Almost Midnight (33 page)

Darrell was on friendly terms with just about everybody at Potosi, in a casual kind of way, much like you might be on friendly terms with your fellow passengers on a cross-country bus trip. But that, for the most part, was as far as it went. He didn’t go out of his way to cultivate deeper friendships and he steered clear of all the usual prison cliques. He even kept his distance from the born-again crowd and their Sunday chapel services. As far as Darrell was concerned, death row was a place he just happened to be passing through. He didn’t want to have too much dirt to shake off when it came time for moving on.

His best friend, the guy he felt most comfortable talking with, was a death-row prisoner named Bert Leroy Hunter. Hunter was a former state computer programmer who’d pleaded guilty to killing an elderly woman and her middle-aged son during a robbery at their home in Jefferson City. Clinically depressed and suicidal at the time of his plea hearing, he waived his right to an attorney and a jury trial and told the court that he wanted to be executed. “Being strapped on that gurney at Potosi would be a blessing to the State and myself,” he said. The court apparently found no reason to disagree.

Hardly anyone on death row admitted actually committing the crimes for which they’d been sentenced. Many of them spent half their waking hours protesting their innocence. Bert Leroy Hunter was one of the very few Darrell took seriously in this regard.
Hunter insisted that he hadn’t killed the old lady and her son and that he’d pleaded guilty only because he had a death wish at the time. Darrell believed him. He thought Hunter was too sweet natured to kill anyone, too delightfully loopy. “Just a couple clicks away,” he’d say, “from being a real good man.” Not that Hunter couldn’t occasionally get on your nerves. He’d cruise the prison yard bragging about his genius-level IQ, which he claimed would be even higher were it not for years of cocaine abuse. Intensely competitive, he’d cheat in a heartbeat at Scrabble or poker or any other recreational game, like he was playing for millions in some back room at Atlantic City. He liked telling people that he was a split personality, and when Darrell once suggested that it must be quite a burden being a split personality, he snapped, “No, it isn’t—well, yes, it is.” Mostly Darrell just appreciated Hunter’s company, one of the few things that made the time pass easier.

There were quite a few names and faces at Potosi that Darrell recognized from back home. Marty Strange, for example—from the Taney County jail days. Strange, convicted of murdering his wife and kids, was now doing life and working in the prison library on the side. Another long-ago acquaintance, Glennon Paul Sweet, was stashed away in the housing unit next to Darrell’s, awaiting execution for the 1987 slaying of Missouri highway patrolman Russell Harper. While he was still on the loose, Sweet had been a full-time menace, running crank down to Texas and New Orleans, scheming it up with Lloyd Lawrence and Bill Gold. He reportedly had a hand-painted sign outside his house north of Springfield that read
NO NIGGERS ALLOWED
. Darrell had seen him at Joe Dean’s a few times, bumping or rolling bulldogs—letting the dogs go at it for five or ten minutes, no betting, just checking them out, seeing if they had the right stuff for a contract fight.

And then there was sweet Mary’s cousin, Red Stephens, who’d killed a Reeds Spring deputy some years back. Darrell had known Red long before he met Mary. He once showed up drunk at Red’s house in Galena only to be sucker-punched by Red or one of his buddies and knocked off the front porch. A month or so after
Darrell arrived at Potosi, Red sent word to him, “Anything you need, just let me know.” Later on, while they were walking the track together, Red said, “You know, it wasn’t me who knocked you off the front porch that time.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Darrell said. “It was my fault anyway.”

So Darrell held nothing against Red—and he certainly held nothing against Mary. This was where a lot of folks back home had it wrong. They assumed he’d be feeling betrayed, abandoned. They assumed he’d be angry. His sweetheart selling him out? Cutting a deal with the state to save her own skin? Of course he’d be angry.

Not a chance. Darrell wasn’t close to angry. He was grateful—and more deeply infatuated than ever. Mary had given him the best two-year run of his life. He’d idealized and romanticized every single moment of their time together. It was his constant fantasy; something to light a candle to. She was his sweetheart for all time, his one and only. His being imprisoned and on death row didn’t change a thing. He was grateful for what she’d given him, and grateful also that she wasn’t locked up somewhere. He was the one who had led her into the wilderness, not the other way around. He’d taken her through hell, and she’d stuck by him every inch of the way. How could he possibly resent Mary? How could he be angry with her for playing the only card she’d been dealt?

