She said, Yep.
I said, That’s an awfully thin line between good and bad.
She said, Actually, it’s not that thin at all.
BEFORE LINCOLN AND KATYA headed back to Galveston the next morning, he and I went to get donuts. He said, Dada, which kind do you think I should get, one with sprinkles, or one with chocolate icing? I told him I thought he should get one of each. He said, That sounds good to me.
Standing below the drive-through window, where the parking lot emptied into the street, a strategically savvy panhandler was hoping to collect change from donut lovers who would find it easier to give away their coins rather than put them in a purse. He had on a pair of Walkman headphones and a fat watch on his wrist. I drove by him and waved. Lincoln said, I think that man would get more money if he wasn’t listening to his iPod and wearing a fancy watch.
Later that morning, we all sat in the conference room to iron out the narrative we would try to construct at the hearing that was ten days away. It had two strands. One was that there was no evidence at all that Quaker had committed the crime or that he should be on death row. The blood in his car had an innocent explanation, as did the life insurance. The fact that his gun had disappeared was curious, but hardly proof of murder. He did not have any blood or gunpowder residue on him when he was arrested. No one had seen him at the house. By all accounts, he adored his wife and kids. Mark Roberts had asked me how he could even have been convicted, and the answer to that question had two words: Jack Gatling. Quaker had a lawyer who was a burned-out case.
In theory, there is a presumption of innocence in the American legal system, innocent until proven guilty, but in practice, it is just the opposite. Juries trust the police and the prosecutors, especially when all the jurors are middle-class white folks, as they were at Quaker’s trial. They think that if someone gets arrested and goes on trial, there must be good reasons to believe that he did it. Quaker’s lawyer could have called the neighbors as witnesses and asked them whether they had ever heard Henry and Dorris fight. He could have asked them to describe how Henry interacted with Daniel and Charisse. He could have called Henry’s coworkers. He could have called a scientific expert who would have explained that Henry would have had blood or gunpowder residue on himself and on his clothes and in his car if he had committed the crime. But Jack Gatling did none of those things.
Nor did he challenge the state’s expert who single-handedly persuaded the jury to sentence Quaker to death. James Grigson is known as Dr. Death. He was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association as well as the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians, but that did not stop him from testifying in hundreds of trials. Grigson claimed to have examined somewhere between two hundred and four hundred capital-murder defendants—the number varied from case to case, because Grigson could not keep his answer straight from one trial to the next. But that did not stop juries from believing him. Sometimes he would not interview the defendants at all; other times he would visit with them for fifteen minutes or so in the county jail, asking them what they saw when they looked at ink blots. He would then sit on the witness stand for as much as five hours, telling jurors that the defendant before them would undoubtedly be dangerous in the future if not speedily put to death.
His flamboyant predictions were spectacularly wrong. By some estimates, he was wrong more than 95 percent of the time. But that too did not stop juries from believing him. Juries would even sentence people to death who had not committed any crime. In one famous case, Grigson testified that Randall Dale Adams would commit more violence if not executed. Adams had been convicted of murdering a state trooper outside of Dallas. Errol Morris made a documentary about the debacle of the trial. As it happened, Adams did not actually kill the officer; someone else did. Adams was released from prison after his innocence was established. He had not committed any crimes prior to his wrongful conviction, and he has not committed any since. But Grigson was nothing if not charming. His avuncular demeanor and white lab coat endeared him to juries. They did what he asked them to. He told them that Henry Quaker would be dangerous if they did not send him to the execution chamber, and the jury obliged.
When it was time for Quaker’s trial lawyer to cross-examine the doctor, perhaps to ask him about the inconsistency in his numbers, or his expulsion from professional societies, or the many cases where his prognostications had proven so unsound, Jack Gatling stood up at the defense table and said, I have no questions for this witness. Gatling had been so convinced he would win an acquittal that he had not prepared even for the single witness that even he could have discredited.
Quaker had a spotless prison record. Part of our narrative would emphasize that Grigson had also been wrong in his case, and testimony from Nicole and other guards would help us there. But the problem we had was that this first theme in the narrative ultimately pivoted on the fact that Quaker’s trial lawyer had been so inept, and even though he had been, it was too late for us to raise that claim. Some people think that law is about truth. It isn’t, exactly. It is about timing. The time to prove that Henry Quaker did not kill anyone was years ago, at his trial, not now, a week and a half ahead of his scheduled execution.
But we also had a second strand to our narrative. We could identify the murderer. His name was Ruben Cantu, and the proof that Cantu did it was the sworn words of Ezekiel Green.
Kassie said, It sure would be nice to know why Wyatt interviewed Cantu.
I said, I agree. Why don’t you ask him?
Kassie said, Me? I’ve never met the guy. What makes you think he’ll talk to me?
I said, Melissa Harmon told me that he got divorced six months ago, that he drinks every night at El Tiempo, and that he’s a skirt hound. I’ll pay for dinner if you get him to talk.
Gary said, You buying dinner for all of us?
I said, If she gets something useful from Wyatt, sure, why not.
Gary said, Hey Kass, be sure to wear something nice.
I said, That’s my line, man.
Kassie said, Yeah, and it’s just as clever, no matter who says it.
THE NEXT NIGHT, we were all sitting at El Tiempo, with a platter of mariscos a la parilla and beef fajitas. The amount this dinner was costing me was out of proportion to how hard Kassie had to work. She told Wyatt who she was and what she wanted to know, and he bought her a drink and told her. The neighbor who had seen the strange pickup truck parked in the street had remembered the last three numbers of the license plate. Wyatt did a computer search and came up with Cantu. He had arrested Cantu before for drug possession and decided he was worth talking to. Kassie asked why he hadn’t arrested him, and Wyatt told her because he had no physical evidence, because Cantu had no motive, and because there was no evidence that Cantu even knew Dorris Quaker or her kids.
I asked Kassie whether she had asked him about the gun they found on the floor next to Dorris. She said, I’m not a moron.
And?
He looked right at me and said that he had no earthly idea what I was talking about.
Now I do not mean any disrespect by this, but police officers are some of the best liars in the world. Their philosophy seems to be, so far as I can tell, that they are the good guys fighting the forces of death and darkness, and that entitles them to break the rules when they think they need to and lie about it later when they deem it necessary. Wyatt would have sworn a lie on his dead mother’s grave if he thought it would help him convict someone he was certain was guilty. If I knew anything, I knew that. But knowing means nothing. Proof is what matters, and I had no proof, and no prospects of getting any. Wyatt was not going to bare his soul, not to Kassie and certainly not to me, and every second I spent fantasizing that he would was another second I might as well have spent in prayer, for all the good it was going to do Quaker.
She said, He seems like a nice guy. He played football at LSU.
I said, Started dumb, finished dumb, too.
Jerome said, I know that one. It’s Randy Newman, sort of.
When people start to get your references, it can be because you have become obvious and transparent. It can also be because they are learning.
That night at home I put on a Tony Bennett–Bill Evans CD and carried a snifter of cognac out to the patio. Bennett was singing My Foolish Heart and I was thinking about lines. Wyatt didn’t care that he was lying and probably didn’t even acknowledge that he was lying, because in the world where he lived, Quaker was guilty of a triple murder, and any facts that got in the way of that conclusion weren’t facts at all. He used one set of concepts
