Mark the Sparrow

by Clark Howard

“Rob, don’t!” Genevieve said, grabbing his arm. “That won’t settle anything!”

  “It’ll settle him,” Cloud said threateningly. He continued to move, Genevieve clinging to him tenaciously.

  “Rob, no! It won’t help! Can’t you see they’ve got us right where they want us?”

  Cloud stopped and turned to her. “What?”

  “They don’t have to do anything,” Genevieve told him bluntly. “Not anything at all. And they’ve covered themselves perfectly against any accusation of malfeasance. It’s all very clear now.” She fixed her eyes on Morris Niebold. “Why so quiet today, dear Mr. Niebold?” she asked pointedly. “Why no words of wisdom, no battle cries, no morale-building slogans?”

  “The time for all that is past,” the invalid replied flatly. For the first time his walnut-cheeked face did not smile or even soften. “You have grasped the situation much more quickly than your friend Robert, my dear.” He glanced at Carla Volt. “You can stop taking the minutes; this isn’t by any stretch of the imagination going into the record.”

  “What is it you want?” Genevieve asked without further preliminary.

  “Control of the foundation,” Niebold said. “And through it, control of Weldon Whitman.”

  “Why?”

  “So that we can conduct his campaign as we see fit.”

  “So you can manipulate him, you mean.”

  Niebold shrugged. “Call it that if you like, my dear—”

  “Goddamn it, stop calling me your dear!” Genevieve stormed, shocking all of them, including Cloud. “Suppose Rob and I refuse to relinquish control of the foundation to you, then what?”

  “Then you may have it back,” Niebold said simply. “The firm of Niebold and White will disassociate itself from it entirely. As a matter of fact, let me tell you—strictly off the record—that we are not prepared to file any further appeals of any kind in Weldon Whitman’s behalf unless and until this firm has a majority vote in the future conduct of the foundation. And if you desire to seek other counsel, we’re prepared to make it as easy for you as possible.” He removed two pieces of paper from a drawer and placed them on the edge of the desk in front of Genevieve. “A blank check drawn on the foundation’s account and duly signed by Borden; and a certified statement of how much money the account contained as of the end of the business day yesterday.”

  Silence came over the office as if someone had touched a switch. Genevieve and Cloud looked at the check and certified statement lying on the desk. Niebold, White, and Carla Volt watched them closely. It was clearly time to choose.

  “What’ll it be, Gen?” Robert Cloud said.

  Genevieve thought for a moment, then snatched up the two pieces of paper and put them in her purse.

  “We’ll find another law firm.”

  She strode from the office, Cloud only a step behind her. Morris Niebold’s voice followed them out the door.

  “If you have no success by Monday noon, come back. There still might be time—”

  The two departing people ignored him.

  At ten A.M. on Monday the execution squad came for Weldon Whitman. It was twenty-four hours to his execution time; he would spend the remainder of the time in a holding cell a dozen feet from the gas chamber. The execution squad—five guards selected by rotation—each received fifty dollars extra pay for the duty. They were led by an execution-squad commander who received one hundred dollars: Captain Dukes.

  “Open Twenty-two,” Dukes instructed the guard in the control room. The cell door slid open. Dukes stepped into the cell. The execution squad waited outside, two on each side of the door, one facing it. They would enter only if they had to; if there was no trouble with the condemned man, the five guards would serve only as an escort and death-watch squad until the next morning, when they would assist in the execution itself.

  “Time to go downstairs, Twenty-two,” Dukes said tone-lessly. “Get up and strip.”

  Weldon Whitman sat up on his bunk and took a final drag on a cigarette. He dropped the butt in the toilet and silently started undressing. Dukes looked around the cluttered cell, at the books, the papers, the pamphlets.

  “You can dispose of your personal belongings in one or more ways,” he advised the prisoner mechanically. “You can give the items to other inmates on the Row; you can instruct that they be boxed for pickup by anyone you name; or you can instruct that they be burned or otherwise destroyed.”

  “Burn them,” Whitman said listlessly. He peeled off the last of his clothes and let them drop to the floor. Fuck it, he thought. Let somebody else pick them up. Dukes ignored the gesture. He nodded to one of the guards.

