Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

NOT ALL BRIDES ARE BEAUTIFUL

THEY SAY THAT all brides are beautiful, but I didn’t like the look of this one. She came into the prison reception area wearing a lavender suit and a little black hat with a veil. Her figure was okay, but when she went up to Tracer and that other photographer from the wire service, there was a hard look about her, despite that spun-sugar smile. I knew it would be easy to get an interview-she’d insist on it-but that didn’t mean I was going to enjoy talking to her.

“Is it true you’re going to marry Kenny Budrell?” I called out.

She redirected her smile at me, and her dark eyes lit up like miners’ lamps.

“You’re here for the wedding, honey?” she purred. “Have you got something I could borrow? I already have something old, and new, and blue.”

Just a regular old folksy wedding. I was about to tell her what I’d like to lend her when I felt a nudge in my side. Tracer-reminding me that good reporters get stories any way they can. I managed a faint smile. “Sure, I’ll see what I can find. Why don’t we go into the ladies’ room and get acquainted?”

She smiled back. “This is my day to get acquainted.”

“That’s right,” said Tracer. “You’ve never met the groom, have you?”

Kenny Budrell had been a newsroom byword since before I joined the paper. By the time he was eighteen, his clip file in the newspaper morgue was an inch thick: car theft, assault and battery, attempted murder. He did some time in the state penitentiary about the same time I was at the university, and it seems we both graduated with honors. The next news of Kenny was that he’d robbed a local convenience store and taken the female clerk hostage. Tracer was the photographer on assignment when they found her body; he says it’s one of the few times he’s been sick on duty. It took three more robberies, each followed by the brutal murder of a hostage, before the police finally caught up with Kenny. He didn’t make it through the roadblock and took a bullet in the shoulder trying to shoot his way past.

The trial took a couple of weeks. The paper sent Rudy Carr, a much more seasoned reporter than I, to cover it, but I followed the coverage and listened to the office gossip. The defense had rounded up a psychologist who said Kenny must have been temporarily insane, and he never did confess to the killings, but the jury had been looking at that cold, dead face of Kenny’s for two weeks and they didn’t buy it. They found him guilty in record time, and the judge obliged with a death sentence.

After that, the only clippings added to Kenny’s file were routine one-column stories about his appeal to the State Supreme Court, and then to Washington. That route having failed, it was official: in six weeks Kenny Budrell would go to the electric chair.

That’s when she turned up.

Varnee Sumner-sometime journalist and activist, full-time opportunist. In between her ecological-feminist poetry readings and her grant proposals, Varnee had found time to strike up a correspondence with Kenny. The first we heard of it was when the warden sent out a press release saying that Kenny Budrell had been granted permission to get married two weeks before his execution.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that Varnee Sumner wanted to be pals-that’s probably what my city editor was counting on when he assigned me to cover the story.

“What’s your name?” she asked me as she applied fuchsia lipstick to her small, tight mouth.

“Lillian Robillard. Tell me-are you nervous?” I decided against taking notes. That might make her more careful about what she said.

She smoothed her hair. “Nervous? Why should I be nervous? It’s true I’ve never met Kenny, but we’ve become real close through our letters-I’ve come to know his soul.”

I winced. Kenny Budrell’s soul should come with a Surgeon General’s warning. Maybe she wasn’t nervous about marrying a mass murderer, but I would have been.

My thoughts must have been obvious, because she said, “Besides, they’re not going to let him come near me, you know. Even during the wedding ceremony he’ll be on one side of a wire screen and we’ll be on the other.”

“Will they let you spend time alone with him?”

That question did faze her. “Lord, I hope-” I’d swear she was going to say not, but she caught herself and said, “Perhaps we’ll have a quiet talk through the screen-Honey, would you like to be my maid of honor?”

“I’d love to,” I said. “And would you like to give me an exclusive pre-wedding interview?”

“I wish I could,” she said, “but I’ve promised the story to Personal World for ten thousand dollars.” She straightened her skirt and edged past me and out the door.

I didn’t think it was possible, but I was beginning to feel sorry for Kenny Budrell.

“You looked real good out there as maid of honor,” Tracer told me as we left the prison. “I got a good shot of you and the warden congratulating the bride.”

“Well, if I looked happy for them, pictures do lie.” The television crews had arrived just as we were leaving and Varnee was granting interviews right and left, talking about Kenny’s beautiful soul and how she was going to write to the President about his case. “You know why she’s doing this, don’t you?”

Tracer gave me a sad smile. “Well, I ruled out love early on.”

“It’s a con game. She stays married to him for two weeks, after which the state conveniently executes him, and she’s a widow who stands to make a fortune on movie rights and book contracts. I Was a Killer’s Bride!”

“Maybe they deserve each other,” said Tracer mildly. “Kenny Budrell is no choirboy.”

I pulled open the outside door fiercely. “He grew up poor and tough, and for all I know he may not be in his right mind. But there’s nothing circumstantial about what she’s doing!”

Tracer grinned at me. “I can see you’re going to have a tough time trying to write up this wedding announcement.”

He was right. It took me two hours to get the acid out of my copy. But I managed. I wanted to stay assigned to the story.

I didn’t see the new Mrs. Budrell for the next two weeks, but I kept track of her. She went to Washington and gave a couple of speeches about the injustices of the American penal system. She tried to get in to see the Vice President and a couple of Supreme Court justices, but that didn’t pan out. She managed to get plenty of newspaper space, though, and even made the cover of a supermarket newspaper. They ran a picture of her with the caption COURAGEOUS BRIDE FIGHTS FOR HUSBAND’S LIFE.

