The Best Revenge Page 15

  “Didn’t the prosecutors rely on a lot of eyewitnesses to make their case against Clone in court?”

  “Yeah, they did. So what? Personally, I like eyewitnesses.”

  “But you know the data, Sam. Eyewitnesses are terribly unreliable informants about what actually happened.”

  “I don’t really care about ‘the data.’ Want to know why I like eyewitnesses? Because juries like eyewitnesses. And that’s good enough for me, because it’s how our system works. Those cops nailed Tom Clone, Alan. They played by the rules and it was a good collar.”

  “Except for the DNA. And those partial prints that don’t match. The DNA says someone else’s blood is on the murder weapon.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said while he kicked at the dirt. “Except for that. The DNA is a problem, I admit it. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I admit it.”

  “And you’re still not convinced about his innocence?”

  His response was some dismissive sound that involved expelling air rapidly in a single burst from between his lips.

  I asked, “Given what you know about the case, would you have been okay with him being executed?”

  He shot a suspicious glance my way. “You sure you wouldn’t rather talk about hockey or even, God forbid, the Rockies? Or how dry it’s been this summer? I’ll even talk about your funny little car some more if you want.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” I said.

  Sam and I saw eye to eye on virtually nothing, politically speaking. We had an unspoken agreement to avoid discussing most public controversies. The pact had served us well over the years.

  “Don’t make assumptions about me, Alan.”

  I tried to spot Emily’s dark mass mowing over the prairie grasses on the hill beside us. When I did see her, the appearance was more apparition than anything else. It reminded me of reports of sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. Emily was there—or was she?—and then she was gone.

  “Really?” I said to Sam. “On some things, you’re pretty predictable.”

  “Stop walking for a second,” Sam said. I did. He looked me in the eyes. “What I’m about to say goes nowhere, you understand?”

  “Sure.”

  He pulled a wrapped toothpick from his pocket—I guessed he’d lifted it from the last restaurant he’d visited—poked it through the paper sleeve, and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. Most of the wooden stick vanished under the umbrella of his mustache. “Fucking McVeigh,” he said, finally. “God forgive me, but I hate him and I hate what he did.”

  I thought of responding. I didn’t. I couldn’t begin to guess where the “Fucking McVeigh” segue was taking us, and I didn’t want to be responsible for altering the course Sam was plotting.

  Sam continued. “At the end—during the last few months before he was finally executed—once McVeigh finally started talking about his crime, he said he blew up that building in Oklahoma City in order to punish those people he considered responsible for committing the quote-unquote reprehensible murders at Waco and Ruby Ridge. He felt that the responsible parties were the Feds and that the Feds worked in the Murrow Building, so that’s why he blew it up.”

  “The kids in the day-care center, too?” I asked. “They were responsible for something?”

  He glared at me but when he replied his tone was gently admonishing, not angry. “Don’t get sidetracked there, Alan. Don’t. It’s an easy detour. But it’s a dead end. The truth is that we would have tracked McVeigh down, convicted him, and executed him even if there were no children and no civilians in that building. The fact that he killed kids and innocent civilians gives us an excuse to hate him even more than we do—and I’m as guilty of that as the next guy—but we didn’t turn the world upside down to arrest and convict this guy only because of the kids he killed. Take the children out of the equation and he’s still a monster. Take the kids out of that building—and God, I wish I could go back and do just that—and McVeigh is still going to lie down on a cold table and take the needle.”

  Sam paused long enough to give me a chance to make the mistake of saying something in reply. I didn’t.

  “When it came time to rationalize his execution, the powers that be said that he needed to die because it was the only appropriate punishment for the quote-unquote reprehensible murders he committed in Oklahoma City.”

  Across from me, to the north, Emily suddenly popped up above the grass, twisted 180 degrees in midair, landed, and took off in the opposite direction. Her herding instincts were firing but some creature out there had her snookered. It was great fun to watch.

  Sam let his words hang in the dry air for a few moments. I wondered if they were going to spin and do a one-eighty, too.

  “It got me thinking,” he went on, finally. “We, the people, used the exact same argument to kill McVeigh that he was using to justify killing a building full of federal employees. Is that just some great cosmic irony? Or are we, as a society, teaching the exact kind of retribution that we say is so reprehensible? What gives us the right to decide who lives and dies? We killed McVeigh for making the exact same decision that we as a society want the freedom to make.”

  He made an I-don’t-get-it face and said, “Huh? What?” while he kicked again at the dust. “McVeigh thought that what those federal employees in the Murrow Building did was reprehensible enough that they deserved to die. So he killed them. We thought that what McVeigh did was reprehensible enough that he deserved to die. So we killed him. Right?

  “Well, what gives? Are we writing the rules and just don’t like the fact that other people have decided to play by them, too? Or are the terrorists and murderers writing the rules and now we’ve decided to stoop low enough to play at their level? I’m no longer sure, no longer sure at all.”

  I found myself entranced by my friend’s soliloquy.

