“I see no point.”
“Then stay home.”
“I’m coming. No way I’m dropping you off all alone in Huntsville.”
We just drove along, listened to the wind instead of our voices. Then I needed to know something. “Scraggs?”
“What?”
“If you come to see things differently, if you become convinced that Rona Leigh shouldn’t die for this crime … will you do anything?”
“What the hell could I do? I only do my job as I know it’s meant to be done.”
Stubborn man. I let it go. I was wrung out.
12
Scraggs called the warden, who told him he had all the time in the world for us. We drove back out of the city, north to Huntsville. Again, the cavalcade of billboards. In half an hour the buildings of Huntsville crept up over the horizon at exactly the point the biggest billboard of all welcomed tourists:
VISIT THE MUSEUM OF THE TEXAS PRISONS—Wonder at Old Sparky, the Country’s First Hot Squat.
The words were superimposed on a photograph of an electric chair constructed of a couple of two-by-fours and strung with BX cables.
I said to Scraggs, “I rest my case.”
“Which one?”
“The one where I wondered how a rational person can live in Texas.”
“DC is rational?”
He took the exit just short of Huntsville, and we headed out on a forty-mile trip to the new death row. The old one was bursting at the seams, 459 men, and there was no more room for construction in the city. Huntsville could only contain so many prisons, had to leave room for a Starbucks or two. A week before an execution, the condemned man had to be driven forty miles to the death house—still in Huntsville—from death row. The Terrell Unit had been built in suburbia.
Terrell was a bright and shining outpost of walls and towers and floodlights and razor ribbon. Every guard working the outer wall had a dog accompanying him. We went into the administration building and were escorted to the warden’s office. All Texas wardens have mansions. Maybe his was back in Huntsville and he commuted.
His secretary was not a prisoner, wasn’t in farm togs. She wore a navy blue suit and white blouse, greeted us with a big smile and handshake, and then apologized: Something important had come up, and the warden wouldn’t be able to see us till later in the afternoon. “How would y’all like to speak to Lloyd Bailey’s chaplain in the meantime?”
Was this an unwritten procedure? To be pawned off on the chaplain in hopes that visitors to the warden would pack their tack and go home after being bombarded by scripture?
Scraggs said, “What exactly came up? I just spoke to him a couple of hours ago.”
She smiled harder. “Warden’s nephew is in town unexpectedly. Warden is taking the opportunity for a few hours of duck hunting.”
Scraggs seemed to find that completely acceptable.
I said to the secretary, “Excuse me, is the season terribly short?”
“What season?”
“Duck hunting season.”
She laughed and winked at Scraggs. “You can always tell a hunter from up north. Agent Rice, hunting season is year-round here, no matter what it is you want to shoot. Now let me just ring for a conveyance. The chaplain’s office is right around the corner.”
Around the corner meant around the corridor corner. The conveyance was a golf cart. The driver wore orange. Scraggs and I climbed in and I asked the prisoner, “What are you in for?”
“Fraud.” He looked at me with tired eyes. “I meant to give it back.”
I said, “I know.”
Scraggs laughed out loud.
White-collar criminals in Texas get to drive golf carts so they won’t lose their touch before returning to the country club.
I asked him how he got the job.
“Minimum security holds a lottery. I won.”
All Texas wardens have slaves of one kind or another.
I looked over at Scraggs in the backseat and smiled. He gave me the finger. Now I laughed, guessed he’d been wanting to do that for some time.
Lloyd’s chaplain was not unlike Vernon Lacker in that he was soft and calm, but he was quite a bit older. According to the certificate on the wall, he’d graduated from the Christian Ministries of America, no degree bestowed.
He had thick glasses and watery eyes. He welcomed us and blessed us and then he said, “Warden told me to tell you all I can about Lloyd Bailey. All he might have said concerning Rona Leigh Glueck. Is that what you came for?”
I said, “Yes.”
