Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  “I’ve got nothing for him. But he may have some papers or something . . .”

  “Well, that’s okay. We ain’t so concerned with stuff being smuggled out of the prison. . . .”

  The sergeant laughed again. He had a booming laugh to match his forthright speech. Rogers was obviously the sort of man who could tell you much or make your life miserable, depending on his inclination. “You’re also supposed to tell me how long you’re gonna be.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, hell, I got all morning, so take your time. Afterwards I’ll give you a little tour of the place. You ever seen Old Sparky?”

  “No.”

  “It’s an education.”

  The sergeant rose. He was a wide, powerful man, with the sort of bearing that implied he’d seen much trouble in his life and always managed to deal with it successfully.

  “Kinda puts things in perspective, if you know what I mean.”

  Cowart followed him through the doorway, feeling dwarfed by the man’s broad back.

  He was led through a series of locked doors and a metal detector manned by an officer who grinned at the sergeant as they passed through. They came to a terminal center where several wings of the immense wheel-like prison building came together. In that moment, Cowart was aware of the noise of prison, a constant cacophony of raised voices and metallic clangs and crashes as doors swung open, only to be slammed shut and locked again. A radio somewhere was playing country music. A television set was tuned to a soap opera; he could hear the voices, then the ubiquitous music of commercials. He felt a sensation of motion about him, as if caught in a strong river current, but, save for the sergeant and a pair of other officers manning a small booth in the center of the room, there were few people about. He could see inside the booth and noted an electronic board that showed which doors were open and which were shut. Cameras mounted in the corners by the ceiling and television monitors showed flickering gray images from each cell tier as well. Cowart noticed that the floor was a spotless yellow linoleum, worn bright by the flood of people and the never-ending efforts of prison trustees. He saw one man, wearing a blue jumpsuit, diligently swabbing a corner area with a dirty gray mop, endlessly going over and over a spot that was already clean.

  “That’s Q, R, and S wings,” said the sergeant. “Death Row. Actually, I guess you’d have to say Death Rows. Hell, we’ve even got an overcrowding problem on Death Row. Says something, don’t it? The chair’s down there. Looks like the other areas, but it ain’t the same. No, sir.”

  Cowart stared down the narrow, high corridors. The cell tiers were on the left, rising up three stories, with stairs at either end. The wall facing the cells contained three rows of dirty windows that swung open to let in the air. There was an empty space between the catwalk outside the bank of cells and the windows. He realized the men could lie locked in each small cell and stare out across and through to the sky, a distance of perhaps thirty feet that might as well have been a million miles. It made him shudder.

  “There’s Robert Earl over there,” the sergeant said.

  Cowart spun about and saw the sergeant pointing toward a small barred cage in a far corner of the terminal area. There were four men inside, sitting on an iron bench, staring out at him. Three men wore blue jumpsuits, like the trustee. One man wore bright orange. He was partially obscured by the bodies of the other men.

  “You don’t want to wear the orange,” the sergeant said quietly. “That means the clock’s ticking down on your life.”

  Cowart started toward the cage but was stopped by the sergeant’s sudden grip on his shoulder. He could feel the strength in the man’s fingertips.

  “Wrong way. Interview room’s over here. When someone comes to visit, we search the men and make a list of everything they have—papers, law books, whatever. Then they go into isolation, over there. We bring him to you. Then, when it’s all said and done, we reverse the process. Takes goddamn forever, but security, you know. We do like to have our security.”

  Cowart nodded and was steered into an interview room. It was a plain white office with a single steel table in the center and a pair of old, scarred brown chairs. A mirror was on one wall. An ashtray in the center. Nothing else.

  He pointed at the mirror. “Two-way?” he asked.

  “Sure is,” replied the sergeant. “That a problem?”

  “Nope. Hey, you sure this is the executive suite?” He turned toward the sergeant and smiled. “Us city boys are accustomed to a bit more in the way of creature comforts.”

