Monument Road

by Michael Wiley

  They ignored that.

  Hank glanced over the seat and offered his lesson of the day. ‘In our experience, most people want to do the right thing. Sometimes fear makes them lie or cheat. But if you show them the hollowness of the fear, they come around. Jane and I have seen it. You just saw it in Kim Jenkins.’

  ‘She won’t show up at the hearing,’ I said. ‘Or if she does, she’ll say Thomas LaFlora killed those people.’

  Hank laughed at me. ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Who’s the husband?’ I asked. ‘How long has she known him?’

  ‘She married him fifteen years ago,’ he said. ‘That’s what she said last time we were here.’

  ‘But who is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Seems like a pretty good guy,’ Jane said. ‘Considering where Kim Jenkins started, she’s come a long way.’

  Back at the office, I hovered over Thelma’s desk until she said, ‘Fine,’ and got up so I could use her computer. I typed Randall Haussen and Kim Jenkins into Google and got nothing that interested me. So I typed in Randall Haussen alone and got over nine hundred hits – too many to make sense of. I opened the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Criminal History Information site and typed his name again.

  I hated to be right. From the time he was eighteen until he was twenty, Haussen had four drug arrests on charges ranging from simple possession to possession with intent to distribute. The first two involved marijuana, the last two cocaine. The first three charges were dismissed, and the last resulted in a sentence of probation. Then, twenty-three years ago – two years after Kim Jenkins’s testimony put Thomas LaFlora on death row – the police arrested Haussen for shooting a crack dealer in the same neighborhood where LaFlora supposedly committed his killings.

  I printed the arrest record and then opened the Times-Union website to search the archives. Two articles gave the details. The crack dealer, shot once in the leg and once in the arm, survived but refused to testify. Haussen took a plea deal – seven years, including time served.

  I printed the articles too and put them and the arrest record on Jane’s desk.

  As she read them, her face flushed. But she said, ‘So what? They both were in the life twenty-five years ago. We already knew that about her. What’s the big deal?’

  ‘Why did she lie when we first went to see her?’ I said. ‘Why did she imply that he had no idea about her past?’

  ‘She wants to forget. She wants her past to stop haunting her. She wants his past to go away too.’

  I said, ‘She’s afraid of him.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘She’ll skip out on the appeal hearing,’ I said. ‘If you scared her enough, she’ll run. Maybe Haussen will buy her a ticket and put her on the bus.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Jane said again. She looked at me, worried. ‘Is it possible you’re projecting your own circumstances with all the betrayals against you on to others? You shouldn’t blur the lines. Work out your own problems, and let other people have theirs. Randall Haussen isn’t Bill Higby. Deal with your issues, but separate them from the rest of us.’

  So I did as she told me. I went back to the computer, but now I searched for details on Higby’s shooting of Josh Skooner. Sure, I had issues with Higby. Even when I was looking into Kim Jenkins’ and Randall Haussen’s pasts, Dr Patel’s words had needled me. What if Josh Skooner really did have a gun and shot at Higby? And I still could hear the words of the woman who came to threaten me at the motel, answering me when I said Higby killed Josh Skooner without just cause. You’re wrong.

  I needed to prove I was right.

  I reread the articles that discussed the hunt for the pistol Higby said Josh shot at him. They all told the same story. The police had pulled apart the wreckage of Josh’s and Higby’s cars … and found no gun. The police had searched the bushes and lawns near the crash … and found no gun. They’d all but dug into the asphalt and put ladders up into the tree branches … and found no gun.

  Then I read about the moments after the shooting. As I’d known from before, Josh’s father and older brother rushed to the scene, as did their neighbors. Higby threatened them against getting close to Josh’s body. He failed to try to save Josh’s life himself.

  But an online publication called Metro Jacksonville, which had the most comprehensive report, included two details I hadn’t seen before. One of the neighbors, angry at Higby for killing ‘a neighborhood boy,’ told the reporter that Josh’s brother, Andrew, bloodied himself while trying to staunch Josh’s wounds before Higby pulled him away. Another neighbor, also angry, described the horror on Andrew’s face as he walked up the driveway to his house after paramedics loaded his brother into the back of an ambulance.