Because of the tearjerker angle, her efforts on Kenny’s behalf received far more publicity than those of the court-appointed attorney assigned to his case. Allen Linden, a quiet, plodding type just out of law school, had been filing stacks of appeals and doing everything he could do, but nobody paid any attention. He wasn’t newsworthy, and he shied away from the media blitz. He hadn’t attended Budrell’s wedding and he declined all interviews to discuss the newlyweds. I know, because I tried to talk with him three times-the last time he’d brushed past me in the hall outside his office, murmuring, “I’m doing the best I can for him, which is more than I can say for-”

He swallowed the rest but I knew what he had been about to say. Varnee wasn’t doing a thing to really help her husband’s case, although she’d been on two national talk shows and a campus lecture tour, and there was talk of a major book contract. Varnee was doing just fine-for herself.

The whole sideshow was due to end on April third, the date of Kenny’s execution. The editor was sending Rudy Carr to cover that and I was going along to do a sidebar on the widow-to-be. I wondered how she was going to play her part: grieving bride or impassioned activist?

“I’m glad to see it’s raining,” said Tracer, hunched down in the backseat with his camera equipment. “That ought to keep the demonstrators away.”

Rudy, at the wheel, glanced at him in the rearview mirror and scowled. He had hardly spoken since we started.

I watched the windshield wipers slapping the rain. “It won’t keep her away,” I said, feeling the chill, glad I’d worn my sheepskin coat.

“You’ve got to give the woman credit, though,” Tracer said. “She’s been using this case to say a lot of things that need saying about capital punishment.”

I sighed. If you gave Tracer a sack of manure, he’d spend two hours looking for the pony.

“She’s getting rich off this,” I pointed out. “Did you know that Kenny Budrell has a mother and sisters?”

“And so did two of the victims,” added Rudy with such quiet intensity that it shut both Tracer and me up for the rest of the trip.

The prison reception room was far more crowded for the execution than it had been for the wedding. By now Varnee had received so much publicity she was a national news item, and when we arrived she was three-deep in reporters. She was wearing a black designer suit and the same hat she’d worn for the wedding. I knew she wouldn’t give me the time of day with all the bigger fish waving microphones and cameras in her face, but I did get a photocopy of her speech on capital punishment from a stack of copies she’d brought with her.

“You’d better talk to her now,” Tracer said. “In a few minutes they’re taking the witnesses in to view the execution and you’re not cleared for that.”

I stared at him. “You mean she’s going to watch?”

“Oh, yeah. They agreed on that from the start.”

I might have gone over and talked with her then, but I noticed Allen Linden, Kenny’s attorney, sitting on a bench by himself, sipping coffee. He looked tired, and his gray suit might have been slept in for all its wrinkles.

He looked up warily as I approached.

“You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want,” I said.

He managed a wan smile. “Have I seen you somewhere before?”

I introduced myself. “You’ve dodged me in the hall outside your office a few times,” I admitted. “But I didn’t come over here to give you a hard time. Honest.”

He let out a long sigh. “This is my first capital murder case,” he said in a weary voice. “It’s hard to know what to do.”

“I’m sure you did your best.” He was very young and I wasn’t sure how good his best was, but he seemed badly in need of solace.

“Kenny Budrell isn’t a very nice person,” he mused.

I was puzzled. I thought lawyers always spoke up for their clients. “You don’t think he’s innocent?”

“He never claimed to be,” said Linden. “At one point he expressed surprise at all the fuss being made over a couple of broads, as he put it. No, he’s not a very nice person. But he was entitled to the best defense he could get. To every effort I could make.”

I guess it’s inevitable for a lawyer to feel guilty if his client is about to die. He must wonder if there is something else he could have done. “I’m sure you did everything you could,” I said. “And if Varnee couldn’t get him a stay of execution, it must have been hopeless.”

He grimaced at the sound of her name. “She’s not a very nice person, either, is she?”

I hesitated. “How does Kenny Budrell feel about her?”

“Very flattered.” Linden smiled. “Here is a minor celebrity making his case a prime-time issue. He has a huge scrapbook of her-he keeps her letters under his pillow. He said to me once: ‘She loves me, so I must be a hero. I’ve worried a lot about that.’ ”

There was a stir in the crowd and the warden, flanked by two guards, came into the room. I stiffened, dreading the next deliberate hour.

“It will be over soon,” I whispered.

“I know. I hope I’ve done the right thing.”

“Are you going to watch the execution?”

Linden shut his eyes. “There isn’t going to be one. I found an irregularity in the police procedure and got the case overturned. I’ve just made Kenny Budrell a free man.”

“But he’s guilty!” I protested.

“But he’s still entitled to due process, same as anyone else, and it’s my job to take advantage of anything that will benefit my client.” He shook his head. “I can’t even take credit for it. It just fell into my lap.”

“What happened?”

“Remember when they captured Kenny at the roadblock?”

“Yes. He was wounded in the shoot-out.”

“Right. Well, in all the excitement nobody remembered to read him his rights. Later, in the hospital, when he was questioned, the police assumed it had already been done. One of the state troopers got to thinking about the case and came forward to tell me he thought there had been a slipup. I checked, and he was right: Kenny wasn’t Mirandized, so the law says there’s no case. The trooper told me he came forward because of all this business with Varnee. He said maybe the guy deserved a break, after all.”

Tracer got a first-class series of pictures of the warden telling Varnee that her new husband was now a free man until death do them part, and of Varnee eventually starting to scream right there in front of the TV cameras. As far as I’m concerned, they deserve a Pulitzer.