Death Row

by William Bernhardt

  “Who’s the guy they’re talking to? The redhead.”

  Christina rolled her eyes. “Ben! Don’t you know anyone? He’s the most prominent one in the bunch.”

  “You’re just saying that because he has red hair.”

  “I’m saying it because it’s true. He could buy and sell the lot of them.”

  “That kid? He’s what? Thirty?”

  “He’s Peter Rothko, founder of the Burger Bliss fast-food chain.”

  “He looks more like the top fry cook.”

  “He owns the whole outfit. He’s a billionaire. Fortune 500. And insanely handsome. He’s got it all.” Her gaze softened. “Generally considered to be Tulsa’s most eligible bachelor.”

  Ben blinked. “I thought I was Tulsa’s most eligible bachelor.”

  “But of course you are. What was I thinking?”

  Without warning, Ben lunged sideways and ducked behind her. “Hide me!”

  “What on—?” Christina turned her gaze in the other direction. “Oh.”

  Not ten feet from them, an attractive man in his early fifties strolled across the room jingling a glass. Some dark liquor or other, straight up. “Derek.”

  “Damn right. Don’t move!”

  “Ben . . . doesn’t this strike you as just a wee bit juvenile?”

  “I don’t care if it is,” he hissed. “The man hates me, and the feeling is mutual. I don’t want to have a big scene.”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “Easy for you to say. You didn’t have to work under him back at Raven.”

  “Actually, I did.”

  “Well, he didn’t fire you. You didn’t watch him become a federal judge just so he could humiliate you at every possible opportunity.”

  “If you’ll recall, Ben, I was more than a little bit interested in that first trial you had before Judge Derek myself.”

  “The man is venal, arrogant, and vicious,” Ben continued. “And he hates me. Just being in the same room with him gives me the shakes. I’m leaving.”

  “Ben, you’re being ridiculous!”

  “I don’t care if I am. This is a waste of time, anyway. I’m not the networking type.”

  “Ben. I insist that you stay.”

  “Insist away. Unless you’re packing handcuffs, I’m outta here.”

  “Ben, as your partner, I demand that you stay put!”

  “Oh, look! Alvin is coming back.”

  Christina did an abrupt about-face. “Feets, do your stuff!”

  Chapter

  3

  When Ben passed through the front doors to his office, he found his staff engaged in a heated discussion.

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Jones, the office manager. “Everyone knows it was the Cubans. It was payback time.”

  “Would you listen to me for just one minute?” Loving said. “I been readin’ about this for twenty years. It was the air force, man. They had a deal with the grays and they had to protect it.”

  “Grays? As in space aliens?” Christina snickered. “I think it was the mob. Who else could bring off a hit like that?”

  “You’re all nuts.” Jones pivoted around. “What do you think, Ben? Who killed JFK?”

  Ben spread his arms. “Could it be . . . Lee Harvey Oswald?”

  Jones rolled his eyes. Loving slapped his forehead. “Jeez, Ben. You are so gullible.”

  “You’re right,” he replied. “I’ll believe anything.”

  “I got some stuff you could read on this,” said Loving, their fridge-size investigator and resident conspiracy buff. “I could get it for you.”

  “Business is slow,” Ben answered, “but, happily, not that slow.” He paused. Something in here smelled. “Christina, did you have the office fumigated again?”

  “Yes. I found a spider.”

  “Only one?”

  “He was a monster.”

  “ ’Bout the size of my pinkie nail,” Jones muttered.

  “Even the little ones can be deadly,” she shot back.

  “Christina, you’ve got to stop. All this pesticide is disgusting. Plus it’s bankrupting us.”

  “Not that that takes much,” Jones said sotto voce.

  “I’m sorry, Ben, but I can’t help it. I hate spiders.” She shuddered. “They totally creep me out.”

  Well, Ben thought philosophically, Christina was a lot tougher than he was about most things. It was nice to know she had at least one weakness. “Anything going on here?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” Christina answered. “You’ve got someone waiting for you in your office. A young woman.”

  “Hey, hey, hey, Skipper,” Loving said, winking. “You got a little action goin’?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Did you interview her, Christina?”

  “I tried. She wants to talk to you.”

  Ben’s head tilted slightly. That was odd. Christina was the empathetic one. Usually clients preferred to spill their guts to her. “Do you know who she is?”

  “Oh, yes. I knew who she was the moment she came through the door. You will, too.” She looked at him levelly. “And you won’t believe it.”

  With an invitation like that, how could he resist? “Let’s do it.”

  Ben started toward his office, Christina close behind. He stopped at the third door on the right and pushed it open.

  After he finished gaping, he stepped inside. Christina was right. He couldn’t believe it.

  The cane leaning against her chair was a sure tip, not that Ben needed one. It hadn’t been that long, and she hadn’t changed that much.

  “Miss Faulkner,” Ben said, offering her his hand. “This is a surprise.”

  “I’ll bet it is,” she said, taking it. “And please call me Erin.” She cast a glance around Ben’s sparsely decorated office. “Did you ever consider maybe watering your plants?”

