by David R. Dow
I said, What?
He said, The first day we were here, I said a jury found you guilty. You asked me the significance of that fact. I’m ready to tell you if you are prepared to listen.
I said, Knock yourself out, John.
He said, Your complaint is we should have gone along with the trial judge who ordered the DNA testing. But you had already been in prison for quite some time before that happened. I don’t know how long, but I suspect you do. So even if you think Judge Moss and I should have ruled differently, we still had nothing to do with everything that came before.
I said, You’re saying the punishment is excessive?
He said, Exactly.
I said, Like fining someone a million dollars for stealing a couple of thousand.
He said, Yes. It’s disproportionate.
I sat down on the floor. It was the first time I had sat in their presence since capturing them. Moss was on her exercise bike, but not pedaling. Stream had his hands wrapped around the bars.
I said, I went to college and culinary school. I’ve never been to law school.
Moss said, I don’t think what Leonard is saying requires a law degree to understand. It’s simple morality.
I said, The guys my father worked for were probably psychopaths. They figured out a truck driver who had access to their warehouses was a spy, planted by the federal police. They killed him, of course, but that’s not what I remember. I was only nine years old. They cut off his head and left it outside the local substation. Just a head, sitting on the ground, with a sideways baseball cap on top.
Moss covered her mouth with her hand. Stream was clenching his teeth. I could see his jaw muscles flexing. I knew he knew what I was about to say.
I said, I think in law school, they refer to that as deterrence.
* * *
• • •
The next evening I brought homemade lasagna, garlic bread, and a bottle of Chianti down to level 6. I was feeling magnanimous. I intended to ask them how much time they thought I should shave off their sentence. But I never got the chance. As soon as I opened the door, Stream said, Am I supposed to be getting a roommate?
My original plan had been to imprison three of them: Stream, Moss, and the district attorney who had opposed testing the DNA. That’s why Stream’s cell had bunk beds. But in the course of my research, I read the obituary of the DA’s wife. She had died from a burst aneurysm at the age of forty-two, leaving her widower as the single father to three young kids.
I said to Stream, The DA has twin boys and a daughter in middle school. So you get to keep your single.
Moss said, Your combination of compassion and callousness is incongruous to me.
I felt the pressure in the room suddenly drop. When Moss said callous, I flashed back to the night I was with Britanny. That had never happened to me before. The two of us were in bed. The TV was on, showing a movie in black-and-white. I looked over Britanny’s shoulder at the screen. Lucas Gleason was picking up the candlestick, examining it, turning it over in his hands. Suddenly Tieresse was in the frame. The towel fell from her head. Gleason was beating her. The TV volume was turned all the way down, but I could tell what my wife was saying. She was screaming, Help me.
It was as if Stream had read my mind. He said, If the man who butchered your wife had been sentenced to death, how sympathetic would you have been to his last-minute appeals?
I did not know what to make of the fact that every possible answer to that question seemed wrong.
* * *
• • •
Just as I reached the top of the stairs, I threw up. My neck was damp and I couldn’t catch my breath. I believed I knew why. The stress of being a jailer was taking a surreptitious toll. It was the only thing I hadn’t prepared for. How could I? I remembered what Sargent told me about Gandhi and hunger strikes. I needed to find a way to either cope with the pressure or let them go, and I knew exactly whom to ask.
There had been one guard on death row who was different from the others. Her name was Irene Johnson. I mentioned her earlier—she was the guard who practiced correctly saying my name—but I didn’t tell you why she was special. On days when my lawyers would visit, I would sometimes see Ms. Johnson hugging family members of other inmates. I never heard anyone mouth off to her. Inmates fantasized about injuring practically every other CO except for her. She and Sargent were especially close. When no other guards were around she would call him by his first name. I once said to him, Looks like you have a bit of a school crush on CO Johnson, and he said, Don’t even be joking around me with that shit, Inocente. Miz Johnson be like Joan of Arc. You know who that is? You can admire the sister, but you cain’t mess with her, you feel me? I knew exactly what he meant, and he had nailed it. She exuded compassion. I had no idea how someone like her ended up working here. I had said, You bet I do. Irene Johnson was saintly. If anybody could help me out, she would be the one.
