The Death Factory (8 page)

“While Sarah slept, I took Annie outside to play with a neighbor’s dog. All I could think was that in a matter of days, maybe even hours, there would only be the two of us. She seemed to understand that, too, but she didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t, either. So long as Sarah’s heart beat, so long as there was one breath in her body, her presence filled that house.

“Late that day, she came out of her haze. With wakefulness came the pain—bone pain in her legs—and she got very agitated again. Worse than the morning, even. Something had changed in her. The iron self-control I’d seen slip just after dawn had finally given way altogether. There was an animal fear in her eyes. Nobody knew what to do. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone you love in pain and being unable to take the pain away. Dad filled a syringe to knock her out again, but Sarah slapped it out of his hand. I think she was afraid that if he gave it to her, she’d never wake up again.

“That was the worst night. Annie was crying, and Mom had to take her upstairs. Sarah’s mother finally cracked. We were in the final stage of the struggle. The Avila case never once entered my head. Dad titrated morphine for pain, but Sarah refused to be fully sedated, and he was losing the battle by then. Half the time she wasn’t coherent, and when she was, she was terrified. I couldn’t understand it. She’d been so accepting all along, so heroically stoic. I think she was like an army that had finally outrun all its lines of supply and was disintegrating on the battlefield.

“At that point I asked everyone to leave her room. With just the two of us, I tried to bring Sarah back to herself, to get her centered again. I talked about the simplest things from our past, things I didn’t think she could ever forget. I realized then that a lot of her fear was caused by the brain mets, terror generated by having no control over anything, not even her thoughts. After a while, she let Dad give her a shot of fentanyl. She calmed down a little then. I felt enormous relief, but when the pain subsided, she took my hand and in a very clear voice said, ‘I don’t think I can do it anymore.’

“‘Do what?’ I asked.

“‘This
.
Being awake is . . . worse than nothing. I don’t want Annie to see me like this.’

“I said everything I could think of to reassure her, but nothing was getting through. I don’t know how much time passed, but when the pain started climbing the scale again, she asked me to get Dad. I did. Then I went upstairs and watched
The Little Mermaid
with Annie. She fell asleep on my shoulder. Very carefully, I put her to bed, then went down to check on Sarah.”

“She was gone?” Jack asks quietly.

“No. The opposite, in fact. Dad seemed to have worked some kind of miracle, because all her anxiety was gone. Her pain, too. I found out later he’d rolled her over and given her an epidural, like they do for pregnant women. He wasn’t an anesthesiologist, but he knew how to do it, and he got my mother to assist him. It was an extraordinary measure, trying that at home—crazy by any conventional standard—but God knows he wasn’t worried about any rules at that point. And the result was miraculous. It was as though this doom we’d all been fighting had magically been lifted, as though fate itself had been suspended, and time stopped. I woke Annie, and we all gathered around the bed. Sarah smiled and smiled, and even laughed a couple of times. Then our parents went out, and it was just the three of us. Annie was euphoric, seeing her mother like that, with the terrible weight lifted, the pain gone from her eyes. For an hour we were just a normal family, the family we’d been in Disney World four months earlier, before the diagnosis.

“Eventually, though, Sarah tired. I asked Mom to take Annie, and then it was just the two of us. For the thousandth time, Sarah made me promise to take care of Annie. And I did, like I’d never said the words before. She told me she loved me. And then she said I shouldn’t let her death be an excuse to stop living. That I needed someone, and Annie would need a mother in her life. You’d think we would have talked about that long before, but we hadn’t. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t let me. She seemed to feel this was her last duty, to give me that permission. She was speaking straight from the heart, pure truth, without fear or regret.”

I shake my head, trying to push away the memory. “You don’t need to hear all this.”

“It’s okay,” Jack says. “Was that the last time you spoke to her?”

I nod slowly. “I didn’t know it, though it seems obvious now. Dad spelled me after a while, and I fell asleep on the sofa, watching an old Sherlock Holmes movie. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. I’ve always remembered that.”

“There’s nothing like a mystery to distract you from reality.”

“Dad woke me about five hours later. The second I saw his eyes, I knew she was gone. Then I felt it. There was an emptiness in the house that hadn’t been there when I lay down.”

