Love Her Madly (16 page)

Maybe if I'd worn the Gambler, my boots, my new belt, and my jeans I wouldn't have been noticed. As soon as the word
America
came out of the governor's mouth, I heard a loud
clunk.
It was the sound of something heavy coming down on my head. The
clunk
was immediately followed by an explosion. The bright Texas sun went out.

7

Not very long after the sound of the
clunk
I heard a siren. I opened my eyes. I was on my stomach, face to the side. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a video camera two inches from my nose. I tried to push myself up but hands were all over me keeping me prone while anti-death-penalty ladies kept telling me to lie still and try not to speak. I must have been trying to speak.

The paramedics broke the crowd apart, cradled my head, rolled me over, and lifted me onto a stretcher. The sun came on again. I said, “The sun in my eyes isn't helping here.”

And then my eyes were shaded by a white Stetson. Max Scraggs. He accompanied me to the hospital in the ambulance.

Like the ladies, he also advised me not to talk and then he advised me once I could talk that he was the one I needed to talk to most.

The ER doctor who examined me said that with a concussion, even a mild one, it was best to submit to a twenty-four-hour observation. I told him a mild concussion was a headache. A little Tylenol and I'd be fine. Hovering above my head, he said, “Well, now, what say first things first? First, instead of shavin' a circle around that cut, I'm takin' advantage of your long hair. Lovely hair and we'll see the blood's washed out soon's I'm finished.”

He employed a creative nonstitching technique, taking four strands of hair from either side of the split in my scalp and then tying a knot. He repeated each knot ten times.

He said, “Double sheet bend.”

I said, “What?”

“Sailing knot. Use it when you want to be extra sure the line'll hold but look neat at the same time.”

Next time I needed stitches I'd remember to ask for a doctor who owned a ketch.

While he knotted, Scraggs said, “We've got four witnesses willin' to identify the fellow who put you out. Don't really need 'em. Got the action on amateur film several times over.”

I said, “Then what are you doing here? Go after him.”

“We're hopin' to find him before the
Austin Constitution
gets put to bed.”

“This is going to make the papers?” It wasn't a real question. I knew the answer.

“We're seein' to it that you will still be referred to as an unidentified woman. Some people, of course, will recognize you. Tomorrow is another day. So you'll have time to reveal yourself as the identified woman to those you see fit to inform.”

“Thanks, Scraggs.”

The doctor said, “What've I got here, a movie star?”

I thanked the doctor sailor for the compliment.

Scraggs said, “Tomorrow morning, I'm goin' to need to talk to you.”

“Give me a ride back to my hotel, and you can talk to me in five minutes.”

He looked at the doctor, who nodded.

Then a half-dozen stricken faces appeared in the doorway. FBI. The locals had amassed for a fallen fellow. Behind them, white Stetsons.

The doctor looked a little stricken too. Figured he'd just closed up the head of one dangerous con. “Nurse, we are through. Let's pack up our riggin' and go where we're needed. Have an aide clean her head.” He said to me, “I get a mild concussion every time the boom hits me. Hits me three or four times per sail. But hear me, ma'am. If you throw up or faint? Y'all come back.” Plural. Figured I always traveled with a Ranger.

He left and I sat up. I did not wince at the pain. I said to the gathered state and federal law enforcers, “Here's the thing, guys. Whoever your infiltrators are, fire them. They're supposed to tell you things like
Someone intends to put Joe Blow out of commission.
And then you're supposed to see that Joe Blow
doesn't
get put out of commission. And, plus, you
warn
Joe Blow. Then you find out when the deed is planned for and you lie in wait and arrest the perp when he comes waltzing down the street with a big brick in his hand.

“Somebody want to tell me what the hell happened?”

Scraggs answered me. “I'll tell you exactly what happened. Your boys didn't tell mine how someone hammered a few nails in the tire of a car you were meant to drive. Our infiltrators found that out, but just a little too late to protect Joe Blow. If they had, they'd have gotten the someone before he had any chance whatsoever to take a brick to Joe Blow's head.”

