If you knew at precisely what time on exactly what day you were going to die, and that date arrived, and the hour and minute came and went, and you were not dead, would you be able to enjoy each additional second of your life, or would you be filled with dreadful anticipation that would turn relief into torture? That is the question I asked myself at twenty minutes past eight o’clock on Halloween night. Jeremy Winston was still alive. He was in the holding cell, eight steps away from the execution chamber at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas. He was supposed to have been dead for two hours.

Winston was my client. I was sitting in my office in Houston with three other lawyers, waiting for the clerk’s office at the United States Supreme Court to call. The warden at the Walls was holding a judicial order instructing him to execute Winston after 6:00 p.m. He would carry it out unless the Supreme Court intervened. Winston had been pacing for two hours in the tiny holding cell, three steps one way, three steps back. He had requested a cigarette in lieu of a final meal. Prison officials informed him that tobacco products were not permitted on prison grounds. But the three guards who would escort Winston to the gurney gave him a pack of cigarettes and one match. He lit each new cigarette with the dregs of the old one.

Our phone rang. The clerk at the Supreme Court wanted to know what time we would be filing additional papers. I hadn’t planned to file anything else. The four of us working on the case had already written our best argument and sent it to the Court. It had been there since five o’clock. In nearly twenty years of representing death-row inmates, this had never happened to me before. Was the clerk telling us to file something? I told him I’d call right back.

Had a law clerk or even a Supreme Court justice seen some argument that we had missed and decided to hold the case a little bit longer, giving us more time for the lightbulb to click on? That’s what the justices do sometimes, they toy with you. Jerome, Gary, Kassie, and I were sitting in the conference room. We frantically deconstructed and reassembled our arguments, looking for something we might have missed. I was bouncing a Super Ball off the wall, tossing it with my left hand and catching the rebound with my right. Gary was juggling three beanbags. Jerome and Kassie were sitting still, pens in their hands, waiting to write something down, if we could think of something to write. Jeremy Winston was wondering why he was still alive. Suddenly I saw him, peering into the conference room, watching his lawyers juggle and play catch and sit there doing nothing. He shook his head, a gesture just short of disgust, realizing the sand was about to run out.

Maybe, I said, we had called something by the wrong name. You might think that when a life is at stake, formal legal rules would not matter so much, but you would be wrong. People die when their lawyers neglect to dot the i’s or cross the t’s. I decided we would refile what we had already filed, and just call it something different. Because I couldn’t think of any other explanation, I convinced myself the problem was with the title. Necessity’s eldest child is invention; her second-born is rationalization. Gary’s the fastest typist. I asked him to get started working on it.

Two minutes later the phone rang again. Kassie answered. The clerk was calling to tell us never mind, that we had lost. I went into my office, closed the door, and called Winston to let him know. He was declared dead at twenty-seven minutes past nine.

I WALKED IN THE DOOR from the garage at nine fifty-five. I was sucking on a peppermint to hide that I had been smoking. A dried-out roasted chicken was sitting on the counter. A fly was on the drumstick. I shooed it away. An open bottle of red wine was next to the chicken. I called to my wife, Katya. There was no answer. I figured Lincoln had had a nightmare and she was upstairs with him. I started to climb the stairs. Katya called to me from the library. She was sitting on the sofa, her feet on the coffee table, holding a wineglass on her stomach. Her eyes were red. She had been crying.

What’s the matter? I said.

Where were you?

At my office. The Supreme Court didn’t call until after eight. Winston didn’t get executed until after nine. What’s the matter?

You were supposed to take Lincoln to the haunted house. He waited up until nearly eight.

Oh shit. I completely forgot.

Lincoln was six. I had expected to be home by 7:00 at the latest. I told him I would take him to the haunted house after he collected enough candy. He had made me a costume to wear. I said, Why didn’t you call to remind me?

I did call you. I left three messages on your cell phone.

I told her I had left my cell phone in my car. I asked, Why didn’t you call the office?

Because I didn’t think you would still be there. You always call when something happens. The execution was supposed to be at six, right?

Yes, it was supposed to be, I said. Did you go without me?

No. He said he wanted to wait for you. I told him I didn’t know when you were going to be home. He said that he would just wait. He kept his Thomas the Tank Engine outfit on and sat on the stairs. At seven thirty I told him the haunted house was going to close in a few minutes, but he said he’d keep waiting. He came and sat outside with Winona and me to hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters. At eight I told him it was time to go to bed. On the way upstairs he said that he was feeling a little sad. I told him that it was okay to be sad. I said that you had probably gotten busy at work. He said, I know, but I’m still disappointed.

I said, Crap. I can’t believe I forgot this. I’m going upstairs to check on him. I’ll be right down.

I peeked in his room. Winona, our seventy-five-pound red Doberman, was lying on the bed, her head resting on Lincoln’s ankles. He said, Hi, Dada. You missed the haunted house.

I said, I know I did, amigo. I’m really sorry. I forgot all about it. Can you forgive me?

He said, Yes. Why are you home so late anyway?

I had a lot of work to do.

He said, Did you help the person you were trying to help?

I’m afraid not, amigo. I tried, though.

He said, Dada, I’m a little sad.

Me too, amigo.

Will you sleep with me for five minutes?

Sure I will. Scoot over.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER I walked downstairs. Katya said, I’m sorry about Winston.

Thank you.

I sat down next to her on the sofa. The TV was muted. She said, Your clients are not the only people who need you.

I said, I know.

LIFE IS EASIER with pillars. Mine are my family. One wife, one son, one dog. When I tell Katya that, she can’t decide whether to believe me. Belief is a decision, I say; it doesn’t just happen. Believe what I am telling you.

Before I met her, I planned to live out in the country. Get forty acres, run some cows, sit on the deck with the dog, watch the sun set and then come up, drive to my office at the university twice a week, come home, take a walk down to the creek. Read a lot of books, stick my head in a hole and say screw you to the world, have a conference call every morning with the lawyers I work with, file my appeals from a laptop eighty miles from death row.

To get to the piece of property I almost bought, you’d head west from Houston on I-10 toward San Antonio and get off the interstate at the small town of Sealy. Eric Dickerson went to Sealy High School. He’s a Hall of Fame running back. There’s a billboard at the exit reminding you of that. Dickerson played for the Los Angeles Rams in the 1980s. One day in practice the head coach, John Robinson, criticized Dickerson for not working hard. Dickerson said he was working hard. Robinson told him that if he was really working, he’d be sprinting on the running plays instead of just jogging. Dickerson said, I am running, Coach. Robinson went out onto the field and ran next to him. Well, he tried to.

From a distance, ease can easily be mistaken for indifference.

STORIES OF EXECUTIONS are not about the attorneys. They’re about the victims of murder, and sometimes their killers. I know death-penalty lawyers who are at the movies when their clients get executed. I know one who found out on Thursday that his client had been executed on Monday. He’d been scuba diving in Aruba. I understand that. It’s possible to care without seeming to. It’s also possible to care too much. You can think of yourself as the last person between your client and the lethal injection, or you can see your client as the person who put himself on the rail to that inevitability. One is healthier than the other.

My first client was executed in 1989. Derrick Raymond was an average bad guy who did one very bad thing. He dropped out of high school in tenth grade. Two years later he enlisted in the army to learn a skill. He wound up in Vietnam. He did not talk much to me about the war. I learned about his service record ten years after he was executed, when one of his army buddies tried to track him down but got in touch with me instead. Derrick returned to Houston with a purple heart and a heroin habit that cost him five hundred dollars a week, but still without any job skills. He pumped gas until he got fired for missing too many days. Drug addiction has many consequences. He started robbing convenience stores and fast-food restaurants. After one stickup, which netted him $73 and change, he was running down the street when the security guard gave chase, shooting. One shot hit Derrick in the leg. He fell to the pavement, turned around, and fired five shots at the security guard. The guard took cover, but one shot hit a seven-year-old boy who had just finished having lunch with his mother. There might be nothing sadder than dead children. On top of that, Derrick was black and the boy was white. That’s a bad combination. The jury took less than two hours to sentence him to death.

Derrick’s lawyer fell asleep during the trial—not just once, but repeatedly. The prosecutor was appalled, but the trial judge just sat there. When a new lawyer requested a new trial, the court of appeals said no, because the judges believed Derrick would have been convicted even if his lawyer had been awake. Another court-appointed lawyer represented him for his habeas corpus appeals in state court. That lawyer missed the filing deadline. If you miss a deadline, the court will not consider your arguments. That’s when I got appointed to represent Derrick in federal court. But the federal courts have a rule: They refuse to consider any issues that the state courts have not addressed first. The state court had said that Derrick’s lawyer was too late and had therefore dismissed his arguments. So the federal court would not hear our appeal either.

My job as a lawyer, therefore, consisted mostly of planning the disposition of Derrick’s estate. Of course, he didn’t have an estate, meaning that my job was to arrange for the disposal of his body. (He did not want to be buried in a pauper’s grave right outside the prison gates in Huntsville, Texas.) Making funeral arrangements didn’t take very long either, so my job was really just to be his counselor, to listen to him, to send him books or magazines, to be sure he would not have to face death alone. My goal is to save my clients, but that objective is beyond my control. All I can control is whether I abandon them.

I would visit Derrick once a week and talk to him by phone another day. He had a son, Dwayne, who was twelve when his dad arrived on death row and nineteen when Derrick was executed. I sat next to them as they struggled to connect. The Internet is ruining society because human relationships are inherently tactile. It’s hard to become close to a man you can’t touch, even (maybe especially) if he’s your dad. I told them I was hopeful that the Board of Pardons and Paroles and the governor would commute Derrick’s sentence, and I was. I am always hopeful. Nothing ever works out, but I always think that it’s going to. How else could you keep doing this work? I watched his execution because he asked me to.

At 12:37 a.m. on Thursday, March 9, 1989, Derrick was put to death in front of me, Dwayne, and two local reporters. Afterward, I hugged Dwayne, got in my truck, and drove with my dog and a case of Jack Daniel’s to my cabin on Galveston Island. I sat on the deck watching the Gulf of Mexico and drinking. The moon was bright. The mullet were jumping in schools and I could see trout in wave curls feeding. I smelled the rain. I left the front door open so the dog could go outside when she needed to and dumped a week’s worth of food in her bowl. At dawn the sky blackened and the storm rolled in. I made sure my lounge chair was under the eave then closed my eyes and slept. When I’d wake up to use the toilet, I’d drink a shot of whiskey and chase it with a pint of water. I intended not to get dehydrated. Other than the birds and the surf, the only sound I heard was the thump of newspapers landing on driveways every morning. On Monday, I opened four papers, to figure out what day it was. I ran for an hour on the beach with the dog and swam for thirty minutes in the surf while the dog watched. Walking back to the cabin for a shower I said to her, Sorry for being a terrible master. She picked up a piece of driftwood and whipped her head back and forth.

We had lunch sitting on the deck at Cafe Max-a-Burger. I ordered four hamburgers, a basket of onion rings, and a lemonade. The dog ate her two burgers so fast that I gave her one of mine. When I paid the bill the cashier said, That’s one lucky dog.

I said, Thanks for saying so, but you have it backwards. That dog is by far my best quality.

I HEADED BACK to Houston. My original interest in the death penalty was entirely academic, not political or ideological, and at the time Derrick got executed, I was working on a project examining the comparative competency of lawyers appointed to represent death-row inmates in Texas, Florida, Virginia, and Kentucky. I was scheduled to meet with an assistant who was helping me collect data. Traffic on the Gulf Freeway was going to make me late. Driving recklessly, I sideswiped an elderly woman near the NASA exit. I jumped out of my truck and was apologizing before my feet hit the pavement. She screwed up her face like she’d just swallowed sour milk. She said she was going to call the police. I told her I wasn’t drunk, I just smelled like it. She smiled and said, I believe you, young man.

The law school has blind grading. Students identify themselves on their final exam with a four-digit number. Every year I hire as research assistants the three numbers who write the best answers. When I asked Katya to work for me, I didn’t even know her name.

An unwritten rule forbids teachers from dating students. I think violations of that rule can be forgiven if you ultimately marry them. A week after Derrick’s execution, I finally got up the nerve to ask Katya out.

We ate dinner at Ninfa’s on the east side. It was back in the days when the east side was iffy at night. We sat in the back. She said, You have sad eyes.

I think you’re most alive when you’re sad.

That’s bullshit.

My favorite moment in the old Mary Tyler Moore Show is when Mary interviews for the job in the WJM newsroom. Lou Grant says to her, You’ve got spunk. She beams with pride and says, Well, yes. He says, I hate spunk.

I told her about Derrick. She asked whether I would represent anyone else. I told her I thought I would.

I said, It seems like important work. I guess I don’t think people should have to die alone, no matter what bad thing they did. She asked whether I thought it would make a difference. I said, Probably not.

She said, I think there’s a word for trying to get in the way of something that’s preordained.

Preordained is a little strong.

I thought, Besides, whether something is inevitable isn’t the same as whether it’s right, but I was feeling too old to say something so naive on a first date.

She smiled, which I interpreted as agreement. The server brought our food. I had ordered for both of us: tacos al carbon and ratones. She said, What are these?

I said, Rats.

Really.

Seriously. That’s what they’re called.

They were large jalapeño peppers, split open, stuffed with shrimp and Mexican cheese, dipped in batter, and deep-fried. She took a bite, and her face broke out in a sweat. She said, These are delicious.

