Out Of Time (6 page)

“Why would you want to work in the office of a district attorney that sent your sister to her death?”

“Lurid fascination?” she suggested, raising her eyebrows and picking a fleck of tobacco off of her well-glossed bottom lip. “This is what I do,” she explained. “I’m a prosecutor. There aren’t a whole lot of places where I could work and get decent cast>

A sister on death row and she decides to specialize in trying death-row cases? A shrink would have a field day with that one.

“Did you help Gail at all in her defense?” I asked out of curiosity. The two sisters seemed so different—in a “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” sort of way, unfortunately.

She nodded. “Sure. I’m the one who told Nanny to hire Kaitland Cameron. She was Gail’s defense lawyer. Big mistake. She’d just hit it big and had taken on too many cases at one time. She wasn’t prepared. Just threw up her usual dog and pony show and hoped it would fly. It didn’t. My sister paid the price. People weren’t in the mood to let a woman off, whether she was battered or not. They still aren’t. I suppose you remember the Sherwood case?”

I nodded. Betty Sherwood was a convicted killer who gave new meaning to the word “nightmare.” “I remember,” I said. “She claimed she accidentally shot her husband through the head in the middle of the night with a gun she kept conveniently stored under her pillow. It was rather inconvenient for her husband, of course.”

“Right,” Brenda Polk said. “And she got away with it, in that she was sentenced to life in prison instead of death. Even after it came out that her first husband had died under suspicious circumstances. It made the public madder than a swarm of killer bees. Lots of people felt she got off easy. That happened right before Gail’s case. I think Gail paid the price.”

“Why didn’t you get Nanny Honeycutt to fire Kaitland Cameron once you knew her legal strategy wouldn’t work?”

“I tried, but I got nowhere. By then, Kaitland had convinced Nanny and the rest of the family that the battered- wife defense was Gail’s only chance to get off.”

“And Roy wasn’t battering her?”

“Hell, no.” She rolled her eyes and took another swig of Pepsi. “I’m addicted to this stuff. The caffeine. Coffee wrecks my stomach.” She looked at a big stack of manila folders on one side of her desk and sighed. “You wouldn’t believe my case load. No, Roy wasn’t beating Gail. That’s one thing she wouldn’t stand for. She worked alongside of my daddy in the fields every day after school. She liked that stuff. Not me. I was too busy twirling batons and being homecoming queen and studying to be a lawyer. I was really obnoxious, I admit it. But Gail was a physical person, she liked all the lifting and hard work. She was strong and she didn’t like being bullied that way. My daddy tried to hit her once when she was fifteen andoff fiftee had stayed all night with this loser who worked at the convenience store down the road. She clocked our daddy before his hand hit her face. He went down like a dead man. Didn’t try to hit her again, though.”

“Whoa,” I said. “That sounds a little violent.”

She stared at me and her level gaze made me feel at least three inches smaller. “You and I both know there’s a difference between standing up for yourself and pushing people around. Gail protected herself physically, abused herself emotionally and never hurt anyone else if she could help it.”

“Then how did she end up in this mess?” I asked.

“Gail’s always done the wrong thing since she could walk. She was born under an unlucky star. When she was five, she accidentally strangled my kitten when she hugged it too hard. When she was nine, she drove my father’s car into a river and hit an old fisherman in his boat. When she was thirteen, she accidentally burned down the barn trying to smoke cigarettes. And when she was eighteen, she got herself knocked up and wouldn’t tell anyone who the father was. Never has. That’s the story of Gail’s life. She was born to lose.”

“That’s some story,” I pointed out. “A lot of people would say it’s the classic portrait of a serial killer, for chris- sakes. Torturing animals, setting fires, inappropriate sexual behavior, running down old men in rowboats.” I wasn’t being serious. I’d been too much of a fuckup myself. But she took me at my word.