“Who was with her when she died?”

“Dad. Just Dad.”

Jack nods slowly. “And Annie?”

“Asleep, thank God, which gave me time to prepare for telling her. It also gave me a little time alone with Sarah. I just sat on the bed and held her hand. I’d thought it was cold the night before, but death brings a coldness all its own. After a while, I felt somebody beside me. I looked up, and it was Dad.

“‘She stood it as long as she could,’ he said, and I heard a crack in his voice. Then he said, ‘She was a trouper, son.’ ”

“Jesus,” Jack whispers. “You know what that means, coming from Tom?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What do you think he meant by that first line? Do you think . . . he helped her at the end?”

“Yes. She’d been suffering so much the night before, and then after she spoke to Dad, she was almost blissful. I think she made her decision right before that epidural. That procedure alone could have killed her, given her brain metastases and the possibility of elevated pressure in her spinal canal. And Dad would have told her that. She wanted a few last hours of clarity before she left us.”

Jack considers this for a while. “Whatever happened, it was her choice.”

I nod silently. “I think her mother sensed it, too. When Mrs. Spencer left to get her husband, she hugged Dad and said, ‘Sarah was so lucky to have you through this, Tom. We’ll never forget you.’ ”

I shake my head, almost unable to continue. “After Mrs. Spencer left, I woke Annie and told her. That was the hardest thing I’d ever done, up to that point. Sarah had prepared her as well as she could. Not by saying she was going to heaven or any of that. Believe it or not, she used
The Lion King
to explain it. How she was going back to be part of the earth and then the grass and finally the stars again. Annie seemed okay with it. At first, anyway. But that’s another story.”

I get up and wipe my eyes on my shirt. “It’s getting kind of cold. You want to get back in the car?”

“Can we pull it out here on the grass?” Jack asks. “Watch the sun go down with the heat on?”

“We’re not supposed to. But I did it all the time as a teenager. Hey, the mayor ought to get
some
perks, right?”

Walking back toward the car, I say, “We were waiting for the funeral home people to collect Sarah’s body, and the doorbell rang. When I answered it, I found Joe Cantor standing there. Joe had no idea Sarah had died. I’d finessed her condition the day before. He was stunned. He asked to come in and pay his respects, but I told him no. I took him over to the porch swing where I’d sat when I talked to Felix Vargas two days earlier. That already seemed like weeks ago.

“‘I’m so goddamn sorry,’ Joe said. ‘To intrude like this, I mean. But you gave me that deadline. I wanted you to know I’m moving to get that plea vacated.’

“‘What do you mean, “moving to”?’

“‘You know that’s not an overnight process. But I’ve spoken to Conley’s defense lawyer, and I’ve spoken to the judge, and I can tell you we’re going to get to a new result.’

“‘Which is . . . ?’

“‘I think they might be willing to take a seven-year sentence for aggravated battery.’

“I forced myself to think about that. ‘No sexual component? No registering as a sex offender?’

“Cantor shook his head. ‘No. But a sure seven years in Huntsville. No federal country club. The alternative would be to try the case. I told them that’s what would happen if they didn’t take the prison deal. In fact, I told him I’d try the case personally, and I’d nail the kid’s ass to the barn door. Between you and me, though, I’d rather not do that, if I can avoid it.’

“‘So you don’t risk the crime lab being looked at too closely?’

“‘For a lot of reasons, honestly. For one, I hinted that we might have that picture.’

“My heart thumped in my chest. ‘They didn’t start screaming that was impossible?’

“Cantor gave me his cagey look. ‘Not as quickly as they should have, in my estimation. But I’d like to close this out before Evan White gets too curious and starts calling my bluffs.’ ”

Jack stops beside the passenger door of the BMW and looks at me over the roof. “Who’s Evan White?”

“One of the top criminal defense lawyers in Houston. I told Cantor that White must be curious already. Then I asked him how the hell he was getting this new deal arranged. ‘You can’t really get a plea vacated simply by calling in favors, can you?’

“‘Let me worry about that,’ he said. ‘You just give me the okay.’

“I thought about it. The offer was tempting, but it wasn’t up to me to say yes or no. ‘I’m not sure the Avilas would settle for the guy not admitting the rape.’ I told him.