Like most people who use social media, Johnson was easy to find. She lived in a nondescript apartment building across the street from a row of inexpensive chain restaurants. One stayed open twenty-four hours a day, and I quickly learned Johnson had two cups of coffee and a piece of pie every afternoon at three thirty. She must have been working the early shift. I got there at three and took a seat with a view of the door. I ordered a BLT from a waitress who said, What’ll it be, handsome? Ms. Johnson did not appear to notice me when she walked in, but when I picked up my check and walked to the cash register to pay, I pretended to accidentally drop my keys as I passed her booth. She looked up, and her eyes fastened on mine. She said, My Lord Jesus, if it ain’t Mr. Zhettah. I stopped as if shocked to see her. She invited me to sit down.
My cover story was I was writing a book about my time spent in prison, and I was in town to do some research. I told her about how I had been spending my time and how I was hoping to talk to some of the guards. She said, I wouldn’t go gettin’ my hopes too high if I was you, Mr. Zhettah. Most a the COs ain’t too big on visitin’ with former inmates, even the ones that ain’t done nothin’ wrong. I told her all I really wanted to ask is how they deal with the responsibility and pressure of having someone’s life in their hands.
I said, Do guards ever think about things like that?
She said, Child, they ain’t bad people. It’s just a job so’s they can put food on the table. There ain’t too many other opportunities out here.
I said, Pardon me if I am stepping over a line, Ms. Johnson, but it seemed like more than that to you.
She smiled. She said, My papa was a preacher. I s’pose that’s why I know those men can be saved. All it takes is someone to try.
I don’t know what I had expected to learn, but it definitely was not that. Saving Moss and Stream was not on my agenda. I told her it had been nice to run into her. I paid my check and I surreptitiously paid hers, and then I flew back home. That evening I made two turkey and Swiss sandwiches and carried them down to level 6. I looked through the peephole and was surprised to see my prisoners staring at the TV.
CNN was reporting investigators had recovered sexually explicit text messages from the phone found in the handbag believed to have been owned by Judge Moss. They had determined the phone was used to make calls and send texts to a single number. An anonymous source inside the Austin Police Department said the working theory was that the number belonged to Judge Stream, but investigators were not yet certain. Another source at the state police said investigators had questions because the phone had been sold at a bodega in New York and they had not yet been able to place Moss in that city at any time in the preceding year. Moss’s husband, appearing exhausted, insisted to a scrum of reporters congregating in his driveway that he and his wife were completely faithful to each other.
I hadn’t thought they would care enough to trace the phone back to its point of sale. I didn’t even know that was possible. I felt my neck gro
w damp and my heart start to race. It must have showed. Stream said, You fucked up, as all fuckups do.
Moss said, Harvey looks exhausted.
I said, People buy all kinds of things online. There are a million ways she could have gotten it and not a single one has anything to do with me. I’m liking my odds here.
That’s what I said, but it wasn’t at all how I felt. Every tiny mistake was an earworm of a bad country song. I could not foresee what would happen if investigators tugged on that thread. Probably it would lead nowhere. Yet I worried it might. I could hear my pulse beating in my ears.
But the last thing I was going to do was let my prisoners see my fear. That would be throwing them a life raft. It would give them hope. It wasn’t going to happen. I forced myself to remember the day I flushed my disposable razor down the commode.
I said, I brought y’all sandwiches. I roasted the turkey and baked the bread myself. The tomatoes and the basil in the pesto are from the greenhouse. Hope you enjoy. When I check in on you tomorrow let me know if there is anything you want from town.
