Caged to Kill

by Tom Swyers

  David headed to the door, ticked off that someone had interrupted his down time. He wanted to be left alone after the long work week. But Phillip Dawkins wanted Thompson, right then and there. He planned to tap all day and night, if that’s what it took. The lifer on the stoop had plenty of practice at both tapping and waiting.

  David opened the door and stared out at Dawkins. His visitor sported a beige leisure suit, right out of the late 1970s. In the early spring wind, it flapped like a used car lot banner around a physique that was both tall and cadaverous. The bony body was wrapped in alabaster white skin, the kind that showed no melanin whatsoever. His chestnut brown hair looked like he shared the same barber as Moe from The Three Stooges.

  Who is this joker?

  One thing was for sure--he was a tall one. David could look directly into the visitor’s gray eyes only because of his position one step up on the door threshold. He didn’t recognize this man. He couldn’t place him in the context of his suburban home turf. He only knew the man from the inside of a prison because that’s where he had last seen him years ago, and that’s where David had left him to rot.

  “Can I help you?” David asked.

  “Hell-o, Mis—ter Thomp---son,” Dawkins said in a rusty singsong. He hadn’t spoken more than a handful of sentences aloud over the past few months; he wasn’t familiar with the sound of his own voice. Not much call for conversation in a solitary cell, unless you were talking to yourself, and he did that often enough. He called Thompson by his surname because that’s the way the correction officers—COs for short—said to address civilians in prison. It was something he had done rarely; maybe once every few years, when a reporter or a human rights lawyer came to visit him.

  “Do . . . you re-mem-ber me?” Dawkins asked.

  David looked at him closely now. He didn’t recognize the face and wondered if his middle-aged brain was having a senior moment. “I’m sorry, I don’t . . . .” But then David saw one of the man’s hands rise to sheepishly wipe his dripping nose and David’s stomach nearly turned over. The visitor’s hands were huge; disproportionately large compared to the rest of his body. David could feel his entire body erupt in perspiration, panic spurting from every pore, as he leaped back from the threshold and slammed the door shut.

  He recognized the hands and that’s all he needed to know. They were the same hands that could totally engulf a basketball when Dawkins was a point-guard prospect for Syracuse University’s basketball program in high school. They were the same hands that strangled Officer Pete Carlson in an LSD-crazed rage back in 1985 in Syracuse, New York. Now David feared those hands were coming for him.

  “What are you doing here?” David screamed through the door while his sweating hands fumbled for the deadbolt. He was relieved that Annie, his wife, and Christy, his teenage son, weren’t at home. They were off visiting family across town.

  “I’m out,” Dawkins said.

  “I can see that. I can’t believe you broke out.”

  “I did not break out . . . .”

  “Oh, so they just let you out through the front gate then?”

  “Yes.”

  David didn’t believe him. The idea that a man could be sentenced to life without parole for murdering a cop only to be set free couldn’t be true. He thought Dawkins was trying to con him—to get him to open the door so he could jump him. “I don’t buy it, Phillip. I’m calling the police.”

  “But I need your help.”

  “The last time I checked, harboring a known fugitive was a crime.”

  “Don’t you get the news . . . paper?”

  “What? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “The story about me was in the paper.”

  “I only get the Sunday paper.”

  “What’s today?” Phillip asked.

  “Saturday.”

  “Really?” Dawkins said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. He had trouble keeping track of the days. It hadn’t mattered what day it was in his life for an eternity. Every day had been the same for him, at least up until yesterday. He couldn’t believe David only got the Sunday paper. Then Phillip couldn’t believe he could remember that newspapers were a big deal when he was a kid. He hadn’t thought about his childhood for decades. But now he remembered that everyone got the daily paper back then. “I didn’t break out of prison. You can look it up on one of them fan-cy phone things.” Dawkins had heard about cell phones, had spied a few in magazines, but he had never seen one for real before arriving at the Greyhound station.

