Monument Road

by Michael Wiley

  ‘He’s still a man,’ I said. ‘Whatever else he is, he’s a man.’

  The nurse opened his mouth. He had yellow teeth. ‘Move away,’ he said. ‘Stand over by the other inmates.’ I held Stuart’s hand. ‘That’s an order,’ he said. ‘Do it now.’

  Then the guards came into the yard and cleared us back to our cells.

  That night, lying on my bunk, I dreamed of a red kayak that my dad won in an Anheuser-Busch company picnic when I was twelve. It was only seven feet long and about a foot and a half wide and had the word Budweiser decaled on the front. It would flip in the smallest waves even when a hundred-pound boy sat low in the cockpit. But in my dream, I floated in it far out on the ocean. No wind blew. No ripples crossed the water. Land was a fading memory. I floated, hardly breathing, as the sun held in the sky above. In the dream, I was happy and knew I would always be happy.

  NINETEEN

  Three days after I visited Rick Melsyn at his apartment, Judge Laura Hendricks heard Thomas LaFlora’s appeal. That morning, as I came into the office, Jane, Hank, and Thelma stood next to a metal-and-glass computer cart on casters. A black plastic folding chair leaned against the cart, and a laptop computer and a box from Dillard’s department store lay on top.

  ‘Surprise,’ they said together.

  Jane said, ‘It’s not much.’

  Hank said, ‘It’s what we can afford.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Thelma said.

  I knew I should feel only gratitude instead of a mix of appreciation and dread, so I hugged them and laughed with them when they laughed, and then I opened the Dillard’s box. Inside was a coal-gray button-up shirt and a navy blue tie.

  Jane took the tie from the box, held it in front of me like a noose, and said, ‘If you’re going to be part of this.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.

  ‘How about Thanks?’ Hank said, and they all laughed.

  So I buttoned the gray shirt over my T-shirt and, with some help from Hank, tied the tie, and then we walked to the courthouse, all but holding hands.

  At eight forty-five, as we stood on the courthouse steps, Hank looked up and down the sidewalk. ‘Kim Jenkins should be here,’ he said.

  ‘I told her nine,’ Jane said.

  ‘That’s cutting it close,’ he said.

  Jane gave me and Thelma a knowing smile. ‘Less time for her to get nervous.’

  At nine, as the morning sun came over the tops of the surrounding buildings, Hank glared at Jane and said, ‘Call her.’

  She said, ‘Give her five minutes.’

  At a quarter after nine, Hank said, ‘The hearing starts in fifteen minutes.’

  Jane pulled out her phone, dialed a stored number, and handed the phone to me. ‘Why don’t you make sure everything’s OK?’

  The phone rang four times, and a man with an unfamiliar voice answered.

  ‘Can I talk to Kim Jenkins?’ I asked.

  He hesitated and said, ‘She’s unavailable.’

  I hung up.

  ‘Unavailable,’ I said, and gave Jane her phone.

  ‘She’s on her way,’ she said to Hank.

  At twenty after nine, he said, ‘Goddamn it,’ and went up the steps and into the courthouse.

  Jane told Thelma, ‘Go with him,’ then dialed her phone again. ‘I need to talk to Kim Jenkins,’ she said to whoever picked up. ‘It’s urgent.’

  She listened, and whatever the person said made her turn from me and walk toward the street, where she talked some more but mostly listened, and as she listened, her whole body seemed to shrink into itself. My head buzzed as I watched, because this was the way it always was, and no matter how many times it happened and no matter how much I’d come to expect it, it twisted at my belly and sucked the breath from my lungs.

  Jane hung up her phone and came back to me, and though she put each foot where it belonged, she seemed to stagger, and all of her happiness at giving me a desk and a computer and a tie – and all the hope she’d held for LaFlora – all of that had gone pale. She opened her mouth and said – nothing. Then, as if she knew she had to say it, ‘She’s dead.’

  I know, I thought. ‘Her husband do it?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘She killed herself.’ She looked around frantically. ‘Excuse me – I’m going to be sick.’ She ran back down the steps to the curb.