Back in my kitchen I heated water for coffee and turned on the news. CNN had moved on. They were covering a story about political upheaval in Venezuela. The other stations were all carrying local news. There was nothing online besides what CNN had reported. There were more than four million people in Manhattan the day I was there buying the phone. Millions of secondhand phones are sold online. I took a deep breath. For ten minutes I focused on my breathing, convincing myself there was nothing to implicate me. Then the phone rang.
Sargent and I were once fantasizing about escape. He said I’d have a harder time readjusting to the free world than he would because in my former life I made plans. I said, Everybody makes plans. He said, Uh-uh, Inocente, not the way you think. Middle-class white dudes make plans to go to college, get married, have kids, all that Ozzie and Harriet shit. I said, I’m not white. He said, Ain’t the point. You akse a corner kid where he wants to be in a year you know what he says? He says he wants to be right where he’s at. Here, everybody says that. ’Fore you got here, you thought about the future, ain’t that right? Now what? You just thinkin’ ’bout that shower tomorrow. Tell me I’m wrong.
But Sargent wasn’t wrong. I’d firmly entered the prisoner’s universe. The crazy guys kept making plans. That’s one way you knew they were crazy. But like most people who have no hope, my concept of the future didn’t extend beyond tomorrow.
Sargent had been right about another thing as well. When I finally did get out, I had to relearn the concept of the future, and how to plan for it. Some of it was easy. In the restaurant business, you order from a supplier the food you need for a week. You just sit down with a paper and pencil and plan the menus and do the math. The other kind of planning is hard. What do you do when a diner doesn’t tell you she is allergic to the hazelnuts you’ve finely ground atop an amuse-bouche of asparagus bisque? Call for a doctor, dial 911, or scream for epinephrine? You have to react right away and triage. If you haven’t thought in advance about how you will deal with an emergency like this one, the patron will die while you ponder options. That was my mistake. I hadn’t seen the tiny hole in my fabric of a plan, and now it was growing, and there was no way for me to stop it.
I answered after the second ring, and the instant I heard his voice, I relaxed. Reinhardt said, I am giving a talk next week at KU on security issues with open networks. Want to come and then have dinner after?
I said, I wouldn’t miss it.
* * *
• • •
In a large conference room in the computer science department, packed, to my surprise, with more women than men, I sat and listened as Reinhardt discussed new measures designed to defeat MAC spoofing. MAC is an acronym for media access control, and every computer on a given network has a distinct MAC address. As best as I could tell, Reinhardt was talking about how hackers fake a MAC address to gain access to a network, and then, once inside, can do all kinds of mischief. After about two minutes, I could barely comprehend what he was saying, but I enjoyed listening to him all the same, like being at an opera where the arias are in a language I don’t understand. The professors and postdocs in attendance seemed in awe.
On the drive back to my house I said, Your mom told me you were like a rock star. I chalked it up to maternal pride. I wish she’d seen that.
Reinhardt said, Me too.
We had a late dinner of barbequed brisket and beef ribs we picked up on the way home. I told Reinhardt about the first time Tieresse and I had flown to Kansas and gotten food from the very same place.
He said, I know. I talked to her the next night. She told me about the property she bought and the rings she braided. I had never heard her sound so happy.
I said, You have no idea how much I miss her.
He said, I think I do.
We sat outside in Adirondack chairs on the front porch and drank ice-cold beer. Fifty meters away, seventy feet underground, my prisoners were in the dark.
I said, Reinhardt, I’ve given my lawyer a letter with instructions to open it only upon my death. I do not think she will forget, but please remind her if I die.
He said, Are you sick?
I said, Not that I know about.
He said, Then why are we talking about this?
I said, I used to think nothing could surprise me.
He said, I get that.
We talked about the Kansas City Royals and the Atlanta Braves. Reinhardt’s second love was computer science. His first was baseball. He had signed a contract with the Royals to create some kind of database they were using to decide which players to pursue and how much to pay them. He described it to me in what he considered a layperson’s terms. For the second time that day I realized how the things that interested him most were utterly incomprehensible to me. I felt Tieresse sitting right there beside me, saying, See what I mean?
