Ring of Truth

  “What about the other death-penalty projects in the country?”

  “They’ve got their own backlog of cases.”

  “So it’s over for Stevie?”

  “Notwithstanding a miracle, yes.”

  “Please forgive me for asking an infuriating question, Tammi, but how do you feel about that?”

  She doesn’t snap at me as she might do. “I feel . . .” She stops, then starts again. “I feel guilty. Guiltier than Stevie, that’s for damned sure. And as a citizen of this state, so should you.”

  “If some supporter of the death penalty had thought this up, and murdered Susanna, and framed Bob, they could hardly have come up with a better way to shut you down, could they, Tammi?”

  The tape plays her bitter laughter. “Don’t think I haven’t lain awake considering that possibility, Marie. In one of my more desperate moments when I was preparing for trial I even thought about floating that in front of the jury.”

  “Just out of a general philosophical curiosity, what’s it going to take to end the death penalty in this country, do you think? The death of a provably innocent person?”

  “That’s what they say, but personally I think it will take more than that. I think most people don’t care if an evil person gets killed by mistake. They’re just glad he’s dead and that he can’t hurt anybody anymore. Justice be damned, they’ll say, this is a higher justice at work. So if Ted Bundy, say, had not been guilty of the murders for which we killed him, who gives a shit? He killed plenty of other girls. He’s better off dead and we’re better off with him dead. Oh, there’s the question of the real killer, but that’s another story.

  “No,” she said, “the kind of case I think we need—God forgive me—is the execution of a person who never did anything wrong. And as crummy as this sounds, it’s probably going to have to be a white person, probably a white man, specifically. A good white man would be the ideal innocent person to execute by mistake. That would change things.”

  “Like Bob Wing?”

  “God help us, yes. When we inject our three different chemicals into him on the day he dies, we will be executing an innocent man, Marie. Trust me on that. But it won’t make any difference if I can’t prove it.”

  “If somebody else confessed to the crime,” I suggest.

  “Which is going to happen any day now,” she retorts, “I’m sure.”

  “Well, at least you got one of your clients off.”

  There’s a silence on the tape and in my car all those months later, I think I remember a certain guarded look on the lawyer’s face. Even at the time, I wondered if she really believed in Artie’s innocence as much as she believed in Bob’s. “I’ll be honest, Marie. It’s not so much that I got her off as it is that without any physical evidence Tony Delano didn’t get it on.”

  “You’re glad she was acquitted, though.”

  “Of course!” It comes so quickly that it sounds forced. “You know what they say about half a loaf . . .” She leaves the rest unspoken . . . is better than none.

  “Tammi, the evidence against Bob is so strong. And yet I get the impression that you really do believe he didn’t do it. What is it that convinces you in the face of all that evidence?”

  “I believe him,” she says, simply but with conviction ringing in her voice. “I believe that they weren’t having an affair, I believe that he didn’t place that baseball bat in his house, I believe he didn’t rape or kill his wife. I know him and I know he couldn’t ever do those things.”

  Well, lawyers have been known to be wrong about their clients.

  “Tammi, why don’t you sound as convincing when you talk about her innocence as when you talk about his?”

  “I don’t?” She sighs. “Oh, dear. Off the record? Maybe it’s because, going into the case, I didn’t know her very well, and you know what? I still don’t. She didn’t cooperate very well, Marie. If you can describe a woman as the strong, silent type, that’s her, even though everybody says she used to be the life of the party. Well, she’s not anymore, let me tell you. I think she’s hiding something, and she may go to her grave with it before anybody finds out what it is.”

  I have pulled up into the newspaper’s parking lot several minutes ago, but I’ve been sitting here in the sun so I could hear the whole interview. I didn’t interview Stevie Orbach for my book because it wasn’t his story and I didn’t need him in it. It was just one chapter, after all. But now I’m feeling an urge to interview him, too. Maybe I could add a scene to my book, something about what it’s been like for him to have people devoted to saving him, and to have his “savior” end up there on death row with him. It might give me an unusual glimpse into Bob Wing’s soul; maybe even the key to his passion for his lover, whom he may never see again. I’ll have to do this interview myself, though. Deb’s too young and inexperienced to be sent off to chat up rapists.

