Tim Green - False Convictions

“Fire-eater?”

“Spit it out at him over a cigarette,” Mallard said. “Doesn’t need his face, really. He’s a lifer.”

A bulky nurse entered, checked the burned man’s pulse, and waddled toward them.

Through a doorway on the far side of the infirmary, Casey heard the clash of bars rolling open and Dwayne appeared in shackles, followed by a guard. Casey held Dwayne’s indifferent stare as she explained why she was there and what she needed from him. While his expression never changed, her voice rose with enthusiasm.

“Robert Graham, whom you met with me last time,” she said, “is working on pulling some strings to get this lab work moved to the top of the pile. Dwayne, we could have you out of here in a matter of days.”

The nurse reappeared with a test tube, needle, and a rubber strap.

But instead of holding out his arm, Dwayne Hubbard shook his head hard enough to jangle his chains.

“Oh, no,” he said. “You don’t get my blood.”

CASEY’S MOUTH DROPPED open. She blinked and said, “Dwayne, we need this to get you out of here. You get that, right?”

“The machine has worked against me since the day I was born,” Hubbard said, his eyes glittering at her. “Now you’re here to tell me it’s different? You think I’m like the rest of these cattle? I have an imagination. It runs wild with the possibilities for what you could do with my blood, other unfinished business to be tagged on me.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Casey said.

“Because you’re here to help me?” he said, holding her in his gaze. “That’s what my original lawyer said, too. That’s what they said with my appeals. All of a sudden, some media lawyer shows up with her billionaire boyfriend? When it seems like it’s too good to be true, it’s because it is.”

“Jesus,” Casey said.

Dwayne turned to go, but with a nod from Mallard his guard stepped in front of him and blocked his path, raising his baton.

“Wait,” Casey said, appealing to Mallard as she stepped toward Dwayne. “Even if you’re right-let’s say it’s someone’s game-why wouldn’t you let me try? If I can show your DNA isn’t a match to whoever raped that girl, you go free. If there’s a game, you’re still here, but you’re here anyway.”

Dwayne grinned at her. “Lady, you want something from me. I might be locked away, but I know an opportunity when I see one. You want what I got? Okay. Maybe. What do I get?”

“You get out of here,” Casey said, her smile crooked with disbelief.

Dwayne’s smile faded. “I want something in case I don’t.”

Casey studied his face.

“You killed her, didn’t you?” she asked, the words spilling from her mouth without thought.

Dwayne’s face lost all expression. “I told you I didn’t.”

Mallard cleared his throat and in an undertone said, “You don’t have to listen to this, Ms. Jordan. I can get whatever you need.”

“Sure he can,” Dwayne said, nodding intelligently. “He can have them beat me to death if he wants, or beat me until you’ve got all the blood you want. Is that what you want? Some lawyer. Thanks for your help. Shit, I bet you sleep real well at night.”

“What do you want?” Casey asked Dwayne, ignoring Mallard.

Dwayne’s shoulders relaxed. A smiled curled the corners of his mouth. “Love.”

Dwayne gave Mallard a knowing look.

“What does that mean, Dwayne?” Casey asked, impatient and annoyed.

“He knows,” Dwayne said, angling his chin at the assistant warden.

Mallard pursed his lips, and to Casey he said, “He wants a wedding.”

“What wedding?” she asked.

“Dwayne has a pending application for marriage.”

“Pending for about five goddamn years,” Dwayne said, the anger flaring in his eyes.

“Why?” Casey asked.

“Married prisoners get conjugal visits,” Mallard said, pushing the glasses up higher on his nose, his cheeks flushing.

“And you found someone on the Internet,” Casey said, turning to Dwayne.

“There’s someone for everyone, Ms. Jordan,” Dwayne said.

BALLOONS RESTAURANT sat just around the corner in a cramped row of houses on Wall Street facing the forty-foot-high concrete barrier that no convict had ever gotten over. The single escape in the history of the wall had been a murderer who found an old overflow pipe in the bowels of the prison’s ancient underground maze, and he’d gone under it. The restaurant looked like its neighbors except the front room had been blown open into one big space with a well-worn wooden bar and two large picture windows facing the wall. Graham waited for Casey at one of the tables crowded into the paneled back room. When he looked up and saw her, he said something she couldn’t hear into his cell phone before snapping it shut and standing to pull out a chair for her.

“I’m impressed,” he said, sitting back down on the other side of the small round table and signaling a waitress.

“You’re the one who fast-tracked the DNA analysis,” she said, removing her napkin from the paper place mat, a map of the red, white, and green boot of Italy. She flipped open the napkin and placed it in her lap.

“Anyone can load up a congressman with campaign contributions and push the red button,” Graham said. “By the way, Marty’s held up at the office.”

They ordered sparkling water and lemons from the waitress and listened to the lunch specials before Casey said, “There’ve been a lot of strange twists in this case, a lot of buttons pushed.”

Graham shrugged and rubbed the stubble that had already begun to appear on his chin. “I like pushing buttons.”

“I had a law professor use me to beat a murder rap, once,” she said. “He liked to push people’s buttons.”

Graham grinned. “Didn’t he butcher his victims and eat their gall bladders?”

“He didn’t start out that way.”

“You said you had to get back to your clinic. All I’m doing is trying to make you happy. You’re not going to hold that against me, are you?” Graham asked, raising his thick eyebrows.

She looked into his eyes. They got big, and softly he said, “Most men look at something and think of all the reasons why they can’t have it. Everything I look at, I ask, ‘Why not?’ That’s how I look at everything, even you.”

Before Casey could answer, his eyes jumped over her shoulder toward the doorway that led through the front room and the bar. He reached out his hand and Casey spun her head to see Ralph handing a manila envelope to him across their table. The driver’s red-rimmed eyes were puffy, he needed a shave, and the color was gone from his face.

“Got it,” Ralph said, then nodded to Casey before turning and disappearing through the doorway.

Graham sat back in his chair and opened the envelope, examining the papers. “Talk about strange twists.”

Casey picked up the spent lemon wedge and sucked on it as he pushed the papers her way. She examined the paper on top, a copy of a vehicle registration from 1988, a white BMW 750i.

“Nelson Rivers,” she said, reading, then looked up at Graham. “Not related to the former DA?”

Graham clamped his mouth shut, expressionless, and shrugged. Casey continued to sift through the papers. Nelson Rivers was the son of Patricia Rivers, the former DA who now sat on the New York State Fourth Circuit Appellate Court in Rochester. One of the papers was a copied page from the Auburn Citizen from 1987, a photo of a handsome young man and a stunning blonde, the junior prom king and queen from Auburn High School, Nelson Rivers and Cassandra Thornton.

“He was her boyfriend,” Casey said aloud, “and he drove a white BMW at the age of nineteen? Is he still around?”