very moment. I had not known that Green had a wife. Monique told me her name was Destiny. She was Irish. I thought to myself, Who names their kid Destiny? Then I thought, How drunk would a woman have to be to get married to a guy who beat his previous wife to death?
Monique and her friends followed me to the prison. Outside the prison gates on Fridays, the parking lot is like a carnival. Vans and RVs and pickup trucks with campers fill all the visitor spaces. Because death row has visiting hours on Saturdays, families can see their loved ones two days in a row without missing two days of work. Wives come to see their husbands. Mothers and fathers come to see their sons. Sons and daughters come to see their dads. Death row on Fridays is living proof of how many families murderers ruin.
Before buzzing me through the gate, the guard reminded me that I could not wear sunglasses inside. I took them off so she could see my eye, the white of which was still the color of a fine chianti, three weeks after my surgery. She said, I think I’ll let you wear them today, counselor.
Inside, Monique introduced me to Destiny. She couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall, but she weighed, I would estimate, close to 300 pounds. Green weighed maybe 120. He was eating fried pork rinds and drinking a Pepsi. Destiny looked up at me when I walked over but didn’t say a word. I said, Nice to meet you. She bit off a fingernail. Her skin was the color of liquid paper. She had put on lipstick, red as a candied apple. Half her ass fit on the folding metal chair. I picked up the other phone and told Green I’d talk to him in an attorney booth when he and his wife were finished visiting.
She said, I’m planning on being here all day, sweets. I told her that the prison would only let her visit for two more hours.
Green said, Introduce yourself to my new lawyer, Destiny. Then he winked at me.
I went and sat in the attorney booth and waited for the guards to bring Green in.
Death row has two types of attorney booths. One is a full-contact room. In this room, lawyers sit across a table from their clients. If you want to, you can shake your client’s manacled hand or pat him on the shoulder. The room is usually used for psychological or psychiatric examinations. Next to it is the other kind of booth, a six-foot- by-four-foot box, that’s divided down the middle by a concrete wall with a reinforced Plexiglas window. There’s a padlocked mail slot that can be used to pass papers back and forth. You have to use a phone to converse. When they enter their half of the cage, inmates meticulously wipe off the mouth and ear pieces of the receiver with their white cloth jumpsuits. Death-row inmates are often obsessed with germs.
The main difference between an attorney area and a regular visiting cubicle is that, like those old-fashioned corner telephone booths, the attorney space is fully enclosed. The idea is to intimate the idea of privacy, and to prevent guards and others in the visiting area from hearing the conversation. Prison officials surreptitiously record visits between inmates and their nonlawyer visitors. They are not supposed to record attorney visits, but I wouldn’t bet that they don’t.
Green and I were conversing in a noncontact booth.
While he was squatting on his haunches, waiting for the guard to reach through a slot in the door and remove his handcuffs, Green said, What happened to you? I had forgotten how bad my eye looked. I told him nothing. Over the years I’ve had three or four clients I was actually fond of. Johnny Martinez was one of them. Green said, Did you know that Johnny Martinez and me were tight?
Death-row inmates live alone, sleep alone, shower alone. Once when I was in graduate school, I performed an experiment to see how long I could go without speaking another word to another human being. I made it eight days. I couldn’t go to restaurants, and the grocery store was tough. At fast-food restaurants I would hold up fingers to place my order and nod when the worker handed me my food and thanked me. It’s harder than you might think for a hardwired social animal to live without any human interaction. But death row hasn’t always been that way. Until the late 1990s, death-row inmates could work outside their cells, in the prison laundry, for example, or fabricating license plates. They also had group exercise, so inmates could play basketball or handball, or lift weights together. Martinez was gay. For the gay inmates, or the temporarily gay, the old death row afforded social opportunities, so to speak. The implementation of total isolation was hard on Martinez. He told me, after the new regulations were put in place, that he never dreamed of escaping; he dreamed of being touched by a human being who wasn’t a guard. I said, Yeah, Johnny, but the guys who aren’t guards are murderers.
He said, Not all of them.
I said, I know. I was kidding.
He said, What do you dream about? I often didn’t know what to say when Martinez asked me questions. I was useless to him as a lawyer. His case had been screwed up beyond repair by his previous attorneys. I told him that the first time we met. He didn’t care. He wanted me to be his father, and his friend. I didn’t want to be his friend just so I could feel better about the fact that, as his lawyer, I wasn’t going to be able to save him. So I didn’t say anything.
Johnny said, You do dream, right? He looked at me like I knew the answers to the big questions. I wrote a note on my pad so I had an excuse to look down. He twisted his head, trying to read it. He smiled. He said, I guess you can’t dream if you don’t sleep. Do you ever sleep?
When Quaker asked me that same question years later, he sounded curious. When Johnny asked, the question felt intimate. I didn’t answer. He said, I bet you don’t.
He said, I’d like to sleep, but it’s loud up on level two.
Death row has three levels. Level 1 is where the well-behaved inmates live. Level 3 is for the troublemakers. Level 2 is in between. If Johnny was on level 2, he’d been doing something disruptive. That made no sense to me. He was meek and obedient. I said, What did you do to get moved?
He rubbed his face twice. His right thumb stroking one cheek two times, his other four fingers caressing the other. He had a wisp of scattered facial hair, like a teenager just starting to shave. He said, I wouldn’t shave when the captain told me to. I asked him why not. He said, I’m not allowed to shave during Ramadan.
Johnny was raised a Catholic. He’d been an altar boy. His parish priest told me that he wanted to do whatever he could to help Johnny get off death row. He had already written the Pope, requesting papal intervention. I said, You’re Catholic, aren’t you?
He said, Not anymore. I’m Muslim now.
I said, Since when?
He smiled. It’s who I am, Senor Abogado, he said to me.
I felt a piece of the wall crumble, and I said, I think you’re the first Muslim I’ve met named Martinez. What does your family think? He tilted back his head and laughed. He seemed almost happy.
That was the image of him I tried to hold on to.
Green said, You remember Martinez, right? He told me you’re a heretic.
Martinez did use to call me a heretic. He teased me. I had conversations with him that weren’t about his case or the law. We talked about religion. I said it was bad, along with nationalism, the most regressive force in human society. He shook his head, respectful but adamant. He told me I might find myself praying every day if I was where he was. I told him he might be right, but that would just prove that I’m a hypocrite, not that I’m wrong. It was a running theme for us. If Green knew that Martinez called me a heretic, Martinez must have told him. But I didn’t see Martinez and Green as friends.
I sat and waited. He said, Destiny doesn’t trust you. I thought to myself, Destiny doesn’t trust
My interior rant apparently amused me. I smirked. Green said, What’s funny? I shook my head.
He said, So let’s get to it. My wife is waiting. I took a pad out of my briefcase and licked the eraser on my pencil. But I didn’t write anything down. There was no way I could forget what Green told me.
HE SAID, HENRY QUAKER didn’t kill no one. I asked him how he knew that. He said, I told that girl who works for you that Ruben did it. I just didn’t exactly tell her how I know it. I know he killed that family, ’cause I paid him to.
Green was not the first person to tell me he had gotten away with murder. I’ve had several clients over the
