In fifty-nine days, if the State of California had its way, the man
inside the Plexiglas booth would die by lethal injection.
Teresa Peralta Paget paused to study him, the guard quiet at her
side. Her new client stood with his back to them. He was bulky, the
blue prison shirt covering his broad back like an oversize bolt of
cloth. A picture of enthrallment, he gazed through the high window
of the exterior wall at the San Francisco Bay, its water glistening
in the afternoon sun. She was reluctant to distract him; the man’s
sole glimpses of the world outside, Terri knew, occurred when his
lawyers came to see him.
The others were out of it now; the last set of lawyers had withdrawn
after their latest defeat. The final desperate efforts to keep
Rennell Price alive-what she thought of as the ritual death spasms
ordained by the legal system-had fallen to Teresa Paget. This was
their first meeting: but for his solitude, she could not have picked
her client out from the other men huddled with their lawyers in the
two rows of Plexiglas cubicles. It resembled, Terri thought, an
exhibit of the damned-sooner or later, in months, or more likely
years, the impersonal, inexorable grinding of the machinery of death
would consume each one in turn.
But perhaps not, Terri promised herself, this one. At least not
until she had burnt herself down to the nerve ends, sleep-deprived
from the effort to save him.
To her new client, she supposed, Terri might appear a mere morsel
for the machine, insufficient even to slow its gears. She was
small-barely five feet four-and slight, with olive skin and a
sculpted face, which her husband stubbornly insisted was beautiful:
high cheekbones; a delicate chin; a ridged nose too pronounced for
her liking; straight black hair, which, in Terri’s mind, she shared
with several million other Latinas far more striking than she. There
was little about her to suggest the steeliness an inmate might hope
for in his lawyer except, perhaps, the green-flecked brown eyes,
which even when she smiled never quite lost their keenness, or their
watchfulness.
This wariness was Terri’s birthright, the reflex of a child schooled
by the volatile chemistry which transformed her father’s drinking to
bru- tality, and reinforced by the miserable first marriage which
Terri, who had no better model, had chosen as the solution to her
pregnancy with Elena. Her personal life was different now. As if to
compensate for this good fortune, she had turned her career down a
path more arduous than most lawyers could endure: at thirty-nine,
she had spent the last seven years representing death row inmates, a
specialty which virtually guaranteed the opposition and, quite
frequently, the outright hostility of judges, prosecutors,
witnesses, cops, governors, most relatives of the victim, and by
design, the legal system itself-not to mention, often, her own
clients. Now that stress and anxiety no longer waited for her at
home, Terri sometimes thought, she had sought them out.
What would be most stressful about this client was not the crime of
which he stood convicted, though it was far more odious than most-especially,
given certain facts, to Terri herself. Nor was it
whatever version of humanity this man turned out to be: her death
row clients had run the gamut from peaceable through schizophrenic
to barking mad. But this client represented the rarest and most
draining kind of all: for fifteen years, through a trial court
conviction in 1987, then a chain of defeats in the California
Supreme Court, the Federal District Court, the Federal Court of
Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court, Rennell Price had
claimed his innocence of the crime for which the state meant to kill
him.
No court had considered this claim worthy of belief or even, in the
last five of these proceedings, a hearing. As far as the State was
concerned, its sole remaining task should be to dispatch three
psychiatrists to advise the Governor’s office, within twenty days of
the appointed date of execution, whether her client was sane enough
to die: one of the niceties of capital punishment, Terri thought
sardonically, was the State’s insistence that the condemned fully
appreciate that lethal injection would, in fact, be lethal.
She nodded to the guard.
He rapped sharply on the Plexiglas. With a twitch of his shoulders,
as though startled, the black man inside the cage turned to face
them.
His eyes were expressionless; for him, Terri thought, the highlight
of her visit-a view of the bay-was already over. With a resignation
born of fifteen years of meeting lawyers in these booths, he backed
toward the door and, hands held behind his back, thrust them through
an open slot.
The guard clapped on his handcuffs, closing them with a metallic
click. Then Rennell Price, shackled, stepped away from the door.
The guard opened it, admitting Terri.
The door shut, and Rennell stood over her. As he backed to the slot
again, waiting for the guard to uncuff his outthrust hands, Terri
had an involuntary spurt of fear, the reflex of a small woman
confined with a hulking stranger who had, in the estimate of twelve
jurors, done a terrible thing to someone much smaller than she.
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 hus- band 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.
It was not quite true, of course. Chris’s parents were unloving and
alcoholic socialites whose wasted lives had ended in a car wreck.
Carlo had been the by-product of an affair, the miserable and
unloved son of a single mother who despised Chris too much to let
him raise Carlo-until the moment, fearful that the stunted
seven-year-old child would become a damaged adult, Chris had given
her no choice. It was this sense of life’s underside that had given
Chris the capacity to understand, at least as much as he could, what
it was like for Terri to grow up in a household where her father
raped and brutalized her mother, indifferent to what their daughter
saw or felt. That this experience had led her-with whatever
emotional crosscurrents-to comprehend the lives which so often
created death row inmates, and to feel that representing them was
recompense for her own escape, was something that Chris still strove
to understand; that their law firm would subsidize her efforts, and
that Chris would help, was a given. Which was why Carlo-preserved in
his idealism, Chris wryly remarked, by an absence of student
loans-had chosen to join them.
They drank iced tea; though it was close to the Pagets’ accustomed
cocktail hour, the conversation was too purposeful for that.
“Still,” Chris ventured, “it’s a strange crime.”
Only after a quick glance at Terri did Carlo turn to him, and she
was acutely aware of the sensitivity toward her that, for a moment,
delayed his question: “Strange in what sense?”
“That it would involve both brothers. It’s a matter of shame-if you
put a nine-year-old boy on the fifty-yard line at Notre Dame
stadium, and packed the seats with pedophile priests, none of them
would move. Child molesters tend to act alone.”
Continues…
Excerpted from Conviction
by Richard North Patterson
Copyright © 2005 by Richard North Patterson.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2005
Richard North Patterson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-345-45019-1
