The Autobiography of an Execution

to make sense of the world. I use another. Why is that? I wondered. Why do some people care about ends and others care about means?

Last August we sat on the beach and watched the Perseid meteor shower. Hundreds of them fired across the sky. Lincoln kept saying, Look, there goes another one. I explained to him that we see them because the earth itself moves through the Perseid cloud. He said, It reminds me of dodgeball, Dada. It’s lucky they don’t hit us.

I looked up and found Orion. The hunter. I was just drunk enough to feel insightful, and the sky felt ominous. Our case hinged on a murderer we couldn’t locate who had been identified by a murderer who was dead. Quaker was in big trouble. A part of me hoped he did it. A big part.

A WEEK BEFORE the hearing we got the results of the blood testing. The drops leading from Dorris’s body to the spot where the kids were killed all belonged to Dorris. So unless she shot herself, went into the other room, murdered her two children, then walked back to the sofa, lay down, and died, she too had been murdered. It would be a lie to try to save Henry by pointing the finger at his wife.

Then again, there are only so many truths I can accommodate. Our finite lives have only so much capacity. You can’t let every little truth exert an equal hold on you. It’s called prioritization. My central truth was that Henry Quaker did not kill anyone. That truth and no other staked a claim on me. If I had to be less faithful to some other ancillary truths in order to demonstrate that fact, who could fault me? Who was even around to blame me? Dorris’s dad was dead, and her mom was not exactly standing by Henry, but she wasn’t blaming him, either. She seemed unsure what to think, and I didn’t see her blowing any gaskets if I implied that Dorris killed herself. I don’t think I could be an army general and send teenaged kids to their certain deaths. But Dorris was already dead. I didn’t see the harm of killing her again.

Jerome thought it was a terrible idea, though, and he was right. At a trial, a lawyer can throw the whole platter of spaghetti at the wall and hope that a strand or two sticks. That’s all it takes, one juror with one reasonable doubt. If Quaker’s trial lawyer had not been comatose, he could have pursued that strategy. Point to Dorris, point to an intruder, point anywhere that was away from Henry. But it was too late for us to do that. At a trial, the defendant wins if it’s a tie. At the stage we were at, a death-row inmate doesn’t win unless it’s a blowout. We had to prove that Quaker was innocent, and if we were going to succeed, we needed a single story. Our story was that Ruben Cantu was the murderer. That was our story, and we were sticking to it.

What did we have? We would go over all the evidence of Gatling’s incompetence. We would point out that the neighbor had seen a strange pickup in the driveway. We could suggest that the truck belonged to Cantu. (Suggest being a euphemism that meant we could not prove a damn thing.) We could prove that Wyatt had interviewed Ruben Cantu. And, for the coup de grace, we would pull out Green’s declaration, stating that Cantu had murdered the Quaker family in a case of mistaken identity.

Gary said, Why do you even think the judge will let us put on any evidence of attorney incompetence?

Jerome added, And everything from Green is hearsay. She might not let in any of that evidence, either.

I said, It might be a short hearing.

FRUGALITY IS the mother of all virtues. Ben Jonson wrote that in 1598, in his play Every Man in His Humour, and the line is inscribed above the lintel of the twelve-story downtown office building where I sometimes work. My father is the cheapest—or, as he would say, the most frugal—man that I know. Once when we grilled hamburgers, someone in the group preferred his sandwich open-faced, so we were left at the end of dinner with the bottom half of a toasted bun. My father neatly wrapped it in wax paper and placed it in the freezer, next to a tub of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream, where it remained for nearly eight months, until I gained the confidence that he would not miss it and dared to throw it away. For his seventy-fifth birthday, Katya took a picture of Lincoln and me, standing beneath the lintel, pointing up to it with our right hands, and holding half a burger bun in our lefts.

Some months later, I saw my brothers admiring the photograph I thought I had given to my dad. As it happened, they were in fact looking at a photograph of the building where I work, but it was not the picture taken by Katya of Lincoln and me. It was a picture that my grandfather took of the building in 1924, when he opened his law practice in the very same building where I now have an office on floor eleven. Visible on the third-floor window facing Main Street were the words Harry Dow, Lawyer, and the six-digit number of his office phone. No one in my family had any idea. The building is in decrepit disrepair and ought to be condemned, and we’ve been looking for new space for the past two years, but at that moment, I believed I belonged there.

