The Dreams of Ada (20 page)

Wyatt said the jury would convict because reputable witnesses placed Tommy near the store that night, and because of the brutal story on the tape. He focused on Tommy’s description of the girl’s blouse; it was so detailed, the lawyer said, that Tommy could not have dreamed it, or been brainwashed by the police, that he had to have seen it. And especially, he said, the jury would convict because Tommy had now told so many different stories that he was clearly lying most of the time—and why would he lie if he did not have something to hide?

Wyatt told Ward’s family the same thing; he told them that to save Tommy’s life they must convince him to tell the truth, to admit his complicity, and to name the real killer, and say why he had been protecting him: if there was another killer.

The family was horrified, confused. Tricia felt that maybe “they” had now gotten to the lawyer, had bought him off. Joel rejected this theory. He felt they must do as the lawyer said; and Tricia soon agreed: they must try to convince Tommy to tell the truth, whatever it was, so he would not be executed.

Saturday night in Tulsa, Joel was asleep. He was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. Sleepily he answered it, wondering who would be calling at this hour; it was nearly two in the morning.

The voice on the phone was a man’s. He told Joel he had better stop helping to defend Tommy Ward—or else. Then the line clicked dead.

Joel remembered the voice. It was the same man who had called him two weeks ago, at the same time on a Saturday night, and had said the very same thing.

Joel didn’t tell his mother, who was living with him, of the call; he didn’t want to frighten her.

The next day, when Tricia went to visit Tommy, there were tears in her eyes as she sat on the stool in the small, dark room and looked at him through the narrow glass window. There were dark circles under his eyes; his skin was pale; he had lost a lot of weight, he looked emaciated; he was not being allowed any sunlight at the jail, or any exercise.

Tommy told Tricia they needed a new lawyer, someone who believed he was innocent; he told her what Wyatt had said. She told him she already knew, that Wyatt had said the same thing to her. The lawyer was right, she said; Tommy had to tell the truth, whatever it was, and place his faith in the Lord. If he was involved, she said, he should show the police where the body was, and get off with a life sentence; he could be paroled in five years.

Tommy insisted to Tricia that he was innocent. He said his dream had really been a dream. He said he kept telling this to the police, that when he told all the lies on the tape, it was because the police had insisted and because he thought they would let him go when they saw it was lies. About his description of the blouse, he said the police had given him that information; he said the police had been lying on the witness stand when they said they hadn’t.

But why did you keep giving out different names of guys who had been there? Tricia asked. Tommy said he’d been giving them a name every time he thought of someone that he knew had a gray pickup; he hoped the police would question them and find out they had done it.

Tricia could only believe him: because, if he knew who had been there, why would he give out these other names? And because he was her baby brother; he was Tommy; she didn’t think he could have done such a thing.

He told her something else, before the knock on the door indicated their ten minutes were up. He said the police had arrested a man that week and put him in a cell near Tommy’s, a man who runs back and forth in his cell all day, shouting, “Pigs eat flesh and bones! Pigs eat flesh and bones!” Perhaps the man knows something about the Haraway case, Tommy said; why don’t the police investigate him?

Tricia warned Tommy to be careful; the man might be a police plant, put there to work on his nerves.

Alone in his cell again, Tommy took up a pen and some lined loose-leaf paper. He wanted to explain to Don Wyatt how the two things had come about that had angered the lawyer the most: the description of the blouse, and the Marty Ashley story. After enumerating all the things in his taped statement that had been proven to be lies, he wrote:

The only thing in my statement that they could hold against me was the blows. I told them in my dream that she had a dress on. Mr. Smith started at me and the OSBI agent about that one. They cept on at me saying she eather had a blows with Red stripes or one with Blue roses with ruffels. So I knew she couldnt of had both on so I said blows with roses and ruffels. But the way they was acting they was trying to get me to say the blows with Red stripes. Even after I said the one with Blue roses and ruffels. They cept saying are you shure it wasnt the one with Red stripes. If people would only know how they done me they would see why I lied.

