Fury (10 page)

On Corso’s side the protesters leaned out to wave their signs in his face. Someone poked at the window with a cross-country ski pole. Corso fed the Chevy more gas. Someone screamed the word “murderer.” He made out a sign. It said “SHAME.”

Twenty yards from the gate, a beer can burst against the passenger window, which cracked but did not break, pulling a gasp from Dougherty and constricting Corso’s throat even further.

Then, suddenly, they rolled past the outermost fence and the crowd was gone. Corso’s hands shook as he braked the car at the guard gate. He swallowed twice and looked over at Dougherty. She was pale and breathing raggedly. The windshield on her side was completely covered with something pink. She looked to Corso, as if for an explanation.

“Strawberry, I think,” Corso said.

Death row. Building H of the Washington State Penitentary at Walla Walla, Washington. All the way at the back of the enclosure. Newest building in a hundred-year-old complex about the size of a small New England town. A three-story brick building. Gleaming gray linoleum floors, burnt-orange concrete walls. None of the multiple-radio-station, hip-hop, honky-tonk screaming heebie-jeebie chaos of a regular cell block. Dead-ass silence and lifeless air so thick you felt as if you needed to swim with your arms as you walked along the concrete canyons.

The bullet-headed sergeant who’d met them in reception hadn’t bothered with introductions. Just said Himes was a “dead man,” so he couldn’t leave the row. Said they had a room on the row where the condemned met with their lawyers. If they wanted to see him, it would have to be there. Since then, Corso and Dougherty had been issued badges, passed through three checkpoints, three increasingly intimate friskings, two metal detectors, and were now without shoes, belts, jewelry, wallets, cell phones, and all the other identity accoutrements of modern society. Reduced to visitors eighty-eight and eighty-nine for the day. Names not even optional.

They’d already been through the camera equipment twice, but Bullethead still checked the inspection tags at a small green table outside the entrance to death row, then handed the camera bag back to Dougherty. He punched the intercom button to the left of the orange steel door. “Clear,” he said. The door rolled open.

Bullethead walked without swinging his arms. Like he was on parade or something. He led them through the door to the first room on the right, selected a key from a ring attached to his belt, stretched the cable out, and snapped the lock. He pulled the door open and stood aside. “I’ll be right outside the door,” he announced in a flat, emotionless tone that made it impossible to tell whether he meant it as admonition or reassurance.

The room was about the size of the bathroom in an average city apartment and smelled about the same. Maybe six by eight. That noxious green the government paints everything. A narrow counter ran across the long wall opposite the door. Two ancient oak chairs waited, the varnish on their seats worn away by a hundred years of squirming asses. The air had an acrid quality, as if it were tinctured with adrenaline.

Meg Dougherty’s eyes moved toward the door when it snapped shut. Her face looked shiny and stretched in the bright fluorescent light. “You okay?” Corso asked.

She took a deep breath. “You should have told me to wear a suit of armor,” she said. “This is…” She rolled her eyes. “I had no idea,” she said.

“Prisons are the opposite of everything else in the world,” Corso said.

Meg slung the camera bag up onto the counter just as the light in the next room burst on. She jumped. Looked to see if Corso noticed. If he had, he wasn’t letting on. He was focused on the room next door and fumbling for his notebook.

A mirror image of the room they were in. In between, three inches of wire-reinforced Plexiglas, with a stainless-steel hole in the center, like a movie theater box office, allowing attorney and client to converse with only a fine screen separating them.

Walter Leroy came into the room at a trot. Just because he was wearing ankle irons didn’t mean the guards were going to wait for his big sorry ass. In the old days, when prisoners wore chains twenty-four hours a day, men who’d been free for twenty years carried that distinctive shambling trot to their graves.

Himes stood motionless just inside the doorway while a guard checked the room. Satisfied, the guard leaned over the counter and spoke to Corso. “He looks funny to you it’s on account of how he shaves everything off,” the guy said. “Wouldn’t want you thinking we did that to him.”

He was right. Not only was Himes’s shaved head gleaming, but his eyebrows were missing also. Corso checked the V of the orange coveralls. Hairless. With his bald head, Himes looked like Crusher, the guy Bugs Bunny always wrestled in the cartoons.

“Every Tuesday and Friday. Shaves every hair offa his body.” The guard grinned. “Least all the hairs he can reach,” he added with a lewd wink. “You ought to see the position he gets in when he shaves his butt crack. You’d never believe old Walter here was that limber. Would ya, Walter?”

“No, suh,” Himes said.