  With his back braced against the door, David took his cell phone out of his rear pocket, Googled Dawkins’s name and checked the news. There was an article from The Post Standard out of Syracuse about Dawkins being set free by the work of lawyers from the Innocence Project using new technology. Officer Carlson put up a fight in 1985. The Innocence Project attorneys filed a motion for DNA testing on skin cells collected at autopsy from underneath Carlson’s fingernails, something that hadn’t been done prior to trial. That skin cell DNA didn’t match DNA that the Bureau of Prisons took from Dawkins. The prosecutors chose not to retry him and Carlson’s family didn’t protest. In a few days, Dawkins was out.

  David couldn’t believe his eyes. Dawkins had always proclaimed his innocence, for all the good it did him. Oh my God, he was telling the truth.

  “Why are you here at my house?” David asked while he sifted through his memories of Dawkins—what he thought was truth had been lies. It was unsettling.

  “Don’t you re-mem-ber what you said to me?”

  “Five years ago at Kranston?” That was when David visited him last. “Give me a break. I don’t remember what I said yesterday.”

  “You said that if I ever get out, I should look you up.”

  David opened the door a crack but braced it with his foot. He looked at a man who was dressed like he had found his clothes in a time capsule. “You and I were joking,” David said. “I think you offered to take me to dinner when you got out and I told you to look me up. But we both knew you weren’t getting out.”

  Dawkins managed a weak smile. “Yet here I am.”

  David shook his head in disbelief. “When did you get out?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Where did you stay last night, then?”

  “At the Albany bus terminal. I took a Greyhound bus from Kranston to get there.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I kept your letters. They had a return address.” Years ago, David and Phillip had exchanged letters as part of New York’s Offender Correspondence Program. Inmates could write to anyone outside of prison. Phillip had randomly chosen David’s name from a lawyer directory and had written asking him to take his Civil Rights case for unconstitutional incarceration. Phillip wanted out of solitary confinement and a lawsuit in federal court was the only way. David declined the case because he didn’t have the deep pockets to fund such a protracted lawsuit against the State in federal court, not counting the appeals the State would most certainly launch. That’s the way the system worked.

  “Why are you here?” David asked, knowing full well that Phillip didn’t have any immediate family. Not that he would have wanted to see his Dad and his belt again. That brutal figure had departed this earth with a bottle in his hand; his mother faded away in a nursing home. His friends outside the clink moved on. They wanted to forget Phillip’s life and live their own. He was easy to forget. Kranston was miles from his home base of Syracuse. It sat right in the middle of the Adirondack Park—the largest publicly protected park area in the continental United States. Phillip was put in a box in the middle of nowhere.

  Now Phillip was beginning to find his voice. “The ex-con who was gonna pick me up didn’t show. No shelter would take me. Some of them said they don’t allow ex-cons. Others said they were all booked up. A guy at the bus station showed me where you lived on his cell phone map. I had the $2.00 for bus fare down and I walked the rest of the way. I got no place else to go.”

 
; David still spoke through a crack in the door but no longer braced it with his foot. Yeah, he realized Phillip was innocent. That’s what the newspaper said. But he was still nervous. Dawson had spent his entire sentence in solitary confinement. The system had just dumped a man straight from thirty years in a 6’ x 8’ box onto his doorstep in a single day. Even Amazon couldn’t match that shipping time. On top of it all, there was something else that worried David. “Are you mad at me?”

  The sun came out from behind a cloud and hit Phillip’s face. He jerked a hand upward and, like a small umbrella, it shielded his sensitive eyes. Sunlight at Kranston came in flickers, not in steady streams. “Why would I be mad at you?”

  David’s guilt was only surpassed by his terror of Phillip. He knew that the one thing Phillip could use to get him through his solitary confinement was correspondence via snail mail. That was the only contact Phillip had with people. There was no human contact allowed within prison walls for those in solitary. Confined to a concrete box twenty-three hours a day. An hour for recess in a cage for the other hour. Like a dog kennel for men. Except the COs did the barking when they shouted out orders. That’s all the contact the system tolerated. What he couldn’t find on the inside, Phillip tried to find on the outside via the few postage stamps he was allotted every month. It was the only loophole in the system.

