"It could be that he's just inarticulate," Chris observed. "Or maybe it's something too awful to articulate. As terrible as it is, we're left hoping to find out the latter—and that it'll matter."
"Shouldn't it?"
"Atkins gives us a shot," Chris answered in an undertone too soft for others to hear. Leaning back, he cast an eye upon the sunlit field and restive fans around them. "But lately I find myself looking at Kit and wondering how I would feel about anyone who did to him what Rennell Price is supposed to have done to Thuy Sen. And what kind of man would Kit become if he suffered as a child like Rennell may have? Considering either question makes me sick. Though not as sick as wondering about what Terri must feel about this case, but can never let herself say."
Pensive, Carlo touched the bridge of his nose, a characteristic gesture Chris first had noticed when his older son had been the age Kit was now. "So how did you decide you were against the death penalty?"
Chris gazed out toward left field, with its giant baseball mitt rising above the stands, the palm trees jutting from behind them toward an electric blue sky. "When I was eight or nine," he answered finally, "and I heard there was a thing called the death chamber, I had a kid's visceral sense that it wasn't right. But I was twenty-one when Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy, and I felt like I could have pulled the switch on that sonofabitch myself, for murdering our future." Turning to Carlo, his father smiled briefly. "Marrying your somewhat determined stepmother required me to sort death out for good. In the end, what clinched it for me was the real fear of executing the innocent, and the absolute conviction we've done that already."
"Think we'll ever prove that?"
"Sure. Maybe starting with Texas, if the state doesn't cover up its crime to spare the rest of our delicate sensibilities. I only hope it'll make a difference." Chris's tone became sardonic. "A lot of people figure it won't happen to folks like them—white, well-educated, privileged—so why does it matter? At the very least, they rationalize, someone charged with a capital crime probably did something, so we're merely weeding out a few social undesirables."
Carlo nodded. "The people who most people never see."
"Uh-huh. When it comes to capital punishment, America suffers from a massive failure of empathy and imagination." Chris's face was somber now. "A sentence of death cuts fault lines through the lives of everyone involved: not just Rennell and Payton Price, but their grandmother; the father, mother, and sister of Thuy Sen; and Yancey James. Perhaps even Eddie Fleet, and whatever lives he may have touched since he dimed out his two friends. The death sentence becomes a life sentence for those it doesn't kill."
Saying this, Chris Paget fully confronted his subconscious fear: Carlo, like Terri, might devote his life to this. This was selfish, he acknowledged, but not entirely—he did not want his son to take on a career that hard, or to develop all the defenses he would need to endure it. He did not want the death penalty to claim Carlo Paget.
Suddenly, Carlo smiled at him—the easy, charming grin Chris had known since Carlo was seven—and turned his eyes toward home plate. "You'd better pay attention, Dad. Bonds is up, and something might actually happen here. Another piece of family lore."
ELEVEN
SAN QUENTIN PRISON ALLOWED PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING MONDAYS, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays between eight-thirty and two, and on Thursdays or Fridays for another three hours beginning at eleven in the morning. Even if the testing consumed the maximum five and a half hours, the prison authorities allowed no food in the psychiatric conference room—not for Rennell, Lane, or Terri. Though she disliked the inhumanity of forcing Rennell to go five hours without food, a condition which made Terri herself irritable, this was one test she badly needed him to fail.
Among the problems of retardation, Lane had confirmed, is that it affects attention—the ability to sustain it, and to chose among competing stimuli the one which is most important. A second area for testing was the ability to absorb and remember information. Another lay in the visual and perceptual function—whether Rennell could see a triangle and then copy it. Yet another was basic reading, spelling, and arithmetic. For the first three and a half hours, Terri observed what she had expected: that Rennell was easily distracted; that his memory was short-lived and erratic; that shapes translated poorly from his eye to his hand, triangles becoming cubes and squares morphing into rectangles; and that Rennell's scholastic skills remained roughly those of the third grader taught by Sharon Brooks. Yet Rennell tried so hard that Terri found it heartbreaking to watch. By the time he began the IQ test, it was past noon. The big man froze, a vacant-eyed replica of himself, with his pencil suspended over the paper as though fearing further shame.
