The Last Juror (34 page)

Danny’s caseworker plowed through a lengthy narrative of her relationship with the inmate. She concluded with the gratuitous opinion that he was “fully remorseful,” “fully rehabilitated,” “no threat whatsoever to society,” even ready to become a “most productive citizen.”

How much did all this cost? I couldn’t help but ponder that question. How much? And how long had it taken for the Padgitts to find the right pockets?

Lucien went next. With no one—Gaddis, Sheriff McNatt—not even poor Hank Hooten—to contradict or possibly throttle him, he launched into a fictional recounting
of the facts of the crimes, and in particular the testimony of an “airtight” alibi witness, Lydia Vince. His reconstructed version of the trial had the jury waivering on a verdict of not guilty. I was tempted to throw something at him and start screaming. Maybe that would at least keep him somewhat honest.

I wanted to shout, “How can he be remorseful if he’s so innocent?”

Lucien carped on about the trial and how unfair it had been. He nobly took the blame for not pushing hard for a change of venue, to another part of the state where folks were unbiased and more enlightened. When he finally shut up two of the board members appeared to be asleep.

Mrs. Padgitt testified next and talked about the letters she and her son had exchanged these past eight, very long years. Through his letters, she had seen him mature, seen his faith strengthen, seen him long for his freedom so he could serve his fellow man.

Serve them a stronger blend of pot? Or perhaps a cleaner corn whiskey?

Since tears were expected she gave us some tears. It was part of the show and appeared to have little sway over the Board. In fact, as I watched their faces I got the impression that their decision had been made a long time ago.

Danny went last and did a good job of walking the fine line between denying his crimes and showing remorse for them. “I have learned from my mistakes,” he said, as if rape and murder were simple indiscretions
where no one really got hurt. “I have grown from them.”

In prison he had been a veritable whirlwind of positive energy—volunteering in the library, singing in the choral group, helping with the Parchman rodeo, organizing teams to go into schools and scare kids away from crime.

Two Board members were listening. One was still asleep. The other two sat in trancelike meditation, apparently brain dead.

Danny shed no tears, but closed with an impassioned plea for his release.

“How many witnesses in opposition?” Jeter announced. I stood, looked around me, saw no one else from Ford County, then said, “I guess it’s just me.”

“Proceed, Mr. Traynor.”

I had no idea what to say, nor did I know what was permissible or objectionable in such a forum. But based on what I had just sat through, I figured I could say anything I damned well pleased. Fat Jeter would no doubt call me down if I ventured into forbidden territory.

I looked up at the Board members, tried my best to ignore the daggers from the Padgitts, and jumped into an extremely graphic description of the rape and the murder. I unloaded everything I could possibly remember, and I put special emphasis on the fact that the two children witnessed some or all of the attack.

I kept waiting for Lucien to object, but there was nothing but silence in their camp. The formerly comatose Board members were suddenly alive, all watching
me closely, absorbing the gruesome details of the murder. I described the wounds. I painted the heartbreaking scene of Rhoda dying in the arms of Mr. Deece, and saying, “It was Danny Padgitt. It was Danny Padgitt.”

I called Lucien a liar and mocked his memory of the trial. It took the jury less than an hour to find the defendant guilty, I explained.

And with a recollection that surprised even me, I recounted Danny’s pathetic performance on the witness stand: his lying to cover up his lies; his total lack of truthfulness. “He should’ve been indicted for perjury,” I told the Board.

“And when he had finished testifying, instead of returning to his seat, he walked to the jury box, shook his finger in the faces of the jurors, and said, ‘You convict me, and I’ll get every damned one of you.’ “

A Board member named Mr. Horace Adler jerked upright in his seat and blurted toward the Padgitts, “Is that true?”

“It’s in the record,” I said quickly before Lucien had the chance to lie again. He was slowly getting to his feet.

“Is that true, Mr. Wilbanks?” Adler insisted.

“He threatened the jury?” asked another board member.

“I have the transcript,” I said. “I’ll be happy to send it to you.”

“Is that true?” Adler asked for the third time.