  Sergeant Rogers laughed. “Why, that’s what I would have guessed. Sorry, this is it.”

  “It’ll do,” Cowart said. “Thanks.”

  He took a seat and waited for Ferguson.

  His first impression of the prisoner was of a young man in his mid-twenties, just shorter than six feet, with a boyish slight build, but possessing a deceptive, wiry strength that passed through his handshake. Robert Earl Ferguson had rolled his sleeves up, displaying knotted arm muscles. He was thin, with narrow hips and shoulders like a distance runner, with an athlete’s easy grace in the manner he walked. His hair was short, his skin dark. His eyes were alert, quick, penetrating; Matthew Cowart had the sensation that he was measured by the prisoner in a moment’s time, assessed, read, and stored away.

  “Thank you for coming,” the prisoner said.

  “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “It wilI be,” Ferguson replied confidently. He was carrying a stack of legal papers, which he arranged on the table in front of him. Cowart saw the prisoner glance over at Sergeant Rogers, who nodded, turned, and exited through the door, slamming it shut with a crash.

  Cowart sat, took out a notepad and pen, and arranged a tape recorder in the center of the table. “You mind?” he asked.

  “No,” Ferguson responded. “It makes sense.”

  “Why did you write me?” Cowart asked. “Just curious, you know. Like, how did you get my name?”

  The prisoner smiled and rocked back in his seat He seemed oddly relaxed for what should have been a critical moment.

  “Last year you won a Florida Bar Association award for a series of editorials about the death penalty. Your name was in the Tallahassee paper. It was passed on to me by another man on the Row. It didn’t hurt that you work for the biggest and most influential paper in the state.”

  “Why did you wait to contact me?”

  “Well, to be honest, I thought the appeals court was going to throw out my conviction. When they didn’t, I hired a new lawyer—well, hired isn’t quite right—I got a new lawyer and started being more aggressive about my situation. You see, Mr. Cowart, even when I got convicted and sentenced to die, I still really didn’t think it was happening to me. I felt like it was all a dream or something. I was going to wake up any moment and be back at school. Or maybe like someone was just going to come along and say, ‘Hey, hold everything. There’s been a terrible mistake made here . . .’ and so I wasn’t really thinking right. I didn’t realize that you have to fight hard to save your life. You can’t trust the system to do it for you.”

  There’s the first quote of my story, Cowart thought.

  The prisoner leaned forward, placing his hands on the table, then, just as rapidly, leaned back, so that he could use his hands to gesture in short, precise movements, using motion to underscore his words. He had a soft yet sturdy voice, one that seemed to carry the weight of words easily. He hunched his shoulders forward as he spoke, as if being pushed by the force of his beliefs. The effect was immediate; it narrowed the small room down to the simple space between the reporter and the prisoner, filling the arena with a sort of superheated strength.

  “I thought just being innocent was going to be enough, you see. I thought that’s the way it all worked. I thought I didn’t have to do anything. Then, when I got here, I got so
me education. Real education.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the men on Death Row have a kind of informal way of passing information about lawyers, appeals, clemency, you name it. You see, over there . . . ,” he gestured toward the main prison buildings, “the convicts think of what they’re gonna do when they get out. Or maybe they think about escaping. They think about how they’re going to do their time, and they think about making a life inside. They have the luxury to dream about something, a future, even if it’s a future behind bars. They can always dream about freedom. And they have the greatest gift of all, the gift of uncertainty. They don’t know what life will hold for them.

  “Not us. We know how we’re gonna end up. We know that there will come a day when the state will send two thousand five hundred electric volts into your brain. We know we’ve got five, maybe ten years. It’s like having a terrible weight around your neck all the time, that you’re struggling to hold up. Every minute goes by, you think, Did I waste that time? Every night comes, you think, There’s another day gone. Every day arrives, you realize another night lost. That weight around your neck is the accumulation of all those moments that just passed. All those hopes just fading away. So, our concerns aren’t the same.”

