Mark the Sparrow

by Clark Howard

Genevieve quickly capitulated now. She sat in a chair facing the desk and hung her head in despair. “Borden, please. We’ve got to do something to find him.”

  “We’ve tried to find him,” White said easily. “We’ve had our private detective agency trying to locate him. We know that he spent an entire day with the Luza family; they all went somewhere together in the Luza car, but no one at the Luza residence will say where. Later that day, Robert drove away from the Luza home in a car he had rented at the hotel. We know he checked out of the hotel the following morning and returned the rental car two mornings after that. Further, we know that he has not been admitted to any hospitals in the L.A. area, nor has he been arrested, nor has he checked into any of the major hotels. Nor is he in the morgue. It seems to me, on the basis of all that information, that we really have no choice but to assume that Cloud has simply terminated his relationship with us of his own free will.”

  “Rob wouldn’t do that,” Genevieve said staunchly. “I know he wouldn’t.”

  “Well, I think he would. And has. As a matter of fact, if he has not communicated with us by the time we hold our next board meeting, I intend to move that he be relieved of his responsibility as an officer of the foundation.” White smiled and stood up. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me now. I have a client coming in. If you have any problems at the printshop and can’t reach Morris or me, why don’t you take them up with Carla? Any decisions that have to be made can be made by her. Morris and I will support whatever decisions she makes. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Genevieve said stiffly. “I understand perfectly.”

  Genevieve left the office. She managed to maintain her composure until she got into her car, and then she had to let the anguish out. She leaned her head against the steering wheel and allowed a great, hollow sob to escape from her breast. It’s all gone wrong, she thought despondently. Everything’s gone wrong.

  Raising her head, she stared dismally out the windshield. She thought of the foundation. The literature it was now printing and distributing was no longer pro-humanitarian in its stand against capital punishment; now it was antigovernment. It openly attacked the present state administration and the state Supreme Court; not only attacked but actually vilified. Instead of creating doubt in the minds of legislators regarding the propriety of capital punishment, the material was now generating anger; not only was it charging specific lawmakers with negligence in not presenting legislation to abolish the death penalty, but it actually accused some of them of dereliction of duty in failing to somehow organize a moratorium on further executions in the state. The literature still pretended to have as its purpose the gaining of public support against capital punishment, but now it had also become a vehicle for political propaganda.

  And while the foundation press created animosity with the printed word, foundation speakers were doing likewise with the spoken word. The four professionals retained by Morris Niebold were traveling the length and breadth of the state, spreading political venom in the guise of arousing public sentiment for Weldon Whitman. Singly, in pairs, sometimes all four on the same podium, they spoke before groups large and small, social and religious, ethnic and integrated, male and female and mixed. And like the foundation literature, these speakers left in their wake three things: a suspicion that perhaps Weldon Whitman did not deserve to die in the gas chamber after all; a curiosity as to whether their present elected officials were competent; and, in the minds of those elected officials, a seething anger at having been so scathingly attacked. All over the state, more and more people were joining the ranks in support of the Save Whitman Movement, while more and more elected officials began to exert more and more pressure in more and more directions in an effort to end, once and for all, the controversy of Weldon Whitman.

  Genevieve could see what was coming. She could see it clearly, without delusions. She was not sure how it would come, or when, but she knew it would come. There was no longer any doubt in her mind.

  They were definitely going to kill Weldon.

  Sucking her breath to keep from sobbing openly, she sat back and started the car. Swallowing, she glanced at the package on the seat beside her. Whatever reservations she had felt about that package and what it contained and what it was for, she now dismissed. The final admission to herself that Weldon would die had changed her thinking about many things. She reached over and touched the package, gently, as if she were touching Weldon himself; then she shifted gears and drove away.

  When she arrived at her apartment, Genevieve took the package inside with her and put it carefully on the dresser in the bedroom. She undressed, hung her clothes neatly in her garment bag, and got into the tub. She decided to shower instead of bathe, so she drew the flowered plastic curtain closed. The water came out of the shower head in a fine spray, and Genevieve stepped into the wet tent it formed. She washed leisurely, soaping her body all over and rinsing longer than was necessary because the warmth of the water felt so good to her.

