Blood of Angels (9 page)

“Tell us what you heard, Paul,” Carl says. “It'll be good instruction for young Stillman.”

Paul nods. “I was doing some fieldwork down there on a thing. There was a crowd of Nationites standing around, talking shit like they do. And I hear Thomas's name.”

“Glad to be on their minds,” I say, taking a bite of sandwich.

“Well, they seem to feel the two of you fucked up.”

“We did,” I say, washing the bite down with a sip of Paulaner. “Royally.”

Paul smiles. “You might not want to have your car break down in that area for a while,” he says.

Stillman looks like he's about to shit a kitten. “So what's the story on these guys?” he asks. “What are they gonna do, slash our tires or something?”

Carl gets one of his sage looks. “You know what the problem is with criminal law, Stillman?”

“No.”

“You're always dealing with criminals.”

Paul and I laugh, and Stillman shuts his mouth, deciding he's had enough. I can see his mind working, though. I'll talk him down later, but for now, it's more important to let him suffer a little.

While Paul's talking, Rita West comes in with a couple of lawyers from the public defender's office. Rita looks good, as usual—for not being that tall, she's got great legs—but the two guys with her have on mediocre shirts, no ties, and slacks from another decade.

Stillman watches them take seats on the other side of the club, about forty feet away. “Public defenders make the same money prosecutors do, right?” he asks.

“To the penny,” I say.

“Then why do they dress like that?”

Carl smiles. “Long tradition, Stillman. They say it's to relate to their clients, but it's actually just that they have no style.”

“No shit,” Stillman says, shaking his head. “They look like they work at Sears.”

“The one on the right's no problem,” I say. “He's a UT grad, just marking time. The good-looking kid with the brown hair is smart. Dukie named Kurt Mayer. You have to watch him.”

Stillman glances over. “That guy went to Duke? What's he doing at the PD's office?”

“Defending democracy against the pernicious power of the state,” Carl says, smiling. “Or, as Thomas prefers to put it, ‘Learning the ropes until he goes private and gets rich.'”

I grin and say nothing. It's enough to watch Carl in his element: drinking excellent beer and holding forth on the law and lawyers.

“And I believe you've already met Ms. West,” Carl says pointedly. He pulls out a cigar and begins unwrapping it. “Buy them a round, Stillman,” he says, without looking at him.

Stillman stares. “Them? Why, for God's sake?”

“Because it's civilized,” he says, getting out his lighter. “You had your ass kicked in that bail hearing, and you're letting them know it's not personal.”

Stillman looks dubious. “Maybe if the cute one blew me,” he says.

“I'm pretty sure Mr. Mayer is heterosexual,” Carl says, lighting the cigar.

I burst out laughing, and Stillman's face turns red. “All right, damn it,” he says. “But not this five-dollar-a-glass stuff.” He motions the waitress over and sends over three domestics in bottles, which are going for two-fifty.

The drinks go to the other table, and Rita nods a thanks and waves.

“Nicely done, Stillman,” Carl says. “You're doing fine.”

So far, Stillman has had to pay for four lunches, bought drinks for a table of public defenders, and had the shit scared out of him.

I smile and finish my beer. After the last couple of days, I almost feel human.

Paul brings me down to Earth. “I'll tell you who needs to stay on his toes,” he says. “That Sudanese kid. The Nationites just might finish your job for you.”

HOVERING OVER OUR HEADS
like the angel of death is the name Kwame Jamal Hale, née Jerome Hale. His lawyer, Georgetown law professor Philip Buchanan, has arranged for us to drive to Brushy Mountain State Prison and interview his client. Kwame Jamal has it in his mind to confess to a crime we sincerely hope he did not commit. And since another man has already been executed for it, we had better be right. If we aren't, it's not hard to imagine a conflagration of epic proportions: the Nation calling for Bol's blood; the Africans defending themselves in whatever tribal way they brought back from their long-running civil war in Sudan; Fiona Towns and her peaceniks, caught in the middle.

The next morning, Tuesday, Carl, Rayburn, and I meet at Shoney's for the early-morning drive out to Brushy Mountain. We pile into Rayburn's Ford Crown Vic and pull out past the kitschy tourist traps selling country music memorabilia, heading east on I-40. We're nervous, except for Carl, who just looks annoyed. Kwame Jamal is taking a lot of the shine off Carl's last seventy-two hours as an employee of the state of Tennessee. Rayburn, who is holding a cup of black coffee from a fast-food joint in his left hand, doesn't look like he slept much. He probably spent most of the last few hours praying that Hale is certifiably insane.

Brushy Mountain is the prison James Earl Ray tried to escape from, and the one Hannibal Lechter tried to get sent to. Neither man got his wish, although Ray managed to spend four days on the run. Brushy prison rises, castlelike, from within the hollow of a mountain's hand, surrounded on three sides by sheer, white granite walls eighty feet high. Walking with a guard through Brushy at night—the steam curling up around the razor wire fence, the glare of spotlights illuminating the worn walkways, the clanking of keys at the guard's hip—is like stepping back in time. It's going to be torn down in a few years, and there are good economic reasons for that, I suppose. When it goes, it will take an era with it.