“Oh come on, since when is getting knocked up at eighteen unusual behavior?” Gail’s sister demanded. “And if it sounds bad, it’s just like I told you. She was born under an unlucky star. It’s only been worse for her because I was such a goody two-shoes. I got straight A’s and a scholarship to UNC. I married a rich farm boy from Virginia, then talked him into living down here. I went to law school. I got a job as a special prosecutor with the state. Blah, blah, blah. Sometimes I make myself sick, so I imagine Gail feels the same way. My father holds it against her for not measuring up. I

hate it—and believe me, I’d love to let my father down— but I can’t sabotage my own life just to make Gail feel better.”

I sided with Gail. Overachievers like Brenda could be a right royal pain in the ass for the rest of us mere mortals. “What makes you think Gail is innocent?” I asked. “Can you give me anything besides the lousy-shot theory?”

“No motive,” Brenda said promptly. “That’s the one thing that really bothers me about this whole mess. I can’t figure out why Gail needed to shoot Roy. They were already getting a divorce and it was amicable.”

I looked at her skeptically. There is no such thing as an amicable divorce and I see living proof of it almost every day. I make a lotry?I make of money following future exes around. Show me an amicable divorce and I’ll show you a spouse who’s being blackmailed into cooperating.

“It’s tru”.” Brenda insisted. “Look, Gail liked Roy. He married her with a bastard kid and all. And stuck by her when she got accused of stealing from the hospital.”

“That would have been at age twenty-two, right before the killing,” I guessed. “She seems to hit a snag every four years or so.”

“She didn’t steal anything,” Brenda said. “And I’m the suspicious sort. She was set up. Believe me, Gail is a natural patsy. I know. I’ve watched my cousins take advantage of Gail’s bad luck her entire life. She’s taken the rap for everything from stealing pies to snitching car keys to dynamiting our Uncle Billy’s pond and killing all the fish. She never did a tenth of what she was accused of. My cousins just smelled a sucker when they saw one.”

“And so did someone else the night Roy Taylor was killed?” I suggested.

“I think it’s possible,” Brenda said hesitantly. “But I can’t be sure.” Leftover tendrils of cigarette smoke curled from her mouth and vanished in wisps. “I think there’s also a chance she killed him,” she finally said. “Gail had been drinking more and more, and there was all this talk about pills. Who knows how they change a person.”

“But Gail denies popping pills, and Nanny Honeycutt says she hated guns,” I said. “How could she drill him right through the heart?”

“That would be Gail’s luck for you,” she offered. “Nothing she does ever works out, except the one thing she shouldn’t be doing. Like shooting Roy in the chest. But, yes, you’re right. She wasn’t a deadeye shot like the rest of my family. Never even picked up a gun to the best of my knowledge. Not even when Daddy wanted her to go out hunting with him and, believe me, Gail would have done anything for that man’s approval.” Brenda shook her head. “Gail never understood about the Honeycutt men. They don’t show anything on the outside, and I’m not so sure they ever feel anything on the inside. Expecting one to love you and show it is a losing proposition. I never bothered. I just did the best I could to get the hell out on my own as soon as possible.”

“Why didn’t the jury think the bullet holes drilled perfectly through her husband’s heart was unlikely?” I asked.

“The jury didn’t believe she was a bad shot,” Brenda explained. “That’s the trouble when you throw up a defense that’s a lie from the start. They smelled a lie and thought it was all a lie.”

“What about the fact that Roy was working with an antidrug unit when he was killed?” I asked. “Did anyone look into that? If he’d been putting drug kingpins behind bars, that’s a pretty large pool of potential suspects right there.”
e=“ere.”

She nodded her head. “Her legal team spent a month and over $20,000 of Nanny’s money having that angle looked into. There wasn’t a whisper of threats against him by dealers. He didn’t put that many behind bars, anyway. Roy died before most of his arrests came to trial. So the drug connection was a dead end.”

“What about the rumors that he was dirty?” I asked.

“We looked into his financial records and followed leads up and down the Eastern seaboard. If Roy was dirty, he sure as hell wasn’t getting rich from it. He had zippo assets except for their home. He didn’t even own their fishing cabin. His stepfather did. I think Roy was clean.”

“Why didn’t Gail’s daughter testify during the trial?” I asked. “She was there that night.”

