We’d gotten into the car before I finally murmured something vague about the drive to Raiford and my promise to go back to the hospital.
Laura tried not to look like she was asking for anything as she said, “He’s not in Raiford. They built a new prison for the overflow. It’s just about forty-five minutes from here, west of Jupiter.”
When I didn’t say oh, well, then immediately, she said with hardly any ice in her tone, “But no problem. Really. Just take me back to Pompano to get my car.”
That would have added two hours to her trip, and I got the sense those two hours were precious to her today. I declined and headed north instead.
On the road I had Laura call the hospital so I could tell Mom I’d be a teensy bit late getting back. Laura was able to get to the room, but no one answered. Mom definitely needed a cell phone. I had Laura call her apartment at Weeping Willow and, with no answer there either, left a message that I’d be back in the afternoon and reminded her of my cell phone number.
What with thinking about my parents, I forgot to ask Laura about Madame Defarge.
Jefferson State Penitentiary was much more high-tech than I remembered Raiford being. There weren’t fenced runs staffed by guard dogs, for one thing. They had been replaced with higher-tech surveillance.
I might point out that Florida is ahead of Texas in the number of prisoners on death row, more than four hundred at last count, and only trails behind California. However you look at it, the statistics aren’t happy ones for convicted felons. But no one has been able to come up with a better way to warehouse them.
The warden had received my preclearance request from Will, and approval from Marcus Creighton. We got through the first checkpoint with Laura’s ID, parked in visitor parking, signed in (Laura grunted as she did so), handed over our weapons, and were shown into a waiting room preparatory to meeting Marcus Creighton in a private room. We didn’t have to do the glass partition thing.
A guard, who Laura introduced as Wally, came to meet us, said hello to me, and turned back to Laura. “You were just here,” he said.
Laura’s face flushed. Flushing is odd in a woman who owns brass knuckles. “I don’t think—” she started.
“Yeah, just a few days ago. You’d been coming about once a week,” Wally said.
Laura was silent, so Wally turned to lead the way. We followed behind him. We walked through clanging door after clanging door that, even in the short time the prison had been around, had all been painted layer upon layer until the surfaces of the bars looked deceptively malleable.
If the General Population cell block was a zoo, with a thousand animals all shouting at the same time, and the only place on earth where you could smell communal bad breath, let alone the expected urine stench, death row was something else. “Row” didn’t begin to describe it. The number of prisoners housed here needed much more than a single row.
We walked down a wide hallway that looked up to a ceiling forty feet above, where fluorescent lights, some flickering, cast a blue-white glow over the pale green cinder-block walls. Solid metal doors with slots in them just big enough for a food tray spanned the three stories of cells above us. If the cells weren’t full, somebody was planning for a future boom in the prison industry.
And yet it was quieter than General Population. Here the prisoners didn’t need to do subhuman things like make shit bombs out of their own feces and lob them at the guards. No, this was where the worst were housed, men who no longer had to prove how bad they were in order to survive. The metal doors that kept these men contained didn’t ease my feeling that I was breathing in evil, that I was being coated with it. This might not be the lowest level of hell, because I’d already been there and I knew what it looked like. But this was easily the vestibule.
“How is Marcus Creighton getting on?” I asked Wally, to provide a sound other than that of his slightly out-turned feet in rubber-soled shoes squeaking like a mallard on the glossy linoleum.
“I’ve liked him,” Wally said. “He’s educated. Refined. And you know, who hasn’t thought of buying that ticket to Bali, wiping the slate clean, and flying off the next day?”
I felt myself controlling my eyeballs so they wouldn’t roll.
A few more steps and then, “Is there extradition from Bali?” Wally asked no one in particular without turning around.
No, I thought.
“Sure there is,” Laura said.
Wally thought about that some. “Mr. Creighton had a bad attack today,” Wally said.
“I noticed Alison Samuels was here. She has a dog.” Laura turned to me. “Sometimes the inhaler works and sometimes it doesn’t.” And back to Wally. “How bad was it?”
“We had to take him to the clinic and get him a shot of epinephrine. You’re right, it was when that Samuels woman came to visit. God awmighty, I don’t know what zone that woman lives in, but he was still wheezing like he couldn’t get the air out of his lungs in order to take the next breath, and she just sat there asking him questions like he could answer if he really wanted to. Like maybe she thought he was pretending to be sick. She even stayed till after he came back from the clinic.”
