Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  Cowart bristled. He could feel a surge of his own frustrated anger pushing through him. “Are you threatening me?”

  The detective shook his head. “No. I’m giving advice.”

  “And?”

  “Take it.”

  Matthew Cowart picked himself out of the chair and gave the detective a long stare. The two men’s eyes locked, a visual game of arm wrestling. When the detective finally swerved away, turning his back, Cowart spun about and walked through the door, closed it sharply behind him, and paced briskly through the bright fluorescent lights of the police headquarters, as if pushing a wave in front of him, watching uniformed officers and other detectives step aside. He could sense the pressure of their eyes on his back as he stepped through the corridors, quieting a dozen conversations in his wake. He heard a few words muttered behind him, heard his name spoken several times with distaste. He didn’t glance around, didn’t alter his step. He rode the elevator alone and walked out through the wide glass doors onto the street. There he turned and looked back up toward the detective’s office. For an instant he could see Tanny Brown standing in his window, staring out at him. Again their eyes locked. Matthew Cowart shook his head slightly, just the barest motion from side to side.

  He saw the detective wheel aside, disappearing from the window.

  Cowart stood rigid for an instant, letting the night envelop him. Then he strode away, walking slowly at first but rapidly gaining momentum and pace until he was marching briskly across the town, the words that would become his story beginning to gather deep within him, parading in military array across his imagination.

  7

  WORDS

  Returning home, however, a spreading exhaustion forced the living to fade into his notebooks and let the dead take over his imagination.

  It was late, well past midnight on a clear Miami night and the sky seemed an endless black painted with great brushstrokes into an infinity of blinking starlight. He wanted someone to share his impending triumph but realized there was no one. All were gone, stolen by age, divorce, and too many dyings. Especially he wanted his parents, but they were long gone.

  His mother had died when he was still a young man. She’d been mousy and quiet, with an athletic, bony thinness that made her embrace hard-edged and brittle, which she’d compensated for with a soft, almost lush voice used to great advantage in storytelling. A product of times that had created her as a housewife and kept her mired there, she’d raised him and his brothers and sisters in an endless cycle of diapers, formula, and teething that had given way to scraped knees and imaginary hurts, homework, basketball practices, and the occasional, inevitable heartbreaks of adolescence.

  She’d died swiftly but undramatically at the beginning of her old age. Inoperable colonic cancer. Five weeks, a magical, steady progression from health to death, marked daily by the yellowing of her skin and growing weakness in her voice and walk. His father had died right along with her, which was odd. As Cowart had grown older, he had come to know of his father’s boisterous infidelities. They had always been short-lived and poorly concealed. In retrospect they had seemed far less evil than the affair with the newspaper, which had robbed him of time and sapped his enthusiasm for being with his family. So, when his father had followed her funeral with six months of obsessive, endless weeks devoted to work, only to announce at the end that he was taking early retirement, it had surprised all the children.

  They had had long conversations on the telephone, questioning his act, wondering what he would do, all alone in a big and now insistently empty, echoing suburban home, surrounded by young families who would find his presence unusual and probably unsettling. Matthew Cowart had been the last of a half-dozen children, grown into teachers, a lawyer, a doctor, an artist, and himself and spread across the states, none close enough to help their father, suddenly old. They had all failed to see the obvious. He’d shot himself on his wedding anniversary.

  I should have known, he thought. I should have seen what was coming. His father had called him two nights earlier. They’d talked gingerly, distantly, about news stories and reporting. His father had said, “Remember: It’s not the facts that they want. It’s the truth.” He had rarely said that sort of thing to his son before, and when Cowart had tried to get him to continue, he’d gruffly signed off.

  The police had found him sitting at his desk, a small revolver in one hand, a bullet wound in his forehead, and her picture in his lap. Cowart had spoken with the detectives afterward, forever a reporter, forcing them to describe the scene with all the small details that, once heard, could never be forgotten, and stripped the dying of all its drama: that his father’d worn old red slippers and a blue business suit and a flowered tie that she’d purchased for him some forgettable Father’s Day in the past; that a copy of that day’s edition of the paper, red-penciled with notes, had been spread before him on the desk next to a diet soda and a half-eaten cheese sandwich. He’d remembered to write a check to the cleaning lady and left it taped to his antique green-shaded banker’s lamp. There had been a half-dozen crumpled papers strewn about his chair, tossed haphazardly aside, all notes started and abandoned, to his children.

  The stars blinked above him.

  I was the youngest, he thought. The only one to try his profession. I thought it would make us closer. I thought I could do it better. I thought he would be proud. Or jealous.

  Instead, he was more remote.

  He thought of his mother’s smile. His daughter’s reminded him of her. And I let my wife take her with hardly a whimper. He felt a sudden dark emptiness at that thought, which was instantly replaced with the nightmare memory of the crime-scene photographs of little Joanie Shriver.