Here, I said, and I slid her my mug of beer.

She said, I think that if you’re going to keep doing this, and it isn’t going to matter, then you need a better coping strategy than a case of bourbon.

I said, That’s probably true.

MOST LAWYERS I work with would never marry a prosecutor. Some of them are making a big mistake. People use proxies to make judgments in life, but the problem with proxies is that most of them are often wrong. A few years ago Katya and I were eating breakfast at the Bellagio. James Carville was sitting by himself at the counter. Katya said, That is one marriage I don’t understand.

I understand it. Party affiliation is not their proxy. They used something else.

I myself use books and dogs, and they have never led me astray. When Katya graduated from law school, I gave her a first edition of Walker Percy’s The Second Coming. She read the first page and smiled. We were at my old house, sitting in the book-lined living room, listening to Frank Morgan. The dog normally didn’t like women in the house. Katya patted the sofa and the dog, who weighed almost as much as she did, hopped up and lay down next to her. Katya scratched her under the jaw, and the dog purred like a kitten. Katya looked at me and said, She likes to be scratched, right here.

WHEN JEREMY WINSTON got executed, I had known him for only two months. I met him and Ezekiel Green, another death-row inmate, the same day, the date of Katya’s and my tenth anniversary. Winston’s lawyer had called me and said he wasn’t going to do any more work on the case because he didn’t have time. To his credit, at least he felt guilty about the fact that he was abandoning his client. You meet many crappy or lazy lawyers, but not very many who admit to others that they’re crappy or lazy. He wondered whether my office would throw the Hail Mary pass. We’re a nonprofit legal-aid corporation that does nothing but represent death-row inmates. I told him I’d talk to Winston the next time I was at the prison.

Winston was so fat he had to sit sideways in the cage where inmates visit with their lawyers. His arms were green, one solid tattoo from wrist to shoulder. In between each knuckle on each hand were tiny crosses. I introduced myself. He saw me staring at his hands. He said, Are you a religious man?

I’m afraid not.

He said, Not a problem. I didn’t mean nothing by the question. Just asking.

I told Winston there was nothing left to do in his case. We could file a challenge to the method the state intended to use to execute him, but it was not likely to succeed.

He said, Yeah, I heard they’re gonna kill me with some drug that they ain’t allowed to use to kill animals, is that right?

One of the drugs that is part of the lethal injection combination has in fact been banned by veterinarians. Lawyers representing death-row inmates in some states had raised successful challenges to the lethal-injection cocktail protocol. So far, the legal maneuvering had not worked in Texas. But the lawyers in my office and I had a new idea, and we thought it might work in Winston’s case. I was not going to tell him that.

I said, That is true, but it doesn’t matter. Most of the judges don’t really believe that you’re going to suffer when you’re executed, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t care, and even if they cared, they couldn’t do anything about it. He nodded. I said, We can file a suit for you, but you will not win. If you want me to file it, though, I will. I just want you to know what’s going to happen. I’ll file it and we will lose.

I paused to let him ask a question. He didn’t, so I continued, Not only will you not win, but besides that, you probably won’t know for sure that you have lost until twenty minutes before the execution. That’s when the Supreme Court clerk will call me. They like to wait as long as they can so that we don’t have any time to file anything else. They’ll call me and then I’ll call you. Are you following me? He nodded. I said, What I’m telling you is that I think you are going to lose, and that after I call to tell you that we have lost, you’re not going to have much time to prepare. Knowing all that, do you still want me to file it?

I knew as I was talking that I sounded almost cruel. That’s not what I was aiming for. I was trying to sound completely without hope. I needed him to be hopeless. I didn’t want him to be thinking he was going to win up until the time I called him. I didn’t want there to be even the faintest glimmer of hope. I don’t mind admitting that I know exactly whose interests I had at heart. I’ve called people who still had hope. It’s easier to tell someone who is prepared to die that he is about to die. Winston said, That will be tough on Marie.

Who’s Marie?

My wife. We got married last year. You didn’t know that? I told him I didn’t. She’s sweet, from Louisiana. I nodded. Winston drummed his fingers against the glass that separated us. The Randy Newman song “Marie” started playing in my head: You looked like a princess the night we met. I listened, lost, while Winston thought. Finally he said, Yeah, go on ahead. You’re the first dude that’s been straight with me. Everybody’s always sugarcoating everything. I’m tired, man, tired of being lied to. Do what you can do.

I told him I would and asked if he had any questions. He said, Yeah I do. Do you have any good news for me? He smiled.

I said, I’m seeing a guy named Ezekiel Green when I finish talking to you. Do you know him?

Winston said, Bald-headed skinny dude with a tattoo on his face?

I said, I don’t know. I’ve never seen him.

He said, I think that’s the guy. Something ain’t right with him. They gassed him once and he didn’t cough or choke or nothing. Just laughed. Talks to himself a lot. Dude showers with his boots on.

I said, Thanks. I’ll send you what we file. I probably won’t see you again. Take care, though, and I’ll talk to you. He touched his hand to the glass between us. I touched it back.

MURDER IS PERHAPS the ugliest crime, which is why it is so shocking that most murderers are so ordinary in appearance. Average height, average weight, average everything. Even after all these years, some part of me expects people who commit monstrous deeds to look like monsters. I meet them, and they look like me.

I stare at their eyes or their hands and try to picture them doing the terrible deed. At the time, this was how I imagined it happened: She was sleeping on the sofa when she felt the gun barrel pressed against her temple. She would have thought it was one of the kids horsing around, except for the hiss of shhhh, followed by, Open your eyes, bitch. She did. Did she think she was dreaming? The gun looked like the one she took to the target range, and she wondered for a moment whether it was. That was the last thought she had. The killer fired one shot, killing her instantly.

He chose the small-caliber gun because it did not make a lot of noise. It would not disturb the neighbors, but it did get the attention of one of the children, who had been playing in another room. The killer looked up and saw him there. There weren’t supposed to be any children. The boy looked to be around twelve, old enough to remember what he’d seen. The boy ran back into the bedroom. The killer walked toward the boy’s retreat, blood dripping from the gun. The boy was on the floor, under the bed, cradling his little sister. The killer pressed the gun against the boy’s chest, and fired one time. The little girl screamed. He pointed the gun at her heart and pulled the trigger again, and she was quiet.

On the day I met with Winston, I did not have time to meet with my client Henry Quaker, who had been sentenced to death for committing the triple murder. But his case was why I was at the prison. Ezekiel Green had written me a letter, saying he had important information that would prove Quaker was innocent. There are some letters I don’t ignore.

GREEN WAS WAITING for me in the booth. He had an elaborate E tattooed on his right cheek and a G on his left. I introduced myself and addressed him as Green. He said, That’s not my name no more. I changed it. I’m Shaka Ali. He paused and looked back over his shoulder, checking to make sure the guard was not standing behind him. He asked, Did you get my letter?

I told him that’s why I was there.

He said, I know all about you. I read your book.

You don’t hear much about people like Green from people like me. Most abolitionists like to focus on innocence. I see their point. They think as soon as we use DNA to prove with certainty that an innocent man has been executed—and that day will surely come—even the sheriffs and prosecutors down here in Texas will choose life.

But the book of mine Green said he read argued that even the guilty should be spared. I used to support the death penalty. I changed my mind when I learned how lawless the system is. If you have reservations about supporting a racist, classist, unprincipled regime, a regime where white skin is valued far more highly than dark, where prosecutors hide evidence and policemen routinely lie, where judges decide what justice requires by consulting the most recent Gallup poll, where rich people sometimes get away with murder and never end up on death row, then the death-penalty system we have here in America will embarrass you to no end.

Sometimes I think I became a lawyer because I believe rules matter, but I suppose I could have the cause and effect reversed. Either way, I said in that book that the abolitionists’ single-minded focus on innocence makes them seem as indifferent to principle as the vigilantes are. I might have gone too far. One abolitionist group invited me to give a talk at their annual conference, then disinvited me after the head of their board realized who I was.

I don’t know whether Green had really read my book, but if he had, I bet he would have liked it. It’s about people like him: murderers who did exactly what the prosecutors said they did.

He said, You’re an activist just like me. Did you know my old man helped organize factory workers?

I raised my eyebrows, trying to look impatient, which I was. I said, No, I didn’t know that. I looked at my watch.

He said, I’m going to organize the guys in here. We can’t stay locked up all day long, man. They treat us like animals. It’s harassment. Captain wrote me up the other day for saying fuck. I got a right to free speech, man. I can say what I want. I been talkin’ to the ACLU people about suing. They sued about the conditions in Mississippi and Oklahoma. Did you know that?

I did know that, but Green did not wait for me to answer. He kept on: They should let us work, listen to the radio, something, you know what I’m sayin’? His right eyelid pulsed like a cricket was trying to get out. He rubbed his hand across his shaved head. He smiled. His two front teeth were gold. He said, When I do this to my hair the guards know not to mess with me. No ’fro for them to grab ahold of. I’m ready to rumble, man. You know what I’m saying? I been keeping it like this for almost a year. They gas me when they take me to the shower, but it don’t bother me none. I can hold my breath for twenty minutes. I wait till it’s all gone.

I looked at my watch again. He said, You gotta be somewhere?

I told him that I had to get back to my office to get something filed. He asked, Who for? I shook my head and didn’t answer. He said, Don’t matter. It’s good you came to see me. We need to be dialoguing. We can learn from each other. You got the book smarts. I know what’s going down in here. I tell you, and we can take it on. You can come see me on a regular basis, all right?

He said, Can you get me something to eat?

Death row has several vending machines, filled with junk food and soda. People visiting inmates can buy them food by putting change into the machines, pushing the buttons, and letting the guard remove the items and pass them to the inmate. Visitors cannot bring paper money into the prison. The prison has a lot of rules. I told Green I didn’t have any change.

Green had murdered two people. He said God had told him to do it. His lawyer asked the jury to rule that Green was insane. The jury said he wasn’t, and the jury was right. Green knew the difference between right and wrong. He was not insane. He was just crazy.

I said, Can we talk about the letter? What do you know that can help me?

He said, Hold on, bro. You got to do something for me first. You got to earn my trust. Then he was off and talking again. He was talking about filing a civil-rights suit against the prison so he could get different medication and satellite radio. He said the only stations they could get were Christian talk shows. He said they were discriminating against the Muslims. He said they punished people arbitrarily. He said the guards let some inmates use cell phones in exchange for sex or bribes. A lot of what he was saying was probably true, but what he wanted was somewhat outside my expertise and way outside my interest. I looked at his face and pretended to listen. All I heard was blah blah blah blah blah. I heard him say, You hear what I’m sayin’, bro?, and I felt myself nod. I was staring at the tattoos on his face, trying to figure out how to change the E into an S, seeing if I could find a way to make the G into an A. He must have asked me a question I didn’t answer. He stood up and banged the phone against the window. He screamed, Are you listening to me? I stared at him. He banged the phone again and said, I don’t even have to be talking to you, motherfucker, do I?

I said, No you don’t, just like I don’t have to be talking to you.

He said, Then get the hell out of here, motherfucker.

I have a confession to make. I had a pocket full of quarters. I do not like all my clients, and I did not like Green. He made the same mistake that death-penalty supporters routinely make. He assumed that because I represent guys like him, I must like guys like him. He assumed that because I am against the death penalty and don’t think he should be executed, that I forgive him for what he did. Well, it isn’t my place to forgive people like Green, and if it were, I probably wouldn’t. I’m a judgmental and not-very-forgiving guy. You can ask my wife. I would have left midway through his tirade, except I wanted to know what he knew. It appeared he wasn’t going to tell me, so I didn’t have any more reason to stay. I stood up. I said, Have a nice life, asshole.

ON SEPTEMBER 1, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, Katya and I got married at the Doubletree Hotel near the Houston Galleria. Three months earlier, we sat with the executive chef in his kitchen, sampling wines and tasting tuna, halibut, and loin of lamb. While we were deciding on our celebratory meal, the Quaker family was dying on the other side of town.

Dorris Quaker worked the third shift at Ben Taub General Hospital. That night, she made fried chicken and biscuits for her two children, twelve-year-old Daniel and Charisse, who was eight. Their next-door neighbor, Sandra Blue, sat at the table drinking sweet tea while the Quakers ate. Sandra said that she left at nine, when Dorris started getting the kids ready for bed. A few minutes later, Dorris called Sandra and told her she was going to take a short nap and leave for the hospital in an hour. She’d get home at seven thirty the next morning, just as the kids were waking up. Daniel knew to call Sandra if he needed anything, and Sandra knew to call Dorris. This had been their routine since Dorris and Henry had separated three months before.

At eight the next morning, Sandra went outside to pick up the newspaper. Dorris’s car was in the driveway. The house was quiet. Sandra thought that the kids were watching TV and that Dorris was asleep. It was Labor Day. There wasn’t any school. At eleven, she noticed the quiet again. No one answered when she knocked. The door was unlocked.

As soon as she saw Dorris lying on the sofa she dialed 911, then she walked into the back bedroom and found the children. When police arrived, Sandra was sitting on the floor in the children’s bedroom, hugging her knees to her chest. A detective took her statement and sent her home.