  “Why? They’re all dead.” He dropped his briefcase on the desktop. Christina sat in one of the outer chairs. “Erin, is this visit about a new matter, or . . . the previous one?”

  “The same one, I’m afraid.” Her eyes didn’t make contact with his. “My family . . .”

  Ben nodded. “Then I have to tell you, before you say anything, that technically anyway, Ray Goldman’s appeal is still active and I’m representing him.”

  “I know that.”

  She looked good, Ben thought, with close-cropped dark hair and a tight-fitting sweater skirt. She had been a bit pudgy as a teenager, but judging by appearances, that baby fat was long gone. “So the prosecutors probably wouldn’t want me talking to you. At least not outside their presence.”

  “Are we breaking any rules?”

  “Christina?”

  Christina edged forward. “Are you personally represented by counsel, Erin?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Then we’re not breaking any rules. But the prosecutors still wouldn’t like it.”

  “Frankly, I don’t give a damn what the prosecutors like.”

  Ben’s eyebrows rose. This was certainly a new attitude from the DA’s star witness. And the sole survivor of the tragedy. “Okay. How can I help you?”

  “You got Goldman’s execution stayed, right? I know—I was there.”

  Ben’s heart sank. Is that why she had come—to chew him out for stopping the wheels of justice? “True, but that’s only temporary. We applied for federal habeas corpus review, but due to an unusually busy docket, the court hadn’t set a hearing. That’s why we got an eleventh-hour stay. But that won’t happen again. And a hearing has been set, in about a week.”

  “What are you planning to say at the hearing?”

  Ben pondered whether to answer the question. He didn’t normally brief prosecution witnesses on his case strategy. But for some reason, he thought he should tell her the truth. “Frankly, we don’t know. Getting a prisoner released on habeas corpus is pitifully rare. One of the most common grounds—which isn’t at all common—is incompetence of counsel a
t trial. I can hardly argue that the trial counsel was incompetent, since I was the trial counsel. Someone else could make the argument, though. Which is why I was looking for a new lawyer to take the case.”

  “I was at that trial every day,” Erin said, and Ben could see in her eyes that she was returning to that time, a place he suspected she did not like to go. “I don’t recall you being incompetent. In fact, I remember thinking if I was ever in trouble, you were the one I’d hire to get me out.”

  “I appreciate that. But there’s no such thing as a perfect trial, and every trial attorney makes mistakes. If there’s an argument to be made, we need to get someone in who can make it.”

  There was a long silence. Ben could tell Erin was thinking, running something through her head. Unless he missed his guess, there was something she wanted to tell him. She just hadn’t figured out how to say it yet.

  “I—” She started, then stopped, then tried it again. “I—would like to help. If I could.”

  Christina’s brow creased. “You want to help us—with Ray Goldman’s appeal?”

  “Yes. If possible. I would.”

  Ben stared at her, unsure what to say. “Forgive us if we seem taken aback, Erin, but—you were the principal prosecution witness at the trial. The only one who mattered, really. To be quite honest, I thought we were winning. Until you took the stand.”

  “Everyone thought so,” Christina added. “Erin, your testimony is what got Ray convicted. More than that. It’s why he got the death penalty.”

  All at once, Erin crumbled forward. Her head fell into her hands. “I know,” she said, barely audibly. “I know that.”

  Ben and Christina looked at one another. This was too strange, almost surreal. What was going on?

  Christina inched forward and gently laid a hand on the woman’s back. “I’m sorry, Erin. I wasn’t trying to induce a guilt trip. I was just stating a fact. About your testimony, I mean.”

  Her chest heaved. “That’s why it hurts so much.”

  “I—I’m afraid I don’t understand. You told the jury what you saw and heard. Why does that hurt?”

  “Because it was all a lie.” She brushed the tears from her face and pressed against the arms of the chair, trying to steady herself. “Every word of it. A tremendous lie.”

  Ben was so stunned he could barely speak. “You—didn’t really see him?”

  “I wasn’t sure what I saw.” Her broken voice seemed part anger, part anguish. “I wasn’t sure about anything. The killer wore a ski mask, remember? I couldn’t tell what he looked like. I did hear his voice, and when I heard Goldman’s voice in the lineup, I thought maybe it was the killer’s voice. But I couldn’t be certain.”

  “Then why—”

  “The DA.” Her lips stiffened as the letters slipped out of her mouth. “He pushed me. Pressured me. He was desperate to win that case. There had been so much publicity, you remember. He couldn’t afford to lose. He was certain Goldman was guilty and he was willing to do almost anything to convict him. I was only fifteen years old and barely thinking straight. Easy for him to manipulate.”

  Ben didn’t argue with her. He knew most district attorneys were honest lawyers who played it straight, but some of his subsequent experiences with Jack Bullock proved the man was willing to break rules to convict someone he believed guilty. “So he told you to lie?”

  “Oh, he never said it like that. He just pushed. Pushed and pushed and never let up. Told me how important my testimony was. How the jury had to hear it from me. How I had to sound sure of what I was saying. That my whole family was counting on me. That I was the only one left, and it was up to me to make sure the man who committed this atrocity didn’t live to do it again. He—” She turned her head, fighting back the tears. “He showed me pictures. Of them, I mean. Of what the killer did to them. So I’d see how important this was.”