An agent said, “We'd figured the nail incident was in-house. Disgruntled employee.”

I said, “Scraggs, what were we supposed to do? Arrest everyone I got fired?”

An aide started dabbing at my head, gently because she was an aide, not a graduate of medical school. I looked at all the downcast law gathered around. I said, “I'm going back to my hotel. Please find the guy. I'm fine.”

Scraggs got to push me in a wheelchair to his car. He never shut up the whole time. He lectured me, couldn't understand why I needed to get Rona Leigh this reprieve so bad that I was risking my life.

I said, “What's the matter with you? It's not Rona Leigh. It's all of them. Anybody who didn't get the fair shake they deserved. This is America, for Christ's sake, with liberty and justice for all, blah, blah, blah. Does it not
bother
you when you arrest someone who turns out to be innocent?”

“'Course it does. But I get more riled when someone's set free who's guilty. Just because a body maybe got a little overzealous, well, hell—”

“Overzealous? Some charlatan gives false forensic testimony to a jury? Since when is a man who commits a felony merely overzealous?”

“But to let someone off the hook? A killer who axed people to death?”

“Again, Scraggs, we're not letting anyone off the hook. You can't be sure she axed anyone to death if she didn't have a fair trial.”

“You can't? I am.”

“The evidence against her came from a witness who was a charlatan.”

“But she admitted to the crime.”

Here I go again. But I wasn't going to lecture someone who should know better. I said, “I kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. Arrest me. Then go and dig up that same charlatan and he'll tell a jury that I left my odor on the Lindberghs' front door. And while you're chatting up that so-called doctor, find out what's in it for him.” I put my hands out. “Where's your cuffs?”

He rolled his eyes.

I said, “I'm overreacting because you're a disgrace to your uniform.”

He pushed the wheelchair a little faster and didn't say another word. I fell asleep in his car. When we reached the hotel he woke me up. He said, “I can't tell you how glad I am you opened your eyes. You don't deserve a concussion.”

The man was making nice because I'd injected a little guilt into his life.

He got me up to my room, sat me on the edge of my bed, got me two Tylenols and a glass of water. He took a couple himself. He said, “I don't know what's drivin' you, Poppy, but you have overstepped the bounds of common sense. You are actin' in an unprofessional manner. It's just as bad as my actin' in a cynical manner. So now I get to pass on some news to you. Gary Scott called us. Told us he wanted a restraining order against you. Said you threatened him with your weapon.”

“He's nuts.”

“Yeah, well, we know that. What're you about, Agent?”

This Scraggs was a stranger. That combined with a knock on the head is the reason, I suppose, I spilled to him rather than Joe. Rather than my shrink friend. I said, “I got a letter from the daughter of a man I prosecuted for rape in Florida. She was a kid then, and now she's an intern at Yale New Haven Hospital. She saved a lock of her father's hair. His DNA did not match the DNA of the sperm found in the victim's body. Her father didn't do it.”

Scraggs sat next to me on the bed. He put his arm around my shoulder. He said, “I'm real sorry. But it happens, you know that.”

“Shouldn't.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I get you anything else?”

“Nope. I just need to have a rest.”

“If I can do anything—call me anytime.”

“You already made that offer. The day we met.”

“Today I mean it.” He wrote his home phone number on his business card, put it on the bedside table, told me to take it easy, and left.

What I didn't tell him was that I knew the guy in Florida hadn't done it while I was prosecuting him. And back then I'd used all the arguments to support myself that the governor had used on me yesterday. Basically, the guy was scum so what's the great loss?

Maybe I was no different from those women Vernon described on death row. I'd been hit by a bolt of lightning, and now I was pressed to make restitution.

I could not avoid the conversation the next day with my director. He wanted me back. I lied and told him I couldn't fly for a week, doctor's orders. But I would stay in bed until the execution. When it was over, I'd be back. What could he say?