  My stomach turned. Maybe those details changed nothing. But they contradicted the reports that said Higby kept Andrew and the judge entirely away from the shooting scene. And they gave Andrew a chance to carry away a pistol.

  I closed the site and said, ‘You know what? I don’t care.’

  Jane looked up from her computer. Hank turned from a document he was reading.

  ‘About what?’ Jane said.

  ‘I just don’t give a damn,’ I said. ‘It all comes down the same way anyway.’

  Hank said, ‘What are you talking about?’

  I stood up and started toward the stairs. ‘I’m going to get my driver’s license.’

  Jane said, ‘We were hoping you might record a statement supporting Thomas LaFlora’s appeal.’

  But I was gone.

  Two hours later, with a new license in my pocket, I drove my dad’s car – its seat cushions sliced with X-ACTO knives, the few remaining strips of fabric hanging from the roof – on Byron Road and parked on the shoulder fifty feet before Bill Higby’s house. A Channel 4 News van idled by the driveway. The other vans must have left for another story, though they would come back as soon as the reporters smelled meat. I sat in the car, watching the house. Shades hung over the windows. The front door looked wedged tight against the gleaming sun. Beyond the side of the house, Black Creek bent toward the St Johns River. A man floating on it on a raft or a jon boat might imagine that nothing in the world mattered but the slow, warm current of his life.

  I got out of the car. I felt none of the bravery or foolishness that I’d felt two days earlier when I’d gone to Higby’s door. I scuffed over the front lawn, passed the bougainvillea trellis, went up the brick steps, and rang the doorbell.

  No one answered.

  I looked back at the news van. It idled, pulsing, its tinted windows reflecting the sun. I glanced at the neighboring houses – Judge Skooner’s, another big house on the other side. They looked as tightly closed as Higby’s. I seemed to be the only one alive.

  I rang the doorbell again.

  When footsteps approached from inside, I fought off the impulse to run. Then the door opened, and a woman’s face appeared instead of Higby’s.

  She frowned. ‘Yes?’ She had short, tightly curling blond hair.

  ‘Is Detective Higby here?’ I managed to ask.

  ‘No’ – as if I’d asked a question that she’d long ago tired of answering – ‘Detective Higby is not here.’

  ‘You’re his wife?’ I asked.

  ‘I wish you people would leave us alone,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not you people,’ I said, and when she just stared at me, I said, ‘My name is Franky Dast. Will you tell him I came by to talk to him? I need to ask him some questions.’

  ‘You’re Franky Dast?’ She looked at me without fear or disgust or any emotion at all. ‘Well, Franky Dast,’ she said, ‘you don’t belong here, and you’d do well never to come back.’ She started to close the door.

  ‘The problem is, ma’am, I don’t belong anywhere. And so here seems as good of a place as any.’

  For a moment, she stared at me again. Then she closed the door the rest of the way and snapped the bolt lock.

  Early that evening, I drove to the Cineplex and bought a ticket to Home Alo
ne.

  ‘It started an hour ago,’ the ticket clerk said.

  ‘All the good stuff is in the second half.’

  I went straight to the concession stand. A line of customers waited at the counter, but Cynthia came to me and said, ‘I’ll be off in ten minutes.’

  I told her I would be watching the movie.

  ‘Wait,’ she said, and she went to the drink machine and filled a cup with crushed ice. She handed it to me.

  ‘For what?’ I asked.

  But she turned back to the customer line.

  Fifteen minutes later, she settled into the seat next to mine. She’d changed out of her work clothes and into a dark dress that fell to her knees. She touched her hand to mine, and as Macaulay Culkin sprang booby traps on the robbers and tormented them with his brother’s pet tarantula, the hours, days, weeks, and years that led to this moment crumbled into pieces of darkness that felt less real than the light flickering on the screen. As the robbers threatened to burn Macaulay’s head with a blowtorch and bite off his little fingers one by one, Cynthia pulled my fingers to her lips and kissed them. Then she guided my hand into the cup of crushed ice. As the police arrested the robbers, she took my cold fingers, pulled her dress up her thighs, and set my hand on her scarred skin. She whispered, ‘That’s nice.’

