House Witness

by Mike Lawson

  Based on his credit card statements, Ella saw that every Sunday and Monday—Jack’s days off—he took a bus to Atlantic City. On rare occasions he would stay in a cheap motel in AC on Sunday nights—those rare occasions almost certainly coinciding with some unexpected luck at the tables—but most often he came home Sunday night and then took the bus back to Atlantic City the following day. Jack had a serious, serious gambling jones—which was why, as soon as she’d seen his file, Ella knew that Jack would be a walk in the park.

  Ella had been on Jack’s bus when he left New York on a warm Sunday morning, a bus filled mostly with badly dressed old folks who didn’t look as though they could afford the bus ticket, much less a place at a poker table. Jack got off the bus at the terminal in AC and walked—eagerly, it seemed to Ella—to the Resorts Casino, one of the oldest casinos on the Boardwalk. There was a spring in his step, as if he just knew that today was going to be different, that today he was going to be a winner.

  He sat down at a blackjack table, pushed a hundred dollars toward the dealer, and collected his chips—and twenty minutes later, he’d lost a hundred bucks. And as he played, he was absolutely grim. Men probably had more fun visiting a proctologist than Jack had playing blackjack. And when he lost—and as near as Ella could tell, he lost every hand—he swore out loud, smacked his hand on the table, and the dealer would admonish him. After he lost the first hundred, he took out five more twenties, and this time the money lasted a bit longer, maybe forty minutes. Then it, too, was gone.

  Jack walked away from the table and over to the bar. Ella wondered if he was through gambling for the day and planned to head back to New York. She suspected not. Most likely he’d wait a while for his luck to change—as if there was any connection between time and luck—and then go to an ATM and get more cash from one of his overloaded credit cards. Ella walked up to him, took a seat on the stool next to his, and said, “Jack, let me buy you a drink.”

  “What?” Jack said. Even the offer of a drink from a pretty woman wasn’t enough to wipe the sour expression off his face.

  Ella wore a red wig, the hair touching her shoulders, and bright green contact lenses. She was dressed in tight-fitting designer jeans and a tank top she’d bought at Neiman Marcus. She’d dressed casually to better fit in with the losers who’d been on the bus with Jack, but as soon as she’d dealt with him, she’d hire a car to take her back to New York. She hated Atlantic City. Other than the towering casinos on the Boardwalk, it was a shabby, depressing place, growing shabbier each year as state after state authorized casino-style gambling.

  “Who are you?” Jack said. “And why would you want to buy me a drink?”

  “Jack, I’m your salvation,” Ella said. “I’m going to give you five grand today so you can keep on playing. And next month, provided you behave, I’m going to give you another five grand. Today is indeed your lucky day.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” Jack said, but the possibility of someone giving him five thousand dollars made him noticeably less belligerent.

  “I’m talking about Toby Rosenthal, the man you mistakenly identified as the man who shot Dominic DiNunzio.”

  “Mistakenly?”

  At that moment, the bartender came over, a heavily made up woman about Jack’s age, and asked if Jack and Ella wanted a drink. Ella didn’t even want to think about what the bartender would look like without her makeup. “I’ll have a Black Jack on the rocks,” Jack said. “A double. And it’s on her.” Ella had a Coke.

  In the next thirty minutes, Ella went over Jack’s original statement to the cops, what he’d said at Toby’s lineup, and what he would say at Toby’s trial. Jack may have been a lousy gambler, but he wasn’t stupid and understood what was expected of him. Jack had no problem with what Ella wanted him to do. She figured Jack could rationalize his actions, as he was only one of five witnesses, and it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t be sure that he saw Toby shoot DiNunzio.

  Ella could tell that Jack, with this newfound money, was eager to get back to the blackjack table, so she concluded by saying, “I’m going to go over all this again before Toby’s trial. In fact, I’ll probably go over your testimony with you several times. And like I said, next month I’ll mail you another five grand. I have your address. So are we good here, Jack?”

  “Yeah, we’re good. Now, can I have the money?”

  He looked over at the blackjack table as if it was an oasis in a desert and he was dying of thirst. What a loser—but he was her loser.

