David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

I said, Good night, amigo.

WE ASKED FOR A TABLE in the back at Café Annie. I told Katya about my day. She said, You have to write him and apologize.

Apologize for what?

You told a man on death row to have a nice life.

The guy’s an asshole. I’m not going to apologize.

The waiter brought our appetizers and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. We ordered a coffee-roasted sirloin and grilled redfish. I lifted my champagne glass to make a toast. Katya’s eyes were wet.

What’s the matter, K?

She said, The guy is totally messed up. He can’t help the way he is. It’s really bad karma for you to say that to him.

Bad karma? Are you serious? Can I tell you what the guy did?

I said, Green beat his pregnant wife to death with his fists. He had his five-year-old son with him watching while he did it. Then he drove with his son to his mother-in-law’s house and strangled her, again with his little boy watching.

Katya started to say something. I said, Wait, I’m not finished. He drove to a motel, and when his boy fell asleep he left him there. Just left him. The next morning the kid woke up alone in the room and wandered outside looking for his dad. A maid found him. Green was arrested watching TV in his trailer at nine in the morning. He was on his sixth beer.

Katya ran her finger around the rim of her champagne glass. She said, I don’t know how he got to be that way. But he was reaching out to you because he respects you. You can’t leave it like that.

I said, I’m not going to apologize to him.

We sat silently. Our food arrived. I cut the steak and the fish in half, put some on each of our plates, and ate a piece of the meat. This is great, I said. Katya smiled. Sad and happy, all at once. I’m either in a good mood or, more often, a bad one. She is more complicated than I am. She can be in both. I said, I’ll write him and thank him for seeing me. I won’t apologize, but I’ll write him. Okay?

Okay, she said. Thank you. And the sadness was gone, just like that.

I said, What was that bourbon, anyway?

Pappy Van Winkle. Twenty years old. I’m glad you liked it.

How many bottles did you buy?

Just one. It wasn’t cheap.

I figured that. I guess I’ll drink it slow.

We had coffee and cognac. I was remembering how Green looked at me as I was leaving. She said, Where did you go?

I told her I was thinking about what it would be like to live the rest of my life in a windowless space the size of my closet. I said, It might be a little easier if it was your closet.

Hah hah.

Katya practiced law for seven years. She was good at it, but she’s too artistic, and too sincere, to be happy as a lawyer. So she went to art school and started teaching high-school photography. If it weren’t for Lincoln, that’s probably what she’d still be doing. But when our son arrived, she devoted herself with an intensity I had not seen before to being a mom and, far more daunting, to making me into a dad.

I was feeling sentimental, and when I’m feeling sentimental I am triter than normal. I had never gotten around to my toast. I lifted my cognac glass. I said, You and our son are the best things in my life. Thank you.

Katya had heard this toast before. I had heard her response before. She said, It sure took you long enough to decide.

When you don’t get married until late in life, the list of qualities you expect your wife to have can grow to be specific and long.

Katya is a competitive ballroom dancer. I bump into our piano walking from the kitchen to the library. She could have been a concert flutist, but her parents were practical Germans who saw no prospects in earning a living as a musician. My great-grandparents died in the Holocaust. The first time I met Katya’s mom and dad I wondered where their parents had been.

I said, You were pretty much the exact opposite of the person my list described. It took me a little while to realize that maybe the list was wrong.

She said, Maybe?

I smiled. I said, A little while to realize that the list was definitely wrong.

She said, Maybe you should stop keeping lists.

THE NEXT MORNING I woke up before dawn and went for a run with the dog. I came home and brewed a pot of coffee for myself and a cup of tea for Katya. I made breakfast for Lincoln while Katya fixed his lunch and helped him get dressed. I showered and shaved and put on a suit. I usually wear blue jeans and a T-shirt to the office, so Lincoln asked me why I was dressed funny. I told him I had to go to a meeting. Katya said, Hey Linco, it’s time to go to school. I kissed them both good-bye then drove to the courthouse.

I walked into the courtroom for the 175th Harris County District Court and chatted with Loretta, one of the clerks. I hadn’t seen her since August, when my client Leroy Winter had been executed. Winter had been serving a prison sentence for sexual assault of a minor when he killed a guard. His defense was that the guard had been raping him. It might have been true, but it’s still not a good idea to kill a guard. Loretta said she was sorry about Winter. She was lying. Her friends are cops. She was just being polite. I appreciated it. I said, Thanks, Loretta. She told me that my wife must have picked out my shirt and tie, because they matched. I smiled and told her that she knows me pretty well. I asked her to please call the prosecutor to let her know that I was there.

A few minutes later, the prosecutor came into the court. While we waited for the judge to arrive, we talked about our upcoming vacations. My wife and I are going white-water kayaking, I told her. Shirley told me that she and her husband were going to the Pacific Northwest. She asked how long I’ve been kayaking, and I asked her whether she’d been to Seattle before. Most of my colleagues don’t like her, but Shirley and I get along just fine. Because I used to support the death penalty, it’s not so hard for me to have sympathy for the misguided souls who still do.

I saw two former students of mine, now assistant district attorneys. They asked how things were going at the law school where I teach, and we chatted about their careers. The judge walked in, and a bailiff shouted for us all to rise. Defense lawyers and prosecutors milled around, trying to work out deals with each other, or just engaging in courthouse gossip. Criminal courtrooms, when there isn’t a trial going on, are a lot like a Middle Eastern bazaar.

A man charged with drug possession stood before the judge, in between the prosecutor and his own lawyer, whom he had met less than five minutes earlier, and pleaded guilty. He had been through this ritual before. He was as calm as you would be if you were standing in line to pay a parking ticket. The judge sentenced him to time already served. The prosecutor and I asked the judge if we could approach the bench, and she told us we could. The prosecutor said that she and I had compared calendars, and we wanted to see if she planned to be in town on February 4. The judge glanced down at her calendar and said that she did. Shirley handed the judge an order. Without looking down, the judge signed it.

The order the judge signed is called a death warrant. Shirley and I had picked the day that my client would die. We planned the execution around our vacations. The warrant commanded the director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to place Henry Quaker, on February 4, “in a room arranged for the purpose of execution” and then to inject him with “a substance or substances in lethal quantity sufficient to cause [his] death” and to continue with the injection “until the said HENRY QUAKER is dead.”