We got to the interviewing room, where Creighton was seated at the far end of a rectangular table. His wrists were cuffed. His hair was wet, which meant this was shower day. Was that the last time he would shower before his death? He wore an orange T-shirt over blue pants. Regular prisoners wore blue shirts. At this prison it was the orange T-shirt that said you were a death row prisoner.
“Hey, Marcus.”
“Wally,” Marcus wheezed. He sounded worse than Dad had the night before.
“You’re a popular guy today,” Wally said.
“Guesso,” Creighton said. He forced his breath out with some difficulty, drew in another with the same effort, and asked, “Howz daught’s gradu … wheez?”
“She was pretty hungover but managed to make it up to the stage. I’m about done with this crap.”
I do not think that the fact that Wally was expressing his familial dissatisfaction to someone who had been convicted of wiping out his own was lost on anyone but, apparently, Wally.
Marcus let the subject drop. Laboring over another breath in preparation for the next few words, he said more clearly than before, “Please. Bring inhaler? And that thing?”
“Are you allowed to use it again so soon after the shot?”
Marcus gave Wally a thin smile, and we all acknowledged the absurdity of keeping a man safe on death row, and Wally left us alone.
Laura sat down on the side of the table, and I sat at the other end to have the best vantage point to see them at the same time. Creighton nodded politely at me, seemed curious, but then focused on Laura. That left me the freedom to observe him.
Pale as sandstone, either from lack of sunlight or his asthma attack, he reminded me of a splendid ruin, its surface crumbled by time and the winds of fortune, but showing all its former glory through the wreckage. He still had all of his hair, thick and wavy but totally gray, like mine. Besides the shower, he had shaved, in preparation for either us or another guest. His prison attire looked clean and hardly wrinkled. That’s about all he had to work with, but he was one of those men whose handsomeness survived no matter what, so you could understand how at least two women had once been in love with him. He seemed to be aware of all this, and ran his fingers through his hair because that was the only part of him he could do anything about. With every gesture his hands moved in tandem because of the wrist cuffs.
“I’m due for a haircut,” he said, his breathing beginning to normalize. “Did you get a chance to bring that book?”
“I’m sorry, I forgot it in the car. Distracted,” Laura said, her head tilting to the side and her voice sounding softer than I’d ever heard it before. “I could—”
“Never mind, next time,” he said, shaking his head.
Laura’s hand almost went to her throat but then passed over the birthmark on her face instead. This may have been her most honest expression of the confidence she had in Creighton’s case. If the man realized the irony in what he said, that there might not be time to read another book, he ignored it.
“I still have a ways to go with…” he said, trailing off. Laura would know which book he meant because she had brought it to him. They could speak in the half sentences of intimates. Creighton took off his wire-rimmed prison glasses and pinched his shirt around them to rub them clean. The cuffs made this awkward, but he managed.
I asked, “Do you like to read?”
He seemed pleased to talk about anything but his case, and said, “I didn’t use to, but I find it makes the time bearable.”
“What do you like to read?” I asked.
“Long books.”
“Alison Samuels was here,” Laura said, forcing him toward business.
“That’s right,” he said, wheezing less with each breath, and better able to speak as long as he breathed after every few words. “I’m in demand. Like that show. Wally told me about. The Bachelor. It’s still on, right?” Trying to engage Laura on a topic that would make him appear he had much more time than five days.
For the first time I noticed he had a white five-by-seven card before him on the table. In an absentminded way the fingers of his right hand curled and straightened so that they moved the card up and down, up and down.
Laura’s voice took back its usual edge. “Why do you see Alison Samuels, Marcus? Even if she didn’t upset you so much, she’s got a dog. They should never let people in to see you if they have pets. Just refuse to see her.” Laura turned to me and said, “Marcus reacts to animals the way some people react to peanuts. It’s a real problem for him.”
Thinking of Al and Peg at home, and whether I might have some Pug residue on me the way killers have gunshot residue on them, I drew back in my chair.
“Is she still telling you she’s looking for your children?” Laura asked.
Creighton looked like he was forming his lips to repeat That’s right, and then, maybe thinking too much repetition might make him sound crazy, he nodded and smiled to reassure us that he was not. “She’s working very hard,” he said. He moved the card up and down, up and down, in front of him.
