Monument Road

by Michael Wiley

  But all the way to the verdict, Lance said he expected the jury to rule against the state. And, after the guilty verdict, he said no jury would sentence an eighteen-year-old to death.

  He lined up three character witnesses. Dad came in a gray suit but never looked at me from the witness stand. He had tears in his eyes, though, and he brought tears to mine as he explained the difficulty of raising two sons as a single parent and said he knew me only as a loving son. Jared wore a suit too, and he said we grew up side by side after the death of our mother. He told a story about a Christmas week when we were the ages of the Bronson boys and, along with Dad, we hiked and played in the snow around a rented cabin that backed up to the Cartecay River in the northern Georgia mountains. If the jury believed his version of that story, we’d lived a happy, wholesome life. Last, my freshman track coach, Ernie Kagen, came to the stand in a green sport coat, khakis, and loafers. He told the jurors that four years earlier he kicked me off the team a week before the season ended because I missed too many practices and seemed to lack commitment, but he’d never seen greater raw talent in a young long-distance runner. He regretted that I graduated from high school without ever returning to the team. ‘What a waste,’ he said, as he finished. ‘What a waste of a life.’

  Overall, I figured the testimony did me more good than harm, but I needed much more than that. The jurors came back after forty-five minutes and told the judge I should die.

  On the night after the sentencing, although I knew a van would come the next day to take me to the state prison, I slept more soundly than I’d slept since I went to talk to Higby about what I saw when I picked up and dropped off the boys on Monument Road. I dreamed of the Christmas-week vacation that Jared had described on the stand.

  At that time, Dad was trying, on and off, to break his drinking habit. One night, he stumbled in and looked at Jared and me as if he’d finally blown a fuse and his brain had just stopped. Flecks of spit hung on his chin. He said, ‘That’s it,’ as if he’d made a big decision. Then he stumbled to the couch and passed out.

  The next morning when I got up, he was cooking breakfast. He’d never before cooked us breakfast. I did remember him vomiting at the smell of scrambled eggs after a hard night. But this morning he chewed a piece of toast and laid strips of bacon in a skillet.

  I stood in the doorway and watched. He hummed while he cooked. Hummed. He’d shaved and showered, and he’d slicked his wet hair back over his head.

  When he saw me watching, he waved at the table for me to sit. ‘Good, good, good,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’

  He brought a platter of eggs to the table and spooned some on to a plate. He jabbered about this and that and went to the toaster to put down the bread. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I know what it is. I’ve been doing it all wrong. You’ve seen it, right?’ He laughed to himself as if he’d figured out a puzzle that everyone else in the room had given up on. ‘It’s this stinking air,’ he said. ‘That’s part of it. Standing water. Swamps. The damned paper mills pumping poison into the air. The damned Maxwell House plant. The damned brewery. You never thought you’d hear me say that, did you?’ He laughed. ‘The damned brewery. The goddamned brewery. Goddamned Anheuser-Busch.’

  I asked, ‘Did they fire you?’ He’d worked for the past ten months as an electrician there.

  He stared at me. ‘Of course not. I’m just tired of this town. The fumes. The gasses on the ground in the morning. I’m sick of it.’

  ‘You can’t not breathe,’ I said.

  ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘You can’t not breathe. And that’s the problem. Part of it. That’s why we’re getting out of here.’

  Jared stepped into the doorway, his hair messy, sleep in his eyes. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Dad’s face gleamed. You hear about florid drunks, and he was like that – but this morning he was sober. ‘Road trip,’ he said. ‘To the mountains. Northern Georgia. Clear air up in the mountains.’

  ‘Did you get fired?’ Jared asked.

  ‘No, goddamn it, I did not get fired,’ Dad said.

  ‘Then, what’s wrong with you?’ Jared said.

  I wanted to tell him to shut up before Dad changed his mind, but Dad said, ‘For the first time in a long time, everything is right. I came in last night and I looked at the two of you, and do you know what I saw?’

  ‘Child neglect?’ Jared said.

  If Dad had been drunk, that might’ve gotten Jared a black eye. But Dad just smiled. ‘I saw two young men. My boys are growing up. And if you want to know the truth, that scared me. Made me think straight.’

