Conviction

FOUR

AT EIGHT-THIRTY THAT NIGHT, THE HABEAS CORPUS TEAM GATHERED in a booth at Terri's favorite steak house, Alfred's—from past experience, she knew them to be carnivores.

Terri sat across from Carlo. To her left was Johnny Moore, bearded and grizzled, a sixtyish former FBI agent turned investigator. On her right sat Tammy Mattox, the mitigation specialist, a Buddha-faced Alabaman with an ample belly and raucous laugh, so tenacious in her gathering of evidence that she claimed—credibly—to know the layout of every trailer park in America. On the drive over, Terri had told Carlo a story that typified Tammy's zeal: learning that the family of a death row inmate held an annual reunion deep in the hills of Arkansas, Tammy had simply shown up with a fresh-cooked ham and a basket of biscuits. When, three hours later, somebody finally asked who she was, her answer didn't much matter; by then she was family herself.

"The thing about retarded folks," Tammy told Carlo, "is people expect them to be slack-jowled and bug-eyed. Otherwise they're a real disappointment."

Sitting beside Carlo, Dr. Anthony Lane nodded his agreement. He was both a neuropsychiatrist—an expert in organic brain damage—and a specialist in retardation, and it would be his job to examine Rennell Price for impairments in mental functioning. Lane was a large black man with thick glasses, so big that Carlo would have thought of him as hulking but for the benignity of his gaze and the gentleness of his manner. "The retarded," he observed, "are as complex as the rest of us, and as varied. Assuming that Rennell is impaired, we have to make sense of what he tells us, and what he did. Even if it seems to make no sense at all."

Tammy sipped her mineral water. She did not drink the cabernet Terri had ordered for the table; years ago, when her drinking had become commensurate with the stress of her job, she had quit cold turkey. "Retarded folks," she told Carlo, "develop all sorts of strategies to keep from looking dumb. Do you know about masking?"

"No."

"Like anyone," she explained, "the retarded want to fit in. One way is to be agreeable, respond to cues the way they believe they should. A Rennell Price—if he is impaired—still wants to be part of the crowd, and may be smart enough to know he can't be. So he tries to cover up. Like he may have with Monk. But instead of seeing Rennell as sullen and resistant, as the cops did, consider the possibility that he was just trying to keep up, to give the answers Monk expected from him. That may be why his responses about Thuy Sen were so ambiguous."

"Except for his bottom line," Carlo said. " 'I didn't do that little girl.' "

Lane touched his arm. "I'll tell you a classic story, Carlo. In a pilot program, a number of retarded people were discharged from an institution and allowed to seek work. During job interviews, the great majority tried to conceal their hospitalization by claiming that they'd been in prison. They thought that sounded better." As Carlo smiled, Lane added, "Anyhow, I find it interesting that Rennell was so adamant about his innocence. No matter how hard Monk tried."

"To be fair to Monk," Terri said, "many of the retarded can do a lot of the things anyone else can—drive, hold a job, make friends, talk sports, join the military, keep secrets, read the news, and even sound knowledgeable about one thing or another. It'd be easy for Charles Monk to meet someone like that and just write him off as 'no genius.' But what's missing is far more profound: the ability to understand and process information, to engage in logical reasoning, and to appreciate the nature of his dilemma, or respond appropriately."

"What causes all that?" Carlo asked.

Dinner arrived: chateaubriand with béarnaise sauce for Terri and Carlo; prime rib for Johnny Moore; strip steaks for Tammy Mattox and Anthony Lane. Lane hoisted his bowl-shaped glass. "Maybe this," he answered. "Alcohol—if Mom drinks enough while the kid's in utero. Or crack, or even prescription drugs pregnant women shouldn't take. There's also hereditary retardation, genetically transmitted. Sometimes you get a process of downward natural selection: inbreeding among the less gifted, which creates a smaller and smaller gene pool, so that the genetics for impaired intelligence predominates. And as the gene pool becomes more marginal, aggravating factors like fetal alcohol syndrome tend to increase—the mother's far more likely to be unaware of risks."

"Like in the Bayview," Mattox said flatly. "Part of my job is to gather up Rennell's school records, teachers' observations, medical and psychiatric records, and then interview people who knew Rennell—and Payton—from the beginning."

"Then I'll evaluate all that," Lane went on, "and meet with Rennell. That'll include testing for lesions on the brain, organic brain syndrome, head injuries, and, of course, IQ."

Carlo sat back, momentarily savoring the wine. It struck him that the warmth of their environment—red-flocked wallpaper, leather cushions, the familiar, dim-lit comfort—might represent the last relaxed moments he would enjoy in weeks. "I've read the Supreme Court opinion in Atkins," he told Lane. "It bars executing the retarded without ever defining what retardation is."

"That's up to us." Lane cut a bite of steak. "There are three standard criteria. First, significantly subaverage intellectual functioning—there's no hard and fast IQ, but seventy is generally considered the cutoff point."

"Seventy," Carlo repeated. "Isn't that awfully low?"

"In a word, yes," Mattox said sardonically. "But why make it easy."

"Second," Lane continued, "are significant limitations in what's called adaptive functioning, found in at least two of the areas we need to get along in life—such as communication, social skills, academic ability, use of community services, conformity to law, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In the case of a black kid from the Bayview, we can expect to see shortfalls like these aggravated by a chaotic and maybe abusive family, lousy social services, poor health care, poverty, low employment, and the like."