“Marcus,” Laura said, “is that another picture you’ve got there?”
For a second he looked like a child caught passing a note in school. His eyes drifted to the side and his hand went flat over the card, though he couldn’t possibly hide it. I looked at the hands at rest. Though the knuckles were somewhat swollen with stress arthritis, the hands were still that combination of elegance and masculinity. I thought of Carlo and wished I could be away from here, sitting on our TV room sofa with his hand resting lightly on my leg, listening to him talk about a book I didn’t understand.
Laura’s own fingers crept forward over the table toward the card. “Could I see it?”
He shook his head no, and besides the refusal it communicated, the shake seemed to bring him back from the person most of us succeed in hiding most of the time. “I’d really rather not, Laura,” he said. He slapped his hand on the card like it would win the jackpot and smiled. “You tend to be a little discouraging.”
“Marcus, that’s just cruel.” Laura looked at me again. “Samuels brings him photographs of exploited children who might be his. She thinks if he didn’t kill them, he got rid of them somehow, sold them or something. You know you can say you don’t want to see someone,” Laura said, turning back to him. “Why talk to someone who doesn’t have your interest at heart?”
“My interest,” he said. “Sometimes I think she’s the only person who cares. She knows my children are alive. She’s looking for them. I have reason to believe she’ll look for them even after I’m dead.” His hand pulled the photograph closer to him. An expression, sad and disappointed, slid down his face. “You don’t even think they’re alive.”
“Marcus. We’ve gone over this. I don’t have any opinion at all about your children. My job is to find the evidence that will get you a new trial.”
He rubbed his mouth with his hand and was contrite. “I’m sorry, Laura. Of course you are, and you’re doing everything you can for me. I’m so sorry.”
Putting aside talk of the children’s survival, a talk they must have had before, Laura said, “I’m here today because I wanted to reassure you face-to-face that we, Will and I, we haven’t given up. I’ve got good news. The same cell phone company still owns the service you used in 1999.”
He seemed to read the look on her face and responded with cautious excitement. “Is that good? You look like this is good news. I could use some.”
Laura explained the significance of the phone records and how I was there to help get the hair dryers. “This is Brigid Quinn, and she’s going to help us. She has some connections.”
Now he really saw me, and the man who had mastered calculus put two and two together. Ran his fingers through his hair again. “I usually don’t look this hopeless,” he said to me, trying for a small laugh and almost getting there. “It’s the asthma attack. And the somewhat disappointing news about my upcoming execution. I promise you, most of the time I look like someone worth saving.”
“It’s okay. I’ve seen worse,” I said, trying to observe him with all I had. I’ve been caught by liars when I wasn’t expecting it, but this was one of those times when I thought a person was lying and I was just looking for proof. It would make this part of my trip so easy.
“Do you think you can help?” Creighton asked, and to disguise any real hope that might have crept into his question, he added a flippant “I’d really prefer not to die.”
A voice came over the loudspeaker: “Counting time. Counting time.” Wally interrupted us just then by poking his head in the door. We all looked up. “Just counting,” he said.
“Here,” Creighton said, and Wally seemed to enjoy the little joke that Creighton delivered without humor. Then Wally’s face lit up with a remembered thing, and he took an inhaler out of his pocket, as well as something that looked like a small book. Wally left both within Creighton’s reach. When Wally left, Creighton took a hit off the inhaler.
He was silent after the “here.” No matter how much you learn, when you spend twenty-three hours a day in a cell, and the twenty-fourth standing in line for the phone to talk to your attorney, counting time, and using the inhaler, having conversations with more than one person may overwhelm. Creighton looked momentarily fatigued, and let his head drop slightly like that of a mechanical toy whose crank had run out. Then he lifted it for another go.
He was like this the whole time we were there, in and out of himself, fighting to appear to be a man who was not on death row, and sometimes succeeding. I pictured those concentration camp prisoners who ran around the compound trying to show that they were healthy enough to be worth keeping alive. There was something noble, something courageous in this, and I admired him in the same way Laura did. Then I gave myself a mental shake, because sympathy wasn’t my reason for being here.