The guard used both hands to plop Walter Lee down into the only chair, then turned again to Corso. His lips twisted into a crooked grin. “I was you, mister, I’d keep well back from the window. Old Walter here don’t even own a toothbrush.” He scowled down at Himes. “Do ya, Walter?” he asked. Himes kept his gaze on the tabletop.

“No, suh,” he said.

“Tell ’em why, Walter.”

“Suh?”

“Tell ’em why you ain’t brushed your teeth in three years.”

“Ain’t no point.” Himes said it like it had been rehearsed.

“Tell ’em why, Walter.”

“Ain’t no point ’cause you doan need no teeth in heaven. Onliest things to eat are milk and honey. Nothin’ but milk and honey for the righteous.”

The guard smiled like a wolf, flicked an amused glance at Corso, and left the room.

Walter Leroy Himes looked up. Smiled. One of his front teeth was completely black. The other, missing entirely. Others had partially rotted away and stood now like rancid pilings. He fixed his eyes on Corso. Blinked a couple of times like a mole.

“You the one, huh?” he said.

“I’m the one,” Corso confirmed. “My name is Frank Corso.”

In the window’s glare, Corso could see Meg Dougherty moving on his left, loading a big square camera. The movement caught Himes’s eye. He sat back in the chair. Pulled his head back like somebody was waving a weasel in his face.

“What she doin’ here?”

“She’s a photographer. Her name’s—”

“Doan say,” Himes said quickly. “Doan wanna hear no name a hers.” He pointed with his manacled hands. “Get her outta here.”

“Don’t you want your picture in the paper?”

“Get her outta here,” he repeated. “Doan like ’em like her.”

“How do you like them?” Corso asked.

“Not like her.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Got big milkers,” Himes said with no hesitation.

Dougherty stopped twisting knobs on the camera. Looked over at Corso.

“Did he just…?”

“I believe so…yes,” Corso said.

“About my…?”

“Yes.”

“Get her out of here,” Himes insisted.

Dougherty shot a nervous glance at Corso, who still hadn’t taken his eyes off Walter. “No,” Corso said. “She stays. You want to get up and walk out, go ahead. But before you go, Walter Lee, you better think about how you’ve only got three days left and just about the only people in the world who think it’s even remotely possible that you might be innocent are sitting here in this room.”

Himes pointed over Corso’s right shoulder. “Turn out the light,” he said.

Corso looked to Dougherty. “Can you work with the light out?”

“Way better than with it on,” she said.

Corso took two steps and flicked the switch down. The overhead bulb in the next room cast a dim yellow glow over the counter area, leaving the rest of the room in virtual darkness. “That better?” Corso asked.

“I guess,” said Himes.

Corso took a seat. Pulled out his notepad. Himes beat him to the punch.

“So what you give a shit writin’ about me and all?”

“It’s news,” Corso answered.

“Writin’ ’bout how I ain’t killed them bitches.”

“I don’t think you got a fair shake.”

“And now the retard says I ain’t done what she said I done.”

Corso could feel movement in the air behind him and hear the clicking of the camera. “Yeah,” Corso said. “She’s told the police that she lied at your trial.” Himes’s shiny dome wrinkled as he thought it over. His eyes rolled in his head for a moment. Then rolled back down and stopped with a bounce like slot-machine windows.

“Then they gotta lemme go,” he said.

“They may stop the execution or they may not. Lotta people don’t like you, Himes. As for you walking out of here, the only way that’s ever going to happen is if they’ve got the real killer.”

“Ain’t fair,” he grumbled.

“There’s still the cop who says you confessed to him.”

“Lyin’ dog. Never said no word to him. Not one. Never said a word.”

“You be willing to take a lie-detector test on that subject?”

“Yep,” he said without hesitation.

“What about on whether or not you killed those girls?”

“Offered to do that the first time.”

“And they turned you down?”

“Nope. I took the test ’fore I ever went to trial. Let ’em hook all them tiny wires all over me.” Himes shuddered at the memory.

“So where were the results? I don’t recall any mention of a lie-detector test in your trial.”

“Weren’t none,” Himes said. “Never come out.”

“You know why?”

Himes spread his huge hands as far as the chains would permit. “Damned if I know.” Corso scribbled furiously. “Warn’t allowed to talk in court.”

“That might have had something to do with the fact that you kept calling the jury cocksuckers.”

“What’s they were,” Himes said stubbornly.

Corso looked back over his shoulder at Dougherty. “You know where I can find his first attorney?” She dropped the camera from her eye.

“I only got through the judge.”

“Tomorrow, first thing,” Corso said.

Himes’s chair squeaked on the floor as he recoiled. “Doan wanna hear her voice.”

“What’s with you, Himes?” Corso asked. “Why are you always crapping in your own front yard?”

“Huh?”

“Why are you always trying so hard to make people hate you?”

