Eileen Dewhurst - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

I looked down at the exam I had been grading. Her chair didn’t move.

“I don’t know what else you have going on in your life, Dr. Triplett, that could be more important than saving an innocent man’s life, but I’m not going to let you run me off with your cynicism.” She pushed the file toward me. “Don’t read it. It’s on your head. If they execute an innocent man how will you explain that you didn’t have time even to look at the file?” Her jaw was determined but her eyes glistened with oncoming defeat.

“I’m going to do everything I can for my client. He is not going to die because I didn’t turn over every rock or look into every corner.”

“And what rock am I under, Ms. Chao? Who sent you to me?”

“Mr. Talaverde did.”

“Paul Talaverde? My old friend?” I smiled at the memory.

“Yes. I work in the pro bono section of the firm.”

“What did he say?”

“I’d really rather Mr. Talaverde talk to you. It was his idea.”

“No, no, no. You’re going to do whatever it takes for your client, remember? This is what it takes; if you want me to read this file you tell me what Paul Talaverde said.”

She smiled at me. “And if I do, you’ll agree to read the file?”

I shook my head sadly. “No, you have no leverage here. I’m mildly curious, you’re desperate.” I pushed the file back at her.

“Okay, you asked for it. He said you used to be the best forensic psychologist around, but that you were burned out now. Actually, he said you pretended to be burned out, but that you could still be seduced if the case was interesting enough. He said that if that didn’t work, I should try to shame you into it. You had always been vulnerable to that, and probably still were.”

“Anything else?”

She looked away and pursed her mouth in distaste. “He said I should start with you because your contract at the university forbids you from doing private-practice work for a fee. So, if you took the case...”

“The price was right. Paul say anything else?”

“No, that was it.”

“Then we’re still friends. Tell him he was right on two counts. Now, I have a couple of questions for you, Ms. Chao.”

She brushed an eave of lustrous black hair out of her face and clasped her hands around her knee, a perfect impression of the earnest student eager to please.

“Who did you talk to at the prison? You said ‘we’ believe there is a terrible miscarriage? Truth or seduction, Ms. Chao?”

“Truth, Dr. Triplett. Our firm got a call from Otis Weems, he was original counsel on this case, saying that one of the doctors at the prison had called him very concerned about Earl, that’s Earl Munsey, the defendant.” She pointed to the case file.

“Mr. Weems didn’t want to get into it, you know the ineffective-counsel issues, so it was assigned to me. I went up to the prison to talk to the doctor. Then I talked to Earl Munsey. Obviously you think I’m a naive fool, but I’m convinced that Earl Munsey didn’t do it and they are going to execute an innocent man.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“He said Earl was deteriorating as the execution date approached.”

“Deteriorating how?”

“You name it. He paced his cell at all hours. He wouldn’t leave for exercise. He was convinced that they would move up the date and take him right off the yard. He stopped eating. Then last week he started crying all the time, calling for his mother. He started banging his head against the walls of his cell, he tore off his fingernails digging at the brick.”

“You’ve never been on death row, have you?”

“No. Don’t ever want to, either.”

“It’s ugly, very ugly. It’s cases like this that make people question what we’re doing. We destroy another human being’s sense of dignity, reduce them to a gibbering gobbet of fear. Why? Then you remember what they did to some other human being and it gets real complicated. At least it does for me.”

“Are you in favor of the death penalty?”

“I think in some cases it’s just. There are some people who do things for which they should forfeit their lives. But then I don’t believe in the sanctity of life. Suicide makes sense to me, so does abortion. What I think is neither here nor there. What you are describing happens all the time. The law prohibits the execution of a mentally ill person. But then, who wouldn’t be mentally ill at the prospect of death by electrocution? The prison hospitals routinely medicate prisoners to near-comas as their dates approach so they won’t act in such a way as to appear mentally ill and avoid execution. It’s a hell of a choice for the doctors. Do nothing and watch your patients shit themselves like crazed rats and then get executed anyway, or trank them to the eyeballs so they’re easier to kill. So far you haven’t told me anything unusual to warrant looking into this case. It’s interesting that the doctor called his attorney, most of the time they wouldn’t bother. What’s got you so convinced this guy is innocent, not just terrified?”

“When I got there to see him he was curled up on the floor, rocking back and forth, crying for his mother, saying, ‘I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it,’ over and over again. I just watched him through the window of his cell. When I went in he didn’t even know I was in the room. Nothing changed. I told him who I was. Nothing. No new evidence, no claims that someone else did it or he was framed. He didn’t ask me to represent him. Just rocking and crying.”

“Did he know you were coming?”

“No. It was on the spur of the moment. The prison doctor had called his attorney, who called us. Mr. Talaverde asked me to go up right away. I didn’t tell the doctor I was coming, neither did Mr. Talaverde. We didn’t even agree to look into it, so his attomey couldn’t have told him anything. I checked with the doctor. Weems hadn’t gotten back to him.”

“All right. Leave me the file. I’ll read it tonight and call you tomorrow.” She was right, I didn’t have anything more important to do.

“Here’s my home number,” she said as she wrote on the back of a business card. “My son’s been sick. I may not be in the office tomorrow.” She slid the card over to me. I put it in the file.

I finished my workout, showered, changed, made a pitcher of gin and tonic, and set it on the patio table next to the file. I put a fresh, clean legal pad and pen on the other side. I poured a drink, sat down, and opened the Earl Munsey file.

Earl Munsey had been nineteen when he was arrested for the murders of Joleen Pennybacker, Martha Dombrowski, and Eleanor Gelman. Pennybacker was found in a model home by a real-estate agent, Dombrowski in an empty house by the residents when they returned from a trip, and Gelman in a rental condo, by the next occupants. At first the three women appeared to have been murdered where they were found, with the murder weapons at the scene: Pennybacker’s skull crushed by a blood-covered wooden stick; Dombrowski shot in the head by the .32 caliber gun found next to her body; and Gelman bludgeoned by the fifteen-pound dumbbell near her.

Medical examination revealed that these were postmortem wounds and that each woman had been strangled by a soft ligature, perhaps rubber tubing. They had all been sexually assaulted before death, with bruising of the genital area but no penetration. There were no hair samples or bodily fluids at the scene of the crime. In addition, each victim had been bled, probably by syringe, and splashes of their blood were found at the next crime scene. They had been murdered elsewhere and placed at the scenes.

I picked up the crime-scene psychological profile. The profiler had been Warren Schuster, trained at Quantico, now a consultant in private practice.