  ‘Nothing straight about you last night,’ Jared said.

  The toast popped up, and Dad buttered a piece for me and a piece for Jared. ‘I got to thinking. This place has dragged on us. Ever since your mother died.’

  ‘It took you until now to figure that out?’ Jared said.

  ‘You know what’s been missing?’ Dad said. ‘Love. I mean, I’ve loved you boys as well as I could. I’ve tried. But this is a bad place.’

  ‘We know who made it this way,’ Jared said.

  ‘Sit down and eat,’ Dad said. ‘And then pack a bag. We’re going to the mountains.’

  So, after breakfast, we drove north into Georgia, up through Waycross and Tifton, then Macon and Atlanta. We headed toward the national forest that spanned the Georgia–Tennessee border.

  We rented an off-season cabin, and the air was cold and sharp on our lungs and smelled like pine and the frozen rot of fallen leaves. For three days we hiked the paths at the southern end of the Appalachian Trail, and at night we built log fires in the fireplace. When we woke on the fourth morning, the wind was blowing and snow was falling. Dad, who’d slept in pajama bottoms and nothing else, laughed and ran outside and danced like a mad man in the blizzard. Jared and I got dressed and went outside with him. We threw snowballs and stared up at the blinding white sky, and we were happy – so happy I almost forgot what sadness felt like.

  When we went back inside, Dad’s belly and back were pink and wet, and he’d bloodied the bottoms of his feet by dancing on the sharp mountain stones. But he still laughed and said, ‘My feet are too frozen to feel the pain.’

  We stayed in the cabin that day and the next because the hiking paths were slick with ice, and on the third day we cut our walk short, but in the car on our way back to the cabin, Dad said, ‘You see what I mean now? The air is good.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ Jared said, as if he was starting to hope it was true.

  ‘It’s good,’ Dad said. ‘Life is good.’

  ‘The higher you fly, the farther you fall,’ Jared said.

  ‘Don’t talk that way,’ Dad said. ‘Don’t even think it.’

  But Jared was right. Some infections get into the bone. You can take medicine and knock them down for a while. You can feel good enough to go out and dance. But the sickness roars back sooner or later. Dad’s infection was like that. His life was.

  On this trip, it came back in the shape of a waitress who served us at a diner on the morning before Christmas Eve.

  Dad’s face paled when she poured his coffee, and when she left our table, he said, ‘Jesus Christ. Doesn’t she look like your mother?’

  ‘No,’ Jared said, ‘she doesn’t.’ There was fear in his voice because he knew what was coming.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Dad said.

  ‘I remember Mom a little,’ he said. ‘And I’ve seen pictures.’

  ‘You were three years old,’ Dad said, ‘and pictures never catch the whole person. Not your mother, anyway.’

  ‘Mom’s whole person looked like a worn-out Georgia waitress?’

  ‘I’m telling you, she looked like her.’

  We spent an hour and a half at the diner, and when we left, Dad had the woman’s phone number and her promise to meet him for a date that night.

  ‘What do you all do around here for fun?’ he asked her.

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p; ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s a bar called Pete’s Haven where some of us hang out.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Jared said.

  ‘I’ll see you at eight,’ Dad said.

  Back at the cabin, he promised he wouldn’t drink. But we knew he was lying – and knew that he knew it too – and when the snow started falling again in the afternoon and he glanced at Jared and me as if he was made of mischief, and took off his shirt and kicked off his shoes and ran to the door, Jared said he didn’t feel like it and I said I didn’t either.

  And that was that.

  In the county lockup on the night that the jury and judge sentenced me to death, I dreamed of the trip to northern Georgia, and when the van came to take me to the state prison in Raiford the next morning, I closed my eyes and pretended I was riding toward snow-covered mountains.