  “Buckle him up.”

  The guard entered the cell and strapped a six-inch leather belt around Whitman’s bare waist, buckling it in the back. Strapped to the front of the belt were a pair of steel handcuffs. The guard pulled Whitman’s hands in front of him and locked the cuffs on his wrists.

  “Let’s go,” Dukes said.

  Whitman, naked except for the restraining belt, stepped into the exercise corridor. The execution squad formed a loose circle around him and Dukes led the way to the door leading into the guard corridor. As he walked naked past the others with whom he had shared the Row for so long, Whitman was acutely aware that all of them were watching him go, but he knew that none of them would say goodbye or otherwise speak. That was an unwritten law on the Row. Over the years, farewells had more often than not proved to be a waste of time and emotion: because of the number of avenues of appeal open to condemned men, the average Death Row resident usually made two or three trips to the holding cell before he was finally executed. Sometimes he was there an hour or so, sometimes longer—dangerously longer—but more often than not, a last-minute stay of execution was telephoned in to grant him a few more weeks or months of life. Since Whitman had been there, he had seen eleven trips to the holding cell: Milo, Stiles, and Franklin had gone once, Henry had gone twice, Clayton and Rimm had gone three times. But there had been no executions.

  But they always watched the man with the date as he left. They watched Weldon Whitman now as he walked by, his pale white body uncovered for all to see, his dick shrunken in coldness and fear almost to total concealment in his pubic hair. He walked in his phalanx of guards through the separating bars into the adjacent corridor and back its length to the Death House elevator. There was no wait at the elevator; the car was already there. The condemned man stepped aboard with his execution squad. Captain Dukes followed, and the door closed.

  When the elevator door opened again, the condemned man and his escort stepped into a short passageway which led to a small room containing two holding cells. This was the Ready Room. The guards took him quickly into it and guided him into the first of the cells. They unlocked his wrists and removed the leather restraining belt. Stuck between two bars of the holding cell door, rolled together in a bundle, were a pair of new blue denim trousers, a new blue denim shirt, and a pair of the inevitably ugly felt slippers.

  “Put those on,” Dukes instructed. Whitman unrolled the clothing.

  “No underwear?” he asked. “No socks?”

  “Just what’s there,” the guard captain said flatly. He locked the cell door and, with three of the five death-watch guards, left the Ready Room. Whitman shook out the wrinkled clothes and got dressed.

  The holding cell was claustrophobically small: three feet wide, eight feet long, seven feet high. At the back was a lidless toilet. There was not even room for a cot; a bare twin mattress had been placed on the floor; Whitman had to walk on the mattress to get to the toilet. From the cell nothing could be seen except the door through which they had entered the room, the bare cement walls of the room itself, an upholstered two-seat bench on which at least one of the two death-watch guards on duty would sit and watch the condemned man at all times, and a very short corridor and a right-angle doorway which led to the gas chamber itself.

  As Whitman was dressing, one of the guards disappeared for several moments in t
he direction of the gas chamber, then returned with a two-burner hotplate and a coffeepot. He set the hotplate on the floor and plugged it in.

  “This is fresh coffee from the dining room, Whitman,” the guard said. “We’ll be keeping it hot around the clock.”

  Whitman nodded. “I’ll take a cup now,” he said.

  The guard asked Whitman how he took his coffee, prepared it for him in a styrofoam cup, and passed it through the bars to him.

  Whitman took the coffee and sat down on the mattress on the floor, leaning back against the bars and drawing his knees up in front of him. Silently he blew on the coffee to cool it. He thought about Genevieve and Cloud and the others.

  What in the fuck are they doing? he wondered.

  He shivered with a sudden chill.

