The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  In the evening, a week before the trial date, she received a call from Detective Perry. He sounded excited.

  “Merce,” he said, “it’s going down tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “It’s guilty-plea time.”

  “No trial?”

  “No. He’s going to cop to the three cases.”

  “What’s the deal.”

  “He gets to live. That’s all.”

  “How much time?”

  “The max on each. He does a mandatory twenty-five calendar, straight time, hard time, no gain time, no good time. All consecutive. Seventy-five years straight. Also he’s gonna cop to some assaults, so the judge is going to add on some more time. He’ll score a hundred easy. We can go up to Raiford Prison and dig his grave, ’cause that’s where he’s gonna die. He’ll never get out.”

  “He should get the death penalty.”

  “Merce, Merce. He’s in front of Judge Rule. The old bastard’s had a dozen first-degree murder cases before him, including that biker-torture case, and he still hasn’t fried anyone. You remember that case, Merce?”

  “I remember.”

  “Cattle prods, Merce. Zippo lighters.”

  “1 remember, dammit.”

  “Those guys are just doing twenty-fives.”

  “It still . . .”

  He interrupted her.

  “Sure, it pisses you off. It pisses off the other victims’ families, too. But they’re going along. Everyone’s a little wary of the guy’s insanity defense, too.”

  “Bullshit! The guy may be screwed a little tight . . .”

  He interrupted her again.

  “I know, I know. But those two guys defending him walked that guy who cut up his girlfriend with a hacksaw into a mental hospital last year.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “No buts. You want to take the chance?”

  She thought hard for a moment. Before she responded, Detective Perry cut into her thoughts.

  “And don’t think for a minute that you could do the creep yourself. I know about all those jailhouse visits, Merce. Don’t think it.”

  “He deserves to die.”

  “He is going to die, Merce.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “We’re all going to die.”

  “Merce,” Detective Perry said. His voice had softened. “Merce. Give it a rest. The guy’s going away. He’s history. It’s over, understand? Don’t make me make this speech. Hell, you probably know it by heart. You’ve probably given it a few times yourself. It’s over. Over. Got it?”

  “Over.”

  “Right.”

  “Over.”

  “Will be, at nine in the morning.”

  “See you there,” she said, hanging up the phone.

  Sadegh Rhotzbadegh seemed mouselike, timid, shivering, though the press of people jammed into the courtroom made the air thick, hot, and stifling. When he spotted Detective Barren sitting in her customary front-row seat he shrank close to the side of one of his public defenders, who turned and glowered at the detective. There was a stiffening in the courtroom as the judge swept in. An elderly man with a shock of white hair that gave him a slightly demented look, the judge surveyed the courtroom quickly, noting the lineup of victims’ families and television and newspaper reporters, filling all the chairs and pressed up against the walls. It was an old courtroom, with pictures of distinguished judges staring down, now in utter anonymity, from dark walls.

  “We’ll take Mr. Rhotzbadegh first,” he said. “There is, I believe, a plea.”

  “Yes, your honor.” One of the young prosecutors had risen. “Simply put, in return for a guilty plea to all outstanding charges, the state will waive its pursuit of the death penalty. It is our understanding that Mr. Rhotzbadegh will then receive maximum terms on all counts, running consecutively. That would be a total of one hundred and eleven years.”

  He sat down. The judge looked at the defense table.

  “That is correct,” said one of the defense attorneys.

  The judge looked at the defendant. The Lebanese student rose.

  “Mr. Rhotzbadegh, have your attorneys explained what is happening to you?”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  “And do you agree with the terms of the plea?”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  “You haven’t been coerced or forced to make this plea?”

  “No, your honor.”

  “It is of your own free will?”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  “You know that your attorneys had prepared a defense and that you had the right to confront your accusers before a jury of your peers and force the state to prove beyond and to the exclusion of any reasonable doubt these allegations against you?”

  “I understand that, your honor. They were prepared to argue that I was insane. I am not.”

  “Do you have anything you wish to add?”

  “I did what I did because it was written and commanded of me to do. This is what I am guilty of. In the eyes of the Prophet, I am blameless. I will welcome the day that he gathers me to his bosom and we walk together in the gardens.”

  Detective Barren heard the sound of reporters taking notes, trying to get all of the suspect’s words. The judge broke in.

  “That is fine, and I’m glad that your religious beliefs are a comfort to you . . .”

  “They are indeed, your honor.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  The judge made a small hand motion and the Lebanese student sat down. The judge looked out over the crowded courtroom.

  “Are the relatives of the victims here?”

  The room remained silent. Then an elderly couple sitting to the right of Detective Barren stood up. She saw another couple stand, followed by an entire family. She stood, too. The courtroom continued in fragile quiet and she noticed that Sadegh Rhotzbadegh’s shoulders were twitching. Fear, she thought. He kept his eyes resolutely forward.

  “Would any of you care to say anything for the record?”