  I touched her, and she sank low in her seat, exposing more of her legs. I pinched crushed ice from the cup and held it to her skin, drawing circles. When I inched up her thigh and under her dress, she whispered, ‘No,’ and so I inched back down, and she whispered, ‘Yes.’

  Someone on the screen was saying, Kids are resilient like that.

  Someone was saying, It’s cool that you didn’t burn the place down.

  And soon the credits appeared, and, after the credits, the lights in the theater came up.

  Cynthia straightened her dress over the wetness on her legs.

  I said, ‘I love movies.’

  She said, ‘Let’s go back to your room.’

  We drove to the motel. The sun was setting outside, and golden light glowed at the edge of my window shade. Cynthia unbuttoned her dress and let it fall to the carpet. I took off my shirt and unzipped my pants.

  She said, ‘If you could go anywhere tonight – anywhere at all – where would you go?’

  ‘Right here,’ I said. ‘Right here and right now.’

  ‘Nice one,’ she said, and came to me.

  When the sun dropped below the horizon and only the glimmering light of passing cars and trucks broke the dark, we lay together on my bed, legs touching, arms and shoulders too.

  ‘That was better than last time,’ Cynthia said. Then a minute later – ‘Not that I minded last time.’ She rolled over, facing me. ‘But this was better.’

  ‘It was good,’ I said.

  ‘Kind of great,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Kind of great.’

  Outside, the tires of cars and trucks swished over the dry pavement on the highway.

  ‘I saw you on TV last night,’ she said. ‘Talking about the detective.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Strange, right?’

  ‘Are you going to hurt him?’ she said.

  ‘Higby?’

  ‘Because I would understand it,’ she said. ‘It would make sense, I mean. To want to hurt him. After what he did to you.’

  I said nothing for a while. Then, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m still figuring it out.’

  We were quiet, and I slept – I think I did, because, like a man dreaming that he’s dreaming, I thought, This is the way real people sleep. For the longest time – eight years – I’d felt unreal, felt that way so long that now that I lay in a real bed, touching real skin, cooling in the real sweat of the night, I could only think of myself with astonishment. The goodness of the night seemed as undeserved as all the bad I’d suffered. Asleep or awake, I looked at Cynthia and asked, ‘Why?’

  And, asleep or awake, she answered, ‘Why not?’

  FOURTEEN

  Walk into a prison to visit an inmate, and you need to shower afterward to get the smell off. Spend a night in a prison, and the place holds to you for a time like fat under your skin. Spend a month or a year, and you’re stained deep. Strangers see it on you. They hear it in your voice. Eight years in prison turns a person. You are what you eat. You are where you sleep.

  On the third day of my trial, my public defender attacked the victims. ‘Were the Bronson boys drunk at the time of their deaths?’ Lance asked the blood expert, as if drunkenness would excuse rape and murder. ‘Were they high?’

  I was feeling so screwed by that point that I welcomed the attack as a glint of hope.

  But the blood expert put out that flicker. ‘No, Mr Stoddard,’ he said. ‘There’s no evidence of alcohol or drugs. Not even aspirin.’ He added, to reinforce his point, ‘The boys did have elevated levels of mercury.’

  ‘Aha,’ Lance said, as if he’d caught him up.

  The expert all but rolled his eyes. ‘Any of a dozen common causes could lead to such levels. The boys might have played with a broken thermometer or spent time near a coal-burning power plant,’ he said. ‘Or they might have eaten too much tuna fish.’

  The jurors laughed.

  Lance turned from the expert and looked at me, wide-eyed. As he sat down, I felt an itching and crawling in my bones.

  The itching and crawling never went away. They deepened and spread until, after a year passed in prison – and then two – if a surgeon had cut into me with a scalpel, or if another inmate had cut into me with a shank, the gasses that came out would’ve smelled like a rat that died behind a wall.

