The Executioner's Song (103 page)

She might have a problem with her child, and her marriage was dead, and she loved the pleasures of seclusion, and the nourishments

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of reading, God, she loved to read the way others would insist on three meals a day, but when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone’s disbelief— at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Beehive State. The girls went big for vertical hair-dos, pure monuments to shellac.

So she went to the meeting for a Coalition Against the Death Penalty and twenty people showed up to see what they could do about convincing Gary Gilmore that he was oo percent wrong in wanting the State to shuffle him off this mortal coil. The Coalition would seek to get the idea across that the State should not be able to kill anybody. Gilmore was a sensitive artist, but he was also, thought Julie Jacoby, acting like a very selfish man.

Shirley Pedler had been intending to organize the meeting herself, but came down with a terrific case of semi-pneumonia, so Julie discovered a fellow named Bill Hoyle from the Socialist Workers’ Party had been handed the bill. He was there, he said, to do the legwork. There was a pastor from the United Church of Christ, the Reverend Donald Proctor, and the Reverend John P. Adams from the United Methodist Church who was on the Board of the National Coalition Against Capital Punishment. They discussed what sort of action they should take.

Don Proctor had ideas that Julie thought were something Alinsky-esque. He wanted a highly visible rally, a get-together, say, in the center of a busy shopping mall on a Saturday.

No one was comfortable with that. For one thing, you had to get permission to go on private property. They finally decided to have a mass meeting in a hall prior to January 17, and then a vigil on the prison grounds all through the night before the execution. More ministers might turn out then. Right now was Christmas week, a time of heavy business for reverends.

In the meantime, they had $oo in working funds contributed by the Society of Friends. Bill Hoyle said he’d get some flyers printed

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and they could count on buttons from the Fellowship of Reconcili ation in Nyack, New York. The buttons would say, “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?”

The following day he called a florist shop in Butte and asked the saleswoman to have flowers delivered. Then he asked her to write on the card, “To the nicest lady in the world” and please sign it Lance LeBaron. He explained he did not know her name, but sure did know how well she had treated him. The woman at the florist shop not only agreed she was nice but said the name was Irene Snell, and the flowers were delivered an hour or so later.

Back in the motel, Gibbs was eating codeine like candy, but he was careful to take Oral Varidase only as prescribed. Day after Christmas, he called his mother and she told him to keep his leg elevated and put a heating pad on it. She’d been a registered nurse for thirty-five years. She also told him to be careful shaving. If he was even to nick himself, he might not, because of the Oral Varidase, be able to get the bleeding to stop.

Gibbs also called Halterman. Ken’s first words were, “If it wasn’t you, Gibbs, I wouldn’t believe it.” Then he said, “Know anybody can get in more jams?” That’s all Gibbs needed to cheer himself up.

He phoned Owl Taxi for cigarettes, whiskey, Cokes, ice and some canned tomato and mushroom soup, which he figured to use on the little courtesy coffeepot heater in the room. Until he got his upper plate fixed, he would have to live on soup. Then he called the Highway Patrol to see who had brought his car in, and asked the kid who’d done the job to look in the front seat for the other half of his teeth. An hour or so later, the fellow came to the room with the miss ing piece. Since the car was totaled, he wondered if Gibbs would con sider selling the engine. Could pay around $z5 a month. The boy had just gotten married and didn’t have much money. Gibbs said, “Take it from me as a late wedding present.”

After a couple days of tomato and mushroom soup, Gibbs asked the lady who ran the motel ff she knew of a restaurant that offered take-home food. Right offhand, she didn’t, but asked what he would like. When he said soft-boiled eggs, toast and milk, she brought it to his room and he paid her $5. She told him two would be sufficient, but he insisted on five. She was one of the most agreeable people he ever met in his thirty-one years of life.

From then on, every night, Mrs. Snell brought his meals. After he got his teeth fixed, she would tell him what she herself was hav ing for dinner. He ended up eating everything from spaghetti to steaks and always had to argue with her on the price. In the mean time, the doctorcame by to check his leg, refill his prescription and remove the stitches from his forehead.

Slowly, his cash was going down, but Gibbs didn’t think about it. He had never been able to manage money anyway. Between $z5 and $6o a day was being spent in long-distance phone calls, and he made a point to pay the motel bill each morning. It was hard not to feel sorry for himself. Each night he’d get drunk, and then he’d want to cry on someone’s shoulder. That was hell at long distance. One old girl friend he almost asked to fly up to stay with him, but decided he wouldn’t. Then he called another old girl friend. Almost did the same thing. But he couldn’t think of a girl who might not disclose to the wrong people where he was and, worse, what condition he was in. He made a poin’t to tell everybody he called that he was lying in bed with a nine millimeter Browning Automatic right next to him, and thirteen good reasons in the clip why nobody, unless invited, better come through his door. When he mentioned this to Halterman, Ken said, “For somebody who’s trying to hide, you sure talk your butt off.” Even the operators in Butte started using his name. As soon as he’d ask for Salt Lake, they would answer, “How are you, Mr. LeBaron? It’s room three at the Mile High, is it not?” He had left Utah with $i,37o and was now down to $5oo.

Lying in bed, he would sometimes go out of his head a little and imagine what it would be like when he went to the execution. Would he get to go up and talk in person? If they let him, he would say, “Gilmore, remember how you once told me you never misjudged a person who has done time? Well, let me tell you what I do for a liv-

years ago.