  There was a moment’s confusion. Detective Barren’s imagination flooded with words, about Susan, about what she meant, about what she would have become. Emotion gagged her and she sat down. But one of the others who had stood, a tall and thin, distinguished-seeming man wearing a well-cut blue pinstripe suit, strode forward. His eyes were red. For an instant he stared down at the defense table with a glance that seemed to suck the heat from the room. Then he turned to the judge.

  “Your honor. Morton Davies, father of Angela Davies, victim . . .”

  He hesitated.

  “We have agreed to this plea because we understand that the system would sooner cheat us, who have suffered such loss, than it would this . . .” He stumbled, searching for a word.

  “. . . this refuse.”

  He paused.

  “Our loss, your honor, our loss . . .”

  And then he stopped.

  His last word hung in the courtroom air, echoing in the sudden silence.

  Detective Barren knew instantly why he’d stopped. Everyone did, she thought. How could one put words to the loss? She felt her own throat closing, and for an instant felt a kind of panic-sense that she wouldn’t be able to breathe much more, certainly not at all, if he tried to continue.

  He did not. He turned on his heel and walked through the room, through the doors to the rear, out to the corridor. There was a sudden flash of light as the television cameramen staked out in the hallway captured his grief. Detective Barren turned again to the front. Sadegh Rhotzbadegh had risen, his attorneys on either side. He was being fingerprinted and the judge was intoning the sentence, reading the counts off and pronouncing the maximum term. The years were adding up swiftly and suddenly the judge c
oncluded and the two defense attorneys stepped aside, replaced instantly by two immense prison guards who firmly and deliberately began to lead Sadegh Rhotzbadegh from the courtroom. She heard the judge declare a recess and disappear, black robe blurring, through a side door. The reporters were on their feet around her, and there were questions and answers flooding the air. One family pushed by, shaking their heads. Another stopped to inveigh against the system. Detective Barren saw the prosecutors shaking hands with a grinning Detective Perry. Then she stepped forward and watched the Lebanese student. He was almost to the prisoner’s exit when he stopped and turned, eyes searching. They met with Detective Barren’s, and they locked together for an instant. For the first time his eyes seemed, not scared, but filled with sadness. The two people looked at each other. He shook his head vigorously, as if trying to insist, trying to pass some negative of importance. She saw him mouth a word or two but wasn’t sure what they were.

  And then he disappeared. Swallowed up. She heard the door slam shut and lock.

  She felt, then, a complete emptiness.

  At first she did everything to excess. Accustomed to an easy two-mile run on the beach in the mornings, she upped it to five miles in forty-five minutes, aching and panting with lost breath in the aftermath. At work she pursued every aspect of each of her cases two or three times, precision and exactitude a comfort to her. She began to drink more, too, finding sleep elusive unless aided. A friend offered her Valium, but she used what she thought ruefully was the remainder of her good sense to turn down the drugs. She recognized that she was behaving exotically, desperately, and knew also that she was in trouble. Her dreams, when she could sleep, were fitful, filled with the Lebanese student, or Susan, or her own dead husband. Sometimes she saw the face of the man who’d shot her, sometimes her father, who looked at her curiously, tearfully, as if saddened, even in death.

  She hated the idea that it was over.

  She knew the procedure. Sadegh Rhotzbadegh would be sent to the classification center in mid-Florida, where he would get his physical and mental examinations. Then, in due course, he would be shipped up to the maximum-security unit at Raiford, to begin his prison life, begin living out his days.

  That he lived dismayed her.

  In her mind’s eye she replayed over and again the small shrug that had passed between them, trying to decipher, amidst the confusion and terror and madness, what he’d meant with that final shaking of the head.

  She would lie in bed at night, thinking.

  She would slow it, like fancy television camerawork, trying to separate each motion into a whole. His head bent first to the right, then the left, his mouth opening, words formed, but evaporating in the noise.

  She took to spending time each weekend on the police range. It gave her some satisfaction to sharpen her skills with the standard issue .38 Police Special. The sensation as the weapon bucked and thrust in her hand was sensual, relaxing. She purchased a Browning 9-millimeter semiautomatic, a large, violent gun, and grew proficient with that, too. She went to Lieutenant Burns and requested a transfer out of crime-scene analysis and back to the street.

  “I’d like to go back on patrol duty.”

  “What?”

  “Take a regular shift. Maybe a beat.”

  “No chance.”

  “This is an official request.”

  “So? I should let you go out there and blow some purse snatcher away? You think I’m crazy? Request denied. If you want to go above my head, fine. If you want to go to the union, fine, but the bottom line’s gonna stay the same.”

  “I want out.”

  “No, you don’t. You want peace. I can’t give you that. Only time can.”

  But she knew none.

  She called Detective Perry.

  “You know, Merce, we were damn close at the end to indicting him for Susan’s murder. We had the newspaper clipping found at his house, and after the guy’s picture ran in the newspaper a couple of students who were at the bar with Susan the night of the killing made him. They would have testified that they saw him there that night. Trouble was, they didn’t see him with her, or follow her out, and one of the students distinctly remembers seeing the creep after Susan had to have disappeared. So we were close, but . . .”

