they are.
There’s not really anything I could say to that. I am judgmental. I’ve already admitted as much. We agreed to disagree about the artist. The next time we were in New York, I stayed at the hotel bar while Katya and she went to dinner.
I have a theory about great artists, which is that they are ordinarily awful human beings. To be a great artist, you have to be so self-centered, so indifferent to everything but your own artistic sensibility, that the whole world, including the people who love you, are just means to your end. Too bad it doesn’t work in reverse. Wouldn’t it be terrific if you could become a great writer or painter or musician by being a shitty person? And don’t write me with a list of exceptions; I am aware that there are some. All I am saying is that in general, my advice to you is that if you should meet a famous artist, do not go to her house for dinner.
But cliches are cliches for a reason, and that dark cloud too had its silver lining. Dinner at the famous artist’s house changed me as a death-penalty lawyer. Until I met her, my focus was on the law, on why some legal rule or principle meant that my client should get a new trial. I’d do exhaustive research, write a powerful legal argument, and then watch no one pay it any heed. The problem with this lawyerly approach is that nobody cares about rules or principles when they’re dealing with a murderer. The lawyer says that the Constitution was violated every which way, and the judge says, Yeah, but your client killed somebody, right? For all our so-called progress, the tribal vengefulness that we think of as limited to backward African countries is still how our legal system works. Deuteronomy trumps the Sixth Amendment every time. Prosecutors and judges kowtow to family members of murder victims who demand an eye for an eye, and the lonely lawyer declaiming about proper procedures is a shouting lunatic in the asylum whom people look at curiously and then walk on by.
Then (if I might say so myself) I had a perfectly cooked piece of grass-fed sirloin while sitting on the floor of the racist artist’s brownstone, and my entire focus changed. My clients were better people than this piece of garbage, and they even killed somebody. That was the magic moment my focus changed. My clients did a terrible, sometimes unforgivable, thing, but most of them were worth saving. It was a moral realization, not a legal epiphany. Sometimes the most immoral, detestable person you’ve ever met can teach you an ethical lesson worth knowing. That’s a lesson, too.
LINCOLN AND KATYA had gone to Galveston. They even took the dog, which was good for the three of them but bad for me, because it meant that when I talked to myself, the dog was not in the room, so I could not pretend that I wasn’t.
It was January 5. On the wall calendar in my office, I had four dates circled in red. O’Neill was scheduled to be executed in one week, on January 12. Green was scheduled to get executed three days later, on January 15. Quaker was scheduled for execution on February 4, and we had his hearing in the trial court on January 27. A typical month had three or four dates with marks-a-lot circles. It was a fairly ordinary agenda for a death-penalty lawyer in Texas.
I took two chocolate glazed donuts out of the Shipley’s box. Kassie said, Two donuts? That’s a record.
I said, Katya and Lincoln took all our food to Galveston. All I’ve got at home are oranges, coffee, ice cream, beer, peanuts, and bourbon. And I’m pacing myself.
Kassie said that she would try to locate Tricia Cummings, the woman that Green said was supposed to have been killed by Cantu. Gary was going to try to find Cantu and take another run at him. I told him that he needed to take Melissa Harmon with him. I was going to call Melissa to tell her about the story that Cantu had left a gun at the scene, and to see whether she could have a chat with Detective Wyatt.
Jerome said, What about me?
I didn’t want him doing anything that couldn’t be interrupted, because I had a feeling that O’Neill was going to cause some interruptions. I said I thought he had his hands full with O’Neill. He said there was nothing left to do but wait. I said, Fine, help Kassie track down Cummings. He looked at me like I had just asked him to rinse out the coffee mugs, but he didn’t say anything. I said, All right, fine. Can you also follow up on the blood? The lab never did call me back. He nodded and almost smiled, slightly mollified.
Melissa Harmon and I met for breakfast the next morning at the Buffalo Grille. I was eating oatmeal. She was eating chicken-fried steak and fried eggs. I said, You’re a real health freak.
She said, Steak and eggs is a classic. You want some?
I shook my head. I told her about my conversation with Green and asked her if she would be willing to talk to Wyatt about the gun. She slowly chewed a piece of meat. After she swallowed it she said, Can you think of a way for me to have that conversation without accusing him of something unethical?
I said, If I could think of that, I’d have the conversation with him myself instead of paying your exorbitant rates.
She smiled. She said, So what’s it like always representing the bad guys?
I said, I’m pretty sure that one of my guys isn’t actually bad.
GARY CALLED. He and Harmon had gone to the house where I talked to Cantu. Gary said that the house was empty. There was a mattress on the bedroom floor, half a roll of toilet paper on the bathroom floor, two slices of leftover sausage pizza in the refrigerator, and a half-gallon carton of Tropicana orange juice, two-thirds gone, on the counter. That’s it. No clothes, nothing to read, no TV or radio, no towels, no beer. Cantu was gone.
While Gary looked through the house and took inventory, Melissa talked to the neighbors. No one knew his name. No one had any idea where he’d gone. I asked Gary to take the orange juice. Maybe Cantu drank from the carton. Maybe we could get some DNA. I didn’t have any idea what good it would do us, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
As I was hanging up, Jerome, ever the meticulous one, came into my office waving a single piece of paper. I said, What’s that? He said he had been going through the file of Quaker’s trial lawyer. It was a page from Detective Wyatt’s report. I wondered how I had missed it. Probably because I read through the file before I knew who Cantu was. Either way, it was not exactly a confidence booster. The report indicated that Wyatt had interviewed Cantu. It didn’t say why. In the report Wyatt had noted that Cantu had an alibi. But it didn’t say what the alibi was, or why Wyatt had even bothered interviewing Cantu in the first place.
Most important of all, though, the fact that the report was in the trial lawyer’s file meant that the trial lawyer had it, and that meant we could not accuse the state of withholding relevant evidence. One of our legal claims had just disappeared.
I told Jerome what Gary had learned at Cantu’s former house.
He said, That’s too bad, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s not like he was all of a sudden going to admit to killing three people.
Jerome is also the guy in the office who can be counted on to remind me that the way our lives actually work is not how death-penalty cases get portrayed on TV. I said, I’ve got a story that ain’t got no moral. He looked at me oddly. I said, You know, let the bad guy win every once in a while? His look didn’t change. I said, It’s Billy Preston, man.
Jerome has an iPod that has something like fifteen thousand songs on it. He plays guitar in a garage band. He said, Who’s that?
I shook my head. He put the piece of paper on my desk and walked out.
GREEN’S LAWYER WAS Mark Roberts, one of the smartest, most aggressive death- penalty lawyers around. When Green first wrote asking to see me, I called Roberts to make sure it was okay with him. The fact that Green didn’t like him was yet another fact that made me feel better about my first instinct. I called Roberts and told him about Green’s claim of responsibility. I knew what he would say if I asked him to allow me to get a written statement from Green. He’d say no. The reason is that he had asked the parole board to commute Green’s sentence to life in prison, and he had filed another writ with the Supreme Court. Logically and legally speaking, whether Green did or did not tell Cantu to kill Tricia Cummings had no bearing on either one of those last-ditch efforts. Realistically speaking, it mattered a lot. If there was some parole-board member who was inclined toward leniency, or if there was some Supreme Court justice who was intrigued by Mark’s legal argument, the inclination and intrigue would give way to disgust and abhorrence if Green was connected to three more murders, especially when two of them were children. I asked him anyway. He said, Green is a piece of shit. I’m