  When she had finished, she stood drying herself and examining her plump body in a full-length mirror on the door. She had thought, with all the activity and tension of the past few years, that she would have lost some weight. But obviously she had not, and she looked at herself now far less satisfied than she would like to have been. Her body, she knew, was not badly put together; she was not obese or anything like that; she was simply too big, all over. Her thighs were such that they often rubbed together when she walked, and chapped; her calves were just plain exaggerated, there was no other word for them; her breasts were so fleshy that they bounced at the least provocation; her buttocks rolled with every step; her upper arms were beyond looking decent in short sleeves anymore; and in general she thought of herself, not necessarily as being fat, but certainly well into the too heavy category.

  Feeling as she did about herself, she often had nagging doubts about the sincerity of Weldon Whitman’s feelings toward her. She could not help but suspect that had he been a free man, he would not have given her a second look. Not that he himself was outstanding when it came to good looks; he wasn’t; as a matter of fact, Genevieve considered herself prettier of face than Whitman was handsome; though certainly his body, which was trim and muscular, was much more attractive than her plump form. But even though he was not a handsome man, at least not handsome in the classic sense, there was about his face a rugged, even tough, attractiveness. She hoped, whenever her conscience forced her to think of it, that their respective shortcomings would have balanced each other out, and that if they had met under different circumstances they would have felt the same way about each other. She did not completely, totally believe it. But she hoped.

  When she was dry, she opened a large bottle of body moisturizer and began applying it to herself. When she had covered herself with the lotion and rubbed it in well, she put on a robe and belted it around her. She went jnto the bedroom, took the package from the dresser, and sat on the bed, holding it in her lap. Thinking about the contents of the package, she remembered how opposed she had been to the idea when Weldon first suggested it. That had been a number of months earlier, when things had still been going well at the foundation and there had been high hopes, at least on her part, that Weldon’s death sentence would be commuted. Now—well, now things were so much different; Niebold and White and that vile bitch Carla Volt were running the foundation, literally had control of it; and—something she never would have guessed would happen—Rob had deserted her. No, there was no other word for it, she might as well admit it—he must have deserted her. Her and Weldon.

  So now everything was different, and she was different. She was different because she now believed that Weldon would die. And being different, she could no longer muster any opposition to anything Weldon wanted if it was in her power to grant it. So she unwrapped the package and removed the Polaroid camera from its box.

  It was very simple to use; the salesman at the camera shop had demonstrated it for her several times and she had mastered it with no diff
iculty at all. Now she expertly put the film pack in, attached the flash, adjusted the exposure indicator, and set the camera on the dresser so that it pointed toward the bed. Then she set the automatic timer.

  Taking off her robe, she stretched out on the bed in the eye of the lens.

  Just before ten o’clock that night, Genevieve stood in the doorway of an all-night drugstore in downtown Sacramento. Tired and sated, she was oddly resigned to what she Was doing. No longer did she even attempt to justify it to herself, to reconcile it with her new acceptance of Weldon Whitman’s eventual execution. What did it matter? she had asked herself earlier, as she had carefully sealed the eight color Polaroid pictures and six ten-dollar bills in an ordinary letter envelope. What did any of it matter anymore?

  Standing in the doorway, she had just glanced at her watch and seen that it was exactly ten o’clock, when a man turned in from the street and paused next to her.

  “Do you have the time?” he asked.

  “It’s ten o’clock,” she answered.

  “I thought it was a lot later than that,” the man said.

  They both stood there for a moment, neither speaking again. Then Genevieve opened her purse and handed him the envelope containing the pictures and the money. He slipped it into his pocket and walked quickly away. Only after he was gone did Genevieve realize that she did. not even know what he had looked like.

