Just Cause Page 3

  The detective closed his eyes and sighed. “I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t do nothing. Jesus.”

  He held out his hand. “Look at that. I’m fifty-fucking-nine years old and gonna retire and I thought I’d seen and heard it all.”

  The hand was quivering. Cowart could see it move in the light thrown from the pulsating police lights.

  “You know,” Hawkins said as he stared at his hand, “I’m getting so I don’t want to hear any more. I’d almost rather shoot it out with some crazy fuck than I would hear one more guy talk about doing something terrible as if it means no more than nothing. Like it wasn’t some life that he snuffed out, it was just a candy wrapper he crumpled up and tossed away. Like littering instead of first-degree murder.”

  He turned to Cowart. “You want to see?”

  “Of course. Let’s go,” he replied, too quickly.

  Hawkins looked at him closely. “Don’t be so sure. You always want to see so damn quick. It ain’t nice. Take my word for it this time.”

  “No,” Cowart said. “It’s my job, too.”

  The detective shrugged. “I take you in, you gotta promise something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You see what he did, then I show him to you—no questions, you just get a look at him, he’s in the kitchen—but you make sure you get into the paper that he’s no boy next door. Got it? That he’s not some poor, disadvantaged little kid. That’s what his lawyer’s gonna start saying just as soon as he gets here. I want it different. You tell them that he’s a stone-cold killer, got it? Stone-cold. I don’t wanna have anybody pick up the paper and see a picture of him and think, How could a nice kid like that have done this?”

  “I can do that,” Cowart said.

  “Okay.” The detective shrugged, rose, and they started to walk toward the front door. As they were about to pass inside, he turned to Cowart and said, “You sure? These are folks just like you and me. You won’t forget this one. Not ever.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Matty, let an old guy look out for you for once.”

  “Come on, Vernon.”

  “It’s your nightmare, then,” the detective said. He’d been absolutely right about that.

  Cowart remembered staring at the executive and his wife. There was so much blood it was almost as if they were dressed. Every time the police photographer’s flash exploded, the bodies glistened for an instant.

  Wordlessly, he had followed the detective into the kitchen. The boy sat there wearing sneakers and jeans, his slight torso naked, one arm handcuffed to a chair. Streaks of blood marked his body, but he ignored them and casually smoked a cigarette with his free hand. It made him look even younger, like a child trying to act older, cooler, to impress the policemen in the room but really only appearing slightly silly. Cowart noted a smear of blood in the boy’s blond hair, matting the curls together, another tinge of dried brown blood on the boy’s cheek. The kid didn’t even need to shave yet.

  The boy looked up when Cowart and the detective entered the room. “Who’s that?” he asked, nodding toward Cowart.

  For an instant Matthew locked his eyes with the boy’s. They were an ancient blue, endlessly evil, like staring at the iron edge of an executioner’s sword.

  “He’s a reporter, with the Journal,” Hawkins said.

  “Hey, reporter!” the kid said, suddenly smiling.

  “What?”

  “You tell everybody I didn’t do nothing,” he said. Then he laughed in a high-pitched, wheezing way that echoed after Cowart and forever froze in his memory, as Hawkins steered him out of the room, back out into the hurrying dawn.

  He had gone to his office and written the story of the junior executive, his wife, and the teenager. He’d described the white sheets crumpled and brown with blood, the red spatter marks marking the walls with Daliesque horror. He’d written about the neighborhood and the trim house and a framed testimonial on the wall attesting to the victim’s membership in an advanced sales club. He’d written about suburban dreams and the lure of forbidden sex. He’d described the Fort Lauderdale strip where children cruised nightly, aging far beyond their years every minute. And he’d described the boy’s eyes, burning them into the story, just the way his friend had asked him to.

  He’d ended the story with the boy’s words.

  When he’d gone home that night, carrying a copy of the first edition under his arm, his story jamming the front page, he had felt an exhaustion that had gone far beyond lack of sleep. He had crawled into his bed, pulling himself up against his wife, even knowing that she planned to leave him, shivering, flu-like, unable to find any warmth in the world.

  Cowart shook his head to dispel the morning and looked around his work cubicle.

  Hawkins was dead now. Retired with a little ceremony, given a pension, and released to cough his life away with emphysema. Cowart had gone to the ceremony and clapped when the chief of police had cited the detective’s contributions. He’d gone to see him in the detective’s small Miami Beach apartment every time he could. It had been a barren place, decorated with some old clippings of stories Cowart and others had written. “Remember the rules,” Hawkins had told him at the end of each visit, “and if you can’t remember what I told you about the street, then make up your own rules and live by them.” They had laughed. Then he’d gone to the hospital as frequently as possible, taking off early and surreptitiously from his office to go and trade stories with the detective, until the last time, when he’d arrived and found Hawkins unconscious beneath an oxygen tent, and Cowart hadn’t known whether the detective heard him when he whispered his name, or felt him when he picked up his hand. He had sat beside the bed for one long night, not even knowing when it was that the detective’s life had slipped away in the darkness. Then he’d gone to the funeral, along with a few other old policemen. There’d been a flag, a coffin, a few words from a priest. No wife. No children. Dry eyes. Just a nightmare’s worth of memories being lowered slowly into the ground. He wondered if it would be the same when he died.