ON THE DRIVE back to Houston from the prison after seeing Green, my cell phone rang. It was Jeremy Winston’s wife, Marie. Her voice was as thin as he was fat. She was calling to thank me for trying to help her husband. That was it, no other agenda. I’ve noticed that if you do the tiniest little thing for someone who has never received even the slightest kindness, you get rewarded with ridiculously effusive gratitude.

Katya handed me a glass of bourbon when I walked in the door. Happy anniversary, she said.

Shouldn’t we be drinking champagne?

Yes, but taste that. It’s a present.

I drank a swallow. Wow, I said. What did you pay for this?

Is it good?

Yes, I said. Amazing.

Then it was a steal. Come on, Lincoln’s already in bed, waiting for his story. I told him we were going to dinner and that Nana was staying with him.

Lincoln was in bed reading Amelia Bedelia. His nanny, Maria, has been with us since Lincoln was six weeks old. He calls her Nana. He said, Hi, Dada. Do you know what a pun is?

I said, Yes, amigo. I love puns.

He said, Me too. Puns are fun, get it? He said, Tell me a real-life story, okay?

I said, Okay. When I was a little boy, just about your age, I read an Amelia Bedelia book. In the book I read, she cooked an egg on top of a car. I asked my dada whether you could really cook an egg on a car, and he said that you might be able to do it if it was hot enough outside. So the next Saturday, after my dada got home from playing tennis, I went outside, and while he was swimming I cracked an egg on the hood of his car.

What happened? Lincoln asked.

I said, It was a big mess. The egg got hard and stuck to the car. I had to clean it off, and my dada made me clean the whole car.

Even the inside?

Yep, even the inside. I didn’t ever do that again.

Lincoln said, That’s a funny story.

I said, Good night, amigo.

WE ASKED FOR A TABLE in the back at Café Annie. I told Katya about my day. She said, You have to write him and apologize.

Apologize for what?

You told a man on death row to have a nice life.

The guy’s an asshole. I’m not going to apologize.

The waiter brought our appetizers and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. We ordered a coffee-roasted sirloin and grilled redfish. I lifted my champagne glass to make a toast. Katya’s eyes were wet.

What’s the matter, K?

She said, The guy is totally messed up. He can’t help the way he is. It’s really bad karma for you to say that to him.

Bad karma? Are you serious? Can I tell you what the guy did?

I said, Green beat his pregnant wife to death with his fists. He had his five-year-old son with him watching while he did it. Then he drove with his son to his mother-in-law’s house and strangled her, again with his little boy watching.

Katya started to say something. I said, Wait, I’m not finished. He drove to a motel, and when his boy fell asleep he left him there. Just left him. The next morning the kid woke up alone in the room and wandered outside looking for his dad. A maid found him. Green was arrested watching TV in his trailer at nine in the morning. He was on his sixth beer.

Katya ran her finger around the rim of her champagne glass. She said, I don’t know how he got to be that way. But he was reaching out to you because he respects you. You can’t leave it like that.

I said, I’m not going to apologize to him.

We sat silently. Our food arrived. I cut the steak and the fish in half, put some on each of our plates, and ate a piece of the meat. This is great, I said. Katya smiled. Sad and happy, all at once. I’m either in a good mood or, more often, a bad one. She is more complicated than I am. She can be in both. I said, I’ll write him and thank him for seeing me. I won’t apologize, but I’ll write him. Okay?

Okay, she said. Thank you. And the sadness was gone, just like that.

I said, What was that bourbon, anyway?

Pappy Van Winkle. Twenty years old. I’m glad you liked it.

How many bottles did you buy?

Just one. It wasn’t cheap.

I figured that. I guess I’ll drink it slow.

We had coffee and cognac. I was remembering how Green looked at me as I was leaving. She said, Where did you go?

I told her I was thinking about what it would be like to live the rest of my life in a windowless space the size of my closet. I said, It might be a little easier if it was your closet.

Hah hah.

Katya practiced law for seven years. She was good at it, but she’s too artistic, and too sincere, to be happy as a lawyer. So she went to art school and started teaching high-school photography. If it weren’t for Lincoln, that’s probably what she’d still be doing. But when our son arrived, she devoted herself with an intensity I had not seen before to being a mom and, far more daunting, to making me into a dad.

I was feeling sentimental, and when I’m feeling sentimental I am triter than normal. I had never gotten around to my toast. I lifted my cognac glass. I said, You and our son are the best things in my life. Thank you.

Katya had heard this toast before. I had heard her response before. She said, It sure took you long enough to decide.

When you don’t get married until late in life, the list of qualities you expect your wife to have can grow to be specific and long.

Katya is a competitive ballroom dancer. I bump into our piano walking from the kitchen to the library. She could have been a concert flutist, but her parents were practical Germans who saw no prospects in earning a living as a musician. My great-grandparents died in the Holocaust. The first time I met Katya’s mom and dad I wondered where their parents had been.

I said, You were pretty much the exact opposite of the person my list described. It took me a little while to realize that maybe the list was wrong.

She said, Maybe?

I smiled. I said, A little while to realize that the list was definitely wrong.

She said, Maybe you should stop keeping lists.

THE NEXT MORNING I woke up before dawn and went for a run with the dog. I came home and brewed a pot of coffee for myself and a cup of tea for Katya. I made breakfast for Lincoln while Katya fixed his lunch and helped him get dressed. I showered and shaved and put on a suit. I usually wear blue jeans and a T-shirt to the office, so Lincoln asked me why I was dressed funny. I told him I had to go to a meeting. Katya said, Hey Linco, it’s time to go to school. I kissed them both good-bye then drove to the courthouse.

I walked into the courtroom for the 175th Harris County District Court and chatted with Loretta, one of the clerks. I hadn’t seen her since August, when my client Leroy Winter had been executed. Winter had been serving a prison sentence for sexual assault of a minor when he killed a guard. His defense was that the guard had been raping him. It might have been true, but it’s still not a good idea to kill a guard. Loretta said she was sorry about Winter. She was lying. Her friends are cops. She was just being polite. I appreciated it. I said, Thanks, Loretta. She told me that my wife must have picked out my shirt and tie, because they matched. I smiled and told her that she knows me pretty well. I asked her to please call the prosecutor to let her know that I was there.

A few minutes later, the prosecutor came into the court. While we waited for the judge to arrive, we talked about our upcoming vacations. My wife and I are going white-water kayaking, I told her. Shirley told me that she and her husband were going to the Pacific Northwest. She asked how long I’ve been kayaking, and I asked her whether she’d been to Seattle before. Most of my colleagues don’t like her, but Shirley and I get along just fine. Because I used to support the death penalty, it’s not so hard for me to have sympathy for the misguided souls who still do.

I saw two former students of mine, now assistant district attorneys. They asked how things were going at the law school where I teach, and we chatted about their careers. The judge walked in, and a bailiff shouted for us all to rise. Defense lawyers and prosecutors milled around, trying to work out deals with each other, or just engaging in courthouse gossip. Criminal courtrooms, when there isn’t a trial going on, are a lot like a Middle Eastern bazaar.

A man charged with drug possession stood before the judge, in between the prosecutor and his own lawyer, whom he had met less than five minutes earlier, and pleaded guilty. He had been through this ritual before. He was as calm as you would be if you were standing in line to pay a parking ticket. The judge sentenced him to time already served. The prosecutor and I asked the judge if we could approach the bench, and she told us we could. The prosecutor said that she and I had compared calendars, and we wanted to see if she planned to be in town on February 4. The judge glanced down at her calendar and said that she did. Shirley handed the judge an order. Without looking down, the judge signed it.

The order the judge signed is called a death warrant. Shirley and I had picked the day that my client would die. We planned the execution around our vacations. The warrant commanded the director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to place Henry Quaker, on February 4, “in a room arranged for the purpose of execution” and then to inject him with “a substance or substances in lethal quantity sufficient to cause [his] death” and to continue with the injection “until the said HENRY QUAKER is dead.”

I paced in the hall while Shirley made me a copy of the order. I have been reading these boilerplate warrants for close to twenty years, but they still take my breath away. I called Jerome, who had left the office and was on the way to the prison to see Henry. Jerome would deliver the news in person. I don’t like for my clients to learn from a letter or even by phone that a date has been chosen for their deaths. I realize that it’s absurd. What difference does it make how you’re told when you’re going to die? None, probably. But we all have our little idiosyncrasies.

I got in my truck to drive to my office at the law school. You don’t see many homeless people in Houston. They’re there, of course, but unlike New York or San Francisco, where you have to hurdle them on the sidewalks, you can pretend like they aren’t here, because they aren’t in my neighborhood. But I see them when I’m at the courthouse. So I keep a stack of twenty or thirty one-dollar bills in my truck. The experts say that they’re just going to buy booze. For all I know the experts are right, but I’ve never figured out why that means I shouldn’t hand out the money. If I’d been alive five hundred years ago, and been a Catholic, of course, I’d have been one of the sinners buying indulgences.

There’s one homeless guy, Stan, who lives with his three dogs and a grocery cart under the freeway where I turn left. How can you turn a blind eye to a man who shares the food he scavenges from Dumpsters with his dogs? He has a squeegee in his cart. I usually give him a dollar not to clean my windshield and Milk-Bones for the dogs. The first time I gave him money he asked me my name. I told him my friends call me Doc. He said, Cool, then I’ll call you Doc. Some days I give him cans of tuna, or crackers and cheese. He says, This is nice, but I’d prefer some beer. Last Christmas I gave him a six-pack of Shiner. He said, Whoa. The good stuff. Thanks, Doc.

I saw Stan on the day the judge signed Quaker’s death warrant. He said, Hey Doc, you’ve looked better. I nodded and gave him the whole stack of ones.

HENRY QUAKER’S STORY was treacly sweet. He and Dorris had been sweethearts at Yates High School. He carried her books to school, literally, and held her hand in the halls. They got married a week after they graduated, in 1983. Their son Daniel was born seven months later. Henry felt like he had to do something dramatic. He had a son on the way. He intended to support his wife and child, but he had been only a mediocre student. Although he loved to read, he had no skills and no prospects. So he enlisted in the army. It would be a living, and he figured he would get the job skills he needed to take care of his family. Dorris went to pharmacy school while they lived on the base, learning how to mix IVs. Henry learned heavy-machine maintenance and read a lot of books. They were a charming cliché. Charisse was born four years later. Henry served his time, became a reservist, and started welding in Houston. The pay was twice what he made as a soldier. He said he was deliriously happy. He would drink a beer after work with his buddies, but he was home in time to bathe the kids and put them to bed. On Saturday nights, he and Dorris paid a neighborhood kid to babysit, and they would go out to dinner and to the movies.

Then, in 1989, Henry was working at a chemical plant in Pasadena. Leaking gas ignited an explosion that measured over 3.0 on the Richter scale. You could feel the ground shake for miles. Henry escaped with barely a scratch, but his two best friends burned to death in a massive fire that took half a day to contain. Henry heard them screaming, first for help, then in agony. Their bodies were literally consumed by the flames.

A week later he was back on the job. Between the day he returned and the day his family was killed, Henry did not miss even a single day of work. But he stopped reading books and stopped going out for a beer after his shift. His coworkers described him as sullen and withdrawn. They said he did his work like he was hypnotized. No one could remember the last time Henry laughed or even smiled.

When police arrived at the Quaker house following the 911 call, Sandra Blue told them that Dorris and Henry had been separated for a few months. She said she didn’t know him very well. He was quiet. When Sandra would see him in the mornings before he moved out, he was always polite, waved, said good morning, asked her how she was doing. He still spent a lot of time with the kids, shooting baskets, playing catch, going for ice cream. Even after they split, Henry came over to the house twice a week to pick up the kids. He adored them. Sandra had never seen or heard him yell at either of them, and she’d never seen or heard Henry and Dorris fighting.

She said there was no chance that Dorris was seeing someone else. Henry was the love of her life.

Police found Henry at a construction site in the medical center. He was sitting astraddle a beam eleven stories up, welding. He was a suspect because the spouse is always a suspect. When police told him why they were there, he started to shriek.

He made more than $30,000 a year. He had good health insurance. When it looked like they were headed for divorce, he told Dorris that they should stay married until she found someone else just so she and the kids could still be covered under his insurance, which was much better than the coverage Dorris had. The police asked Henry whether they could look inside his truck. He said that sure they could. A detective saw what he thought was blood. He read Henry his rights. A day later, the DNA lab reported that the blood was Daniel’s.

AFTER WE CHOSE the date for Quaker’s death I left the courthouse and drove to my office at the law school. I asked my assistant to send an e-mail to my students saying I was canceling class. I closed my door and sat down to play poker. I entered a $2 tournament online. It took four and a half hours. I won $37. I poured myself a small Knob Creek and drove home.

Katya was in the kitchen making pasta for Lincoln, who was sitting at the table reading. He said, Hi, Dada. Katya looked at me and said, What’s wrong?

I tried to make myself smile, but I couldn’t. Lincoln said, Dada, did you give away all your money again?

When Lincoln was two I realized he was smarter than me. I said, Quaker’s date is February fourth. Katya wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

Lincoln came over and circled his arms around my waist. Looks like it’s time for a group hug, he said. I touched his hair, then his earlobe. He said, Mama, is the pasta ready yet? I’m hungry.

HENRY TOLD HIS TRIAL LAWYER, Jack Gatling, that he thought Dorris might have started seeing someone about six months before she was killed. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t know any more because he didn’t ask. He didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know because whatever she was doing was his fault.