And the other day when I lied was because Jim every day he would come and tell me that even though you didn’t do it you giving that statement they are going to birn you. Then he would say we need to think of a way that they can see that your willing to take the 7 to 15 years at least they wont kill you for something you didnt do. Then I would say I didnt have nothing to do with it. And he would say do you think they care rather you did it or not. All that matters to them is to sattisfy the public and get them off their backs. Then he cept on comming back telling me that he shure hates seeing a innicent man put to death over sombody else’s doings but we need to figure out a way that at least they wont put you to death. It got me to thinking maby they are going to put me to death maby they dont care rather they put me to death them knowing my innicents. Maby they are going to pin this off on me to sattisfy the publick. So thats why I made up the statement. I thought well at least I could get 7 to 15 and at least I wont be put to death over something I didnt do so I made up the statement. I knew that they would see Marty Ashley innicent….

God dont want me to try and do things myself. He wants me to put him first and tell the truth that would be the way out of this dont try to do it yourself you will only make things worse. He says you lieing will only make things worse. Tell the truth that is the only way you will get out. Thats your only way of excaping. He says tell the truth and stick with it no matter how bad things might seem, tell the truth. God knows I didn’t do it and he dont want me to lie and make things worse he wants me to tell the truth and stick by it. And I will.

One day while the hearing was in recess, Tricia was at home when she heard a knock on the front door. The kids were at school; Rhonda was being taunted again by her classmates, because the case, during the hearing, was being publicized again in the newspaper and on the television news. The little foster kids, David and Lisa, were crawling about the living room; Lisa, nurtured by Tricia and Bud for little more than a month, was healthy now, was a pixieish little girl; David, with the face of a miniature Tab Hunter, demanded attention, had the habit of slamming his head into people’s chests, hard, as if demanding love but also unconsciously venting aggression; it was a practice they were trying to break him of. Tricia went to the door and opened it; standing on the front porch was a woman named Vicki Jenkins.

Tricia knew Vicki from around town. Vicki’s father worked with Bud at the mill; they would see each other in church sometimes, but they were not close. Vicki had never before come to the Wolf home. Surprised, Tricia invited her into the house.

Seated on one of the twin brown sofas in the living room, Vicki said she was upset: that there was something she needed to tell Tricia. She said she was a close friend of Karen Wise, who had testified against Tommy. She had been troubled ever since she heard of Karen’s testimony, Vicki said, because Karen had told her before the hearing that she could
not
positively say it was Tommy Ward who had been at J.P.’s that night. She said Karen had told her that Karl Fontenot definitely was not one of the two, that although the other one “favored” Tommy Ward, she could not be sure it was him. Then the police had convinced Karen to make a positive identification, Vicki said.

Vicki also told Tricia that Karen had been getting threatening phone calls since she testified, and of the man Karen had seen lurking in the alley outside her house, who had frightened her so much that she had called the police.

Tricia thanked Vicki for the information. Her mind was in turmoil, was going ninety-to-nothin’. Who could this stranger in the alley be? Karen Wise had identified Tommy, but Tommy was in jail. Could the stranger be the real killer, who knew that Tommy was innocent? If Tommy had somehow gotten involved, could this be his accomplice, the one he was protecting? Was he threatening Karen so she would not identify him as well? But if he was the killer, why would he be hanging around Ada? Or was he still in Ada precisely because, in a town that small, if he left it would invite suspicion?

Tricia did not know what to make of it. She called Don Wyatt and told him what Vicki Jenkins had said.

When Bud got home from work, she told him of the visit. They also discussed the children. Rhonda was being hurt deeply by the taunting in school; her grades were suffering; thin already, she was losing weight. Bud’s supervisor at the feed mill had suggested they send the kids to school in Allen, fifteen miles away; because their name is Wolf, the supervisor said, the kids in Allen would not know the relationship of Rhonda and Buddy and Laura Sue to Tommy Ward. But Bud was thinking that for the sake of the children, the whole family might have to move from Ada, despite their deep roots. One possibility, he told Tricia, was El Reno, a hundred miles away, west of Oklahoma City; Evergreen had another feed mill there; perhaps they would give him a job. He had to check, he said, to see if he would lose his seniority.

