He said, I don’t know what happened to that gun, I really don’t.
I wanted to nod again. I wanted to straddle the line. I wanted to support him and to protect myself. He exhaled through his nose.
I said, I know. I know you didn’t.
Instantly his eyes filled with tears. His lips parted then closed. He covered his mouth and nose with his left hand. He lowered his head and lifted it. My heart was so loud I could hear it. I thought, Where do we go from here?
I said, The plan is to get some judge to believe that, too.
I wanted to run out of there. I stood up. He said, Thank you. Thank you. We touched our hands to the glass between us.
Nicole was the guard operating the electronic door that day. She asked me how my Thanksgiving had been, and I wished her a merry Christmas. I told her I’d see her after the first of the year. She said, Quaker’s all right. He never causes no trouble. If you need any kind of statements from me or anyone else, you tell me, okay? There’s lots of guys in here who want to help him.
I emerged from death row onto the asphalt yard at two in the afternoon. I don’t believe in omens, but that didn’t change the fact that the sky was turning from ochre to black. I smelled sulfur in the air. I started to hurry across the prison yard, wanting to beat the rain to my truck. Maybe the guard didn’t want me to make it. While I was waiting for him to buzz me through the third of three gates, rain drops as fat as grapes began to fall. The sky crackled with lightning. Thunder like a sonic boom made me think of the night that Tim Robbins escaped from Shawshank. By the time I reached my truck, I was shivering hard and so soaked I squeaked.
THAT NIGHT I had a dream. I was driving home from seeing Quaker, down the twisting two-lane farm road that slices through fecund farmland just north of death row. The rain was pouring down, and the creek that runs along the east side of the prison was rising fast. Across from Florida’s restaurant the road doglegs to the left. A canoe usually tied up at the dock behind the restaurant floated into the road. I swerved to miss it and my truck skidded into the creek. It bobbed like a cork, then pointed nosedown and started to sink. Water began to leak into the cab. I took off my seat belt and fell against the windshield. Legal papers and CDs were sliding all around me. I reached for a rock hammer I keep in my truck for just this emergency, but of course it wasn’t there. Muddy water was two-thirds of the way up the door. I found the hammer and I swung it at the driver’s-side window. It shattered and looked like a spider web. Instead of swinging again, I used my fist. Shards of glass pierced my wrist like a bracelet. I squeezed through the window and breaststroked upward, following the bubbles as I exhaled. I ran out of air and sucked down a greedy breath a moment too soon, so when I broke through the surface a moment later I was gagging. The rain had stopped. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. A young boy wearing overalls and rubber boots was standing ankle-deep on the side of the creek fishing with a bamboo pole. He looked at me with no surprise and said, Hey mister, what are you doing?
THERE IS A MOMENT in the middle of every night when I am the only man alive. I slip out of bed and put on a sweatshirt. I fill a mug with hot water and a squeeze of lemon. I carry it into Lincoln’s room and watch him sleep. If he’s still enough, I touch his hair or stroke his cheek. I picture him and Katya sitting at the piano playing four-handed, or the two of them dancing at a wedding. Every New Year’s Day, they go swimming together in the ocean. I don’t need to stay alive. I’ve done my job. I sit at my desk and think of nothing. With headphones I listen to Art Tatum or Teddy Wilson. I wait. Sometimes I fall asleep there. Sometimes I just sit. Sometimes something comes to me. That night it was the blood. The blood might tell us something.
I crawled back into bed. Katya asked if everything was okay. I said, No, not really.
She said, It will be. She put her right leg over mine and dropped her arm over my shoulder, and for the few moments before I fell back asleep, she was right.
ON SOME DAYS, it is hard to believe that mind readers are confidence men. When I got to the office the next morning, everyone was already in the conference room. A time line and a dozen photographs of the crime scene were tacked to the wall. I went and got my rubber ball and came back. The two children had been killed in their beds. Dorris had been killed on the couch in the living room, lying on her back, a single gunshot wound in her temple. There was a trail of blood connecting the two rooms. To my eye, the drops looked thinner on the side closer to the kids, and fatter on the side closer to Dorris. That would mean that the kids died first, and the killer then walked back toward Dorris, dripping blood as he went, either from the gun or maybe from his body. Of course, your eyes often see what you want them to. Plus, the blood could have been there already, since before the murders, but there’s no point to believing in coincidences, especially when they’re not helpful. We had to assume that the killer trailed it from one victim to the next. But if the kids were shot first, Dorris would have heard the shots, and if she had, she would have gotten up. But she didn’t get up; she was killed lying on the couch, with no signs of struggle. Nobody sleeps that deeply. That meant she had to have been killed first, probably while she was sleeping. If she was, the blood drops would be from her. If the blood wasn’t from her, if it was from one of the children, then maybe she did commit suicide after all, first shooting her kids and then taking her life. The story was in the blood. We needed to test the blood drops and see who they came from and to see which direction the killer was walking.
I asked Gary, our in-house chemist, to write a motion asking the judge to let us test the blood and then to arrange for a lab to test it. Jerome was going to arrange to have Quaker polygraphed. The results of the test would not be admissible in a court proceeding, but if we got down to the eleventh hour and had to ask the governor to intervene, it would help to be able to say that Quaker had passed the lie detector. You might as well ask a Magic 8 Ball for advice, but if the governor believed in the wizard, I wasn’t going to pull back the curtain.
Gary and Kassie were going to line up the witnesses for the trial. We would bring in Green from death row to testify about what he had heard, and Bud, Dorris’s brother, would say that he had lied at the trial. We’d get Detective Wyatt to say that he had tested Dorris’s hands for gunpowder residue, and we might walk blind into an alley and ask him why he tested her hands. We would try to make sure Ruben Cantu was there, to say detectives had interviewed him, but I had a feeling Cantu was going to be hard to find again. It wasn’t nearly enough to prove that Quaker was innocent, but our goal wasn’t to prove that he was innocent. The goal was to create a little mayhem to buy more time. If we could keep him alive, we could try to figure out what had really happened. If we could figure out what really happened, we could keep him alive.
I went outside to walk around the block. There was nothing for me to do but wait. I walked by the cloisters. Two men sitting next to one another on a bench by a fountain looked so serene I thought they were fake, until they nodded to me in unison. Last fall I had taken a weeklong course on Buddhist meditation. The room smelled like sweaty feet, and when I tried to clear my mind, it would fill with images of lavender virus cells under a microscope. I should have spent the time working on another case, but when you cannot help but believe that an innocent man’s life is in your care, it can prove difficult to divert your attention to another pressing task.
My cell phone rang. It was Judge Truesdale. I stopped in midstride and stepped closer to a building. I looked behind me. It felt like someone was watching. She said, I just signed an order granting you a hearing in the Quaker case.
I had forgotten we even filed a request for a hearing. We always ask, and they are never granted. I thought, How did she get my cell phone number? Then I realized, She had probably called the office first and gotten it from someone there.
I said, Thank you, Judge.
She said, You are welcome, Professor. I told you this case bothered me.
She told me that we were set for the last week of January, and I told her I would see her then. She said, If not before.
When I got back, everyone was still in the conference room eating donuts. I put my phone down on the table and gave it a spin, like I was playing spin-the-bottle. I told the team we had a hearing in less than five weeks. Kassie asked, How do you know that? I told them that Judge Truesdale had called me. Kassie said, She called you on your cell phone to say she had signed an order?
There is little distance between calmness and irresponsibility. I am no Zen master, but I live far from the edge. When the plane is crashing, I will be as scared as everyone else, but I will be the one who isn’t screaming.