  Then it hits me: barring a reprieve, Orbach will be dead in five days.

  If I’m going to see him, I’ve got to do it now.

  * * *

  “Mr. and Mrs. Tobias have agreed to see me at eight o’clock tonight,” Deb tells me before she interviews me. She has on a godawful dotted skirt-and-blouse combination today, with the same clunky shoes. “I’m going up there tomorrow night, but I’m not so sure anymore that it’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  She makes a grimace of sadness. “I think she’s lost it. All the trauma and grief, or Alzheimer’s, or whatever it is, she doesn’t seem to have her mental faculties about her anymore. I told her that I wanted to find out about the note she left and about the cake tin, if she didn’t mind, and she said I could see them if I wanted to! Like that’s even possible. I didn’t say anything, but it kind of shocked me, you know?”

  “I can imagine,” I say, sympathetically.

  “When he got on the phone he practically told me she’s crazy.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Deb.”

  “No, I still want to. Maybe he’ll know something.”

  It sounds like a wild-goose chase to me, but then, that’s often the nature of this work.

  Deborah’s editor is excited about the story I’m giving them and tells us it will run in tomorrow morning’s paper. It won’t use Artie McGregor’s name, because I haven’t given it to them. It won’t say, specifically, that I have seven of the nine rings, the other two being in the possession of the police department, because I haven’t given that information to them, either. What I’m pretty sure it will say is that George and I planted in the house some property that belonged to somebody who might have been involved in the murder of Susanna Wing, and that we wanted to see who might show up to collect it. I’m leaving Bennie’s name out of it. If Deb wants to bring in the name of Artemis McGregor on her own, that’s her choice. I’m sure she’ll quote me as saying, something like, “We don’t know if the person who killed George is the same person who took the bag, but the bag did disappear from the house. They didn’t get everything that was originally in it, though.” If Deb had followed up by asking what that was, I’d probably have told her. But she didn’t ask. Some other time, I’d better give her a few tips about interviewing techniques.

  * * *

  By late afternoon, Franklin DeWeese, in his role as state attorney for Howard County, has arranged for me to interview Stevie Orbach tomorrow, pulling some very high strings to get me in on short notice. I am aware this should have required a month of requests, in triplicate, working their way through multiple layers of bureaucracy. I’m not questioning his means, I’m just grabbing this chance he has opened up for me.

  “May I see you tonight?” Franklin asks me.

  If it’s Franklin, it must be Monday. This morning he drove his kids to their preschools and now he’s a bachelor again.

  “Sure,” I tell him.

  “You want to eat out?”

  My heart leaps at this unexpected capitulation. “Great. What time? Which restaurant?”

  “I meant out on
your patio,” he says, smoothly. “I could bring over some steaks. We could fire up the grill.”

  And I could throw you on it, I’m thinking as I repeat, “Sure.”

  * * *

  His own work keeps him at his office late, and I don’t want to stay up late, because I have a long way to travel tomorrow and I have to get up early to do it. So we settle for leftovers in the kitchen, saving the rest of what little time we have together for the bedroom. This is fine with me, as I am in need of the comfort of his body against mine. Not only that, but I want to keep my vow: if these are our last nights together, they’ll be memorable, by God. But as luck would have it, afterward he’s the one who goes right to sleep and I am left staring at the ceiling, until I quietly get up and go outside.

  The night air is nearly as comforting as he was.

  I stretch out in a chaise lounge, melting into it.

  Like nowhere else I’ve ever been, the air in South Florida is soft, so soft. After my last book tour, riding home from the airport late of a winter’s night, I opened a window in the backseat, closed my eyes and felt the soft air pat my face like a lover. It’s always like that: when I return from other places, Florida whispers to me, Welcome home, Marie.

