Conviction

FIVE

IT WAS ON TERRI'S FOURTH VISIT TO RENNELL PRICE, WITH forty-one days before his execution, that she first took Carlo with her.

They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County, the city behind them a mirage seen in glimpses through a low, swirling fog, the point of the Transamerica Pyramid piercing its highest wisps. On the far side of the bridge the parched, brown hills of Marin were like another country, bathed in the sun of a clear fall day. As they sped up Highway 101, Terri described Rennell's life.

"San Quentin has roughly six hundred prisoners on death row," she told Carlo. "More than anywhere in America. Rennell's in East Block, where most of them are—five rows of cages stacked in tiers. Each cell is six feet by six, with a bunk, a stainless steel toilet and sink, a maximum of six cubic feet for possessions, one small shelf, and maybe a TV with headphones to cut down the noise.

"There's a lot of shouting—conversations about sports, or people calling out chess moves, or just screaming for no reason. East Block's also where they put prisoners with things like psychosis, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder. Which makes it worse for Rennell—most of the death row population is sort of dulled down, just resigned. But the mentals are loud—"

"Can Rennell see anyone?" Carlo interjected.

"Only the guards. The walls to each side are concrete—you can only look out the front, and that has bars which are crosshatched to keep the prisoners from pelting guards with urine or feces. They can peer in at you, of course—whether you're sitting on the toilet or just lying on your bunk. Otherwise there's just noise bouncing off concrete and metal."

"Does Rennell get out for meals?"

Terri shook her head. "They prepare the food in the main kitchen. Then guards push it over on carts, raise it on a mini-elevator to the tier—Rennell's on the fourth tier up—and slide it through a food slot built into the bars. The hot breakfast comes with a box lunch for later, a sandwich with peanut butter or mystery meat and maybe some fruit and a couple of cookies. Then there's another hot meal for dinner. After a time, the guards pick up the trays." Glancing at her watch, Terri stamped down on the gas pedal. "From the standpoint of the prison administration, cell feedings take up a lot of time and labor. But letting this crowd eat together would be worse. Especially with all the crazies."

Carlo had never thought to visualize Rennell Price's day. Now he imagined himself stuck in a cage amidst five tiers of cages housing people he could only hear; the endless, dissociated sameness of waiting for trays to materialize through a slot, bringing much the same meals you'd had the day before. "What about showers?" he asked.

"Showers you get three times a week. But the showers are converted cells, which never seem to work that well. Best not to expect warm water." Squinting, Terri took her sunglasses off the dashboard and slid them on. "Or to smell very good. That's one of the prices of exercising daily."

"Where do they do that?"

Terri jerked down the sun visor. "Exercise? There are six exercise yards, each with a basketball hoop and a toilet, each surrounded by concrete walls and partially covered with a metal roof in case it's raining out. On a catwalk above the roof are guards with rifles—to quell riots or, in theory, to keep some prisoners from getting killed by others. San Quentin's a dangerous place—a lot of prisoners refuse to exercise for fear of getting killed by other inmates, or maybe just because the yards are crowded and there's nothing much to do . . ."

"Can't they segregate the worst ones?"

"Actually, they try." Turning on the right blinker, Terri glanced over her shoulder and changed lanes, exiting the highway at the sign for San Quentin State Prison. "They divide prisoners into categories," she continued. "Grade A's, the supposedly well-behaved ones, can exercise together up to five hours a day. Grade B's—psychotics and gang members and the obviously violent—don't get out much at all. And then there are the 'walk-alones,' like Rennell and Payton.

"Walk-alone is the name for at-risk inmates: snitches, or prisoners whose crimes are so low status that other prisoners think they don't deserve to live." Terri smiled faintly. "I guess they don't see the irony."

"Where do Rennell and Payton fit in?"

"Child sex criminals. From top to bottom, the hierarchy goes from rage killings—some guy catches his girlfriend with someone else—to someone convicted of killing a child in the course of sex. That's the Price brothers.

"In a way, they're lucky. Snitches can't go in the yard. But sex offenders get to exercise with their own kind, several hours a day." Turning down a two-lane road toward the prison, Terri added softly, "Rennell gets to see his older brother almost every day. So they get to go through life together, just like before."

* * *

San Quentin sprawled across an isolated finger of land. Parking in the lot below the guardhouse, Terri and Carlo got out.

She had schooled him in the rules. They both wore gray suits to differentiate themselves from the prison population—blue or denim was forbidden. They locked all their possessions in the Jeep except for a notepad, pen, their drivers' licenses, Terri's State Bar ID, and the clear plastic bag filled with quarters, which—on Terri's instructions—Carlo carried so that they could get Rennell food from the vending machine. Then they headed for the guardhouse which screened all visiting lawyers.

"We're the privileged visitors," Terri remarked. "Nonlawyer visits are a bitch."

"How so?"

"People like Rennell's grandmother can only call a few hours every week to schedule visits. And the phones are so busy you have to keep hitting the rep dial and hope that you'll get through.

