Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  He shook his head again. Mustn’t forget, he thought. He remembered the epithet that had burst from the dead man’s brother’s lips a few hours earlier. None of it has changed.

  He knocked on his eldest daughter’s door. “Come on, Lisa! Rise and shine. Let’s go!” He turned quickly and banged away on the younger girl’s door. “Samantha! Up and at ’em. Hit the deck running. Schooltime!”

  The groans amused him, turning his thoughts momentarily away from Pachoula, the murdered girl, and the two men who’d occupied space on Death Row.

  Tanny Brown spent the next half hour in suburban-father school-day routine, prodding, cajoling, demanding, and finally accomplishing the desired result: Both girls out the door, with homework intact, lunches made, in time to catch the school bus. With the two girls gone, his father had retreated to his bedroom to try to take a nap, and he was left alone with the growing morning. Sunlight flooded the room, making him feel as if everything was twisted about. He felt like some odd nocturnal beast trapped by the daylight, lurching from shadow to shadow, searching for the familiarity and safety of night.

  He looked across the room and his eyes focused on an empty flower vase that stood on a shelf. It was tall, with a graceful hourglass shape, and a single painted flower climbing up the ceramic side. It made him smile. He remembered his wife buying the vase when he took her on a vacation to Mexico, and hand-carrying it all the way back to Pachoula, afraid to trust it to doormen, luggage handlers, or porters. When they returned home, she put it in the center of the dining-room table and always kept it filled with flowers. She was like that. If there was something she wanted, there was no end to what she would do to accomplish it. Even if it meant carrying a silly vase by hand.

  No flowers anymore, he thought, except for the girls.

  He remembered how hard they’d tried to save her at the emergency room, how, when he’d arrived, they were still working, crowded around, running adrenaline and plasma lines, massaging her heart, trying to coax some life into her body. He’d known with a single look that it was useless. It had been something left over from the war, a way of understanding when some invisible line had been crossed and when, even with all of science gathered, connected, and being utilized, death still beckoned inexorably. They’d worked hard, passionately. She had been there herself, some twenty minutes earlier, working alongside all of them. Twenty minutes to get her raincoat, maybe make some small, end-of-the-workday joke, say good night to the rest of the emergency-room crew, walk to her car, drive five blocks and be rammed broadside by a drunk driver in a pickup truck. Even after she was dead, when they knew there was no hope, they kept working. They knew she would have done the same for them.

  He stared at the ceiling but couldn’t sleep, regardless of how exhausted he was. He realized that he no longer wondered when he would get over missing her, having come to understand that he would never get over her death. He had reached an accommodation with it, which was sufficient to get him from day to day.

  He rose and walked into his youngest daughter’s room, moved over to her bureau and started to push aside some of the girlish things collected there, a case overflowing with beads and rings and ribbons, a toy bear with a torn ear, an old loose-leaf binder stuffed with a different year’s schoolwork, a tangle of combs and brushes. It did not take long to find what he was searching for: a small silver frame with a photo inside. He held it up in front of him. The frame gleamed when it caught the sunlight.

  It was a picture of two little girls, one black, one white, one raven-haired, one blonde, arm-in-arm, giggling, braces and wildly mussed makeup, feather boas and dress-up clothes.

  He looked at the two faces in the photograph.

  Friends, he thought. Anyone would look at that picture and realize that nothing else counted, that they just liked each other, shared secrets and passions, tears and jokes. They had been nine and mugging shamelessly for his camera. It had been Halloween, and they had dressed up in colorful, cacophonous outfits, outdoing each other with wild, outrageous appearance, all laughter and unfettered childish glee.

  He was almost overcome with fury. All he could see was Blair Sullivan, mocking him. I hope it hurt, he thought. I hope it ripped your soul from your body with all the pain in the world.

  Sullivan’s face disappeared, and he thought of Ferguson.

  You think you’re free. You think you’re going to get away with it. Not a chance.

  He looked down at the picture in his hand. He especially liked the way the girls had their arms around each other’s shoulders. His daughter’s black arm hung down around the front of Joanie Shriver’s body, and Joanie’s arm hung around his daughter’s, so the two girls were hugging close, framing each other.