His lawyer asked him whether he was having an affair. Henry looked at him like he had a mouse hanging out of his mouth. He shook his head. Henry told Gatling that the only woman he had ever loved or slept with was Dorris. Gatling wrote the word lovesick on his legal pad. He doodled a broken heart. I had these pieces of paper in my file. When I showed them to Henry, he smiled. Henry told Gatling that Dorris first brought up the possibility of divorce two years before they separated. He answered, Whatever you want, baby. Dorris said, I want you to be the way you were. He said, I want that, too. I just don’t know how. But he said that he would try. He told his lawyer, I might not have acted like it, but I loved my family. I could never have hurt them. Gatling put a question mark after lovesick.

The foreman at the job site where Henry had been working testified at the trial that Henry had been sullen. The man who lived next door to Sandra Blue, two doors down from the Quakers, told the jury that he saw a truck like Henry’s in the driveway at around 8:00 p.m. He had given police the part of the license-plate number that he remembered. A DNA expert explained that the blood in Henry’s truck belonged to his son. A police officer said that the three victims had been shot with a .22-caliber pistol, and that Henry owned such a gun. Officers looked in the house and in Henry’s truck for the gun. It was never found. Someone from the benefits office of Henry’s company showed the jury copies of the forms where Henry had listed himself as the beneficiary on life insurance policies taken out for his wife and kids; he stood to receive half a million dollars for their deaths. Gatling, Henry’s lawyer, did not call any witnesses of his own. He told the jury that the case against Henry was entirely circumstantial. It was, of course, but Gatling had not challenged or questioned any of the circumstances. Saying he phoned it in would flatter him. Despite all that, it took the jury more than six hours to convict.

At the punishment phase of the trial, where the prosecutor asks the jury to sentence the defendant to death while the defense pleads for life, Gatling called no witnesses. He had not interviewed anyone from Henry’s past who could have told the jury about him. He later said that he had been expecting an acquittal, so he wasn’t prepared for sentencing. Henry told Gatling that he wanted to testify himself, but Gatling told him it would be a bad idea, and Henry went along. Gatling did not make a closing argument. He later said that he decided not to beg for Henry’s life because by saying nothing, he would not give the prosecutor an opportunity to make a rebuttal. The judge said it was the only capital-murder trial she had ever heard of where the defense lawyer did not implore the jury to spare his client from execution. It took the jury three hours to sentence Henry to death.

I READ THE TRANSCRIPT of the trial after a federal judge appointed me to represent Henry in his federal appeals. As Yogi Berra said, it was déjà vu all over again. Gatling was dead, having died from cirrhosis of the liver, but his tactics in the trial had been exactly the same as his approach in the trial of Derrick Raymond, my first client. He did not interview any witnesses. He did not put on any evidence of his own. He had no idea whom the state was going to call as witnesses. Henry told me that Gatling smelled like a bottle at eight in the morning. He told me that Gatling fell asleep during the trial, and the judge’s law clerk confirmed it was true.

Quaker’s case was like my first client’s in another way as well. The lawyer who had represented Quaker in his first appeal in state court had neglected to complain about the inadequacies of the trial lawyer. Quaker’s lawyer did not miss a filing deadline, but he might as well have. He did not raise a single decent claim, even though there were plenty to choose from. That was a problem; as I noted before, the federal courts will not consider any issue that the state court did not examine. The state court had not examined whether Quaker’s trial lawyer was incompetent because the lawyer who represented him during that appeal failed to raise it. In other words, Gatling was not the last bad lawyer in the case. Quaker’s appellate lawyer was incompetent, too. I would try again to go back to state court to complain about Gatling’s incompetence, but the state courts have a rule of their own: Unless you raise the issue the first time, you cannot raise it later. So I was going to be hamstrung. The federal court would refuse to look into the issue because the state court had not examined it, and when I asked the state court to examine the issue so that I could go to federal court, the state court would refuse because Quaker’s original lawyers forgot to ask them to. I told Quaker that I wasn’t optimistic.

He said, It’s like a Catch-22, right? I nodded. He said, I love that book.

Normally, the first thing a death-penalty appellate lawyer does is conduct a complete investigation of the case: locate witnesses the previous lawyers had not talked to, interview jurors, reconstruct the entire case. But there was no point to doing that investigation without first figuring out a way to make it matter. Why spend a thousand hours pursuing futility? Death-penalty lawyers have many clients, and we have the same twenty-four hours in our day as everyone else. An hour spent on one case is an hour not spent on another. Jerome thought there was enough doubt about Henry’s guilt that we should at least do enough to raise questions about his innocence. If we did that, perhaps a court would cut us some slack. I overruled him. It did not make sense to look for a needle in a haystack without even knowing whether a needle was in there. Instead, we would try to get a court to agree to let us start over. Then, we still might not find anything, but at least we would know that if we did find something, a court would listen.

So we filed papers in federal court saying that Henry had been represented at his trial by an incompetent trial lawyer, and that the only reason that issue had not been presented to the state appellate court was that his appellate lawyer was terrible, too. We said that basic fairness dictated that he should be entitled either to have the federal court address his issues, or to a second trip through the state courts so that the state court could address his issues. The federal judges said, in effect, Sorry, our hands are tied. We tried the same argument again, this time in state court. The state judges said, Sorry, the legislature has decided that you get one and only one crack, and you have had yours.

Nothing worked. Henry would not get a bona fide appeal, where some judge reviewed the legality of his trial. Jerome said, I still think we should investigate the innocence angle. If he didn’t do it, someone will care about that.

I said, His kid’s blood was in the car. He had a life insurance policy on his family. His gun, which is the same caliber as the murder weapon, is missing. There are no other suspects. How do you plan to prove that he’s innocent?

Gary and Kassie looked at Jerome. He said, All I’m saying is that it’s all we’ve got.

He did have a point.

A week after the federal appeals court had ruled against us, I saw one of the judges outside a restaurant, waiting for the valet to bring his car around. He had written the opinion in the case ruling against Quaker. He’s a handwringer, a supposedly devout Catholic who goes to extraordinary lengths to uphold death sentences. I used to divide my life into boxes, too. I had different sets of friends who did not know each other, and all of them knew a different side of me. I’m sympathetic to people whose lives are segmented by Chinese walls. I understand this judge. He reminded me of who I used to be unhappy being. I stood behind him, hoping he might not notice me, but as his car arrived, he did. A tiny man, he hugged me, and his arms didn’t get past my shoulders. He said, I saw Sister Helen Prejean give a speech last week. I have never been so moved in my life. What an amazing woman. He got in his car, waved, and drove away.

Sister Helen gave a speech at the law school where I teach a few years before. People were sitting in the aisles. She talked for more than an hour without a single note. She combines humility and moral authority in a way I’d never seen. Like the Houston Oilers head coach Bum Phillips used to say about Earl Campbell, she might not be in a class of her own, but it doesn’t take long to call the roll. Afterward, several of us went out for a few drinks. It was the first time I went drinking with a nun. She said, You know, support for the death penalty is a mile wide, but just an inch deep. I believe that.

I said, Well, Sister, I believe you can drown in an inch of water. She cackled like a barnyard hen.

Three months later, I got a postcard in the mail. The Supreme Court had refused to hear our appeal.

QUAKER WAS DOUR the day I went to tell him. Like nearly everyone, he had gotten his hopes up. I tried, but my efforts to squash his spirits had not entirely succeeded. The problem is, if you have an ember of hope, a desperate observer will perceive it and stoke it and fan it and cling to it no matter what you say. This is not simply human nature. It is the will to live. I talked legalese so I would not have to have an actual conversation. I said that our claims had been defaulted in state court and that we had not been able to exhaust them; I said that the state court ruled against us on independent and adequate state-law grounds, so the federal court lacked jurisdiction to address the merits; I said that the Supreme Court was not interested in the manner in which the procedural barriers interfered with his substantive rights. I paused. Quaker shook his head, like he was getting out of a pool. He said, I would never ever have killed my family.

The only thing worse than being gutless is feeling guilty about it. I could barely look at the guy.

Quaker had claimed to be innocent from the time I first met him. I had not paid much attention. It’s hard to prove that someone is innocent. Where were you at eight o’clock on a Thursday night ten years ago? I had pinned my hopes on getting a judge interested in how unfairly Quaker had been treated. I had a good reason for telling Jerome that we were not going to waste time and money on innocence. I thought that even though I could not prove that he didn’t do it, I could prove he would never have been convicted if he’d had a competent lawyer. But I hadn’t been able to solve the procedural maze that prevented us from raising that argument. So now I had nothing left.

Well, almost nothing. When there’s one arrow still left in the quiver, I believe I should fire it, even though it’s too dull to do any damage. They can execute my clients, but I can make their job harder. Some lawyers call this throwing sand in the gears. I call it doing my job. My goal is to save my clients’ lives. If I fail, I don’t want it to be because there was gas left in the tank. It helps that I also didn’t think Quaker should be executed, even if he did kill his wife and kids. I’m not sure why I thought that. You can’t get any lower than people who hurt children. But we don’t always choose what we think.

I said, I can file another appeal in state court claiming that you are innocent, but it will be impossible to prove. We’ll lose, but we can give it a shot.

He said, Don’t even bother, man. I asked him what he meant. He said, I ain’t ever gonna get out of here until I’m dead, right? So I’m just ready to be done with it. I told him that if he was asking me to waive his appeal, I couldn’t do that without having a psychologist examine him. I was bluffing. He didn’t have any appeals left. He said, You have a family, right? I waited. He said, Would you want to be alive if they were all dead and everybody thought you killed them?

FROM THE TIME I was in eighth grade until I was a senior in college, I was never full. I would eat hamburgers and ice cream for breakfast. In high school, we would go off campus for lunch to all-you-can-eat pizza buffets, and I would eat fifteen or twenty slices of pizza, along with half a dozen pieces of fried chicken. Other days I would eat four double-meat hamburgers from Burger King, with two orders of fries and an order of onion rings, or eight chili dogs from James Coney Island. After school and before dinner, I would eat half a dozen tacos. In college we would eat on weekends at an all-you-can-eat steak place next door to Houston’s most famous strip club, and I would eat six or seven steaks, a baked potato, a salad, and a loaf of bread. Sundays my housemate and I would go to a pizza restaurant and order four large pizzas, two for him and two for me. During summer vacation, my brothers and I would stay up until dawn talking; I would sit down with a half-gallon tub of Blue Bell ice cream in my lap and a spoon. I was five foot ten and weighed 165 pounds.

When I was growing up, my parents kept a kosher home. For the eight days of Passover, there was no bread in the house. During my junior year of high school I got hungry in the middle of the afternoon on the third day of Passover. I drove to Jack-in-the-Box and ordered a triple-meat hamburger and four tacos. My plan was to eat the food on the way home. There would be no evidence of my infraction. I finished the tacos and started on the burger. Three blocks from my house, a car ran a red light. I slammed on the brakes. Lettuce, pickles, onions, tomatoes, ketchup, and taco sauce went everywhere. I pulled over and picked pieces of shredded lettuce from the car’s carpet. When my mother asked me where I had been, I said the library.

That night at dinner I said I was not very hungry. I had not not been hungry in many years. Guilty people, I have noticed, say and do inexplicable things.

On the drive home from the prison, I called the office and told Jerome he had been right. I asked him to write up the best argument we had for proving that Quaker was innocent.

TWO DAYS AFTER MY VISIT with Quaker, I received two letters from the prison. One was from Ezekiel Green. As I had promised Katya, I had written to thank him for seeing me. And as usual, Katya had been right. Green apologized for losing his temper. He said his medication wasn’t right and he was always on edge. He asked me to come see him again.

The other letter was from Quaker. He wrote, I know this is hard for guys who do what you do, but it’s what I want. I hear from the guys here that you represented Van Orman. Van Orman is a cool dude, real mellow. Congratulations on that, but I don’t want to be like him, you understand? I hope you won’t be mad.

I did understand. Van Orman was sent to death row for stabbing a pizza delivery man to death. Police caught him because he bought beer at a neighborhood bar with a $10 bill wet with fresh blood. An execution date was set. A judge appointed us to represent Van Orman at a trial where the sole issue would be whether he is mentally retarded. He is. He can’t count change, tie his shoelaces, or boil a pot of water. He could not read a street map if his life depended on it. Van Orman is big and gentle and so obviously retarded that even the district attorney simply went through the motions in saying that he wasn’t, and when the judge agreed with us, the district attorney didn’t appeal.

But that’s not what Quaker was referring to.

In the course of our investigation, we also learned that Van Orman didn’t commit the murder. He was at the scene, but he didn’t stab the driver, and he didn’t have any clue that it was going to happen until it was all over. He thought he and two buddies were going to eat pizza and watch a baseball game. Then the doorbell rang, and one of the other guys stabbed the driver and brought the pizza and the driver’s wallet inside. Massive Van Orman helped his friend put the dead driver back in his car. At the trial, we introduced evidence that Van Orman is innocent. One of the bailiffs came up to me after the proceedings were over and shook my hand and said he believed that the judge should order Van Orman released from prison. But that’s not what the trial was about; it was about whether he’s mentally retarded, and we proved that Van Orman is. So he got moved off of death row.

