Time's Witness (60 page)

“Well, yeah. If that's what it says.”

“That's what it says.” Isaac opened the second sheaf of papers. “All right, in December, when I came all the way up to Delaware to talk to you because I’d heard you’d been there at Smoke's that night—though never once in the first trial did you come forward with all these exact words and direct knowledge—when I asked you how that fight got started, what—in your exact words—did you tell
me?
” When Moonfoot protested he couldn’t possibly remember,
Isaac said, “Ah, yes. I forgot. You can only remember things that happened seven years ago! Well, would you mind reading this paragraph, the one circled in red?” He handed Butler the paper, pointing at the top.

Butler moistened his lips, then silently mouthed some of the words. I began to worry that perhaps he couldn’t read, but then he nodded and said, “You want me to read this to y’all?” Isaac said he’d appreciate it. Clearing his throat, and pulling at his tiny ear, Moonfoot read in a slow singsong, with apologetic pauses at the profanity. “It starts out, says, ‘Butler,’ then, ‘Looked to me like Pym was raising a ruckus on purpose-like, had an attitude, you know. Nobody wanted to get into it with him. Most folks, they be out only for theirselves. But George, he say to me, “That fucker can’t come in here and do folks that way.” I told him, “Pym's mean, drunk, and white. Leave it alone.” He say, “The man start something with me, I’ll wipe his butt on the floor.” And he jump up and go to the jukebox.’” Moonfoot looked at Rosethorn. “That's all you got circled.”

Taking back the paper, Isaac shook it, then he shook the first set of pages in his other hand. “Mr. Butler, the time has come for you to pick and choose! You’ve testified under oath that George said one thing. You’ve signed two separate statements that he said
two
separate other
things. Now, is one of them true and are the two
others lies? Or are all three lies?! Which is it? Did George say, ‘I’ll
get him sooner or later, and kill him because he's not fit to live’?
Or
, did he say what you claimed, at the State's persistent leading and urging—”

Bazemore: “Objection! Uncalled for!” Hilliardson: “Sustained.”

Isaac: “—Say to you, ‘I’ll lay him out’?”
Or
did he say, as you told
me
, ‘I’m going to try to stop this man from disrupting a public place
and annoying other people.
If
he starts something with me, then I will fight back’? Which is very, very different from saying, ‘I’m sitting here plotting and planning to murder this man at the first opportunity.’ Isn’t it?
Isn’t it, Mr. Butler?
”

“I guess.”

“Or did George say
none
of them to you?”

Fidgeting around in the chair, Moonfoot turned sullen. “I guess maybe he said them all.”

Isaac threw the papers down on the defense table in disgust. “You
guess maybe
he said them all! You guess! Well, guessing isn’t enough. And maybe isn’t enough.” Moving faster than he ever had before in this trial, Isaac charged at Butler, who literally shrank back in the chair, and boomed at him, “I don’t guess! I
know!
I know you are no friend of George Hall's. You
were
no friend of George Hall's. And I would be
ashamed
to call you a friend of mine.” The old man spun to face Mitch Bazemore. “And I would be
ashamed
to bring you into a court of justice
to witness the sacred truth!
I am sorry, Your Honor.” After a long stare at Mitch, and then a long stare at Moonfoot, and then a long sigh, Isaac limped back to his chair, and sank into it. “No more questions.”

I don’t know what Mitch was able to do on redirect, because Wes Pendergraph tapped me on the shoulder and said they needed me upstairs. But the vote of the press and the lobby gossip was that the prosecution hadn’t been able to do much, and that the Moonfoot Butler round went solidly to Rosethorn.

That afternoon, the State produced the former, now retired, HPD medical examiner, who testified that at his arrest George had had nitric stains on his hands, evidence that he’d fired a gun, and that he hadn’t been drunk when he’d done it, evidence that he was in full possession of his faculties. Isaac asked the M.E. if he had
checked George's eyesight. No, he hadn’t, the old doctor replied querulously; no one had asked him to. The State then produced a man George had beaten up in a ballpark fight a year before the shooting; the man said George had a violent temper. Under cross-examination, the man admitted he’d dumped his beer on George's head. Two former employers of George's testified that they’d fired him for being abusive and intractable. Under Isaac's questioning, they sounded like they’d fired him for being an uppity black man. The State attempted to produce the audiotape of Pym's dying words made in the ambulance. Isaac objected to its presentation as inflammatory and was sustained. He tried to keep out the photographs of Pym's corpse for the same reason, but was overruled. He took exception to the ruling. And so it went, with Bazemore heaping wood on the pyre, Rosethorn pouring water on the flames, and the jury watching the show from the safety of their box.