  It had been a long tour, that one. Sixteen cities in two weeks. Hard air in all of them. But then, riding home . . . and now, sitting here by myself in the starlit darkness, the air is soft as a caress. On that tour, I was in cities north and south, east and west, and everywhere I went I compared it to here. I couldn’t help it, I always do. “We have nicer palm trees than you do, California,” I’d think, in my chauvinistic way. Theirs are spindly, the leaves are sparse. Ours are thick with fronds, thick as shrubs, magnificent if you like palms. Not everybody does. Not everybody likes South Florida. I love it, love it. I don’t care what other people say. I am unabashedly its lover and it is mine, always here for me, always soft, receptive, listening, murmuring to me.

  There’s a cushioned porch chair across from me, the one where Deborah Dancer sat, and it looks starkly empty in the moonlight, as if to remind me of the obvious—that while I may have a lover in my bed tonight, I am mostly alone. I don’t feel lonely, though, except lately when Franklin is with me.

  “I think it’s over,” I tell the empty chair.

  I came out here, my Florida, because I couldn’t sleep.

  But only a few minutes with you, my Florida, and now I can lean into this air, this soft air, and sleep for days. I want my bed now. I want my open windows. I want to be sleeping naked and alone between clean sheets if I cannot walk into the daylight with the man who sleeps there now.

  Susanna

  15

  When I drive past the guardhouse at the entrance to my residential enclave, my heart aches. There is a stranger there now, a young man who doesn’t know me. We wave good morning at each other and I’m glad he can’t see my eyes behind my sunglasses.

  It will feel good to get on the road and drive a long way today.

  Florida stockpiles all of its male death-row inmates at the Union Correctional Institute in Raiford and at the Florida State Prison Main Unit in a town aptly named Starke. Both Bob Wing and Stevie Orbach are in FSP, where the death chamber also happens to be. Starke is thirty-five miles north of Gainesville, so I have about five hours of driving from Bahia. To get there in plenty of time for my 2:00 P.M. interview, I leave home at seven in the morning, with the sun and the ocean to my right. By the time I get home tonight, only one of them will still be there.

  * * *

  He still looks exactly like Allison Tobias’s grieving dad described him: a big, muscular guy, though now he’s got a prison pallor. He is by no means the first condemned man I’ve ever met with just before his execution. I always find it beyond strange to look at, to talk to, a completely healthy, alert human being who knows he will be dead in a few days.

  This man now has less than four days to live.

  There are pickets outside the prison, there is a murmur of protest in the world over his impending death, but no more than there is over the execution of any American prisoner at any time. As reported in the media, and as I observed it outside, it seems merely reflexive, the usual response of people who are opposed to the death penalty as a matter of principle, no matter the crime, the victim, the killer. It feels to me as if everybody knows that this man’s execution is a foregone conclusion.

  We’re separated by bulletproof Plexiglas in a stark, gray clean booth, and just as it was in my interviews with Bob Wing, there is a perforated metal circle between us through which we can converse. His muscular arms rest on the counter that hides him below the waist; his long, blunt fingers are entwined with each other, his wrists are in handcuffs. His hair is cropped so close he looks near-bald. His face has that sculpted look that some athletes get, and he looks scrupulously clean. Death-row inmates are allowed showers every other day; he appears to take regular advantage of the opportunity.

  I don’t underrate the self-discipline it has taken for this man to keep himself in this condition on death row, where the men rarely get out of their six-by-nine-foot cells. There are windows just across the corridor from the men’s cells, letting in some daylight. Orbach doesn’t have any extra freedom of movement. And he’s not popular. I’ve asked. He engenders a certain fear, or call it respect. Looking at him now—at his strength, at his careful expressionless face with its wary watchful eyes—I know I would never mess with him. I can understand why neither guards nor inmates want to, either.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I say carefully.