Himes pursed his big rubbery lips. “I had me a bird once,” he said after a minute. “An oriole. Found him all tore up by a barbed-wire fence. Took him home and nursed him back to health.” Himes’s eyes had a distant look. “But you know what?”

“What?”

“Soon as he was getting well…soon as he could fly again—just about when I was gonna let him go—he seen himself in a mirror. You know what he done?”

“What?”

“He started flyin’ at his own reflection. Just throwin’ himself at that other bird in the mirror, like whatever he saw there was surely his own worst enemy. Didn’t stop until he’d busted him a crack in the mirror. Little guy kept peckin’ until he covered the whole damn mirror with his blood and then fell over, stone dead. Just like that.” Himes’s eyes locked on to Corso’s. “I buried him in the garden. In a matchbox. Later on, I asked my uncle Emmett how come a animal do somethin’ like that. What he seen in that mirror that was worth dyin’ for. Uncle Emmett, he said he reckoned it was just the critter’s nature.”

“So…you figure this is your destiny. Is that it?”

Himes wrinkled his nose and sneered at Corso. “Doan matter what I figure. People doan care who you are. Doan see nothin’ but what they wanna see anyway. Just somethin’ bad about you so’s they can feel better about themselves. Doan gotta be true, neither. Just gotta let ’em feel superior to somebody else.”

“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”

Himes smirked. “If you askin’ my advice, Mr. Corso, I wouldn’t feel nothin’ at all. Me…I give it up a long while back.”

“I want to go back over your trial with you,” Corso said. “Starting from the moment you were arrested, until your conviction. Okay?”

Himes said it was. It took forty minutes and nearly filled Corso’s notebook. By the time Corso had finished, Meg had her gear packed and was leaning against the wall, in the deep shadows. Corso pocketed his notebook.

Himes got to his feet. Stretched. “They know damn well I neva done them things they said I done. They gonna kill me anyway, huh? Just outta spite.”

The room felt thick and damp, as if it had suddenly filled with seawater.

“Could be, Walter. Could be,” Corso said without looking up. He slowly got to his feet. “Anything you need?” he asked Walter Himes. “Can I put some money in your account…for cigarettes or something?”

Himes showed his ravaged teeth.

“Ain’t no smokin’ on the row. Wouldn’t want us to get sick or nothin’.”

Wednesday, September 19
5:40
P.M.
Day 3 of 6

The eastern slope of the Cascades loomed like purple pickets. Mara Liasson’s voice on “All Things Considered” sounded like somebody was blending margaritas in the backseat. Corso switched the radio off, leaving only the dull hiss of rain and the heartbeat slap of the windshield wipers.

“Thanks,” Dougherty said. “The static was driving me crazy.” She was huddled against the passenger door, using her jacket as a blanket. The digital dashboard clock read 5:41. Another hour to Seattle. They’d spent the past three hours mostly lost in their own thoughts and listening to National Public Radio. The Kosovo crisis. A guy flogging a book about the creation of
The Oxford English Dictionary
. Advances in fetal surgery. A recipe for peach cobbler.

Corso yawned. “Long day,” he said.

She nodded. “Makes you wonder.”

“What?”

“Why are we bothering about somebody like Himes?”

“The rationale, as I understand it, is that if we make sure to protect the rights of somebody like Walter Leroy Himes, citizens like us can be pretty damn sure our own rights are going to be secure.”

She settled farther down into the seat, pulling the jacket closer around her neck.

“Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Yes,” Corso said. “Actually, I do.”

She laughed again. “So anyway…what I want to know is, how can this guy who lives inside this enormous personal bubble, who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, how can a guy like that get himself so in tune with other people’s tragedies that he can write the kind of pieces you write?”

Her hands moved beneath the coat. Corso checked the rearview mirror and then slid the car over into the left lane, gave it more gas. Passed a tandem Allied Van Lines truck. Ahead, the right lane was clogged with trucks laboring up the slope. He stayed to the left, put his foot in it.

“Are you just going to ignore me?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Corso said.

“How fast are we going?” she asked.

“You want to drive?”

“No. Don’t change the subject.”

“It’s like they say…if you walk a mile in another man’s shoes…”

“Yeah?” she prompted.

“You’re a mile away, and you’ve got his shoes.”

“Come on.”

“What did you think of Walter Lee?” Corso asked.

“You’re not going to answer me, are you?”

“No,” he said. “Tell me what you thought of him.”

As they crested the summit, the rain turned to slush, splatting on the glass, filling the night sky as if they were inside a paperweight. Corso turned the wipers up to high, tried the high beams, but that just made visibility worse. Clicked back to low.