  Two hours after Weldon Whitman was moved to the holding cell, Genevieve Neller and Robert Cloud returned to the offices of Niebold and White. Genevieve was pale, her eyes swollen from crying. Cloud’s eyes were bloodshot and dark-circled, his face gray and pinched-looking. Neither of them had slept for more than sixty hours; they had existed on quickly consumed sandwiches, black coffee, and sheer determination. In three cities—Sacramento, San Francisco, and Oakland—they had seen in person seventeen lawyers. On the telephone they had spoken with an additional eighteen. A total of nearly three dozen attorneys and they had failed to enlist even one willing to represent Weldon Whitman in his last-ditch, final-hour effort to avoid the gas chamber.

  The first attorney they talked to had given them the general answer that all the others would eventually give: “It’s too near his execution time. We aren’t familiar with the legal background of the case. We wouldn’t have time to prepare an adequate appeal. It wouldn’t be fair to the condemned man.” Several were honest enough to comment on the adverse publicity they would receive if a quickly prepared appeal failed. But even those who avoided that aspect of it, or denied that it made any difference to them, still refused to negotiate. So Genevieve and Cloud had come back. And the invalid received them benevolently.

  “Sit down, my dear, please. Robert, do sit down. You both look exhausted. I really, sincerely regret that you had to go through this ordeal.” He folded his pudgy hands on the desk and hunched forward. “Are you ready now to cooperate in reorganizing the Whitman Foundation board of directors?”

  “Can you stop the execution?” Genevieve asked in a hoarse, haunted voice.

  “I can’t guarantee it,” Niebold said frankly, “but I will say this: if we can’t stop it, no one can.”

  Genevieve nodded and looked down, away from the lawyer’s face. “Then we’ll do whatever you want,” she said.

  “Carla,” said Niebold, “bring in the papers.”

  Within five minutes, the necessary legal documents had been signed and witnessed making Morris Niebold president as well as chairman of the board of directors of the Weldon Whitman Foundation. The other board members were Borden White, vice-president; Carla Volt, treasurer; Genevieve Neller, secretary; and Robert Cloud, assistant secretary. The reorganization assured the law firm a three-to-two majority in any vote.

  Morris Niebold looked at his watch and said, “Borden, you’re all set with the appeal, I presume?”

  “Yes,” White said. “The brief is all prepared. The Supreme Court justices usually return from lunch between one-thirty and two. I’ll have a copy on one of their desks before then.”

  “Fine,” Niebold nodded approvingly.

  “What—what are you going to do?” Genevieve asked.

  ‘We“ve drafted an unusual appeal, my dear,” Niebold said with a crafty smile. “One which we feel the Supreme Court of California is ripe to have presented to it. In it we are contending that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment and violates the constitutions of both the state and the nation. In effect, we are attacking a judicial tradition which has been practiced in this state since it adopted the English common-law system. We are questioning the state’s right to kill.” Niebold sat back in his mechanical chair and hooked both thumbs in his vest pockets. “It is a challenge the court will have to face. There is no way it can be avoided.”

  Genevieve looked puzzled. “But—I don’t understand—you haven’t time to file such an appeal—”

  “We’re not going to file it,” Borden White told her. “Not through ordinary channels. I am going to deliver a copy personally to one of the justices in his chambers, along with a note pleading the urgency of his reading it. He won’t be inclined to read it right then, of course, but he will certainly glance at the front page. And when he reads the opening contention he will find himself caught in an ethical trap. He won’t be able to put the appeal aside because on it will hinge the life of a man who is to be executed within some twenty hours. And he won’t be able to pass judgment on its merits, even if he does read it, because it is a gauntlet flung at the entire court, not just him. As I said, he’ll be in a trap. He will have no choice but to issue a stay of execution for Whitman in order to allow the court as a body to determine whether taking a man’s life, by today’s standards, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”

  Robert Cloud, sitting next to Genevieve, turned to her, and said, “Does it sound to you like it’ll work, Gen? Does it make sense?”

  She nodded slowly, and Cloud could detect visible signs of relief slowly softening her features. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it makes sense. It—ft’s a brilliant legal move.” She shifted her glance back to Niebold. “I’m not happy that you have control of the foundation,” she said simply, “but I can’t say that you haven’t earned it with this.”

  “No words could give me greater pleasure than that morsel of praise from you, Genevieve,” the invalid said.