"The third criteron," Mattox finished, "is that these problems have been visible before eighteen. Otherwise, think of all the death row inmates who'll start faking retardation. Like a high school production of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Johnny Moore emitted a short laugh. "One thing you can be sure of," he told Carlo. "Give me a group of people charged with the same crime, and it's the retarded guy who's most likely to get the death penalty. Unlike our friend Eddie Fleet, he won't be smart enough to cut a deal, or navigate the system."

"I keep coming back to seventy," Carlo told Lane.

"So will the Attorney General. He'll want seventy to be the absolute ceiling. And he'll play into all the lay conceptions of the retarded—they slobber, they drool, they walk stooped, they talk funny, they've got Down syndrome." Lane glanced at Moore and Mattox. "Our job's harder. Not only do we have to show how Rennell got to be who he is—his entire life—but how he coped with the cops, the trial, and the justice system . . ."

"Let's get back to testing," Carlo said. "What kinds of tests?"

"Tests that measure performance—how well and quickly the brain functions. For example, if I blindfold you, then give you blocks with various shapes—squares, triangles, and circles—I'm betting you could put the right shapes in a board with the same shapes cut out. If you're retarded, believe it or not, that may not be so easy."

Carlo tried to imagine the brooding thug of Laura Finney's description wearing a blindfold and putting shapes in a board, like a kid at a kindergartner's birthday party. Shaking his head, he said, "What if Rennell doesn't want to do it?"

Lane shrugged. "If he's retarded, he won't. I guarantee you that much."

"To me," Tammy said, looking to Lane for agreement, "showing limitations in adaptive behavior is the most important. No one spends their entire life faking being slow in school, lousy with girls, and short of walking-around sense."

"That's why Tammy will construct a social history," Terri added. "From prenatal care to parenting, relatives, peer relationships, school performance, mental health, substance abuse, bizarre behavior, problems with juvenile authorities, and well before all that—the same work-up for every member of his family. Plus all the records we can find—for sheer credibility, paper trumps everything, particularly with judges who don't trust us . . ."

"All the stuff no one ever bothered with." Mattox jabbed the table for emphasis. "No one who represented Rennell Price knows who this man really is. Probably no one in his life does—excepting Payton, maybe. But six weeks from now, we will.

"A social history is like a novel—rich in characters and incident. But the tragic aspects tend to be numbingly the same: mental problems in the family, parental substance abuse, prenatal risk factors, nightmare childhood." She paused, her southern drawl deepening. "Honey, you just won't believe what we're gonna find out. It's so goddam baroque some judges hate us for making them confront it—they don't ever want to know. Like it's their mission to kill somebody, but confronting the life of the guy they're executing will offend their sensibilities.

"And this stuff is common—it's common. I remember one mama telling me our client wasn't bad like her other kids—she'd never had to stick his hand over the hot stove. Like I was a mom, too, so I'd get what she meant."

Carlo put down his fork. "Which brings us to the heart of things," Terri said softly.

"Yup," Mattox said. "Abuse."

"Hard to get at sometimes," Lane observed. "If it exists, trauma like that can be painful to open up. Families guard their secrets—fiercely so, the more dysfunctional they are. And no one else may know. Society does a rotten job with at-risk kids."

Terri sipped her wine. "Rennell Price is on death row because Monk, Mauriani, and twelve jurors all believed he was a party to a child sexual abuse. Was he abused? Conversely, is there any evidence that he was predisposed to be an abuser?

"There's no direct evidence of guilt. No witnesses; no physical evidence of sexual contact between Rennell and Thuy Sen. What we're left with is a damning but wholly circumstantial case. Which Rennell denies."

"He's got a real investment in denial," Lane observed. "But if you're right—that he's a wobbler, borderline retarded—he might not be a very good liar. To me that lends his denial a certain credence."

Listening, Carlo felt himself being drawn into a complex world—equal parts psychodrama, mystery, and horror story. It gave him a new appreciation of the mettle, and complexity, of his young stepmother's character, complicated still further by the deep ambivalence which this case surely must create. "There's a lot to consider," Terri was saying. "Start with Rennell's relationship to Payton. Could Payton lead him into an act he wouldn't do on his own?"

Lane fiddled with his salad. "At eighteen, Rennell would have been ragingly hormonal. And if he was retarded, he might have been more comfortable with children than with female peers. But he'd need a real antisocial component in his makeup for him to force a nine-year-old into oral copulation. Unless he was high on crack."

Cocking her head, Mattox looked across the table at Lane. "Isn't there a contraption called a pleathysmograph, or something—measures penile activity in response to visual cues, like naked women or little girls in tutus?"

"There is, actually. If you like that sort of thing."

"Too demeaning," Terri said firmly. "We're trying to build a relationship with this man, not turn him into a lab experiment from Krafft-Ebing." She drained her glass. "Still, I'd give a lot to know what really happened fifteen years ago."

Carlo gave her a quizzical smile. Would you? he wondered in silence.

But it was only as they left, and he and Terri stood in a dense fog waiting for the valet to bring their cars, that she asked, "How was dinner with Elena?"

"Good," Carlo answered, then added quietly, "I'm pretty sure she doesn't know, Terri. There's been nothing in the news, after all. Our client's sliding toward death without a ripple."