Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  “What did they ask?”

  “There wasn’t a lot. Not by the police. Not at the trial. I was so nervous, getting up there to testify, but it was all over in a few seconds.”

  “What about the cross-examination?”

  “He just asked me whether I was sure about the color, like you did. And I said I could be wrong, but I didn’t think so. That seemed to please him real well, and that was it.”

  Cowart looked down the roadway again, then at the young woman. She seemed resolved to the memories, her eyes staring off away from him.

  “Do you think he did it?”

  She breathed in and thought for an instant. “He was convicted.”

  “But what do you think?”

  She took a deep breath. “The thing that always bothered me was that she just got into the car. Didn’t seem to hesitate for an instant. If she didn’t know him, why, I can’t see why she’d do that. We try to teach the kids to be safe kids and smart kids, Mr. Cowart. We have classes in safety. In never trusting a stranger. Even here in Pachoula, though you might not believe it. We aren’t so backwoods backwards as you probably think. A lot of people come here from the city, like I did. There’s people here, too, professional people who commute down to Pensacola or over to Mobile, because this is a safe, friendly place. But the kids are taught to be safe. They learn. So I never understood that. It never made sense to me that she just got into that car.”

  He nodded. “That’s a question I have, too,” he said.

  She turned angrily toward him. “Well, the first damn person I’d ask is Robert Earl Ferguson.”

  He didn’t reply, and in a moment she softened. “I’m sorry for snapping at you. We all blame ourselves. Everyone at the school. You don’t know what it was like, with the other children. Kids were afraid to come to school. When they got here, they were too afraid to listen. At home they couldn’t sleep. And when they did sleep, they had nightmares. Tantrums. Bed-wettings. Sudden bursts of anger or tears. The kids with discipline problems got worse. The kids who were withdrawn and moody got worse. The normal, everyday, ordinary kids had trouble. We had school meetings. Psychologists from the university came down to help the kids. It was awful. It will always be awful.”

  She looked around her. “I don’t know, but it was like something broke here that day, and no one really knows if it can ever be fixed.”

  They remained silent for an instant. Finally, she asked, “Have I helped?”

  “Sure. Do you mind just one more question?” he replied. “And I might have to get back to you after I talk with some of the other people involved. Like the cops.”

  “That’d be okay,” she said. “You know where to find me. Shoot.”

  He smiled. “Just tell me what it was that went through your mind a couple of minutes ago, when we were talking about the pictures of the car, and you cut it off.”

  She stopped and frowned. “Nothing,” she replied.

  He looked at her.

  “Oh, well, there was something.”

  “Yes?”

  “When the police showed me the pictures, they told me that they had the killer. That he’d confessed and everything. My identifying the car was just a formality, they said. I didn’t realize that it was so important until months later, just before the trial. That always bugged me, you know. They showed me pictures, said, ‘Here’s the killer’s car, right?’ And I looked at them and said, ‘Sure.’ I don’t know, it always bothered me they did it that way.”

  Cowart didn’t say anything but thought, It bothers me, too.

  A newspaper story is a compilation of moments, accumulated in quotations, in the shift of a person’s eyes, in the cut of their clothes. It adds in words the tiny observations of the reporter, what he sees, how he hears. It is buttressed by the past, by a sturdy foundation of detail. Cowart knew that he needed to acquire more substance, and he spent the afternoon reading newspaper clippings in the library of the Pensacola News. It helped him to understand the unique frenzy that had overtaken the town when the little girl’s mother had called the police to say that her daughter hadn’t come home from school. There had been a small-town explosion of concern. In Miami, the police would have told the mother that they couldn’t do anything for twenty-four hours. And they would have assumed that the girl was a runaway, fleeing from a beating, from a stepfather’s sexual advances, or into the arms of some boyfriend, hanging out by the high school in a new black Pontiac Firebird.

  Not in Pachoula. The local police started cruising the streets immediately, searching for the girl. They had ridden with bullhorns, calling her name, up the back roads surrounding the town. The fire department had assisted, sirens starting up and wailing throughout the quiet May evening. Telephones started ringing in all the residential neighborhoods. Word had spread with alarming swiftness up and down each side street. Small groups of parents had gathered and started walking the backyards, all searching for little Joanie Shriver. Scouts were mobilized. People left their businesses early to join in the search. As the long early-summer night started to slide down, it must have seemed as if the whole town was outside, hunting for the child.

  Of course, she was already dead then, he thought. She was dead the moment she stepped off the curb into that car.

  The search had continued with spotlights and a helicopter brought in that night from the state police barracks near Pensacola. It had buzzed, its rotors throbbing, its spotlight probing the darkness, past midnight. In the first morning light, tracker dogs were brought in and the hunt had widened. By noontime the town had gathered itself like an army camp preparing itself for a long march, all documented by the arrival of television cameras and newspaper reporters.

  The little girl’s body had been discovered in the late afternoon by two firemen diligently searching the edge of the swamp, walking through the sucking ooze in hip waders, swatting at mosquitoes and calling the little girl’s name. One of the men had spotted a flash of blonde hair at the edge of the water, just caught by the dying light.