  Ella took an envelope from her purse—but didn’t hand it to Jack. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Now me, I’ve never hurt anyone in my life; I’m just not that kind of girl. But the people I work for … Jack, can you imagine what it would be like tending bar in a wheelchair? Because that’s what you’ll be doing if you take our money and don’t do what you’ve agreed to do.”

  Ella handed Jack the envelope and started toward the exit of the noisy, depressing, smoke-filled casino. She noticed she had a quarter in her pocket and stuck it in a slot machine on her way to the door. She pulled the handle and three red 7s lined up across the face of the machine. The machine started making a god-awful racket as it spit out eighty quarters. She couldn’t believe it: She’d just won twenty bucks. She laughed and kept on walking, not bothering to take the quarters out of the tray.

  25

  DeMarco was in a bar, having a beer, feeling disgruntled as he mulled over the five days he’d pretty much wasted in Texas. His cane was hooked over the back of his chair. His right leg throbbed, making him wonder if he’d gotten rid of the crutches too early.

  The bar was less than a mile from the massive redbrick prison in Huntsville where the state of Texas executed folks. From 1819, when the prison was built, until 1923 they hanged murderers and rapists in Huntsville, but in 1924, thanks to the modern miracle of electricity, Old Sparky came into use. Sparky was used over three hundred times. In 1982, however, the state concluded that lethal injection was a less cruel and unusual form of punishment—at least no one’s head caught on fire—and since then Texas has executed over five hundred people in this manner.

  DeMarco had just come from seeing a man on death row in Huntsville who was waiting for his appointment with the needle, and he felt very much in need of a drink. The bar was called Humphrey’s, and DeMarco stopped there only because it was the first drinking establishment he saw after leaving the prison. The irony was that the man DeMarco suspected he was chasing had used the name Humphry—spelled without an e—and he used it because he had a sick sense of humor.

  Oh yeah, he’d gotten a whiff of the guy.

  While sipping his beer, DeMarco called Sarah and told her to get him reservations tomorrow for Minneapolis, saying that between Las Vegas, Houston, and Huntsville, he’d seen enough of the American Southwest to last him a lifetime. He said this knowing that he might be flying to Arizona if he struck out in Minneapolis.

  “What are you doing in Huntsville?” Sarah asked.

  “I went to see a guy on death row who met with me only because they gave him a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. And then he told me to go fu … to go screw myself.”

  “What?” Sarah said.

  “Aw, never mind. I’ll tell you about it later. Just get me a flight to Minneapolis.”

  DeMarco had arrived in Houston five days earlier to talk to the Houston DA about the Miss Texas case. In 2009, a former Miss Texas—whose name was Stella Harrington—hired a killer to whack her abusive, cheating, wealthy husband. Then the killer, a bottom-feeder named Randy White, was arrested for another murder: Randy, drunk and higher than a kite on meth, had shot a pregnant convenience store clerk three times because she was slow to open a cash register—and a surveillance camera captured every gruesome detail.

  Randy knew he was going to get the death penalty—there was no doubt about it, not in Texas—so he told the prosecutor that he was also the guy who’d killed Stella Harrington’s husband, because Stella had p
aid him to do the deed. In exchange for his testimony against Stella, Randy White wanted life in prison for killing the pregnant clerk instead of the death penalty—and the Houston DA reluctantly agreed to the deal. At Stella’s trial, however, Randy got on the stand, swore to tell the truth, and lied. He said that he’d never met Miss Texas, and she was acquitted—but since Randy had reneged on his deal with the DA, off to death row in Huntsville he went.

  It took DeMarco two days to get a meeting with the Houston DA, a guy named Coogan, because Coogan had better things to do than talk about a seven-year-old case that he’d lost. After DeMarco finally got into see him, Coogan said, “Randy White killed two people that we know about and probably a few more we don’t know about. I believe there are one-cell parasites that have a bigger conscience than Randy does, and I figured that he didn’t care about one person on this planet, other than his own useless self. Well, it turned out I was wrong.” DeMarco—prejudiced by too many movies—had expected Coogan to look and sound like Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard, complete with a Stetson, cowboy boots, and a Texas twang. He turned out to be a soft-spoken man with no regional accent, short gray hair, and bifocals, and reminded DeMarco of a history teacher he’d once had.