We ride in silence for a while, heading toward the mountains of east Tennessee. The poor South emerges, comfortable in its manufactured housing, wood-burning stoves, and junked cars parked up on blocks in yards.

Carl harrumphs from the backseat. I turn around, and he looks like he's smelled bad fish. “I bet this guy Buchanan is nothing special,” he says. “He's probably just your ordinary, everyday-variety, bleeding-heart. The kind of guy who can't stand the thought of a mass murderer feeling a pinprick when the needle breaks the skin.”

“
Prick
's the word,” Rayburn says, and he's off, thirty solid minutes of pure Republican propaganda on everything from legalizing drugs to teenage pregnancy to what the hell has happened to the school system. Being silent so long has topped up his fuel, and we glide on Rayburn's invective until we turn onto State Road 61.

“Maybe we should ask for a continuance on the Bol case,” Carl says. “At least until we see where we are on this thing.”

Rayburn looks stricken. “We are going to conduct business absolutely as usual,” he says. “Nobody is even going to
flinch
around our office.”

“Sure, boss,” I say, but I can't help thinking that Moses Bol may end up the luckiest defendant in the history of the Tennessee court system. It's going to be pretty damn hard to convince a jury to send Bol to death if it turns out we fucked up the last time.

The car crests a final hill, and Brushy looms in the near distance. The road gently descends into the excavated pit that envelopes the main buildings, and Rayburn stops at the guardhouse. We're issued badges and drive slowly down the gravel road, passing outbuildings and the occasional trustee in his state blues. We park in front of the castle and walk up to the prison entrance, an electronically controlled gate topped with nasty-looking barbed wire. Our pockets are emptied, our briefcases searched. A guard stamps our hands with a number in invisible ink; the number shows only under black light and is our ticket out. It changes every day, so the inmates can't predict what it is. A voice calls out, “Free-world personnel coming inside.” The door before us opens, and we walk past the blocks of medium-security cells. A few inmates are working in the main areas, scrubbing floors and walls. The inmates say hello with exaggerated politeness, anxious for conversation and brownie points. Hale waits in high security, a prison-within-a-prison where the worst-behaved prisoners are held.

We make our way through the building to the courtyard that leads to high security. We hear, “Free-world personnel coming across the yard,” and we take the short walk to the concrete building where Hale is housed. Inside high security we're greeted by John Palecek, Brushy's warden. Palecek is the new face of criminal justice, which means he's an administrator who's comfortable with things like keeping the bill for cleaning supplies under control. He's also the man who physically gave the order to execute Wilson Owens. “So,” he says, summing up how fucked we all are. He points to the shift manager's room. “Buchanan's in there.”

“Is there anything to this?” Rayburn asks. “I mean, this guy Hale. He's a fruitcake, right?”

“He's got religion, David,” Palacek says. “If he doesn't screw up pretty soon, I'm going to have to send him back to the general prison population.”

A man walks out of the shift manager's room. He's smiling, which makes him a population of one in Brushy Mountain prison.
Buchanan,
I think. Buchanan dresses hip for a university type, with a pair of expensive-looking black pants, an open-collared shirt, and what look like—no shit—boat shoes. “Jesus,” he says, “I knew I was going to the South, but nobody told me it'd be a million degrees out there.” He sticks out his hand, and there's a nice, awkward moment before anybody takes it.

Rayburn, ever the politician, goes first, but he doesn't say “good to meet you” because it isn't good to meet Professor Buchanan. Maybe one day there will be five or ten people who are proved to have been wrongly executed, but there's only going to be one first time, and the people behind that will be the names who get remembered. They will be the Fuckups Royale, the ones who will be publicly skewered, left to wrestle with their consciences the rest of their lives.

“Are we clear on the ground rules here?” Buchanan asks. He pulls out the original of the paperwork Stillman showed us in the office. “Kwame Jamal doesn't come in the room until we get some signatures.”

“We came to hear what the man says,” Rayburn mutters. He signs the papers, holding the pen like it's poison.

We file into the shift manager's office, which is square, about fifteen by fifteen. A metal desk has been put in the middle of the room, the parties situated around it. Two video cameras sit on stands, one for each side of the conversation. One chair remains empty for Hale.

Palecek nods to the guards, and a minute later we hear the massive cell-block door grind open. A few seconds later Hale enters, flanked on each arm by a burly guard. Hale wears the regulation white T-shirt and sweatpants of high security, with a pale green kufi skullcap. His arms are massive, the result of years of weight training. His left bicep is covered in an ornate tattoo, now stretched beyond recognition. He's growing a ragged and unkempt beard. He looks as evil and dangerous as any inmate in Brushy. He does not, however, look insane.

Hale sits beside Buchanan with a detached expression, as if this meeting is something he has to do, and when it's over, he's ready to go back to whatever it was he would have been doing. “
As salaam alaikum,
” he says, and it's clear he's speaking only to me.

Buchanan nods and repeats the phrase, with the goofy, eager look of a man who wants to be down with the brothers, especially when he's on the safe side of the bars. “Kwame Jamal asked for this meeting because he wants to set the record straight,” he says. “He does this of his own free will.”

