John Grisham - The Confession

Robbie was in the kitchen looking for water. “This is great, Fred,” he said.

“It is, and it’s not. He refuses to sign an affidavit.”

“What!”

“Won’t do it. We left the strip club and went to a coffeehouse. I begged him to sign an affidavit, but it’s like talking to a tree.”

“Why not?”

“His momma, Robbie, his momma and his family. He can’t stomach the idea of admitting that he’s a liar. He’s got a lot of friends in Slone, and so on. I did everything I could possibly do, but the boy is not willing to sign on.”

Robbie downed a glass of tap water and wiped his mouth with a sleeve. “Did you tape it?”

“Of course. I’ve listened to the tape once, about to go through it again. There’s a lot of background noise—you ever been to a strip club?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Really loud music, a lotta rap shit and stuff like that. But his voice is there. You can understand what he’s saying. We’ll need to enhance it.”

“There’s no time for that.”

“Okay. What’s the plan?”

“How long is your drive?”

“Well, at this lovely time of the day, there’s no traffic. I can be in Slone in five hours.”

“Then get your ass on the road.”

“You got it, Boss.”

An hour later, Robbie was in bed, flat on his back, the dark ceiling doing strange things to his thought process. DeDe was purring like a kitten, dead to the world. He listened to her breathe heavily and wondered how she could be so untroubled by all of his troubles. He envied her. When she awoke hours later, her first priority would be an hour of hot yoga with a few of her dreadful friends. He would be at the office screaming at the telephone.

And so it had all come down to this: a drunk Joey Gamble confessing his sins and baring his soul in a strip club to a man with a concealed mike that produced a scratchy audio that no court in the civilized world would take heed of.

The fragile life of Donté Drumm would depend on the eleventh-hour recantation by a witness with no credibility.

PART TWO

THE

PUNISHMENT

CHAPTER 16

Lost in the frenzy of the departure was the issue of money. When he paid six bucks for Boyette’s feast at the Blue Moon Diner, Keith realized he was low on cash. Then he forgot about it. He remembered it again after they were on the road and needed gas. They stopped at a truck stop on Interstate 335 at 1:15 a.m. It was Thursday, November 8.

As Keith pumped gas, he was aware of the fact that Donté Drumm would be strapped to the gurney in Huntsville in about seventeen hours. He was even more aware that the man who should be suffering through his final hours was, instead, sitting peacefully only a few feet away, snug inside the car, his pale slick head reflecting the overhead fluorescent lights. They were just south of Topeka. Texas was a million miles away. He paid with a credit card and counted $33 in cash in his left front pocket. He cursed himself for not raiding the slush fund he and Dana kept in a kitchen cabinet. The cigar box usually held around $200 in cash.

An hour south of Topeka, the speed limit increased to seventy miles per hour, and Keith and the old Subaru inched upward to seventy-five. Boyette so far had been quiet, seemingly content to sit crouched with his hands on his knees and stare at nothing through the right-side window. Keith preferred to ignore him. He preferred the silence. Sitting next to a stranger for twelve straight hours was a chore under normal circumstances. Rubbing shoulders with one as violent and weird as Boyette would make for a tense, tedious trip.

Just as Keith settled into a quiet, comfortable zone, he was suddenly hit with a wave of drowsiness. His eyelids snapped shut, only to be reopened when he jerked his head. His vision was blurred, foggy. The Subaru edged toward the right shoulder, then he moved back to the left. He pinched his cheeks. He blinked his eyes as wildly as possible. If he’d been alone, he would have slapped himself. Travis did not notice.

“How about some music?” Keith said. Anything to jolt his brain.

Travis just nodded his approval.

“Anything in particular?”

“It’s your car.”

Yes, it was. His favorite station was classic rock. He cranked up the volume and was soon thumping the steering wheel and tapping his left foot and mouthing the words. The noise cleared his brain, but he was still stunned by how quickly he had almost collapsed.

Only eleven hours to go. He thought of Charles Lindbergh and his solo flight to Paris. Thirty-three and a half straight hours, with no sleep the night before he took off from New York. Lindbergh later wrote that he was awake for sixty straight hours. Keith’s brother was a pilot and loved to tell stories.

He thought about his brother, his sister, and his parents, and when he began to nod off, he said, “How many brothers and sisters do you have, Travis?”

Talk to me, Travis. Anything to keep me awake. You can’t help with the driving, because you have no license. You have no insurance. You’re not touching this wheel, so come on, Travis, help me out here before we crash.

“I don’t know,” Travis said, after the obligatory period of contemplation.

The answer did more to lift the fog than anything by Springsteen or Dylan. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

A slight tic. Travis had now shifted his gaze from the side window to the windshield. “Well,” he said, then paused. “Not long after I was born, my father left my mother. Never saw him again. My mother took up with a man named Darrell, and since he was the first man I ever remembered, I just figured Darrell was my father. My mother told me he was my father. I called him Dad. I had an older brother and he called him Dad. Darrell was okay, never beat me or anything, but he had a brother who abused me. When they took me to court the first time—I think I was twelve—I realized that Darrell was not my real father. That really hurt. I was crushed. Then Darrell disappeared.”

The response, like many of Boyette’s, raised more mysteries than it solved. It also served to kick Keith’s brain into high gear. He was suddenly wide-awake. And he was determined to unravel this psycho. What else was there to do for the next half day? They were in his car. He could ask anything he wanted.

“So you have one brother.”

“There’s more. My father, the real one, ran off to Florida and took up with another woman. They had a houseful of kids, so I guess I have outside brothers and sisters. And there was always this rumor that my mother had given birth to a child before she married my father. You ask how many. Pick a number, Pastor.”

“How many are you in contact with?”

“I wouldn’t call it contact, but I’ve written some letters to my brother. He’s in Illinois. In prison.”

What a surprise. “Why is he in prison?”

“Same reason everybody else is in prison. Drugs and booze. He needed cash for his habit, so he broke into a house, wrong one, ended up beating a man.”

“Does he write back?”

“Sometimes. He’ll never get out.”

“Was he abused?”

“No, he was older, and my uncle left him alone, far as I know. We never talked about it.”

“This was Darrell’s brother?”

“Yes.”

“So, he wasn’t really your uncle?”

“I thought he was. Why are you asking so many questions, Pastor?”

“I’m trying to pass the time, Travis, and I’m trying to stay awake. Since I met you Monday morning, I have slept very little. I’m exhausted, and we have a long way to go.”