Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  He saw the large man rise then and take his wife by the hand. The courtroom was silent as they walked out. Their footsteps echoed slightly, and the doors creaked shut behind them. Black paused, watching them, then delayed another second or so as the doors swung closed. He nodded his head slightly.

  “Mr. Sims, please read the letter.”

  The witness coughed and turned toward the judge. “It’s a bit filthy, your honor. I don’t know that . . .”

  The judge interrupted. “Read the letter.”

  The witness bent his head slightly and peered down through his glasses. He read in a quick, hurried voice filled with embarrassment, stumbling on the obscenities.

  “. . . Dear Mr. and Mrs. Shriver: I have been wrong not to write you before this, but I have been real busy getting ready to die. I just wanted you to know what a sweet little piece of fuck your little baby was. Dipping a prick in and out of her snatch was like picking cherries on a summer morning. It was just the tastiest bit of fresh new pussy imaginable. The only thing better than fucking her was killing her. Sticking a knife into her ripe skin was kinda like carving up a melon. That’s what she was, all right. Like a bit of fruit. Too bad she’s all rotten and used up now. She’d be an awful cold and dirty fuck now, right? All green and maggoty from being underground. Too bad. But she sure was tasty while she lasted . . .” He looked up at the defense attorney. “It was signed: Your good friend, Blair Sullivan.”

  Black looked up at the ceiling, letting the impact of the letter filter through the air. Then he asked, “He’s written to other victims’ families?”

  “Yes, sir. To just about all the folks of all the people he confessed killing.”

  “Does he write regularly?”

  “No, sir. Just when he seems to get the urge. Most of the letters are even worse’n this one. He gets even more specific, sometimes.”

  “I imagine.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No further questions.”

  The prosecutor rose slowly. Boylan was shaking his head. “Now, Mr. Sims, he doesn’t say specifically in that letter that he killed Joanie Shriver?”

  “No, sir. He says what I read. He says she was tasty, sir. But he doesn’t say he killed her, no sir, but it sure seems like that’s what he was saying.”

  The prosecutor seemed deflated. He started to ask another question, then stopped. “Nothing further,” he said.

  Mr. Sims picked himself up from the witness stand and walked quickly out of the courtroom. There was a minute or two before the Shrivers returned. Cowart saw their eyes were red with tears.

  “I’ll hear arguments now,” Judge Trench said.

  The two attorneys were blissfully brief, which surprised Cowart. They were predictable as well. He tried to take notes, but stared instead at the man and woman fighting tears in the front row. He saw they would not turn and look at Ferguson. Instead, their eyes were locked forward, up on the judge, their backs rigid, their shoulders set, leaning slightly toward him, as if they were fighting the strong winds of a gale.

  When the lawyers finished, the judge spoke sharply. “I’ll want to see citations for each position. I’ll rule after I review the law. Set this down for a week from now.”

  Then he stood abruptly and disappeared through a door toward his chambers.

  There was a moment of confusion as the crowd rose. Cowart saw Ferguson shake hands with the attorney and follow the guards through a door in the back of the courtroom leading to a holding cell. Cowart turned and saw the Shrivers surrounded by reporters, struggling to extricate themselves from the narrow aisle of the courtroom, and exit. In the same instant, he saw Roy Black motion to the prosecutor, gesturing at the trouble the couple were having. Mrs. Shriver was holding up her arm, as if she could fend off the questions raining down on her like so many droplets from the sky. He saw George Shriver drape an arm around his wife, his face reddening as he struggled to get past. Boylan reached them after a moment and managed to get them steered around, like a ship changing direction in the high seas, and he led them the other way, heading through the door to the judge’s chambers. Cowart heard the photographer at his elbow say, “I got a shot, don’t worry.” Black caught his eye then and surreptitiously made a thumbs-up sign. But Cowart felt first an odd emptiness, followed by a nervousness that contradicted the excitement of the moment.

  He heard voices around him: Black was being interviewed by one camera crew, the lawyer bathed in the glare of the minicam. He was saying, “. . . Of course we thought we made our point there. You can’t help but see there’s all sorts of questions still floating about this case. I don’t know why the state won’t understand that . . .”

  At the same moment, a few feet away, Boylan was replying to another camera, glowing with the same intensity in the same light. “It’s our position that the right man is sitting on Death Row for a terrible crime. We intend to adhere to that position. Even if the judge were to grant Mr. Ferguson a new trial, we believe there’s more than sufficient evidence to convict him once again.”

  A reporter’s voice called out, “Even without a confession?”

  “Absolutely,” the lawyer replied. Someone laughed, but as Boylan pivoted, glaring, they stopped.

  “How come your boss didn’t come down and argue this motion? How come they sent you? You weren’t on the original prosecuting team. How come you?”

  “It just fell to me,” he explained without explaining.

  Roy Black answered the same question ten feet away. “Because elected officials don’t like coming into courtrooms and getting their heads beat in. They could smell it was a loser right from the start. And, boys, you can quote me.”

  Suddenly a camera with its unyielding light swung at Cowart, and he heard a question thrust his way. “Cowart? This was your story. What did you think of the hearing? How about that letter?”