“‘Surely you can influence them on that?’

“‘That’s not my place, Joe. Maribel Avila was the one who got raped, not me. And not you, either, no matter how you may feel right now.’

“Joe was about to argue with me when a long black hearse rolled down the street and turned into our driveway. He shook his head, then got up and started to give me a hug, but I couldn’t do it. ‘Christ,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am about Sarah. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.’ ”

“Goddamn,” Jack says, opening the passenger door and climbing into Dad’s car.

I get in and start the engine, then pull the big sedan out within a few yards of the edge of Jewish Hill and park, leaving the motor running. In the distance, the sun seems to be dropping faster, flaming orange filling the clouds above the river where it winds through the still-green fields.

“The next days were a blur,” I recall aloud. “Sarah’s wish was to be cremated, and Annie started having nightmares about fire. I wasn’t sure what to do. I comforted her as best I could, and we all tried to explain that Sarah was beyond feeling any physical pain, but it was tough. That was a harbinger of things to come.

“They cremated her on Wednesday, and we planned a memorial service for Friday. I didn’t know how many people to expect. I had so many cell calls I started to ignore them, and eventually I shut the thing off. After that four-month war of attrition, Sarah’s death had left us in a state of utter exhaustion. I don’t think Maribel Avila even crossed my mind during those days. I didn’t know what Cantor was doing on her case, and I didn’t much care.

“When Friday came, nearly five hundred people showed up. Most of the lawyers from the DA’s office came, tons of cops, teachers and kids from Annie’s school, all the neighbors. We were overwhelmed. Friends I hadn’t seen in years flew in from Mississippi. Rosa and Maribel Avila even showed up. Thank God it wasn’t raining. The entire backyard was filled with people. I lit a fire in the pit, and people took turns telling stories about Sarah. A friend of hers from college sang Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now,’ which Annie loved. Then we had food, or spread what we had around as best we could.

“While this was going on, Joe Cantor suddenly showed up and asked if he could speak to me in private. We went into my study, and he wasted no time getting to the point.

“He said he’d been busting his ass on the Avila case, but we were out of time. He laid out two options. One, Conley would do nine years in Huntsville, no time off for good behavior, but no sexual component, either. Two, the case would be tried in open court. That meant no guaranteed result. An independent crime lab had verified Conley’s DNA on the carpet, but Joe felt that if they took it to trial, Conley’s legal team might make the HPD crime lab an issue in the case, and the kid could get off because of it. Evan White had already heard some rumors about Kirmani, and he had made some noise about it. To keep him in check, Joe had threatened to go for the maximum sentence for aggravated sexual battery: ninety-nine years.”

“That’d make anybody think twice,” Jack says.

“And you can bet Joe delivered that message without any subtlety whatever. I’ve seen him turn legal pit bulls into quivering puddles of Jell-O. Evan White was tough enough to test Joe’s resolve, but I think Conley’s old man was afraid to.”

“Did you let the Avilas make the choice?”

“Yes. I told Joe to go get himself a drink while I spoke to them. Then I found Rosa and Maribel and brought them into my study. They sat holding hands while I explained their choice. When I was finished, they spoke in Spanish for a couple of minutes. I think Rosa asked Maribel if she wanted to go through a trial. Maribel asked in English if I thought Joe Cantor could win a trial, given all the circumstances. I said there was a good chance, but Wes Conley had a top-flight lawyer, and there were no guarantees. In the end, they decided that putting Conley away for nine years was enough. It would ensure that he wouldn’t hurt any other women for a long time, and maybe he’d learn a lesson while he was inside. I told them he’d probably get some firsthand knowledge of what Maribel had been through, and I saw some satisfaction in Rosa’s eyes. Then we all hugged each other, Rosa blessed me, and they left.

“When I gave Joe the news, the relief in his eyes was palpable. He did
not
want to take that case to trial. He left almost immediately, to close the deal before Evan White had time to persuade Old Man Conley to change his mind.”

“Was that really the end of it?” Jack asks.

“Not quite. It took another hour for all the guests to clear out. Our close friends and relatives were still hanging around. There was also a woman I didn’t recognize, about thirty, and black. I had the feeling she was waiting for a chance to speak to me, so I went over to her.