Hale watches his lawyer with vaguely bored eyes. He knows that no matter what happens in this room, he isn't going to feel the free sun on his body again in his lifetime.

“Why are we here, Mr. Hale?” I ask.

“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says he who blame another for his crime get the punishment multiplied to him tenfold. May Allah accept my good deeds.”

“Did you blame someone for a crime you committed, Mr. Hale?” I ask.

“I killed that man at the Sunshine Grocery Store,” he says. “The woman, too.”

“Wilson Owens has already been tried and convicted of that crime, Mr. Hale.”

“May Allah forgive me.”

“Did you know Wilson Owens, Mr. Hale?”

He nods. “We was incarcerated together.”

“Were you friends?”

Hale shakes his head. “Owens was a
shaiton.
A devil.”

“Because?”

Hale shrugs. “He wanted what was not his.”

“And what was that?”

Hale pauses a moment, drawn back in a memory. “She worked in food services. Real sweet face, like an angel. I went through the line, and she give me my first smile in a year.”

Jesus, this is about a woman.
“Who was this?”

“Damita D'Angelis. I just called her Angel. We was real.”

“You developed a relationship?”

Hale nods. “I bought my way onto food services, and it was real good. I built my time, no problem.”

“The guards tolerated this relationship?”

“You know how it is,” Hale says, and I do.

“How long did your relationship last?”

Hale's answer is the mathematics of a man whose world is building time. “Four months, eleven days,” he says. “Until Owens filed incompatibility on me.”

Filing incompatibility is the neutron bomb of prison life; a prisoner claims another will do him harm, and the institution is obligated by law to move one of them to another location. If they don't get moved and the violence goes down, the state can be sued for wrongful death. Like everything else in prison life, the inmates have learned how to use the filing of incompatibility for their own purposes.

“So who was moved?” I ask.

“Me.”

“Once you were gone, did Mr. Owens start a relationship with Ms. D'Angelis?”

Hale's face proves that even the most godforsaken bastard on Earth feels his own loss, in spite of the fact he has exacted ten times as much misery on other people. “Yeah,” he says, after a moment. “So we had business. I got out in October, Owens the month after.”

“What did you do to him, Mr. Hale?”

He smiles. “I set his ass up. Owens hung out around Green's pawn, over near where he lived. Only took me a couple hours to get four butts. Once I had that, it was pretty much over. He's in the system, know what I'm sayin'? The DNA gonna nail his ass; case closed.”

“So you stood outside the grocery store smoking, but dropping Owen's cigarette butts instead of your own.”

“That's it.”

“It seems to me this is a lot of trouble, Mr. Hale. Why not just confront him? Take him out?”

Hale smiles. “Because a niggah's got to have style.”

“Style?”

“I got pride in my work. Everything I do, it got that mark of quality. Style.”

“So now you're confessing,” I say. “You don't want Allah to punish you for your crimes.”

He nods. “I got to stand before Allah.”

At this point, I let myself lose it a little, intentionally opening up to a slow, controlled burn. “So your idea of style is walking into a grocery store, pulling a sawed-off shotgun out of your coat, and blowing holes into Steven Davidson and Lucinda Williams? Is that what you're going to tell Allah, Kwame? That you killed those two people because it had more
style
?”

Hale's face flushes. “I don't need no lecture on the Koran from no white man.”

“And I don't need a lecture about morality from a self-confessed murderer.”

Hale moves up off his chair—getting him upset is child's play, really, considering his malevolent disposition—and the guards move to squash him back down into it. Hale is immensely strong, and for a moment, the three of them are locked in midair, Hale in a half squat, a motion he's probably done in the weight room carrying nearly the same weight he has on him now. Hale's fists are close together from the plastic cuffs, and he brings them down hard on the table, gaining leverage. Buchanan backs away like a scared cat, and the guard on Hale's left reaches for his nightstick. I do not move. What I want to do is to make Hale crack a little bit. I want to upset his game, play into his emotional makeup. I want him to end up saying more than he planned, and about two more incendiary comments ought to do it. Hale shrugs the guards' hands off his shoulders and sits back down, but he's still as tense as a spring.

I know this kind of baiting is going to make me look bad on the videotape, but I don't care, because compared to how bad I'm going to look if it turns out Hale is telling the truth, it hardly matters. “You're a liar, Kwame,” I say, leaning forward until our faces are only about eighteen inches apart. “You've got a fifth-grade education, and you want to start talking shit about dropping DNA? You've been incarcerated six times, and you're in now because you were too stupid to wipe your fingerprints off a car you stole when committing a robbery. Oh yeah, you've got style, pal. You've got the style of a goddamn moron.”

Hale loses it, and it's beautiful. He actually reaches for me, and the guards drop on him like a ton of bricks. Buchanan elevates once again out of his chair and away from the commotion, then starts screaming about prisoner abuse and the violation of his client's rights. I ignore him because he is now irrelevant. Kwame Jamal Hale is all that matters. The guards wrestle Hale back down into his chair, and he gives me a look that says if we were alone, he would end me. When the guards get him back under control, they chain his arms to his chair. Hale glowers at me, radiating hate.