Bubba Percy, who described the afternoon's events to me, said he scored the jurors at this stage as six convictions, two acquittals, and four undecideds. He didn’t explain his betting system, and I didn’t have time to ask him about it because I was calling him from University Hospital. I called to pay off “the big one” he’d said I owed him.

I told him we had Purley Newsome in custody, and that Justin was going to make a statement about that news tomorrow, which gave the Star a morning's advantages. Bubba demanded to know if we were holding our suspect at HPD. I said no, we were holding Purley in the intensive care unit at University Hospital because he was suffering from acute bronchial pneumonia.

Zackery Carpenter, warden of Dollard Prison, didn’t have much time to give me. He supervised, after all, more boarders than there were in all of Haver University; kept more farmers out in his fields than were hanging on in some entire Piedmont counties; bossed more assembly-line workers in his factory (making all the linens, sewing all the uniforms for every state institution in North Carolina—from the insane asylum to the school for the blind) than Cadmean Textiles had employed at the peak of its productivity. It was probable that George Hall was now sleeping in the county jail on a mattress and pillow made at Dollard; in pants and a shirt made at Dollard, and being guarded by a deputy wearing a Dollard-made hat.

Like that out-of-the-way baron's castle it reminded me of, Dollard Prison was medievally self-sufficient—grew its own crops, made its own clothes, mortared its own bricks, tended its own sick, buried its own dead. Or maybe it was really more like one of those nineteenth-century utopian farms; only Dollard had even less tolerance for criticism of its imperfections. Stepping out of line at Dollard led to solitary (sometimes naked) lock-up in the hole (without water, without a toilet); protest led to Thorazine. Dollard laborers were not exactly competing on the free market, and they weren’t unionized, and their earning power ($25 a month) was less of an inducement than the two days taken off their sentences for each day on the line. They didn’t have the option of declining the
jobs either, and what they produced belonged to the state. The left hand of the state sold their products to the right hand of the state, and rumor was that along the way, considerable change got left in some personal pockets. In fact, Warden Carpenter's predecessor at the prison was thought to have died a wealthy man, though not a popular one: inmates kept repeating the old prison joke that the man was mean enough to sprinkle thumbtacks on the electric chair.

An elderly hillbilly trusty who worked there was telling me about the difference between Carpenter and his predecessor as we waited in the warden's office for him to return from settling a shouting fracas on death row over which station to turn the communal radio to. The trusty said, “Mr. Carpenter now, he's a hard, honest man. You can take a hate to him, and some folk may have cause, but I’ve been doing life here, one day at a time, Captain, and the man, well, he won’t cheat you, and he won’t tell you a lie.” It was an interesting preamble to what Carpenter had to tell me himself when he finally came back to his office—which, like him, was big and gray and homely—and sat down in his (prison-built) rocking chair. No small talk except, from him, “Turning hot,” and from me, “Yeah, I think God's dropped spring and fall from the line- up; going for a two-season year. You notice that lately?”

“No. I don’t get outside enough to tell one month from the next.” Rocking forward, he used a kitchen match to light a large pipe with a charred black bowl, then frowned at me. “Listen, you asked me something back a while, and I dodged it. It's been on my mind.”

“You dodged two questions, Zack.” I sat down in a plain wood chair across from him. “One about Winston Russell. One about Julian Lewis.”

He nodded, sucking on the pipe. “You wanted to know, when Winston was in here, about his visitors. Okay, I gave you a list, but not the full one.”

“Oh? Somebody didn’t want his visit recorded?”

“Yeah.” Reaching into his gray bagged-out jacket, he handed me a sheet of paper; on it were typed dates and names. I saw the name Otis Newsome three times—the last time, the day before Russell had been released. The first time, very near the beginning of
the list, back when Winston first went in, Otis had been accompanied on his visit by William Slidell. While I was thinking about this, Carpenter's desk intercom buzzed to say that a prisoner on East 7 had tried to cut his own throat in the showers and was on his way to the hospital in Raleigh. Carpenter settled back in his rocking chair with a soft groan. “Poor stupid, dumb kid,” he sighed, and was quiet for a minute.