“Brittany couldn’t add anything that would have helped, and Gail didn’t want to put her through it. I agreed, but for a different reason. It would have made Gail look bad if Brittany had been put on the stand. What kind of a person would shoot a kid’s father practically in front of her? Her lawyer wanted to avoid that issue.”

I groped for another lead. “What about the two bullets in the wall above the door frame?” I asked. “The trajectory is odd. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Well, Ham contended during his closing argument that Gail had lied about blacking out, shot Roy through the heart then discharged her gun wildly into the air. In victory, to hear him tell it.”

I stared at her incredulously. “What? Like Pecos Pete getting a snoot full of tequila and shooting off his pistol for fun?”

She shrugged. “You and I both know that Ham’s an idiot. The jury would probably agree. But I don’t think they found the extra shots important.”

“What about her appeals? Who’s handling them?”

Brenda’s sigh was a long one. “Ever heard of Northern Lights?”

“You’re kidding?” I said. The Northern Lights Foundation was a nonprofit organization devoted to overturning death-penalty convictions everywhere. But, it seemed, mostly in the South. You would have thought they’d have better sense than to send a bunch of Yankee lawyers marching into the South to bring enlightenment to the masses under the name “Northern Lights.” But they didn’t.

“Gail has a good appeals lawyer,” Brenda explained, “but she doesn’t know southern judges. During the first federal appeal, she argued that Gail htsd that had been so medicated during the trial, she had been unable to assist in her own defense. I thought we had a pretty good chance, but it was turned down. A second appeal was filed with the Fourth Circuit. We expect to hear from them sometime next week. I don’t think we have a chance.”

“Why?” I asked.

“We filed on the grounds that Gail’s original defense lawyer was not allowed to present all of the mitigating circumstances during the sentencing phase,” Brenda explained. “Gail’s lawyer wants to try this angle because, of all the death-penalty appeals successfully filed over the past five years, twenty-six percent have been overturned on those grounds. It’s an easy way for the judges to assuage their consciences without looking too liberal.”

“What mitigating circumstances weren’t presented?” I asked. “It seems to me that they aired every scrap of your family’s dirty laundry.”

“She’s claiming severe alcohol and pill abuse impaired Gail’s ability to distinguish right from wrong,” she said.

“It isn’t going to work,” I warned her. Gail abused alcohol, but she wasn’t going to get any sympathy on that point. Here in the South, we tell ourselves that if people want to be damn-fool drunks and destroy themselves, that’s their business. But in return, we hold them responsible for what they do while they’re drunk. Plus, you can’t persuade a bunch of southern judges through rhetoric alone. Once a jury of peers has said someone deserves to die, you have to show new evidence that at least points to the possibility of someone else having done it. More important, every one of the Richmond judges had graduated from a law school in Virginia, North Carolina or Georgia. Like a lot of southerners, they came from families that had been ripped off by outsiders who made pretty speeches too many times over the past two hundred years. We’re a skeptical lot, even if we do seem mighty polite on the surface. Only new evidence would impress those judges.

“Is there any point in looking into the case?” I asked. “It seems like you’ve done about all you can do and I have no new leads.”

Brenda hesitated. “Yes,” she finally said. “There’s a big point to it. Nanny and the rest of us need to know we did everything we possibly could to help Gail, no matter what happens in the end. That’s why I want you to take the case.” She looked away uncomfortably.

“I am taking the case,” I assured her. “So I can sleep at night, too. But you’ve got to help me find a place to start. What’s this about a crackpot caller?”

She pushed her Pepsi bottle away and fiddled with her cigarette pack. “It’s a sad case,” she finally said.

“I know that already,” I assured her.

“Not Gail’s case,” she snapped. “The caller’s.”

“Just tell me what he said and let me decide if it’s important,” I countered. If she was so dang anxious to help her sister, why the hesitation?

Brenda struggled with her conscience in silence while I counted the empty cigarette packs in her wastebasket. Nine crumpled cellophane-covered boxes on top and more beneath. Good god, I hoped her lungs would hold out long enough for her to make up her mind. Eventually, she reached a decision.