The Simple Truth (16 page)

“It’s not about
my
family, John.”

“Is that right?”
As he looked into Hawkins’s troubled eyes, Fiske’s gut clenched.

“Damn, John, you know how much we hated going around to the next of kin, and we didn’t even know them.”

Fiske slowly stood up, his mouth instantly dry.
“Next of kin? Oh my God, not my mom? My dad?”

“No, John, it’s not them.”

“Just tell me what the hell you need to tell me, Billy.”

Hawkins licked his lips and then started speaking quickly.
“We got a call from the police up in D.C.”

Fiske looked confused for an instant.
“D.C.?”
As soon as he said it, his body froze.
“Mike?”

Hawkins nodded.

“Was it a car accident?”

“No accident.”
Hawkins paused for a moment and cleared his throat.
“It was a homicide, John. Looks like a robbery gone bad. They found his car in an alley. Bad part of town, I understand.”

Fiske let this horrific news sink in for a long minute. As a cop and now a lawyer, he had seen the results of many murders on other people, other families. This was new territory.
“You haven’t told my dad, have you?”
he said quietly.

Hawkins shook his head.
“Figured you’d want to do that. And what with your momma the way she is.”

“I’ll take care of it,”
Fiske said.

His thoughts were interrupted by Hawkins’s next words.

“The detective in charge has requested an ID from next of kin, John.”

As a police officer, how many times had Fiske told a grieving parent that same thing?

“I’ll go on up.”

“I’m so sorry, John.”

“I know, Billy, I know.”

After Hawkins had left, Fiske walked over to the photo of him and his brother and picked it up. His hands were shaking. It was not possible, what Hawkins had just told him. He had survived two gunshot wounds and spent nearly a month in the hospital, his mother and his little brother next to him for much of that time. If John Fiske could survive that, if he could be alive right now, how could his brother be dead? He put the photo back down. He tried to move to get his coat, but his legs were frozen. He just stood there.

Rufus Harms slowly opened his eyes. The room was dim, shadowy. However, he was accustomed to seeing without benefit of light, becoming, over the years, an expert of sorts. The years in prison had also boosted the acuity of his hearing such that he could almost hear someone thinking. You did both a lot in prison: listening and thinking.

He shifted slowly on his hospital bed. His arms and legs were still in restraints. He knew there was a guard right outside the door to his room. Rufus had seen him several times now, as people had come and gone from his room. The guard was not a cop; he was in fatigues, and he was armed. Regular Army or maybe reserves, Harms couldn’t be sure. He took a shallow breath. Over the course of the last two days, Harms had listened to the doctors checking him. He had not suffered a heart attack, although apparently he had come close. He couldn’t remember what the doctors had called it, but his heartbeat had been irregular enough for him to stay in intensive care awhile.

He thought back to his last hour at Fort Jackson. He wondered if Michael Fiske had even made it out of the prison before they killed him. Ironically, Rufus’s near heart attack had saved his life. At least he was out of Fort Jackson. For now. But when his condition improved, they would send him back. And then he would die. Unless they killed him in here first.

He had scrutinized each of the doctors and nurses attending him. Anyone administering drugs to him was given special attention. He was confident that, if he thought himself in danger, he could rip the sides of the hospital bed off. For now, all he could do was get his strength back, wait, watch, and hope. If he could not gain his freedom through the court system, then he would obtain it another way. He was not going back to Fort Jackson. Not while he was still breathing.

For the next two hours he watched people come and go. Every time the door to his room opened, he would look at the guard outside. A young kid, looking very self-important in his uniform and wearing his gun. Two guards had flown with him on the helicopter, but neither was the one posted outside now. Perhaps they were doing a rotation. When the door opened, the guard would nod and smile at the person entering or leaving, especially if the person happened to be young and female. When the guard had occasionally looked into the room, Rufus had seen two emotions in his eyes: hatred and fear. That was good. That meant he had a chance. Both could lead to the one thing Rufus desperately needed the guard to commit: a mistake.