  He imagined the news must have savaged the town, just as surely as the girl’s body had been savaged. He realized two things: To be picked up for questioning in the death of Joanie Shriver was to have stepped into the center of a whirlwind; and the pressure on the two police detectives to catch the killer had to have been immense. Perhaps, he thought, unbearably immense.

  Hamilton Burns was a small, florid, gray-haired man. His voice, like so many others in Pachoula, tinged with the rhythmic locutions of the South. It was late in the day, and as he motioned to Matthew Cowart to sit in an overstuffed red leather chair, he mentioned something about the “sun being over the yardarm,” and fixed himself a tumbler of bourbon after magically producing a bottle from a bottom desk drawer. Cowart shook his head when the bottle was proffered in his direction. “Need a bit of ice,” Burns said, and he went to a corner of the small office, where a half-sized refrigerator stacked high with legal documents occupied some precious floor space. Cowart noticed that he limped as he walked. He looked around the office. It was paneled in wood, with legal books filling one wall. There were several framed diplomas and a testimonial from the local Knights of Columbus. There were a few pictures of a grinning Hamilton Burns arm in arm with the governor and other politicians.

  The lawyer took a long pull at his glass, sat back, swiveling in his seat behind the desk opposite Cowart and said, “So y’all want to know about Robert Earl Ferguson. What can I tell you? I think he’s got a shot on appeal for a new trial, especially with that old sonuvabitch Roy Black handling his case.”

  “On what issue?”

  “Why, that damn confession, what else? Judge shoulda suppressed the shit out of it.”

  “We’ll get to that. Can you start by telling me how you came into the case?”

  “Oh, court appointment. Judge calls me up, asks me if I’ll handle it. Regular
public defenders were overburdened, like always. I guess a little too hot for ’em, anyway. Folks was screaming for that boy’s neck. I don’t think they wanted any part of Ferguson. No sir, no way.”

  “And you took it?”

  “When the judge calls, you answer. Hell, most of my cases are court appointed. I couldn’t rightly turn this one down.”

  “You billed the court twenty thousand dollars afterwards.”

  “It takes a lot of time to defend a killer.”

  “At a hundred bucks an hour?”

  “Hell, I lost money on the deal. Hell’s bells, it was weeks before anybody’d even talk to me again in this town. People acted like I was some kind of pariah. A Judas. All for representing that boy. Walk down the street, no more ‘Good morning, Mr. Burns.’ ‘Nice day, Mr. Burns.’ People’d cross the street to avoid talking to me. This is a small town. You figure out how much I lost in cases that went to other attorneys because I’d represented Bobby Earl. You figure that out before you go criticizing me for what I got.”

  The attorney looked discomfited. Cowart wondered whether he thought it was he that had gotten convicted, instead of Ferguson.

  “Had you ever handled a murder case before?”

  “A couple.”

  “Chair cases?”

  “No. Mostly like domestic disputes. You know, husband and wife get to arguing and one of them decides to underscore their point with a handgun. . . .” He laughed. “That’d be manslaughter, murder two at worse. I handle a lot of vehicular homicides and the like. Councilman’s boy gets drunk and smashes up a car. But hell, defending somebody from a jaywalking charge and defending someone from murder’s the same in the long run. You got to do what you got to do.”

  “I see,” Cowart said, writing quickly in his notepad and for the instant avoiding the eyes of the lawyer. “Tell me about the defense.”

  “There ain’t that much to tell. I moved for a change of venue. Denied. I moved to suppress the confession. Denied. I went to Bobby Earl and said, ‘Boy, we got to plead guilty. First-degree murder. Go on down, take the twenty-five years, no parole. Save your life.’ That way, he’d still have some living left to do when he gets out. ‘No way,’ the boy says. Stubborn-like. Got that fuck-you kind of attitude. Keeps right on saying, ‘I didn’t do it.’ So what’s left for me? I tried to pick a jury that warn’t prejudiced. Good luck. Case went on. I argued reasonable doubt till I was fair blue in the face. We lost. What’s to tell?”

  “How come you didn’t call his grandmother with an alibi?”

  “Nobody’d believe her. You met that little old battle-ax? All she knows is her darling grandson is well-nigh perfect and wouldn’t hurt a flea. ’Course, she’s the only one that believes that. She gets on the stand and starts lying, things gonna be worse. Mighty worse.”

  “I don’t see how they could be worse than what happened.”

  “Well, that’s hindsight, Mr. Cowart, and you know it.”

  “Suppose she was telling the truth?”

  “She might be. It was a judgment call.”

  “The car?”

  “That damn teacher even admitted it could have been a different color. Sheeit. Said it right on the stand. I can’t understand why the jury didn’t buy it.”

  “Did you know that the police showed her a picture of Ferguson’s car after telling her he’d confessed?”

  “Say what? No. She didn’t say that when I deposed her.”

  “She said it to me.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  The lawyer poured himself another drink and gulped at it. No, you won’t be, Cowart thought. But Ferguson will.

  “What about the blood evidence?”

