Richard Patterson - Conviction

Rennell closed his eyes, sucking stale air into his lungs. Outside, one guard with a baton took the place of another, this one looking bored and disdainful, as though watching a dumb show performed by a murderer attempting to cheat justice.

Rennell resumed the test, pencil stabbing at the paper.

* * *

At a little past one-thirty, Lane placed a wooden board in front of Rennell—a replica of the child's game Elena and Kit had played in preschool, which challenged them to fit wooden pieces into the hollow shapes presented by the board. Rennell stared at it, suspicion warring with embarrassment.

"I seen this before. In school."

Lane smiled. "But I do this one a little different—it's for adults."

Rennell's shoulders sagged. "How's that?"

"Before you put the shapes in, I'll be covering your eyes with a blindfold."

For the first time, Rennell's tone bespoke resistance. "What's that for?"

"It's just part of the rules. Helps us know what you remember."

Staring at the board, Rennell shook his head from side to side. "At that trial, I didn't have no blindfold."

Silent, Terri watched, worried Rennell was on the edge of exhaustion, so fearful of looking stupid that he would refuse to go on. "True enough," Lane answered. "But they didn't test you at the trial. This will help us explain you to the judge. How you think and all."

"This game's got nothin' to do with me being innocent." Rennell's tone of voice became implacable. "I don't want no blindfold, man. Damn straight I don't."

Terri realized that fatigue and hunger had slowed her thoughts and dulled her instincts. "This is the last part," she interjected with quiet urgency. "We need it to try and save your life."

Once more Rennell shook his head. "I didn't do that little girl. Don't want no blindfold—just tell that judge I didn't do her."

"Please trust me about this, Rennell. I'd never ask if this test wasn't good for you . . ."

He stared at her, as though straining to hear Terri through his need to resist. Terri looked into his eyes. "Please," she repeated. "It won't take long at all."

The distance seeping into his gaze began to frighten her—it was as though he were reverting to the stranger who first had confronted her with the wall of his seeming indifference. "Why don't we take a minute," she suggested. "Try and relax."

Turning from her, Rennell folded his hands in front of him and stared mutely at the wooden board. Terri let the second hand on the schoolroom clock above the guard's head trace its circle twice, then nodded at Lane.

"Look at the pieces," he said encouragingly. "Just try to remember where a piece fits on the board. Then we can start."

Rennell did not acknowledge him. Terri couldn't tell whether he was struggling to absorb the instructions or had receded to some other place or time.

"I'll put the blindfold on now," she told him. "Okay, Rennell?"

When he did not answer, Lane handed her the black swatch of cloth. Standing behind Rennell, she paused, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. Then she folded the cloth once and placed it over his eyes, tying it behind his head.

"Okay, brother Rennell," Lane said in his most companionable voice. "You can start with any piece you want."

Slowly, Rennell groped for the piece nearest him, a star.

"Good," Lane said.

Rennell's hand began twitching. "Can't," he whispered.

"You're doing fine."

Rennell hesitated, shoulders bracing with the effort. A tremor ran through his body.

"It's okay." This time it was Terri who spoke. "It'll be okay."

Abruptly, Rennell's mouth clamped shut, the part of his face she could see screwed tight. He folded his arms as though to fight off cold.

"Rennell . . ."

From beneath the blindfold, a single tear trickled down his face.

Abruptly, Terri stood, removing the blindfold. Rennell hunched forward, head pressed against his drawn-up knees. A cry of anguish ripped from deep inside his chest.

Terri hugged him from behind, face pressed against the top of his head, watching Lane's narrow-eyed scrutiny of the sobbing man before him.

"It's okay," Terri whispered, trying to breathe with him. She could feel his body trembling in her grasp.

* * *

Emerging from the prison, Terri felt diminished. Her only hope was that what she'd wrung from Rennell Price had some meaning larger than the fatigue and hunger of a man beaten down and then betrayed by a lawyer too intent on her goals to see him.

"I don't know what that was about," Lane had told her. "Maybe we never will. But it felt like more than a sugar deficit. The man was scared."

"Maybe scared of looking stupid," Terri answered. "Or maybe of what he thought I was doing."

For a moment, Terri thought of her childhood, her own nightmares and fear of darkness and then, unavoidably, their recurrence in Elena, and the terrible reasons for that. But all she could do was keep on going. So she drove downtown to Macy's, where Yancey James's ex-wife, Diana, worked behind a cosmetics counter.

* * *

Though quite striking, Diana James used too much of her own product for Terri's taste, and the spiky eyelashes made her enormous black eyes too prominent in a face so long and thin. But an edgy humor flashed through the makeup when Terri explained herself. "Oh, Lord," James said. "Another one of poor Yancey's condemned. They find their way to his door like swallows coming back to Capistrano."

"My swallow's got twenty-nine days," Terri said. "And his next stop won't be Capistrano. I was hoping we could talk."

Diana rolled her eyes, her expression hovering between exasperation and hard-earned resignation. "I'm a sucker for nostalgia. I mean, why would merely living with the man ever have been enough." She glanced at her watch. "Tell you what, counselor, my break's in twenty minutes. Chance to get us some fresh air."

* * *

Terri sat with Diana James on a wooden bench in Union Square, watching the pigeons strut by with their chests stuck out while peering about for food.

James eyed them with amused disdain. "Like Yancey before the fall," she said. "Posing like wild, all the time trying to figure out how to get through the next twenty-four hours. Excepting pigeons don't lie."

Terri managed a smile. "Nostalgia," she remarked, "isn't what it used to be."

"Not for this girl." James gave Terri a look of shrewd appraisal. "I guess you want to talk with him, and you're needing my supposed expertise. Or intervention."

"That was the idea," Terri acknowledged. "Especially the intervention part."

A corner of James's mouth twisted up. "You're Rennell Price's lawyer, right? So hard to keep them straight. As I recall things, Yancey didn't much like Rennell's last pack of lawyers when they came sniffing around." Pausing, James stretched out her syllables in an orotund mimicry of her ex-husband. " 'Acc-u-sa-tory,' he called them. 'Con-de-scending.' Poor bastard was scared to death of losing everything like he was losing me, so naturally he inflated himself with bluster like it was helium. Or," she finished with sudden bitterness, "white powder. By the time I left him, he wasn't anything but coke and pretense. Nobody home no more."

Terri studied her with genuine curiosity. "Did you have kids?"

"No, thank God." The eyelids lowered. "I say that, but now I've got no kids, too far south of forty. Yancey's the only child I'll ever have."

"I guess you still see him."

"If that's what you call propping somebody up." Diana James sighed, her voice combining weariness with a certain measured sympathy. "Yancey's got a long, hard road. One of the steps to recovery, they say, is apologizing to those you've wronged. He can't even remember all the people he owes apologies, and the ones he can remember make for a very long list. Sort of makes the road to Calvary look like the hundred-yard dash." Her tone sharpened. "One thing I do remember is your client made some poor Asian child choke to death on his own dick. Compared to that, lethal injection seems like a cakewalk. But maybe there's no exceptions on the path to true repentance."