The Good Daughter

Sam could not keep talking in circles, though she knew that Rusty could gladly spin around all night. She pulled her notes from her purse. “I’ve got some other things you should follow up on. Kelly doesn’t seem to know the victims. I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse.” Sam knew it made things worse from her perspective. She had never become indifferent to the randomness of violence. “You’re going to want to nail down the sequence and number of bullets fired. There seems to be some confusion.”

  Rusty talked through the list. “Pregnancy: question mark. Paternity: big question mark. Video: we got one, thanks to you-know-who, but we’ll see if that ol’ snake Mr. Coin follows the judge’s order.” He thumped the paper with his finger. “Yes, why indeed was Kelly at the middle school? Victims random.” He looked at Sam. “You’re sure she didn’t know them?”

  Sam shook her head. “I asked and she said no, but it’s worth a follow-up.”

  “Follow-ups are my favorite things.” He looked at the last line on the list. “Judith Pinkman. I saw her on the news earlier. Quite the conversion with this ‘turn the other cheek’ line.” He folded the list back in two and put it in his pocket. “When Zachariah Culpepper was on trial, she wanted to flip the switch herself. This was back when they still electrocuted people. Remember everybody who committed a crime before May of 2000 was grandfathered in.”

  Sam had read about the methods of execution during law school. She had found the process barbaric until she imagined Zachariah Culpepper pissing himself the same way Charlie had as he awaited the first delivery of 1,800 volts.

  Rusty said, “She wanted Gamma’s murderer to be executed and she wants her husband’s murderer to be spared.”

  Sam shrugged. “People mellow when they get older. Some people.”

  “I will take that as a compliment,” Rusty said. “As to Judith Pinkman, I would say: ‘It is better to be sometimes right than at all times wrong.’”

  Sam decided now was as good a time as any to drop Charlie’s problem back into Rusty’s lap. “Kelly told me that Mason Huckabee put the murder weapon down the back of his pants. I’m assuming he walked it out of the building. You need to figure out why he took such a huge risk.”

  Rusty did not respond. He smoked his cigarette. He stared out into the parking lot.

  “Dad,” Sam said. “He took the murder weapon from the scene. He’s either involved somehow or he’s an idiot.”

  “I told you stupid breaks your heart.”

  “You came to that conclusion pretty quickly.”

  “Did I?”

  Sam was not going to volley back his riddles. Rusty obviously knew something that he was not sharing. “You’ll have to turn Mason in for the gun. Other than Judith Pinkman, he’s probably Coin’s strongest witness.”

  “I’ll find another way.”

  Sam shook her head. “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll find another way to neutralize Mason Huckabee. No need to put a man in jail for making a stupid mistake.”

  “We’d have to let half of them out if that was the standard.” Sam rubbed her eyes. She was too drained for this conversation. “Is this guilt on your part? Some sort of penance? I don’t know if giving Mason a pass makes you a hypocrite or soft-hearted, because you’re clearly trying to protect Charlie at the expense of your client.”

  “Probably both,” Rusty admitted. “Samantha, I will tell you something very important: there is value in forgiveness.”

  Sam thought about the letters in her purse. She was not sure she wanted to know why her mother’s murderer, the man who had tried to rape her sister, who had stood by while Sam was shot in the head, was reaching out to Rusty. In truth, Sam was afraid that her father had forgiven him, and that she could never forgive Rusty for having given Zachariah Culpepper’s conscience a reprieve.

  Rusty asked, “Have you ever been to an execution?”

  “Why on earth would I attend an execution?”

  Rusty stubbed out his cigarette. He slipped it into his pocket. He held out his arm to Sam. “Feel my pulse.” He saw her expression. “Humor your old man before you get back on a plane home.”

  Sam pressed her fingers to the inside of his bony wrist. At first, she felt nothing but the thick line of his flexor carpi radialis. She moved her fingers around, then located the steady tap-tap-tap of blood pulsing through his veins.

  She said, “Got it.”