*   *   *

The most-used media word surrounding the upcoming execution of Rona Leigh Glueck was
circus.
From the Best Western, I watched the events unfold each night on the evening news, and
circus
was the right word. A tent went up, followed by several more, because Best Western, Holiday Inn, and the two other motels were not able to handle the hundreds of people arriving like ants attracted to a piece of cake at a picnic. Farmers rented out their harvested fields abutting the prison compound, and then, for small fortunes, they rented out their unharvested fields. Losing a crop to trampling proved cost-effective. About the time the flatbed truck carrying satellite dishes rolled in, the RVs descended, followed by little makeshift shacks manned by Mexicans selling food, drink, and souvenirs.

The anti-execution people were in the tents; the pro people were in the RVs; the day-trippers drove the pickups.

The biggest and sturdiest tent had been erected by CBS. Dan Rather, hailing from Texas, had warned his technicians to get a serious tent or they'd be sucking grit and so would their equipment.

The cardinal held an open-air mass in the public park in the middle of Gatesville. He brought his own security; the pickup trucks couldn't get close enough to drown out his sermon in English, then in Spanish, condemning the death penalty.

I ran into the people from
People
the afternoon of the execution, and they invited me to dinner that night. They'd had the foresight to make a reservation at the only restaurant in Gatesville that didn't seat people on stools at a counter. Turned out Rona Leigh had asked the warden if the photographer could take a picture of her after she was pronounced dead. She said she wanted everyone to know that dead was dead.

Frank said, “Shit, I couldn't believe our luck. We were sure the warden would say no, but he told us that the anti-death-penalty folks will see that Texas means business. Figured maybe they'd give it a rest.”

The photographer said, “And our editor, he's beside himself. The first face of a dead body on the cover. ‘Let the reactions begin,' he said.”

Looked like she'd be on a
People
cover after all—one week after the cardinal.

I said, “Sounds as though Rona Leigh has given up.”

They both looked at me. They couldn't have cared less about Rona Leigh.

I asked the photographer, “Is the warden limiting you?”

“Yeah. One shot.”

“How many are you planning to take?”

He said, “I got a special camera Fed-Exed to me yesterday. It's the Uzi of the camera world. I'll be taking pictures nonstop. One shot every second and a half. Special film. I can take eight hundred shots. Camera's got a silencer on it, too.”

“You're serious, aren't you?”

He grinned. “I took a half-dozen pictures of you as you were coming in the door.”

At the restaurant we all ordered the special, chicken-fried steak with okra, which we moved around our plates into varied patterns. I said to them, “You guys have never witnessed an execution before, have you?”

They hadn't.

“Well, that's why you have no appetite. I
have
witnessed a few, and that's why
I
have no appetite.”

While we didn't eat they told me Rona Leigh would be going to bed as usual at 8
P.M
. She would be awakened at eleven. They'd already taken pictures of her having her last meal at five. The meal she requested was probably not too different from the last meal she'd had before she was arrested. She wanted a Big Mac, fries, and a chocolate shake, more evidence that she had resolved herself to die. Takeout from McDonald's was not in keeping with what an angel would eat. Rona Leigh had accepted her fate; just like the governor, she knew God would not save her.

At eleven-thirty the moon was at three-quarters, with the kind of silver light you only find above the great plains of America. Once the media equipment came on, though, it was outshone.

*   *   *

I stood in the doorway to the witness room with the warden. Through the window, the death chamber was exactly as it had been when I'd first seen it, except that a full IV bag hung from the metal stand with one piece of rubber tubing hanging down loose, another strung through the hole chipped out of the cinder block.

The families of the victims get the first row if they choose. Gary Scott was front and center. The empty seat next to him, between him and Melody's brother, was for the governor. The warden told me the brother had protested the arrangement but finally saw reason; the widower was entitled to first choice. Melody's brother had his head bent, his eyes closed, ignoring the attempts at conversation coming from Gary.