  The hearing lasted eight minutes. LaFlora came in from the back, his wrists cuffed and his ankles shackled, escorted by two deputies. His eyes touched mine as he passed, and he showed no more recognition than an already dead man would show of an old neighbor.

  Jane explained to the judge that the witness whose testimony formed the basis of LaFlora’s appeal had committed suicide last night, and she asked for a postponement.

  The judge, who seemed to have heard such things before, asked whether a new appeal would be possible now that the witness was deceased.

  Jane said, ‘I don’t know, Your Honor.’

  The judge looked impatient. ‘Can you explain why I should postpone then?’

  ‘No,’ Jane said, ‘I can’t.’

  The judge glanced at LaFlora, at the prosecutor, and then at Hank, Thelma, and me.

  ‘Denied.’

  When we went back to the office, Jane tore LaFlora’s poster from the door. Hank went to his desk, yanked the phone from the cradle, and called a contact at the Callahan Police Department. He demanded to know what had happened and demanded again – until the contact hung up. Then he called again and demanded some more. Thelma, tears in her eyes, sat at her desk, staring at a blank computer screen.

  I went to the computer cart, unpacked the cords for the laptop, and plugged them in. As the computer booted up, I whistled the theme from Star Wars.

  Jane stared at me and said, ‘Don’t.’ She went to her desk and sank into her chair as if she would never get up again.

  I whistled anyway. As much as Kim Jenkins’s death unsettled me, it also confirmed a world I’d come to know – bloody and out of balance. I felt hooked tight to that world. As I tilted and swayed with its tiltings and swayings, my parts stopped shaking.

  I whistled until Hank, phone to his ear, glared at me.

  I said to him, ‘Ask how she killed herself.’

  He made his hand into a pistol and pointed it at his temple. His contact apparently had already told him.

  That started me whistling again.

  When the laptop screen brightened, I brought up the internet. For a half hour, I Googled information about female suicides and homicides. Then I emailed three links to Jane, Hank, and Thelma. The National Center for Biotechnology Information said what we all knew – that women who commit suicide use less violent methods, such as drugs and carbon monoxide poisoning, than do men, who often use violent methods, such as guns and hanging. The FBI’s ‘Expanded Homicide Data’ site said, of female murder victims, thirty-seven percent are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends. The Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice said forty-eight percent of female homicide victims are killed by firearms.

  When my message dinged on to Jane’s computer screen, she read it and said, ‘So what?’

  ‘So we’ve got a chance,’ I said.

  ‘You’re fooling yourself. Some women who kill themselves use guns.’

  ‘And half of the women who get killed by others die from them.’

  ‘That’s nothing to work with,’ she said. ‘It’s less than nothing.’

  ‘What if Randall Haussen killed those crackheads twenty-five years ago? What if he worried about what his wife would say at the hearing – even if she promised to keep lying?’

  ‘You have absolutely no reason to think so,’ she said.

  None but the way Randall Haussen had clawed into Kim Jenkins’s shoulder with his fingers when we talked to them at their house. None but his plea agreement after he shot a drug dealer. None but my eight years of reading other men for danger. None but a lifetime of seeing innocent-faced men lie.
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  ‘This was Thomas LaFlora’s last chance,’ Jane said, ‘and it’s gone.’

  I went to the poster of him and picked it up. I stretched it over the computer cart top, and smoothed the creases. I borrowed a roll of tape from Thelma and patched a rip across his left eye, then hung the poster on the door again. When I gave the tape back, Thelma smiled at me, and I wondered if she approved or pitied me.

  ‘You want to go for a ride?’ I asked her.

  We drove to Callahan in my car. As we waited at a stoplight, her fingers found the slices in the seat where the police used X-ACTO knives as they searched for evidence in the deaths of the Bronson brothers. Then she looked at the strips of fabric that hung from the roof and started picking at them, pulling them away, collecting them in her lap, as if she needed to stay busy.

  She said, ‘Hank and Jane – they mean well.’

  ‘They saved my life,’ I said.

