Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  Wilcox shook his head. “It ain’t happened yet. Class is still in session.” He grinned at Cowart. “You’re looking a bit pale. Something on your mind?”

  Before Cowart could reply, Wilcox whispered, “Got any last words? It’s midnight.”

  They waited a heartbeat or two.

  A side door opened and the prison warden stepped through. Blair Sullivan was next, flanked by two guards and trailed by a third. His face was rigid and pale, a corpselike appearance. His whole wiry body seemed smaller and sickly. He wore a simple white shirt buttoned tight to the neck and dark blue trousers. A priest wearing a collar, carrying a Bible and an expression of frustrated dismay, trailed the group. The priest shuffled off to the side of the chamber, pausing only to shrug in the direction of the warden, and cracked open the Good Book. He started reading quietly to himself. Cowart saw Sullivan’s eyes widen when he spotted the chair. They swung abruptly to a telephone on the wall, and for the briefest moment his knees seemed to lose some strength, and he tottered. But he regained control almost instantly and the moment of hesitation was lost. It was the first time he’d seen Sullivan act in any way vaguely human, Cowart thought. Then things started to happen swiftly, with the herky-jerkiness of a silent movie.

  Sullivan was steered into the seat and two guards dropped to their knees and started fastening leg and arm braces. Brown leather straps were tightened around Sullivan’s chest, bunching up his white shirt. One guard attached an electrode to the prisoner’s leg. Another swooped behind the chair and seized a cap, ready to bring it down over Sullivan’s head.

  The warden stepped forward and started reading from the black-bordered death warrant signed by the governor of Florida. Each syllable pricked Cowart’s fear, as if they were being read for him. The warden hurried his words, then took a deep breath and tried to slow his pace down. His voice seemed oddly tinny and distant. There were speakers built into the walls and microphones hidden in the death chamber.

  The warden finished reading. For an instant, he stared at the sheet of paper as if searching for something else to read. Then he looked up and peered at Sullivan. “Any last words?” he asked quietly.

  “Fuck you. Let ’er rip,” Sullivan said. His voice quavered uncharacteristically.

  The warden gestured with his right hand, the one that held the curled-up warrant, toward the guard standing behind the chair, who abruptly brought the black leather shroud cap and face mask down over the prisoner’s head. The guard then attached a large electrical conductor to the cap. Sullivan squirmed then, an abrupt thrust against the bonds that held him. Cowart saw the dragon tattoos on the man’s arms spring to life as the muscles beneath the skin twitched and strained. The tendons on his neck tightened like ropes pulled taut by a sudden great wind. Sullivan was shouting something but the words were muffled by a leather chin strap and tongue pad that had been forced between his teeth. The words became inarticulate grunts and moans, rising and falling in panic pitch. In the witness room there was no noise except for the slow in and out of tortured breathing.

  Cowart saw the warden nod almost imperceptibly toward a partition in the rear of the death chamber. There was a small slit there, and for an instant, he saw a pair of eyes.

  The executioner’s eyes.

  They stared out at the man in the chair, then they disappeared.

  There was a thunking sound.

  Someone gasped. Another person coughed hard. There were a few whispered expletives. The lights dimmed momentarily. Then silence regained the room.

  Cowart thought he could not breathe. It was as if some hand had encircled his chest and squeezed all the air from within him. He watched motionless as the color of Sullivan’s fists changed from pink to white to gray.

  The warden nodded again toward the rear partition.

  A distant generator whine buzzed and shook the small space. A faint odor of burnt flesh crept into his nostrils and filled his stomach with renewed nausea.

  There was another fracture in time as the physician waited for the 2,500 volts to slide from the dead man’s body. Then he stepped forward, removing a stethoscope from his black bag.

  And it was done. Cowart watched the people in the execution chamber as they circled around Sullivan’s body, slumped in the polished oaken chair. It was as if they were stage players readying to break down a set after the final performance of some failed show. He and the other official witnesses stared, trying to catch a glimpse of the dead man’s face as he was shifted from the killing seat into a black rubber body bag. But Sullivan was zipped away too quickly for anyone to see if his eyeballs had exploded or his skin had been scorched red and black. The body was hustled back through the side door on a gurney. It should be terrible, he thought, but it was simply routine. Perhaps that was the most terrifying aspect of it. He had witnessed the factorylike processing of evil. Death canned and bottled and delivered with all the drama of the morning milk.

  “Scratch one bad guy,” Wilcox said. All the jocularity had fled from his voice, replaced with a barren satisfaction. “It’s all over . . .” The detective glanced at Cowart. “. . . Except for the shouting.”

  * * *

  He walked through the prison corridors with the rest of the official witnesses toward where the other members of the press contingent and the demonstrators had crowded. He could see the artificial light of the television cameras flooding the vestibule, giving it a forced otherworldly glow. The polished floor glistened; the whitewashed walls seemed to vibrate with light. A bank of microphones was arranged behind a makeshift podium. He tried to sidle to the side of the room, edging toward the door, as the warden approached the gathering, holding up his hand to cut off questions, but there were no shadows to hide in.