And still he tried.
Now he glanced sideways at Terri, as though fearful of her judgment or, perhaps, imploring her to stop. Tiredly, Rennell said, "You're really workin' my mind today."
She forced herself to smile and stay quiet. "You're doing good," Tony Lane assured him. "Just stick with it awhile longer, and this stuff will all be over."
Rennell closed his eyes, sucking stale air into his lungs. Outside, one guard with a baton took the place of another, this one looking bored and disdainful, as though watching a dumb show performed by a murderer attempting to cheat justice.
Rennell resumed the test, pencil stabbing at the paper.
* * *
At a little past one-thirty, Lane placed a wooden board in front of Rennell—a replica of the child's game Elena and Kit had played in preschool, which challenged them to fit wooden pieces into the hollow shapes presented by the board. Rennell stared at it, suspicion warring with embarrassment.
"I seen this before. In school."
Lane smiled. "But I do this one a little different—it's for adults."
Rennell's shoulders sagged. "How's that?"
"Before you put the shapes in, I'll be covering your eyes with a blindfold."
For the first time, Rennell's tone bespoke resistance. "What's that for?"
"It's just part of the rules. Helps us know what you remember."
Staring at the board, Rennell shook his head from side to side. "At that trial, I didn't have no blindfold."
Silent, Terri watched, worried Rennell was on the edge of exhaustion, so fearful of looking stupid that he would refuse to go on. "True enough," Lane answered. "But they didn't test you at the trial. This will help us explain you to the judge. How you think and all."
"This game's got nothin' to do with me being innocent." Rennell's tone of voice became implacable. "I don't want no blindfold, man. Damn straight I don't."
Terri realized that fatigue and hunger had slowed her thoughts and dulled her instincts. "This is the last part," she interjected with quiet urgency. "We need it to try and save your life."
Once more Rennell shook his head. "I didn't do that little girl. Don't want no blindfold—just tell that judge I didn't do her."
"Please trust me about this, Rennell. I'd never ask if this test wasn't good for you . . ."
He stared at her, as though straining to hear Terri through his need to resist. Terri looked into his eyes. "Please," she repeated. "It won't take long at all."
The distance seeping into his gaze began to frighten her—it was as though he were reverting to the stranger who first had confronted her with the wall of his seeming indifference. "Why don't we take a minute," she suggested. "Try and relax."
Turning from her, Rennell folded his hands in front of him and stared mutely at the wooden board. Terri let the second hand on the schoolroom clock above the guard's head trace its circle twice, then nodded at Lane.
"Look at the pieces," he said encouragingly. "Just try to remember where a piece fits on the board. Then we can start."
Rennell did not acknowledge him. Terri couldn't tell whether he was struggling to absorb the instructions or had receded to some other place or time.
"I'll put the blindfold on now," she told him. "Okay, Rennell?"
When he did not answer, Lane handed he
r the black swatch of cloth. Standing behind Rennell, she paused, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. Then she folded the cloth once and placed it over his eyes, tying it behind his head.
"Okay, brother Rennell," Lane said in his most companionable voice. "You can start with any piece you want."
Slowly, Rennell groped for the piece nearest him, a star.
"Good," Lane said.
Rennell's hand began twitching. "Can't," he whispered.
"You're doing fine."
Rennell hesitated, shoulders bracing with the effort. A tremor ran through his body.
"It's okay." This time it was Terri who spoke. "It'll be okay."
Abruptly, Rennell's mouth clamped shut, the part of his face she could see screwed tight. He folded his arms as though to fight off cold.
"Rennell . . ."
From beneath the blindfold, a single tear trickled down his face.
Abruptly, Terri stood, removing the blindfold. Rennell hunched forward, head pressed against his drawn-up knees. A cry of anguish ripped from deep inside his chest.
Terri hugged him from behind, face pressed against the top of his head, watching Lane's narrow-eyed scrutiny of the sobbing man before him.