That’s why Quaker congratulated me, and this is why he said he doesn’t want to be like him: In place of the death sentence, Van Orman will spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

But I’m a death-penalty lawyer and Van Orman won’t get executed, so I count it as a victory. One of my clients committed suicide a week before his execution. That’s a victory. Another died of AIDS. A victory.

My client Randy Baze is not on death row anymore, either. He was seventeen when he and two buddies hijacked a car, killing its owner. I was in the middle of losing one appeal after another in his case when the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the states can execute people who were younger than eighteen when they committed murder. After the Court ruled in our favor, Baze tried to stay on death row anyway. He didn’t want to move. He knew that if he moved to the general prison population, he would fall to the bottom of my to-do list, just like Van Orman, and he was right. He has compelling legal issues in his case, but they are not matters of life and death, not anymore. I can’t even remember what they are.

One day, if I have some extra time, I’ll go back to court to win Van Orman’s and Baze’s total vindication.

If I have some extra time.

I WALKED IN THE DOOR and poured myself a glass of the expensive bourbon Katya had bought me for our anniversary. She was drinking wine.

She said, Do you deserve the good stuff today?

I think I do, I said. Nobody got killed.

She said, For a change. We clinked our glasses together. She said, I picked up a chicken for you to roast. And Lincoln wants you to be sure to save the wishbone.

From the library Lincoln said, Hi, Dada. Mama said you would save the wisher bone for us to break in the morning when I have my breakfast. I said that sounded fine. He said, Will you read me a book now?

The three of us climbed the stairs to his room. After a book and a bedtime story, before Katya and I told him good night, I said, Hey amigo, what are you going to wish for if you get the bigger piece of the wishbone tomorrow?

He said, I’m not supposed to tell you, but I will anyway. I’m going to wish that I have a great life. And guess what, Dada? My wish already came true.

I TOLD KATYA about Quaker’s letter. She said, You can’t force him to appeal if he doesn’t want to.

I said, Actually, I think I can. He doesn’t have the right to let the state execute him for a crime he didn’t commit.

She said, How are you going to prove that he’s innocent?

Good question, I said. I told her about Quaker’s reference to Van Orman.

She said, Van Orman is incapable of living outside an institution. If he weren’t in prison, he’d be in some other facility, or homeless. You didn’t betray him. You gave him the best life you could.

I said, There’s been a load of compromisin’ on the road to my horizon.

She said, Thanks for not singing it. Can we eat now?

IN APRIL 1972, I was twelve. My Little League team, the Mets, played the Pirates in the championship game. Our pitcher was the only twelve-year-old in the league who could throw a slider. Lots of kids could throw a curveball, but Andrew Peters could throw a bona fide slider. He went to junior college to play baseball. He got drafted his sophomore year, dropped out, and pitched two years in the minor leagues before he ruined his arm and gave up on his dream and joined the Marines. He was killed in the first Gulf War. I know this because his son Timothy goes to law school where I teach, and he told me last week when he came by my office to introduce himself.

I was the catcher on the Mets. Andrew was the coach’s son. The Peters family lived one street behind mine. When Andrew would make an error during a game, Coach Peters didn’t say anything. But at night, I would hear him screaming through the window.

Coach Peters would call the pitches. He sent me a signal, and I would relay it to Andrew. It was the bottom of the last inning. They were batting. We were ahead 2–1. Their first hitter leaned out over the plate and got hit on the arm. Coach Peters was shouting at the umpire from the dugout that the player had walked into the pitch, but the umpire sent him to first base anyway. Their best hitter was next. Andrew threw two quick strikes. Coach Peters signaled a slider, and Andrew threw a beauty, right on the outside corner. The umpire called it a ball. Coach Peters raced out of the dugout screaming. The vein on the side of his neck looked like a dancing Gummi Bear. A short man, he had been an NCAA wrestling champion. There were pictures of him holding trophies hanging on the walls of their house.

The umpire just stood there. Coach Peters walked back to the dugout, kicking at the dirt. When he got there he must have said something I didn’t hear, because the umpire pulled off his face mask, looked at Coach, and said, Cool it, Drew. Coach Peters picked up a bat and stared at the umpire. It seemed like a long time went by. Then he started walking toward the plate. The other team’s third-base coach tried to cut him off. Coach Peters swung the bat, and I heard the other coach’s ribs crack. Then there was mayhem. All the coaches, on their team and ours, and all the umpires jumped on Coach Peters. Years later I would recall the scene when watching videos showing five-man teams of helmeted prison guards rushing into a cell on death row to subdue one of my clients. They held Coach Peters there until two policemen arrived. The police put handcuffs on him and took him away. Andrew was crying hysterically, screaming, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Coach Peters didn’t turn around. He sat in the backseat of the squad car for an hour, until the police let him go.

Timothy said, My dad was friends with Henry Quaker. Before Dad went back to Iraq, Mr. Quaker helped him find a job. Timothy pronounced it “eye-wrack.” He said, Mr. Quaker had dinner at our house a few times. He would always bring me a book. I don’t believe Mr. Quaker did what they said he did. Timothy told me who his dad was. He said, You knew my dad, didn’t you? I told him we had grown up together, that we played ball on the same team. He said, I hear through the grapevine that you use students on your cases. If you need some students to help on Mr. Quaker’s case, I volunteer. I told him I’d think about it.

DEPENDING ON WHOM you ask—Katya or me—we dated for somewhere between seven and two years before getting engaged. She teases me about why it took me so long. It’s because she’s exactly the type of person I never thought I’d marry. She’s beautiful, athletic, artistic, and understanding. I’m bookish, plodding, and unforgiving. Falling in love with her created in me a cognitive dissonance that took awhile to subside. I’m not a good enough writer to know how to say this without sounding corny, but the day I decided to propose was the day I realized I would never run out of things I wanted to talk to her about and I would never get tired of looking at her. Two and a half years into our marriage, she got pregnant.

We were not trying not to have a kid, but we were not trying to have one, either. We liked our life. We saw a movie or two every week, we went to bars and restaurants, we talked about books. Once a month or so, Katya would go out dancing. (That she would do without me; as Dirty Harry said, a man has got to know his limitations.) We’d read stories from the newspaper to each other over breakfast.

The night we learned about Lincoln, we saw American Beauty before meeting three other couples for dinner. We drank many martinis. At two in the morning, Katya was sick. She threw up food, then gastric juices, then dry heaves, then red foamy blood. I was terrified. She was too exhausted to be scared. I drove us to the hospital. Katya vomited twice more, walking from the car to the admitting area. Before we had finished filling out the paperwork, the nurse said, Kidney stone, sweetheart. Have you had them before?

They ran a sedative and an antinausea medicine through her IV. Her eyes slid shut. I asked whether I could have something. The nurse smiled. She thought I was joking. I said, Really.

At four the doctor walked in, glanced at her chart, and said he was virtually certain it was a kidney stone. But they would do an X-ray anyway, just to be sure. I felt myself sag with relief. They were wheeling her out of the cubicle when a nurse walked in with a piece of paper and stopped the doctor. He looked down and smiled like he was in a movie. Apparently, a routine pregnancy screen is part of the protocol. He said, Congratulations.

Two months after Lincoln was born, I had an argument in the court of appeals. The Sunday before I left for New Orleans, we were sitting on a bench in Hermann Park watching the paddleboats. You could feel the first hint of autumn. The air was thick with smoke from charcoal fires, and the smell of hamburgers grilling made me hungry. I was trying to get a new trial for an illegal immigrant because the prosecutors had kept all the blacks and Hispanics off the jury. My client had murdered a pregnant woman and her fourteen-year-old daughter. Those facts had absolutely nothing to do with the legal issues in the appeal, but there was no way the judges would overlook them. I was thinking, I’ve got no chance of winning this case.

Winona was lying at our feet. Lincoln was in a jogging stroller. Katya was pushing him forward, pulling him back. She was looking out at the water. She said, If you are not going to be with us when you’re with us, you might as well stay home.

WHEN LINCOLN WAS NEARLY TWO, I was making coffee in the kitchen one morning while Katya was getting him dressed. She called down to me to turn on the Today show. There on TV, talking to Katie Couric, was Lana Norris, the mother of Clay Peterson. Clay Peterson was dead. He had been murdered during a robbery of a convenience store by my client Johnny Martinez. Martinez had stabbed him eight times. The murder was caught on the store’s security camera, so Clay Peterson’s mother had watched a video of her son bleeding to death. She told me she had watched it at least a hundred times. It made her feel like she was close to her son, with him, as he lay dying. Norris was on TV because it was sweeps week on television, and she was a curiosity. A deeply religious person whose son had been saving money to study for the ministry when his life was cut short, Norris had met with Martinez for nearly four hours a week before his scheduled execution. After the meeting, Ms. Norris wrote a letter to the governor of Texas urging that Martinez’s life be spared.

Martinez’s own mother was a heroin addict who sold her kids’ possessions to support her drug habit. His neighbor made him masturbate while he filmed it. I think the video is still on the Internet. No court of law ever took Johnny away from his mother, but she couldn’t have been more absent. Martinez was raised by his grandmother. Lana Norris told me at the prison after her meeting with Johnny ended that she did not want Martinez’s grandmother to lose a child and be forced to go through what she had gone through herself. She told Katie Couric the same thing.

The governor in Texas cannot grant a reprieve unless the parole board authorizes him to. By a vote of 8–7, the board voted against commuting Martinez’s sentence from death to life in prison. One of the board members who voted in the minority called me to tell me the result of the vote before it was announced. He told me not to tell anyone that he had called. It was a breach of protocol. I could hear him softly crying.

Two hours before the execution I sat with Martinez in the holding cell. When the parole board member had called me the day before, he said, I just want to tell you that I do not think Mr. Martinez should die. I’ve been reading these petitions for ten years, hundreds of cases, and this is the first time I’ve voted to spare a life. I am impressed with who Mr. Martinez has become. I wish I could have convinced one more person. I really do. I’m sorry, sir. I repeated this conversation to Martinez. He nodded twice and stifled a sob. He said, It doesn’t make any sense, but I feel better that not everybody wants to kill me.

I was going to be witnessing the execution with his brother and sister. He did not want his mother there, but he asked me to be sure to tell her that he loved her. He knew his brother would not convey the message. The guard said it was time to go. Johnny’s hands were cuffed together and then shackled to a leather belt around his waist. He tried to lift his hand to shake mine. I hugged him and told him that I wished I had done more. He said, You did everything. You were the only one. Now go right home when you leave this hell and hug your son, okay? Hug Lincoln until he falls asleep tonight, will you? I had never told Martinez my son’s name. I’m not sure how he learned.

I said I would, but when I got home from watching Martinez die, Lincoln was already sleeping. I carried him from his bed into Katya’s and my bedroom and hugged him until I fell asleep myself. I thought that was close enough.

I WRITE DOWN MY DREAMS because they scare me. They scare me because I understand them.

The night Martinez got executed, I dreamed Lincoln and I were in a hotel room, waiting for room service. He opened the window. It was cold outside. I said, Close it, Lincoln. He ignored me and climbed out onto the ledge. He threatened to jump. Go ahead, I said. He looked at me, wounded. On the television the hotel safety video was playing on a loop, warning people not to use the elevators in case of a fire. I put my hand on the small of Lincoln’s back, meaning to hook my fingers through his belt, but before I could, he jumped. I heard only silence as he fell. Then a splash. He had fallen into the hotel pool. By the time I got downstairs, Lincoln was clinging to the side, and Katya was already there. I woke up, covered with sweat.

It was nearly 3:00 a.m. I started to shiver violently and could not go back to sleep. I put on a sweatshirt and checked to make sure Lincoln was fine. I kissed Katya on the cheek, went into the kitchen, and poured myself a drink. The dog thought it was time to go out. She followed me downstairs. But when she looked outside and saw it was still dark, she climbed back up the stairs and hopped into bed. I carried my drink into our library and, one by one, deleted all the Martinez files from my computer.

It is easier to forget failure if you don’t have the icons to remind you.

IN THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, Freud sides with those who maintain conscience is silent in our dreams…. Ethical indifference reigns supreme. He was wrong, at least about me. In my dreams my conscience shouts until it wakes me and makes me too afraid to go back to bed. If you don’t want to be confronted with an aerial map of all the corners you’ve cut that day, you shouldn’t go to sleep.

Katya and I had invited three couples over for dinner later that week. Two of my clients had been executed in the past ten days. She asked if I wanted to cancel. I said no. Cooking relaxes me. I pan-roasted a loin of venison with lots of thyme and garlic, and I deep-fried cauliflower dipped in beer batter. Over cocktails we were talking about the JonBenet Ramsay murder. Like everyone else, I suspected the mother. Our friend Sharon disagreed. She believed the intruder theory. She and her husband Tom are oncologists. We compared the futility of our work. Sharon said, My goal is to save my patients’ lives. Barring that, my goal is to extend their lives as long as I can. If I can’t do that either, at least I can struggle with them for as long as they have.

I said, Exactly. Me too.

Except my clients killed somebody. She asked me why I keep doing it. I paused to consider the answer. Katya said, Because he’s wracked with guilt when he even contemplates stopping, and he thinks doing anything else would be unfulfilling and self-indulgent. She took a sip of wine and looked at me. I rested my hand on her thigh. She said, Right?

