Richard Patterson - Conviction

Terri took a sip of beer. "How did Rennell act?"

Fleet studied the table. "Like he'd gone to some other planet. Maybe had his brain taken over by aliens."

"And he was like that when he came to your door."

"Yeah." Fleet seemed to think, then swiftly added, "Maybe a little more jittery, like I told the cops."

Terri angled her head. "I guess Payton didn't rely on Rennell much, at least when it came to dealing crack."

Behind his newly impassive mask, Fleet seemed to watch her, wondering what lay behind this unexpected question. "Too stupid," he answered. "Boy get himself busted."

"So why didn't Payton come for you himself, instead of sending Rennell?"

"Payton was too screwed up, maybe. Or maybe he didn't trust Rennell with her alone."

"Are you saying Rennell liked dead children, Eddie?"

Fleet shrugged. "Maybe Payton was worried—leave Rennell alone, and he'd do somethin' stupid. Maybe tell Grandma, and then she'd call the cops."

Then why didn't he just call you? Terri thought. But Fleet was no fool, then or now—the image of Rennell arriving at his door made him sound more culpable, his brother's partner in a terrible crime. "Why'd you tell the cops?" she asked.

Fleet's eyes widened in satiric amazement. "What planet are you on? Cops are puttin' pressure on us all. Maybe Payton's not gonna crack, but guy like Monk could think rings around Rennell. If he confesses, I'm on my way to prison just for helpin' dump her body." His voice took an edge. "No time for sentiment. That's why I'm sittin' here, enjoyin' your so-ciety, and those boys about to die."

Terri appraised him. Fleet's story, while plausible enough, could be a fun-house mirror of the truth: if Payton had confessed, choosing to save Rennell, then it was Fleet who might wind up on death row. And so Fleet had chosen to frame the retarded brother, and dared Payton to choose between keeping silent and contradicting Fleet at the cost of his own life.

"So what did Monk offer you?" she asked.

"Just what I told their fool lawyer at the trial—consideration for cooperation, long as I told the truth. Nothin' more than that."

"Did you have anything against either Payton or Rennell?"

Eddie's smile was brief and chilly. "Not until they tried to get me capped."

"Think that was Rennell's idea?"

"Nothin' was ever Rennell's idea. Spent his whole damned life waitin' to have one. You can bet it was Payton that dreamed up my de-mise."

In that moment, Terri felt Rennell—and she—were caught in a continuing war between Payton and Fleet. But whether Fleet was trying to save himself or Payton was lying to exact revenge before dying, she didn't know. For now, desperate as she was, she could only try to exploit Fleet's animus toward Payton by inducing him to help Rennell at the margins.

"You knew them both," she said, "pretty much all your life. If you had to guess, which brother strangled Thuy Sen?"

Fleet seemed to ponder the question and, perhaps, the advantage of answering. Then a fresh thought appeared to hit him so hard that he flinched, his eyes narrowing in distrust. "What about this DNA stuff?" His tone, though soft, was wary. "Can't they test the come now, figure out whose it was?"

It was you, Terri thought. For an instant, all the time she had, Terri weighed the merits of keeping him in doubt. But the advantage would be temporary, the risk too great—inducing silence, or even flight. "No DNA available," she answered. "Thuy Sen was in the bay too long."

Light crept back into Fleet's eyes. "Then I'd guess Payton," he answered flatly. "Don't think Rennell's brain could send signals all the way to his thing. Or figure out a nine-year-old's mouth might work better than her pussy."

But you could, Terri thought. "Think so?"

"Yeah." Fleet smiled slightly. "Rennell's way too stupid to teach a child no tricks. Even ones that want to learn."

Terri felt the pinpricks on her skin. Fleet had let his mask slip, exposing the narcissism and perversion beneath the veneer of a survivor. Some men, Terri knew too well, could want both a woman and her child.

Softly, she said, "I think you can help me, Eddie."

Fleet had begun studying her mouth. "How might that be?"

"I'd like you to execute a declaration—saying that Rennell was slow, and that he depended on Payton for everything. Maybe that you never knew Rennell to be sexually involved with women of any age."

Once more, Fleet seemed to weigh his choices. "Maybe," he allowed. "Them executin' that fool won't do nothin' much for me. Let Payton pay the piper."

Of course, Terri thought. Payton's the brother who knows what happened, the one that you need dead. "Can I draft a declaration and bring it to you?"

"Why don't you bring it to my place?" Smiling, Fleet gently placed his fingers on her wrist. "You can read it aloud, just you and me. Sort of an oral pre-sentation."

TWENTY-TWO

THE NEXT MORNING, WITH FOUR DAYS REMAINING BEFORE PAYTON Price was scheduled to die by lethal injection, Terri applied with Payton's lawyer, Paul Rubin, for a stay of execution from the same federal district judge who had denied Rennell's prior habeas petition.

She, Carlo, and Chris had worked until three o'clock that morning, assembling the legal papers which outlined Payton's confession and her meeting with Eddie Fleet. The risk of filing was clear: that exposing Payton's accusation of Fleet would, if Fleet learned of it, end any chance of entrapping him. But there was no more time. So at 10:00 A.M., her nerves jangled with coffee, Terri found herself in the chambers of Judge Gardner W. Bond, as crisp and imperious as the pin-striped suit and starched white shirt which were his uniform, his peremptory gaze trained on those who gathered around his conference table—Bond's supplicants, Terri, Rubin, and the Assistant California Attorney General Laurence D. Pell—as well as the impassive female court reporter he had summoned to record his rulings.

With his gold wire-rim glasses, neatly clipped, graying brown mustache, and an erect posture which made him seem to tower while sitting, Gardner Bond often seemed to Terri less a person than a series of poses intended to convey his pride of place, the conviction that a well-ordered world was best run by men whose stringent sense of law was unleavened by sentiment and sloppiness of thought. But Judge Bond's sense of law—just as subjective as Terri knew her own to be—had been tempered on the forge of the Federalist Society, whose conservative philosophy held the death penalty to be redemptive of good moral order. At least the knowledge that Payton Price would die—perhaps quite soon—made Bond's behavior less peremptory than was his norm. Of course, Terri thought unkindly, the judge knew himself to be in good hands: those of death's bureaucrat, Larry Pell.

Pell was African American, a former college quarterback with keen eyes, a pleasant but somewhat guarded expression, and a gift for swaddling executions in what Terri considered sanitizing legalisms, making lethal injection sound like the resolution of a boundary dispute. Aside from a healthy professional respect for his skill in preserving executions, what Terri felt for Larry Pell was less dislike than bemusement: she could not understand how a black man could devote his professional life to making cosseted white males like Gardner Bond even more comfortable in their assumptions. But then life was full of such quandaries, not the least of which, in Terri's mind, was the pervasive and quite persuasive rumor that Gardner Bond, steward of the right-wing moral order, was a closeted homosexual.

"Your Honor," Pell told him calmly, "Payton Price can't get a stay of execution on his own merits. So he's piggybacked on his brother, Rennell, to save himself by claiming, incredibly, that he's been keeping Rennell on death row all these years in order to save himself. The sole consistent theme is 'whatever it takes to cheat death.' "