He thought I was laughing at him. He said, What’s funny?
I said, Sometimes I feel the presence of your mother.
He said, Yes, sometimes so do I.
I said, I mean physically, like she is actually pressing against me. Is that normal?
I placed my hand on top of his arm, and we sat that way for some time. Finally he grew tired and got up to go off to bed. As he was walking to the guest cottage I said to him, Thank you for forgiving me, and for being my friend.
He turned toward me, placed his hands together as if in prayer, and stood perfectly straight. He said, Rafael, you have no idea. The pleasure is mine. And you have the direction of the forgiveness exactly backwards.
The next morning, after coffee, I offered to fly him home. I watched him as we pulled the plane out of the hangar, looking to see if he would notice the flap I had cut in the large rubber mat designed to keep oil and gas from dripping onto the concrete floor. But he did not, and there were no sounds from below. I pictured the woman in the Hitchcock TV episode who kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb then roasts it and feeds it to the police. I was fighting a powerful urge to tell Reinhardt what I had done.
He said, Is something bothering you?
I put my arm around his shoulders and said, Not a single thing. Let’s get out of here.
By evening I was back at home. There was no more news on CNN. There was nothing online. The prosecutors on their discussion board were talking about other issues. At last I felt myself again relax.
* * *
• • •
Hopelessness is not caused by a single thing. The opposite is true. It is caused when there is not a single reason to go on. The day after Demerest was raped in his cell by a malignant guard, the state court turned down my appeal. Sargent told me about something called the Stanford experiment. He said, You think it’s a coincidence that just about every CO in this joint gets a hard-on when they get to suit up? I said, It’s not a coincidence. You have to be a
certain kind of person to want to do this work. Sargent said, Uh-uh, Inocente. You got the causation backwards. Doing this work makes you into that certain kind of person. He described how researchers at Stanford University, using twenty-four volunteers, assigned twelve undergraduates to play the part of prison guards and another twelve to be the inmates. It was role-playing. Nobody had broken any laws. People were assigned to one group or the other arbitrarily. Yet within a matter of days, the prisoners began to exhibit signs of madness, and the guards became sadistic and cruel. The behaviors were so dramatic, the experiment had to be canceled. I said, What’s your point? That I should have more sympathy for the guards? He said, Nope. That ain’t what I’m sayin’ at all.
That afternoon, a trustee came by my house with a stack of pamphlets. I told him I hadn’t ordered anything from the library. Sargent said, It’s on me, Inocente. I thought you could use some illumination. I sat down with the material. Sargent had sent me a collection of death penalty decisions involving Judges Moss and Stream.
I read a case. I said, Shit. Sargent said, Keep reading. So I did. I read about a case involving an inmate whose lawyer kept falling asleep during his trial. Several jurors, the court reporter, and a bailiff all signed affidavits confirming they had witnessed the lawyer with his head on the table during testimony snoring quietly, saliva dripping from his open mouth. Judge Moss said it was impossible to tell whether the lawyer had missed anything important, so where was the harm? Two years later, a different judge determined the inmate was innocent.
Another case involved an inmate whose lawyer arrived at court in the morning already drunk. Stream wrote the opinion ruling against the inmate. He said, Requiring trial judges to monitor the sobriety of every lawyer who appears before them is insulting. We see no reason to add tedious burdens to their already heavy workload. Our state’s judges can be trusted to run their domains efficiently and fairly. Moss added a warning. She said, In recent years, lawyers representing inmates on death row have adopted terrorist tactics of spamming the courts with numerous and frivolous appeals. This abuse creates unjustified stress for the courts and judicial personnel, and for the family members of the victims of these heinous murderers. I take this opportunity to admonish defense counsel they may be found in contempt of court if these behaviors continue.