Marcus must have been thinking while I was, because he spoke in a continuation of his last remark. “It’s not the dying so much as the waiting for it. Did Wally tell you they’re going to move me into another cell this afternoon? It’s called a death watch cell. They watch me to make sure I don’t kill myself before they do.”
Laura’s energy seemed to swell then, to give hers to him as if they were two cells of the same organism and the conveyance of her life force to his was actually possible. I knew this Laura well, a woman who could not countenance failure of any kind. She leaned toward him until their heads were closer than I would have liked, and said, “Marcus, the reason I drove up here today is to show you how convinced I am that this isn’t hopeless. You just keep hanging on, because there are a number of us working on your behalf. I swear I won’t let anything happen to you. Do you hear me? I swear this, Marcus.”
Creighton laughed, this time more of an echo of a sound that came from the back of his throat as from the back of a cave. Yet he seemed to be the calm one, making cocktail-party small talk, while Laura became more agitated as he went on. “One of the things I’ve learned is that the gazelle doesn’t spend its life in fear of the lion. The fear just kicks in when the chase starts. But humans, humans live in terror of what’s going to happen.”
“Marcus,” Laura said.
“Dogs are the same way,” he said. Like a teacher, he lifted his index finger to punctuate the most important points of his lecture. “They get all anxious and trembly when a storm comes, but they don’t worry about the storm that’s coming tomorrow.”
“Marcus,” Laura said.
“We’ve never had a dog. The kids have always wanted a dog, but I’ve got this asthma.”
“Marcus,” Laura said.
Creighton got that look a person gets when someone they’re talking to isn’t understanding, and they want to be understood more than anything. He started working his jaw side to side. He opened the little book to show that it was actually a photo album, and as he paged through it, lingered here and there to touch one of the photos, I saw another man emerge, one who forgot to pretend that a meeting on death row was not uncommon, who forgot we were there for a different reason, even forgot where and when he was.
“See, this is the one they want. It’s a standard poodle. It’s not the actual dog, it’s a picture of one, see? Sara put it in this album along with the other pictures when she gave it to me for Father’s Day. They say I should at least go to a breeder and just test it to see if it’s true that poodles don’t have fur, they have hair like us.”
When he stopped talking, his jaw started up again, that little grinding motion that showed how hard he was fighting for control. He had let his hand come to rest on the page facing the one with the poodle. “Here, look—”
“Marcus, we can’t—”
Giving up on Laura, Creighton asked if I’d mind if he sat closer to me. When I said that was okay, he got up from his chair and sat down in the one at my end of the table.
“See, here’s one of me with Devon,” he said. “He likes model cars, and when I sat down to help him, I found out I did, too. It’s as if he inherited a trait I didn’t know I had. This is Sara, see, she’s draped around my neck like a cat. She always does that. She wants to be sure she gets her share of my attention.” He flipped two more pages. “This is from our trip to the Grand Canyon. See Kirsten standing there with her foot out and that sullen look kids put on? And see, she doesn’t know I’m goofing off behind her, pretending like I’m going to fall over the edge. But she’s a good kid, a responsible kid. Very reliable.”
“Marcus,” Laura said.
“Laura?” Creighton said, and looked fondly over at her as if he had just arrived in the room and was surprised and pleased to see her.
“Mr. Creighton,” I said, “do you want me to help you? Do you want to stay alive? Because an honest answer to that question will determine what happens next.”
Creighton focused on me. He shook his head the same way he had before, as if he was shaking the crazy out of it, to get a grip on being normal enough to be allowed to live. He took off his glasses again and pinched them between the folds of his shirt to clean them, something a sane person does. “Yes. Yes. Yes,” he said. “But what can I tell you? What can I say? I didn’t do it? Would you believe me?” He put his glasses back on and raised his cuffed hands off the table in some gesture of supplication with a smile at the folly of it all. “Give me the magic words that will convince you.”
“It’s not us you need to convince. Or at least not Laura. Can I ask you some questions?”
“Anything,” he said. “And I’ll answer them honestly because that’s all I’ve got.”
“You obviously loved your children. Did you love your wife?”
Creighton didn’t seem surprised. “I hated her. She was a drunk. She kept threatening to divorce me, but I didn’t want to share custody of the kids. Didn’t want to be one of those dads. And I didn’t want them to have to live alone with her. She blamed the drinking on me, but I knew it wouldn’t stop if I was out of the picture.” He laced his fingers and leaned across the table in my direction. “Do you want more honesty than that? Well, I imagined her dying in much the way that she actually did. When I found her body, there was a moment when I had the thought This is luck. Then the children were missing and I thought I was being punished for being glad she died.”