“There were three hundred people in the courtroom,”
I said, staring at Lucien and saying with my eyes, Don’t do it. Don’t lie about it.

“Shut up, Mr. Traynor,” a Board member said.

“It’s in the record,” I said again.

“That’s enough!” Jeter shouted.

Lucien was standing and trying to think of a response. Everyone was waiting. Finally, “I don’t remember everything that was said,” he began, and I snorted as loudly as possible. “Perhaps my client did say something to that effect, but it was an emotional moment, and in the heat of the battle, something like that might have been said. But taken in context—”

“Context my ass!” I yelled at Lucien and took a step toward him as if I might throw a punch. A guard stepped toward me and I stopped. “It’s in black-and-white in the trial transcript!” I said angrily. Then I turned to the Board and said, “How can you folks sit there and let them lie like this? Don’t you want to hear the truth?”

“Anything else, Mr. Traynor?” Jeter asked.

“Yes! I hope this Board will not make a mockery out of our system and let this man go free after eight years. He’s lucky to be sitting here instead of on death row, where he belongs. And I hope that the next time you have a hearing on his parole, if there is a next time, you will invite some of the good folks from Ford County. Perhaps the Sheriff, perhaps the prosecutor. And could you notify members of the victim’s family? They have the right to be here so you can see their faces when you turn this murderer loose.”

I sat down and fumed. I glared at Lucien Wilbanks and decided that I would work diligently to hate him for the rest of either his life or mine, whichever ended first. Jeter announced a brief recess, and I assumed they needed time to regroup in a back room and count their money. Perhaps Mr. Padgitt could be summoned to provide some extra cash for a Board member or two. To irritate the Board attorney, I scribbled pages of notes for the report he’d prohibited me from writing.

We waited thirty minutes before they filed back in, everyone looking guilty of something. Jeter called for a vote. Two voted in favor of parole, two against, one abstained. “Parole is denied at this time,” Jeter announced, and Mrs. Padgitt burst into tears. She hugged Danny before they took him away.

Lucien and the Padgitts walked by, very close to me as they left the room. I ignored them and just stared at the floor, exhausted, hungover, shocked at the denial.

“Next we have Charles D. Bowie,” Jeter announced, and there was movement around the tables as the next hopeful was brought in. I caught something about a sex offender, but I was too drained to care. I eventually left the room and walked down the hallway, half-expecting to be confronted by the Padgitts, and that was fine too because I preferred to get it over with.

But they had scattered; there was no sign of them as I left the building and drove through the main gate and back to Clanton.

CHAPTER 34

T
he parole hearing was front page news in
The Ford County Times.
I loaded the report with every detail I could remember, and on page five let loose with a blistering editorial about the process. I sent a copy to each member of the Parole Board and to its attorney, and, because I was so worked up, every member of the state legislature, the Attorney General, the Lieutenant Governor, and the Governor received a complimentary copy. Most ignored it, but the attorney for the Parole Board did not.

He wrote me a lengthy letter in which he said he was deeply concerned about my “willful violation of Parole Board procedures.” He was pondering a session with the Attorney General in which they would “evaluate the gravity of my actions” and possibly pursue action that would lead to “far-reaching consequences.”

My lawyer, Harry Rex, had assured me the Parole
Board’s policy of secret meetings was patently unconstitutional, in clear violation of the First Amendment, and he would happily defend me in federal court. For a reduced hourly rate, of course.

I swapped heated letters with the Board’s lawyer for a month before he seemed to lose interest in pursuing me.

Rafe, Harry Rex’s chief ambulance chaser, had a sidekick named Buster, a large thick-chested cowboy with a gun in every pocket. I hired Buster for $100 a week to pretend he was my own personal legbreaker. For a few hours a day he would hang around the front of the office, or sit in my driveway or on one of my porches, any place where he might be seen so folks would know that Willie Traynor was important enough to have a bodyguard. If the Padgitts got close enough to take a shot, they would at least get something in return.

______

A
fter years of steadily gaining weight and ignoring the warnings of her doctors, Miss Callie finally relented. After a particularly bad visit to her clinic, she announced to Esau that she was going on a diet—1,500 calories a day, except, mercifully, Thursday. A month passed and I couldn’t discern any loss of weight. But the day after the
Times
story on the parole hearing, she suddenly looked as though she’d lost fifty pounds.