  “I’ll read a short statement,” the warden said. His voice creaked with the strain of the events. “Then I’ll answer your questions. Then the pool reporters will brief you.”

  He gave the official time of death as 12:08 A.M. The warden droned that a representative from the state attorney general’s office had been present when Sullivan had been prepared for execution and during the procedure, to make certain that there was no controversy over the events—that no one would come forward later and claim that Sullivan had been denied his rights, had been taunted or beaten—as they had more than a dozen years earlier when the state had renewed the death penalty by executing a somewhat pathetic drifter named John ­Spenkelink. He said that Sullivan had refused a final plea to file an appeal, right outside the execution chamber door. He quoted the dead man’s final words as, “Obscenity you. Let ’er rip.”

  The still photographers’ cameras made a whirring, clicking noise like some flight of mechanical birds taking wing en masse.

  The warden then gave way to the three pool reporters. Each in turn started reading from their notepads, coolly relating the minute details of the execution. They were all pale, but their voices were steady. The woman from Miami told the crowd that Sullivan’s fingers had stiffened, then curled into fists when the first jolt hit him and that his back seemed to arc away from the chair. The reporter from St. Petersburg had noticed the momentary hesitation that had stymied Sullivan for just an instant when he spotted the chair. The reporter from the Tampa Tribune said that Sullivan had glared at the witnesses without compassion, and that he seemed mostly angry as he was strapped in. He had noticed, too, that one of the guards had fumbled with one of the straps around the condemned man’s right leg, causing him to have to redo the binding rapidly. The leather had frayed under the shock of the execution, the reporter said, and afterward was almost severed by the force of Sullivan’s struggle against the electric current. Twenty-five hundred volts, the reporter reminded the gathering.

  Cowart heard another voice at his shoulder. He pivoted and saw the two detectives from Monroe County.

  Andrea Shaeffer’s voice whispered soothingly, “What did he tell you, Mr. Cowa
rt? Who killed those people?”

  Her gray eyes were fastened onto his, a whole different sort of heat.

  “He did,” Cowart replied.

  She reached out and grasped his arm. But before the detective could follow up, there was another clamor from the assembly.

  “Where’s Cowart?”

  “Cowart, your turn! What happened?”

  Cowart pulled away from the detective and walked unsteadily toward the podium, trying desperately to sort through everything he’d heard. He felt his hand quiver, knew his face was flushed and that sweat ringed his forehead. He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and slowly wiped his brow, as if he could wipe away the panic that filled him.

  He thought, I have done nothing wrong. I am not the guilty person here. But he didn’t believe it. He wanted a moment to think, to figure out what to say, but there was no time. Instead, he grabbed on to the first question he heard.

  “Why didn’t he file an appeal?” someone yelled.

  Cowart took a deep breath and answered, “He didn’t want to sit in prison waiting for the state to come get him. So he went and got the state. It’s not that unusual. Others have done it—Texas, North Carolina, Gilmore out in Utah. It’s sorta like suicide, only officially sanctioned.”

  He saw pens scraping across paper, his words falling onto so many blank pages.

  “What did he tell you when you went back there and talked with him?”

  Cowart felt pinioned by despair. And then he remembered something Sullivan had told him earlier: If you want someone to believe a lie, mix a bit of truth in with it. So he did. The killer’s formula: Mix lies and truths.

  “He wanted to confess,” Cowart said. “It was pretty much like Ted Bundy a few years back, when he told investigators about all the crimes he’d committed before going to the chair. That’s what Sullivan did.”

  “Why?”

  “How many?”

  “Who?”

  He held up his hands. “Guys, give me a break. There’s no confirmation on any of this. I don’t know for certain if he was telling me the truth or not. He could have been lying . . .”

  “Before going to the chair? C’mon!” someone shouted from the back.

  Cowart bristled. “Hey! I don’t know. I’ll tell you one thing he told me: He said if killing people wasn’t so hard for him, how hard did I think lying would be?”

  There was a lull as people scribbled his words.

  “Look,” Cowart said, “if I tell you that Blair Sullivan confessed to the murder of Joe Blow and there was no such murder, or someone else got charged with the crime, or maybe Joe Blow’s body’s never been found, then, hell, we’ve got a mess. I’ll tell you this. He confessed to multiple homicides . . .”

  “How many?”

  “As many as forty.”

  The number electrified the crowd. There were more shouted questions, the lights seemed to redouble in intensity.

  “Where?”

  “In Florida, Lousiana, and Alabama. There were some other crimes as well, rapes, robberies.”

  “How long?”

  “He’d been doing them for months. Maybe years.”

  “What about the murders in Monroe County? His mother and stepfather? What did he tell you about them?”

  Cowart breathed slowly. “He hired someone to do those crimes. At least, that’s what he said.”

  Cowart’s eyes swept over to where Shaeffer stood. He saw her stiffen and lean her head toward her partner. Weiss was red-faced. Cowart turned away swiftly.

  “Hired who?”

  “I don’t know,” Cowart said. “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  The first lie.

  “Come on! He must have told you something or somebody.”

  “He wouldn’t get that specific.”

  The first lie bred another.