Outgoing phone calls are restricted at Potosi. Prisoners can only dial numbers they’ve been authorized to dial. One day Doyle Williams phoned his sister and had her patch a call through to Mary. Doyle handed the receiver to Darrell. Mary picked up on the other end. Darrell said, “Hi, baby.” Mary hung up.

Darrell was momentarily jolted. But just for a minute or two. He was a true believer. He believed in unconditional love. The time wasn’t right.

The time would come.

D
ARRELL WAS PACKING
on the pounds. Part of the problem was the starchy prison diet. The other part was his innate extremism—
“whole hog or nothing” he liked to call it. Some months he’d settle into a nice workout routine and fast-walk the track every day for an hour or two. But then he’d go months at a time just sitting around and eating. And that’s when he’d balloon up. He’d come in at around one ninety-five, now he was pushing two thirty. He wasn’t proud of the excess weight but he wasn’t overly concerned, either. Put him in a more natural environment, it was sure to melt away.

Food—even more than sex—was a constant preoccupation at Potosi. Inmates would complain endlessly about the miserable prison fare and fantasize aloud about the thick-cut pork chops, crispy fried chicken, and juicy T-bones they could be digging into at their hometown restaurants. Sometimes guys got so worked up thinking about food that they hit the mess hall for supper tense and angry. Nerves could run raw and ragged at supper. It was a prime time for altercations.

Usually nobody messed with Darrell. He was regarded as a standup guy who’d never think of snitching anyone off. He wasn’t involved in any of the prison drug or sex trade. He was on decent terms with both black prisoners and white prisoners. There was no reason, really, for anybody to mess with Darrell. Only once, at suppertime, did he ever come close to getting in a fight. He was standing second in the chow line, waiting his turn. The guy at the head of the line wouldn’t budge. He was letting his buddies cut in front while Darrell and everyone else behind him smoldered.

Finally, after five or six dudes had crashed the line, Darrell said to the guy, “I’ll be going next. It looks like you’re not interested in eating.”

The guy stepped back and flexed his shoulders, setting himself for some serious action.

“You know what you gotta do,” he said.

“Yow, I do,” Darrell said, ready to go.

They stood there ten or fifteen seconds, facing each other down, before they both eased up and let the moment pass. Afterward, Darrell reprimanded himself. He’d just come within inches of precisely the kind of fracas he’d been trying to avoid. He’d try his best to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

Drugs were another preoccupation—and considerably easier to come by than pork chops, fried chicken, or T-bones. Occasionally guards would smuggle drugs inside and pass them off to a prisoner they were trying to impress or a prisoner they were trying to buy sexual favors from. More often it was visitors who did the smuggling, tucking the goodies into body cavities and sweating their way past the security checkpoints, praying they wouldn’t get singled out for a full body search. They’d then hand the stuff over to the guy they were visiting who at first opportunity would keester it or shove it up his rear end. In a slightly classier variation, a wife or girlfriend would tuck a condom containing drugs into her mouth and then transfer it during the brief “greeting” kiss in the visiting room. Her man would swallow the condom and later on fish it out of the toilet in his cell.

Darrell knew all about the drugs. He knew who was bringing them in and who was taking them and who was making a profit off them. A few years ago it would have been exciting knowing all of this. Now it bored him. The whole scene left him cold. He couldn’t care less about the drugs.

The doubling up of capital-punishment prisoners got under way in late 1995, just before Christmas. It seemed unlikely to go off without a hitch. Seventeen prisoners, Darrell included, signaled their intention to protest the new policy. They were supposed to be hard-knock guys; here was their chance to prove it. There was no way they were simply going to roll over and take whatever the institution decided to dish out. They’d hang tough, stand up to the prison bosses, and insist on their right to their own cells.