Leaving a single guard, they must think him pretty well incapacitated, Rufus figured; only he wasn’t. The monitors with their numbers and jumpy lines meant nothing to him. They were metal-cased buzzards waiting for him to fade before moving in. But he could feel his strength returning; that was something tangible. He curled and uncurled his hands in anticipation of being able eventually to fully move his arms.

Two hours later he heard the door swing inward, and then the light came on. The nurse carried a metal clipboard and smiled at him as she checked his monitor. She was in her mid-forties, he guessed. Pretty, with a full figure. Looking at her wide hips, he figured she had been through several childbirths.

“You’re doing better today,”
she said when she noticed him watching her.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She stared at him openmouthed.
“You better believe a lot of people in this place would love to have that kind of prognosis.”

“Where exactly am I?”

“Roanoke, Virginia.”

“Never been to Roanoke.”

“It’s a pretty town.”

“Not as pretty as you,”
said Rufus with an embarrassed smile, the words having slipped through his lips. He had not been this close to a woman in almost three decades. The last woman he had ever seen in person was his mother, weeping at his side as they carried him off to serve his life sentence. She had died within the week. Something exploded in her brain, his brother had told him. But he knew his mother had died from a broken heart.

His nose wrinkled up as the scent touched it. It seemed out of place in a hospital. At first, Harms did not realize that he was simply smelling the nurse’s scent, a mixture of slight perfume, moisturizing lotion and woman. Damn. What else had he forgotten about living a real life? A tear started to tremble at the corner of his right eye as he thought this.

She looked down at him, her eyebrows raised, a hand on one hip.
“They told me to be careful around you.”

He looked at her.
“I’d never hurt you, ma’am.”
His tone was solemn, sincere. She saw the tear barely clinging to his eye. She didn’t really know what to say next.

“Can’t you put on that chart that I’m dying or something?”

“Are you crazy? I can’t do that. Don’t you want to get better?”

“Soon as I do, I go right back to Fort Jackson.”

“Not a nice place, I take it.”

“I been in the same cell there for over twenty years. Kind of nice seeing something else for a change. Not much to do there except count your heartbeats and stare at the concrete.”

She looked surprised.
“Twenty years? How old are you?”

Rufus thought for a moment.
“I don’t know exactly, to tell you the truth. Not over fifty.”

“Come on, you don’t know how old you are?”
He eyed her steadily.
“The only cons who keep a calendar are the ones getting out someday. I’m serving a life sentence, ma’am. Ain’t never getting out. What’s it matter how old I am?”
He said this so matter-of-factly that the nurse felt her cheeks flush.

“Oh.”
Her voice quavered.
“I guess I see your point.”

He shifted his body slightly. The shackles pinged against the metal sides of the bed. She drew back.

“Can you call somebody for me, ma’am?”

“Who? Your wife?”

“I don’t got no wife. My brother. He don’t know where I am. Wanted to let him know.”

“I think I have to check with the guard first.”

Rufus looked past her.
“That little boy out there? What’s he got to do with my brother? He don’t look like he can go pee-pee by hisself.”

She laughed.
“Well, they sent him to guard big old you, now, didn’t they?”

“My brother’s name is Joshua. Joshua Harms. He goes by Josh. I can tell you his phone number if you got yourself a pencil. Just call him and tell him where I am. Gets kind of lonely in here. He don’t live all that far away. Who knows, he might come on over and see me.”

“It does get lonely here,”
she said a little wistfully. She looked down at him, at his tall, strong body, all covered with tubes and patches. And the shackles — they held her attention.

Rufus noted her staring. Chains on a man usually had that effect on people, he had found.

“What’d you do anyway? To be in prison for.”

“What’s your name?”

“Why?”

“Just like to know. My name’s Rufus. Rufus Harms.”

“I knew that. It’s on your chart.”

“Well, I ain’t got no chart to look up your name.”

