The Washington Decree_A Novel
Page 11
“How can you keep working here when everybody knows it was you who arranged for the president to hold his election party at your father’s goddamn hotel?”
Fucking arrogant, lying cocksucker! Was he actually trying to make her doubt her own memory? “Me? As I recall, I was the one who was totally against even mentioning the idea. Was it not you, Mr. Sunderland, who kept pestering me to do it and then went on with the matter yourself?”
He didn’t answer her question. He was weighing his options. Finally he just said, “Well . . . what do you say?”
She nodded, mostly to herself. This heartless ghoul wasn’t going to get the better of her. “Well . . . I say I’ll bet the president has more important things to think about!”
CHAPTER 8
Bud Curtis was moved to Sussex State Prison in Waverly four days after Judge Marsha W. Tanner sentenced him to death. His defense lawyers made their customary immediate appeal, and no one expected the appellate courts and board of appeals could reach their final decision in less than six years. That’s how long the death chamber would have to wait.
But Bud could tell that “the people” had already pronounced judgment. There’d been none of his family present during the concluding legal procedures. No one asked him what he thought about the charges anymore, only if he regretted what he’d done, and that’s what took the fight out of him. The newspapers were mostly occupied with negative coverage, boring deeply into his successful—but questionable—business methods as hotel owner. Not a word about the many lean and laborious years when he sweated blood for every dollar he could set aside. They weren’t looking for a success story. Not anymore.
A lot of other things changed after the sentencing, too. The prison guards began treating him more roughly, they no longer listened to what he had to say, and from one day to the next, permission to have visitors was restricted to the minimum.
He’d been convicted of conspiring to murder the president’s wife—or rather, the wife of a government official on duty—and a pregnant woman besides. He was to wait on the death row of one of Virginia’s security-level-five prisons.
Ironically, if one ignored the chains and the circumstances—which of course was difficult—it was almost like returning home. He’d driven that same route to Richmond a couple of times a week for more than two years: through Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Isle of Wight, Wakefield, and Waverly. In Waverly he’d eat lunch at Marco’s Italian Restaurant on Main Street, always the same pizza and ice cream in the same booth with its faded bullfight poster. Then he’d take a couple of turns on the pinball machine with the locals, maybe the same ones who now would fasten him to the execution pad one day. Finally he’d make the customary trip past his old aunt’s dilapidated house that stank of cats and cheap perfume. It stood on Musselwhite Drive, just four miles from the quadrangular prison block. Who else had there been to look after her?
Now his aunt was dead, and here he sat.
* * *
—
They drove him out to the prison in an armored car. Through a little shutter in the side he could just make out the landscape passing by: the long straight stretch of road through swamp and forest, the eagles circling above the treetops, and the enormous spiderwebs that hung down over the branches and undergrowth like protective coats of mail.
All colors disappeared as the first gray buildings of Sussex State Prison began to appear. An anemic panorama of asphalt and concrete and gray silos whose only function was storing society’s offal. A couple of orange prison suits behind the barbed wire provided the only dabs of color.
It was hell on earth. A hell devoid of nuance. Completely unreal and light-years away from Marco’s.
Three days went by where Bud attempted to accustom himself to his new reality, such as making the steel toilet flush, lying properly on his flat mattress, getting used to the metallic slamming of doors, and insulating himself from the chorus of complaints from the surrounding cages where the animals they called “the condemned” were supposed to wait until their time came.
And then the true state of reality dawned on Bud.
He’d been collecting his thoughts until his head hurt, attempting to find a way out of this nightmare, to find something that would convince the proper authorities that his case had to be retried. Now he gave up.
The reality was that it was too late. He’d missed his chance. During the massive court case, hadn’t not only the state prosecutor, but also his defense lawyers—and even he, himself—thoroughly accustomed themselves to the concept of his guilt? Who’d ever seriously take up his cause now? Doggie? He doubted it. Why should she? He and his lawyers had conducted the case dismally.
It was all over. That was the reality. The case was closed; conclusions had been drawn. He’d been convicted of something he didn’t do, but he was going to die anyway. And no matter how many lawyers he had and how clever they were, and no matter how many reasons there were for a retrial, it was all going to end in the execution chamber a few yards from where he presently sat.
It was a nightmare. Blinking neon lights and a five-yard square box that wouldn’t be approved even for the caging of wild animals. Cold colors, a steel sink, and smooth cement surfaces.
Inmates were yelling to one another all the time, and the big, black man in the adjoining cell—with huge hands that hung limply through the bars most of the time—was the worst. Although his mouth wasn’t quiet for a second, things were okay as long as someone answered him. It wasn’t until no one answered that he went out of control and all hell broke loose.
His name was Daryl Reid. He’d obviously seen and experienced too much in his lifetime and—what was worse—he felt it necessary to tell everyone about it.
“When my time comes, I want it all: cheeseburgers, two enchiladas, two tacos, and two Cokes—two giant Cokes. How big do they come these days? Really big? Half gallon? Yeah, two of them!” Then he beat his fists on the bars. “Hey, you, new man! Hey, you, Bud Curtis! What are you gonna have when they come for you?”