  “Have you decided which justice you’re going to give it to?” she asked Borden White.

  “I thought I’d give it to Tanaka,” he said.

  Niebold smiled. “The little Jap, yes. Youngest man on the court, racially inferior, a born rebel and troublemaker. An excellent choice, Borden.” Niebold turned his attention to Genevieve and Cloud. “You’re both very tired, I’m sure. I want you to take the week off and rest. Come in on Monday and we’ll talk about realigning duties and getting started on future projects. Robert, in the meantime I wonder if you’d send over the final draft of Judgment in Anguish; I’d like to read it before it goes to New York.”

  “All right,” Cloud said. He glanced at Genevieve; they both knew he now had no choice.

  “See you Monday then,” Niebold said, smiling. “And Genevieve, please give my best to your Mr. Whitman; I’m sure you’ll be going down to see him. Tell him we’re all sorry things got so close to the wire.”

  He turned his attention to some papers in front of him; Cloud and Genevieve knew they had been dismissed.

  They went to Genevieve’s apartment, got out what food was in the refrigerator, and halfheartedly ate a weary lunch. For the rest of the afternoon they sat around the living room, alternately dozing and fighting sleep, keeping both the televison and the radio on to listen to the periodic news announcements for some word on the appeal. They waited all afternoon. Finally, on the six o’clock news, there was a bulletin:

  “Weldon Whitman, the convicted Spotlight Bandit, has been granted a stay of execution by State Supreme Court Justice Jesse Tanaka. Just seventeen hours before the condemned man was scheduled to be put to death in San Quentin’s gas chamber, the recently appointed Tanaka, serving his first term on the Supreme Court, issued an order to the state department of corrections instructing that the execution proceedings be halted. Although Tanka did not state specifically why he had stayed the proceedings, he did indicate that a question of constitutional rights had arisen which conceivably could affect the condemned man’s sentence. Whitman, convicted more than two years ago of sex and kidnapping charges, is the only condemned man on San Quentin’s Death Row who has not been convicted of taking a life. Justice Tanaka, the first non-Caucasian appointed to the state’s highest court, said that
his order would delay Whitman’s execution indefinitely until the entire Supreme Court could rule on the constitutional point in question….”

  When the announcement was over, Cloud laid his head on the arm of the couch and closed his eyes. Genevieve rose from her chair, turned off the television and radio, and went over to him.

  “That’s no way to sleep, Rob,” she said. She took his hand. “Come on.”

  Cloud let her lead him into the bedroom and lay him down on her bed. She untied his shoes and took them off. Then she took off her own and lay down beside him. She drew a satin comforter over them. Then she took his hand in hers and instantly went to sleep.

  They slept like that, under the comforter, fully clothed, holding hands, for thirteen hours.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Cloud and Genevieve returned to see Morris Niebold the following Monday, it very quickly became apparent exactly what the future thrust of the Whitman Foundation was to be.

  “The first thing we’re going to do,” Niebold said in his most benevolent tone, “is relieve Genevieve of some of the responsibility we’ve let her take on. She has much too heavy a load to carry, and I’m afraid we’re all to blame for not recognizing it sooner.”

  “I don’t feel that my responsibility is that great a burden,” Genevieve told him quietly.

  “Of course you don’t, my dear. The rare person as dedicated as you never realizes it. But the fact remains that we’ve been letting you do far too much, and we must put a stop to it immediately. To begin with we’ll give you a respite from those public-speaking engagements that take up so many of your evenings.”

  “But I’ve made commitments—”

  “Yes, yes,” Niebold said. “I had Carla bring me the foundation appointment calendar. I’ve made arrangements to honor all the engagements you had already made.”

  “But how?”

  “Professional speakers, my dear, professional speakers,” he said almost proudly. “We have hired four people who are experts in the field to go out on the lecture circuit and really promote our cause for us. They’ll do wonders, take my word for it. They work together as a crew, you see, and they tailor their presentation to fit the particular audience and to determine which of them will handle the assignment. There are two men and two women: one man and one woman are in their early thirties, the other two are in their early fifties. They can work singly or in pairs—”