Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  Ferguson took a deep breath. “Every so often he would take a break, just leave me in that little room alone, cuffed to the chair. Maybe he went out, took a nap, got something to eat. He’d be out five minutes once, then a half hour or more. Left me sitting there a couple of hours one time. I just sat there, you know, too scared and too stupid to do a damn thing for myself.

  “I guess he got frustrated, finally, with my refusing to confess, because eventually he started to whale on me. Started by just slapping me about the head and shoulders a bit more frequently. Stood me up once and punched me in the stomach. I was shaking. They wouldn’t even take me to the can, and I wet myself. I didn’t know what he was doing when he took the telephone book and rolled it up. Man, it was like being hit with a baseball bat. Knocked me right to the floor.”

  Cowart nodded. He had heard of the technique. Hawkins had explained it to him one night. The telephone book had the impact of a leather sap, but the paper wouldn’t cut the skin or really leave a bruise.

  “I still wouldn’t say anything, so finally he left. Brown comes in. I haven’t seen him in hours. I’m just shaking and moaning and figuring I’m gonna die in that room. Brown looks at me. Picks me up off the floor. All sugar and spice. Man, he says he’s sorry for everything that Wilcox has done. Man, he knows it hurts. He’ll help me. He’ll get me something to eat. He’ll get me a Coke. He’ll get me some fresh clothes and he’ll let me go to the bathroom. Man, all I got to do is trust him. Trust him and tell him what I did to that little girl. I tell him nothing, but he keeps at it. He says, ‘Bobby Earl, I think you’re hurt bad. I think you’re gonna be pissing blood. I think you need a doctor real bad. Just tell me what you did, and we’ll take you right over to the infirmary.’ I tell him I didn’t do nothing and he loses it. He screams at me, ‘We know what you did, you just got to tell us!’ Then he takes out his weapon. It wasn’t his regular gun, the one he wears on his hip, but a little snub-nosed thirty-eight he had hidden in an ankle holster. Wilcox comes in right then and cuffs me with my hands behind my back, grabs my head and holds it so I’m looking right down the barrel of that little gun. Brown says, ‘Start in talking now.’ I says, ‘I didn’t do anything!’ and he pulls the trigger. Man! I can still see that finger curling around the trigger and tugging back so slow. I thought my heart stopped. It clicks down on an empty chamber. I’m crying now, just like a baby, blubbering away. He says, ‘Bobby Earl, you got real lucky with that one. You think you’re real lucky today? How many empty chambers I got in here?’ He pulls the trigger again and it clicks again. ‘Damn!’ he says. ‘I think it misfired.’ And then he cracks open that little gun, swings the cylinder right out and pulls out a bullet. He looks at it real careful like and says, ‘Man, how about that? A dud. Maybe it’ll work this time.’ And I watch him put it back into the gun. He points the gun right at me and says, ‘Last chance, nigger.’ And I believe him this time and I say, ‘I did it, I did it, whatever you want, I did.’ And that was the confession.”

  Matthew Cowart took a deep breath and tried to digest the story. He suddenly felt that there was no air in the small interview room, as if the walls had grown hot and stifling, and he were baking in the abrupt heat. “And?” he asked.

  “And now I’m here,” Ferguson replied.

  “You told this to your attorney?”

  “Of course. He pointed out the obvious: There were two police detectives and just one of me. And there was a beautiful little dead white girl. Who do you think was going to get believed?”

  Cowart nodded. “Why should I believe you now?”

  “I don’t know,” Ferguson replied angrily. He glared at Cowart for an instant. “Maybe because I’m telling the truth.”

  “Would you take a polygraph test?”

  “I took one for my attorney. Got the results right here. Damn thing came back ‘Inconclusive.’ I think I was too jumpy when they strapped all those wires onto me. Didn’t do me no good at all. I’d take another one, if you want. Don’t know if it’d do any good. Can’t use it in court.”

  “Of course. But I need some corroboration.”

  “Right. I know that. But hell, that’s what happened.”

  “How can I prove that story, so I can put it in the paper?”

  Ferguson thought for a moment, his eyes still burrowing into Cowart’s. After a few seconds, a small smile tore through some of the intensity in the convicted man’s face.

  “The gun,” he said. “That might do it.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I remember before they took me into that little room, they made a big deal of checking their sidearms at the desk. I remember he had that little sucker hidden under his pants. I bet he’ll lie to you about that gun, if you can figure out a way of tripping him up.”

  Cowart nodded. “Maybe.”

  The two men grew quiet again. Cowart looked down at the tape recorder and watched the tape spinning on its capstan. “Why did they pick you?” he asked.

  “I was convenient. I was right there. I was black. They made the green car. My blood type was the same—of course, they figured that out later. But I was there and the community was about to go crazy—I mean, the white community. They wanted somebody and they had me in their hand. Who better?”

  “That seems like mighty convenient reasoning.”

  Ferguson’s eyes flashed, an instant moment of anger, and Cowart saw him ball his hand into a fist. He watched the prisoner fight and regain control.

  “They always hated me there. Because I wasn’t a dumb backwoods shuffling nigger like they were used to. They hated that I went to college. They hated that I knew all the big-city things I did. They knew me and they hated me. For what I was and for what I was going to be.”