  SEVEN

  Five days after Bill Higby shot Josh Skooner, the sheriff, looking like a broken-hearted father, announced second-degree murder charges. The emerging details looked bad and worse for Higby. We learned that when Judge Skooner and his other son, Andrew, rushed from their house at the sound of the car crash, Higby threatened to shoot them too if they approached Josh, who was dying on the street. Two neighbors who also came from their houses said the detective ranted about crime scene integrity, but the fact was he denied Josh the last comfort of a father’s or a brother’s loving hands. Worse, he did nothing to keep Josh breathing or to resuscitate him when he stopped.

  Although the police made three separate searches and kept an officer posted at the shooting site around the clock for seventy-two hours, Josh’s supposed gun never appeared. Nor did a slug or shell casing from the bullet Josh supposedly fired.

  Then the medical examiner announced that seven of the eight bullets that struck Josh were shot from close range. The eighth – which lodged in Josh’s skull and probably killed him – was shot when Higby’s pistol barrel was pressed against Josh’s cheek. When asked whether the killing shot was necessary after Josh had already taken seven bullets to his chest and belly, the medical examiner said, ‘I don’t see how.’

  The Sheriff’s Office or Judge Skooner – or someone else who disliked Higby – had alerted the television stations about the arrest, and the news feed cut from the announcement to a video clip of him coming out of his house, his hands cuffed behind his back, a grim-faced plainclothes cop on either side of him. He stared at the cameras. I knew that stare – a proud stare, the stare of a man who would accuse but never tolerate being accused, a man who would never admit to being wrong. But in the hollow of his eyes, I saw something else I’d also seen in my own eyes looking back at me in a mirror and in the eyes of most of the men I’d known on death row. Fear.

  Lying naked on my bed, I laughed as I watched the arrest. I laughed and laughed until I ran out of breath, and then I was crying, heaving from my chest and belly. I laughed and cried until I felt as if I would throw up. I imagined the owner of the Cardinal Motel finding me, my lungs collapsed, naked on my bed – surviving all those years in prison only to die at the good news that the man who railroaded me was going to jail for murder.

  As the cops loaded Higby into the backseat of a squad car, though, he looked at the camera again, and I saw something else I recognized. I knew the look well. I’d felt it in my own eyes, and I’d wondered why no one else saw and believed it. The look said, I didn’t do it. Jesus Christ and swear to God, I didn’t.

  I’d heard Higby lie too many times to ever believe him – heard him lie more than I’d heard him speak the truth. I’d listened to him tell a jury that I raped a boy and killed him and his brother. Now, watching his moment of shame and humiliation, I felt no sympathy for him. But I realized I was breathing again. And I wondered if the look in his eyes spoke the truth.

  The next morning, Jane Foley, Hank Cury, and I drove to Callahan to talk to the woman who testified against Thomas LaFlora twenty-five years ago.

  Her name was Kim Jenkins, and we found her in a garden that fronted a white-brick bungalow. She was almost fifty but had the clear face and eyes of a much younger woman. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, white shorts, and a flower-print blouse, and she had well-muscled arms. She looked like anything but a crackhead, and at first I thought we’d made a mistake.

  But Hank walked across her lawn and said, ‘Ms Jenkins? We’re here to talk to you about Thomas LaFlora.’

  She smiled at him, dangling a pair of sheers from one hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’

  Jane softened her voice. ‘He’ll almost certainly die in five weeks unless you help him.’

  Kim Jenkins’s smile hung on her lips. Again, she said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and turned back to the garden.

  Jane said, ‘This is Franky Dast. You’ve probably heard about him. He just got out of prison after eight years – three of them on death row, alongside Mr LaFlora. We believe that Mr LaFlora deserves to come off death row too. We think he’s been unjustly incarcerated.’

  ‘Your words put him in prison,’ Hank said. ‘Yours and your friends’. Now your words can make things right.’

  The woman said nothing. She trimmed the underbranches of a boxwood hedge.

  ‘Nothing can give him back the twenty-five years he’s lost,’ Hank said. ‘But he can have the rest of his life. What remains of it.’

  Kim Jenkins stopped trimming. The sheers shook.

  Without thinking, I stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder.

  She sprang back – more wild cat than human – and spun toward me, holding the sheer blades toward my chest. But then something seemed to break inside her. She glanced at the house and whispered, ‘I can’t. Randy—’

  ‘Your husband?’ Jane said.