  He stumbled for something clever or glib to say, finally shaking his head. “Come on, Matt,” someone shouted. “Give us a break.” But he pushed past. “Touchy,” someone said.

  Cowart paced down the corridor and rode an escalator to the vestibule. He hurried through the doors to the courthouse and stopped on the steps. He could feel the heat surrounding him. There was a solid breeze and above him the wind tugged at a triptych of flags: county, state, and national. They made a snapping sound, cracking like gunshots with each renewed blow from the air. He saw Tanny Brown standing across the street staring at him. The detective simply frowned, then slid behind the wheel of a car. Cowart watched him pull slowly into traffic and disappear.

  One week later, the judge issued a written statement ordering a new trial for Robert Earl Ferguson. There was nothing in it describing him as “a wild animal.” Nor did it acknowledge the dozens of newspaper editorials that had suggested Ferguson be granted a new trial—including those papers circulating in Escambia County. The judge also ordered that the statement that Ferguson had made to detectives be suppressed. In an in-chambers motion, Roy Black requested Ferguson be released on bail. This was granted. A coalition of anti-death-penalty groups provided the money. Cowart learned later that it was fronted to them by a movie producer who’d purchased the dramatic rights to Robert Earl Ferguson’s life story.

  9

  DEATH WARRANT

  Restless time flooded him.

  He felt as if his life had become compartmentalized into a series of moments awaiting a signal to return to its normal continuity. He felt an annoying sense of anticipation, a nervous sort of expectation, but of precisely what he could not tell. He went to the prison on the day that Robert Earl Ferguson was released from Death Row in advance of his new trial, postponed by the judge until December. It was the first week in July, and the road to the prison sported makeshift stands selling fireworks, sparklers, flags, and red, white, and blue bunting, which hung limply from the whitewashed board walls. The Flori
da spring had fiercely fused into summer, the heat pounding on the earth with an endlessly patient fury, drying the dirt into a hard, cracked cement beneath his feet. Sheets of warmth wavered above the ground like hallucinations, surrounding him with a presence as strong as a New England blizzard in winter, and just as hard to maneuver in; the heat seemed to sap energy, ambition, and desire. It was almost as if the soaring temperatures slowed the entire rotation of the world.

  A fitful crowd of sweating press waited for Ferguson outside the prison doors. The numbers of people gathered were thickened by members of anti-death-penalty groups, some of whom carried placards welcoming his release, and who had been chanting, “One, two, three, End the Death Pen-al-ty. Seven, eight, nine, End It for All Time” before the prisoner emerged from the prison. They broke into cheers and a smattering of applause when he came through the doors. Ferguson looked up briefly into the pale blue sky before stopping. He stood, flanked by his lanky attorney and his brittle, gray-haired grandmother. She glared at the reporters and cameramen who surged toward them, clinging with both arms to her grandson’s elbow. Ferguson made a short speech, perched on the steps of the prison, so that he looked down at the crowd, saying that he believed his case showed both how the system didn’t work and how it did. He said he was glad to be free. He said he was going to get a real meal first, fried chicken and greens with an ice-cream sundae with extra chocolate for dessert. He said he had no bitterness, which no one believed. He ended his speech by saying, “I just want to thank the Lord for helping to show me the way, thank my attorney, and thank the Miami Journal and Mr. Cowart, because he listened when it seemed no one else would. I wouldn’t be standing here before you today if it weren’t for him.”

  Cowart doubted that this final bit of speechmaking would make any of the nightly newscasts or show up in any of the other newspapers’ stories. He smiled.

  Reporters started to shoot questions through the heat.

  “Are you going back to Pachoula?”

  “Yes. That’s my only real home.”

  “What are your plans?”

  “I want to finish school. Maybe go to law school or study criminology. I’ve got a real good understanding now of criminal law.”

  There was laughter.

  “What about the trial?”

  “What can I say? They say they want to try me again, but I don’t know how they can. I think I’ll be acquitted. I just want to get on with my life, to get out of the public eye, you know. Get sort of anonymous again. It’s not that I don’t like you folks, but . . .”

  There was more laughter. The crowd of reporters seemed to swallow up the slight man, whose head pivoted with each question, so that he was facing directly at the person who asked it. Cowart noted how comfortable Ferguson appeared, handling the questions at the impromptu news conference with humor and ease, obviously enjoying himself.

  “Why do you think they’re going to prosecute you again?”

  “To save face. I think it’s the only way they can keep from acknowledging that they tried to execute an innocent man. An innocent black man. They would rather stick to a lie than face the truth.”

  “Right on, Brother!” someone called from the group of demonstrators. “Tell it!”

  Another reporter had told Cowart that these same people showed up for every execution, holding candlelight vigils and singing “We Shall Overcome” and “I Shall Be Released” right up to the time the warden emerged to announce that the verdict and judgment of the court had been carried out. There was usually a corresponding group of flag-waving fry-’em-all types in jeans, white T-shirts, and pointy-toed cowboy boots, who hooted and hollered and engaged in occasional shoving matches with the anti-death-penalty bunch. They were not present on this day.