  He asked, “How do I teach this distinction to my kid? I can’t figure it out. It’s like telling Simon it’s okay for a teacher to hit a kid but not for a kid to hit another kid. Well, I don’t want him to think that. So do I tell him the government knows best? That because the government has said capital punishment is the law and the government is doing the killing, that somehow the Ten Commandments don’t apply? I’m a conservative Republican, Alan. There’s not a bone in my body that believes that the government always knows best. Not about taxes, not about religion, not about much of anything that comes anywhere close to my home or my family. Certainly not about who should live and who should die.”

  He started walking. I whistled for Emily and followed Sam back up the lane. As far as I knew, we were on our way to get ice cream.

  He looked at me over his right shoulder and, in a voice that was stunning for its normalcy, he said, “I know you, Alan. I know where your mind is going. If you’re even thinking about mentioning the World Trade Center to me, don’t. Our response to the events of that day was self-defense. That was war. War is a different story, and . . . war has a different ending.”

  I took a step. He didn’t; he’d stopped walking. I wasn’t about to say anything about September 11 or the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. What happened that daywas different. We were painfully learning all the ways that it was different.

  In the same everyday voice, he continued. “Once we put him in jail and dragged him to court and convicted McVeigh, it wasn’t war. It was justice. The same thing never happened with bin Laden because from moment one that was war. We can’t mix them up, war and justice.”

  I knew he wasn’t done.

  Finally, he said softly, “I don’t think our society could survive that.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Kelda was on time for her appointment for the first time since I’d started seeing her for psychotherapy.

  I started by rescheduling the following week’s session from Thursday to Tuesday. Kelda agreed to a late afternoon time. She didn’t ask, so I didn’t explain that I had to take Grace to the pediatrician for a checkup late in the day on Thursday.

  Kelda used
a minute or two of the remaining time to ask about my arm and my adjustment to my injury. I deflected her inquiries as well as I could without becoming rude. When it was clear that I wasn’t inviting any further attention on my condition, she crossed her legs, ran her teeth over her bottom lip, and said, “I imagine that you want me to talk about Jones.”

  The only neutral response was no response. If I said I did, Jones would become my topic, not Kelda’s. If I said I didn’t, I ran the risk of dismissing something that might be important to her. I could have been obvious and told Kelda that we would talk about whatever she wanted to talk about. My silence said the same thing.

  She uncrossed her legs, untied her hair, and threaded through it with her fingers before she sat back and recrossed her right leg over her left. Then she smiled, laughed out loud, and said, “Jones was the first person I ever knew who shaped her pubic hair. She said it was an artistic statement.” She shook her head in amusement. “We’d be out somewhere and she’d pull me aside into a room or just off by ourselves and all of a sudden she’d drop her pants or lift her skirt and point to her crotch and say, ‘What do you think, Kelda? Is this my best work, or what?’”

  I was enamored as Kelda’s eyes sparkled. The memory of Jones’s shaved pubes lit her like stage lights. Something about her friend was the electricity.

  “I don’t know why I told you that, but that . . . that was Jones. She was always a step ahead of the world, always . . . out there a little bit. Have you ever been with one of those people whose face seemed to be in a never-ending smile? You know, someone who was like the opposite of the rest of us. Most of us have a normal face, and sometimes we smile, right? Not Jones. Jones’s normal face was this big half-moon smile and sometimes she would have to force herself to close her mouth andnot smile. No matter how you were feeling, you ended up smiling back at her when you were with Jones. If things seemed dark, she always managed to light a different path for you.”

  Kelda uncrossed her legs and crossed her arms across her chest, curling her fingers around her biceps. I didn’t think I was observing a strategy to cope with physical pain. She was embracing herself in preparation for something she was about to tell me.

  What? I didn’t know. So I waited.

  “And then she died,” Kelda said. “And then Jones went and died. I don’t think I’ve been the same since.”

  We lost touch a little bit when I went to Australia. I think she was kind of hurt that I would just pack up and leave Denver. Leave her. I thought she was being silly about the whole thing. For me, Australia was a lark, a chance to go exploring and see a piece of the world. Because of her fears, Jones couldn’t do that, just pick up someplace and go. But it wasn’t like we were fighting or anything. We exchanged a couple of letters during the first few weeks, and I called her once and woke her up because I misjudged the time difference. I didn’t think much about her and me while I was there. I always thought that when I got back to Denver we’d be the same great friends we’d always been.”

  Kelda grew silent.

  I said, “And then she went and died.”

  She sighed. “I didn’t even know she was dead until I got home. After I’d been in Australia for a few months she sent me a letter, more of a change of address really, just a note letting me know that she was moving to Hawaii, to Maui, to be part of some co-op gallery. She had an opportunity to do art full-time. I was surprised—shocked is more like it—I didn’t think that Jones could make that big a change in her life. But I thought, great, that I’d stop and see her on my way back to the States when I was done with my work in Sydney. I sent her a postcard or something telling her to watch for me one day soon on her doorstep, and I waited to hear back from her. But I never did hear back from her, and I didn’t stop in Hawaii.