The test of resolve came several months later, in May, when the superintendent of Potosi issued an ultimatum: either double up without fuss or suffer banishment to the administrative segregation unit, more commonly known as isolation or the hole. This was serious business. Banishment to the hole meant being locked in a tiny cell virtually twenty-four hours a day, with canteen, visiting, and basic walking-around privileges severely curtailed. It was a stiff price to pay for joining a fight that probably wasn’t winnable anyway. Far too stiff, apparently, for most of the would-be protesters. One after
another, they caved in. Being consigned to the hole—the very idea of it—was more grief than the malcontents could handle. There was just one holdout. Of the seventeen guys who’d initially locked arms, Darrell alone stood his ground. Refusing to double up, he was thrown into isolation. He’d remain in isolation for three long years.

Anyone who knew Darrell, truly knew him, wouldn’t have been surprised. Of course he’d refuse to back down. Once he zeroed in on something, there was no knocking him off course. Going to the hole didn’t faze him a bit. He’d been in training half his life for precisely such a punishment, hanging out by himself in the brush back home, surviving by his wits, playing by his own rules. He’d deal with the hole: How rough, after all, could it be?

Quite a bit rougher, as it turned out, than Darrell had anticipated, especially at night. At ten o’clock, when the lights in administrative segregation were switched off, the howling began. The unit became a bedlam of shouting and weeping and tortured sexual release. Guys would be hollering at their long-lost lovers; they’d be taunting imaginary demons and wailing for mercy and crying out for their mommas. They’d be screaming blood-curdling fantasies of revenge and violence. Darrell would wad up pieces of toilet paper and stick them in his ears; he’d stuff his prison-issue blanket under the door. Try as he might, however, he couldn’t block out the noise. Some nights he’d try reading himself to sleep by the shaft of light that came in through his window slit from the security lamps outside. He’d usually manage to drop off at two or three, and then wake up at five when the lights were switched back on.

All meals were served through slots in the cell doors. The food ranged from dismal to inedible, but it seemed to have a tranquilizing effect on the shouters and weepers. The three- or four-hour stretch after breakfast was the most blessedly quiet period of the day. Darrell would frequently take advantage of the lull in lunacy by grabbing some sleep until ten-thirty or thereabouts, which was when the lunch trays were brought to the unit. Then it was largely a matter of killing time until supper at four-thirty, after which he’d top out the day by answering his mail, reading his Bible, and losing himself in thought.

Communicating with other prisoners was a tricky proposition. Some guys would simply holler from their cells for one and all to hear. Darrell preferred subtler methods, such as writing kites, or notes, which he’d hand off to wing workers, who were prisoners assigned tasks such as passing out food trays and picking up laundry. The wing workers would deliver the kites to Darrell’s buddies in other housing units. On good days he might receive something in return, a kite from Bert Leroy Hunter, maybe, or a treat from the canteen socked away in his parcel of fresh laundry.

Anyone so inclined could also conduct cell-to-cell conversations through the unit’s air vents. The hole was designed so that groups of four cells, two on the bottom walk and their twins directly above, shared the same vent. Hearing your vent mates, providing it wasn’t howling time, was seldom a problem; the problem was picking up something actually worth hearing. During all of Darrell’s time in the hole, the only guy whose conversation he found even halfway interesting was a serial killer named Joseph Paul Franklin. Franklin was on death row for the 1977 killing of a man outside a synagogue in Clayton, Missouri. He’d been linked to more than twenty murders or attempted murders all told, including the 1978 shooting of
Hustler
magnate Larry Flynt. Darrell enjoyed talking with Franklin now and again through their shared vent, though that was as close as he really cared to get. “The guy could be civil but he could also snap easy—hard and fast,” Darrell recalled of their time together in the hole. “Out on the street, you’d definitely want a gun on him at all times.”

Despite being physically separated from one another, prisoners in isolation were still able to exchange smokes and lighters and other contraband. Their main way of doing so was through the use of so-called Cadillacs. Here’s how it worked: Your buddy in the cell down the walk wants a couple of cigarettes. You put the smokes in an envelope weighted down with a packet of ketchup or whatnot and tie the envelope to the end of a cord, fashioned out of strands you’ve pulled from your sheet or mattress. You then throw the weighted end of the cord, or Cadillac, out onto the walk. The guy in the next cell reels it in and transfers the smokes to his own Cadillac and guns
it out again. On and on down the walk, until the cigarettes reach their destination.