Mark the Sparrow

by Clark Howard

  “Tray number four is for Whitman. Pass it along.”

  “Check,” said the orderly.

  At quarter of four, the steam table containing the evening meal was rolled off the Death Row elevator and taken into the Twenty Section.

  “Come and get it,” the Death Row kitchen helper said loudly as he put a tray of hot food on the tray shelf in the cell door of Twenty. “Hot roast beef tonight,” he said as he passed a tray to Cell Twenty-one. “Got a good dessert tonight,” he commented as he put a tray on the shelf of Cell Twenty-two.

  In Cell Twenty-two, Weldon Whitman got off his bunk at once and pulled his dinner tray into the cell. He watched the kitchen helper push the table on, followed by the Row duty guard. When they had passed, he looked curiously at his tray. A good dessert tonight was the code phrase used to tell an inmate that he had the special tray.

  Whitman, anxious to open the tray, was patient enough to know that he had to wait until he had eaten most of the food. He drew his chair over and used it as a table while he sat on the edge of his bunk to eat. He was wearing glasses all the time now, his hair had receded a little farther at each temple, and when he sat, a slightly thickening middle bulged under his blue cotton shirt. As he ate, he wondered if the tray contained some message of Robert Cloud’s whereabouts. The ex-reporter had been missing for going on three weeks now and no one, not even Genevieve, seemed to know where he was. The cocksucker had probably run out on him, Whitman thought as he chewed a mouthful of roast beef. He should have known better than to ever trust a fucking newspaperman, anyway. Half of them were lushes and fuck-offs, and the other half were lowlife rabble-rousers with about as much style and intelligence as a Mongoloid idiot. The condemned man shrugged. What the fuck difference did it make, anyway? Cloud had come in handy when he was needed—but he really wasn’t needed anymore. With Niebold and White in his corner, with the foundation flourishing like a whorehouse on Saturday night, with organizations all over the state starting to take a good hard look at the California Supreme Court—who needed a hack like Cloud?

  Thinking of Cloud made him think of Eugene Terrier. The ex-Black Panther, whom Borden White had brought up to visit shortly after he had been retained by the foundation, was presently rewriting the draft of Judgment in Anguish that had been done by Cloud. Personally, Whitman had been satisfied with Cloud’s version; but White—and Niebold, apparently—had wanted it to read more strongly, to take a more aggressive approach, to project its author, Weldon Whitman, less as a victim of society and more as a victim of the court system. They wanted, they said, to elevate Weldon Whitman to the status of a citizen demanding justice. And they felt that the smooth, urbane, well-educated Eugene Terrier was just the man to do that.

  Whitman finished eating, putting the warm peach cobbler away in two huge bites. Then he shifted the chair ninety degrees so that its back was to the cell door and the dinner tray concealed. Pressing with his thumbs, he released the false bottom of the tray and quickly looked to see what had been delivered to him. There were eight Polaroid pictures, all turned face down. He flipped one over, stared at it, and his mouth dropped open incredulously. Well, I’ll be goddamned—!

  He slid the eight pictures into a deck, removed them from the bottom of the tray, and shoved them under his pillow. Snapping the top back in place, he took the tray over to the shelf and left it for the kitchen helper to take away. Propping himself up on his bunk, he opened a law book and slipped the pictures behind it. He studied them one by one, his incredulity gradually giving way to delighted amusement. Son of a bitch! Fat mamma actually did it for him!

  He felt an erection coming on; he wanted badly to jack off. But there were still too much activity in the corridor, with the two duty guards and the kitchen helper. Even so—

  He propped his feet up, bending his knees in front of the book. Unbuttoning his fly, he worked his erect penis out and let it stand free behind the book. He looked through the bars into the corridor. He could hear voices but there was no one in sight. He looked back at his throbbing hard-on saluting the pictures of Genevieve. He wanted to do it. But he hated the idea of anyone seeing him. He had a certain status to maintain. If someone should walk by—

  Fuck it. He wanted it.

  He closed his fist around his all-demanding dick.

  When he was finished, he felt better. He always felt better after he masturbated. Even though it was only a halfway kind of satisfaction, a relief shadowed by an anxiety of being observed by someone, it was still a tension-relaxant of no little value in his present situation.

  He washed his hands and sat back on the bunk again. Putting the open law book in front of him, he went through Genevieve’s pictures a second time, uninspired now by the heat of passion, giving them a much more clinical, and critical, examination. Old fat mamma really did it up good for me, he thought. He shook his head, half chuckling. You are really something, fat mamma. I mean, really!