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ing.” Then he would ponder whether he really would say it, assum-hag ha his mind, somehow, that Schiller had never told anybody, which, of course, he had. “Gary,” Gibbs would say, looking him in the eye, “you have met your match. Your sixth sense about good convicts has served you wrong in regards to me. I am the one person who has been able to fool, deceive and turn the tables on you, Gary Gilmore.” Then it would all come down on him again, his pain, his situation, his fucking life, and he would say to himself, “Gary, that ain’t the speech I’d make. I would say, ‘Goddamn you, you got more guts than any son of a bitch I ever knew. I just wish I had as many balls as you. Hell, fellow, A man knows a man whenever they meet,’” and he would blink back his sadness, for it was a sentence Gary had written to him ha a recent letter that could just as well have been received

Half the value of Schiller’s vacation was quickly blown. He had brought Stephie out to meet his brother and sister-in-law andit was a social thing, and she was spending all her time with them, and where was he? On the phone. What headaches.

The lawyers for Max Jensen’s insurance company had filed a Wrongful Death suit for recovery of $4o,ooo from Gary Gilmore’s estate, and as a courtesy to Colleen Jensen, had hooked on a million-dollar suit for her. Now, while Schiller was trying to go belly-up to the sun, damn if the insurance lawyers didn’t get a Court order that Gary had to give a deposition. When Schiller found out about it, he hit the fucking ceiling. He was stuck to the phone. Said to Moody, “Did you agree? You didn’t fight it? What do you mean you didn’t?” He did not enjoy shrieking “at Moody because it was highly nonproductive. Moody was too stubborn for that. Just sat behind his glasses. A real poker player. Yet Schiller couldn’t help himself. He was climbing the walls and bouncing.

“What are you upset about?” asked Bob Moody. “What’s the thing about a deposition?”

Schiller almost said, “Are you out of your mind?” He did say, “Don’t you understand? The Enquirer can make a goddamned

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with those lawyers, go in for three hours, and pick up Gary’s whole life story. Even if they can’t get any of their own reporters in, they can coach one of the attorneys to pump Gary.” It was awful. They had a right to start the deposition with where-were-you-born, then go into Gilmore’s criminal record. “The whole story,” shrieked Schiller, “can be pulled out in one session.”

Moody said, “We can’t stop it.”

“Bullshit,” said Schiller. “I want you to go right into Court. If you can’t block the deposition, at least file a motion that it’s got to be put in bond.” He smacked his fist against the night table, feeling a whole kinship with the notion of bend. “The tapes from that meeting,” he said, “have got to be sealed right ha the jail, and the Court has to give an order that they’re not to be transcribed for so many months, blah blah, you understand what I mean, et cetera.” Stephie was ready to kill him. Here it was supposed to be a vacation, and he was living on the phone. “Is this what it’s going to be like when we get married?” she cried out. Was she just another woman? Was she a business deal? Schiller waved her off. Over the wire, he was practically writing out the motion. What a relief when he learned a couple of days later that the Judge agreed to seal the stuff ha wax, literally, until March.

There; in the balmy air of Hawaii, Schiller began to breathe. The Enquirer could still try to get those insurance lawyers to take notes, but he didn’t worry about that. Now that there was a Court order ha-yoking secrecy, a lawyer could be disbarred for making such a deal. Besides, no local Mormon would fight a Judge’s order. It had been close. A possible catastrophe averted.

Yet when the lawyers went to the prison next day to take the deposition, they had to wait six hours, and Gary never showed. It seemed his food had come on a paper plate, and he threw a tantrum, and refused to leave his cell. Double insurance.

From Hawaii, Schiller was making phone calls all over the world to set up the sale of the letters so they couldn’t be traced to him. This all involved dealing with the right editor. It was only every few years when he had a particularly big offering, that he would contact the major foreign magazines. He knew, therefore, they wouldn’t cross him. He wasn’t obliged to be on the phone with them tomorrow making still another deal. He was not an agent who had ten projects mov

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ing at once with the same people, and so could say, “All right, I’ll give you this concession, ff you give me that.” Under such conditions, each side could afford to double-cross the other occasionally. Ten mild double-crosses, say, in a hundred deals. But doing custom work, as he did, custom jobs, editors were hardly going to trick him. They’d never have another opportunity to bid on his work.

In Hawaii, he hired secretaries to type the sales contracts. That way, anyone on his traveling team, either his mother, Stephie, or Stephie’s mother, Liz, would only have to fill in the amount and the name of the publisher. Since he was doing this preparatory work on the phone, the letters could be presented in lots. Package #i would offer the magazine a sample contract and five Gilmore letters. The editor would only be allowed to look at them while one of Schiller’s women was in the room. That was to make sure no juicy quotes were copied out. If the editor liked what he saw, he could then open Package #2. That contained the complete set of letters, a large package. He would then be given so many hours to make a decision. Except for the solitary editor in on the secret, nobody on any of those magazines would have the remotest idea who those three women might be.

That much to the good. On the other hand, he did not feel comfortable with the way Barry was now handling the Utah operation. On the flush of their terrific interview on December o, Farrell had planned to keep the work going while he was gone, keep it moving like clockwork. The intention was for Barry to call the lawyers each morning from Los Angeles with a new set of questions. Moody and Stanger would then carry them out to the prison, interview Gary, and put the tape on a plane that night. Farrell would pick up the package at the airport, listen to the new tapes, and compose a new set of questions, call them in by the next morning-it would all be very productive. A strong arrangement, but it was falling through completely. In one week, things could travel a long distance down the wrong. tube.

An unconscionable amount of time was being lost, Farrell explained, dictating the questions to the secretaries. They kept garbling them, and then the lawyers weren’t working much. It was like weren’t about to do Schiller’s business while he was out of

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“When you get back,” Barry said, “we’ll go down together.” Before he knew it, Schiller was agreeing. But he was infuriated. If Barry was getting such shitty returns, why didn’t he travel to Utah on his own and come to grips will the stuation instead of limping along with the telephone? But Schiller didn’t dare have it out at long distance. That, of course, kept the pressure up everywhere in his system. What a vacation I