  “When a person is executed,” Rusty began. “You sit in the viewing area, and there’s the family down front and a pastor and a reporter and then on the other side, there’s you, the person who couldn’t stop any of this from happening.” Rusty put his hand over Sam’s. His skin was rough and dry. She realized that this was the first time she had touched her father in almost thirty years.

  He continued, “They pull back the drape, and there he is, this human being, this living, breathing creature. Is he a monster? Perhaps he has done monstrous deeds. But now, he is strapped down in a bed. His arms and legs, his head, are pinned so that he cannot make eye contact with any one person. He’s staring up at the ceiling, where the tiles have been painted with white clouds and a blue sky. Cartoonish in nature, likely done by another inmate. This is the last thing this condemned man will ever see.”

  Rusty pressed her fingers closer against his wrist. His heart rate had accelerated.

  “So what you notice is that his chest is pumping as he tries to control his breath. And that’s when you feel it.” He tapped the top of her fingers. “Dum-dum. Dum-dum. You feel your own blood pumping through your body. You feel your own breath swishing in and out of your lungs.”

  Without thinking, Sam had let her breathing match her father’s.

  “Then they ask him for his last words, and he says something about forgiveness, or hoping his death brings the family peace, or that he is innocent, but his voice is shaking, because he knows this is it. The red phone on the wall will not ring. He will never see his mother again. He will never hold his child. This is it. His death is nigh.”

  Sam pressed together her lips. She could not tell if her own heartbeat was matching the cadence of Rusty’s or if she had let herself again get wrapped up in his words.

  He said, “The warden nods the go-ahead. There’s two men in the room. They each press separate buttons to deliver the drug cocktail. This is so no one knows for sure who killed him.” Rusty was silent for a few seconds, as if he was watching the buttons being pressed. “You get a taste in your mouth, like a chemical, like you can taste the thing that’s about to kill him. He tenses, and then slowly, surely, his muscles start to let go until he is completely, utterly without movement. And that’s when you start to feel it, this sensation of tiredness, as if the drug is going into your own veins. And your head starts to nod. You’re almost relieved, because you’ve been so tense the whole time, during the waiting time, and now it’s finally seconds from being over.” Rusty paused again. “Your heart slows. You feel your breaths start to taper off.”

  Sam waited for the rest.

  Rusty said nothing.

  She asked, “And then?”

  “And then it’s over.” He patted her hand. “That’s it. They shut the curtains. You leave the room. You get in your car. You go home. You have a drink. You brush your teeth. You go to bed, and you stare at the ceiling for the rest of your life the same way that condemned man stared at the ceiling tiles over his head.” He held tight to Sam’s hand. “This is what Zachariah Culpepper thinks about every second of his life, and he’ll keep thinking about it every day until he’s wheeled into that room and they open that curtain.”

  Sam pulled away from him. The skin of her hand felt tight, as if she’d been singed. “Lenore told you that we found the letters.”

  “I never was able to keep you girls out of my files.” He gripped the arms of his wheelchair. He looked into the distance. “He’s being punished. I know you wanted him to suffer. He is suffering. There is no need to pursue anything to do with that man. You need to go back to New York and forget ab
out him. Live your life. That’s how you get your revenge.”

  Sam shook her head. She should have seen this coming. She was infuriated with herself for always letting Rusty hide in her blind spot.

  He said, “If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your sister.”

  “I’ve tried to help my sister. She doesn’t want it.”

  Rusty grabbed her arm. “Listen to me, baby. You need to hear this, because it’s important.” He waited until she looked at him. “If you get Charlotte stirred up about Zachariah Culpepper right now, she will never, ever come back from the bad place that she’s in.”

  “What does Zachariah think that you owe him?”

  Rusty let her go. He sat back in his chair. “To borrow from Churchill, it is a riddle wrapped in a canard.”

  “A canard is an unfounded rumor or fable.”

  “Also, a winglike projection on an airplane. Or, in the French, duck.”

  “Rusty,” Sam said. “He mails these letters to you, the same letter with the same message, the second Friday of every month.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You know it’s so,” Sam said. “It’s the same day you always call me.”

