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Four people were dead, the bodies burned so badly that they virtually crumbled apart when the paramedics tried to extract them from the wreckage. The centerpiece of the news story was neither the macabre nature of the accident nor the loss of innocent life but the death of the prisoner. Asa Surrette had stalked and tortured and killed eight people, including children, in the city of Wichita, and had eluded execution because the crimes to which he’d confessed had been committed before 1994, when the maximum sentence in Kansas for homicide was life imprisonment.
The news of his death went out over the wire services and was soon consigned to the category of good riddance and forgotten. Also forgotten was the account given by the autistic boy whose breath had fogged the window just before the scarecrow man silhouetted against the truck’s headlights. But historical footnotes are tedious and uninteresting. Why should the little boy’s tale be treated any differently?
I DIDN’T WANT TO be unfair to Gretchen. Her childhood had been one of neglect and abuse. No, that’s not quite accurate. Her childhood had been horrific. Her body was burned with cigarettes when she was an infant. Many years later, Clete Purcel c
aught up with the man who did it, out on the flats, on the backside of Key West. Later, a man’s skin and most of his bones washed out of a sandbar, a Bic cigarette lighter wedged in what was left of the thorax.
At age six, Gretchen was sodomized by her mother’s boyfriend, a psychopath named Bix Golightly who did smash-and-grab jewel-store robberies and fenced the loot through the Dixie Mafia. Last year Gretchen took a pro bono contract on Golightly and found him sitting in his van at night in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans; she planted three rounds in his face. Clete saw it happen and called in a shots-fired but protected his daughter’s identity. His love for the daughter and his attempts at atonement almost cost him his life.
I liked Gretchen. She had many of her father’s virtues. There was no doubt that she was fearless. There was no doubt she was intelligent. I also believed that her contrition for her former life was real. However, there is a peculiar atavistic mechanism built into each of us that doesn’t always coincide with our thought processes. A tuning fork buried in the human breast develops a tremolo when we come in contact with certain kinds of people. Ask any career cop about former felons of his acquaintance who have stacked serious time in a maximum-security joint and were stand-up and took everything the system and the prison culture could throw at them and came out of it fairly intact and went to work as carpenters and welders and married decent women and started families. Every good cop is glad to witness that kind of success story. But when one of those same guys moves next door to you, or asks to come by your house, or introduces himself to your wife and children in the grocery store, a film projector clicks on in your head and you see images from this man’s past that you cannot stop thinking about. As a consequence, you create an invisible moat around your castle and loved ones and subtly indicate that it is not to be crossed by the wrong people, no matter how unfair that might seem.
I was helping Albert scrub out the horse tank in the south pasture when I saw Gretchen’s chopped-down hot-rod pickup coming up the dirt road from the state highway, the soft-throated rumble of the twin Hollywood mufflers echoing off the hillsides. “Albert?” I said.
“What?” he replied, obviously irritated that I had chosen to use his name as a question rather than simply ask him the question. His denim sleeves were rolled up on his arms, the exposed skin sprinkled with purple-and-blackish-brown discolorations that he refused to see a dermatologist about. Few of his university colleagues ever knew that Albert had been a drifter and roustabout and migrant farmworker at age seventeen and had done six months spreading tar on a Florida road gang. The greatest contradiction about Albert lay in the antithetical mix of his egalitarian social views and work-hardened physicality with his patrician features and Southern manners, as though his creator had decided to install the soul of Sidney Lanier in the body of a hod carrier.
“Did Clete tell you very much about Miss Gretchen?” I asked.
“He said she was planning to make a documentary on shale-oil extraction.”
“Did he tell you about her background?”
“He said she just finished film school.”
“She got mixed up with some bad dudes in Miami.”
He was bent over the rim of the tank, scrubbing a ring of dried red bacteria off its sides. I could hear him breathing above the sound of the bristles scraping against the aluminum. “What kind of bad dudes are we talking about?”
“Greaseballs from Brooklyn and Staten Island. Maybe some Cuban hitters in Little Havana.”
He nodded, still moving the brush back and forth. “I never liked the term ‘greaseballs.’ I know you use it to characterize a state of mind and not ethnicity. Just the same, I don’t like it.”
“Forget political correctness. She did contract hits, Albert.”
This time he stopped working. He was crouched on his knees, one arm resting on the lip of the tank. “Why isn’t she in jail?”
“Clete and I looked the other way. I don’t always feel real good about that.”
“Is she mobbed up now?”
“No, she’s done with it.”
He watched Gretchen’s hot rod come up the dirt road, the horses running beside it along the rail fence. “I had chains on my ankles when I was eighteen. I watched two hacks put a man on an anthill. I saw a boy locked in a corrugated tin sweatbox that almost cooked his brain. I was in a parish prison in Louisiana when a man was electrocuted twenty feet from the lockdown unit I was in. I could hear him weeping when they strapped him down.”
“I had to inform you, Albert.”
“Yeah, I know. If you were me, what would you do?”
I had to collect my thoughts before I spoke. “I’d ask her to leave.”
“Going to Mass this Sunday?” he said.
“You know how to rub the salt in the wound.”
He began hosing off the inside of the tank, tilting it sideways to force the water through the drain hole in the bottom. “We didn’t have this conversation.”
“Sir?”
He glanced at the sky. “It looks like more rain. We can use as much as we can get. Those goddamn oil companies are cooking the whole planet.”