  ‘We’ve been happy,’ the woman said. ‘I won’t tell him. Not now.’ She glanced from Jane to Hank to me. ‘It’s too late,’ she said. She moved toward the front porch.

  ‘You need to tell the truth,’ Hank said.

  ‘I can’t.’ She ran up the porch steps and disappeared into the house.

  Jane picked up a pair of checkered gardening gloves from the lawn, carried them to the porch, and put them on the steps.

  As we started back toward the city, she and Hank said nothing more about Kim Jenkins. They talked instead about a restaurant called The Pig Bar-B-Q, where they wanted to eat lunch.

  ‘Why so cheerful?’ I asked.

  ‘She’ll come around,’ Jane said.

  ‘Guilt is a powerful motivator,’ Hank said.

  I said, ‘She’s stayed silent for twenty-five years. Why talk now?’

  ‘Because we asked her to,’ Hank said, ‘and because she knows someone is listening.’

  ‘And because she saw your face,’ Jane said. ‘Now she can imagine Thomas LaFlora’s face too.’

  That afternoon, I waited for Thelma to leave, and then I hopped on to her computer. I looked into Josh Skooner’s past. The earliest web pages I could find showed that, like me, he ran track as a freshman in high school, but as a sprinter instead of a long-distance runner. He had mediocre times in the hundred meters, and the absence of later meet records meant that, also like me, he stopped running after one year.

  After that, up until the shooting, web coverage came from newspapers and television sites that told story after story about the delinquent son of the powerful Judge Skooner. At eighteen, he got pulled over for driving seventy-seven in a forty-five-mile-an-hour zone. He told the patrolman that his father would have him fired, and so the patrolman arrested him for resisting without violence. Prosecutors dropped the charges when he completed a diversionary program.

  Three months later, the police arrested him again after a fight outside Mavericks Nightclub. He had a joint in his pocket, and they found a knife and a baggie with traces of cocaine while searching his car. The search was ruled inadmissible, and he got community service for the assault and marijuana charges.

  On the evening that Bill Higby shot him, he was on probation for a disorde
rly intoxication and battery charge after he beat up a girlfriend. He’d asked the arresting officers to give him a break since his dad was a judge, but the break came at a higher level when the prosecutor gave him a plea deal that included no time in jail. The news story about that deal also compared him to his brother, Andrew, who succeeded every time Josh failed. The salutatorian at Episcopal High School, Andrew had just finished his junior year at Cornell. The photo of Andrew made him look like a younger version of the judge – big, square-faced, serious, handsome except for a scar across the bridge of his nose and another above his left eyebrow.

  I Googled Andrew’s name separately and came up with links to old articles about him on a high school crew team. Then I searched Judge Eric Skooner. The judge graduated from the University of Miami School of Law, then served as an assistant state attorney. As a prosecutor, he became notorious for pursuing death penalty convictions – including Thomas LaFlora’s – sometimes against the wishes of the victims’ families. Then he worked for three years in private practice before becoming a county judge. Later, the governor appointed him to the circuit court, where he eventually became chief appellate judge. Although he seemed to be best known for work he did on violent crimes, he also served for two years on the juvenile drug court where he sentenced fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds to max time. One website said, though, that when Josh stumbled into the arms of the cops with reefer in his pocket and coke in his nose, Judge Skooner cut deals to get other judges to go easy on him.

  According to several websites, on the night that Higby arrested the judge and his wife on domestic battery charges, the couple were drinking heavily, and Melody Skooner was taking prescription medications for an unnamed psychological problem. She’d thrown her cell phone at him. He’d punched her in the mouth and gone after her with a bottle. She’d called 911 and said her husband was trying to kill her. Three patrol cars raced to their house, followed by Higby who, disturbed by the sirens while eating dinner, came over from next door. A week later, when dropping the charges, the prosecutor said simply that he was exercising his discretion. When pressed to explain, he added, ‘Pursuing the matter further would be imprudent.’ I heard fear in his evasions. Two websites also noted that Melody Skooner died five years ago – one said of a heart attack, the other kidney disease.