  “I am glad to know you look forward to my phone calls.”

  Sam shook her head. They both knew those were not her words. “Dad, why does he send you that same letter? What do you owe him?”

  “I owe him nothing. On my life.” Rusty held up his right hand as if he was swearing on a Bible. “The police know about the letters. It’s just something he does. The miserable fuck has got an awful lot of time on his hands. It’s easy to keep to a regular schedule.”

  “So there’s nothing behind the letters? He’s just an inmate on death row who feels you owe him something?”

  “Men in that position often feel they are owed something.”

  “Please don’t tell me there is value in forgiving him.”

  “There is value in forgetting him,” Rusty clarified. “I have forgotten him so that I can move on with my life. My mind has rendered his existence immaterial; however, I will never forgive him for taking away my soulmate.”

  Sam was tempted to roll her eyes.

  “I loved your mother more than anything else on this earth. Every day with her was the best day of my life, even if we were screaming at each other at the top of our lungs.”

  Sam remembered the screaming if not the adulation. “I’ve never understood what she saw in you.”

  “A man who did not want to wear her underwear.”

  Sam laughed, then felt bad for laughing.

  “Lenny introduced us. Did you know that?” Rusty did not wait for a response. “He dragged me up north to meet this gal he was kind of dating, and the minute I saw her, I thought a God damn boulder had fallen out of the sky and conked me on the head. I simply could not take my eyes off of her. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Legs that went on for miles. Lovely curve of her hip.” He grinned at Sam. “And of course, lest you think your daddy was a total poonhound, there was the enigma of her mind. My Lord, she knew things. Just blew me away with the breadth and depth of her knowledge. I had never in my life met a woman like that. She was like a cat.” He pointed his finger at Sam. “Anyone ever say that about you?”

  “I can’t say that they have.”

  “Dogs are stupid,” Rusty said. “This is a known fact. But a cat—you have to earn a cat’s respect every single day of your life. You lose it and—” He snapped his fingers. “That’s what your mama was to me. She was my cat. She kept my compass pointing true north.”

  “Your metaphors are mixing.”

  “Cats sailed with the Vikings.”

  “To kill rats. Not to navigate the ship,” Sam said. “Mama hated what you did.”

  “She hated the inherent risks in what I did. She hated the hours, without a doubt. But she understood that I needed to do it, and she always respected people who made themselves useful.”

  Sam heard Gamma’s own voice in his words.

  Rusty said, “City of Portland v. Henry Alameda.”

  Sam felt a jolt of shock.

  Her first case.

  Rusty said, “I sat in the back with my teeth shining so bright I could’ve shown a cat how to sail a ship away from the rocky shore.”

  “But, Dad—”

  “You were a natural, my girl. Just a damn fine prosecutor. Totally in charge of the courtroom. Never been more proud.”

  “Why didn’t you—”

  “I just wanted to check on you, see if you’d found your place.” Rusty shook another cigarette out of his pack. “Clinton Cable Corp. v. Stanley Mercantile Limited.” He winked at her, as if it was nothing to recite the first patent complaint she had argued completely on her own. “That’s your place, Samantha. You have found your way to be useful in this world, and you are undoubtedly the best in the game.” He tossed the cigarette into his mouth. “I cannot say that I would’ve chosen that particular direction to point your remarkable brain, but you are truly in your element when you are discussing the tensile strength of a reinforced cable.” He leaned over. He pointed his finger at her chest. “Gamma would have been proud.”

  Sam felt unwelcome tears in her eyes. She tried to conjure the image of the courtroom, to make herself turn around, to see her father sitting in the back row, but the memory would not come. “I never knew you were there.”

  “No, you did not. I wanted to see you. You didn’t want to see me.” He held up his hand to spare her the trouble of making an excuse. “It is a father’s job to love his daughter in the way that she needs to be loved.”

  Instead of joking this time, Sam wiped away tears.