Your characteristics can explain your actions, but if there’s a persuasive explanation for the source of your characteristics, I’ve never heard it. I once fired a lawyer who left the office every day at five. He told me he was guarding against burnout. I understand people who say they need to take care of themselves. What I don’t understand is why they say it. The day I fired him, I stayed up all night working on a clemency petition for a death-row inmate I didn’t represent.

When my clients ask me what I intend to do next, I don’t tell them that I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to figure it out, because tonight I have plans. Tonight I’m picking up a pizza and going home to play Scrabble and watch SpongeBob with my wife and son. When you’re careening toward death, you don’t want the only person who can pull the brake to look at his watch and decide it’s time for lunch.

Here’s what Sharon’s and Tom’s patients have in common with my clients: no one wants her life to depend on a stranger who might have something else, or something better, to do. I understand my clients, and I understand how the patient’s reaction burdens the stranger.

A WEEK LATER Katya and I were having martinis at the Downing Street pub. I was smoking a Cuban cigar I had brought back with me from Mexico. Katya was eating olives. She said, Do you think Quaker did it? I told her I didn’t have a clue. She said, Why would he?

I said, Same answer.

She said, I think you think he’s innocent, and you don’t want to say it out loud.

I said, You think you know me, don’t you?

I know a lot of lawyers who want to represent a death-row inmate who’s actually innocent. Prove he’s innocent, get him out, be a hero, go on TV, be adored, feel good about yourself. I understand the impulse, but I counsel them against it.

I said, You know, K, when Jeremy Winston got executed on Halloween, he was truly remorseful. I could tell that when I first met him. At some level, he felt like he deserved to die. That’s why he didn’t care when I told him we weren’t going to win. He didn’t want to win.

Winston had broken through a first-floor window and stolen Lucy Romer from her bed in the middle of the night on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Lucy’s mother found her empty bed at eight the next morning. There was blood on the window frame and glass on the bed. Police found Lucy later that afternoon. She had been vaginally and anally raped. She had been smothered. Her skull was crushed, probably from being run over. She was five years old.

Winston’s dad had been murdered in front of Winston when the boy was eight. Over the next seven years, his mother lived with eleven different men. At least six of them beat Winston and his mother on a fairly regular basis. One of them fired a gun at Winston. Another beat him with a brick. A third sodomized him.

Katya said, You wanted to keep Winston alive, but it wasn’t your doing that he died.

I said, That rationalization hasn’t worked so well for me before, and if I start to believe that he’s innocent, it won’t work at all with Henry Quaker.

She said, Whether you believe he’s innocent has nothing to do with it.

I thought about that. I couldn’t be sure whether she had stressed the word you or the word believe. I didn’t see the need to sort it out. The point was the same.

JEROME, GARY, KASSIE, AND I met to discuss our strategy. Jerome had read the transcripts. He noticed that when police arrived at the murder scene, they checked Dorris’s hands for gunpowder residue. The police reports did not say what the results of the test had been. But Jerome thought it was significant that they had even conducted a test. They had to have been thinking that she killed her two children and then committed suicide. But why would they think that, why would they check her hands, unless they had found a gun nearby? And if they had found a gun nearby, why wasn’t it mentioned anywhere in the file? I told the team that I’d have lunch with Detective Harmon to see what I could learn.

Gary and Kassie thought we should take another run at Green. I asked what he could possibly know. Gary had figured out from jail records that Green had been in the county jail during Quaker’s trial. He could have heard just about anything. I warned them again about Green’s temper. Kassie said, Right, you tell the guy to have a nice life, and he’s the one with the temper.

I shrugged. I told Gary to let Kassie take the lead in talking to Green. Then I said to Kassie, Be sure to wear something nice.

MELISSA HARMON SAID, If you’re buying lunch, you must need something.

I’d known Melissa for close to twenty years. She had been a homicide cop before leaving the police force to open her own detective agency. She is five feet two inches tall, and weighs maybe a hundred pounds after a big breakfast. She is also a third-degree black belt. For ten years she was married to an abusive spouse. I once asked her why she didn’t beat the crap out of the guy. She turned her head to the side and shrugged. I never asked again. She did me a big favor when I was a young lawyer, and I was finally able to pay it back by getting her a divorce lawyer who put her ex-husband through the misery he deserved. When I needed a cop’s perspective, I asked her. Sometimes I even hired her.

I said, If you were investigating a crime scene, is there any reason you would think a dead guy had committed suicide if you didn’t find a gun near him? She asked what hypothetical crime scene I was talking about. I told her.

She said, Lucas Wyatt pulled that case, right? I nodded. She said, He might take too many shortcuts, but he isn’t corrupt. I said that wasn’t exactly what I had asked her. We were at Goode Company Bar-B-Q. She ate a piece of sausage. She said, I don’t know why you eat the brisket. It’s like diet food. It isn’t as good as this. She stabbed another piece of sausage with her plastic fork and waved it under my nose. I waited. She said, No, I don’t think that thought would cross my mind. I asked whether it would make a difference if the victim was a woman. She thought for a minute and asked, Wasn’t she a mother? I told her yes. She said, If the kids were dead, I might give the possibility of murder-suicide a little thought.

Even if there wasn’t a gun?

If there wasn’t a gun, it would be just a very little thought, she said.

I said, If Wyatt had found a gun next to the body he’s not the kind of cop who would neglect to put that in his report, is he?

No, he isn’t.

You sure?

She paused and said, Yeah, I am.

I said, I detected a pause before that answer.

She smiled. Then she said, I told you, he’s not corrupt. If it was my time, I wouldn’t waste it chasing that rabbit. But it isn’t my time, is it? And if I know you, you’re going to do what you’re going to do. She wiped her mouth and stood up to go. Thanks for lunch, Doc. Let’s do it again when I can bring more clarity to your life.

LINCOLN CALLED ME as I was driving back to the office. He had learned to ride his bike without training wheels two weeks earlier, and ever since all he wanted to do was practice. He would wake up with me at five and wait for it to get light, then ride up and down the driveway in his pajamas until it was time for breakfast. He asked whether I could come home for a while to help him practice. I told him to practice with Nana. He said, But she runs too slow. She won’t be able to help catch me if I fall. I told him that he would have to work it out. He said, You told me this morning you would practice with me at lunch. He was correct. I had forgotten. I said that something had come up at my office, and that I would have to do it tomorrow. He said, Okay, Dada. He waited for me to break the connection.

Why is it that when my six-year-old son says, Okay, Dada, I feel like my entire life is a waste of time?

JEROME AND BUD LOMAX were waiting for me when I got back to the office. Jerome looked at me over Bud’s shoulder and rolled his eyes.

Bud Lomax was Henry Quaker’s brother-in-law, Dorris’s younger brother. Bud had been seventeen when Dorris and the children were killed. At Henry’s trial, Lomax had testified that Dorris told him that Henry was abusive. I could not conceive of how a jury could have believed him. His eyes flitted like a bird eyeing a cat. He was a loser, and I could not imagine how anyone could believe that Dorris told him a meaningful thing. He said that Dorris was scared of Henry and once told him that Henry had threatened to kill her. Henry’s lawyer did not ask him a single question on cross-examination. Three months ago he called our office, talked to Jerome, and said he needed to see us. He told Jerome that he had lied at the trial.

Jerome drove out to Bud’s apartment. Bud told Jerome that the day after the bodies were found, a detective had come to see him and said that Henry committed the crime. He said it would help if Bud could remember fights he had witnessed between Henry and Dorris. Bud said he couldn’t remember any fights. He said Henry and Dorris loved each other. The detective told him it sure would be a shame if Henry got away with murdering his sister just because Bud had a bad memory. The detective came to see Bud four or five times. Eventually, his memory improved.

In the scheme of things, neither Bud’s original testimony nor his recantation was of great importance. Motive is overrated as an element of criminal trials. People kill for good reasons, bad reasons, and no reason at all. But in this case, the evidence against Henry was so slim that anything helped.

Bud had served twenty months in prison for drug possession. He was twenty-seven, no longer a kid, when he called Jerome. That day in my office he smelled like he’d bathed in peppermint schnapps. I said, Happy hour started a little early today, huh, partner? He looked at me blankly. Jerome asked him to tell us again what had happened after the murder. He repeated the same story Jerome had already heard. I asked him, Where were these conversations? He said at his house. I said, Inside or outside? He said he couldn’t remember. I asked him whether the detective might have found drugs inside the house. He stared at me like I had horns, with equal parts fear and disbelief. I said, How early in the morning do I need to schedule a meeting with you if I want to see you sober? He ran his thumb across his bottom lip. I told Jerome to take him home.

Later that day Jerome said, Just because the cop found drugs doesn’t mean that Bud would lie, and even if we could prove he did, just because Bud lied doesn’t mean Henry didn’t do it.

That’s true, I said. I asked Jerome whether Bud had any kids. He said, Four. Three sons, one daughter, three different mothers.

I said, Fatherhood can have unpredictable effects. I’ll see you tomorrow.

I DROVE HOME to pick up Lincoln for t-ball practice. He was waiting for me, throwing a tennis ball against the garage and catching the rebound. He seemed to have forgotten about the shitty dad episode, another great thing about six-year-olds. He said, Look, Dada. Nana helped me fix my injury. He had skinned his knee falling off the bike, Maria explained, and he had insisted he needed Neosporin and an Ace bandage. He had his leg wrapped, from ankle to thigh, with an elastic bandage. I thanked Maria and told her she could go. She said to Lincoln, Adios, amor.

He hugged her and said, Hasta mañana, Nana.

Katya had wanted Lincoln to play baseball because his three best friends from school were going to. When Lincoln said he wasn’t interested, I smiled. I’ve had enough of Little League Baseball for one lifetime. He said, I want to learn how to wrestle instead, like Dada. I thought that was a great idea. Katya gave me her be-quiet-a-minute look and asked him, Won’t you be sad if all your friends are playing and you aren’t?

Lincoln said, Maybe. He thought for a moment then said, Okay, I’ll play if Dada will be coach. Katya gave me her gotcha look. Thus it was that I became a Little League manager, outmaneuvered by the two of them for neither the first nor the last time.

The parents in our neighborhood take Little League more than a little too seriously. They sign a contract agreeing not to abuse the umpires. Some start with the abuse anyway, and they get banned from attending the games. One banned parent sued the league, claiming he had a right to free speech, which meant he could heckle any umpire he wanted. The league hired professional coaches to train the kids. At our first practice, the professional coaches had the kids line up and told them to run to a spot on the field. Most of the kids were five; a few were six. The coach said, When you get there, break down, box-step, and throw. Eleven kids looked at me. Lincoln said, Dada, what does that mean? I told him I wasn’t sure. He picked up a stick and started to draw a picture in the dirt.

The coaches were teaching the kids how to run past first base. I was still thinking about Bud Lomax. Lincoln said, Dada, I’m hot. I told him I was hot, too; just pay attention to the coaches. Sam was running to first base and crashed into Connor, who had wandered into the base path. Connor started shrieking when he saw his nose was bleeding. I wrapped some ice in a towel and pressed it against his nose. Lincoln came trotting over. I told him to go back to the other kids, that I was busy.

He said, But I’m too hot.

That’s it, amigo. I’m tired of your arguing with me. We’re not having a snow cone after practice.

This was a severe punishment. Snow cones are one of his favorite things to eat, and he had been talking since breakfast the day before about the flavor he was going to get. On the way to the car Lincoln pleaded with me to change my mind. When I didn’t, he cried all the way home. We walked in the house and Katya asked what was the matter. I said, Sometimes I am easily the world’s worst dad.

I went out back and jumped in the pool. I blew out my breath and felt myself sink to the bottom. I rolled onto my back and looked up. The sun was low in the west, casting a dancing shadow from our curly willow over the water. The shimmering surface calmed me.

Earlier that summer, a girl who had been in Lincoln’s preschool class drowned at a classmate’s fifth birthday party at a neighborhood country club in full view of her supposed protectors. I have heard that drowning is not a painful death, but I don’t believe it. Twenty kids were swimming, and neither lifeguard saw her go under. Her hair got caught in the drain. They emptied the pool and sent the children inside and tried to revive her for half an hour before another parent who is a doctor mercifully declared her dead.

She had been an only child. I told Katya that if it had happened to Lincoln, I didn’t think I’d be able to go on. Her eyes filled and she said, I know, me neither.

Under the water, I tried to imagine what the girl’s parents felt, how they got out of bed in the morning. If you have other kids, you have to. If you don’t, you don’t. I was dizzy. I felt hollow, like the pressure had shrunk my organs and my body contained nothing but space. I sliced to the surface. When I came up, Lincoln and Winona were chasing each other around the yard. He was laughing. Her tongue was lolling to the side. She was running sawtooth slow, so he could catch her. I said, Hey Linco, you want me to go back to the field and buy you a snow cone?

He said, Nah, I think I’ll just have some ice cream instead. Two scoops, one coconut crunch and one of chocolate, and a cone on the side. He paused a beat, then added, Please.

I said, I love you, amigo.

He said, I know.