  “You mean he tells you he’s the person who arranged a double homicide and you didn’t ask him how he managed it?”

  “I did. He wouldn’t say.”

  “Well, how did he contact the killer? His phone privileges were monitored. His mail was censored. He’s been in isolation on Death Row. How did he do it?” This question was greeted with some buttressing cheers. It came from one of the pool reporters, who was shaking his head as he asked it.

  “He implied he set it up through some sort of informal prison grapevine.”

  Not exactly a lie, Cowart thought. An oblique truth.

  “You’re holding back!” someone shouted.

  He shook his head.

  “Details!” someone called out.

  He held up his arms.

  “You’re gonna put it all in the Journal tomorrow, right?”

  Resentment, jealousy, like the lights, flowed over him. He realized that any of the others would have sold their souls to be in his position. They all knew something had happened and hated not knowing precisely what. Information is the currency of journalism, and he was foreclosing on their estate. He knew no one in that room would ever forgive him—if the truth ever came out.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he pleaded. “I haven’t had a chance to sort through anything. I’ve got hours of tape to go through. Give me a break.”

  “Was he crazy?”

  “He was a psychopath. He had his own agenda.”

  That was certainly the truth. And then the question he dreaded.

  “What did he tell you about Joanie Shriver? Did he finally confess to her murder?”

  Cowart realized that he could simply say yes and be done with it. Destroy the tapes. Live with his memory. Instead, he stumbled and landed somewhere between truth and fiction.

  “She was part of the confession,” he said.

  “He killed her?”

  “He told me exactly how it was done. He knew all the details that only the killer would know.”

  “Why won’t you say yes or no?”

  Cowart tried not to squirm. “Guys. Sullivan was a special case. He didn’t put things in yes-and-no terms. Didn’t deal in absolutes, not even during his confession.”

  “What did he say about Ferguson?”

  Cowart took a deep breath. “He had nothing but hatred for Ferguson.”

  “Is he connected to all this?”

  “It was my impression that Sullivan would have killed Ferguson, too, if he’d had the chance. If he could have made the arrangements, I think he would have put Ferguson on his list.”

  He exhaled slowly. He could see the interest in the room shifting back to Sullivan. By assigning Ferguson to the list of potential victims, he’d managed to give him a different status than he deserved.

  “Will you provide us with a transcript of what he did say?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not a pool reporter.”

  The questions increased in anger.

  “What are you going to do now? Gonna write a book?”

  “Why won’t you share it?”

  “What, you think you’re gonna win another Pulitzer?”

  He shook his head.

  Not that, he thought. He doubted he would have the one he had won much longer. A prize? I’ll be lucky if my prize is to live through all this.

  He raised his hand. “I wish I could say that the execution tonight put an end to Blair Sullivan’s story, guys. But it didn’t. There’s a bunch of loose ends that have to be tied up. There are detectives waiting to talk to me. I’ve got my own damn deadlines to meet. I’m sorry, but that’s it. No more.”

  He walked away from the podium, followed by cameras, shouted questions, and growing dread. He felt hands grasping at him, but he pushed through the crowd, reached the prison doors, and passed through into the deep black of the hours after midnight. An anti-death-penalty group, holdi
ng candles and placards and singing hymns, was gathered by the road. The pitch of their voices washed around him, tugging him like a blustery wind, away from the prison. “What a friend we have in Jesus . . .” One of the group, a college coed wearing a hooded sweatshirt that made her seem like some odd Inquisition priest, screamed at him, her words cutting bladelike across the gentle rhythms of the hymn, “Ghoul! Killer!” But he sidestepped past her words, heading toward his car.

  He was fumbling for his keys when Andrea Shaeffer caught up with him. “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “I can’t talk. Not now.”

  She grabbed him by the shirt, suddenly pulling him toward her. “Why the hell not? What’s going on, Cowart? Yesterday was no good. Today was no good. Tonight’s no good. When are you going to level with us?”

  “Look,” he cried. “They’re dead, dammit! They were old and he hated them and they got killed and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about that now! You don’t have to have an answer right now. It can wait until the morning. No one else is dying tonight!”

  The detective started to say something, then paused. She fixed him with a single, long, fierce glance, shut her mouth and set her jaw. Then she poked him three times in the chest with her index finger, hard, before stepping aside so that he could get into the car.

  “In the morning,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Miami. My office.”

  “I’ll be there. You be sure you’re there as well.”

  She stepped back from the car, menace creeping into her tone.

  “Yes, dammit, yes. Miami.”

  Shaeffer made a small sweeping motion with her hand, as if reluctantly granting permission for him to depart. But her eyes were filled with suspicion, narrowed to pinpoints.

  He jumped behind the wheel and thrust the keys into the ignition, slamming the door. The engine fired and he snatched at the gearshift, put the car in gear, and pulled back.

  But as he retreated, the headlights swept over the mocking red check of Detective Wilcox’s sportcoat. He stood in the roadway, his arms crossed, watching Cowart closely, blocking the reporter’s path. He shook his head with exaggerated slowness, made his fist into a pistol and fired it at him. Then he stepped aside to let him pass.