  Cowart started to ask a question, but Ferguson thrust both hands straight out, gripping the edge of the table to steady himself. His voice was barely contained, and Cowart felt the man’s rage pour over him. He could see the sinews on the prisoner’s neck stand out. His face was flushed, his voice had lost its steadiness and quavered with emotion. Cowart saw Ferguson struggling hard with himself, as if he were about to break under the stress of remembering. In that moment, Cowart wondered what it would be like to stand in the way of all that fury.

  “You go there. You take a look at Pachoula. Escambia County. It’s right south from Alabama, not more than twenty, thirty miles. Fifty years ago, they just would have hung me from the nearest tree. They would have been wearing white suits with little pointy hats and burning crosses. Times have changed,” he spoke bitterly, “but not that goddamn much. Now they’ve hung up with all the benefits and trappings of civilization. I got a trial, yes sir. I got an attorney, yes sir. A jury of my peers, yes sir. I got to enjoy all my constitutional rights, yes sir. Why, this damn lynching was nice and legal.” Ferguson’s voice shook with emotion. “You go there, Mr. White Reporter, and start asking some questions and you’ll see. You think this is the nineteen nineties? You’re gonna find out that things haven’t moved along quite as quickly. You’ll see.”

  He sat back in the chair, glaring at Cowart.

  The prison sounds seemed distant, as if they were separated by miles from the walls, corridors, and cells. Cowart was suddenly aware how small the room was. This is a story about small rooms, he thought. He could feel hatred flooding from the prisoner in great waves, an endless flow of frustration and despair, and felt swept along with it.

  Ferguson continued to stare across the table at Cowart, as if considering his next words. “Come on, Mr. Cowart. Do you think things work the same in Pachoula as they do in Miami?”

  “No.”

  “Damn right they don’t. Hell, you know the funniest thing? If I had done this crime—which I didn’t—but if I had, and it was down in Miami? Well, you know what would have happened with the shabby evidence they had against me? I’d have been offered a deal to second de
gree and sentenced to five to life. Maybe do four years. And that’s only if my public defender didn’t get the whole thing thrown out. Which he would have. I had no record. I was a college student. I had a future. They had no evidence. What do you think, Mr. Cowart. In Miami?”

  “In Miami, you’re probably right. A deal. No doubt.”

  “In Pachoula, death. No doubt.”

  “That’s the system.”

  “Damn the system. Damn it to hell. And one more thing: I didn’t do it. I didn’t damn do the crime. Hey, I may not be perfect. Hell, up in Newark, I got into a couple of scrapes as a teenager. Same thing down in Pachoula. You can check those out. But dammit, I didn’t kill that little girl.”

  Ferguson paused. “But I know who did.”

  They were both silent for an instant.

  “Let’s get to that,” Cowart said. “Who and how?”

  Ferguson rocked back in his seat. Cowart saw a single smile, not a grin, not something that preceded a laugh, but a cruel scar on the man’s face. He was aware that something had slipped from the room, some of the intensity of anger. Ferguson changed in those few seconds, just as effectively as he had earlier when he had changed accents.

  “I can’t tell you that yet,” the prisoner replied.

  “Bullshit,” Cowart said, letting a touch of displeasure slip into his own voice. “Don’t be coy.”

  Ferguson shook his head. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but only when you believe.”

  “Wat sort of game is this?”

  Ferguson leaned forward, narrowing the space between the two men. He fixed Cowart with a steady, frightening glare. “This is no fucking game,” he said quietly. “This is my fucking life. They want to take it and this is the best card I’ve got. Don’t ask me to play it before I’m ready.”

  Cowart did not reply.

  “You go check out what I’ve told you. And then, when you believe I’m innocent, when you see those fuckers have railroaded me, then I’ll tell you.”

  When a desperate man asks you to play a game, Hawkins had once said, it’s best to play by his rules.

  Cowart nodded.

  Both men were quiet. Ferguson locked his eyes onto Cowart’s, watching for a response. Neither man moved, as if they were fastened together. Cowart realized that he no longer had any choice, that this was the reporter’s dilemma: He had heard a man tell him a story of evil and wrongs. He was compelled to discover the truth. He could no more walk away from the story than he could fly.

  “So, Mr. Cowart,” Ferguson said, “that’s the story. Will you help me?”

  Cowart thought of the thousands of words he’d written about death and dying, about all the stories of pain and agony that had flowed through him, leaving just the tiniest bit of scar tissue behind that had built up into so many sleeping nightmare visions. In all the stories he’d written, he’d never saved anyone from even a pinprick of despair. Certainly never saved a life.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he replied.

  3

  PACHOULA

  Escambia County is tucked away in the far northwest corner of Florida, touched on two borders by the state of Alabama. It shares its cultural kinship with the states to its immediate north. It was once primarily a rural area, with many small farms that rolled green over hillsides, separated by dense thickets of scrubby pine and the looped and tied tendrils of great willows and vines. But in recent years, as with much of the South, it has seen a burst of construction, a suburbanizing of its once country lands, as its major city, the port town of Pensacola, has expanded, growing shopping malls and housing developments where there was once open space. But, at the same time, it has retained a marshy commonality with Mobile, which is not far by interstate highway, and with the saltwater tidal regions of the Gulf shore. Like many areas of the deep South, it has the contradictory air of remembered poverty and new pride, a sense of rigid place fueled by generations who have found the living there, if not necessarily easy, then better than elsewhere.