  They were both quiet for an instant. Cowart could hear his own breath easing in and out, almost as if he’d just run up a flight of stairs. “You sound like a philosopher.”

  “All the men on Death Row are. Even the crazy ones who scream and howl all the time. Or the retards who barely know what is happening to them. But they know the weight. Those of us with a little formal education just sound better. But we’re all the same.”

  “You’ve changed here?”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  Cowart nodded.

  “When my initial appeal failed, some of the others, some of the men who’ve been on the Row five, eight, maybe ten years, started to talk to me about making a future for myself. I’m a young man, Mr. Cowart, and I don’t want it to end here. So I got a better lawyer, and I wrote you a letter. I need your help.”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute.” Cowart was uncertain precisely what role to play in the interview. He knew he wanted to maintain some sort of professional distance, but he didn’t know how great. He had spent some time trying to think of how he would act in front of the prisoner, but had been unsuccessful. He felt a little foolish, sitting across from a man convicted of murder, in the midst of a prison holding men who’d committed the most unthinkable acts, and trying to act tough.

  “Why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about yourself? Like, how come a person from Pachoula doesn’t have an accent?”

  Ferguson laughed again. “I can, if you want to hear it. I mean, if’n I’z wan’ta, I’z kin speechify lak da tiredest ol’ backwoods black you done ever heard. . . .” Ferguson sat back, sort of slumping into his chair, mimicking a man rocking in a rocking chair. The slow drawl of his words seemed to sweeten the still air of the small room. Then he pitched forward abruptly and the accent shifted. “Yo, mutha, I ken also talk like a homeboy from da streets, ’cause I know dat sheeit jes’ as well. Right on.” Just as quickly, that disappeared too, replaced by the wiry earnest man sitting with elbows on the table and speaking in a regular, even voice. “And I can also sound precisely as I have, like a person who has attended college and was heading to a degree and perhaps a future in business. Because that’s what I was as well.”

  Cowart was taken aback by the quick changes. They seemed to be more than simple alterations in accent and tone. The changes in inflection were mimicked by subtle alterations of body English and bearing, so that Robert Earl Ferguson became the image he was projecting with his voice. “Impressive,” Cowart said. “You must have a good ear.”

  Ferguson nodded. “You see, the three accents reflect my three parts. I was born in Newark, New Jersey. My momma was a maid. She used to ride the bus out to all the white suburbs every day at six A.M., then back at night, day in, day out, cleaning white folks’ homes. My daddy was in the army, and he disappeared when I was three or four. They weren’t ever really married, anyway. Then, when I was seven, my momma died. Heart trouble, they told us, but I never really knew. Just one day she was having trouble breathing and she walked herself down to the clinic and that was all we ever saw of her. I was sent down to Pachoula to live with my grandmother. You have no idea what that was like for a little kid. Getting out of that ghetto to where there were trees and rivers and clean air. I thought I was in paradise, even if we didn’t have indoor plumbing. They were the best years of my life. I would walk to the school. Read at night by candlelight. We ate the fish I caught in the streams. It was like being in some other century. I thought I’d never leave, until my grandmother got sick. She was scared she couldn’t watch over me, and so it was arranged I would be sent back to Newark to live with my aunt and her new husband. That’s where I finished high school, got into college. But I used to love coming down to visit my grandmother. Vacations, I would take the all-night bus from Newark down to Atlanta, change there for Mobile, get the local to Pachoula. I had no use for the city. I thought of myself as a country boy, I guess. I didn’t like Newark much.”

  Ferguson shook his head and a small smile creased his face. “Those damn bus rides,” he said softly. “They were the start of all my troubles.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ferguson continued shaking his head but answered, “By the time I got finished riding, it was nearly thirty hours. Humming along the freeway, then right through every country town and back road. Bouncing along, a little carsick, needing to use the can, filled up with folks that needed to bathe. Poor folks who couldn’t afford the plane fare. I didn’t like it much. That’s why I bought the car, you see. A secondhand Ford Granada. Dark green. Cost me twelve hundred bucks from another student. Only had sixty-six thousand miles on it. Cherry. Sheeit! I loved cruising in that car. . . .”