  And with that knowledge, I felt the rotting inside me speed its work.

  Some of the other men gave themselves to that rot, accepted it as they accepted the sweat we breathed in our prison cells and the gristle and rice we ate. Stuart did – fat, sideways-moving, lazy-lipped, go-with-the-flow Stuart. How he managed to turn diabetic on the food they fed us, I never figured out. Sometimes he breathed hard even after the smallest exertion. Supermax tore him apart even faster than the rest of us.

  ‘Sit down,’ I would say, and I would get off my bunk so that he had a place. ‘Catch your breath.’

  ‘My breath ain’t going anywhere,’ he would say. ‘Not behind these bars.’ And he would laugh his breathless laugh.

  Another inmate would tell him, ‘You got to go to the RMC’ – which was the Raiford Medical Center.

  ‘What for?’ Stuart would say. ‘RMC is just like here. They put you in a different bed is all, and tell you you’re sick when you already know it.’

  So he held down the new prisoners for the predators and protected the old prey if they asked him to, and he rotted from the inside out, and he never complained. After a while, his uncomplaining acceptance led the rest of us in Supermax to love him.

  FIFTEEN

  At two in the morning, a boot kicked a hole through my door at the Cardinal Motel. The wood by the bolt lock shattered. I jerked from my sleep and turned on the lamp. In the bright light, Cynthia, terrified, naked on the bed beside me, stared at the crumbling door.

  The boot came through again. A man’s hand reached into the hole and fumbled with the handle. I froze – in a nightmare of men coming in the night to attack me in my cell.

  The broken wood jammed in the frame. Outside, the man swore, pulled his hand from the hole, and kicked again. The door flew into the room.

  The man came – followed by another man, and a third.

  They were in their early twenties. The kicker wore black cargo pants and a black sleeveless T-shirt. The others wore blue jeans, gym shoes, and untucked golf shirts.

  Strangers.

  But they knew me.

  ‘Franky Dast?’ the kicker said – asking but also saying.

  I saw no weapons. They must have thought three-on-one would give them all the advantage they needed.

  I looked for something to defend Cynthia and myself. The car key, on the n
ight table, would take out a man’s eye. I grabbed for it.

  But one of the men in blue jeans – with military-cut blond hair and a couple of days of beard – reached under his golf shirt and took out a pistol. He eyed me, then Cynthia. He seemed no more interested in her nakedness than mine, gazing only at her scarred legs.

  The man in boots stepped close to the bed. I grabbed the key. He grinned. ‘What? You’re going to run us over with a car?’

  I slashed the key at him.

  His friend aimed the gun. ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  But the reflex after eight years is to never back down. My head felt clearer than it had since I walked out of prison, where danger from other men was constant. The man in boots reached for me, and I slashed again. The key raked across his arm, and he jumped back as if I’d touched him with a hot electric wire. He yelled as a crease of blood rose on his forearm.

  Cynthia made a high wailing unlike any sound I’d ever heard.

  The man with the gun shouted at her, ‘Shut up.’

  The one I’d wounded shook his bleeding arm. He said, ‘Shoot him.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said the man with the gun. He aimed at my head. ‘Get up.’

  I eased myself out of bed, gripping the key in case the man in boots came at me again.

  The one with the gun said to the third man, ‘Lock him up.’

  The third man pulled out a set of handcuffs and approached me, then stopped, eyeing the key.

  ‘Drop it,’ the man with the gun said. ‘And if you touch my friend, I’ll kill you right here.’

  Cynthia watched, as if curious about what I would do. I handed her the key. ‘Let me put on pants,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said the man I’d hurt.

  ‘Put your hands behind your back,’ said the man with the gun.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Hands,’ he said.

  I put them behind my back. ‘You’re not cops,’ I said.

  The man with the cuffs came to me. I smelled his nervous sweat. He locked my wrists.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked.

  ‘Why did you kill Steve and Duane?’ the man in boots said. ‘Why do you think you can—’