He took off the glasses, wiped them off with a fold of his shirt, and gazed into the ceiling. “Lloyd Bailey,” he said softly, as if he were perusing an invisible Rolodex. “Lloyd told me first time I met him that he’d meant to hang onto Rona Leigh for as long as he could, which amounted to as long as she’d let him. He said to me she was the one precious thing he’d ever owned in all his life, even more precious than his chopper, which he blamed for getting him into the trouble he was in. Trouble was what he deemed the crime of murder.”
I said, “He referred to his part in the relationship with Rona Leigh as ownership?”
He smiled a little bit. “That’s the vernacular among people like Lloyd Bailey. You’ve got a woman who’s true to you, why, then you own that woman. There is a strong pride that goes along with it.”
How nice. I thought that Gary Scott wasn’t able to take much pride in ownership. I asked the chaplain how else people like Lloyd Bailey were alike.
“I’d have to say they’re the world’s biggest losers, ma’am. Low intelligence. Addicts. Ugly. Unloved, mostly.”
“Are you aware of the plea he struck to avoid the death penalty?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am. I have just reviewed his file.”
The warden may have asked this chaplain on the spur of the moment to fill in for him, but at some earlier time he’d had him review Lloyd’s file.
Scraggs said, “Was he the kind of man who would have invented a new version of the murders to guarantee himself a life sentence rather than the death penalty?”
“I believe every man here is that kind of man. But when Lloyd was first arrested, he felt free to tell anyone who would listen that his victim deserved what he got. For stealing his bike and refusing to hand it back when confronted. Told everyone he gave James Munter a chance to make him happy. Lloyd never said anything about Rona Leigh taking part in the crime, told the police it was not the thing a real man would do when they’d asked him. But then, once the police convinced Lloyd that Rona Leigh, being a girl, a very young girl, wouldn’t be sentenced to death no matter what, and that he would be, sure as hell, he eventually came to believe them. To believe that it was in his best interest to say he killed James because Rona Leigh made him do it and he only hit Melody the one time to put her out of her misery once Rona Leigh was through with her. But he couldn’t get it right: Rona Leigh tried to kill her but Melody wouldn’t die, Rona Leigh never touched the ax after all, Rona Leigh was out in the truck.
“His story changed again and again. Finally, he said Rona Leigh did it all. She went crazy, he said, and axed both the victims. He signed a witness report describing in great detail Rona Leigh’s ferocity when she killed James with one blow and then attacked Melody with the intent to hurt her before doing away with her. The report ended with his saying the whole thing was her idea. He didn’t even know for sure if James was the guy who took his bike.
“My understanding is that they made up a confession along those lines for Rona Leigh to sign, and she signed it.”
“By ‘they,’ you’re talking about the police.”
“Who else would I be talking about? They’re the ones feel the pressure. Made no matter in the end, though. Lloyd Bailey drew the death penalty. But he was to escape his execution.” He looked to the heavens again. “Same as Rona Leigh, turns out, though in his case Lloyd died of prison-contracted AIDS. Or it could have been hepatitis, as so many of the men pass that on to each ot
her along with the AIDS. They’re puttin’ cause of death as AIDS pretty much with every death here. Further humiliates the convict’s family.”
“What is the point in further humiliating the convict’s family?”
“Feelin’ is, you raise a child to be scum, you’re likely scum yourself. We’re in a paranoid and punishin’ culture, ma’am.”
I caught Scraggs’s eye. He stared me down. “Reverend, did you get to talk to Lloyd personally?”
“Many times. He confessed to me as how he made up all that stuff up about Rona Leigh in order to live. In the infirmary, he told me how his plea bargain was all a lie.”
“What was the truth? Did he tell you that?”
“Yes, he did. And I told him to repent not just for the crime but for not telling the truth to the court.”
“Will you tell me what he said to you?”
“He said he killed James Munter and Melody Scott.”
“Meaning he alone?”
“Yes.”
“He said that Rona Leigh took no part in the killing?”
“That’s right.” He shook his head.
Scraggs said, “Did Rona Leigh and Lloyd carry on a correspondence?”