  He got up and took a cigar box from the shelf above the table where his typewriter and typing supplies were kept. The box was one of three in which he kept newspaper clipping about himself; two of them were full, the third was used for current clippings. The box he took from the shelf was the first one, containing the oldest clippings. He set the box inside him on the bunk, spread a few yellowing clippings around to make it look good, then removed two-dozen-odd snapshots from the bottom of the box. He looked through them as a man might look through his stamp collection. Three of the dozen were of Carla Volt going down on an unidentified man whose face could not be seen. Carla had sent him a set of a dozen like that; he had traded nine of them for other pictures, and favors: six of them and a five-dollar bill had gone to Jones, the illiterate, homosexual copkiller, for a blow job in his cell during one of the Row’s weekly movies. The others, along with some more current shots of Carla, these showing her fucked in different positions by a lean, handsome black man, Whitman kept for himself. He was certain that the man in the photographs was Eugene Terrier, even though the man’s face was either turned partly away from the lens, or was buried in cunt. Not that it made any difference to Whitman; he just wanted the pictures and wanted Carla to keep visiting him every two weeks and telling him about all the sex things she had done with Cloud and was now doing with this spade Terrier.

  He sorted through the rest of his pictures, those he had acquired through trade from other men on the Row. He had a good variety, and to his collection he now added one of the shots of Genevieve. He covered the pictures back up with his old newspaper clippings and returned the box to the shelf. Then he sat down at his table, spread the other seven pictures of Genevieve out next to the typewriter, and started analyzing their worth. They might bring him something in trade, he thought. But he rather doubted it. Poor old fat mamma was a real dog; she was really hurting. But maybe Henry, the black rapist-killer in Twenty-seven, would trade him one good one for all seven of them. Henry was a psycho who really freaked out over white pussy. He just might go for this poor fat cunt.

  Weldon Whitman hoped so. It would be a shame for fat mamma’s pictures to go to waste.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Robert Cloud awoke just before noon, opening his eyes under a hand he had placed over one side of his face. He was glad he had the hand there; he could feel warm sunlight on it, and he knew if that sunlight had been on his face instead of his hand, he would have awakened with a rotten headache. Keeping his hand in place, he craftily moved his head over until he found a cool place on the pillow where the sunlight had not fallen; then he took his hand away. He saw that the room itself was dim and cool; the sunlight was a maverick beam that had found its way past a crooked slat in the blinds.

  Cloud sat up and stretched. He was on Carol’s side of the bed. She had left before eight; he usually moved onto her side, into her warmth, as soon as she got up. He stood, naked, and stretched again. Yawning, he went into the bathroom, lifted the toilet seat, and urinated. The odor of the urine reached his nostrils and made, him sneeze. He put the toi
let seat lid down and flushed it quickly, but not before he sneezed a second time.

  At the sink he brushed his teeth and gums vigorously, taking pleasure in destroying the foul taste that was inevitably in his mouth every morning. He washed his face, lathered and shaved; when he finished shaving, he examined his face critically in the mirror. His skin was pale, almost unhealthy-looking—the result of his not having left the apartment in more than six weeks. Shrugging off his whiteness, he rubbed some of Carol’s hand lotion onto his freshly shaved cheeks and neck.

  After showering, Cloud dressed in a new set of underwear, a pair of Levis, and a turtleneck sweater Carol had bought for him. “I’m tired of washing your underwear every other night,” she had told him, referring to the two sets he had brought from Sacramento on the trip that was supposed to have lasted only two days. “Besides, I don’t like those boxer shorts you wear. These are sexier,” she had said, and handed him several packages of brightly designed men’s bikini briefs with matching undershirts. He had not worn the boxers since.

  When he was dressed, he picked up Glory Ann Luza’s cross and chain from the dresser, slipped it into his trousers pocket, and went into the living room. As usual, Carol had opened the drapes and bathed the room in daylight. Cloud closed them at once and turned on the lights. The morning edition of his old alma mater, the Ledger, was laid neatly at a place set for him at the table. He dropped it in the trash container without even looking at the headline. He turned to the refrigerator; there was a note Scotch-taped to the door. Eat something decent for breakfast, it implored. Decent was underlined three times. Cloud opened the door, got out what he wanted, and sat down at the table. He ate four slices of cold, leftover pizza supreme, half a dozen chocolate marshmallow cookies, and drank a Coke.

  Cloud had come back to Carol Carter like a wounded animal on that day which now seemed like an eternity ago when Judge G. Foster Klein had told him first of Weldon Whitman’s partial innocence, then of Doris Calder’s suicide. From that utterly shocking moment, Cloud’s mind had absolutely refused to function for him in any matter relating to the Weldon Whitman case. The many complexities of the affair had compounded one time too many. His consciousness had been left reeling under the impact of Klein’s disclosures; his thought processes refused to attempt any further evaluation of these latest numbing pieces of information. Defensively, his subconscious had sucked the whole awful mess down into its protective custody; and Robert Cloud had been left with only enough lethargic thought processes to care for himself in a calm, nonchallenging environment.

  He found that environment for his mind, as well as a placid, comforting place for his body, in the apartment and the arms of Carol Carter. He had come back to her seeking shelter and solace—and she had taken him in eagerly, without hesitation or reservation. She had known instinctively that he was on the brink of something, that one more step would send him plunging into a psychological abyss. Having stood on that same kind of brink herself, Carol Carter understood both the threat and the challenge of it. She had backed away from the dangers of her abyss long ago—and she had needed no help from anyone to do it; and being a very intelligent woman, she was proud of herself but not vain about that accomplishment, and she had the good sense to realize that Robert Cloud’s brink might be higher and more precipitous than hers had been, and the abyss below it deeper and darker. So she helped him—and at no time did she consider herself either stronger than he was, or superior to him.