  Her first and best friend, he thought

  He stared at Joanie’s eyes. They were a vibrant blue. The same color as the Florida sky on the morning of his wife’s funeral. He had stood apart from the rest of the mourners, clutching his two daughters beneath his arms, listening to the drone of the preacher’s voice, words about faith and devotion and love and being called home to the valley, and hearing little of it. He had felt crippled, unsure whether he would be able to summon the energy to take another step. He had pinned his daughters to his sides, aware only that each of them was convulsed with tears. He had wanted to be enraged but knew that would have been too simple, that he was instead going to be cursed with a dull constant agony blended with the terror that with their mother gone, he would somehow lose his daughters. That with their center ripped away, they couldn’t hold together. He had lost his tongue, didn’t know what to say to them, didn’t know what to do for them, especially Samantha, the younger, who had sobbed uncontrollably since the accident

  The other mourners had kept their distance, but Joanie Shriver had pulled away from the comforting grasp of her own father, serious beyond her years, wearing her best dress and, eyes filled with tears, had walked past the lines of people, right up to him and said, “Don’t you worry about Samantha. She’s my friend and I will take care of her.” And in that moment, she’d reached out and taken hold of his daughter’s hand and stood there holding it as well. And she’d been true to her word. She’d always been there, whenever Samantha needed to turn to someone. Weekends. Lonely holidays. After school days. Helping him to restore a routine and solidity to life. Nine years old and wiser by far than any adult.

  So, he thought, she was more than just her friend. She was my friend, too. Saved our lives.

  Self-hatred filled him. All the authority and power in the world, and I couldn’t protect her.

  He remembered the war. Medic! they called, and I went. Did I save any of them? He remembered a white boy, one week in the platoon, a cowboy from Wyoming who’d taken a round in the chest, a sucking chest wound. It’d whistled, taunting him as he struggled to save the soldier. He’d had his eyes locked onto Tanny Brown, watching through the haze of hurt and shock for a sign that would tell him he was going to live or die. He’d still been looking when the last breath wheezed through his chest. It was the same look that George and Betty Shriver had worn when he came to their door carrying the worst news.

  Brown shook his head. How long have I known George Shriver? Since the day I went to work in his father’s store and he took a mop and worked next to me.

  His hand twitched. I’ve buried too many. He looked at the picture a final time before setting it back on top of the bureau. It’s not over, he insisted. I owe you too much.

  He walked from his daughter’s room into his bedroom. He no longer thought of exhaustion or rest. Propelled by outrage and debt, he began collecting a change of clothes and stuffing them into an overnight bag, wondering when the next commuter flight down to Miami left the airport.

  13

  A HOLE IN THE STORY

  He had no plan.

  Matthew Cowart faced the day after the execution of Blair Sullivan with all t
he enthusiasm of a man who’d been told he was next. He drove his rental car rapidly through the night, down more than half the length of the state, jumping on Interstate 95 south of Saint Augustine. He cruised the three-hundred-plus miles at an erratic pace, often accelerating to ninety miles per hour, oddly surprised he was not stopped once by a trooper, though he passed several heading in the opposite direction. He soared through the darkness, fueled by all the furious contradictions ricocheting back and forth in his head. The first morning sunshine began to rise as he pushed past the Palm Beaches, shedding no light on his troubles. It was well after dawn when he finally deposited the car with a surly Hertz agent at Miami International Airport, who had difficulty understanding why Cowart had not returned the vehicle to its North Florida origin. A Cuban taxicab driver, jabbering about baseball and politics without making a distinction between the two and using an energetic mixture of languages, muscled his way through the city’s morning rush-hour traffic to Cowart’s apartment, leaving the reporter standing alone at the curbside, staring up into the wavy, pale blue heat of the sky.

  He paced about his apartment uncomfortably, wondering what to do. He told himself he should go in to the newspaper but was unable immediately to summon the necessary energy. The newspaper suddenly no longer seemed a place of sanctuary, but instead a swamp or a minefield. He stared down at his hands, turning them over, counting the lines and veins, thinking how ironic it was that so few hours earlier he’d been desperate to be alone and now that he was, he was incapable of deciding what to do.

  He plumbed his memory for others trapped in the same type of circumstances, as if others’ mistakes would help diminish his own. He recalled William F. Buckley’s efforts to free Edgar Smith from Death Row in New Jersey in the early sixties and Norman Mailer’s assistance to Jack Abbott. He remembered the columnist standing in front of a bank of microphones, angrily admitting to being duped by the killer. He could picture the novelist fighting through the glare of camera lights, refusing to talk about his murderous charge. I’m not the first reporter to make an error, he thought. It’s a high-risk profession. The stakes are always tough. No reporter is immune from a carefully executed deception.

  But that only made him feel worse.

  He sat up in his seat, as if talking to someone in a chair opposite him and said, “What could I have done?”

  He rose and started pacing about the room. “Dammit, there was no evidence. It made sense. It made perfect sense. Dammit. Dammit.”

  Rage suddenly overcame him, and he reached out and swept a stack of newspapers and magazines from a countertop. Before they had settled, he picked up a table and overturned it, crashing it into a sofa. The thud of the furniture smashing together was intoxicating. He started to mutter obscenities, picking up pace, assaulting the room. He seized some dishes and threw them to the floor. He swept clear a shelf filled with books. He knocked over chairs, punched the walls, finally throwing himself down next to a couch.

