Ricky begins to talk quickly. First, about Bessie and Alcide. Then—he can’t help himself, the words are tumbling out of him—about the car crash, about Oscar, about his father cradling Oscar’s head by the side of the road and singing to it; how clearly Ricky remembers that moment, the beautiful spindly sound of his father’s voice. He tells them about the photograph of Oscar he carried in his pocket as a child, about talking to it while he ate lunch crouched under the canopy of a yellowwood tree, Oscar tucked carefully between the snakelike roots.
An officer shifts in his chair. Another crosses his arms. This isn’t an introduction to the mind of a pedophile. These are one man’s memories, or else his imagination.
Clive catches Ricky’s eye and motions to prompt him. He should talk about what they’ve discussed. Ricky takes a deep breath. He must feel a strange mix of pride and shame now, all these eyes on him when he’s supposed to tell something even he knows to hide. “I’ve been molesting children since I was nine years old. Doing it is easier than you’d think.” The room goes still. Their raptness is his reward. “I just ask a child to sit on my lap. Children are always sitting on people’s laps, and it’s always children whose families I know. Then I touch them. I’ve even”—all these eyes on him, him who’s never been listened to this seriously, he cannot resist a bit of bragging—“done it with their parents right in the room.”
This is when, some in attendance will report later, they began to feel sick.
“There are three kinds of pedophiles,” Ricky continues. “The first kind does it to hurt children. They’re just bad that way. Maybe you even think they’re evil. Then there’s the second kind. They do it for control.”
A young woman stands up abruptly. Her eyes down, she walks quickly out of the room.
Ricky keeps going. “You know how it is,” he says, and it must be nice to be talking to them this way, as if they are on the same side of this problem and Ricky is helping them to understand people who are nothing like him. “They don’t have control in their lives, so they’ve got to have it over the kids.” He pauses. Perhaps he is remembering the therapist in Georgia, the careful questions she asked him: Was he frustrated in his life? Lonely? Depressed? The therapist thought his love for children was a replacement for something else. She didn’t understand. “Then there are guys like me.” He finally gets to explain. “I loved Jeremy. I loved him like a boyfriend/girlfriend kind of love. Jeremy was my true love.”
“If you loved him,” a man shouts, “why’d you kill him?”
The question seems to take Ricky aback. He’s silent for a minute. Then he blurts out, “I didn’t mean to. I thought he was Oscar.”
Whatever Clive hoped, whatever he planned for this day, has failed. The more Ricky talks, the sicker people feel.
Clive stands, putting his hand on Ricky’s arm to silence him. “This may have gone beyond what we intended. Ricky has had to struggle more than most of us. Despite the unfortunate thing that happened, Ricky tried very hard. I believe—and this may be hard for Ricky to hear me say, but we’ve talked about it and he knows I feel this way—I believe that Ricky is mentally ill.”
Clive’s career is based on his ability to read people. That’s true of any trial lawyer. It was true for my father, and when it went wrong for him was when his pain and depression fogged out that ability. And it’s especially true for death penalty defense lawyers, who must read a jury well enough to save their client’s life. Clive is almost uniquely successful in this regard, one of the most famous and most successful death penalty lawyers in the South. The man who’ll lose only six cases in two decades.
But he must not see the way an officer in the back row has curled up his lip. He must not see a woman’s face shut like an iron gate. Clive, in this moment, doesn’t seem to see what’s happening. How badly the crowd’s turned against him.
What he sees is the past.
“My father was mentally ill,” he continues. “No one understood him; they reviled him. Even my own family didn’t understand him. We have a chance now to understand Ricky. He’s being so brave. He’s working to face who he is. For that”—he looks down at Ricky, maybe he gives Ricky’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze before he looks back out at the room, the room in which person after person will remember this last line and repeat it to the prosecutors verbatim—“Ricky Langley is my hero.”
“There’s a case in Arizona right now,” an officer in the back of the room shouts, his voice hard as a bullet. He stands. “Maybe you’ve heard of it. A father found out that a man had molested his child and he hunted that person down and shot him again and again and every time he shot him he told him he wanted him to know what pain really was. If someone did that to you”—he points at Ricky—“would that stop you hurting children?”
Clive looks aghast, then flustered. Ricky stares down at the ground. Clive says, “I didn’t want to kill my father. That’s not how we deal with these cases.”
The officer ignores Clive. “Would that make you stop?” Right now the officer is remembering walking down the wet leaves on the side of the ravine, clutching his hat in his fist, planting his boots carefully so as not to stumble, holding his breath as he shines the flashlight into the wet leaves. How he hoped to see a child’s face, hoped though he knew that if he found the boy the boy might be dead. Then the strange mix of relief and despair that fogged his heart that night when there were only leaves. He told his supervisor he didn’t want to come to this meeting. He remembers seeing the killer’s face for the first time on the evening news and realizing the boy was dead. He told his supervisor he did not ever want to see that face again.
Come anyway, the supervisor said. He told the officer he could leave at any time.
But the officer can’t leave. He sits back down, his chest heaving hard, his face flushed. He is screwed to the chair by the bolt of memory. He is rooted as a witness. They are giving attention to the wrong person here. He closes his eyes to shut out the killer and tries to fix in his mind an image of the boy. The school portrait he was given back then. The boy’s blond hair. He offers that image in his mind like a candle.
Thirty-Two
With only two days left in Louisiana, I know what I’ve been avoiding. In the tens of thousands of pages I’ve gone through, the transcripts and serology reports and bodily fluid reports and the documents from Ricky’s life, his mental health records from Lake Charles and then from when he was imprisoned in Georgia, the only photographs I’ve seen of Jeremy are the ones in which he’s alive.
But that’s not how his story ended. I have been driven all along by the belief that there is a knot at the heart of the collision between me and Ricky that will help me make sense of what will never be resolved. The way my body is evidence. The way I carry what my grandfather did in my body. I carry it through my life. All the records I’ve seen have made me imagine Ricky, imagine his family, begin to empathize with him. I can’t not know—I can’t not face—what he did. I can’t allow even any part of myself to think that Jeremy remained the boy in his school photo. Unchanged and alive.