Conviction

FIFTEEN

FROM THE MOMENT THAT TERRI STEPPED INTO THE PLASTIC CUBICLE where he waited with his lawyer, Payton Price surprised her.

The first jolt was his appearance. She still thought of him as the twenty-two-year-old crack dealer in the mug shot, with a smooth, hard handsomeness and the cold, indifferent stare meant to signal his lethality. But fifteen years had passed. The man sitting across from her had a premature touch of gray in his close-cropped hair and creases of age in a thin face lit by eyes bright with intelligence, its harsh angles leavened by a full mouth, turned up slightly at one end to signal amusement at their circumstances. The other thing that struck Terri was Payton's stillness. Compared with his lawyer, Paul Rubin—a lean, bespectacled, thirtyish public defender twitching with repressed energy—Payton seemed an oasis of calm, facing his last ten days of life with the fatalism of someone who has moved beyond hope.

"So," Payton said to Terri, "you're Rennell's lawyer. Talks about you all the time."

The curiosity in Payton's tone was matched by his expression. But for their surroundings, he could have been meeting his kid brother's first girlfriend, brought home for a family dinner. "We've spent a lot of time together," Terri answered.

"So he tells me. You're the first one he ever gave a damn about, or thinks gave a damn about him." A brief smile showed a flash of gold-capped teeth. "Keeps runnin' on about how beautiful you are. Course he's been in here a good while now, and he never had much luck with women."

The last remark, too wryly delivered to be slighting, was darkened by its tacit reference—which Terri thought intended—to the murder of Thuy Sen, reinforcing her queasy near-certainty that this man was guilty of a loathsome crime into which, perhaps, he had led Rennell. As he sat beside his client, Rubin's eyes darted between Payton and Terri. It was all too apparent the lawyer did not want her here.

She decided to start slowly. "Fifteen years," she said. "How have you two gotten by?"

"Day at a time—one push-up or sit-up at a time, five hundred of each, each and every day." His mouth twisted in a brief, bitter smile. "Helps to have a purpose. One of mine was to keep Rennell and me from gettin' buttfucked. This life could have been hard on him."

The sardonic acknowledgment of his responsibility for Rennell suggested, to Terri, more self-awareness than she had expected. "Still," she said, "you spend a lot of the day alone."

He gave a measured shrug, a slight movement of the head. "You learn to organize your time, make prison serve you as best you can. I read a lot of history—African mostly. Try to write a little poetry." His tone took on the pride of the self-educated. "Keep up with the world, like what's happenin' in the Middle East. Don't think a pack of white folks in Washington ever gonna be able to fix that. I mean, we invented fucking Osama-been-missin', and this guy Saddam, and then when they don't turn out like they're supposed to, we have to kill 'em. Think we'd of learned by now."

The pithiness of this assessment made Terri laugh with surprise. Then her amusement was overshadowed by the sad realization that fifteen years on death row had produced a more thoughtful man than selling crack in the Bayview ever could have—assuming the unlikely, that Payton Price would have lived that long. But the end result would be the same, his premature death.

He seemed to read her thoughts. "Well," he said evenly, "you didn't come to hear my views on ge-o-politics. You're hopin' to keep Rennell from joinin' me in Paradise."

Terri nodded. "I thought one of you was enough."

For the first time, Payton averted his eyes, gazing down at the table. "Rennell says you been askin' about when we was kids. Think any of that shit matters?"

"It should." Acutely conscious of Paul Rubin's presence, Terri decided to avoid, until the end, the circumstances of Thuy Sen's death. "Rennell's slow," she continued. "That much we know for sure. But we don't know all we need to about how his family affected him."

Payton glanced up. "What?" he inquired in mock amazement. "You mean our Mama hasn't straightened all that out?"

Terri said nothing.

Again Payton gazed at the table. "Weren't no Disneyland," he said in a quieter tone. "I'll say that much for it."

"How did you get through it?"

His fleeting smile suggested weary tolerance of a question which, while both gratuitous and stupid, managed to evoke pain. "Bein' Vernon Price's kid teach a man to lower his expectations. But Rennell had it worse—that's what you're here for, right?"

"Uh-huh."

" 'Slow' don't begin to cover that boy. He was slow crawlin', slow standin' up, slow walkin'. Our daddy treated him like some dog you'd kick for havin' half a brain." Payton looked up at her, unsmiling now, voice toneless. "When he was two, maybe three, Daddy would feed Rennell beer so his head flopped to the side. Then he'd sit him down on the porch and spin him in circles till he tumbled off the edge and started crying. Made our daddy laugh like he was crazy."

