Terri stood, her expression of annoyance quickly switching to curiosity. 'I told Julie to hold my calls, unless it's the President or the Easter bunny.'
'Maybe,' Moore suggested helpfully, 'it's Rennell's real father, calling in from Yale. Where he's chairman of the Physics Department.'
With a wan smile, Terri walked over to the far end of the conference room and picked up the phone. 'Teresa Paget.'
Carlo watched her expression change to one of taut attention, so complete that she barely seemed to breathe. 'When?' she asked and then, a moment later, said simply, 'I'll be there.'
As the others watched, she slowly put down the phone, taking a moment to acknowledge their presence.
'You'll never guess,' she told them. 'That was Payton's lawyer. Before he dies, Payton wants to see me.'
FIFTEEN
FROM THE MOMENT THAT TERRI STEPPED INTO THE PLASTIC CUBICLE where he waited with his lawyer, Payton Price surprised her.
The first jolt was his appearance. She still thought of him as the twenty-two-year-old crack dealer in the mug shot, with a smooth, hard handsomeness and the cold, indifferent stare meant to signal his lethality. But fifteen years had passed. The man sitting across from her had a premature touch of gray in his close-cropped hair and creases of age in a thin face lit by eyes bright with intelligence, its harsh angles leavened by a full mouth, turned up slightly at one end to signal amusement at their circumstances. The other thing that struck Terri was Payton's stillness. Compared with his lawyer, Paul Rubin—a lean, bespectacled, thirtyish public defender twitching with repressed energy—Payton seemed an oasis of calm, facing his last ten days of life with the fatalism of someone who has moved beyond hope.
'So,' Payton said to Terri, 'you're Rennell's lawyer. Talks about you all the time.'
The curiosity in Payton's tone was matched by his expression. But for their surroundings, he could have been meeting his kid brother's first girlfriend, brought home for a family dinner. 'We've spent a lot of time together,' Terri answered.
'So he tells me. You're the first one he ever gave a damn about, or thinks gave a damn about him.' A brief smile showed a flash of gold-capped teeth. 'Keeps runnin' on about how beautiful you are. Course he's been in here a good while now, and he never had much luck with women.'
The last remark, too wryly delivered to be slighting, was darkened by its tacit reference—which Terri thought intended—to the murder of Thuy Sen, reinforcing her queasy near-certainty that this man was guilty of a loathsome crime into which, perhaps, he had led Rennell. As he sat beside his client, Rubin's eyes darted between Payton and Terri. It was all too apparent the lawyer did not want her here.
She decided to start slowly. 'Fifteen years,' she said. 'How have you two gotten by?'
'Day at a time—one push-up or sit-up at a time, five hundred of each, each and every day.' His mouth twisted in a brief, bitter smile. 'Helps to have a purpose. One of mine was to keep Rennell and me from gettin' buttfucked. This life could have been hard on him.'
The sardonic acknowledgment of his responsibility for Rennell suggested, to Terri, more self-awareness than she had expected. 'Still,' she said, 'you spend a lot of the day alone.'
He gave a measured shrug, a slight movement of the head. 'You learn to organize your time, make prison serve you as best you can. I read a lot of history—African mostly. Try to write a little poetry.' His tone took on the pride of the self-educated. 'Keep up with the world, like what's happenin' in the Middle East. Don't think a pack of white folks in Washington ever gonna be able to fix that. I mean, we invented fucking Osama-been-missin', and this guy Saddam, and then when they don't turn out like they're supposed to, we have to kill 'em. Think we'd of learned by now.'
The pithiness of this assessment made Terri laugh with surprise. Then her amusement was overshadowed by the sad realization that fifteen years on death row had produced a more thoughtful man than selling crack in the Bayview ever could have—assuming the unlikely, that Payton Price would have lived that long. But the end result would be the same, his premature death.
He seemed to read her thoughts. 'Well,' he said evenly, 'you didn't come to hear my views on ge-o-politics. You're hopin' to keep Rennell from joinin' me in Paradise.'
Terri nodded. 'I thought one of you was enough.'
For the first time, Payton averted his eyes, gazing down at the table. 'Rennell says you been askin' about when we was kids. Think any of that shit matters?'
'It should.' Acutely conscious of Paul Rubin's presence, Terri decided to avoid, until the end, the circumstances of Thuy Sen's death. 'Rennell's slow,' she continued. 'That much we know for sure. But we don't know all we need to about how his family affected him.'
Payton glanced up. 'What?' he inquired in mock amazement. 'You mean our Mama hasn't straightened all that out?'
Terri said nothing.
Again Payton gazed at the table. 'Weren't no Disneyland,' he said in a quieter tone. 'I'll say that much for it.'
'How did you get through it?'
His fleeting smile suggested weary tolerance of a question which, while both gratuitous and stupid, managed to evoke pain. 'Bein' Vernon Price's kid teach a man to lower his expectations. But Rennell had it worse—that's what you're here for, right?'
'Uh-huh.'
' 'Slow' don't begin to cover that boy. He was slow crawlin', slow standin' up, slow walkin'. Our daddy treated him like some dog you'd kick for havin' half a brain.' Payton looked up at her, unsmiling now, voice toneless. 'When he was two, maybe three, Daddy would feed Rennell beer so his head flopped to the side. Then he'd sit him down on the porch and spin him in circles till he tumbled off the edge and started crying. Made our daddy laugh like he was crazy.'