“She wrote to him, yes. Right till he died. But he couldn’t read or write. His fellow inmates read the letters to him. I read him a few. He did send several letters back to her that he dictated to his cellmate.”
“As far as you know, did her letters influence him?”
“Her letters were mostly reminders, descriptions of the sex they’d had.”
Scraggs crossed his arms over his chest, his line of questioning over.
I asked, “Did you attempt to make Lloyd’s revised confession known to the authorities?”
He smiled. “The revised confession of a condemned killer holds no weight with the Board of Pardons and Paroles. But God in his infinite mercy took Lloyd with him into paradise from a hospital bed rather than our death chamber.”
“Dying of AIDS-related afflictions doesn’t sound much like mercy to me, Reverend.”
“Everything is relative, ma’am. I’d say a death certificate that reads cause of death is AIDS has a kinder ring than STATE-ORDERED LEGAL HOMICIDE.”
“Death certificates for the executed really say that?”
“If you’re executed in Texas that’s what they say, and correctly so. When these men are executed, they show all the terror and fear that you or I would show if someone was pointing a gun at our heads and we knew we would be shot no matter how we might beg for our lives. The men plead with us. They cry and grovel and then they scream, all the while insisting they are innocent. They beg the warden, the guards—me—to understand they’re innocent, or they’re sorry, or they didn’t mean to do it.”
“In executions I’ve witnessed, the prisoners have been sedated.”
“Where was that?”
“Florida.”
“Not so in Texas. About half the time we’re required to call in a cell extraction team.”
He looked at me and saw he needed to explain.
“Group of corrections officers chosen based on the shape they’re in, their strength. They come in and pry the prisoner out of his cell. In one case, we had ourselves a killer who truly should have been sedated. Not to calm him but to prevent him from his last slap at the face of the law. He insisted he wasn’t going to let anyone kill him. Took a dozen men to drag him out of Terrell, and then on the day of his execution it took a dozen more Huntsville officers to get him out of the holding pen and on down the corridor to the death chamber. Corrections officer who’s supposed to announce they got a dead man walkin’ was too busy wrestlin’ with him to say the words.
“In the end, he ripped the stitching in the bonds that tied down his arms. Men had to use their belts to secure him to the gurney. His last words amid the curses he hurled were, ‘I almost did it. Don’t none of you forget it either.’ Then he spit out the key to his handcuffs.
“To this day, there’s been no official explanation as to how he managed that.”
“How do you think he managed it?”
“Extra key got made somewhere along the line. The prisoner’s friends or family came up with the money.”
Everywhere, always, money talks.
“Reverend, was Lloyd Bailey repentant? For the death of his victims and for his lies to the police and the courts about Rona Leigh?”
“I’m afraid, like most of the men you find here, he didn’t know the meaning of the word repent.”
“You said God took him into paradise.”
“Yes. Because Lloyd Bailey was a victim. Because he’d been rendered senseless by drugs, by the criminals who make them available. It has been my observation that drugs first attack that part of the brain that makes a man a human being.”
“Wouldn’t God punish him for taking drugs in the first place?”
“No. Lloyd’s upbringing denied him the capability required to know the difference between right and wrong.”
This was one liberal chaplain. “Bottom line, Reverend, there was no remorse at all?”
He reached over and gently patted my wrist. “Do we feel remorse when we run over a possum?”
I’d never hit a possum. But I didn’t mention the remorse I’d felt when I hit a squirrel a few months ago in DC.
I said to him, “Rona Leigh’s chaplain married her. Became her husband. What did you think of that?”
“I wasn’t surprised. She’s a witch.”
A witch.
“God in his infinite mercy has never found any mercy for her?”
“Probably accurate. She controlled Lloyd. She could have stopped him from doing what he did, but as I said, he was bewitched.”
“You’re saying she was responsible for his actions?”
“Yes.”
Not so liberal when it came to lady killers. I said, “But she’d been rendered senseless by drugs just as he had been.”
“A woman’s constitution allows her to maintain her reason.”