  “Randy had two sisters,” Coogan said, “and the older one basically raised him, because his mother died when he was ten. Well, his older sister had ALS, you know, Lou Gehrig’s disease, like Stephen Hawking has. She didn’t have any money, was living in a shitty state nursing home, and was probably going to live another five or ten years, suffering the whole time, then die a horrible death.”

  “Okay,” DeMarco said, having no idea what this had to do with Randy not testifying against Stella Harrington.

  “Two days after Stella was acquitted,” Coogan said, “someone helped the sister commit suicide. She went peacefully and painlessly, and that was the deal I’m sure Randy made with the Devil: He agreed not to testify that Stella had hired him to kill her husband, and in return the Devil ended his big sister’s misery, which she’d been begging the doctors to do for years.”

  “But I take it you couldn’t find the Devil,” DeMarco said.

  “No, but God knows I tried. I knew I couldn’t get Stella, because she was found not guilty at trial, but I thought I might be able to get her dirtbag attorney for suborning a witness. And because Randy was in the county jail before the Harrington trial for murdering that poor pregnant woman, I knew somebody had to have visited him there and convinced him not to testify. I found out Randy’s sisters visited him—even the one with ALS—and his public defender, of course, and a couple of his low-life, white-trash friends. Plus one other person: A man named Derek Humphry met with him four times. Do you know who Derek Humphry is?”

  “No,” DeMarco said.

  “Well, I didn’t either until I tried to find the Derek Humphry who visited Randy. Derek Humphry is the man who back in 1980 founded the Hemlock Society, an organization pushing to get laws changed for assisted suicide. Whoever the guy really was, he was just rubbing my nose in what he did.”

  “But I take it you couldn’t identify him.”

  “No. We looked at video footage at the jail and interviewed guards, and the best we got was a guy about six two with a dark beard who wore glasses and a baseball cap. And Randy, of course, told me to go fuck myself when I tried to get him to tell me who the guy was, although I doubt Randy knew his real name.”

  “Did the same person visit Randy’s sister before her death?”

  “I don’t know. The nursing home where she was living doesn’t have any real security; it’s amazing the old folks who live there still have their wedding rings. At any rate, no one saw a man visit the sister the night she died or at any time in the weeks before she died. The only one who normally visited her was Randy’s other sister. We did find one aide, a girl who could barely speak English. She said she saw a woman with Randy’s sister a couple of times before her death, but she couldn’t describe her at all. Just said she was a white woman who had long dark hair. You have to realize that this place is so understaffed the aides run around like squirrels all day.”

  “Are you saying that this woman may have been working with Humphry, and that she may have helped the sister commit suicide?” DeMarco said.

  “Maybe,” Coogan said, “although no one saw a woman visiting the sister the night she died. But you wouldn’t have to be a cat burglar to sneak into this facility, so it’s possible a woman—or maybe Derek Humphry himself—sneaked into the place, helped the sister with her suicide note, then put the needle into her and helped her push down the plunger. Somebody had to have helped her with all that—she could barely do a thing for herself.”

  “Have you talked to Randy recently to see if he’ll give you more information on Derek Humphry? I mean, since his sister’s dead and Stella Harrington can’t be tried again, maybe he’ll talk. He’s got no reason to protect whoever he made the deal with.”

  “After Stella’s trial, I talked to Randy till I was blue in the face, and he wouldn’t tell me a thing. But I haven’t talked to him in five years. The problem is, Randy’s sitting on death row and knows he’s going to die eventually, and he knows I don’t have one single thing to offer him to convince him to talk. Plus, Randy is the type that if he can screw you over in some way, he’ll do it just for the fun of it.”

  “Well, I have to try to get him to talk,” DeMarco said. “Can you get me a meeting with him?”

  It took Coogan three days to convince Randy to agree to meet with DeMarco, and all DeMarco could do in the meantime was wait in Huntsville, bored out of his mind, wilting in the heat and humidity.