  After he told her what he had learned from G. Foster Klein, Carol was able to assemble a fairly accurate picture of Cloud’s dilemma. He had originally thrown himself into the case with no preconceived notion of Whitman’s guilt or innocence—merely a conviction that Whitman should not be executed for a crime in which no life had been taken. Subsequently, Cloud had become convinced that Whitman had not committed the Calder crime, and believed therefore that Whitman was innocent of both sex crimes. Then, two years later, came the meeting with Glory Ann Luza, and the evidence of the cross and chain proving that Whitman possibly had committed that crime. And the awful spectacle of the girl’s Adam syndrome had forced him to admit that possibly the death penalty was justified for crimes less than murder: crimes such as the one committed against Glory Ann’s mind. With that admission the quandary had begun. Problem: if Whitman committed the one crime but not the other, was it possible that the Luza crime alone would not have resulted in a death sentence? To find out, Cloud had turned to the one person who probably knew more about the legal aspects of the Whitman case than anyone else in the world: G. Foster Klein. But instead of Klein clarifying the equity of it, he had served only to further compound Cloud’s confusion by first admitting to him that Whitman did not commit the Calder crime, by convincing him finally that Whitman did commit the Luza crime, then by blasting his conscience wide open by telling of Doris Calder’s suicide and intimating that it had in part been Robert Cloud’s fault.

  Cloud had refused to talk about the Whitman case any longer. He had not talked about it since his return to Carol’s apartment, except for a brief explanation of where he had gone, why, and what he had learned. Beyond that, he had become distant and remote on the subject, and was quickly perturbed if Carol brought up the matter.

  “Shouldn’t you at least call someone in Sacramento to let them know that you haven’t been hurt or killed?” Carol asked early on in his stay.

  Cloud had merely shaken his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m sure that isn’t so,” she argued. “I’m sure that—what’s her name, Genevieve Neller—is probably very concerned about you. It wouldn’t hurt to pick up the phone and call her—”

  “No, Carol,” he said simply, emphatically, with finality.

  She let it go—but not before she classified his decision with the all-inclusive blanket comment she used for anything with which she disagreed. “I think that’s pretty dumb.”

  On that first night when he returned, Carol had no idea that his plans for the future extended only as far as her front door. They ate together that night, sat and talked together, went to bed together, made love, and slept together. Carol got up the next morning and went to work, first making him promise to stay there all day and rest. He kept his promise and was there waiting for her when she got home. Their second evening was a repetition of the first: dinner, talk, bed, make love, sleep. They repeated the routine the following night, and the following, and the night after that. She asked twice that first week if he wanted to have dinner out, perhaps go to a show. He did not. After ten days of the same routine night after night, Cloud began to feel guilty about his presence in her apartment; he asked if she wanted him to leave. She put her arms around his neck and told him that of course she did not want him to leave; she wanted him to stay.

  “It’s just that I’m concerned about you. I worry about you being here by yourself all day with nothing to do.”

  “I keep occupied,” he said.

  “Would you mind telling me at what? I’m not being critical; I’m just curious.”

  Cloud had shrugged. “I watch television. I play solitaire. I read your magazines. I’ve even gone through your desk and read some of the notes and letters you got from that guy you were going with.”

  “Oh?” A cold, vindictive anger rose up in her at the admission of such a flagrant invasion of her privacy. It showed in her eyes, which lost every degree of their warmth, and in her lips, as they compressed tightly to contain a flow of profanity which gathered quickly in her mind for immediate use. But she was able to control herself, to hold back the initial impulse to call him a dirty lowlife son of a bitch and tell him to get the fuck out of her apartment. She was able to curb what she knew would be nothing but an emotional outburst, able to overcome it by coolly reminding herself that she did care for this man, that he needed her help and understanding, and that the letters no longer meant anything to her. “What did you think of the letters?” she finally asked in a beautifully controlled voice.

  “They we
re no good at all,” Cloud said professionally. “The composition was sloppy, some of the sentence structure was poor—”

  He gave her a short oral critique on the basics of good writing, and then they dropped the subject.

  The next evening, when she was ready to take the trash out, she took all of her letters with it.

  Two things about him disturbed her. The most important was their sexual relationship. As was her nature, her drive, she completely abandoned herself to him. She quickly came to worship his body and she wanted it in every way possible. As often as possible. And, as was her preference, with the lights on. But Cloud, after undressing, invariably darkened the room.

  “Why do you do that?” she asked one night.

  “Do what?”

  “Turn off the lights.”

  “I like it better with them our,” he said. He slipped onto the bed and put his hand between her legs.

  “Don’t you like to look at my body?”

  “I love to look at your body.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to look at it while we’re fucking?” He was rubbing her, working a finger into her, feeling her wetness begin. “Wouldn’t you?” she persisted.

  “Sure I would,” he told her. “But right now I like you in the dark where it’s cool and quiet and private. You like it in the dark, don’t you?”