WHILE KATYA AND I were having dinner, Kassie called. Green had been friendly. He told her that he knew for a fact that Henry was innocent. He said he knew who the killer was, and that the killing had been drug related. The killer’s name was Ruben. Green told Kassie that he had been in the county jail with this Ruben during Quaker’s trial. Kassie asked why he had been in jail, and Green said he’d violated his parole. She asked why Ruben was there. Green said he didn’t know. She asked for Ruben’s last name. Green said he forgot. Kassie hadn’t pressed him for details, she just let him ramble. Kassie’s major strength as a lawyer is her instinct about people who are generally untrustworthy. She said, He might have been yanking my chain, or he might not have been. It’s hard to say. I’ll need some time to poke around. She told me she was going to investigate the drug angle, see whether Sandra Blue, the neighbor, could remember anything helpful. I told her that sounded fine, and that she should get Gary to help her. I asked her whether there was anything else. She said, Yeah. The guy asked me if I know any recipes for soul food that he can cook on his hot plate. And one other thing, too. He masturbated while he was talking to me. Didn’t try to hide it in the slightest. He’s a piece of work, Doc. I’d rather not have to go see him again.

I told Katya what Kassie had said. She said, See. You should listen to me more often. I said I’d reserve judgment on that until we could figure out whether anything Green said was true. I told her about the masturbation. She said, All I’m saying is that he’s actually trying to help you. Just because people are screwed up doesn’t mean that nothing they say is right.

Later that night we were sitting in the library reading. I started to think about Jeremy Winston’s children. I’d seen them at the prison the day I met Winston. I had given them my cell phone number, and they called me twenty times or more in less than a week. His sons were twelve and fifteen when he died. I wondered whether they went trick-or-treating on the anniversary of their dad’s execution. What happens to children whose father is a murderer? I should know the answer to this question, but I don’t. Nearly all my clients had terrible fathers, but only one, so far as I know, had a dad who killed someone. Isn’t that curious? Lincoln wants to be a wrestler because I was a wrestler, yet my clients come to murder on their own. But what about their children? What will they tell people about their dads? How do their teachers treat them? Are their classmates scared of them?

How far into a relationship do you have to be before you tell your girlfriend that the state executed your old man?

I meet many of the parents, though I can’t truly say that I know them. I wonder whether they blame themselves. I remember news footage of Timothy McVeigh’s dad, in his small yard, on a riding mower, refusing to hide from the cameras. I felt like he was trying to say, I didn’t kill anyone. Now let me mow my grass in peace. During a death-penalty trial, when a murderer’s mother gets on the witness stand to plead with jurors to spare her son’s life, the prosecutor tears into her as if she herself committed a crime, throwing in her face every bad thing her son has ever done, insinuating that she is somehow to blame. Does the prosecutor hate his own mother, or does he not see this other mother as like his own?

I’m pensive only when I have time on my hands. Socrates had it backward. He thought the unexamined life is not worth living. I think no one’s life holds up to examination. The more time you spend thinking, the more you notice that everyone else is doing something better, or more important, than you. Idleness and idolatry aren’t related, but they ought to be.

Winston’s father was a devout Jehovah’s Witness. He had forced Winston to knock on doors and invite himself in to people’s homes to discuss the Bible. When Winston misbehaved, his father beat him with a tree branch or an extension cord. He didn’t think he was being cruel. He thought he was being stern. He and Winston’s mother got divorced when Winston was fourteen. The father moved to Louisiana. He never talked to the son again. Days before the execution, he called me to say that he believed he had been too tough on his son and to ask if there was some way he could help. He asked whether he could see his son in prison. I told him no, he couldn’t. He said, I do understand. Thank you, sir. If you think it is appropriate, please tell Jeremy that I love him.

When I called Winston shortly before he died, I told him what his dad had said. If you can feel an emotion through the phone, I would swear I felt him smile, not a happy smile, more a smile of relief—no, of release, which is different, the smile of a weight being lifted.

Lincoln started to cry. I ran upstairs to his room. I tried to wake him but he was deep into a dream. He was saying, Stop, turn off, stop. I lifted him out of his bed and turned on the light. He kept screaming. I sat down at the electric keyboard in his room with him on my lap. I played two bars of Thelonious Monk’s Everything Happens to Me. At last Lincoln woke up. He told me his bad dream. He had been in our exercise room and the treadmill turned itself on. The belt was whirring and the platform raised itself to the steepest incline. Lincoln pulled the plug out of the wall, but it kept on running. He said, I tried to make it stop, Dada, but it wouldn’t. I told him it was okay, that it was over now. I put him back in his bed and stayed with him, stroking his damp hair, until he fell back asleep.

Katya had been standing in the hall outside his door, ready to come in and help if I needed her. When Lincoln was three and four, he had these nightmares once or twice a week. Katya used to be the only one of us who could calm him down. I would try and fail, and she would have to intervene. This night was the first time in several months that he’d had one, and I felt absurdly happy that Katya had let me handle it by myself. I made it through the day without being a total failure. I walked out of his room, feeling serene. Katya was waiting there, right outside the door. She kissed me softly and said, You’re a great dad.

She always knows exactly which lie to tell.

WHEN I GOT TO THE OFFICE the next morning Kassie and Gary were already there, doing computer searches for the guy Green said had murdered Henry Quaker’s family. Green had been in the jail during the Quaker trial. During two days of the trial, there was also an inmate named Ruben Francisco Cantu, the only Ruben in the jail at the same time Green was there. He’d been stopped in a routine traffic stop and when cops opened the trunk they found bricks of marijuana. He bonded out two days later. I said, So I guess the rabbit chase goes on for a little while longer, huh? I asked where Cantu was now. Kassie told me that he’d served three years of a ten-year sentence and had gotten paroled five years ago. The address we had for him was two years old, but it was all we had. I said, I think I’ll take a drive over to the east side.

When the dry wind blows in from the west, carrying the petrochemical fumes toward Lafayette, the only toxic clue is that the setting sun looks like a blood orange sinking into the Sabine. People who live with poisoned air get to see the most beautiful sunsets, the bargain for not getting to see as many of them. Cantu lived five doors down from an eggshell-colored clapboard church sitting on top of cinder blocks with a listing portable sign that said, Jesus Cristo es el Hombre. I parked at the church and walked across the oyster-shell parking lot to see if anyone was inside. A man sat at a piano, picking out a tune with his left hand and jotting down the notes with his right. I said, Perdon, senor. Yo quiero saber si usted conoce a uno de sus vecinos, un hombre se llama Ruben Cantu? He asked me in English whether I was a police officer. I told him I wasn’t. He said he had a lot of neighbors named Cantu. He didn’t think he knew anyone named Ruben. I asked him whether I could leave my car in his parking lot, and when he said I could, I said, Muchisimas gracias, and walked down the street.

The house I hoped was Cantu’s looked like a sharecropper’s cabin. It had peeling white paint and a shattered window. From inside I could hear Spanish television and canned laughter. I knocked and a man wearing jockey shorts and a hooded sweatshirt opened the door. I introduced myself and said, Yo quiero hacerle unas preguntas. Usted preferie que hablar en Ingles or Espanol? My plan was to go ahead and assume he was Cantu until he corrected me.

He said, You talk Spanish like the Unabomber writes. I speak English. What do you want?

He didn’t invite me in. I asked him whether he knew someone named Henry Quaker. He said no. I told him that someone I knew on death row told me he had some information that might help my client. I asked whether he knew why someone might say that. He said no. I asked him whether he knew Ezekiel Green. He said no, but he delayed a brief second, and his eyes changed. He knew him. I asked whether he knew who had killed Quaker’s family. He said, I already told the other guy I don’t know nothing about it. That was a slip. Green’s name had rattled him. As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t. I bluffed and asked him what was the detective’s name. He cocked his head to the side and didn’t answer, but I knew. Some cop had talked to him. I asked him how long they had talked. He narrowed his eyes and looked at me like he was trying to figure out whether I was actually stupid or just pretending. He said, How long? Are you loco? I don’t remember, man, it was a long time ago. He relaxed again, no longer nervous. I asked like how long. Days? Weeks? Months? He said, Nah, I’m talking about years ago, right after your client killed his family.

I said, A detective asked you these questions years ago?

He said, What’s the matter? You don’t hear so good? While I was thinking of what else to ask, he said, Adios, abogado, and he closed the door. I stood there awhile and thought about knocking, but he probably wouldn’t have answered, and besides, I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. So I bought a lemon aqua fresca at a taco cart that had set up in the church parking lot and headed back to town.

On the drive back I called the office and told Jerome to file a new appeal. I thought we had learned enough to entitle us to a hearing in state court. We had Green saying he knew Cantu committed the crime, and we had Cantu saying that he had been interrogated, and we had Lomax recanting and saying he incriminated Henry because a police officer pressured him to. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and even though it didn’t answer very many questions, it raised quite a few, which was all I could realistically hope to do at that point. It seemed likely that the cops talked to Cantu around the time of the crime, and that detail should have been in the police reports, and therefore known to Quaker’s trial lawyers, but it must not have been, or Quaker’s lawyer, bad as he was, would have at least talked to him. We had police testing Dorris’s hands for gunpowder residue, but also no mention of a gun in police reports. Lots of dogs weren’t barking. There were several threads in the case that Quaker’s trial lawyer had ignored, and we needed to pull on them to see what unraveled. But the first thing I needed to do was have another conversation with Henry.

I WAS MEETING KATYA for dinner at La Griglia, and I got there a few minutes early. I ordered a martini at the bar. Jocelyn Truesdale was sitting at the end of the counter. She motioned me over. She said, You drinking alone, counselor?

I said, Hi, Judge. I’m waiting for my wife.

She said, Have I met her? The answer was no, but I did not want to be talking to Judge Truesdale about my wife. She caught the bartender’s eye and pointed at her empty glass. She said, Want to buy me a drink?

I didn’t. I said, Sure.

She said, I hear rumors you are going to ask me to reopen the Quaker case. Is that true? When she said rumors she pronounced it rur-mors.

I tried to think of some way that this conversation was not highly inappropriate. I lied and said, We haven’t decided what we are going to do. We might ask for a new hearing.

She said, I remember that case. It’s always bothered me a little. She was drinking scotch on ice. She took a swallow and chewed a piece of ice.

Katya arrived. She saw me and took a step toward the bar. I stood up before she could walk over. I said, I’ll let you know, though. I’ve got to go. It’s been nice talking to you, Judge. I practically jogged toward Katya and steered her to our table. She asked me whom I had been talking to. I said, The judge in the Quaker case. I might need an expert opinion here, but I think she might have been coming on to me.

After we ordered, I told Katya about my conversation. She said, It’s possible she was hitting on you, but she might have just been drunk. Your track record of accurately perceiving women, frankly, isn’t all that great.

I told Katya the story: Truesdale had been married to a cop. She sold real estate by day and went to law school at night. Early one morning her husband pulled over a driver for drunk driving. He asked the driver to get out of the car. He didn’t know it, but the driver had just robbed a gas station. The driver came out firing. Truesdale’s husband was hit twice in the chest and once in the head. He died at the scene. The driver jumped back into the car and sped off. Police tracked him down the next day, but there was no video of the stop, and they couldn’t find the gun. So they did what cops sometimes do when another cop gets killed. They beat the guy until he told them where he had thrown it. They found the gun in the bayou, just where he said it would be.

The case got assigned to Judge Dan Steele. Steele was a former marine. He served two tours in Vietnam before he went to law school. His law-and-order credentials were like early Clint Eastwood. But he had integrity. He ruled that the only reason the police found the gun was because they had beaten the suspect. So he concluded that the prosecutor couldn’t use the gun as evidence. Without the gun, there was no case. The shooter walked. Everybody was livid, especially the victims’-rights crowd. They made it their mission to defeat Steele in the next election, and they convinced Truesdale to run against him. She crushed him. Six months after she took the bar exam, she was a criminal court judge.

I said to Katya, There is no way this case has bothered her. Nothing bothers her. We once proved that a guy who had been convicted of rape in her court couldn’t have committed the crime, because the DNA didn’t match. You know that she said? She said, Maybe he did it and used a condom. She figures that even if the guy didn’t do what he was convicted of, he probably did something. There’s not a sympathetic bone in her body. I don’t buy it.

Katya said, You don’t know how you would react if I got murdered. You might think you do, but you don’t. Maybe her nephew is a delinquent. Maybe she found dope in her kids’ clothes. Maybe she found religion. Maybe she read a good book. Maybe she started listening to Bob Dylan. Maybe she had a dream. Maybe she just spent some time meditating. Maybe she finally met someone else. Who knows? But people do change their minds, you know. I bet it really did bother her. It’s a strange case.

Our food arrived. I waited until the waiter had left, then I said, Well. I still think she was just hitting on me.

Katya smiled. She said, The ego on you.

QUAKER WAS ALREADY in the cage when I got to the prison. He was eating a ham sandwich and a bag of tortilla chips. I asked him where he got the food. I was assuming he must have had a visitor I didn’t know about. He said, Nicole got it for me.

Nicole is a guard on death row. She’s notoriously tough. I didn’t think Quaker meant her. I said, Nicole the guard?

He said, Uh-huh. I looked at him. He said, She ain’t that bad. Got a tough reputation, that’s all. But you act right, she treats you right. I asked whether she buys him food very often. He said, Only when I ask her. I don’t ask too often. This is maybe the third time. I give her the money from my commissary; it ain’t like it’s her treat. I asked him whether there was anything he wanted to talk about. He said, Not really. You wanted to see me, right? He was in a sour mood. As someone who is in sour moods quite a lot, I am expert at recognizing them. Of course, he had a better excuse than I ever do. He lived twenty-three hours a day in a sixty-square-foot cell that had a cot and a stainless-steel toilet and a strip of clouded Plexiglas for a window. Guards passed him his meals through a slot in the solid-steel door. Breakfast at four, lunch at ten thirty, dinner at four. He had no television. His radio got two stations—a country music station in Huntsville and a Christian talk station in Livingston. For one hour a day, guards moved him from his cell into the so-called day area, a ten-by-ten-foot caged area where he got to exercise by himself, while another inmate exercised in an adjacent cage.