My philosophy is: live well, love others, and hope that someone loves you. We live one life on this earth and then we return to dust. We have our bodies and our brains but nothing I would call a soul. I have no faith in higher powers, and I believe that there is no fate, but coincidence is nonetheless a real and curious thing. I keep the 1924 photograph hanging on my office wall, right next to a copy of the picture that Katya and I gave to my dad eighty years later. I touched my finger to it and decided to take a walk around the block. The day was cool and crisp. It made me not want to smoke. I found myself at Treebeard’s, where I had not aimed to be. I was not hungry. I walked inside, scanning the tables for Judge Truesdale. I bought a bowl of crabmeat gumbo and a bottle of Dixie beer and sat near the cash register, where I could see everyone who came through the line. I finished the first bottle and bought a second. I sat there for two hours wondering if she’d come in, wondering why I was wondering, until the manager locked the door, and the busboys ate leftover links of boudin sausage standing in the kitchen and began wiping down the tables and stacking the chairs.

SEVEN-EIGHTHS OF THE TIME, in the week leading up to the hearing, I was a monk. Lights out at eleven. Up at four. A forty-five-minute run, a half-hour swim, an orange, a banana, a bowl of Grape- Nuts and a pot of coffee, and at the office by seven. For twelve hours I’d cram like a medical student, memorizing every line on every document in every one of the dozen banker’s boxes on the floor of my office. My plan was to be so busy that I had no time to appreciate how hopeless it was, but even hyperactivity cannot keep hopelessness at bay.

At precisely eight every night that week, like Swiss clockwork, my heart would start to race and my vision would blur and I would feel flushed even though my office window was open to the chilly air. I saw Quaker strapped down and his mother, Evelina, sitting in a wheelchair, watching through one-way glass, a canister of oxygen in her lap, plastic tubing running up her nose. I’d see flashing lights—my eye doctor calls them floaters—and I’d have to stand up and shake my head like a boxer beating the count to chase the image away. I’d walk two blocks to McElroy’s and sit at the bar with a double Jack and a cigar. I’d call Lincoln to tell him a story before bed and then Katya would get on the phone and for the first time that day I quit pretending that I believed that everything was going to be all right. She and Lincoln would get on the phone together and tell me what they had done that day, about Schlitterbahn Waterpark or the Harry Potter movie or the long walk with Winona. In the mirror behind the bar I could see myself smile.

I’d drive home and make a sandwich. I thought, I wonder if Quaker is sleeping now? On our last visit, he told me that if he did not go to sleep, tomorrow would never come. I’d turn on the TV and drink just enough bourbon to keep Henry from visiting me again until the following day.

THE HEARING WAS SCHEDULED to begin at eight thirty. We got there at eight. Judge Truesdale’s clerk came up to me when we walked into the courtroom and said the judge wanted to see me for a moment in her chambers. Kassie cocked her head. Gary said, That’s interesting.

She was wearing a short V-neck gray dress. Her legs were crossed and the bottom of the dress reached barely to the middle of her thigh. She had on a necklace of what I think were diamonds that brushed the tops of her breasts. If she was aiming for sexy, she had definitely nailed it.

Here I should probably confess what is probably obvious, which is that I find women completely inscrutable. When I was a young lawyer in Washington, there was another lawyer at the firm, two or so years senior to me, who was my friend. Our offices were adjacent, so we would see each other every day and talk about ordinary things. A group of us would go out for a beer after work most evenings. Jane and I worked for the same boss. We’d talk about him and our work. Once, after I bought three dollars’ worth of tunes from the jukebox, we discovered that we both played jazz piano just well enough to entertain ourselves and that neither one of us really understood Ornette Coleman. I said, You know the line in Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise is at Renee Zellweger’s house and she puts on a Miles Davis record and he says, What is this music?