Carlo placed it in front of Fleet. "This is for you, I think."
Expression frozen, Fleet studied the autopsy photo of Thuy Sen. With clinical detachment, Terri inquired, "Did you ever force this minor Asian female to put your penis in her mouth?"
Holding up his hand, Hall leaned awkwardly between Terri and the witness. "For the record," he interjected, "Mr. Fleet will invoke the Fifth Amendment in response to any further questions." Gathering himself up, he mustered a show of indignation. "Your strategy's transparent—to present Mr. Fleet as the guilty party and to expose him to charges of perjury. No matter how irrelevant to the matter at hand—"
"The matter at hand," Terri interrupted, "is the murder of this child. That was the subject of Mr. Fleet's trial testimony fifteen years ago, on which basis my client stands to die.
"So let's be clear, counselor. We're going to be here for however long it takes for me to read aloud every answer he gave, to every question Lou Mauriani asked him about the murder of Thuy Sen, and then to ask him if the answer's true. By my count, that's roughly sixty-seven chances to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Is that what Mr. Fleet intends to do?"
Hall folded his arms. "On my advice, yes."
Terri turned to Pell. "Any suggestions, Mr. Pell?"
"No."
"Then I've got one: grant Mr. Fleet immunity from prosecution—for both perjury and the murder of Thuy Sen—based on any answer he gives in this proceeding." Terri allowed disdain to seep into her voice. "That would satisfy all of our needs—Mr. Fleet's continuing need to escape prosecution for the murder of Thuy Sen, Rennell Price's need not to be executed for Mr. Fleet's crime, and your need to learn the truth. Which is the reason, I recall, you gave me for informing Mr. Fleet of Payton Price's confession."
With apparent effort, Pell remained inscrutable, marshaling the careful phrasing which, Terri knew, he had composed to evade entrapment. "Whether to grant immunity," he said in his most professional manner, "is a question of policy, based on a number of very complicated factors, to be decided at the highest levels of the Attorney General's Office. It's not within my authority to immunize Mr. Fleet in the middle of his deposition."
"Too bad," Terri answered. "I guess we're in for a long day. But please get back to me before the next time we see Judge Bond."
Across the table, Eddie Fleet watched her, malevolence filling his eyes.
"Why don't you take a break?" she said to him. "Your 'oral presentation' has just begun."
* * *
"Pell's expression was a study," Carlo told his father that evening. "But Fleet's made me afraid for Terri. He hates her as much as she hates him."
With an expression of worry, Chris sat back, the State's response to Rennell's postponed clemency petition spread across his desk. "She got what she wanted," he answered at length. "Maybe the A.G. will grant immunity—"
"Don't count on it." Terri stood in the doorway, causing Carlo to wonder how much she had heard. "It's a matter of 'policy,' " she continued. "If they start immunizing snitches to help petitioners on habeas corpus, just think how long these cases might go on. There'd be no end to them." Turning to Chris, she asked, "So, do I put Rennell on?"
Chris rubbed the back of his head. "Depends on what Pell does about Fleet, I think. Or Bond—"
The telephone rang. Picking it up, Chris listened for a moment, then pushed the speaker button. Tammy Mattox's smoke and whiskey drawl filled the office. "When you gonna see Rennell?" she asked without preface.
"Tomorrow," Terri answered. "Why?"
"Grandma's dead. After all this time, I think Payton dying was all she could take." Tammy's voice softened. "Rennell's got no family now but crazy Mama. Know you got a full plate, Terri, but someone needs to tell him."
SEVEN
RENNELL'S EXPRESSION BARELY CHANGED. FROM THE DISTANCE in his eyes, Terri sensed him retreating within himself, perhaps from yet more pain and loss. She tried to guess at his emotions—or even whether, after Payton, he had much emotion left.
"She always stay in her room," he mumbled. "That where she die?"
Eula Price had lost the house over fourteen years ago, to the poisonous confluence of Thuy Sen's murder and Yancey James's coke-addicted greed. And yet the external world must remain, in Rennell's limited imaginings, that which he had left. "Yes," Terri answered, "in her room."
He bowed his head. "That's where she hide. Like she be scared."
Had Eula Price not felt like a prisoner, it struck Terri, Thuy Sen might not have died. But this was only one of the many mischances which worked variations on Rennell's fate, ordained by family, the Bayview, and Rennell's inability to cope with either. "She was just tired," Terri said. "She got old, and started wearing out."
Rennell did not raise his head. "Started once that cop came for us—the black dude. At that trial, I kep' tryin' to smile at her. She just kep' shakin' her head. Like we been bad to her so long she don't know how to smile back."
A deeper sadness overcame Terri, both at what Rennell remembered and at how little he understood it: Eula Price had surely known how he appeared to others and done her best to warn him. "She was afraid for you," Terri said. "That's all it was."
Rennell said nothing. Terri sat back, gazing down the row of cubicles at other prisoners in conference with their lawyers. For a curious moment it reminded her of confession, condemned men seeking absolution in plastic booths from priests disguised in suits.
"How she die?" Rennell asked.
"In her sleep. She just slipped out of life to heaven, without feeling any pain."
He looked up at her. "Like Payton?"
Terri winced inside. Much better, she thought. She never knew it was her time, and she didn't die twitching and gasping for breath. "Like Payton," she answered.
* * *
"There was no way to talk about the hearing," Terri said, "or whether he might testify. But we have to decide whether we put him on."
Her listeners—Chris, Carlo, Anthony Lane, and Tammy Mattox—sat around the conference table with soft drinks and sandwiches on paper plates. They all looked tired.
"High risk," Chris answered. "But maybe high reward."
"How so?"
"If Bond finds that we haven't shown sufficient proof of retardation, or innocence—it will be fatal." Chris allowed himself a quick, sharp taste of Diet Coke. "One way to change the balance is to show Bond—and the media—a retarded man, and then ask how the Court can affirm his sentence of death."
Lane shook his head. "Rennell doesn't get that he's retarded. So he doesn't know how he's supposed to act, any more than Bond will know how to interpret what he sees. Too many people expect a drooling moron, or someone who looks like he's got Down syndrome. Bond may see Rennell as an actor in our morality play, trying to fake his way off death row. And if we coach Rennell to the point where he can cope with Larry Pell, and make a case for his innocence, we may have made him smart enough to kill—"
"If he's not at the hearing," Carlo objected, "he's an abstraction fought over by lawyers and mental health experts—ours, and theirs." His tone became angry. "How the hell can you have a hearing about whether Rennell lives or dies without Rennell?"
"Because he looks normal," Lane retorted. "I remember one sensitive pair of lawyers who gave their arguably retarded client a suit and glasses and law books to 'read' at the defense table, all so he could feel as smart as they were. In that case, he probably was. They got him executed."
"Aren't we forgetting Rennell?" Tammy asked. "We've all been all caught up on how he might look at a hearing, or what he might say, but not about how he might feel.
"He'll get to hear us tell Bond what a nightmare his childhood was, how Payton screwed him over, and how his last fifteen years were all about him being too stupid to defend himself in a courtroom. All while he's sitting in a courtroom—"