  Randy was led into a small room about the size of a standard closet, hands cuffed in front, legs manacled so he was forced to take short, choppy steps. The room contained a single chair and a phone sitting on a plastic shelf, and had a wire mesh screen in the back wall so the guard could see his prisoner at all times. DeMarco and Randy were separated by a thick sheet of Plexiglas.

  Randy was wearing a plain white T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. He was a slender man of medium height with a pockmarked complexion, lifeless blue eyes, and dishwater blond hair hanging to his narrow shoulders. He didn’t look dangerous. He didn’t look like a killer. He just looked pathetic. For a moment he sat there, staring at DeMarco, then finally he picked up the phone.

  DeMarco knew he had two significant problems when it came to Randy. First, as had been the case with Coogan, there wasn’t anything he could offer him. Randy was going to die and he knew it, and there was nothing anyone could do about that. The second problem was that Randy was most likely grateful to the man who had helped his sister escape her pain and end her life with some dignity. Certainly, he’d feel no animus toward the man who had called himself Derek Humphry. The only card DeMarco might have to play was that Randy might want to meet his Maker with a clear conscience. Not surprisingly, people on death row tended to find religion as their time grew near.

  DeMarco said, “I know that a man who called himself Derek Humphry made you a deal to help your poor sister die a peaceful death.” DeMarco didn’t really know this, but like Coogan, he couldn’t think of any other reason why Randy would trade life in prison for lethal injection. “And I have to tell you, Randy, that I admire you for what you did.”

  This earned DeMarco a smirk.

  “No, seriously, Randy, I do,” DeMarco said. “You could have avoided the death penalty, but you cared enough about your sister that you were willing to give up your life to spare her years of misery. So I’m not bullshitting you when I say I admire what you did. It took courage, a lot of courage. I also know you’re probably grateful to the man who helped your sister, and that there’s nothing I can do to make you tell me what you know about him.”

  Randy still didn’t say anything, but he seemed amused.

  Then DeMarco played the only card he had: “Randy, the man who helped your sister might have done the right thing by her, but he’s an evil man. For years, he’s
been helping rich people avoid paying for their crimes, just like Stella Harrington avoided punishment, even though you didn’t. And I know you know that’s not right. This man’s a sinner, in spite of what he did for your sister.”

  Now Randy smiled—and DeMarco was willing to bet that he was providing him with the most entertainment he’d had in years. But he plowed ahead, already knowing he was wasting his breath.

  “Do you believe in God, Randy? Do you believe that you’ll be rewarded in Heaven if you leave this earth with a clear conscience?”

  “You mean the God who made my sister sick?” Randy said. “The God who made me an orphan when I was ten? The God who let me kill that pregnant bitch? Well, I gotta tell you, buddy, when you ask if I believe in God, I gotta say not so much.”

  Well, shit.

  “You know the reason I agreed to meet with you?” Randy said.

  “No,” DeMarco said, not that he cared at this point.

  “A bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know how sometimes you get a craving for something and you just can’t stop thinking about it? Well, I’ve had this craving for the Colonel’s chicken for the last two months. I told Coogan I’d talk to you if they brought me a ten-piece bucket of Extra Crispy. That bucket’s sitting in my cell right now, because I wouldn’t talk to you until they brought it to me. But I’m not going to tell you shit about the guy who helped my big sis.”

  While still holding the phone and looking at DeMarco, Randy yelled to the guard, “All done here, boss.” Then he smiled at DeMarco again, and when the guard opened the door he walked away without a backward glance.

  It was after his encounter with Randy that DeMarco went to the first bar he saw, hoping a beer would help get the stench of Huntsville prison out of his nose.

  A waitress bounced over to his table and cheerfully asked if he wanted another beer. He had to admit that Texas had some of the best-looking servers he’d ever seen, and they were definitely the friendliest he’d ever encountered. He said, “Sure, and some of those chicken wings, too.” Then he thought of Randy back in his cell eating fried chicken, licking the grease off his fingers, and said, “Wait. Forget the chicken wings. Just bring me another beer.”