Instead of frying a chicken, she baked one. Instead of whipping mashed potatoes with butter and thick cream and covering them with gravy, she boiled them.
It was still delicious, but my system had become accustomed to its weekly dose of heavy grease.

After the prayer, I handed her two letters from Sam. As always, she read them immediately while I jumped into the lunch. And as always, she smiled and laughed and then finally wiped a tear. “He’s doing fine,” she said, and he was.

With typical Ruffin tenacity, Sam had completed his first college degree, in economics, and was saving his money for law school. He was terribly homesick, and weary of the weather. To boil it all down, he missed his momma. And her cooking.

President Carter had pardoned the draft dodgers, and Sam was wrestling with the decision to stay in Canada, or come home. Many of his expatriate friends up there were vowing to stay and pursue Canadian citizenship, and he was heavily influenced by them. There was also a woman involved, though he had not told his parents.

Sometimes we began with the news, but often it was the obituaries or even the classifieds. Since she read every word, Miss Callie knew who was selling a new litter of beagles and who wanted to buy a good used riding mower. And since she read every word every week, she knew how long a certain small farm or a mobile home had been on the market. She knew prices and values. A car would pass on the street during lunch. She would ask, “Now, what model is that?”

“A ’71 Plymouth Duster,” I would answer.

She would hesitate for a second, then say, “If it’s real clean, it’s in the twenty-five-hundred-dollar range.”

Stan Atcavage once needed to sell a twenty-four-foot fishing boat he’d repossessed. I called Miss Callie. She said, “Yes, a gentleman from Karaway was looking for one three weeks ago.” I checked an old section of the classifieds and found the ad. Stan sold him the boat the next day.

She loved the legal notices, one of the most lucrative sections of the paper. Deeds, foreclosures, divorce filings, probate matters, bankruptcy announcements, annexation hearings, dozens of legal notices were required by law to be published in the county paper. We got them all, and we charged a healthy rate.

“I see where Mr. Everett Wainwright’s estate is being probated,” she said.

“I vaguely remember his obituary,” I said with a mouthful. “When did he die?”

“Five, maybe six months ago. Wasn’t much of an obituary.”

“I have to work with whatever the family gives me. Did you know him?”

“He owned a grocery store near the tracks for many years.” I could tell by the inflection in her voice that she did not care for Mr. Everett Wainwright.

“Good guy or bad buy?”

“He had two sets of prices, one for the whites, a higher one for Negroes. His goods were never marked in any way, and he was the only cashier. A white customer would call out, ‘Say, Mr. Wainwright, how much
is this can of condensed milk?’ and he’d holler back, ‘Thirty-eight cents.’ A minute later I would say, ‘Pardon me, Mr. Wainwright, but how much is this can of condensed milk?’ And he’d snap, ‘Fifty-four cents.’ He was very open about it. He didn’t care.”

For almost nine years I’d heard stories of the old days. At times I thought I’d heard them all, but Miss Callie’s collection was endless.

“Why did you shop there?”

“It was the only store where we could shop. Mr. Monty Griffin ran a nicer store behind the old moviehouse, but we couldn’t shop there until twenty years ago.”

“Who stopped you?”

“Mr. Monty Griffin. He didn’t care if you had money, he didn’t want any Negroes in his store.”

“And Mr. Wainwright didn’t care?”

“He cared all right. He didn’t want us, but he would take our money.”

She told the story of a Negro boy who loitered around the store until Mr. Wainwright struck him with a broom and sent him away. For revenge, the boy broke into the store once or twice a year for a long time and was never caught. He stole cigarettes and candy, and he also splintered all the broom handles.

“Is it true he left all his money to the Methodist church?” she asked.

“That’s the rumor.”

“How much?”

“Around a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Folks say he was trying to buy his way into heaven,” she said. I had long since ceased to be amazed at the gossip Miss Callie heard from the other side of the tracks. Many of her friends worked as housekeepers over there. The maids knew everything.