  He lowered his head and peered down the street. In the distance, he could see the boulevard glistening with yellow streetlamps and the sweeping headlights of passing cars. He turned away, hearing a siren wailing some ways away, and entered his apartment building. He rose in the elevator, stepped across the corridor, and opened the door to his apartment. For an instant, he hesitated in the entranceway, flipping on the lights and peering about himself. He saw a bachelor’s disarray, books stuffed into shelves, framed posters on the walls, a desk littered with papers, magazines, and clipped articles. He looked about for something familiar that would tell him he was home. Then he sighed, locked the door behind himself, and went about the business of unpacking and going to bed.

  Cowart spent a long week working the telephone, filling in the background for the story. There were brusque calls to the prosecutors who’d convicted Ferguson and didn’t want to talk with any reporters. There were longer calls to the men who’d worked the cases against Blair Sullivan. A detective in Pensacola had confirmed Sullivan’s presence in Escambia County at the time of Joanie Shriver’s murder; a gasoline credit-card receipt from a station near Pachoula was dated the day before the girl was murdered. The prosecutors in Miami showed Cowart the knife that Sullivan had been using when he was arrested; it was a cheap, nondescript four-inch blade, similar but not identical to the one he’d found beneath the culvert.

  He had held the knife in his hand and thought, It fits.

  Other pieces fell into line.

  He spoke at length with officials at Rutgers, obtaining Ferguson’s modest grade record. He’d been a steady, insistently indifferent student, one who seemed to possess only meager interest in anything other than completing his courses, which he’d done steadily, if not spectacularly. A proctor in a dorm remembered him as a quiet, unfriendly underclassman, not given to partying or socializing in any distinguishable fashion. A loner, the man had said, who kept primarily to himself and had moved into an apartment shortly after his first year at the university.

  Cowart spoke to Ferguson’s high-school guidance counselor, who said much the same, though pointed out that in Newark, Ferguson’s grades were much higher. Neither man had been able to give him the n
ame of a single real friend of the convicted man.

  He began to see Ferguson as a man floating on the fringe of life, unsure of himself, unsure of who he was or where he had been going, a man waiting for something to happen to him, when the worst possible thing had swept him up. He did not see him as much innocent as a victim of his own passivity. A man to be taken advantage of. It helped him to understand what had happened in Pachoula. He thought of the contrast between the two black men at the core of his story: One didn’t like pitching and reeling in the back of a bus, the other ran out under fire to help others. One drifted through college, the other became a policeman. Ferguson hadn’t had a chance, he thought, when confronted by the force of Tanny Brown’s personality.

  By the end of the week, a photographer dispatched by the Journal to North Florida had returned. He spread his pictures out on a layout desk before Cowart. There was a full-color shot of Ferguson in his cell, peering out at the camera between the bars. There was a shot of the culvert, other shots of Pachoula, the Shriver house, the school. There was the same picture that Cowart had seen hanging in the elementary school. There was a shot of Tanny Brown and Bruce Wilcox, striding out of the Escambia County homicide offices.

  “How’d you get that?” Cowart asked.

  “Spent the day staked out, waiting for them. Can’t say they were real pleased, either.”

  Cowart nodded, glad that he hadn’t been there. “What about Sully?”

  “He wouldn’t let me shoot him,” the photographer replied. “But I’ve got a good shot of him from his trial. Here.” He handed the picture to Cowart.

  It was Blair Sullivan marching down a courtroom corridor, shackled hand and foot, braced by two huge detectives. He was sneering at the camera, half-laughing, half-threatening.

  “One thing I can’t figure,” the photographer said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, if you saw that man coming at you out on the street, you sure as hell would run fast the other way. You sure wouldn’t get into the car with him. But Ferguson, hell, you know, even when he’s staring out at you angry, he still don’t look that damn bad, you know. I mean, I could see letting him talk me into a car.”

  “You don’t know,” Cowart replied. He picked up the picture of Sullivan. “The man’s a psychopathic killer. He could talk you into anything. It’s not just that little girl. Think about all the other folks he killed. How about that old couple, after he helped change their tire? They probably thanked him before he killed them. Or the waitress. She went with him, remember? Just looking to have a little good time. Thought she was going to have a party. She didn’t make him for a killer. The kid in the convenience store? He had one of those emergency alarm buttons right under the register. But he didn’t hit it.”

  “Didn’t have the chance, I think.”

  Cowart shrugged.

  “Well,” the photographer said, “I sure as hell wouldn’t get into a car with him.”

  “That’s right. You’d be dead.”

  He commandeered his old desk in a back corner of the newsroom, spreading all his notes out around himself, staring into a computer screen. There was a single moment, when the screen was empty before him, that he felt a quick nervousness. It had been some time since he’d written a news story, and he wondered if the skill had left him. Then he thought, It’s all there, and let excitement overcome any doubts. He found himself describing the two men in their cells, the way they had appeared, the way they’d talked. He sketched out what he’d seen of Pachoula, and he outlined the hulking intensity of the one detective and the abrupt anger of the other. The words came easily, steadily. He thought of nothing else.

