about some informal prison grapevine that even gets to Death Row. He said anything could be arranged for a price. But he didn’t say what he paid.”

  “Well, I wonder. I mean, you’ve got to write what he said. But sorting it all out. Well, hell.”

  She looked up and across the newsroom toward where the two detectives were reading transcripts. “You suppose they’ve got any real evidence? I think they’re just hoping you’ll wrap the whole thing up for them nice and easy.” The cynicism in her voice was evident.

  He looked up at her. “Edna,” he started.

  “You want some help checking these suckers out, right?” Edna’s voice immediately filled with enthusiasm. She slapped her hand against the sheaf of papers. “Got to know what’s a definite, what’s a maybe, and what’s a no way, right?”

  “Yes. Please. Can you do it?”

  “Love to. Take a few days, but I’ll get to work on it right away. I’ll tell the higher-ups. You sure you don’t mind sharing the story?”

  “No. No problem.”

  Edna gestured at the computer screen. “Better be careful not to be too explicit about old Sully’s confession. It may have some more little problems. Don’t dig any hole in the story you can’t jump out of.”

  Cowart wanted to laugh or be sick, he was uncertain which.

  “You know, you got to appreciate old Sully. Never wanted to mak
e anything easy on nobody,” she said, turning away.

  He watched Edna McGee saunter across the newsroom to the city editor and start talking animatedly with him. He watched as they both stared down at the sheet of transcribed statements. He saw the man shake his head and then hurry over to where he was working.

  “This right?” the city editor demanded.

  “That’s what she says. I don’t know.”

  “We’re gonna have to check every bit of all this out.”

  “Right.”

  “Christ! How’re you writing the story?”

  “Just as the dying man’s words. Allegations unproven. No idea where the truth lies. Questions abound. All that sort of stuff.”

  “Go heavy with the description and be careful with details. We need some time.”

  “Edna said she’d help.”

  “Good. Good. She’s going to start making calls now. When do you think you’ll be able to get on it?”

  “I need some rest.”

  “Okay. And those detectives . . .”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Cowart looked back at the page. He plucked Sullivan’s words from his notebook and closed the piece with: “Some story, huh?”

  He punched a few buttons on the keyboard, shutting the screen down in front of him and electronically transporting his article over to the city desk so it could be measured, assessed, edited, and dummied on the front page. He no longer knew whether what he’d done compounded truth or lies. He realized that for the first time in his years as a journalist, he had no idea which was which, they had become so tangled in his head.

  Adrift in a sea of ambiguity, he went in to see the detectives.

  Shaeffer and Weiss were livid.

  “Where is it?” the woman demanded as he walked through the door into the conference room. The three typists were stapling pages together at a large meeting table where the afternoon news conferences were held. When they heard the anger in the detectives’ voices, they hurried, leaving a stack of paper behind as they left the room. Cowart didn’t reply. His eyes swept away to a large picture window. Sunlight reflecting off the bay streamed into the room. He could see a cruise liner getting up steam, heading out Governor’s Cut toward the open ocean.