The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  When Lorilei heard Ricky’s story from Ricky at the prison, something in it swayed her, something made her understand that he wasn’t just the monster who had taken her child’s life, but a man, and made her decide to fight for him. Somewhere in this story is the person Bessie knew. The people in this courtroom are sitting in front of real-life, flesh-and-blood Ricky. Small and scrawny in his chair, swallowed by his orange jumpsuit. He will tell them who he is. He will tell them how trapped he’s been. Clive takes a gamble.

  How it backfires.

  Ricky begins to talk quickly. First, about Bessie and Alcide. Then—he can’t help himself, the words are tumbling out of him—about the car crash, about Oscar, about his father cradling Oscar’s head by the side of the road and singing to it; how clearly Ricky remembers that moment, the beautiful spindly sound of his father’s voice. He tells them about the photograph of Oscar he carried in his pocket as a child, about talking to it while he ate lunch crouched under the canopy of a yellowwood tree, Oscar tucked carefully between the snakelike roots.

  An officer shifts in his chair. Another crosses his arms. This isn’t an introduction to the mind of a pedophile. These are one man’s memories, or else his imagination.

  Clive catches Ricky’s eye and motions to prompt him. He should talk about what they’ve discussed. Ricky takes a deep breath. He must feel a strange mix of pride and shame now, all these eyes on him when he’s supposed to tell something even he knows to hide. “I’ve been molesting children since I was nine years old. Doing it is easier than you’d think.” The room goes still. Their raptness is his reward. “I just ask a child to sit on my lap. Children are always sitting on people’s laps, and it’s always children whose families I know. Then I touch them. I’ve even”—all these eyes on him, him who’s never been listened to this seriously, he cannot resist a bit of bragging—“done it with their parents right in the room.”

  This is when, some in attendance will report later, they began to feel sick.

  “There are three kinds of pedophiles,” Ricky continues. “The first kind does it to hurt children. They’re just bad that way. Maybe you even think they’re evil. Then there’s the second kind. They do it for control.”

  A young woman stands up abruptly. Her eyes down, she walks quickly out of the room.

  Ricky keeps going. “You know how it is,” he says, and it must be nice to be talking to them this way, as if they are on the same side of this problem and Ricky is helping them to understand people who are nothing like him. “They don’t have control in their lives, so they’ve got to have it over the kids.” He pauses. Perhaps he is remembering the therapist in Georgia, the careful questions she asked him: Was he frustrated in his life? Lonely? Depressed? The therapist thought his love for children was a replacement for something else. She didn’t understand. “Then there are guys like me.” He finally gets to explain. “I loved Jeremy. I loved him like a boyfriend/girlfriend kind of love. Jeremy was my true love.”

  “If you loved him,” a man shouts, “why’d you kill him?”

  The question seems to take Ricky aback. He’s silent for a minute. Then he blurts out, “I didn’t mean to. I thought he was Oscar.”

  Whatever Clive hoped, whatever he planned for this day, has failed. The more Ricky talks, the sicker people feel.

  Clive stands, putting his hand on Ricky’s arm to silence him. “This may have gone beyond what we intended. Ricky has had to struggle more than most of us. Despite the unfortunate thing that happened, Ricky tried very hard. I believe—and this may be hard for Ricky to hear me say, but we’ve talked about it and he knows I feel this way—I believe that Ricky is mentally ill.”

  Clive’s career is based on his ability to read people. That’s true of any trial lawyer. It was true for my father, and when it went wrong for him was when his pain and depression fogged out that ability. And it’s especially true for death penalty defense lawyers, who must read a jury well enough to save their client’s life. Clive is almost uniquely successful in this regard, one of the most famous and most successful death penalty lawyers in the South. The man who’ll lose only six cases in two decades.

  But he must not see the way an officer in the back row has curled up his lip. He must not see a woman’s face shut like an iron gate. Clive, in this moment, doesn’t seem to see what’s happening. How badly the crowd’s turned against him.

  What he sees is the past.

  “My father was mentally ill,” he continues. “No one understood him; they reviled him. Even my own family didn’t understand him. We have a chance now to understand Ricky. He’s being so brave. He’s working to face who he is. For that”—he looks down at Ricky, maybe he gives Ricky’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze before he looks back out at the room, the room in which person after person will remember this last line and repeat it to the prosecutors verbatim—“Ricky Langley is my hero.”

  “There’s a case in Arizona right now,” an officer in the back of the room shouts, his voice hard as a bullet. He stands. “Maybe you’ve heard of it. A father found out that a man had molested his child and he hunted that person down and shot him again and again and every time he shot him he told him he wanted him to know what pain really was. If someone did that to you”—he points at Ricky—“would that stop you hurting children?”

  Clive looks aghast, then flustered. Ricky stares down at the ground. Clive says, “I didn’t want to kill my father. That’s not how we deal with these cases.”