  Ben felt as if someone had slipped a dull knife inside his heart. Small wonder Erin was traumatized—to be put through so much when she was only fifteen.

  “So I did what he said,” Erin continued, her voice trembling. “I testified. I told them I was certain.” She paused. “But I wasn’t.”

  Ben stared dumbly across the desk as Christina tried to comfort Erin. He had no illusions about what had happened at that trial. It was her testimony—the certainty of her testimony—that had convicted Ray Goldman. But for that, they would not have lost. And Ray would not have spent the last seven years on death row.

  “You should talk to the DA,” Ben said finally. “Tell him what you’ve told us.”

  “But—if I do that, won’t they charge me with perjury?”

  “I think it’s unlikely. You were a crime victim, and a juvenile. And the prosecutors encouraged you. But I can’t rule it out.”

  “I don’t want to go to prison. And I don’t want to see that district attorney. I can’t face that man again. He’ll try to shut me up.”

  “Well, Bullock isn’t there anymore, but . . .” But other DAs were. And since her recantation meant they would have no legitimate conviction on one of the worst homicide sprees in Tulsa history, they had plenty of motivation to silence or discredit her.

  If this mess was going to be fixed, it would have to be a defense attorney who did it.

  “We’ll need you to swear out an affidavit,” Ben said quietly. “And the judge will want to hear from you in person. You’ll be examined—and cross-examined.”

  “Whatever. Whatever it takes. Just stop this. Don’t let it go on any longer.” She drew herself up and tried to steady her voice. “I’ve been tearing myself apart. I’ve talked to everyone—my preacher, my friends, my boyfriend, my coworkers—everyone I know. But no one can help. When I thought Goldman was going to be executed, I almost died myself. That’s when I made up my mind. That I had to talk to you.”

  Christina wrapped her arms around the young woman. A fresh wave of tears cascaded forth, but Erin continued to speak in the same voice tinged with despair. “I can’t bear it any longer. I don’t want that man’s death on my conscience forever, damning my soul. I want it to be over.” She looked up at Ben, her eyes wide and watery. “Please help me, Mr. Kincaid. Please.”

  “Do you believe her?” Christina asked, after Ben returned from escorting Erin to her car.

  “Of course I believe her. Didn’t you see her face?”

  “I saw . . . a very disturbed woman.”

  Ben loosened his tie and flopped down behind his desk. “She’s been carrying that guilt around for seven years.”

  “I agree that she’s traumatized by guilt. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s telling the truth.”

  Ben’s forehead creased. If this had come from anyone but Christina, he would find it laughable. But he knew Christina’s instincts about people were sound—much better than his own, generally. “What do you mean?”

  “She feels responsible for Ray’s imminent execution.”

  “So? She is.”

  “A lot of people later come to regret the part they played in a case that leads to the death penalty. Witnesses, jurors, judges—even lawyers.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “She may be telling us she lied to stop the execution. Regardless of whether she thinks Ray is guilty.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  Christina sat on the edge of Ben’s desk. “What if she’s been born again? She said she’d been talking to a preacher. She said she worried about her soul being damned.”

  “I think you’re stretching.”

  “Am I? She could’ve had a religious conversion experience, come to think of the death penalty as murder, and regretted her part in causing a man’s death.”

  Ben shook his head vigorously. “I saw that woman’s eyes, Christina. The only cause of her guilt is the fact that she lied on the witness stand.”

  “Are you sure about that? Or do you just want to be sure of it?”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “I kno
w you consider the Goldman case your greatest failure. And I know you’d grab at anything to get him off death row.”

  “That’s my job. Her word is good enough for me.”

  “It won’t be enough for the judge.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the prosecutors will make all the same arguments I have. And no judge is going to overturn a jury verdict in a high-profile case unless he has something more than a recanting witness.”

  Ben frowned. “You’re probably right about that.”

  “And there’s more to consider. I know why you haven’t been able to find anyone to take over Ray’s case. The funding for his defense ran out a long time ago.”

  Ben averted his eyes. That was the problem with Christina—she always knew what was going on. All too well.

  “Jones will have a heart attack if you launch a major initiative without someone to pay the bills.”

  “That much is certain.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” Ben rose. “Before I make that decision, there’s someone else I need to consult. Someone whose opinion is a hell of a lot more important than mine.”

  Chapter

  4

  “I don’t think that’s wise,” Major Mike Morelli said as two uniforms buckled his bulletproof vest and wired him for sound. “That’s a dangerous man in there.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Sergeant Hoppes shot back. “We’re talking about a nutcase holed up in a fast-food restaurant holding twenty people at gunpoint.”

  “What I’m saying is, we have to be careful. When the SOT boys show up, keep them out of sight. Behind the perimeter.”

  “And what I’m saying is, let’s get them right up in the creep’s face. Give him something to worry about.”

  “He’s already on the brink. And he has hostages!”

  “All the more reason. We’ll show him who’s boss. Show him how quickly he’ll be dead if he tries anything. He’ll back down.”