“One more question, Zack.” I held up the page from the visitors’ log. “Why’re you giving me this now?”

He scratched his pipe stem against the burn scar that spread to the gray cheek stubble and changed the subject. “Other thing was, why’d Julian Lewis come over here personally that night to stop the Hall execution.”

“Because of Briggs Cadmean's death, right?”

“Well, they might’ve used that for a cover, I guess. But Lewis came because the governor
made
him come. Lewis was madder’n hell about that reprieve, and madder’n hell at Wollston for granting it. Seemed to me, he took it all a little too personal, whether George lived or died. Oughtn’t to be personal, I don’t figure.” Carpenter rocked quietly and talked, while around us buzzes and phones and machines and raised voices clattered. I watched him pausing to pick his words with a tight slowness, as if looking for the least distasteful ones to use to say things he didn’t like saying. “Oughtn’t be political either. Now, the governor's always been real strong pro–death penalty. He feels that it's the will of the people of this state.”

“Well, executions do seem to be getting more and more fashionable these days, don’t they? Especially here in the South. So why be unpopular and reprieve Hall?”

Carpenter looked out the window. “The governor figured if something could make this fellow Andrew Brookside take a public stand
against
the death penalty, well, they could count him out of the election. George Hall's case was where most of the pressure was getting put on Mr. Brookside to take that stand. But he hadn’t done it. And George's time was getting close. So—” Carpenter tapped his pipe ash out in an ugly metal bowl. “So, I guess the governor thought he’d slow things up awhile. Give the Hall supporters time to push Brookside out on a limb.…That's why the reprieve.”

“Jesus, Zack. Who told you this?”

He said, “The governor told me.”

“Governor Wollston
himself
told you he stayed an execution for campaign reasons?” The sad fact is, it wasn’t the doing it that surprised me so much, as the talking about it.

“Bob Wollston and I go back a lot of years. Been friends for a lot of years.” Carpenter looked at me, his jaw stiff. “That wasn’t even the point of the story he was telling me. His point was, he’d wondered what the hell the matter with Lewis was, fighting him so hard on it, when getting Lewis elected was the whole purpose of the stay. Then, afterwards, he hears Lewis has got links to people who may be in some kind of trouble that's connected to George. But he says he doesn’t know anything about it, and he told Lewis he damn well better never
tell
him anything about it.” A tiny sad crack of a smile opened Carpenter's thin lips. “’Course, it's all backfired now, with that Roseberg lawyer hopping on the bandwagon, getting George his retrial. I guess if you let things get political, they can jump both ways.”

“Rosethorn,” I said.

A uniformed woman stuck her head in the door with messages: the fire in the kitchen was out, a prisoner had had a bad epileptic seizure in the visitors room, and the chaplain was waiting outside. Carpenter thanked her, then when she left, went on talking to me with his same slow carefulness. He said, “I don’t know exactly how to put this. But lately I’ve been asking myself, what are these ulcers for?” His thick hard fingers pushed in on his stomach. “I’ve walked men to their deaths right here in this building, just the way I was set to walk George. Walked a woman too. Whole time all of us waiting for that phone to ring and stop us. Some I took that walk with, they went singing hymns. Even whistling, one fellow, sure the governor's call was coming. Some we dragged sobbing through the door. Some said they were guilty as sin, some died swearing their innocence, and some, well, we’ll never know.”

Carpenter shoved himself out of his rocker and walked over to the thick-glassed window. Down below, convicts were mowing grass, weeding flowers, raking gravel. He nodded his head to someone. Then he sighed. “And you know what, Cuddy, it doesn’t
make a difference after that door clangs shut. They all shit their pants the same, all drool the same color blood, fists grab at the chair just the same. And watching, there's always some witness who pukes and runs off. And I always feel like doing it too.” He turned back around toward me. “I got a black boy slated to die next month. There's no fancy committees fighting to free Joe Bonder. Won’t be any either. He’ll die right on schedule. Liquor store holdup; the other guy turned state's evidence, said Joe pulled the trigger. Maybe he did. I don’t think so. But maybe he did. Other guy played the system. He’ll be out in four years. Joe's got an I.Q. about seventy-five. He smiles at me when I tell him the date of his death; says, ‘Yes, sir. I understand.’ Next day he's asking me when he can go home and see his mama.…Well, I guess I’m getting sick of it.”