  It took him three days to write the first story, two days to construct the follow. He spent a day polishing, another day writing sidebars. Two days were spent going over it line by line with the city editor. Another day with lawyers, a frustrating word-by-word analysis. He hovered over the layout desk as it was budgeted for the front of the Sunday paper. The main headline was: A CASE OF QUESTIONS. He liked that. The subhead was: TWO MEN, ONE CRIME AND A MURDER THAT NO ONE CAN FORGET. He liked that as well.

  He lay sleepless in bed at night, thinking, There it is. I’ve done it. I’ve really done it

  On the Saturday before the story was to run, he called Tanny Brown. The detective was home, and the homicide offices wouldn’t give Cowart his unlisted telephone number. He told a secretary to have the detective call him back, which the man did an hour later.

  “Cowart? Tanny Brown here. I thought we’d finished talking for now.”

  “I just wanted to give you a chance to respond to what’s going to be in the story.”

  “Like your damn photographer gave us a chance?”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Ambushed us.”

  “Sorry.”

  Brown paused. “Well, at least tell me the picture doesn’t look too damn bad. We’ve always got our vanity, you know.”

  Cowart could not tell if the detective was joking or not.

  “It’s not bad,” he said. “Like something out of Dragnet.”

  “Good enough. Now, what do you want?”

  “Do you want to respond to the story we’re running tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow? l’ll be damned. Guess l’ll have to get up early and go down to the paper store. Gonna be a big deal?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Front page, huh? Gonna make you a star, right, Cowart? Make you famous?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  The detective laughed mockingly. “This is Robert Earl’s big shot, right? You think it’ll do the trick for him? You think you can walk him off the Row?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a pretty interesting story.”

  “I bet.”

  “I just wanted to give you the opportunity to respond.”

  “You’ll tell me what it says now?”

  “Yes. That’s correct. Now it’s written.”

  Tanny Brown’s voice paused over the telephone line. “I suppose you got all that stuff about beating him up and that crap? The bit with the gun, right?”

  “It says what he contends. It also says what you said.”

  “Just not quite as strong, though, huh?”

  “No, they have equal weight.”

  Brown laughed. “I bet,” he said.

  “So, would you like to comment directly?”

  “I like that word, ‘comment.’ Says a bunch, doesn’t it? Nice and safe. You want me to comment on what it says?” A sharp sarcasm tinged his voice.

  “Right. I wanted you to have the opportunity.”

  “I got it. An opportunity to dig a bigger grave for myself,” the detective said. “Get myself in more trouble than I’m already going to be in, just because I didn’t bullshit you. Sure.” He took a breath and continued, almost sadly. “I could have stonewalled the whole thing, but I didn’t. Is that in your story?”

  “Of course.”

  Tanny Brown laughed briefly, wryly. “You know, I know you got an idea what’s gonna happen because of all this. But I’ll tell you one thing. You’re wrong. You’re dead wrong.”

  “Is that what you want to say?”

  “Things never work out as smoothly or as simply as people think. There’s always a mess. Always questions. Always doubts.”

  “Is that what you want to say?”

  “You’re wrong. Just wrong.”

  “Okay. If that’s what you want to say.”

  “No, that’s what I want you to understand.” The detective laughed abruptly. “Still the hard case, ain’t you, Cowart? You don’t have to answer that. I already know the answer.” He let a beat slip by, then another.

  Cowart listened to the deep, angry breathing on the line before Tanny Brown finally spo
ke, rumbling his words like a distant storm. “Okay, here’s a comment: Go fuck yourself.”

  And then he hung up.

  8

  ANOTHER LETTER

  FROM DEATH ROW

  He did not see or speak with Ferguson until the hearing. The same was true for the detectives, who refused to return any of his phone calls in the weeks after the stories ran. His requests for information were handled summarily by prosecutors up in Escambia County, who were scrambling for a strategy. On the other hand, Ferguson’s defense attorneys were effusive, calling him almost daily to inform him of developments, filing a barrage of motions in front of the judge who’d presided over Ferguson’s murder trial.

  When his story had appeared, Cowart had been caught up in a natural momentum created by the allegations he’d printed, like being driven down a street by sweeping sheets of rain. The television and newspaper press inundated the case, crawling with rapacity over all the people, events, and locations that had constituted his tale, retelling it, re-forming it in dozens of different yet fundamentally similar ways. To all involved, it had been a story of several fascinations: the tainted confession, the disquieted town still restless from the child’s murder, the iron-hard detectives, and ultimately, the awful irony that the one killer could see the other go to the electric chair simply by keeping his mouth shut. This, of course, Blair Sullivan did, summarily refusing all interviews, refusing to speak with reporters, lawyers, police, even a crew from 60 Minutes. He made one call, to Matthew Cowart, perhaps ten days after the articles appeared.

  The call was collect. Cowart was at his desk, back in the editorial department, reading the New York Times version of the story (QUESTIONS RAISED IN FLORIDA PANHANDLE MURDER CASE) when the phone rang and the clipped voice of the long-distance operator asked him if he would accept a call from Mr. Sullivan in Starke, Florida. He was momentarily confused, then electrified. He leaned forward in his seat and heard the familiar soft twang of Sergeant Rogers at the prison.