  I wonder what happened to the kid, he thought. Probably out of juvenile hall and out on the street. Or on Death Row beside the letter writer. Or dead.

  He looked at the letter.

  This really should be a news story, he thought, not an editorial. He ought to hand it to someone on the city desk and let them check it out. I don’t do that anymore. I am a man of opinions. I write from a distance, a member of a board which votes and decides and adopts positions, not passions. I have given up my name.

  He half rose from his chair to do exactly that, then stopped.

  An innocent man.

  In all the crimes and trials he’d covered, he tried to remember ever seeing a genuinely innocent man. He’d seen plenty of not-guilty verdicts, charges dismissed for lack of evidence, cases lost by sheer defensive eloquence or stumbling prosecution. But he could not recall someone genuinely innocent. He’d asked Hawkins once if he’d ever arrested someone like that, and he’d laughed. “A man who really didn’t do it? Ah, you screw up a bunch, that’s for sure. A lot of guys walk who shouldn’t. But bust somebody who’s really innocent? That’s the worst possible case. I don’t know if I could live with that. No, sir. That’s the only one I’d ever really lose sleep over.”

  He held the letter in his hand. I DID NOT COMMIT. He wondered, Is someone losing sleep over Robert Earl Ferguson?

  He felt a hot flush of excitement. If it’s true, he thought . . . He did not complete the idea in his head but swallowed swiftly, curbing a sudden flash of ambition.

  Cowart remembered an interview he’d read years before about a graceful, aging basketball player who was finally hanging up his sneakers after a long career. The man had talked about his achievements and disappointments in the same breath, as if treating them each with a sort of restrained and equal dignity. He
had been asked why he was finally quitting, and he started to talk about his family and children, his need to put the game of his childhood away finally and get on with his life. Then he’d talked about his legs, not as if they were a part of his body, but as if they were old and good friends. He’d said that he could no longer jump the way he’d once been able to, that now when he gathered himself to soar toward the hoop, the leg muscles that once had seemed to launch him so easily screamed with age and pain, insisting he quit. And he had said that without his legs’ cooperation, continuing was useless. Then he had gone out to his final game and scored thirty-eight points effortlessly—shifting, twisting, and leaping above the rim as he had years earlier. It was as if the man’s body had given him one last opportunity to force an indelible memory on people. Cowart had thought the same was true of reporting; that it took a certain youth that knew no exhaustion, a drive that would shunt aside sleep, hunger, love, all in the singular pursuit of a story. The best reporters had legs that carried them higher and farther when others were falling back to rest.

  He flexed his leg muscles involuntarily.

  I had those once, he thought. Before I retired back here to get away from the nightmares, to wear suits and act responsible and age gracefully. Now I’m divorced and my ex-wife is going to steal the only thing I ever really loved without restriction, and I sit back here, hiding from reality, issuing opinions about events that influence no one.

  He clutched the letter in his hand.

  Innocent, he thought. Let’s see.

  The library at the Journal was an odd combination of the old and the new. It was located just past the newsroom, beyond the desks where the soft-news feature writers sat. In the rear of the library were rows of long metal filing cabinets that housed clippings that dated back decades. In the past, every day the paper had been dissected by person, subject, location, and event, each cutting filed away appropriately. Now this was all done on state-of-the-art computers, huge terminals with large screens. The librarians simply went through each story, highlighting the key people and worth, then transmitting them into so many electronic files. Cowart preferred the old way. He liked being able to arrange a bunch of inky clips about, picking and choosing what he needed. It was like being able to hold some history in his hand. Now, it was efficient, quick, and soulless. He never neglected to tease the librarians about this when he used the library.

  When he walked through the doors, he was spotted by a young woman. She was blonde, with a striking sheet of hair, tall and trim. She wore wire-rimmed glasses, sometimes peering over the top.

  “Don’t say it, Matt.”

  “Don’t say what?”

  “Just don’t say what you always say. That you liked it more the old way.”

  “I won’t say it.”

  “Good.”

  “Because you just said it.”

  “Doesn’t count,” the young woman laughed. She rose and went to where he was standing at a counter. “So how can I help you?”

  “Laura the librarian. Has anyone told you that you’ll wreck your eyes staring at that computer screen all day?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Suppose I give you a name . . .”

  “. . . And I’ll do the old computer magic.”

  “Robert Earl Ferguson.”

  “What else?”

  “Death Row. Sentenced about three years ago in Escambia County.”

  “All right. Let’s see . . .” She sat primly at a computer and typed in the name and punched a button. Cowart could see the screen go blank, save for a single word, which flashed continuously in a corner: Searching. Then the machine seemed to hiccup and some words formed.

  “What’s it say?” he asked.

  “A couple of entries. Let me cheek.” The librarian hit some more characters and another set of words appeared on the screen. She read off the headlines: “Former college student convicted in girl’s murder, sentenced to death penalty; Appeal rejected in rural murder ease; Florida Supreme Court to hear Death Row cases. That’s all. Three stories. All from the Gulf Coast edition. Nothing ran in the main run, except the last, which is probably a roundup story.”

