Ring of Truth (23 page)

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?

“If you ever got out of here,” I say, feeling cruel, “what would you do?”

His eyelids twitch again, small muscles he can't quite control.

“I don't care to say,” he says.

“You get to talk much to Bob Wing?”

He quirks the side of his mouth, giving himself a sarcastic expression. “Yeah, we talk about ‘justice.’ ”

“What's he like?”

“What's he
like?
Look at him, for Christ's sake, listen to him. Look at the work he's done for sons a bitches like me. He's a righteous man. And an innocent one. He shouldn't be in here, neither one of us should.”

“What about Mrs. McGregor?”

“What
about
her?”

“Is she guilty?”

“No way.”

“Does he miss her?”

That gets me a cold stare. “He misses all of his friends.”

“How's he doing in here?”

“If you want to know, ask him yourself. Listen, you trying to get me to tell you stuff about him, I'll tell you one thing. If they execute Bob, then you can blame that murder on me.” For the first time, I see a hint of passion in his expression. His jaw and his lips have tightened. “He should have left my case alone, I've
told him that. From the beginning, I told him, don't be a fool, stay the fuck away from me. I'm death for anybody who touches me. I told him. I warned him. He can't say I didn't. And now he's in here because of me.” Suddenly he leans forward and whispers intensely at me. “You write that in your book. That they went after him, that they framed him, to keep him from springing me. He's here because of me and he's going to die because of me. You tell those bastards that, you tell them that I know, even if nobody else does.”