  “How could I have known?” he shouted. The silence in the room was his only answer. A different exhaustion filled him, and he leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. Abruptly, he laughed. “Boy,” he said, affecting a lugubrious Hollywood-Southern accent, “you done fucked up good. Fucked up righteous. Done fucked up in a unique and special way.” He drew out the words, letting them roll around the disheveled apartment.

  He sat up quickly. “All right. What are we going to do?” Silence. “That’s right,” he laughed again. “We just don’t know, do we?”

  He rose and walked through the mess to his desk and tore open a bottom drawer. He shuffled through a stack of papers until he found a year-old copy of the Sunday paper with his first story. It had already started to yellow slightly. The newsprint felt brittle to his touch. The headline jumped at him and he started reading through the story.

  “Questions raised about Panhandle murder case,” he abbreviated the words of the opening paragraph out loud. “No shit.”

  He continued to read as far as he could, past the lead and through the opening page to the jump and the double-truck inside. He wouldn’t look at the picture of Joanie Shriver but stared angrily at the photos of Sullivan and Ferguson.

  He was about to crumple the paper and throw it into the wastebasket when he stopped and looked at it again. Grabbing a yellow highlight pen, he started marking the occasional word or phrase. After he finished the entire story a second time, he laughed. In all the words written, there was nothing wrong. There was nothing really untrue. Nothing inaccurate.

  Except everything.

  He looked at what he’d written again: All the “questions” had been correct. Robert Earl Ferguson’s conviction had been based on the flimsiest evidence concocted in a prejudicial atmosphere. Was the confession beaten out of Ferguson? His stories had only cited what the prisoner had contended and the policemen denied. It was Tanny Brown, Cowart thought, who had been unable to explain the length of time Ferguson had been held in custody before “confession.” It had deserved to be set aside. The jury that had convicted him had been steamrollered into their decision by passions. A savagely murdered little white girl and an angry black man accused of the crime and represented by an incompetent old attorney. A perfect formula for prejudice. His own words—illegally obtained—putting him on the Row. There was no question about all that, about the injustice that had beset Ferguson in the days after Joanie Shriver’s body had been discovered.

  Except for one isolated detail. He had killed the little girl. At least, according to a mass murderer.

  His head spun.

  Cowart continued to scan through his story. Blair Sullivan had been in Escambia County at the time of the murder. That had been confirmed and double-confirmed. There was no question Sullivan had been in the midst of a murderous spree. He should have been a ­suspect—if the police had bothered to look past the obvious.

  The only outright lie—if it was one—that he could detect belonged to Ferguson, when he had accused Sullivan of confessing to the crime. But that was Ferguson talking—carefully attributed and quoted, not himself.

  And yet, everything was a lie, the explosive coupling of the two men completely obscuring whatever truth lay about.

  He thought, I am in hell. The simple, terrible reality was, for all the right reasons, all the wrong things had happened.

  The first two times the telephone rang, he ignored it. The third time, he stirred himself and, despite knowing there was no one he wanted to talk to, plucked the phone from its cradle and held it to his ear.

  “Yes?”

  “Christ, Matt?”

  It was Will Martin from the editorial department.

  “Will?”

  “Jesus, fella, where the hell have you been? Everyone’s going slightly bananas trying to find you.”

  “I drove back. Just got in.”

  “From Starke? That’s an eight-hour trip.”

  “Less than six, actually. I was going pretty fast.”

  “Well, boy, hope you can write as fast as you can drive. The city desk is screaming for your copy and we got a couple hours before first-edition deadline. You got to get your rear in gear, in here, pronto.” The editor’s singsong voice was filled with excitement.

  “Sure. Sure . . .” Cowart listened to his own voice as if it were someone else talking on the telephone. “Hey, Will, what’re the wires moving?”

  “Wild stuff. They’re still doing new leads on that little press conference of yours. Just what the hell happened up there, anyway? Nobody’s talking about anything else and nobody knows a damn thing. You ought to see your phone messages. The networks, the Times and Post, and the newsweeklies, just for starters. The three local affiliates have the front door staked out, so we got to figure a way of getting you in here without too much fuss. There’s a half-dozen calls already from homicide cops working cold cases that just happen to be on the rout
e that Sullivan took. Everybody wants to know what that killer told you before taking his evening juice, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

  “Sullivan confessed to a bunch of crimes.”

  “I know that. The wires have run that already. That’s what you told everybody up there. But we’ve got to get the inside story right now, son. Chapter and verse. Names, dates, and details. Right now. You got it on tape? We got to get that to a typist, hell, a half-dozen typists, if need be, get some transcripts made. C’mon, Matty, I know you’re probably exhausted, buddy, but you got to rally. Pop some NoDoz, gulp some coffee. Just get on in here. Pump out those words. You got to move, Matty, move, before this place gets crazy. Hell, you can sleep later. Anyway, sleep’s overrated. Better to have a big story anytime. Trust me.”