Scraggs stood up on that note. Probably afraid I’d take out my gun and shoot the chaplain. He thanked the reverend and told him we had to be on our way.
Out in the corridor, in another golf cart, Scraggs said to me, “Being a chaplain for the condemned is one unconventional job. He’s been around psychopaths too long, Poppy.”
“It’s a good thing he’s not around women. Probably would want them all crucified, the Jezebels.”
* * *
The warden was big and beefy, just like wardens in old black-and-white prison films. I asked him how many ducks he’d bagged. He said, “A dozen, ma’am. Each ’n’ ever’ one fat as a Goodyear blimp. So what’s the FBI doin’ here exactly? Shouldn’t all your forces be concentrated on chasin’ down Rona Leigh?”
“The FBI is preparing for what’s to be done once she’s captured.”
Scraggs said, “Texas Rangers are chasin’ her down.”
“Then I’m sure the Texas Rangers have told the lady what’s to be done once she’s captured.”
“Lady figures she might not necessarily be captured in Texas.”
The warden leaned back in his chair. “Ain’t easy to get a dyin’ woman through the international area of the Dallas/Fort Worth airport.”
Scraggs said, “Ain’t easy getting one out of a Texas death chamber.”
Scraggs sympathized with my irritation at the chaplain, was taking it out on the warden. I appreciated his support. I cut to the chase. “Lloyd Bailey told your chaplain—and I wonder if he told you the same thing—that Rona Leigh Glueck took no part in the killing of James Munter and Melody Scott.”
He grinned. “Man on his deathbed will say the damnedest things. Rona Leigh was Lloyd’s woman. Maybe he felt less a man that his words put her on death row. Wanted to prop up his self-esteem.”
“Did he say anything to lead you to believe…?”
“He said a lot of things. Might have said the moon had cooties big as pigs. He was a sick man. He
was dyin’. Man’s word’s not very reliable in such a condition. Lloyd had his chance in court. That’s all that counts.”
“As your governor so often points out.”
“And rightly so. Now, ma’am, I have got a lot of backed-up appointments today. I can’t tell you anything the chaplain hasn’t already said. You mentioned you’d appreciate the opportunity to talk to Lloyd’s former death row neighbors. They’re long gone, a course. We execute three–four men, average, every month. Do the math, ma’am. But I got a few others you might be interested in.
“Four men are waitin’ on rides to Huntsville now who knew Lloyd back before they graduated. You’re welcome to talk to them. Give me the chance to make up for keepin’ the FBI waitin’.”
“You did make up for it. The chaplain was very helpful. But I would be glad to speak with those men.”
“Thought so.” He clicked his intercom. “Martha, darlin’? My car right out front? Good.” He stood up, put out his hand, and we all shook.
We were driven across the prison yard.
I saw the four men. One of them recognized Scraggs. He said, “Hey, Scraggs, you still out there plantin’ false evidence?”
Scraggs told him to shut up. “Lady wants to talk with you. I do not. Me and you were done talkin’ a long time ago.” Max’s grammar mocked the criminals.
This prisoner and each of the other three said the same thing, using different synonyms: Lloyd Bailey was a killer (the devil / a psycho / a piece a shit). I’m not. I was framed (set up / shafted / fucked over) by my lawyer (the jury / the judge / the prosecutor). I didn’t kill (shoot / stab / strangle) anybody. I am a Christian. So listen, FBI (ma’am / angel / sweetheart), why don’t you see about gettin’ me a reprieve?
I didn’t say no, I didn’t use synonyms for no, I just lied. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then I asked each of them, “Did Lloyd tell you that he killed both his victims and that Rona Leigh did not?”
I got: Damn right. / You got that straight. / Sure as hell did. / Made me write it down.
I asked the last one, “Why did he want you to write it down?”
“Couldn’t write hisself. Too stupid. But he was so sick he couldn’t lift a pen anyway. Had me put it in a letter to Rona Leigh’s public defender.”
Love Her Madly Page 21