"It's okay," Terri whispered, trying to breathe with him. She could feel his body trembling in her grasp.
* * *
Emerging from the prison, Terri felt diminished. Her only hope was that what she'd wrung from Rennell Price had some meaning larger than the fatigue and hunger of a man beaten down and then betrayed by a lawyer too intent on her goals to see him.
"I don't know what that was about," Lane had told her. "Maybe we never will. But it felt like more than a sugar deficit. The man was scared."
"Maybe scared of looking stupid," Terri answered. "Or maybe of what he thought I was doing."
For a moment, Terri thought of her childhood, her own nightmares and fear of darkness and then, unavoidably, their recurrence in Elena, and the terrible reasons for that. But all she could do was keep on going. So she drove downtown to Macy's, where Yancey James's ex-wife, Diana, worked behind a cosmetics counter.
* * *
Though quite striking, Diana James used too much of her own product for Terri's taste, and the spiky eyelashes made her enormous black eyes too prominent in a face so long and thin. But an edgy humor flashed through the makeup when Terri explained herself. "Oh, Lord," James said. "Another one of poor Yancey's condemned. They find their way to his door like swallows coming back to Capistrano."
"My swallow's got twenty-nine days," Terri said. "And his next stop won't be Capistrano. I was hoping we could talk."
Diana rolled her eyes, her expression hovering between exasperation and hard-earned resignation. "I'm a sucker for nostalgia. I mean, why would merely living with the man ever have been enough." She glanced at her watch. "Tell you what, counselor, my break's in twenty minutes. Chance to get us some fresh air."
* * *
Terri sat with Diana James on a wooden bench in Union Square, watching the pigeons strut by with their chests stuck out while peering about for food.
James eyed them with amused disdain. "Like Yancey before the fall," she said. "Posing like wild, all the time trying to figure out how to get through the next twenty-four hours. Excepting pigeons don't lie."
Terri managed a smile. "Nostalgia," she remarked, "isn't what it used to be."
"Not for this girl." James gave Terri a look of shrewd appraisal. "I guess you want to talk with him, and you're needing my supposed expertise. Or intervention."
"That was the idea," Terri acknowledged. "Especially the intervention part."
A corner of James's mouth twisted up. "You're Rennell Price's lawyer, right? So hard to keep them straight. As I recall things, Yancey didn't much like Rennell's last pack of lawyers when they came sniffing around." Pausing, James stretched out her syllables in an orotund mimicry of her ex-husband. " 'Acc-u-sa-tory,' he called them. 'Con-de-scending.' Poor bastard was scared to death of losing everything like he was losing me, so naturally he inflated himself with bluster like it was helium. Or," she finished with sudden bitterness, "white powder. By the time I left him, he wasn't anything but coke and pretense. Nobody home no more."
Terri studied her with genuine curiosity. "Did you have kids?"
"No, thank God." The eyelids lowered. "I say that, but now I've got no kids, too far south of forty. Yancey's the only child I'll ever have."
"I guess you still see him."
"If that's what you call propping somebody up." Diana James sighed, her voice combining weariness with a certain measured sympathy. "Yancey's got a long, hard road. One of the steps to recovery, they say, is apologizing to those you've wronged. He can't even remember all the people he owes apologies, and the ones he can remember make for a very long list. Sort of makes the road to Calvary look like the hundred-yard dash." Her tone sharpened. "One thing I do remember is your client made some poor Asian child choke to death on his own dick. Compared to that, lethal injection seems like a cakewalk. But maybe there's no exceptions on the path to true repentance."
The abrupt mutation of James's attitude made Terri fearful she would not help. "My client has a story," Terri answered. "No one ever told it. We're still discovering what it is."
"We all got stories, counselor. And nobody ever tells them. There's no reality TV show wanting mine."
Terri paused a moment. In a neutral tone, she asked, "Do you think Yancey will talk to me about Rennell?"
James briefly closed her eyes. "Only if you let him apologize enough." Her voice softened, a muted apology of her own. "I'll call him for you, all right? Don't want to stand in the way of my baby growing up."
