Twenty-Two
Louisiana, 2003
There’s no sign on the building when I arrive at the New Orleans address the lawyer gave me over the phone. Just a smoked-glass door, not even numbered, and windows with slat blinds pulled tight. Though the other buildings on the block are all gray, this one is Mardi Gras purple, and the color only accentuates how vacant the blocks feels, how evacuated, as if it were a night or a weekend. But it’s Monday morning, 9:00 a.m., and still no one’s here. Maybe this isn’t the right building, but the address is all I’ve got. I press the bell.
A man answers the door. Behind him, the room is so dark it’s like a pocket of night in the middle of the morning. He’s wearing jeans and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt, no law firm suit, and now I’m really wondering if I’ve got the right place. Then there’s the man’s dark skin. When the lawyers talked about the noose ties on the phone, the way they talked made me realize that they were all white, most of their clients black. They wouldn’t have a client answer the door, would they?
If the man can sense I’m startled, he doesn’t show it. He smiles. “Come right on in. You’re an intern, right? The others are upstairs.”
This is John Thompson. The man who spent a year on death row next to Ricky, and fourteen years before he was exonerated. If he tells me his name now, if he sticks out his hand for a shake and introduces himself, the moment doesn’t tack into my memory. His name doesn’t mean anything to me yet. Instead my attention is on the office that is suddenly visible: how after the threshold the floor sinks and the two black fake-leather couches in the waiting room have seen better days; how the magazine covers are dated and dusty and the desk where the receptionist sits is behind a thick layer of plastic that looks like bulletproof glass. This isn’t a reception area for actually receiving anyone. Not like my parents’ firm, with its gleaming mahogany designed to impress. A dry-erase board on the wall lists an alarmingly long roster of names, its markings smeared. There’s a column for “in” and a column for “out,” magnets like poker chips meant to mark which lawyers are available. But only a few magnets are clearly in a particular column, the rest strewn haphazardly across the board. The board, like the reception area, looks like someone set it up long ago in a burst of optimism before succumbing to dust, time, and too much work.
“The library’s right up this staircase,” John Thompson says.
So the man who knew Ricky is the one who leads me to his story. One hand on the slim banister, I climb. The staircase is narrow and tight, the wooden ceiling so low I can just barely straighten my back. The room I leave and the room I walk toward are both dim. All summer this passage will strike me as strange to climb: to leave the overcooled office space and enter this pocket of hot darkness tucked to the side. Always it will seem at once illicit and stifling. Only years later, flipping through the photographs in Ricky’s file, will I see another staircase that perfectly evokes the same feeling, and stop short. The staircase in the Lawson house that Lucky and Dixon climbed, following Ricky. The staircase Ricky climbed, following Jeremy. The way the evidence photograph was taken, angled up, is exactly how the memory of this staircase will feel.
Up top, the corridor opens into a cavernous space with a wide table at the center. The ceilings are impossibly high, leather-bound books climbing the walls as though trying to reach them. Case registers. These books hold the sources of the hypotheticals I love, the cases that are the foundation of the world I am entering.
Eight other young people sit around the table—law students, like me, here to spend their summer working for the firm. At the table’s head stands a thin woman with a British accent, wearing a black suit. We make our pleasantries and our introductions. For the whole day we sit around that table. We learn the firm’s history. We learn its methods for keeping track of files. We learn what to wear when visiting clients.
The next morning she again steps to the front of the room. Today, she says, we were supposed to meet her husband, Clive Stafford Smith, who founded this office. “But Clive is still in Texas, being the awake lawyer in the sleeping lawyer case.”
We laugh, a little awed. That case is famous right now, one in which a condemned man has appealed for a new trial because during the original, when he was sentenced to death, his lawyer actually fell asleep during the proceedings. All of us at the table are from northern schools. All of us at the table are from the North. Until now, that case has had the feel of a story from far away. But we’re actually here.
“Instead,” she says, “we’ll show you this.” She holds up a videotape. “This is the taped confession of the man whose retrial we just finished, recorded in 1992. Nine years ago he was condemned to death, but this time the jury gave him life.” She hadn’t planned to show it to us; that much is clear. But we’re here, the time needs filling, and what better way to preview the work ahead than to show us whom we’re here to defend?
“Could you please,” she says to another lawyer, “get the lights?”
On the screen a face flickers into view.
Thick, Coke-bottle glasses. Too-big ears, the legacy of Bessie’s drinking. Brown eyes that were the last Jeremy saw.
He is talking about molesting children. “Sometimes I, you know, rub my penis on them,” he says—and my grandfather’s hands are at the hem of my white flannel nightgown with the little blue stars; he is tugging it up and he is tugging down my underwear and he is undoing his fly.
I came here to help save the man on the screen. I came to help save men like him. I came because my ideals and who I am exist separately from what happened in the past. They must. If they don’t, what will my life hold?
But I look at the man on the screen, I feel my grandfather’s hands on me, and I know. Despite what I’ve trained for, despite what I’ve come here to work for, despite what I believe.
I want Ricky to die.
Part Three: Trial
Twenty-Three