  “Not much for a murder and death sentence,” Cowart said. “You know, in the old days, it seemed we covered every murder trial . . .”

  “No more.”

  “Life meant more then.”

  The librarian shrugged. “Violent death used to be more sensational than it is now, and you’re much too young to be talking about the old days. You probably mean the seventies . . .” She smiled and Cowart laughed with her. “Anyway, death sentences are getting to be old hat in Florida these days. We’ve got . . .” She hesitated, pushing her head back and examining the ceiling for an instant. “. . . More than two hundred men on Death Row now. The governor signs a couple of death warrants every month. Doesn’t mean they get it, but . . .” She looked at him and smiled. “But Matt, you know all that. You wrote those editorials last year. About being a civilized nation. Right?” She nodded her head toward him.

  “Right. I remember the main thrust was: We shouldn’t sanction state murder. Three editorials, a total of maybe ninety column inches. In reply, we ran more than fifty letters that were, how shall I put it? Contrary to my position. We ran fifty, but we got maybe five quadrillion. The nicest ones merely suggested that I ought to be beheaded in a public square. The nasty ones were more inventive.”

  The librarian smiled. “Popularity is not our job, right? Would you like me to print these for you?”

  “Please. But I’d rather be loved. . . .”

  She grinned at him and then turned to her computer. She played her fingers across the keyboard again and a high-speed printer in the corner of the room began whirring and shaking as it printed the news stories. “There you go. On to something?”

  “Maybe,” Cowart replied. He took the sheaf of paper out of the computer. “Man says he didn’t do it.”

  The young woman laughed. “Now that would be interesting. And unique.” She turned back to the computer screen and Cowart headed back to his office.

  The events that had landed Robert Earl Ferguson on Death Row began to take on form and shape as Cowart read through the news stories. The library’s offering had been minimal, but enough to create a portrait in his imagination. He learned that the victim in the case was an eleven-year-old girl, and that her body had been discovered concealed in scrub brush at the edge of a swamp.

  It was easy for him to envision the murky green and brown foliage concealing the body. It would have had a sucking, oozing quality of sickness, an appropriate place to find death.

  He read on. The victim was the child of a local city-council member, and she had last been seen walking home from school. Cowart saw a wide, single-story cinder-block building standing alone in a rural, dusty field. It would be painted a faded pink or institutional green, colors that could barely be brightened by children’s excited voices greeting the end of the school day. That was when one of the teachers in the elementary grades had seen her getting into a green Ford with out-of-state plates. Why? What would make her get into a stranger’s car? The thought made him shiver and feel an instant flush of fear for his own daughter. She wouldn’t do that, he told himself abruptly. When the little girl failed to arrive home, an alarm had gone out. Cowart knew that the local television stations would have shown a picture on the evening news that night. It would have been of a ponytailed youngster, smiling, showing braces on her teeth. A family photo, taken in hope and promise, used obscenely to fill the airwaves with despair.

  More than twenty-four hours later, deputies searching the area had uncovered her remains. The news story had been filled with euphemisms: “brutal assault,” “savage attack,” “torn and ripped body,” which Cowart recognized as the shorthand of journalism; unwilling to describe in great detail the actual horror that the c
hild had faced, the writer had resorted to a comfortable series of clichés.

  It must have been a terrible death, he thought. People wanted to know what happened, but not really, because if they did they would not sleep either.

  He read on. As best he could tell, Ferguson had been the first and only suspect. Police had picked him up shortly after the victim’s body had been discovered, because of the similarity with his car. He’d been questioned—there was nothing in any of the stories about being held incommunicado or beaten—and confessed. The confession, followed by a blood-type matchup and the vehicle identification, appeared to have been the only evidence against him, but Cowart was circumspect. Trials took on a certain momentum of their own, like great theater. A detail which seemed small or questionable when mentioned in a news story could become immense in a juror’s eyes.

  Ferguson had been correct about the judge’s sentencing. The quote “. . . an animal that ought to be taken outside and shot” appeared prominently in the story. The judge had probably been up for reelection that year, he thought.

  The other library entries had provided some additional information: primarily that Ferguson’s initial appeal, based upon the sufficiency of evidence against him, had been rejected by the first district court of appeal. That was to be expected. It was still pending before the Florida Supreme Court. It was clear to Cowart that Ferguson had not yet really begun to gnaw away at the courts. He had numerous avenues of appeal and had yet to travel them.

  Cowart sat back at his desk and tried to picture what had happened.

  He saw a rural county in the backwoods of Florida. He knew this was a part of the state that had absolutely nothing in common with the popular images of Florida, not the well-scrubbed, smiling faces of the middle class that flocked to Orlando and Disney World, nor the beered-up frat boys who headed to the beaches during their spring breaks, nor the tourists who drove their mobile homes to Cape Canaveral for space shots. Certainly, this Florida had nothing to do with the cosmopolitan, loose-fitting image of Miami, which styled itself as some sort of American Casablanca.