She hesitated for a moment, looked around at the door and then back at him.
“My name’s Cassandra,”
she said.

“Real pretty name.”
His eyes passed over her figure.
“It fits you.”

“Thank you. So you’re not going to tell me what you did?”

“Why you want to know?”

“Just curious.”

“I killed somebody. A long time ago.”

“Why’d you do it? Were they trying to hurt you?”

“Didn’t do nothing to me.”

“So why’d you do it?”

“Didn’t know what I was doing. Was out of my mind.”

“Is that right?”
She drew back a little farther as he said this.
“Isn’t that what they all say?”

“Just happens to be the truth with me. You gonna call my brother?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Tell you what, I’ll give you the number. If you don’t, you don’t. If you do, then I thank you very much.”

She looked at him curiously.
“You don’t act like a murderer.”

“You ought to be careful about that. It’s the sweet-talking ones end up hurting you. I seen enough of that kind.”

“So I shouldn’t trust you, then?”

His eyes seized on hers.
“You got to make up your own mind on that.”

She considered this for a moment.
“So what’s your brother’s number?”

She took down the telephone number, slipped it in her pocket and turned to leave.

“Hey, Ms. Cassandra?”
She turned back around.
“You’re right. I ain’t no killer. You come back and talk to me some more … if you want to, that is.”
He managed a weak smile and rattled the shackles.
“I ain’t going nowhere.”

She eyed him from across the room and he thought he saw a smile flicker across her mouth. Then she turned and went out the door. Rufus craned his neck to see if she spoke to the guard, but she walked right past him. Rufus lay back and stared at the ceiling. He inhaled deeply, letting the remnants of her scent soak into him. A few moments later a smile spread across his face. As did, finally, the tears.

It was an unusual gathering of all of the clerks and the justices. Marshal of the Court Richard Perkins and Supreme Court Police Chief Leo Dellasandro were there too, looking stonily around the table in the large room. Elizabeth Knight’s eyes were moist and she dabbed continually at them with a handkerchief.

As Sara Evans looked at the grim-faced justices, her eyes stopped on Thomas Murphy. Murphy was short and flabby, with white hair and tufted eyebrows. His face held cheekbones the shape of almonds. He still favored three-piece suits and wore large, showy cuff links. His dress, however, did not attract Sara’s attention; rather it was his expression of complete mourning. She quickly finished checking the occupants of the room: Michael Fiske was not there. She felt the blood rush to her head. When Harold Ramsey rose from the head of the table, his deep voice was oddly subdued; she could not really hear him that well, but she knew exactly what he was saying, as though reading his lips.

“This is terrible, terrible news. In fact, I can’t remember anything like it.”
Ramsey surveyed the room, his hands making fists in his anxiety, his tall frame shaking.

He took a heavy breath.
“Michael Fiske is dead.”
The justices obviously already knew. All the clerks, however, collectively missed a breath.

Ramsey started to say something else but then stopped. He motioned to Leo Dellasandro, who nodded and stepped forward while the chief justice collapsed into his chair.

Dellasandro was about five-ten, face wide, with flat cheeks and a pug nose, and a layer of fat over a muscular physique. He had an olive complexion, with wiry black and gray hair. Arising from his pores was the smell of cigar. He wore his uniform with a proud air, his thick fingers tucked inside the gun belt. The other man in uniform standing immediately behind him was Ron Klaus, his second-in-command. Klaus was trim and professional in appearance, the darting activity of his blue eyes suggesting a nimble mind. He and Dellasandro were the watchdogs of this place. They seemed to move about in tandem. Most people who worked at the Court could not think of one man without the other.

“The details are sketchy right now, but apparently Michael was the victim of a robbery. He was found in his car in an alley in Southeast near the Anacostia River. His family has been notified, and one of them is coming up to officially identify the body. However, there’s no question that it’s Michael.”
He looked down for a moment.
“When they learned he was employed here, the police brought over a photograph.”