  ‘No, you saved your own life. They just threw you a rope when you asked for it.’

  ‘I would have died without that rope,’ I said.

  A half mile beyond AJ’s, we pulled into the lot at Aardo Auto Parts. A white pickup had parked in the disabled space, and a green one in a regular spot next to it. We parked next to the green truck and went inside.

  Two men stood behind the counter. Through an open door behind them, a woman sat at a desk. All of them wore black pants and red golf shirts with yellow Aardo logos.

  One of the men gave us a big-toothed grin. ‘What can I do for you?’ he said.

  ‘We need to see Randall Haussen,’ Thelma said.

  ‘Randy’s out today,’ the man said, grinning. ‘Family emergency.’

  Thelma said, ‘Is that what you call his wife putting a gun to her head?’

  The man’s grin fell, and the other one spoke. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘We knew his wife,’ I said. ‘Where can we find him?’

  ‘At the hospital?’ he said. ‘At the police station? At home? Check around.’

  ‘This must be hard on him,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right.’ As if he took it personally.

  ‘When did you last see him?’ I asked.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ the big-toothed man said. ‘He left early. Something—’

  ‘Shut up, Tom,’ the other one said.

  ‘Why should he shut up?’ Thelma asked. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a man leaving his place of business.’

  ‘Randy can tell you what he does with his time if he wants,’ the man said. ‘Talk to him. Try him at home.’

  ‘Why did he leave early?’ I asked the man with the teeth.

  ‘We’re done talking,’ the other man said.

  Thelma said, ‘If he comes in, tell him that people from the Justice Now Initiative stopped by to offer their sympathies.’

  ‘Whatever,’ he said.

  As we left the store, the man with big teeth called after us, ‘Randy’s an all-right guy.’

  We drove to the brick bungalow where I’d first seen Kim Jenkins in the garden. The driveway was empty. The police had X-ed crime scene tape over the front door. The flowers in the garden strained toward the sun as if they wanted the heat to scorch them. On the front sidewalk, two girls sat on little bikes and stared at the house. When Thelma and I got out of the car and started up the path, one of them said, ‘You can’t go in there,’ and the other said, ‘She’s dead.’

  I rang the bell and, when no one came, rang again.

  Then Thelma rang.

  Sunlight glinted off the front windows.

  I reached to ring the bell once more, but Thelma shook her head. We walked back to the car.

  The girls watched us drive away as if they’d told us so.

  The police station was just outside of town on Highway 1. It shared a squat brown building with the mayor’s office and town hall. Except for a sago palm in a planter in front of the Hardee’s across the street and a pair of stunted evergreens in pots on either side of the station door, the strip of highway was dry and dusty.

  When we stopped in front, Thelma said, ‘You OK going into a police station? After what you’ve gone through, I could see never wanting to step inside one again.’

  The buzzing in my head had started again, but I said, ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I’m friends with the woman Hank called when we got back from the hearing,’ she said. ‘She’ll talk to me.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Because if you want to stay in the car—’

  ‘Do I look like I’m going to pass out if I go in there or something?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  I got out of the car, and we went into the station together.

  A thick-boned woman with tightly braided hair sat at the front desk. She wore a forest-green uniform that would have looked better fighting forest fires than doing police work. She stared at me the way you stare at a man with a bad fever – with sympathy but also worry that he might have something catching. Then she looked at Thelma, and her face lit up.

  She gave her a hug and said, ‘I talked with your boss on the phone this morning. He gave me an earful, then filled the other one too.’

  ‘He’s upset.’

  ‘It’s been an upsetting morning,’ the cop said. She turned to two middle-aged men who sat at desks in a deeper part of the room. ‘I’m stepping out for a cigarette,’ she said.

  Neither of them acknowledged her, and we went outside into the parking lot.

  Thelma introduced me then, and the cop said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen you on TV.’ Clearly, she disliked what she’d seen. She said to Thelma, ‘I’ve told it all to Hank. What else do you need to know?’

  ‘Where’s the husband?’ Thelma asked.