  The next morning, the pictures and four of the ten-dollar bills, now in a stamped, addressed manila envelope, were dropped into a mailbox. The posted envelope was delivered the following afternoon to a man in San Francisco. That man removed two of the remaining bills and repackaged the rest of the contents in a plastic sandwich bag. He took the bag with him the next morning when he left his apartment before dawn and reported to his job as a milk delivery man. The delivery man’s route included the Tiburon and San Quentin areas, and by six o’clock he was at the main outside gate of the San Quentin complex. Beyond the gate was that part of the prison compound that was outside the walls. The milk truck was passed without question through the gate, just as numerous other delivery vehicles were passed daily. Immediately beyond the gate, the truck made a sharp right turn into a narrow, tree-lined street on which were situated the residences of the warden, his deputies, medical personnel, the chaplain, senior guard captains, and other prison employees whose fringe benefits included living quarters. The street went straight for a block, then split and wound off in separate directions.

  The delivery man made his deliveries along the street at a leisurely pace. Aside from the newspaper delivery boy, whom he could see half a block ahead of him, there was no one else in sight. Moving casually, he placed the tri-weekly orders of milk on the warden’s porch, on two of the deputy wardens’ porches, on Captain Dukes’s porch, and so on down the street As he worked, he hummed a quiet tune to himself. He did not interrupt either the pace of his work or his quiet humming when he made the delivery to the chaplain’s house. Walking up to the porch, he stood next to the steps, put down his metal basket, and expertly removed the bottles of milk and lined them up neatly in the shade of the porch rail. Then, as he was picking up the basket, he quickly palmed the sandwich bag, and slipped the small package into a narrow space between the porch and the back of the top step.

  Intentionally built by an inmate carpenter, the space was set back under the overhang of both of the step and the porch, and could not be seen except by someone on hands and knees searching the underside of that particular step. Just beyond the opening, which served as a slot for the convict mailbox, was a single shelf of wood, put there by the same carpenter, onto which the smuggled packets fell when dropped by their mailman. The mailbox was used only for letters, photographs, money, and drugs. Soft contraband, the inmates called it. It was never used for hard contraband: guns, knives, razors, saw blades, or the like.

  The packet dropped by the mailman lay on the dark shelf under the chaplain’s porch for four hours, until shortly after ten A.M., when it was picked up by an inmate trusty who was a member of the garden squad. The garden squad was a group of trusty inmates who worked outside the walls but within the surrounding fenced compound; they mowed lawns, trimmed trees and shrubs, watered and fertilized, and in general took care of all landscape maintenance around the homes of prison personnel.

  The garden squad trusty who picked up the milkman’s drop was working on the chaplain’s back lawn this particular morning, trimming and edging. He finished up at ten-thirty and sat down on the grass next to the back porch to clean the blade of the edger. Halfway through the job, when he was certain no one was around to see him, he moved backwards under the porch and scurried quickly beneath the house to the front steps. He saw the pickup waiting for him on the shelf, snatched it off, and hurried back to where he had been sitting.

  Giving the appearance of again cleaning the edger blade, he put the sandwich bag on the ground between his legs and deftly opened it. He took one of the two remaining ten-dollar bills, folded it in quarters, unlaced the high-top work shoe on his left foot, and put the bill neatly, flatly, under the tongue of the shoe. The sandwich bag and the rest of its contents he bundled together and stuffed into the top of one of the heavy, oatmeal-colored socks he wore. It barely made a bulge inside the sock, and did not show at all under his trouser leg.

  The trusty finished cleaning the edger, placed it over his shoulder like a rifle, and went out to the front of the house. The garden-squad truck, a gray prison pickup, was parked a block down, in front of the residence of Captain Dukes. At the truck the trusty checked in his edger, then walked down past the last row of houses to the trusty gate.