"Often, you won't. That means no visit. If you get lucky, then you go to the general visiting area and sit in a cage with your prisoner, surrounded by more cages holding other prisoners and their visitors. It's been like that ever since members of a rival gang got into a fight—what had been an open room became a zoo." Terri opened the door to the guardhouse, a one-story wooden structure that resembled a cheap trailer. "To the authorities, visitation is just another problem they'd sooner be without. So they make it as hard as possible for someone like Eula Price to even schedule a visit. But then running death row's no picnic, I suppose."

At the desk inside, a somewhat chatty guard—happy to be working outside the prison walls, Carlo assumed—waited while they filled out a visitor form before shooing them through security. Carlo stripped off his belt and shoes and watch and passed through a metal detector; retrieving them, he emerged from the building with Terri to find himself inside San Quentin State Prison.

To his right were mock Tudor homes, housing for prison staff; ahead, looming above the sprawling stucco prison, was a tower manned by guards with rifles. To the left was death row, next to a ventilator shaft jutting from the prison's roof.

Terri followed his gaze. "The gas chamber," she told him. "It's still available for occupancy. But lethal injection's now the death of choice."

"Who decides?"

"Rennell." Her tone was clipped. "A bullet in the brain seems more humane than either. But that's too up close and personal."

They passed through a second security station with a guardhouse and metal detector. Beyond that a neatly tended square of grass surrounded a marker engraved with the names of murdered prison guards. "You mentioned gangs?" Carlo said. "You'd think they'd keep a pretty tight lid on this place."

"They do. But somehow the folks inside come up with knives and makeshift weapons. And there's still an underground economy: people making 'pruno'—alcohol fermented from fruit—or getting drugs, maybe through employees gone bad. There's everything from weed to crack and black tar heroin." Stopping at an iron gate, the entry to death row, Terri added, "As for gangs, it's a veritable United Nations. You've got the Bloods, the Crips, the Skinheads, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia, and the North and South Mexicans. There's even alliances: at the moment, the North Mexicans and the Bloods are united against the South Mexicans and, of all people, the Aryans. Go figure. I guess it's a case of self-protection over principle."

"What about our guys?"

"They're just survivors." She paused. "I've never met Payton. But I hear he's spent the last fifteen years becoming a real badass—abs of steel, two hundred push-ups at a crack. He's made himself mean enough to live, and maybe for Rennell to live, too."

The gate buzzed open. Inside a cramped space a guard in a plastic booth took their visitor forms. Then they passed through a door composed of iron bars into the visiting area.

It was as Terri had described it—two parallel rows of Plexiglas booths encased in wire. One row had views of the bay through high windows; the second, which did not, included "Visitors' Booth 4." The guard opened its metal doors and locked them inside.

"Too bad," Terri remarked. "Rennell likes the view. But this way he'll focus better."

As they settled in two plastic chairs on one side of the small wooden table, Carlo prepared himself to meet his new client. "Building a relationship," he remembered Terri saying, "is the only way to pose hard questions and deal with hard subjects—like abuse. And we need to prepare Rennell to meet with Tony Lane." Then she had paused, and her green-flecked eyes had become more distant. "We also have to prepare him to die. That's not a job for strangers."

At the entry to the row of booths, Carlo saw a large black man with his hands shackled behind his back, flanked by two guards in bulletproof vests. "Rennell," Terri said softly.

Silent, Carlo watched them approach.

Briefly, Terri touched his arm. "Just remember this: as long as we're in this cage, and no matter what we think, there's never a reason to doubt Rennell's innocence. Never give him one. Not in your words, or your expression—for you to help him, he has to believe in you. No matter what."

How, Carlo wondered, could she control her thoughts with such discipline, or even believe she could? Then the guard opened the cage, and Rennell stepped inside.

The guard locked the door behind him. Rennell stood over them, an otherworldly gaze dulling his large brown eyes. His wrists thrust backward through a slot in the door, as though schooled by habit. Then the guard unsnapped the cuffs.

Rennell flinched. "Hi, Rennell," Terri said. "It's good to see you."

* * *

In the next few moments, Carlo tried to absorb as much about Rennell Price as his senses allowed.

The big man settled across from them with painful deliberation, as though he had to think hard about the act of sitting. Carlo flashed on his maternal grandfather after his first stroke; Carlo Carelli had never again trusted his body, and to move his hand, or take a step, had seemed a willful act of memory. But this man's face, younger than his years, lacked all emotion—except that his gaze was so fixed on Terri that Carlo felt invisible.

"This is Carlo," she told Rennell. "My stepson. He's also a lawyer, and he's going to help us."

Smiling, Carlo held out his hand. It took Rennell a few seconds to grasp it, his grip as lifeless as his fleeting look at Carlo.

"How's your television working?" Terri asked. "Okay, I hope."

"Good."

The deep voice conveyed far less emotion than the word. "How's Hawkman doing?" she asked.

Rennell's brief glance at Carlo conveyed discomfort with his presence, perhaps distrust. "Good. Like I told you. But mostly same is same."