  “Can I have their names?”

  “Sure.”

  She scribbled them down. She intended to visit them.

  She thought often of the Lebanese student’s head shaking. What, she thought repeatedly. What was he saying?

  She lay in bed feeling blackness surround her. It was weeks after the sentencing; the tropical springtime with its great rush of growth and lushness had enveloped the city. Even the darkness seemed alive with resurgence. Suppose, she thought, he was trying to say, No, I didn’t kill Susan. Don’t be ridiculous. He hated you, she thought. He was mad as a March hare. Allah this and Allah that, he was seeking some kind of forgiveness. From her? He was too scared and too arrogant, an impossible combination. Then what was he saying? He shook his head, that’s all. Forget it. How?

  And then she was filled with an odd, disquieting fear, as if there were something very obvious that she had forgotten. For a moment her head spun and she turned on the light. It rended the nighttime. She padded across the bedroom to a small desk, where she kept all the copies of reports, evidence and notes from the investigation and solution of Susan’s murder. Slowly she spread them about her. Then, carefully, thinking to herself, Be a goddamn detective, stop acting like a grief-stricken puppy, she began to search through them. Look, she said to herself. Find it, whatever it is. Something is there.

  And there was. A small something.

  It was in the evidence-disposition report from her boss.

  Trace alcohol.

  She read: “. . . Guy must have had a drink or two. Booze always screws everything up . . .”

  “Oh, God,” she said out loud to no one.

  She ran to a bookshelf in the living room, pulled out a dictionary, and looked up “Shiite Moslem,” but it wasn’t enough of a help. She spotted a course catalog from the university that Susan had once left behind. She seized it and tore it open. She found Middle Eastern Studies on page 154. She underlined the department chairman’s name and grabbed a telephone book. He was listed.

  She looked at the clock. Three a.m.

  She sat motionless for three hours, trying to blank out her fear.

  Sorry, she thought, as the clock turned six a.m. She dialed the number.

  “Harley Trench, please.”

  “God,” said a voice clouded with sleep. “You’ve got him. No damn extensions, I told you all in class.”

  “Professor Trench, this is Detective Mercedes Barren of the City of Miami Police. This is a police matter.”

  “Ohmigosh, I’m sorry. It’s usually students. They know I’m an early riser and they take advantage of me . . .”

  She heard him collect himself.

  “How can I help?” he asked.

  “We have a suspect in an important case who is of Middle Eastern extraction. He claims to be a Shiite Moslem.”

  “Oh, like that horrid fellow who killed the young girls.”

  “Very similar.”

  “Well, yes, go on . . .”

  “We need to know, well, we can exclude this fellow as a suspect in a case if we can show that he took a drink.”

  “You mean, like some alcoholic beverage.”

  “Right.”

  “A beer, or a glass of wine or a gin and tonic.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, that’s a simple question, detective. If he’s a sincere Shiite, like that poor crazed fellow said he was, not a chance.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A mortal sin, detective. No alcohol at all. Not through their lips. Not any time. It’s a pr
etty widespread tenet of the fanatic Moslems and the reformists. A true conservative Moslem wouldn’t touch a drop. Probably think the ayatollah himself would come after him. Now we’re not talking about a Saudi, here, or a North African Moslem. But a real eye-rolling ­hostage-taking Shiite? No chance. Does that answer your question, detective?”

  Detective Barren was silent.

  “Detective?”

  “Yes. Sorry. Just thinking. Thank you, it does.”

  Trace alcohol, she thought.

  She felt dizzy.

  She hung up the telephone and stared at the words before her. Trace alcohol.

  Oh, God, she thought.

  She saw the head as if in slow motion, shaking back and forth, insistent.

  She raced to the bedroom and rifled through the papers until she came to an inventory of everything at Sadegh Rhotzbadegh’s house. No liquor.

  But he was at the bar, she thought. They saw him there.

  But did they see him drink?

  Oh, God, she thought again.

  She got to her feet and walked into the bathroom. For a moment she stared at herself in the mirror. She saw her own eyes open in fear and horror. Then she was overcome by nausea, bent over the toilet and became violently ill. She wiped herself clean and looked back in the mirror.

  “Oh, God,” she said to her reflection. “He’s still out there. I think he’s still out there. Maybe, maybe, maybe, oh, God, maybe. Oh, Susan, oh, my God, I’m sorry, but he still may be out there. Oh, Susan, I’m so goddamn sorry. Oh, Susan.”

  A sob filled her throat. It burst from her lips like an explosion.

  “Oh, Susan, Susan, Susan,” she said.

  And then, for the first time since the first phone call so many months earlier, she gave in to her sorrow, capitulating to all the resonances of her heart that she’d suppressed so successfully and was suddenly, completely, utterly taken over by tears.

  II

  AN ENGLISH LIT MAJOR

  4. The glare off the highway filled the windshield, blinding him for a single second, and he pictured the way he’d stared across the table at his brother as his brother had said, “You know, I wish we’d been closer, growing up . . .”