  He nods, watching me, waiting, even more wary than I. I know that, like me, he’s been up since before dawn,- on death row, breakfast is served at five; he’ll get his third and last meal of the day between four and four-thirty.

  “I was going to ask you if I can call you Stevie, but that name doesn’t fit you, does it? What do you prefer?”

  “Steve.”

  “May I ask you questions for my book?”

  He lifts an eyebrow, lowers a corner of his mouth, shrugs almost imperceptibly.

  “You look athletic. Did you play sports?”

  “I wanted to.” His voice is firm, a businesslike tone between baritone and bass. “Football.”

  Sometimes, interviewing killers, there’ll be a moment that catches me off guard and I am struck by the “if only” of their lives. Call it sentimental, but there can be a sadness about it that catches me unawares. I have one of those moments now, realizing he was a boy who finished high school in prison, whose life story is a diary of pain, both his own and that which he inflicted on others. For just a moment, I have to look down; I can’t continue. I don’t let on to anybody that killers can break my heart as much as their victims do. It’s not politically correct to say that, or to feel that. But I know, as no one else can, that I couldn’t do what I do, write what I write, without some feeling for them. Sure, I know: it’s easy to feel that when they’re caged. My sympathy would vanish if any one of them came after me or somebody I loved.

  I remember Allison Tobias and look back up at him.

  If he noticed my lapse, he doesn’t let on.

  One by one, I go down my list.

  “Did you kill your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “It was her or me.”

  “Did she abuse you?”

  He shrugs his massive shoulders. “Who cares? I took care of it.”

  “Did you ask anybody for help, before you killed her?”

  “What do you think?” he asks, with a hard edge of sarcasm.

  Having read the literature, I say, “I’d guess that you did. Teachers, maybe a social worker or two, possibly a cop, or a neighbor, maybe some relatives. Right?”

  He nods, and I see in his eyes that I’ve won a small point here. Still going by the literature, I say, “And either they didn’t believe you, or they tried to help and it made things worse, or they were too timid to do anything. I suppose you tried running away,
but they caught you and either punished you by placing you in a juvenile center, or they just took you back to her . . .”

  His only movement is a slight twitching of his eyelids. I could go on summarizing the probable childhood of this man I’ve never met before, but I’m not here to talk about his torturer of a mother.

  “Did you kill Allison?”

  “No.”

  “Did you rape her?”

  He hesitates. “Maybe. She was drunk and I took advantage. Is that rape?”

  “If you have to ask, then it probably is.”

  He nods, though I don’t get any sense of agreement.

  “You want to say anything else about that, Steve?”

  I watch him as he thinks. “She cried afterward and she said she shouldn’t have done it. She got up and got dressed and left and I never saw her again.”

  “You didn’t follow her upstairs.”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear anybody who did?”

  “No. I heard a lot of people—the other tenants—going up and down at weird hours all the time, every night almost. So I didn’t pay attention that night. Besides, I was out cold. Asleep after that.”

  “Who do you think killed her?”

  “I’ve thought about that.” For the first time the slightest hint of a smile reaches his eyes and mouth. “I’ve thought about that a lot. Whoever it was, she had to let them in. Either that, or they were already inside her room. Like I said, she was drunk and she was crying. One of the other tenants or the landlord, they could have asked her what was wrong, pretended to comfort her, got inside her apartment, like that. I don’t think she felt real attractive. A girl like that, she might have let anybody in.”

  I hadn’t expected him to talk this much. Or, rather, I hadn’t known what to expect. In an odd way, he’s almost easier to talk to than Bob Wing is, because there’s no charm to confuse things. He speaks in a cold, clear, simple manner. My sense is that he’s pent-up with words to explain himself. This may even be a kind of release for him.

  I feel as if I’m seeing—hearing—the inside of his thoughts and fantasies. Are they merely justifications that he’s made up to cover his own guilt? Or are these his ideas of the truth?