Richard Patterson - Conviction

Once more, Terri cocked her head. "Hide from what?"

Rennell folded his arms.

"Your father?" Terri asked.

Rennell's shoulders hunched. "Sometimes he'd take a belt to me."

"Your daddy? Or Payton?"

Rennell shook his head. "Sometimes he'd hit me a lick, keep me in line. But mostly he'd look out for me."

Carlo saw Terri hesitate, trying to interpret this. Then she asked, "Did Payton ever get you in trouble?"

"No."

The stubborn tone had returned. Quietly, Terri prodded. "Not even about selling crack?"

Rennell looked up at her. "Payton never did nothing," he said in a stone-cold voice.

To Carlo it was as though, quite suddenly, Terri were a stranger. Sifting his impressions, Carlo tried to imagine how Rennell would seem to someone who, unlike him, did not strain to sympathize.

"I'm just trying to understand things," Terri told him. She paused, eyes silently seeking trust. "I want to bring another friend to see you, Dr. Lane. He can help me tell the judge what you're really like, and why you're innocent."

Rennell's eyes watched her closely. "Then get me some of that DNA. Man on TV told me about that."

"You ask Payton about it?"

Rennell nodded. "He say don't bother. They won't never be spending money on no gangbanger."

It was as good a rationalization as any, Carlo thought. "Sometimes it's not money," Terri said. "Sometimes DNA doesn't work. If it doesn't, what should I tell the judge?"

Rennell sat back. In a tone even wearier than before, he repeated, "I didn't do that little girl."

It was as though, Carlo thought, Rennell Price were talking to himself. He could not begin to guess whether this was a statement of enduring truth, or all that a guilty man had ever known to say.

"I know that," Terri answered. "Is there anything else you can tell me to help the judge believe us?"

Rennell's eyes closed. Silent, he rocked in his chair, seemingly beyond words. "I'm a respectful man," he murmured at last. "I wouldn't do that to no child."

To Carlo, the statement had a rote quality, something learned very long ago. But Terri's gaze grew more intense. "Who taught you to be respectful?"

"Grandma."

Whose authority, Carlo thought, seemed to have expired long before Thuy Sen's death.

Terri leaned closer. "Did you always try to do what your grandma said?"

Rennell's eyes shut tighter. "Yes, ma'am."

Terri paused. Softly, she asked, "Is Payton a respectful man?"

For a long moment Rennell would not answer. "Payton never did nothin'," he insisted.

This seemed to be ingrained—the point Rennell would uphold, whatever the accusation. But it was Terri and Carlo's job, perhaps contrary to Rennell's most basic instinct, to separate him from Payton on pain of death. Still quietly, Terri inquired, "Did Payton say that Tasha Bramwell would help you? Or maybe Jamal Harrison?"

At last Rennell opened his eyes. "Payton didn't say nothin'," he said. "Took care of me, is all."

SIX

THE BAYVIEW DISTRICT IN LATE AFTERNOON ENVELOPED TERRI in the deceptive lassitude of danger awaiting night to bloom: cleaning women returning home to lock their doors; aimless youths playing pickup basketball or loitering on the streets; a squad car with a shattered side window cruising down Third Street past a clump of girls sharing a cigarette no doubt laced with crack; a burglar alarm jangling that no one seemed to notice. The bus in front of her belched exhaust.

Turning, Terri drove up a narrow street past what had been Flora Lewis's house, a peeling remnant with missing shutters. But she did not stop until she reached the neatly tended stucco home to which Thuy Sen had never returned.

* * *

The door was protected by a wrought-iron security gate, for Terri a disturbing echo of death row, made more unsettling by her hope that the Sens' desire for Rennell Price's death might have lessened through the years. She rang the bell.

After a moment she heard someone stirring inside, the rattling of a chain. The door cracked ajar. A small Asian woman regarded Terri through the bars with eyes more scared and stricken than the appearance of a female stranger would account for.

"Are you Chou Sen?" Terri asked.

The woman froze. When it came, her nod was barely perceptible, as though this admission stripped her of defenses. Her eyes drilled Terri's like a bird's, both penetrant and deflective.

"I'm Teresa Paget." With deep reluctance, she finished, "I represent Rennell Price."

The woman's face was so taut that the only sign of comprehension was a brief flutter of eyelids. "What you want?"

The words seemed barely to escape her throat. Briefly, Terri bowed her head in a gesture of respect. "I was hoping we could talk."

"About what?"

"The case." Terri paused. "Rennell's scheduled to be executed in forty-one days, Payton in twenty-five."

Crossing her arms, Chou Sen clasped both shoulders tightly. "They just tell us that. Years since they tell us anything. Now you."

Terri was unsurprised: over time, as memories faded and personnel changed, the District Attorney's solicitude for survivors too often lapsed into forgetfulness, no less unkind for its inadvertence. "I'm sorry to come here," Terri said. "But there'll be publicity, hearings where we try to stop the execution. I expect that people from the Attorney General's Office will ask you to attend."

The tight mask of Chou Sen's face began to crumble. "Fifteen years," she said.

Her voice was etched with incredulity. "I know," Terri answered. "I'm sorry for that, too."

"You don't know sorry." Each word held sibilant precision. "Sorry is a picture of a child who never gets older. Sorry is a father looking at his living daughter with questions she can never answer."

Terri felt the tremor of a long-ago psychic explosion, still reverberating, which this woman would feel in her bones until she died. Cautiously, she asked, "How is your daughter Kim doing now?"

Chou Sen stood straighter. "Leave Kim be," she hissed at Terri. Tears in her eyes, she softly shut the door.

* * *

Alone, Terri stood on the desolate spit of land where—in Eddie Fleet's telling—Thuy Sen had begun her journey to Candlestick Point.

The druidical piles of sand were gone. But enough remained—the stunted shrubs, the tallow factory with its stench of burning animal remnants. The neglected pier was now a few worn posts sticking from the water like rotted teeth, and the old, wrecked barge was a ghost of Terri's imaginings. Across the steady current of the channel, loading cranes cast fading shadows on black water.

Walking to the dirty sand along the channel, Terri tried to envision a large black man bearing the frail body of a child, waist-deep in the current. But she could not summon Rennell's face. Perhaps that was because of the darkness she imagined—she could not fault Fleet's description of the place itself, as chilling as the water which had borne Thuy Sen away. As chilling as Terri's own memories.

* * *

In the dark of her bedroom, Terri awoke.

Shirtless, Chris slept beside her, his face still softened from their lovemaking. But though long hours of work separated Terri from her meeting with Chou Sen and her visit to the water's edge, Terri could not stop thinking of Elena.

With a mother's intuition—or perhaps the incessant worry, she acknowledged, of a woman who believed, despite Chris's generous heart, that she alone truly loved this damaged child—Terri went to her teenage daughter's room.

The door was cracked open, the inside dark. Uncertain of her purpose, Terri opened the door, pausing at the threshold of Elena's room to hear the whisper of her breathing.

Her daughter spoke from darkness. "Why are you defending him?"

Terri felt gooseflesh on her skin. Words of answer sticking in her throat, she crossed the carpet to sit at the edge of her daughter's bed, then reached for Elena's hand.