“I’d say Walter’s got some issues involving women,” she said.

“Don’t we all.”

“Walter’s issues may be a bit out of the mainstream.”

“You noticed that, did you? What else?”

She thought it over. “When he was talking about that bird,” she began, “suddenly he was like—”

“He was almost human, wasn’t he? Like you could see the little kid in him. Carrying that matchbox out to the garden.”

“Yeah.”

She sighed and turned toward the side window. A reflection of the green dash lights was superimposed over the windswept trees of the summit. Short, thick firs. Nearly all the limbs on the east side of the trees, standing like tattered flags, retaining only those gnarly branches protected by the stout trunks from the howling Pacific winds.

On the left, the bright lights of the Snoqualmie Ski Area flashed by.

“How fast are we going?”

“You sure you don’t want to drive?”

Corso couldn’t be certain, but he thought maybe she growled at him.

“No wonder you’re single,” she said.

“Who says I’m single?”

She snorted. “You’re not married.”

“What—have I got some sort of mark on me?”

She laughed that deep laugh. “I’ve got the marks. With you, it’s the marks you don’t have.”

“I’m in remission from women.”

“Oh…nice word choice there. Makes women sound like a deadly disease.”

“And your point is?”

She laughed again. “So what passes for your social life these days, Corso?”

“Fishing. And you?”

She made a rude noise with her lips. “Get a clue, Corso. I’m a freak.”

“Lots of tattooed people around Seattle.”

“Not the kind of stuff that’s on me.”

They rode in silence for a moment.

“Guy your age, never even got close to being married. Weird, Corso. Statistically aberrant, at best.”

“You’re not going to quit, are you?”

“Nope,” she said. “I’m in therapy. I’m supposed to share.”

“Therapy for what?”

“Recovering my lost self-esteem.”

“If you ask me, your self-esteem is just peachy. It’s your ‘other esteem’ I’ve got some questions about.”

She snorted and said, “Don’t change the subject.”

Corso sighed. “Almost…once. A few years back.” He waved a hand. “Tell you the truth, thought…it…wasn’t so much that I wanted to get married as it was just what seemed to come next in life. Like I’d met her parents and all…and, you know, it seemed obvious to everybody but me that the next logical move was to get married…so I just sort of went along with the program.”

“What happened?”

“My life took a left turn,” Corso said.

“New York?”

He looked over at her. She had the coat pulled up over her nose. Her eyes looked like something out of
The Arabian Nights
. “Have you always been this pushy?” he asked.

“Since birth.”

“And persistent?”

She dropped the coat below her chin. “I told you; I’m rebuilding my self-esteem. So what happened with the fiancée?”

Corso sighed. “About five minutes after I got fired, she was gone.”

The oncoming headlights etched deep shadows in his face.

“Just like that?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I was working a story in Miami. My editor, Ben Gardner, called me. Said, on account of me, the
Times
was being sued for ten million bucks. Said I was on unpaid leave until things got sorted out. By the time I got back to New York, she was gone. Took her stuff, half of my stuff, and hit the bricks.” His mouth formed a bitter smile. “Not even a note,” he said.

“What’s she doing now?”

“She’s a reporter for CNN.”

“Really?”

“Cynthia Stone.”

“The blonde with the big hair?”

“That’s her.”

She reached over and clapped him on the shoulder. “See now, you told me something about yourself. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“Yes,” he said.

Sometime earlier in the day, the road had been sanded. The rhythmic ticking of the sand on the undercarriage sounded like a jazz drummer using brushes on the high hat. He steered the Chevy back into the right lane.

“Corso,” she said. “Let me help you out here. Now that you’ve disgorged a tidbit about yourself, this is the point in the conversation where you ask more about me and my story.” She settled back in the seat. “Fire away,” she said.

Corso sighed. “This morning you said your parents had other plans for you. What did that look like?”

“I was supposed to marry Dickie Wirtz.”

“Dickie Wirtz?” Corso mocked. “What’s a Dickie Wirtz?”

“His father owned the Drug Store. Four or five of them. All over the state. I was supposed to settle down and mow grass. Raise up a pack of little rat-faced Wirtzes. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What were you supposed to turn out to be?”

Corso laughed. “My family…,” he started, “my family specializes in day-to-day survival. Where I come from, people don’t spend any time wondering what you’re going to be when you grow up. They just hope you last that long.” He looked over at her, hoping for a laugh. Got only silence.

“Another half hour, and we’re home,” he said finally. He turned the flailing wipers back to regular speed. Then flicked the radio on. Del Shannon singing “Runaway.” He turned it up. She pulled the jacket tighter around her shoulders. He could feel her eyes on him as he drove toward the bright lights ahead.