People think death-row inmates have it great, that they lift weights all morning and watch TV all night, with three square meals a day, access to computers and books, and an endless series of appeals. I’m not sure whether the people who constructed this myth are ignorant, or just cynical. Either way, it’s wrong in every respect. Death row is a cage at the pound. You might not have any problem with that. You might say that someone who kills someone should be kept in a cage. I don’t agree with that viewpoint, but I do understand it. One day we can have the debate where I take the position that a great nation built upon the rule of law ought not to treat prisoners the way the Iranians or the Chinese do. But that wasn’t the topic that day with Quaker. Instead, I needed to remember that at some point in the small remainder of every inmate’s life, the exterior cage becomes interior, too. Once that happens, your client reacts to stimuli that you cannot see. It’s like watching a musical without the sound. So much seems inappropriate, or inexplicable, and that makes me mad—well, not mad, exactly; impatient might be a better word.

I asked him whether he knew Ruben Cantu. He said he didn’t. I told him what Green had told us and about my conversation with Cantu. He said, I know Green. I wouldn’t believe a word he says. Anyway, I’m no lawyer, but it sounds to me like you don’t have that much, just a bunch of questions, not much else. I told him I agreed with him. He said, They kill dudes in here every day who have a hundred questions. A thousand, maybe.

I couldn’t argue with him about that. I said, Was Dorris depressed?

He didn’t answer right away. After a moment he said, If you were married to a guy who had secrets he couldn’t share and woke up every night drenched with sweat and sat around like a zombie and pushed you away when you tried to help, wouldn’t you be depressed?

I said, Was she depressed enough to kill herself ?

He shook his head violently. He leaned toward me. He said, She’d light herself on fire before she’d hurt those kids. I nodded.

He said, I got no interest in trying to help myself by making Dorris look bad, you understand what I’m saying? I told him I did. He said, A bunch of questions don’t prove that I’m innocent.

He dropped his eyes, looking at his fingers. He was strumming them on the table, like he was playing the piano. His face softened and his eyes got wet. I had this thought: I do not want to like this man. He said, I don’t know how you do what you do. Do you ever sleep?

I thought, My client Johnny Martinez asked me that very question. I said, What tune were you playing there?

Quaker played piano for the church from the time he was eight years old until the fire where he worked. On one of our earlier visits he had said to me, I ain’t too religious, but I do love the music. He smiled and his eyes lit up. I told him he reminded me a little bit of Bud Powell. He said, Yeah, Dorris told me that. And I talk to myself when I’m playin’, too, just like ole Bud.

He strummed his fingers some more. He said, I miss having a piano. I used to sleep good in here. It’s always noisy, but I slept okay, ten or eleven hours. Lately I ain’t been sleepin’ at all. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I filled out a form to get some medicine, something to knock me out. I nodded. From nowhere he smiled. He said, You don’t seem too interested in my problems.

I said, Most of your problems I can’t do anything about.

He said, I know. That’s okay.

I thought of a Zbigniew Herbert poem I’d been reading: I imagined your fingers / had faith in your eyes / the unstrung instrument / the arms without hands.

And many verses later: heroes did not return from the expedition / there were no heroes / the unworthy survived.

I said, I might not be able to do anything about any of your problems, but we have raised a lot of questions, and I think we can maybe get a stay.

It was the first time I had used the word stay, and it was electric, an acknowledgment of the proximity of death. No stay meant Quaker would die in a few weeks. A stay meant he would survive to fight on. Survive, not thrive. Someone who thrives looks forward to tomorrow. Tomorrow for someone who only survives is just one day closer to the end.

I think all the time about what I would do if I knew how many weeks, how many days, how many hours I had left. I’d circle the date on a calendar. That’s all I know. Everything else is a question. Would I sleep a lot, or not at all? Would I eat a lot, or would I have no appetite? If I ate, would I eat new foods I’d never tried, or gorge myself on my favorites? Would I watch TV or movies? Would I read books? Would I be able to concentrate? Would I exercise? What would be the point? Would I travel? Would I jump out of an airplane again, kayak huge white water, fly a jet? Would I call everyone I know and say good-bye? Would I spend every waking moment with my family, the people I love the most, or would that be too painful to withstand?

Doesn’t everybody think about these things?

I didn’t want Quaker not to think about these things. I didn’t want to give him hope. Like I said before, I’m always hopeful, but never optimistic.

Most of my clients nod their heads at that point. Some just bow their heads. They perceive my hope like a vanishing scent. They breathe it in and memorize its smell. They cling to it when they visit their parents or their children, because it is the only reason they have to think they will visit again. They don’t want to give me a chance to say anything else, anything else that might reveal how slender the reed happens to be. Not Quaker. He said, Why?

I didn’t answer right away. I thought to myself, Katya is right. A sliver of belief had crept into my head and I couldn’t stamp it out. It was like the aroma of baking bread. How could twelve jurors have looked at him and seen a killer? I said, Because none of this adds up.

He said, In case you’re wondering, I didn’t kill my family.

I almost said, I know, but I was not ready to surrender. I nodded.

He said, I don’t know what happened to that gun, I really don’t.

I wanted to nod again. I wanted to straddle the line. I wanted to support him and to protect myself. He exhaled through his nose.

I said, I know. I know you didn’t.

Instantly his eyes filled with tears. His lips parted then closed. He covered his mouth and nose with his left hand. He lowered his head and lifted it. My heart was so loud I could hear it. I thought, Where do we go from here?

I said, The plan is to get some judge to believe that, too.

I wanted to run out of there. I stood up. He said, Thank you. Thank you. We touched our hands to the glass between us.

Nicole was the guard operating the electronic door that day. She asked me how my Thanksgiving had been, and I wished her a merry Christmas. I told her I’d see her after the first of the year. She said, Quaker’s all right. He never causes no trouble. If you need any kind of statements from me or anyone else, you tell me, okay? There’s lots of guys in here who want to help him.

I emerged from death row onto the asphalt yard at two in the afternoon. I don’t believe in omens, but that didn’t change the fact that the sky was turning from ochre to black. I smelled sulfur in the air. I started to hurry across the prison yard, wanting to beat the rain to my truck. Maybe the guard didn’t want me to make it. While I was waiting for him to buzz me through the third of three gates, rain drops as fat as grapes began to fall. The sky crackled with lightning. Thunder like a sonic boom made me think of the night that Tim Robbins escaped from Shawshank. By the time I reached my truck, I was shivering hard and so soaked I squeaked.

THAT NIGHT I had a dream. I was driving home from seeing Quaker, down the twisting two-lane farm road that slices through fecund farmland just north of death row. The rain was pouring down, and the creek that runs along the east side of the prison was rising fast. Across from Florida’s restaurant the road doglegs to the left. A canoe usually tied up at the dock behind the restaurant floated into the road. I swerved to miss it and my truck skidded into the creek. It bobbed like a cork, then pointed nosedown and started to sink. Water began to leak into the cab. I took off my seat belt and fell against the windshield. Legal papers and CDs were sliding all around me. I reached for a rock hammer I keep in my truck for just this emergency, but of course it wasn’t there. Muddy water was two-thirds of the way up the door. I found the hammer and I swung it at the driver’s-side window. It shattered and looked like a spider web. Instead of swinging again, I used my fist. Shards of glass pierced my wrist like a bracelet. I squeezed through the window and breaststroked upward, following the bubbles as I exhaled. I ran out of air and sucked down a greedy breath a moment too soon, so when I broke through the surface a moment later I was gagging. The rain had stopped. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. A young boy wearing overalls and rubber boots was standing ankle-deep on the side of the creek fishing with a bamboo pole. He looked at me with no surprise and said, Hey mister, what are you doing?

THERE IS A MOMENT in the middle of every night when I am the only man alive. I slip out of bed and put on a sweatshirt. I fill a mug with hot water and a squeeze of lemon. I carry it into Lincoln’s room and watch him sleep. If he’s still enough, I touch his hair or stroke his cheek. I picture him and Katya sitting at the piano playing four-handed, or the two of them dancing at a wedding. Every New Year’s Day, they go swimming together in the ocean. I don’t need to stay alive. I’ve done my job. I sit at my desk and think of nothing. With headphones I listen to Art Tatum or Teddy Wilson. I wait. Sometimes I fall asleep there. Sometimes I just sit. Sometimes something comes to me. That night it was the blood. The blood might tell us something.

I crawled back into bed. Katya asked if everything was okay. I said, No, not really.

She said, It will be. She put her right leg over mine and dropped her arm over my shoulder, and for the few moments before I fell back asleep, she was right.

ON SOME DAYS, it is hard to believe that mind readers are confidence men. When I got to the office the next morning, everyone was already in the conference room. A time line and a dozen photographs of the crime scene were tacked to the wall. I went and got my rubber ball and came back. The two children had been killed in their beds. Dorris had been killed on the couch in the living room, lying on her back, a single gunshot wound in her temple. There was a trail of blood connecting the two rooms. To my eye, the drops looked thinner on the side closer to the kids, and fatter on the side closer to Dorris. That would mean that the kids died first, and the killer then walked back toward Dorris, dripping blood as he went, either from the gun or maybe from his body. Of course, your eyes often see what you want them to. Plus, the blood could have been there already, since before the murders, but there’s no point to believing in coincidences, especially when they’re not helpful. We had to assume that the killer trailed it from one victim to the next. But if the kids were shot first, Dorris would have heard the shots, and if she had, she would have gotten up. But she didn’t get up; she was killed lying on the couch, with no signs of struggle. Nobody sleeps that deeply. That meant she had to have been killed first, probably while she was sleeping. If she was, the blood drops would be from her. If the blood wasn’t from her, if it was from one of the children, then maybe she did commit suicide after all, first shooting her kids and then taking her life. The story was in the blood. We needed to test the blood drops and see who they came from and to see which direction the killer was walking.

I asked Gary, our in-house chemist, to write a motion asking the judge to let us test the blood and then to arrange for a lab to test it. Jerome was going to arrange to have Quaker polygraphed. The results of the test would not be admissible in a court proceeding, but if we got down to the eleventh hour and had to ask the governor to intervene, it would help to be able to say that Quaker had passed the lie detector. You might as well ask a Magic 8 Ball for advice, but if the governor believed in the wizard, I wasn’t going to pull back the curtain.

Gary and Kassie were going to line up the witnesses for the trial. We would bring in Green from death row to testify about what he had heard, and Bud, Dorris’s brother, would say that he had lied at the trial. We’d get Detective Wyatt to say that he had tested Dorris’s hands for gunpowder residue, and we might walk blind into an alley and ask him why he tested her hands. We would try to make sure Ruben Cantu was there, to say detectives had interviewed him, but I had a feeling Cantu was going to be hard to find again. It wasn’t nearly enough to prove that Quaker was innocent, but our goal wasn’t to prove that he was innocent. The goal was to create a little mayhem to buy more time. If we could keep him alive, we could try to figure out what had really happened. If we could figure out what really happened, we could keep him alive.

I went outside to walk around the block. There was nothing for me to do but wait. I walked by the cloisters. Two men sitting next to one another on a bench by a fountain looked so serene I thought they were fake, until they nodded to me in unison. Last fall I had taken a weeklong course on Buddhist meditation. The room smelled like sweaty feet, and when I tried to clear my mind, it would fill with images of lavender virus cells under a microscope. I should have spent the time working on another case, but when you cannot help but believe that an innocent man’s life is in your care, it can prove difficult to divert your attention to another pressing task.

My cell phone rang. It was Judge Truesdale. I stopped in midstride and stepped closer to a building. I looked behind me. It felt like someone was watching. She said, I just signed an order granting you a hearing in the Quaker case.

I had forgotten we even filed a request for a hearing. We always ask, and they are never granted. I thought, How did she get my cell phone number? Then I realized, She had probably called the office first and gotten it from someone there.

I said, Thank you, Judge.

She said, You are welcome, Professor. I told you this case bothered me.

She told me that we were set for the last week of January, and I told her I would see her then. She said, If not before.

When I got back, everyone was still in the conference room eating donuts. I put my phone down on the table and gave it a spin, like I was playing spin-the-bottle. I told the team we had a hearing in less than five weeks. Kassie asked, How do you know that? I told them that Judge Truesdale had called me. Kassie said, She called you on your cell phone to say she had signed an order?

There is little distance between calmness and irresponsibility. I am no Zen master, but I live far from the edge. When the plane is crashing, I will be as scared as everyone else, but I will be the one who isn’t screaming.

I said, Which one of you gave her my cell phone number? Gary stuffed half a cake donut into his mouth. Kassie stared at me. I looked at Gary and said, Was it you?

He swallowed and said, Are you kidding?

I said, Well, she got it from somebody.

Jerome said, That’s pretty weird.

I said, I think she might actually be bothered by the case.

Kassie said, Right.

I reached for a glazed donut and took a bite, and I felt happy. It was three days before Christmas. We had an execution date in six weeks and a hearing in five, not a lot of time. I said, Tick tock, folks.