  He said, “There’s a picture of Gamma in my office that I want you to have.”

  Sam was surprised. Rusty had no way of knowing that she had spent part of her day thinking about the photo.

  He said, “The picture is one you haven’t seen before. I’m sorry about that. I always thought I would show it to you girls eventually.”

  “Charlie hasn’t seen it?”

  Rusty shook his head. “She has not.”

  Sam felt a strange lightness in her chest that he was telling her something that Charlie did not know about.

  “Now.” Rusty took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth. “When this photo was taken, Gamma was standing in a field. There was a weather tower in the distance. Not metal like the one at the farmhouse. It was wooden, an old, rickety thing. And your Gamma was looking at it when Lenny pulled out his camera. She was wearing these shorts.” Rusty grinned. “My God, the time I spent with those legs …” He gave a low, disconcerting grumble. “Now, the picture you know about, that was taken the same day. We had a picnic spread out on the grass. I called her name, and she looked back at me with her eyebrow up, because I had said something devastatingly intelligent.”

  Sam smiled despite herself.

  “But there’s a second picture. My private photo. Gamma’s facing the camera, but her head is turned slightly to the side because she’s looking at me, and I am looking at her, and when Lenny and I got back home and we got the roll of film back from the Fotomat, I took one look at it, and I said, ‘That’s the moment when we fell in love.’”

  Sam loved the story too much for it to be true. “Did Gamma agree with you?”

  “My beautiful daughter.” Rusty reached out. He cupped Samantha’s chin in his hand. “I say without any guile that my interpretation of this critical moment was the only time in our lives that your mother and I were in complete agreement.”

  Sam blinked back more tears. “I’d like to see it.”

  “I will put it in the mail as soon as I am able.” Rusty coughed into his hand. “And I will continue calling you, if you don’t mind.”

  Sam nodded. She could not imagine her life in New York without his messages.

  Rusty coughed again, a deep sound rattling in his lungs that did not stop him from trying to light his cigarette.

  She said, “Y
ou know coughing is a sign of congestive heart failure.”

  He coughed some more. “It is also a sign of thirst.”

  Sam took the hint. She left her suitcase beside the bench and walked back into the hospital. The gift shop was by the front door. Sam found a bottle of water in the cooler. She waited in line behind an older woman who was intent on paying her bill with all the loose change from the bottom of her purse.

  Sam drew in a breath and let it go. She could see Rusty outside. He was leaning on his right elbow again. The lit cigarette was held between his fingers.

  The woman in front of Sam was scraping around for pennies. She made small talk with the cashier about her sick friend whom she was visiting upstairs.

  Sam glanced around. The drive back to Atlanta would be another two hours. She should probably find something else to eat since she had been too upset to order anything at the diner. She was looking for a Kind Bar when she spotted a display of mugs in the back of the store. MOTHER OF THE YEAR. BEST FRIEND IN THE WORLD. STEPDAD OF THE YEAR. WORLD’S BEST DAD.

  Sam picked up the BEST DAD mug. She rolled it in her hand.

  She stood on her tiptoes so that she could see Rusty.

  He was still leaning in his chair. Smoke curled up around his head. She put the mug back and chose the STEPDAD one because Rusty would think it was funny.

  The penny counter was gone from the checkout. Sam found her credit card in her purse. She waited for the chip reader to process the charge.

  The cashier said, “Visiting your stepdad?”

  Sam nodded, because no normal person would find humor in the explanation.

  “I hope he’s better soon.” The cashier ripped off the receipt and handed it to Sam.

  She walked back through the lobby. The hospital doors slid open. Rusty was still by the bench. Sam held up the mug. “Look what I got.”

  Rusty did not turn to look.

  Sam asked, “Dad?”

  Rusty wasn’t just leaning in his chair. He was listing to the side. His hand had dropped down. His lit cigarette had fallen to the ground.

  Sam stepped closer. She looked into her father’s face.

  Rusty’s lips were parted. His eyes stared blankly into the bright lights of the parking lot. His skin looked waxy, almost white.