  The officer ignores Clive. “Would that make you stop?” Right now the officer is remembering walking down the wet leaves on the side of the ravine, clutching his hat in his fist, planting his boots carefully so as not to stumble, holding his breath as he shines the flashlight into the wet leaves. How he hoped to see a child’s face, hoped though he knew that if he found the boy the boy might be dead. Then the strange mix of relief and despair that fogged his heart that night when there were only leaves. He told his supervisor he didn’t want to come to this meeting. He remembers seeing the killer’s face for the first time on the evening news and realizing the boy was dead. He told his supervisor he did not ever want to see that face again.

  Come anyway, the supervisor said. He told the officer he could leave at any time.

  But the officer can’t leave. He sits back down, his chest heaving hard, his face flushed. He is screwed to the chair by the bolt of memory. He is rooted as a witness. They are giving attention to the wrong person here. He closes his eyes to shut out the killer and tries to fix in his mind an image of the boy. The school portrait he was given back then. The boy’s blond hair. He offers that image in his mind like a candle.

  Thirty-Two

  With only two days left in Louisiana, I know what I’ve been avoiding. In the tens of thousands of pages I’ve gone through, the transcripts and serology reports and bodily fluid reports and the documents from Ricky’s life, his mental health records from Lake Charles and then from when he was imprisoned in Georgia, the only photographs I’ve seen of Jeremy are the ones in which he’s alive.

  But that’s not how his story ended. I have been driven all along by the belief that there is a knot at the heart of the collision between me and Ricky that will help me make sense of what will never be resolved. The way my body is evidence. The way I carry what my grandfather did in my body. I carry it through my life. All the records I’ve seen have made me imagine Ricky, imagine his family, begin to empathize with him. I can’t not know—I can’t not face—what he did. I can’t allow even any part of myself to think that Jeremy remained the boy in his school photo. Unchanged and alive.

  I return to the clerk of court’s office on a gray afternoon. The woman at the desk is friendly but brusque.

  “Well, I can show you the trial transcripts,” she begins.

  “I’ve already seen those.”

  “But the photographs are evidence. You can’t see the evidence, not without a court order. It was sealed.”

  I stare at her. “When was it sealed?�
�

  “I don’t know, ma’am, but it’s not just free for the viewing. What exactly are you trying to see?” she asks.

  “Only the photographs.” I think about what else would be there. Everything I haven’t considered: the plastic bags of evidence taken from the scene, the blankets. Jeremy’s white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt with the holes cut out for the semen samples. His BB gun, with its long brown plastic barrel. How much am I required to see to understand?

  I wait. I watch the thoughts move across her face. Her name is in the files. Her signature on every stamped document, over and over again. Everything I am trying to see, she has already seen.

  “All right,” she finally says. “You can see the photocopies of the photographs. Mark what you want, and we’ll send you them later.”

  She brings out five or six stacks of papers clipped together, each several inches thick. I lift the cover of the top stack and see a black-and-white copy of an aerial photograph. Blotchy woods, dense and thick with black. A few small houses, arranged in a row.

  The house at the end is white and bigger than the others. The Lawson house. It is like being shown a photograph of the ghost that has been trailing you. I see it nestled against the thick black web of the woods and I understand instantly why it was so strange that Ricky didn’t get rid of the body. The woods were right there, only a few feet out the back door, dense enough to make a tangled darkness of the page.

  I gather myself a stack of paper clips and small Post-it flags and I mark the pages. When I reach the pictures of Lorilei’s son, I flip through them so quickly I register only flashes. The sheen the flash made against his blond hair. The moist bulb of his lower lip.

  That night, in my motel room, I pour screw-top wine into a plastic cup and channel-surf stations. The too-sweet red wine blurs my mind, but not enough. The motel room is strangely constructed, with a sitting room I can’t see from the bed. Twice I get up and check it. I am checking to make sure I am alone. I know I am alone. I do not feel alone. I check the closets and try not to think of Jeremy’s body. I check the bathtub. For years, whenever I walked into a bathroom that had a tub in it I would have to peel back the curtain and make sure there wasn’t a dead body in there. After my grandfather’s death, it became, more specifically, his body. Him dead. I felt foolish for the gesture every time, yet I had to check. I had just done so, secretly, in the bathroom at a house where my family was staying, and emerged to see my mother standing there. Sheepish, I told her about this quirk of mine.

  She looked at me, stricken. She might have seen a ghost. “When you were a child,” she said slowly, “you found your brother Andy unconscious and blue at the bottom of an empty tub.”

  The mind remembers. The mind mixes up. Everything repeats.

  The next afternoon, on the plane back to Boston, the clouds through the window are an unrelenting gauze. They seem not beautiful but indecently sticky. I order more wine and gulp it down. The white of the bubble of wet saliva on Jeremy’s lip in the camera’s flash. The plush white ribbing of the cotton sock he chokes on as it spills from his darkened mouth. I turn away from the window and press my eyes closed. I try hard not to imagine what I have invited to follow me home.

  * * *

  The process by which the jury is selected—voir dire, from the French for “to speak truth”—is unique for a death penalty case. The jurors must be death-qualified, which means that they must avow that they would theoretically be able to vote for a sentence of death. Clive has successfully petitioned to hold voir dire in New Orleans. People there won’t be as familiar with the case. The selected jurors will then be bused to Lake Charles. Each day, panels of prospective jurors pass a corded microphone back and forth among themselves as the lawyers and Judge Gray ask them questions. The microphone cord becomes a running joke. Clive says that it will strangle him. Gray asks the jurors not to strangle themselves. The joke is strange in its recurrence—its insistence—and in the fact that Jeremy was strangled, a deep score around his neck from the fishing wire. Gray has seen the photographs. So has Clive. Are the photographs haunting them already?