TWELVE
ENTERING THE PSYCHIATRIC INTERVIEW ROOM WITH ANTHONY Lane, Terri studied Rennell with apprehension, fearful that she had destroyed his trust. But when she gave him the sheaf of Hawkman comics she had brought as a present, the smile of gratitude spreading across his face caused her to reach for his manacled hands.
"I love your smile," she told him and realized that she meant it.
A hint of bashful pleasure crept into his eyes. "Grandma always say that. She tole me I had a happy disposition."
"I think you do, Rennell. Where'd you get that, I wonder."
"Payton." The reflexive answer was followed by a sudden remembrance of their circumstances, causing Rennell's smile to vanish, his voice to soften. "But now they're gonna kill him."
"Let's not think about that now," Lane suggested gently. "Your smile got me thinking about when Payton was little, and you were just a knee baby. What were things like then?"
Rennell studied his handcuffs. "Long time ago, man. Don't remember much about that, excepting Payton always took care of me."
"How'd he do that?"
The question caused Rennell's eyes and mouth to tighten in concentration, or perhaps, Terri suspected, in fear. "When I got scared."
Lane glanced at Terri. In a tone of amiable sympathy, he said, "When I was a kid, the dark used to scare me. What used to scare you?"
Rennell's expression seemed to close. "Maybe when I got in trouble at school. Not learnin' stuff and all, like you said."
The answer was so plainly deflective that it sparked a new keenness in Lane's eyes, though his smile remained in place. "Ever get scared when you were just at home?"
Rennell flipped open a Hawkman comic with his thumb, staring at its images. "I got scared, yeah."
"When you got scared, what'd you do?"
Rennell kept gazing at the bright-colored pages. Lane waited for some moments before prodding, "Rennell?"
The big man's eyes closed, and Terri saw that it was not the comics which had captured his mind. "Sometimes Payton took me to the bush."
"Tell me about the bush."
"We be hiding out there." Rennell's voice slowed, as though speaking a memory as it came to him. "It was in the park, all thick and tangled up, with places where we hid. Seems like we're stayin' there for a long time."<
br />
"What did you do?"
"Just hidin'. Sometimes Payton tell me stories."
Lane smiled again. "What kind of stories?"
" 'Bout what he'd be doin', when he growed up. Like havin' a big house with guard dogs all around it. He tole me I could live with him."
"Bet that sounded good."
"Yeah." Terri heard a complex mix of warmth and fear and melancholy seep into Rennell's words. "When we was kids, it sounded real good."
"Sure. I get the part about hiding," Lane ventured. "Sometimes when we're little kids, our daddies get mad at us."
In the silence which followed, Terri and Lane watched Rennell settle into an expressionless torpor. "Yeah," Rennell finally allowed. "Sometimes he get mad."
"Tell about a time your daddy gets mad."
Rennell's shoulders twitched—a shrug, Terri thought, or perhaps a flinch. "Gets mad a lot."
"How can you tell he's mad?"
"When his eyes get bigger."
"What happens when you see his eyes get bigger?"
Rennell raised his hands to his face, rubbing both eyes with his thumbs. "He does bad things to me."
Terri felt herself tense. But Lane maintained the same manner of empathic curiosity. "What things are those?"
"Things." Rennell kept rubbing, and his next words had a strangled quality. "He hurts me."
"Yeah," Lane answered. "I'm sorry he hurt you."
Rennell's body shuddered, as though he was receding into his moments of darkest fear. Softly, Lane asked, "What does he do to you, Rennell?"
Rennell shook his head. No more words came out.
Lane considered him and then, glancing at Terri, briefly frowned. After a moment, he asked Rennell, "What did you do to be safe?"
Slowly, Rennell let his fingers slip from his face. "Find Payton," he answered. "Sometimes he takes me to the bush."
Lane, Terri saw, had begun studying Rennell's hands. "Tell me about your mom," he said.
Rennell's eyes remained closed. "She didn't want me."
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