Bud had given the same answer a hundred times: He didn’t know.
“Come on, man, you can get everything! Tell me!”
And while the poor guy chanted his life story next door, Bud suddenly understood. One day he’d have to choose. Tacos or pâté de foie gras. Of course it could take ten years and countless appeals, but he’d have to choose.
This was one thought among many that he was having a hard time dealing with.
* * *
—
Way back from the time of his pretrial detention he could see that powerful forces wanted to do away with him. During the nighttime interrogation after the murder, he’d told the police time and again that it hadn’t been him but one of the president’s security people—one Blake W. Wunderlich—who had suggested having Toby O’Neill unveil the painting in the corridor. “It wasn’t me,” Bud had repeated the whole night through, but no one believed him. The cop leading the interrogation had asked if he’d met this Wunderlich in person, and Bud had to explain that, aside from a single phone conversation, all contact between them had been written, but that he’d saved all their fax communications.
Sure enough, the next morning investigators found four faxes in Bud’s office in Virginia Beach, all sent on the same day and signed by one Blake W. Wunderlich. During the next few days they apparently made a persistent attempt to locate the man but without luck. Neither the Secret Service, the FBI, the bodyguard corps, nor the CIA had had an employee by that name. They said the man didn’t exist and that the faxes had been sent from one of Bud’s hotels in Chicago. They showed him the faxes and pointed at the fax number. Yes, they were authentic—he recognized them. Did he also recognize the sender’s fax number? No, of course, how could he? All in all, his various hotels must have hundreds of fax numbers.
Then they showed him a note he’d written in his appointment diary that indicated he’d been at t
he hotel from which the faxes were sent on the given day. Didn’t he remember? Was he so often in Chicago that he couldn’t remember what he did there?
Bud understood nothing. They’d said the man with the fax didn’t exist, yet he’d spoken with him on the telephone, and he distinctly remembered the name.
The state prosecutor could also easily remember the name when the trial began. “Wunderlich, with his convenient activities but strangely imaginary being,” as he described him. The prosecutor concluded that the faxes were sent from a man who didn’t exist, from one of Bud Curtis’s own hotels in Chicago. When a detective was able to confirm that Bud had been in that hotel office the same day the fax was sent, it looked like Bud was guilty as hell. He could see that himself. It was hard to refute the allegation that he’d constructed the events and the faxes himself, and that Blake W. Wunderlich had never existed other than in his own sick mind. Bud had to ask himself who would want the murder blamed on him?
But that was far from the only situation that was making Bud’s future look dark. The series of similar ugly surprises in this case were endless. Among other things, two of the black-clad security men claimed to have seen his pistol lying on his desk at the hotel in Virginia Beach just two days before the murder, even though he hadn’t had it out of the desk drawer in at least three years. Analysis of the cartridge cases had even revealed his fingerprints. But how could they, since he’d never loaded the gun himself? They also had a video of him at the moment when he claimed to have reentered the hotel corridor with a glass of water, but there was no glass to be seen in his hand. All this—even though he knew that none of it was true. Not to mention the mysterious money transfer they claimed he made to Toby O’Neill.
And no one came to his defense. None of his employees took the opportunity to tell the court about how much he’d looked forward to finally making peace with his daughter and how thrilled he was at the PR scoop it would be to have the next US president as his hotel guest on election night. And even though everyone knew it, no one bothered to soften his now infamous criticism of the president and Mimi Jansen by mentioning that he’d always criticized everyone and complained about everything—with a smile on his lips. Nor did anyone bother to draw attention to how little he’d actually participated in Barry Goldwater’s and George Wallace’s election campaigns as a sixteen-year-old kid. Or how much he’d done for his community after he came home from Vietnam. If one thought it over, the reason was probably that no one had noticed, and it was wishful thinking that people should dwell on the soft, humane side of a man as powerful as he was. It was as though it were his own fault that people had been made insensitive by his characteristic bossy tirades.
This was probably true, unfortunately, and it hit him hard.
He’d been expecting a fair trial, and that it wouldn’t be hard to prove his innocence. But telling details—like the suspicion and doubt on Doggie’s face when she visited him in prison, the way the jury foreman looked him straight in the eye, or when the police officer testified that the fax came from an imaginary person—made Bud Curtis realize that the fateful die was cast and the rest would fall in place.
No one is innocent until proven guilty.
* * *
—
There were twenty-seven men on death row. The oldest was sixty-two; the youngest was just a kid. Ten blacks, a couple of Latinos, the rest white. They were all condemned to die, and practically all were fighting like mad with the authorities and lawyers to drag time out.
The men’s hands told the whole story, because they were all their fellow prisoners could see. These hands were their faces. They reflected despair and apathy and hung limply through the bars all day long.
