Richard Patterson: Conviction

She held out her hand. "I'm Terri Paget," she told him. "Your new lawyer."

His expression was somewhere between sullen and indifferent—she might as well have pronounced herself an emissary from Pluto. But after a moment, he looked up at her and said in a monotone, "My name Rennell."

She searched his eyes for hope or, at least, some instinct to trust. She saw none.

"Why don't we sit," Terri said. "Get acquainted a little."

With a fractional shrug, her client turned, slid out the orange plastic chair on the far side of a laminated wood table, and sat, staring past Terri. Settling across from him, Terri saw the inmates in the next two cages huddled with their lawyers, lips moving without sound.

Rennell's face, Terri decided, was more than inexpressive—it had no lines, as if no emotion had ever crossed it. She reminded herself that he had been only eighteen when convicted, now was barely thirty-three, and that the fifteen years in between had been, were this man lucky, mostly solitary, and unrelentingly the same. But not even Terri's presence—a novelty, at least—caused the line of his full mouth to soften, or his wide brown eyes to acknowledge her.

Terri tried to wait him out. Yet the broad plane of his face remained so impassive that he seemed not so much to look through her as to deny her presence. It was hard to know the reasons. But one of the hallmarks of an adult abused as a child, Terri reflected, was an emotional numbing to the point of dissociation—a willful process of going blank, of withdrawing mentally from this earth. Jurors often thought such men indifferent to the crimes their prosecutors described so vividly; in the case of this crime, that could hardly have helped Rennell Price.

"I've taken over your case," Terri explained. "Your lawyers at Kenyon and Walker thought you deserved a fresh pair of eyes."

This drew no reaction. Mentally, Terri cursed her predecessors for their absence, the ultimate act of cowardice and desertion—leaving her to build a relationship with a sullen stranger, the better to save his life, or prepare him to die. Then, to her surprise, he asked, "You know Payton?"

"Your brother? No, I don't." Terri tried to animate her voice with curiosity. "How's he doing?"

"Fixing to die. They're going to kill him. Before me."

Oddly, Terri thought, this last detail about Payton seemed to carry more dread than his own fate. "How do you know?" she inquired.

He slumped forward on the table, not answering. "I can't be there," he said dully. "Warden told me that."

Struck by the answer, Terri chose to ignore its unresponsiveness. "What else did she tell you?"

"That I can pick five people. When my time come."

Five witnesses, Terri thought, granted the condemned by the grace of the State of California. But from what Terri knew, it would be hard to find five people, outside the victim's family, who gave enough of a damn to watch. Rennell Price's death, if it came, would be a very private affair.

"You don't have to worry about that yet." Pausing, Terri looked hard into his eyes. "We'll have a lot of help—my husband, Chris, who's a terrific lawyer, and a team of investigators to look into your case. You'll meet them all soon. We'll be doing everything we can to save your life."

For almost half that life, he had heard this—Terri could see that much in his face. And each time, she already suspected, whoever said it had been lying.

Slowly, his eyelids dropped.

"I didn't do that little girl," he said. "Payton didn't do her."

The denial sounded rote, yet etched with fatigue. "How do you know about Payton?" Terri asked.

"He told me."

What to make of that, she wondered. As either a reason to believe his brother or a statement of truth, it was implausible to the point of pitiful, and she could not divine if this man knew it. "Who do you think 'did' her, Rennell?"

He gave a silent shrug of the shoulders, suggesting an absence of knowledge or, perhaps, a massive indifference.

"The day she died," Terri persisted, "can you remember where you were?"

"I don't remember nothing."

As an answer, it was at least as credible as the alibi the defense had offered at the brothers' trial. But one or the other could not be true, suggesting—unhelpfully—that neither was.

Terri simply nodded. There was little else to ask until she combed the record, little purpose to her visit beyond starting to persuade Rennell Price—against the odds, given his life lessons—that someone cared about him. "I'll be coming to see you every few days," she assured him. "Is there anything you need?"

Rennell gazed at the table. "A TV," he said at last. "Mine's been broke for a long time now."

"Before it broke, what did you like to watch?"

"Superheroes. Especially Hawkman. Monday through Friday at four o'clock."

She could not tell if this commercial announcement was a statement of fact or suggested an unexpected gift for irony. Whatever the case, given the size of his cell and the cubic footage limitations on his possessions, a new TV would not bankrupt the Paget family. And fifty-nine days of Hawkman was not too much to ask—though it was not easy for Terri to imagine the waning existence which would be measured out, hour by hour, in images on the Cartoon Network.

"I'll get you a new one," she promised.

Her client did not answer. Maybe, Terri thought, he did not believe her. Even when she stood to leave, he did not look up.

Only as the guard approached did Rennell Price speak again, his voice quiet but insistent.

"I didn't do that little girl," he told his lawyer.

TWO

"TO LOOK AT HIS REACTIONS," TERESA PAGET TOLD HER HUSBAND and stepson, "most people would wonder if there's a human being inside. But I began to wonder if he's retarded."

Chris's mouth formed a smile. "Or maybe just antisocial. In the Attorney General's Office, that means just smart enough to feel no remorse."

The three of them—Terri, Chris, and Carlo—sat on the deck of the Pagets' Victorian home in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco, three tall glasses resting on the table in front of them. In the foreground of their sweeping view, Victorians and Edwardians and red-brick Georgians crowded the hill, which descended to the Italianate homes of the Marina District. Beyond that, the bay was still crowded with boats in the failing sun of a late Saturday afternoon, their sails swelling with a steady wind, which on the Pagets' deck calmed to a fitful breeze. Though the panorama relieved Terri's sense of claustrophobia, so intense in the Plexiglas booth, it heightened her consciousness of the surreal gap between Rennell's existence and her own, intensified by the familiar visages to either side of her.

At fifty-five, Christopher Paget remained trim and fit, the first streaks of silver barely visible in his copper hair, the clean angles of his face as yet unsoftened by age. Wealthy by inheritance, Chris carried an air of sophistication and detachment which never obscured, at least for Terri, his devotion to their reconfigured family: her thirteen-year-old daughter, Elena; their seven-year-old son, Kit; and, as always, their newest legal associate—Chris's son Carlo, fresh from Yale Law School at the age of twenty-five.

If anything, Carlo appeared more blessed than Chris. His mother, of Italian descent, had been a beauty, and Carlo had dark good looks which Terri had seen stop women on the street. Among Carlo's many graces was that he seemed unaware of this. Unlike Chris, who superficially did not appear so, Carlo was idealistic, a sweet and loving soul—all of which, Terri knew, had everything to do with Chris himself. That was part of what had caused Terri to fall in love with Chris. So here she was, the daughter of a struggling Hispanic family, sitting in a beautiful house in a beautiful city with two men who, by all appearances, had been showered with God's favors since the moment they were born.