  “Because I stopped writing to you,” David said, trying to meet Phillip’s eyes.

  After David declined to take Phillip’s case, the two exchanged many letters. David even visited him once. But it became too much to sustain. Phillip would send him thirty-page letters neatly written in perfect cursive on lined notebook paper. One after another after another. They were written in pen with rarely even one mistake. The letters detailed his stay in solitary. They were heartbreaking to read. David thought they deserved an answer. Every last one of them. But responding to them was both painful and time consuming. And his responses just generated more letters from Phillip. The system was devouring Phillip and their pen-pal correspondence made David feel as if he was tagging along for the ride.

  David finally decided there was nothing he could do to help Phillip. He had written letters to the editors of newspapers, to politicians, even to the prison itself. But nothing happened. It was as if he was banging his head against a wall. Nobody gave a rat’s ass about a cop killer in solitary. He was getting what he deserved and could burn in hell. That’s what the haters said on Facebook when David’s Op-Ed articles were posted, right before they said Phillip should be fried to death.

  All David could do to move on with his life was to stop writing to Phillip. It was easy enough to do. He asked the New York Bureau of Prisons to place his name on the negative correspondence list. The system informed Phillip that he couldn’t write to David any longer. There was no messy breakup. Just block Phillip’s mail and be done with it. Out of sight; out of mind.

  Like everyone else, David tried to justify his thinking by telling himself that Phillip was a cop killer. What about the cop’s family? Maybe Phillip deserves solitary after all. You lie to yourself sometimes when there’s a problem that’s way bigger than you. You lie to yourself so that you can move on.

  “You weren’t the only one who stopped writing,” Phillip said. “There were others before you and after you.”

  “Really? I didn’t know . . .”

  “Well, that’s because I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anyone about anyone else because nobody would write to me then if I did. They’d all figure, you know, I’d always have someone else to write to if they didn’t want to anymore.”

  David stood there speechless as he took in Phillip’s point of view. “I think I understand. I’m sorry I couldn’t write you anymore. It’s just—”

  “Forget it. It’s okay. I got used to people dropping out. It’s kinda the way my life goes. Family drops dead. Friends on the outside fade. COs come and go. Other inmates move on or kill themselves. I just sit in my box.”

  They put the wrong man in a box for thirty years. The thought consumed David as the wind blew a cloud over the sun. It was chilly outside. Phillip was shivering. He didn’t have a coat.

  “Come in,” David said, opening the door.

  “Are you sure?” Phillip asked, stepping over the threshold.

  “Yeah. Don’t worry. Christy and Annie aren’t home.” But David knew they would be within the hour. He also knew that Phillip needed to leave before they came back. Otherwise, she’d ask him to stay for supper before he could talk to her privately. That was her nature. She didn’t know Phillip by name. All she might recall was that years ago David had tried to help a prisoner. Cop killers or any bad guys having to do with David’s law practice weren’t Topic A at the dinner table.

  “Do you want something to drink?” he asked just as Annie had trained him to do when company called.

  Phillip’s eyes lit up, one eyebrow higher than the other. David recognized that look. It was the same look he gave when David fetched a bag of Doritos for him from the prison vending machine in the visiting area.

  “You know I’m not talking about alcohol, right Phillip?”

  “Sure,” Phillip said, eyes unchanged. “Do you have a Coke, by chance?”

  “How about a Pepsi?”

  “That’ll be fine, thank you.”

  David closed the front door and walked past Phillip on the way to the kitchen. “Have a seat,” David said, pointing to the dining room chairs.

  As David reached for the refrigerator door, he looked into the dining room. Panic hit him like a wave. Phillip was not within his range of view. The visitor wasn’t sitting in any of the chairs.