The inmates on either side of Bud were out of their minds, a fact about which the prison guards apparently couldn’t care less. Except for the newest guard, a guy named Pete. Pete Bukowski was the only prison guard who seemed to possess the vestiges of humanity. His eyes were almost kind, and sometimes he nodded to the inmates or smiled sadly, as though he were capable of putting himself in their place, of mourning man’s fate.
The other guards were cold as ice. They performed their job of chaining the inmates and leading them out to the yard for their hour’s exercise as though they were airing the neighbor’s dog. It was a case of groveling like a dog, too, as he’d been warned by the man in the adjoining cell. Especially with the big, red-haired guard they called Lassie. Otherwise one’s rations would come up short.
“Yo, Curtis, you lis’nin’?” His neighbor Daryl Reid was pounding on the bars again. He’d murdered twice, a couple of days apart, and he didn’t give a shit. He was guilty and had never pretended otherwise. The only thing he cared about was getting it over with. Daryl had been sitting in his cell since 1999, and, aside from Bud’s other neighbor, Reamur Duke, none of the men presently on death row had survived that long. By now, possibilities to appeal had been more or less exhausted. It wouldn’t be long before Daryl would be enjoying his last, magnificent meal.
“You listening, I said?” He banged the bars again.
“What now, Daryl?”
“You’re rich, man, aren’t you?”
“Shut up, Daryl! How many times do I have to say it?”
“Then get hold of some cigarettes for Reamur Duke. Buy him some, and buy me some, too, okay?”
“What about buying us all some pot? Enough to blast our minds out of this fucking place!” someone else yelled. Several of them were shaking their bars.
“Not for Robert, that fucking child killer. Give him a shot of uncut heroin, right in the neck!” came another voice. Bud judged that the man was in cell number six or seven.
“Fuck that shit, Clive, and you, too, Dave! If Bud’s gonna use his millions on something, it should be to get us some decent lawyers. Ain’t that right, Buddy Boy? Whaddaya say? Half of us have only had shitty lawyers that couldn’t tie their own shoelaces!” This time the voice was accompanied by a pair of big, white hands, gesticulating through the bars a couple of cells away.
Bud didn’t answer. For a moment everyone was banging on his cell bars like a madman. Then suddenly everything got quiet.
In the end, they all got on one another’s nerves.
“Hey, man, fuck them,” whispered Daryl. “Just as long as you buy cigarettes for me and Reamur, okay?”
It was the fifth time at least that this conversation had taken place, and it was still only 10:00 A.M. It had happened about twenty-five times in the course of the previous day and the day before that. Tomorrow it would be the same. And the day after.
The thin steel walls on death row provided no insulation from this kind of grinding, everyday trivia. Only dreams could do that.
* * *
—
Reamur Duke cried at night and would never say why. Afterwards he’d recite the same nonsense again and again—words and numbers, all at once. “Get hold of eight comma six and the one, two, three, four signatures.” Then he’d go on for a while about cigarettes and then back to the endless word-number combinations that were clogging his head. He was even crazier than Daryl but apparently not crazy enough not to be laid on the pad with a shot of deadly poison in his veins.
Bud hated to think about it, but it was merely a matter of time before they all lost their minds. Daryl Reid knew plenty of stories about how bad it got for inmates on various death rows, and one rarely heard him laugh as hard as when he told the one about the man who wanted to save his dessert until after his execution.
Bud never laughed. He’d been on death row for six days, and he was already about to crack up. Something had to happen.
CHAPTER 9
It was ten o’clock in the evening on the sixth of March, and by now the night sky above the West Wing was pitch-black. Several hours had passed since the meeting between the president and his vice president had begun, and Wesley had done plenty of thinking in the meantime.
* * *
—
Wesley and the others heard Vice President Lerner’s agitated voice well before he showed up in the doorway of the Oval Office. His face was not a pretty sight, red and swollen like he was having some kind of strong allergic reaction. He nodded curtly around the table, sat down on the only sofa, and crossed his legs. The president arrived a minute later, flanked by the attorney general and Secretary of the Interior Betty Tucker. Secretary Tucker looked harried, as though she’d just arrived from endless inspections of various public institutions around the country. Wesley scanned the faces of those present, letting his gaze fall to the floor and then rise again along Betty Tucker’s shapely legs. He’d been there once, between those legs. Ms. Tucker felt—and ignored—Wesley’s glance. For her, it was ancient history.
“Okay, Bruce . . .” The vice president was absolutely the only person who allowed himself to address the country’s leader in this manner, and although Jansen didn’t show it, Wesley knew he didn’t appreciate it. All in all, Jansen had become a master at not manifesting what he was feeling inside.
“Now I’m asking you,” he rumbled, “and it’s up to you if you’ll answer or have one of your coolies do it for you!”
Jansen looked at him steadily. “Fire away, Michael,” he said, unaffected by his second-in-command’s informality and aggressive tone of voice.
“I’m assuming those present already know everything we’ve been talking about in Sunderland’s office,” said the vice president.
“Yes, they do.”
Michael K. Lerner turned to the others. “Did you know that everything you say in this building is recorded on tape?”