  Both groups were generally ignored by the press as much as possible.

  “What about Blair Sullivan?” a television reporter shouted, thrusting a microphone at Ferguson.

  “What about him? I think he’s a dangerous, twisted individual.”

  “Do you hate him?”

  “No. The good Lord instructs me to turn the other cheek. But I got to admit, sometimes it’s hard.”

  “Do you think he’ll confess and save you from the trial?”

  “No. The only confessing I think he’s planning on doing is when he goes to meet his Maker.”

  “Have you talked with him about the murder?”

  “He won’t talk to anybody. Especially about what he did in Pachoula.”

  “What do you think about those detectives?”

  He hesitated. “No comment,” he said. Ferguson grinned. “My attorney told me that if I couldn’t say something nice, or something neutral, to say ‘no comment.’ There you go.”

  There was more laughter from the reporters.

  He smiled nicely. There was a final blurring as cameramen maneuvered for a final shot and soundmen struggled with boom microphones and portable tape machines. The newspaper photographers bounced and weaved about Ferguson, the motordrives on their cameras making a sound like bugs on a still evening. The press surged toward Ferguson a last time, and he raised his hand, making a V-for-victory sign. He was steered into the backseat of a car, waving one last time through the closed window at the last photographers shooting their final pictures. Then the car pulled out, heading down the long access road, the tires kicking up little puffs of dust that hovered above the sticky black macadam highway. It soared past an inmate work crew, marching single file slowly in the heat, sweat glistening off the dark skin of their arms. Sunlight reflected off the shovels and pickaxes they carried on their shoulders as they headed toward their noontime break. The men were singing a work song. Cowart could not make out the words, but the steady rhythms filled him.

  He took his daughter to Disney World the following month. They stayed in a room high in the Contemporary Hotel, overlooking the amusement park. Becky had developed a child’s expertise about the place, mapping out each day’s assault on the rides with the excitement of a successful general anxious to engage a beaten enemy. He was content to let her create the flow to the day. If she wanted to ride Space Mountain or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride four or five times in a row, that was fine. When she wanted to eat, he made no adult pretense of nutrition, allowing her to select a dizzying variety of hot dogs, french fries, and cotton candy.

  It was too warm to wait in line for rides during the afternoon, so the two of them spent hours in the pool at the hotel, ducking and cavorting about. He would toss her endlessly in the opaque waters, let her ride on his shoulders, swim between his legs. Then, with the meager cooling that slid into the air as the sun dropped, they would get dressed and head back to the park for the fireworks and light shows.

  Each night he ended up carrying her, exhausted and fast asleep, back on the monorail to the hotel, up to the room, where he would gently slip her under the covers of her bed and listen to her regular, easy breathing, the child sound blocking all thoughts from his head and giving him a sort of peace.

  He had but one nightmare during the time there: a sudden dream-vision of Ferguson and Sullivan forcing him onto a roller coaster ride and seizing his daughter away from him.

  He awoke gasping and heard Becky say, “Daddy?”

  “I’m all right, honey. Everything’s all right.”

  She sighed and rolled over once in bed before tumbling back into sleep.

  He remained in the bed, feeling the clammy sheets surround him.

  The week had passed with a child’s urgency, all rolled together into nonstop activity. When it came time to take her home, he did it slowly, stopping at Water World for a ride on the slide, then pulling off the thruway for hamburgers. He stopped again for ice cream and finally, a fourth time, to find a toy store and buy yet another gift. By the time they reached the expensive Tampa suburb where his ex-wife and her new husband lived, he was barely pus
hing the car down the streets, his reluctance to part with her lost in the rapid-fire, boundless excitement of his daughter, who pointed out all her friends’ houses en route.

  There was a long, circular drive in front of his daughter’s home. An elderly black man was pushing a lawn mower across the expanse of vivid green lawn. His old truck, a red faded to a rusty brown, was parked to the side. He saw the words NED’S LAWN SERVICE COMPLETE handwritten on the side in white paint. The old man paused just for a moment to wipe his forehead and wave at Becky, who waved eagerly in return. Cowart saw the old man hunch over, bending to the task of trimming the grass to a uniform height. His shirt collar was stained a darker color than his skin.

  Cowart looked up at the front door. It was a double width, carved wood. The house itself was a single-story ranch design that seemed to spread out over a small rise. He could see the black screen of an enclosed pool just above the roof line. There was a row of plants in front, trimmed meticulously like makeup carefully applied to a face. Becky bounded from the car and raced through the front door.

  He stood for a moment, waiting until Sandy appeared.

  She was swollen with pregnancy, moving carefully against the heat and discomfort. She had her arm wrapped around her daughter. “So, was it a success?”

  “We did it all.”

  “I expect so. Are you exhausted?”

  “A bit.”

  “How are things otherwise?”

  “Okay.”

  “You know, I still worry about you.”

  “Well, thanks, but I’m okay. You don’t have to.”

  “I wish we could talk. Can you come in? Have a cup of coffee? A cold drink?” She smiled. “I’d like to hear about everything. There’s a lot to talk about.”

  “Becky can fill you in.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Got to get back. I’m late as it is.”