  The cop glanced at the station door, as if the men might leave their desks to eavesdrop. ‘Gone,’ she said. ‘He’s got family in Georgia. He left late last night. Couldn’t bear to stay in the same house.’

  ‘Any chance he did it?’ Thelma asked.

  ‘Killed Kim Jenkins? No. That lady had troubles. In the last six months, she had her stomach pumped twice.’

  ‘She was still using?’ Thelma asked.

  The cop said, ‘It was more like life became too heavy. She would go to a CVS, buy up everything on the shelves, and give herself a going-away party.’

  ‘What about Randall Haussen?’ I asked.

  ‘What about him?’ she said. Talking to me looked like it tasted bad in her mouth.

  ‘He spent seven years in jail for shooting a man,’ I said.

  ‘He’s stayed clean since his release,’ she said. ‘And he’s stayed sane, which is more than Kim Jenkins could say.’ She glanced at Thelma. ‘My guess is your bosses pushed too hard trying to get her to testify. She broke. That’s all. It happens.’

  ‘Whose gun did she use to kill herself?’ I asked.

  ‘Why are you asking this?’ she said.

  ‘You make mistakes if you accept the easy answers. Mistakes can kill a person.’

  ‘Sometimes the answers are easy,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to like them. But they are what they are. If you dig in the ground, you’ll always find dirt. But there’s sad dirt and there’s bad dirt. This is just sad dirt.’

  ‘It’s the dirt they’ll bury Thomas LaFlora in,’ I said.

  TWENTY

  If you’re walking through the woods and you cross a flooded river and the water rises over the stepping stone you’re on, what do you do?

  Step to the next stone.

  Takes no cleverness to work out that one.

  And when that stone goes under, step to the next.

  I learned that lesson when the first appellate judge said, Get back in line and march toward the needle with the rest of the men. After that, I spent a month beating my head against a cell wall. Then I stepped to the next stone. When the second judge moved me from the row into general population, I stepped to the one after that. And then the next and the next until the warden opened the gate, shook my hand, and said, Be seeing you.<
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  As if.

  So I dropped Thelma off at the Justice Now Initiative office, and when she asked, ‘Aren’t you coming up?’ I said, ‘Either I keep moving or I drown.’

  She said, ‘Huh?’

  ‘I have another lead to check out,’ I said.

  ‘You want company?’

  ‘I need to check this one on my own.’

  ‘Maybe my friend is right,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s simple. Maybe Kim Jenkins did it.’

  I said, ‘The other times when she tried to kill herself she used drugs from a CVS, but this time she used a gun?’

  ‘Maybe this time she meant it.’

  In truth, I had no lead – at least none that would help LaFlora. But while I saw little I could do to keep him from drowning in the rapids, I knew some paths that might keep my own head above water. So I zigged instead of zagged, the stone to the left looking as good as the one to the right. That path took me to see my old running coach, Ernie Kagen.

  Kagen lived in a white, single-story house with a dormered attic in the Murray Hill neighborhood. The paint was flaking, and the front porch had turned gray. Two cats lounged on the porch. Holly bushes scratched the walls, and the grass needed mowing.

  When I was on the freshman boys track team, and still when Coach Kagen visited me in prison, he walked with the leggy bounce of a long-distance runner. But now, as he opened his door, he’d grown fat in the belly, though his legs and arms remained thin. His skin, tan from the sun when I last saw him, had a yellow tinge. A sour smell leaked from the inside hallway.

  He blinked as if seeing sunlight for the first time, and then a broad smile broke across his face. ‘Franky!’ he said, and he stepped on to the porch. He pulled me into a sour hug. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘A free man.’ He put a hand on my shoulder and guided me to the other end of the porch, where there were two lawn chairs. ‘I’ve watched you on the news. You’re getting out and about. That’s good.’ His movements were nervous. He sat on one of the chairs. ‘What brings you here?’

  I said, ‘Early on, when no one else believed me, and even my dad and brother stayed away, you came. That probably saved me. I was falling, and when you showed up, you reached a hand down to me.’