  “I tried to reach her once more before I came home, but the letter was returned to me. When I finally got back to Denver, I called her parents in New Hampshire to try to find out where I could find her. That’s when I learned that she’d died a couple of months before on Maui.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Do you know Maui?”

  “No,” I said. I’d been to Hawaii once years before, but hadn’t spent much time on Maui.

  “The island is shaped like a peanut, and she was living in the hills outside a little town called Paia that’s on the side of the isthmus where the tourists don’t tend to stay. Paia’s an old cowboy town that’s kind of been taken over by aging hippies and young hippies and windsurfers. A lot of artists have congregated there, too. It was a real little town, not a tourist place. She could find real people there; it was the kind of place where Jones could thrive.”

  I waited, wondering why the geography lesson had been important.

  “Anyway, Jones fell—that’s how she died. She went hiking one day by herself near some cliffs above the ocean outside of Paia on the road to Hana. It was low tide and somehow she fell about sixty feet onto some rocks, and she died. She crushed her head on the rocks.”

  I was still wondering why the geography lesson had been important. I was about to ask when Kelda continued. “There’s a wonderful old cemetery outside of Paia on this sloping hillside above the Pacific. It’s a tiny graveyard, just a little wispy place below some sugarcane fields that’s dotted with gravestones and a few crosses. She’s buried there.

  “The wind blows hard on that part of Maui almost all the time; it’s this constant, strong force that comes off the ocean. Not a breeze, but a real wind. A few years after she died—after I came back to Denver from the FBI Academy—I went there, to Hawaii, and I spent a few days in Paia and I visited her grave three or four times. On a clear day you can see the shoreline where she was hiking right from the cemetery.

  “I was moved by it all. The cemetery, the cliffs, the ocean, the wind. The wind reminded me of Jones. Its power. Its energy. Since then I’ve thought about her every time I’ve felt a breeze wash over my skin. It’s like a sign that she’s visiting me, looking over me.”

  “You went to Hawaii to say good-bye?” I almost immediately regretted the presumptiveness of my words.

  “Yes,” she said. “To say good-bye. To say I’m sorry. And to make sure she was resting in the right place.”

  “Is she?”

  Kelda nodded. “Yes, yes, yes.” Her words were a hoarse whisper.

  “You said that you went to say that you’re sorry?”

  “Yes. For losing touch with her, for not being as good a friend as I could have been, for not being with her when she went for that hike.”

  “I don’t understand that last part, Kelda. You were sorry for not being with her when she went on the hike?”

  “You had to know Jones, Alan. If I had been living in Denver when she decided to move, she would have begged me to go to Hawaii with her. And if I’d said no, she wouldn’t have gone by herself. Jones had fears. Serious fears, phobia fears. They ruled her life sometimes. She was afraid of heights, of fire, of loud noises. She was always worried about someone breaking into her apartment. Even in Denver, she had more locks on her doors than anybody I knew. She had this weird thing about electrical wiring—she was always checking for electrical shorts and worrying about the wiring in the walls. She used to crawl around and sniff the electrical sockets to see if she could smell fire. And lightning? God, you didn’t want to be outside with Jones on a summer afternoon.

  “She told me once that if it wasn’t for her fears—and the fact that she had one or two freckles too many—she’d be an almost perfect person. I don’t think she was speaking from conceit—I know she wasn’t—I think she was telling me that at some level her phobias and her fears kept her humble.”

  I didn’t know which strand of the story to tug. I tried one almost at random. “But even though she was afraid of flying, she somehow got the nerve to get on a plane to go to Hawaii—a place she’d never been—by herself?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Did that surprise you?”

  “The whole
thing surprised me. Jones wasn’t an independent person. Sometimes I thought that her demeanor was so magnetic because she constantly needed to attract new people to be around her. People got fed up with her fears, and they got fed up fast. She wouldn’t dothis because of that fear. She wouldn’t dothat because of this fear. It was always something with Jones. Her friendships started quickly and they ended quickly. She burned through friends and she really burned through boyfriends.” She shook her head. “Packing up and moving someplace where she didn’t know anyone? That wasn’t Jones. It just wasn’t. Her fears were like anchors. They kept her from moving, they kept her from going anywhere.

  “And she definitely wouldn’t have made the move if I was in Denver instead of Australia. I would have talked her out of it.”

  “You would have talked her out of it?”

  “Yes. That’s sounds funny, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t convince her not to go. That’s not what I mean. I’d simply point out alternatives, and help her see what she’d have to confront if she did go. That’s all.”

  “In terms of her fears?”

  “Yes.”

  I asked, “You mentioned something about regretting not being with Jones when she went hiking. What’s that about?”

  “Jones didn’t tolerate her fears passively. She was constantly confronting them, you know, like inching up to things that terrified her. She thought if she desensitized herself that maybe the fears would go away. She’d light candles in her room and try to read by candlelight. The whole time she’d be sure her hair was on fire. She’d use an extension cord when she didn’t have to, and every thirty seconds she’d feel it to see how hot it was.

  “And my role? She’d count on me to tell her when she’d gone too far. Where things she was afraid of were concerned, she didn’t have a sense of what was reasonable for her to do.”