“Why didn’t you try to get better defense?”
“I thought I could convince the detective on the case that they shouldn’t be wasting their time on me. They should have been looking for the kids. They did an Amber Alert immediately but called it off when Shayna blew my alibi. Couldn’t they see how crazy I was? I was going nuts and no one was doing anything. I begged them. I even told them maybe Kathleen’s death really was an accident, and the crime was that the kids had been abducted on their way to the community center. Nobody listened. Have you any children?”
“No,” I said.
“Maybe you can’t understand the horror of that time, knowing that with each minute my children could be closer to death, and the very people sworn to protect them were doing nothing. Nothing. Then I was in the system, I’d been assigned a public defender, and that was that.” Creighton looked as if the agony was now, that moment when he tried to make someone believe him and no one did. His breathing got labored again, and he took another hit off the inhaler.
“You don’t have to keep talking if it’s hard,” Laura said.
Creighton put up a hand to show he was okay.
I thought it would help to change the subject for now. “What about Shayna Murry?”
Even so long after last seeing her—and that was when she was on the stand betraying him—his eyes still softened. “I was in love with her. And I’m certain she loved me, too. She was coached. I’ve spent all these years wondering why she lied about my being there that night.” He smiled at me, his breathing controlled. “How am I doing so far? Are the words magical enough?” He waggled his fingers in a sleight-of-hand way, making his shackles jingle.
“So far, you’re convincing,” I said. “Why do you think your children are alive?”
He took as deep a breath as he was able. “I didn’t in the early years. I stopped hoping. I told myself they were probably dead, and I spent some years mourning. Then Ms. Samuels suggested they weren’t. She said anything could have happened. That they could have been shipped to Thailand. Especially the twins, she said. Exotic sex.” He pressed his midsection against the edge of the table as if it could press out the pain. “I think at first she wanted to hurt me by saying this, to trick me into saying I’d buried them somewhere. But while it was awful, it was hopeful, too. I wanted to live again. Find them. If I seem a little … off … it’s because there’s not much else to do here, besides the reading, than think. Sometimes the thoughts make me crazy, but I can’t stop them.”
“Mr. Creighton,” I said, “what will you do if Laura and Will get you a stay of execution? What will you do if you’re exonerated? If you’re let out of prison after all this time?”
“Find my children,” he said, without having to stop and think. “Help Alison Samuels find my children.” He clutched his hands on top of the table and gazed at me in all sanity, as if his words were all there was between him and despair.
Laura reached across the table to touch the hands, then, glancing at me, drew back.
“We need to go, Marcus,” Laura said. “We have a lot of work to do for you.”
Whether or not he was paying attention, she explained how the paperwork was all done in anticipation of getting the two pieces of evidence. How Will Hench would use what he had to get a stay of execution within the next five days, then file an appeal based on perjury and flawed forensics with the next higher court. She would continue to be the investigator for him. She promised again that he wasn’t going to die in five days. And promised again.
Creighton, for one, at least pretended his confidence in Laura’s assurances, and didn’t ask any more questions about the case. Instead, he pushed the photograph album in her direction, but kept his fingers on it as if he couldn’t decide whether to really give it up. “Would you take care of this?” he asked. “I wouldn’t want it to get lost. In case.”
Hesitating a bit more, he finally decided to pull his hand back, and stared at it as Laura sighed, put the album into her briefcase, got up from the table, and announced her intention of leaving into the intercom. She tried to say good-bye, but professional though she was, her voice broke on the “bye,” swinging it up to a higher pitch.
And my reaction as I sat there watching him? On death row for murdering his family. No matter what kinds of evidence to the contrary Laura and Will said they had, I had arrived at this meeting convinced of his guilt. I was leaving with a mixture of instinct that he didn’t do it and a fervent hope that he did.
That feeling of hope? The reason I hoped he was guilty was because only that, and nothing less, would justify what society had done to this man. The alternative was unthinkable to me: an innocent man, waiting for death, while tortured by the obsession that his children were out there somewhere. And if they were still alive, no one but him caring that they were being hurt.