  “Type O positive. Fits half the males in the county, I’d wager. I cross-examined the technicians on that, and why they didn’t type it down to its enzyme base better, or do genetic screening or some other fancy shit. Of course, I knew the answer: They had a match and they didn’t want to do something special that might screw it up. So, hell, it just seemed to fit. And there was Robert Earl, sitting there in the trial, squirming away, looking hangdog and guilty as sin. It just didn’t do no good.”

  “The confession?”

  “Shoulda been suppressed. I think they beat it out of that boy. I do, sir. That I do. But hell, once it was in, that was the whole ball of wax, if you know what I mean. Ain’t no juror gonna disagree with that boy’s own words. Every time they asked him, ‘Did ya’ll do this, or did y’all do that,’ and he answered, ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ All those yes, sirs. Couldn’t do much about them. That was all she wrote. I tried, sir, I tried my best. I argued reasonable doubt. I argued lack of conclusive evidence. I asked those jurors, Where is the murder weapon? Something that positively points at Bobby Earl. I told them you can’t just kill someone and not have some sort of mark on you. But he didn’t. I argued upside and downside, rightside and leftside, over, under, around, and through. I promise you, sir, I did. It just didn’t do any damn good. I kept looking over at those folks sitting in the box and I knew right away that it didn’t make no damn difference what I said. All they could hear was that damn confession. His own words just staring at him off the page. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Put himself right in that electric chair, he did, just like he was pulling up a seat at the dinner table. People here was mighty upset with what happened to that little girl and they wanted to like get it finished, get it over, get it all done with right fast, so they could go on living the way they was used to. And you couldn’t find two folks in this town who’d a got up and said a nice thing about that boy. Something about him, you know, attitude and all. No sir, no one liked him. Not even the black folks. Now I’m not saying there weren’t no prejudice involved . . .”

  “All-white jury. You couldn’t find one black qualified?”

  “I tried, sir. I tried. Prosecution just used their peremptory challenges to whack each and every one right off the panel.”

  “Didn’t you object?”

  “Objection overruled. Noted for the record. Maybe that’ll work on appeal.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “How so?”

  “Well, what you’re saying is that Ferguson didn’t get a fair trial and that he may be innocent. And he’s sitting right now on Death Row.”

  The lawyer shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Yeah, the trial, well, that’s right. But innocent. Hell, his own words. That damn confession.”

  “But you said you believed they beat it out of him.”

  “I do, sir. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I’m old-fashioned. I like to believe that if’n you didn’t do something, there’s nothing in the world’ll make you say you did. That bothers me.”

  “Of course,” Cowart responded coldly, “the law is filled with examples of coerced and manipulated confessions, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Hundreds. Thousands.”

  “That’s correct.”

  The lawyer looked away, his face flushed red. “I guess. Of course, now what with Roy Black on the case, and now you’re here, maybe gonna write a little something that’ll wake up that trial judge or maybe something that the governor can’t miss, well, things have a way of working their ways right out.”

  “It’ll work out?”

  “Things do. Even justice. Takes time.”

  “Well, it sounds like he didn’t have much of a chance the first time.”

  “You asking me for my opinion?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, sir. No chance.”

  Especially with you arguing his case, Cowart thought. More worried about your standing in Pachoula than putting someone on the Row.

  The lawyer leaned back in his chair and swished his drin
k nervously around in his hand so that the bourbon and ice tinkled.

  Night like impenetrable black water covered the town. Cowart moved slowly through the streets, stepping through the odd lights tossed from streetlamps or from storefront displays that remained lit. But these moments of dull brightness were small; it was as if with the sun falling, Pachoula gave itself over completely to the darkness. There was a country freshness in the air, a palpable quiet. He could hear his own footsteps as they slapped at the pavement.

  He had difficulty falling asleep that night. Motel sounds—a loud, drunken voice, a creaking bed in the next room, a door slamming, the ice and soda machines being used—all intruded on his imagination, interrupting his sorting through of what he’d learned and what he’d seen. It was well past midnight when sleep finally buried him, but it was an awful rest.

  In his dreams, he was driving a car slowly through the riot-lit streets of midnight Miami. Light from burning buildings caressed the car, tossing shadows across the front. He had driven slowly, maneuvering carefully to avoid broken glass and debris in the roadway, all the time aware he was closing in on the center of the riot but knowing that it was his job to see it and record it. As he had pulled the car around a corner, he spotted the dream mob, dancing, looting, racing through the flickering fire lights toward him. He could see the people shouting, and it seemed to him they were calling his name. Suddenly, in the car next to him, a piercing voice screamed, panic-stricken. He turned and saw that it was the little murdered girl. Before he could ask what was she doing there, the car was surrounded. He saw Robert Earl Ferguson’s face and suddenly felt dozens of hands pulling him from behind the wheel as the car was rocked, pitching back and forth as if it were a ship lost at sea in a hurricane. He saw the girl being pulled from the car, but as she slipped from his wild, grasping hands, her face changed terribly and he heard the words “Daddy, save me!”

  He awakened, gasping for breath. He staggered from the bed, got himself a glass of water, and stared into the bathroom mirror as if looking for some visible wound, but seeing only a ridge of sweat plastering his hair by his forehead. Then he went back and sat by the window, remembering.