  Ferguson’s voice was smooth and distant.

  “But . . .”

  “But if I hadn’t had the car, I never would have been picked up by the sheriff’s men investigating the crime.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “There’s really not that much to tell. The afternoon of the killing, I was at home with my grandmother. She would have testified to that, if anybody’d had the sense to ask her. . . .”

  “Anybody else see you? Like, not a relative?”

  “Oh, uh, oh, I don’t recall anyone. Just her and me. If you go see her, you’ll see why. Her place is an old shack about a half mile past any of the other old shacks. Dirt-road poor.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, not long after they found the little girl’s body, two detectives come out to the house to see me. I was in the front, washing the car. Boy, I did like to see that sucker shine! There I was, middle of the day, they come out and ask me what was I doing a couple of days before. They start looking at the car and at me, not really listening to what I say.”

  “Which detectives?”

  “Brown and Wilcox. I knew both those bastards. Knew they hated my guts. I should have known not to trust them.”

  “How’d you know that? How come they hated you?”

  “Pachoula’s a small place. Some folks like to see it just keep on keepin’ on, as they say. I mean, they knew I had a future. They knew I was going to be somebody. They didn’t like it. Didn’t like my attitude, I guess.”

  “Go on.”

  “After I tell them, they say they need to take a statement from me in town, so off I go, not a complaint in the world. Christ! If I knew then what I know now . . . But you see, Mr. Cowart, I didn’t think I had anything to fear. Hell, I barely knew what they were taking a statement about. They said it was a missing persons case. Not murder.”

  “And.”

  “Like I said in my letter, it was the las
t daylight I saw for thirty-six hours. They brought me into a little room like this one, sat me down and asked me if I wanted an attorney. I still didn’t know what was going on, so I said no. Handed me a constitutional-rights form and told me to sign it. Damn, was I dumb! I should have known that when they sit a nigger in that chair in one of those rooms, the only way he’s ever going to get to stand up again is when he tells them what they want to hear, whether he did it or not.”

  All jocularity had disappeared from Ferguson’s voice, replaced with a metallic edge of anger constrained by great pressure. Cowart felt swept along by the story he was hearing, as if caught in a tidal wave of words.

  “Brown was the good cop. Wilcox, the bad cop. Oldest routine in the world.” Ferguson almost spat in disgust.

  “And?”

  “I sit down, they start in asking me this, asking me that, asking me about this little girl that disappeared. I keep telling them I don’t know nothing, They keep at it. All day. Right into the night. Hammering away. Same questions over and over, just like when I said ‘No,’ it didn’t mean a damn thing. They keep going. No trips to the bathroom. No food. No drink. Just questions, over and over. Finally, after I don’t know how many hours, they lose it. They’re screaming at me something fierce and the next thing I know, Wilcox slaps me across the face. Wham! Then he shoves his face down about six inches from mine and says, ‘Have I got your attention now, boy?’”

  Ferguson looked at Cowart as if to measure the impact that his words were having, and continued in an even voice, filled with bitterness.

  “He did, indeed. He kept screaming at me then. I remember thinking that he was going to have a heart attack or a stroke or something, he was so red in the face. It was like he was possessed or something. ‘I want to know what you did to that little girl!’ he screams. ‘Tell me what you did to her!’ He’s shouting all the time and Brown walks out of the room so I’m alone with this madman. ‘Tell me, did you fuck her and then kill her, or was it the other way around?’ Man, he kept that up for hours. I kept saying no, no, no, what do you mean, what are you talking about. He showed me the pictures of the little girl and kept asking, ‘Was it good? Did you like it when she fought? Did you like it when she screamed? Did you like it when you cut her the first time? How about when you cut her the twentieth time, was that good?’ Over and over, over and over, hour after hour.”