That much, Carlo believed. "What else have you been up to?" Terri asked.

Still Rennell did not look at Carlo. "I've started making a book," he said in an oddly stubborn tone. "Of my life."

Carlo heard this as a kind of narcissism, reminding him of an odd fact recalled by his father: that Lee Harvey Oswald's mother had once proposed to write a book entitled "A Mother's Place in History." But perhaps, Carlo amended, beneath this was a sad hope that his life mattered to anyone at all.

"What kind of book?" Terri asked.

"With pictures, for Grandma. Next time I want you to bring a camera."

The demand, both childish and peremptory, bemused Carlo further. He found nothing in Rennell's eyes to give him any clues as to whether his client suffered from a poverty of thought, feeling, or both.

"She wants to come see you," Terri said in a sympathetic voice. "But she's way too sick."

For the first time, Rennell's expression became probing. "Is she dead?"

Terri shook her head. "No," she answered softly. "Just old and sad and worried for you."

Rennell laughed softly. "Worry," he said. "Like she always done."

Carlo could not tell whether he heard disdain or merely fact. But Terri nodded her understanding. "That's because she loves you." She cocked her head, eyes expressing curiosity. "What else do you remember about her?"

"Chicken dinners."

What about the time she lost her house for you? Carlo wondered. But Terri smiled. "Did Payton like those, too?"

"Guess so."

"How's he doing, by the way?"

Rennell shrugged. "He say follow the rules and you be all right."

"Sounds like good advice, Rennell."

"Guess so." His stubborn tone returned. "Long as Payton be here, they don't give me no trouble in the yard."

At this, Carlo glanced at Terri: Payton's execution date was twenty-five days away, and his lawyers now had little hope—whatever else, no one believed Payton Price to be retarded.

"He say they going to kill him," Rennell continued softly. "Say he in a race with Grandma for the grave. Won't see him in the yard no more, he say. I got to keep my head down when he be gone."

Terri considered him. "When you were kids," she ventured, "I guess Payton looked after you."

For the first time, Rennell seemed to smile, the slightest change in his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth. "Yeah, he done that. Took me to school, maybe sometimes to the store."

"What else did he do?"

Rennell's eyes clouded. "Sometimes, if things was bad, he'd take me out to hide."

Once more, Terri cocked her head. "Hide from what?"

Rennell folded his arms.

"Your father?" Terri asked.

Rennell's shoulders hunched. "Sometimes he'd take a belt to me."

"Your daddy? Or Payton?"

Rennell shook his head. "Sometimes he'd hit me a lick, keep me in line. But mostly he'd look out for me."

Carlo saw Terri hesitate, trying to interpret this. Then she asked, "Did Payton ever get you in trouble?"

"No."

The stubborn tone had returned. Quietly, Terri prodded. "Not even about selling crack?"

Rennell looked up at her. "Payton never did nothing," he said in a stone-cold voice.

To Carlo it was as though, quite suddenly, Terri were a stranger. Sifting his impressions, Carlo tried to imagine how Rennell would seem to someone who, unlike him, did not strain to sympathize.

"I'm just trying to understand things," Terri told him. She paused, eyes silently seeking trust. "I want to bring another friend to see you, Dr. Lane. He can help me tell the judge what you're really like, and why you're innocent."

Rennell's eyes watched her closely. "Then get me some of that DNA. Man on TV told me about that."

"You ask Payton about it?"

Rennell nodded. "He say don't bother. They won't never be spending money on no gangbanger."

It was as good a rationalization as any, Carlo thought. "Sometimes it's not money," Terri said. "Sometimes DNA doesn't work. If it doesn't, what should I tell the judge?"

Rennell sat back. In a tone even wearier than before, he repeated, "I didn't do that little girl."

It was as though, Carlo thought, Rennell Price were talking to himself. He could not begin to guess whether this was a statement of enduring truth, or all that a guilty man had ever known to say.

"I know that," Terri answered. "Is there anything else you can tell me to help the judge believe us?"

Rennell's eyes closed. Silent, he rocked in his chair, seemingly beyond words. "I'm a respectful man," he murmured at last. "I wouldn't do that to no child."

To Carlo, the statement had a rote quality, something learned very long ago. But Terri's gaze grew more intense. "Who taught you to be respectful?"

"Grandma."

Whose authority, Carlo thought, seemed to have expired long before Thuy Sen's death.

Terri leaned closer. "Did you always try to do what your grandma said?"

Rennell's eyes shut tighter. "Yes, ma'am."

Terri paused. Softly, she asked, "Is Payton a respectful man?"

For a long moment Rennell would not answer. "Payton never did nothin'," he insisted.

This seemed to be ingrained—the point Rennell would uphold, whatever the accusation. But it was Terri and Carlo's job, perhaps contrary to Rennell's most basic instinct, to separate him from Payton on pain of death. Still quietly, Terri inquired, "Did Payton say that Tasha Bramwell would help you? Or maybe Jamal Harrison?"

At last Rennell opened his eyes. "Payton didn't say nothin'," he said. "Took care of me, is all."