  The evening commuter flight into the small airport was a frightening series of stomach-churning bumps and dips, passing along the edges of huge gray storm clouds that seemed to resent the intrusion of the twin-engine plane. The passenger compartment alternately filled with streaks of light and sudden dark as the plane cut in and out of the thick clouds and red swords of sunshine fading fast over the Gulf of Mexico. Cowart listened to the engines laboring against the winds, their pitch rising and falling like a racer’s breath. He rocked in the cocoon of the plane, thinking about the man on Death Row and what awaited him in Pachoula.

  Ferguson had stirred a war within him. He had come away from his meeting with the prisoner insisting to himself that he maintain objectivity, that he listen to everything and weigh every word equally. But at the same time, staring through the beads of water that marched across the plane’s window, he knew that he would not be heading toward Pachoula if he expected to be dissuaded from the story. He clenched his fists in his lap as the small plane skidded across the sky, remembering Ferguson’s voice, still feeling the man’s ice-cold anger. Then he thought about the girl. Eleven years old. Not a time to die. Remember that, too.

  The plane landed in a driving thunderstorm, careening down the runway. Through the window, Cowart saw a line of green trees on the airport edge, standing dark and black against the sky.

  He drove his rental car through the enveloping darkness to the Admiral Benbow Inn just off the interstate, on the outskirts of Pachoula. After inspecting the modest, oppressively neat room, he went down to the bar in the motel, slid between two salesmen, and ordered a beer from the young woman. She had mousy brown hair that flounced around her face, drawing all the features in tight so that when she frowned, her whole face seemed to scowl along with her lips, an edgy toughness that spoke of handing too many drinks to too many salesmen and refusing too many offers of companionship issued over shaky hands clutching scotch and ginger ale. She drew the beer from a tap, eyeing Cowart the entire time, sensing when the froth from the beer was about to slide over the lip of the glass. “Y’all ain’t from around here, are you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I like to guess. Just say, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.”

  He laughed and repeated the phrase.

  She smiled at him, just losing a small edge from her distance. “Not from Mobile or Montgomery, that’s for sure. Not even Tallahassee or New Orleans. Got to be two places: either Miami or Atlanta; but if it’s Atlanta, then you ain’t originally from there but from somewhere else, like New York, and you’d just be calling Atlanta home temporary-like.”

  “Not bad,” he replied. “Miami.”

  She eyed him carefully, pleased with herself. “Let’s see,” she said. “I see a pretty nice suit, but real conservative, like a lawyer might wear. . . .” She leaned across the bar and rubbed her thumb and forefinger against the lapel of his jacket “Nice. Not like the polyester princes selling livestock vitamin supplement that we get in here mainly. But the hair’s a bit shaggy over the ears and I can see a couple of gray streaks just getting started. So you’re a bit too old—what, about thirty-five?—to be running errands. If you were a lawyer that old, you’d damn well have to have some fresh-cheeked just-outa-school assistant you’d send here on business instead of coming yourself. Now, I don’t figure you for a cop, ’cause you ain’t got that look, and not real estate or business either. You don’t have the look of a salesman, like these guys do. So now, what would bring a guy like you all the way up here from Miami? Only one thing left I can think of, so I’d guess you’re a reporter here for some story.”

  He laughed. “Bingo. And thirty-seven.”

  She turned to draw another glass of beer, which she set in front of another man, then returned to Cowart. “You just passing through? Can’t imagine what kinda story would bring
you up here. There ain’t much happening around here, in case you hadn’t already noticed.”

  Cowart hesitated, wondering whether he should keep his mouth shut or not. Then he shrugged and thought, If she figured out who I was in the first two minutes, it isn’t going to be much of a secret around here when I start talking to the cops and lawyers.

  “A murder story,” he said.

  She nodded. “Had to be. Now you’ve got me interested. What sort of story? Hell, I can’t remember the last killing we had around here. Now, can’t say the same for Mobile or Pensacola. You looking at those drug dealers? Jesus, they say that there’s cocaine coming in all up and down the Gulf, tons of it, every night. Sometimes we get some ­Spanish-speaking folks in here. Last week three guys came in, all wearing sharp suits and those little beeper things on their belts. They sat down like they owned the place and ordered a bottle of champagne before dinner. I had to send the boy out to the liquor store for it. Wasn’t hard to figure out what they were celebrating.”

  “No, not drugs,” Cowart said. “How long have you been here?”

  “A couple of years. Came to Pensacola with my husband, who was a flier. Now he still flies and he ain’t my husband and I’m stuck here on the ground.”

  “Do you remember a case, about three years old, a little girl named Joanie Shriver? Allegedly killed by a fellow named Robert Earl Ferguson?”

  “Little girl they found by Miller’s Swamp?”