  Where did he go?

  David grabbed a Pepsi from the six-pack rings—the same type of rings that Phillip used from a beer pack to help strangle Officer Pete Carlson. Except that he didn’t do it. He’s innocent, remember?

  But all of a sudden, it didn’t matter that he was innocent anymore. In a heartbeat, David recalled how prison changes a man. He had spent time in the county jail himself when he was falsely accused of killing his friend and expert witness, Harold Salar. He recalled how quickly his mental state deteriorated in jail. He tried to be a badass inmate in his quest to survive. He had violent thoughts and was just one bad day away from acting on them. David knew if you weren’t guilty of something before going into the slammer, you’d find yourself guilty of something inside of it. That’s the way the system works you over. David had spent less than thirty days in jail and had become a basket case before his release. He couldn’t imagine what he’d be like after thirty years. Maybe a monster.

  When David re-entered the dining room, Phillip was stroking the mahogany credenza with his index fingers. The top drawer was slightly open. That’s where Annie stored the holiday carving knives—the large decorative ones used to cut the big turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Those sat right next to the stainless steel poultry shears—so large and sharp that they could sever the joint of an adult. David didn’t remember the drawer being ajar. Gotta make sure he doesn’t steal something or stab me with one of those things.

  “Here’s your Pepsi,” David said.

  Phillip looked up over his shoulder. “This is a great piece of furniture you have here. Six dovetail joints in the drawer. I haven’t seen one like this since . . . forever.”

  “Thank you,” David said, not knowing what else to say. He handed the soda to Phillip. The face of the can disappeared as that huge right hand engulfed it.

  “Sit down, Phillip,” David said, while closing the drawer.

  Phillip lowered himself into a padded wood armchair, one of the eight around the table. When his butt hit the seat, he grinned. “Comfortable.” He hadn’t sat in a chair in decades. His cell didn’t have one. No furniture. Just a metal sheet that served as a bed frame and a skinny mattress. He’d throw the mattress on the floor. That would be his seat when he used the solid steel bed frame as a desk to write.

  Phillip had chosen David’s chair, the one
with the arms, the more ornate one at the end of the table. It bothered David a bit. Everyone in the family knew not to sit in his chair. Everything else of David’s was fair game. Just not the chair. But David told himself to shrug it off. The guy deserves my chair. Thirty years in prison and innocent. Jesus.

  David sat down beside him facing the window. He could see the driveway from that chair. He could spot Annie’s approach. He’d have to hide Phillip if he saw her. He just didn’t know where. David could imagine Annie opening the coat closet door and finding Phillip standing there. Oh, honey, don’t worry. It’s just Phillip. You know, the guy who murdered that cop who I tried to help years ago. No need to panic. He’s innocent. They let him go. Why is he in the closet? Um, because he’s used to small rooms.

  But David didn’t want to bring Phillip into Annie and Christy’s life. He didn’t even know if he wanted him in his life or, if so, on what terms. Phillip’s release was very much a shock to him. He needed time to sort it out.

  David’s eyes met Phillip’s. “What are your plans?”

  Phillip looked down at the bare mahogany dining room table. He touched the abstract outline of his face visible in his reflection on the polished surface. He circled it slowly with his index finger, round and round. His lips began to quiver as he tried to speak. Nothing came out.

  David realized then that he’d asked a stupid question. He hasn’t planned a damn thing for thirty years. The COs told him what to do every second of every day. He doesn’t know how to plan.

  “I’m not sure,” Phillip said sheepishly, before bringing his index finger to his nose and inhaling. “What’s that smell?”

  “Lemon oil, I think.” David had seen Annie polish the table with it the day before.

  Phillip smiled. “That’s what a real lemon smells like?”

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  “It’s nice.”

  David heard the faint electric hum of the Toyota Prius his wife drove. He looked up. Annie and Christy had just pulled into the driveway.

  David bolted upright. “You need to leave,” he blurted out. “You need to get out of here this minute!”