  From the start, selection runs into trouble. The New Orleans murder rate is eight times the national average. The first day of voir dire, Gray announces that he’ll make sure they end on time each evening, because he doesn’t want anyone on the streets when the sun begins to set. Nine days in, the prosecutor, Cynthia Killingsworth, comments that it’s the first day since they’ve been in New Orleans that there hasn’t been a murder. Gray corrects her: There was a murder. There’s been a murder every day. One juror’s nephew was involved in two murders. Another’s friend is on death row. A woman’s half brother is serving three consecutive life sentences for murder. She couldn’t impose the death penalty on anyone, she says, because he maintains his innocence and in case that’s true, she wouldn’t want him to die. One man didn’t used to believe in the death penalty, but his best friend of thirty years was found murdered on the street two months ago, and now he’s not sure. He’s just not sure. Another’s brother was murdered. A woman’s daughter’s friend. “They never found out who did it,” she says. A man’s son was murdered at seven. “I sat down here and I got forty years of memories coming back to me,” he says. “I don’t mind coming to do my civic duty, but this one’s really tough for me.”

  Because of death qualification, it is arguably not that hard to get off a death penalty jury. You just have to say you couldn’t impose a death sentence, no matter the crime. By a week into voir dire, roughly three-quarters of the prospective jurors are saying they don’t believe in the death penalty. That percentage seems suspect. True, this is liberal New Orleans, but it’s still Louisiana, part of the so-called fry belt—named for its old quickness with the electric chair—and still one of the most active death penalty states in the country.

  So when one lady, asked if she could vote to impose death, says, “Oh, no, I couldn’t do that,” a lawyer finally presses her further. “Do you mean to tell me,” the lawyer says, “that if we have the trial and the lawyers present their evidence and you’re convinced on guilt, you could not consider the death penalty?”

  The woman is flustered. There will be a trial? “I thought we were gonna vote on whether he got the death penalty today.” She’s excused.

  Soon voir dire has lasted almost two weeks, with nearly two hundred people questioned. Clive is losing his voice and apologizes to the jury for it. Killingsworth keeps talking about the New Orleans murders. Gray is sick of the whole thing. “When this is all over,” Gray says to a juror, frustrated, “I am going to come in here and I am going to look at you, if you are on the jury, and I am going to say, ma’am, stand up. Does Mr. Langley live or die? And you’re going to have to say life or death. I’m not going to let you—I’m not going to let you write something on a piece of paper that says, well, I vote the death penalty. I am going to make you stand up and tell me, look me dead in the eye and look that man dead in the eye, and look the State dead in the eye, and tell me, does he live or die. Can you do that?”

  She’s shaken. “I don’t know.”

  “OK.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s tough.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nobody said it ain’t tough. My question to you is, can you make the decision?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Judge Gray and the lawyers must find sixteen people—twelve jurors and four alternates—to try this case. The people face being asked to make an unimaginable decision. There is no other situation in which we ask a civilian to decide if someone will live or die. The closest analog is military, maybe: a drafted enlisted soldier, somebody who didn’t intend to end up in the position of having someone at the other end of his or her gun and deciding whether to shoot.

  In law school, the concept of the jury is taught through the metaphor of a black box. Into the box, evidence and the law go. Out of the box, a verdict comes.

  But a black box doesn’t have fe
elings.

  “Being exposed to the things I was exposed to,” begins one prospective juror—she was on a death penalty jury once before, and now, bad luck, she’s been called again—“it was very traumatic. I would say I haven’t gotten over it.” There is a name for the way the decisions of war haunt people: PTSD. People who have served on death penalty juries speak of depression, of trouble with alcohol, of being haunted. Not everyone does, but—some do. The men and women chosen for this jury will live sequestered in a hotel together, cut off from their families, isolated each night with the images they have seen that day. The images will take root inside them. Each day, they will see Ricky in the courtroom. Each day, they will be pressed closer to having to choose whether Ricky lives or dies. In the future, will they be haunted by Jeremy’s face, by knowing that with a not-guilty verdict they have said he will have no justice? Or will they be haunted by the image of the man they have sentenced to die?

  On May 2, 2003, the men and women who will have to face this evidence are finally selected. Nine women, three men. Seven are black, five white. Three have family members who are schizophrenic; three have family members who are bipolar. (“It sounds like an epidemic,” a juror says, shocked that the secrets in her family don’t make her so alone after all.) Two are nurses. A heavyset, white schoolteacher named Stephen Kujawa is appointed foreman. “I teach eighth graders,” he’d said when Killingsworth asked him if he’d be able to speak his mind during jury deliberations. “I’m not going to be shy of anything.” Gray sends the jurors home to say goodbye to their families. Then they’ll be bused to Lake Charles. The trial will begin.