At the city jail, Karl Fontenot had adopted owl’s hours. He slept all day and stayed awake all night, when the building was deserted except for the police dispatcher. In three months now he had not had a single visitor, except for a minister who had come at the beginning, whom Karl didn’t know and didn’t want and didn’t count. Part of his nights he spent writing letters to his sisters in California, hoping they would answer; they never did. Unlike Tommy, Karl was introspective, was able to analyze himself to some extent: “I used to have a bar built around myself and wouldn’t let anyone get close to me.” He knew he was paying for that now in his aloneness. Living on the streets he had liked to fish and hunt and camp, and to draw; now, in the jail, he spent some of the long nights drawing. He fantasized sometimes about being a photographer “so I can see the world and travel.” Always a quiet person, with little to say to anyone, he felt he was coping well with his time in the jail. Some nights, when it rained, he sat and listened to it all night long; he loved the smell of the rain.

It was the view of the detectives that Tommy Ward, reading the Bible for hours in his solitary cell, shaking, having nervous attacks, was at least showing remorse for what he had done, but that Karl Fontenot, less in touch with reality, was showing no remorse at all.

It was the feeling of Tricia and Bud and Miz Ward that Karl, having no family to turn to in Ada, no place to live except the streets, was enjoying his stay in jail, even though both he and Tommy were innocent, that he felt more secure inside than out, with a roof over his head, a place to sleep, meals guaranteed every day, for free. Periodically they heard through the grapevine that Karl was saying he might plead guilty, might say they had done it, even though they hadn’t; they were afraid Karl would do that so he could live his life in prison.

The defense attorneys felt this was all some kind of game to Fontenot, that because he knew he was innocent, he was sure he would be freed one day, and meanwhile he would enjoy the game, that he didn’t truly comprehend the trouble he was in.

In the county jail Tommy felt that his mind was clearing about that night in April, that he was starting to remember details. He told Tricia that was the night Willie Barnett had come by, and had started annoying the bird, Pretty Boy, and Tommy had made him leave the house. And then Jimmy had come by, he said, and they had gotten into an argument, because Jimmy said Tommy owed him $150, and Tommy said he didn’t. That would prove he’d been home that night, Tommy said.

Tricia, excited and hopeful, relayed the information to the lawyers. Maybe now the district attorney would see that Tommy was innocent, she thought, and would drop the charges, and they could all get on with their lives, like before.

When the hearing in the Haraway case resumed on February 4, it was entering its fifth full day, a month after it had begun. Dennis Smith was on the stand. He conceded that the house in which Karl Fontenot had said they had burned Denice Haraway’s body was burned down by the owner the year before; he conceded that soon after making the tape, Fontenot had claimed he was innocent, had said he had lied in the taped statement.

“I’d never been in jail or had a police record in my life and no one in my face telling me I killed a pretty woman that I’m going to get the death penalty so I told them the story hoping they would leave me alone. Which they did after I taped the statement. They said I had a choice to write it or tape it. I didn’t even know what the word statement or confessing meant till they told me I confessed to it. So that’s the reason I gave them a untrue statement so they would leave me alone,” Fontenot would state later.

Smith, under questioning, discussed Fontenot’s use of the word “abducting” in his statement; when Karl said he abducted her, he seemed to think it meant having sex with a dead person.

The detective was questioned about the incident in which he and Mike Baskin had brought a skull and bones to Tommy Ward’s cell; Baskin had also been cross-examined about that. “We already had confessions. We wanted to get the body back for the family,” Smith testified. “We knew we wouldn’t have been able to use the body as evidence in court if we found it that way.”

Soon after, the state rested its case.