  All trusty inmates who worked in the outer compound were required to enter and leave the prison proper through the Trusty Room, built into the actual wall of the prison, one door inside the wall, the other door outside the wall. The room itself was divided by a waist-high railing, in the center of which were two red spots painted on the concrete floor. The first spot was in the middle of a metal detector, and apparatus resembling a telephone booth without door or back, in which an inmate returning to the walls had to stand while its invisible beams searched his person for metal. The second spot, six feet past the first, was the position for a strip search. If, after triggering the metal detector, or if the duty guard decided that an inmate should be strip-searched, it was on this spot that he stood and removed all his clothes and had his body and its orifices meticulously examined.

  Other than for triggering the metal detector, there was no established routine for strip seaches; they were conducted strictly at the whim of the duty guard. The trusty inmates knew, as did the guards, that the odds against catching someone with soft contrabands by the use of random strip searches were extremely high. That, plus the fact that the guards were primarily concerned with the smuggling of hard goods, gave inmate couriers a wide margin of safety. They knew that most of the correctional officers connected with the prison could not have cared less about uncensored correspondence, pornography, and drugs getting behind the walls. All of those items, the experienced guard knew, were harmless to the operation of the institution, and actually helped keep the place calmer than it might otherwise have been.

  On the morning he was smuggling the sandwich bag inside, the garden squad trusty entered the Trusty Room, signed the log on the compound side of the rail, and dutifully stepped into the metal detector. He stood on the red spot while the detector scanned him, waiting for the hold light to go off, the pass light to go on. When the light did change, the trusty stepped forward to the next red spot. The duty guard, one of the older, experienced correctional officers, was sitting at the post desk, chewing on a toothpick. He looked up at the trusty, studying him, as he moved his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. After a moment, he nodded silently and passed the trusty back to prison-side.

  The trusty walked around the prison chapel and cut across a corner of the big yard to the dining room. He entered the big warehouselike room and walked back to the
kitchen. In a tiny partitioned cubicle back in one corner, an inmate storekeeper sat at a desk checking food bills of lading. The trusty went over to the cubicle and stood next to the desk. He waited while the storekeeper eyeballed the entire kitchen without moving his head. There were three guards on duty, none of them near or paying attention. In a minute, the storekeeper nodded toward the wastebasket next to the desk. The trusty knelt and retied his shoe, and as he stood up he dropped the sandwich bag into the store-keeper’s half-filled wastebasket. Then he walked quickly away.

  The storekeeper waited a full hour after the trusty had left before he fished the plastic bag out of the basket. Keeping a practiced eye on the three guards—again without raising his head—he opened the bag and removed the last ten-dollar bill, casually putting it in his trousers pocket He knew without examining the rest of the contents who the delivery was for. At that particular time he was expecting some homosexual love letters for a fairy named Dewey in D Block, some sniffing-grade cocaine for a user named Partell who worked in the laundry, some beaver pictures for Whitman up on the Row. This packet was obviously the one for Whitman.

  The storekeeper shoved the bag of Polaroid shots in his pocket, picked up his clipboard, and walked back to the storeroom. He began to check his inventory of cooking utensils, cups, food trays, and other kitchenware. In one corner of the storeroom, on a reinforced shelf, were eight stacks of metal food trays which were used to feed inmates who did not go through the chow line: those in the prison hospital, those locked away in the Isolation Unit, and the condemned men on Death Row. The sixth tray down, in the third row over, had a specially constructed false bottom which had been fabricated for the storekeeper in the metal shop at a cost of eighty dollars. It was this tray that the storekeeper removed. He placed it on a crate, pressed with his thumbs on two of the corners, and lifted the top section away. Quickly he spread the photographs out in for rows of two inside the bottom tray; then he pressed the top tray back into place over them. He put three ordinary trays on top of the special one, two others under it, and carried all of them out of the storeroom and over to a cart which, two hours earlier, had come from the Death Row kitchen laden with dirty trays, and which would shortly be returned there with clean trays. The storekeeper removed six trays from the cart, put them back in the scrubber to be washed and sterilized again, and replaced them with the six he had brought from the storeroom. The kitchen orderly who would push the cart back to the Row kitchen was standing nearby. The storekeeper walked over to him.