The last laconic phrase was pregnant with horror: at six or seven, Payton Price had realized that his father was insane, his brother helpless. "Is that when you started hiding him?" she asked.

Another fleeting smile. "He told you about that?"

"He kept talking about the bush."

"He liked it there. But there was nothin' I could do to hide that boy enough—he was just so stupid. When my mama was passed out, and Daddy gone, sometime I'd have to find their money and go to the store for food, then get back to the house, all without gettin' rolled. No way to do that and take Rennell. So I'd tie him to the bedpost so he wouldn't try and follow me and get hisself run over." Payton folded his hands in front of him. "I could see why Daddy wanted to cuff him. Couldn't do a thing with him—too stupid even to keep hisself away from old Vernon. He'd just take it and take it and take it, like that was how his life was s'posed to be."

Listening, Terri felt a frisson of pity: for the older brother, riven by compassion, anger, and contempt, and more piercingly, for Rennell. The scapegoat, he must surely have grown to believe himself deserving of the most arbitrary abuse, and been both mystified and pathetically grateful for Payton's every protective act. "Did your mother try to protect him?" she asked.

Payton stared at his hands. "She'd cuff him, too. He was so pitiful he just brought more trouble down on her—Daddy always pissed at her for givin' him such a stupid child." Payton's voice grew harsh with memory. "All I had to do was look at either one of them, and I could see trouble comin'. Rennell didn't have no clue. So I was stuck with him."

Terri cocked her head. "Why did you bother?"

Payton looked up at her with a bleak smile which never reached his eyes. "Ever wake up at night to hear a child screaming 'cause his daddy's stripped him naked and made him sit on a radiator so hot it's spittin' steam and water? That's a sound you don't want to hear but once."

Paul Rubin's eyes closed briefly, reflecting the nausea Terri felt. Softly, she asked, "Is that why Rennell couldn't sleep?"

Payton nodded. "Way too scared to sleep. No way out for him at all—neighbors were scared of Daddy, their kids don't want nothin' to do with Rennell. Only place it's safe is on the streets, and even there you gotta get by, get food, and keep Rennell out of trouble. I figured it out for both of us."

"Dealing crack?"

Payton shook his head. "Rennell wasn't no good there, either. Too slow to be muscle—got hisself beat up on. The one time I let him deal he wound up with a stretch in juvenile hall. Come out a whole different person."

"How so?"

Payton sat back, eyes veiled as though remembering. "At our grandma's we each had our own room. But when Rennell come back he wanted to sleep with me. 'Cept he couldn't sleep—he'd pace up and down half the night, and when I'd make him lay on the bed he'd do it in his street clothes, holdin' his pocketknife and layin' on his back. First all he told me was 'You don't never sleep facedown in lockup.' "

For Terri, the last detail held a premonition. "And later?"

"He finally wore hisself out so bad he fell asleep. I could feel him twistin' up the sheets. Then he started screamin' 'Stop' over and over, sweat streamin' down his face, both hands gripping his jeans by the belt loops." Payton looked up at Terri, voice softer. "He didn't have to tell me nothin' then."

"Did he ever tell you?"

"Never made him. Just made him sleep alone. Boy couldn't sleep without no nightmares."

For an instant, silent, Terri flashed on Elena. Absently, Rubin removed his glasses and began to wipe them. "Always the same nightmare?" Terri asked.

"No." Payton sounded tired now. "Sometimes about Mama and Daddy."

"What exactly?"

Payton seemed to slump, his air of laconic composure slipping away. "Daddy used to tie her naked to a door handle and whip her with a belt. Made us watch that. Then he'd fuck her in the booty till she couldn't cry no more. Watchin' made Rennell cry, too. Still cryin' about it when he's eighteen." Briefly, Payton shrugged. "Maybe now, for all I know. Don't sleep with him no more."

Terri sat back, quiet for a moment. Payton looked up at her. "No more questions, counselor? Spent enough time at the zoo?"

"Not yet," she answered with some effort. "I've been reading the police reports from when your mother stabbed your father. All they tell me is that she did, not what happened before."

Payton's eyes narrowed slightly. "That's 'cause I never told 'em," he said at length. "You really want to know?"

"Yes."

"Our daddy made Mama suck Rennell's dick."

Startled, Terri shuddered: in one sentence, Payton had cast her worst imaginings of Rennell and Thuy Sen, and what psychology might underlie it—as well as the potental reason for Rennell's stubborn refusal to admit the act itself—in a horrific new light. "After all Daddy did," Payton added conversationally, "a nine-year-old's dick seems like a small thing to kill him over. But I guess Mama had her standards."

Terri gazed at him, face cradled in one hand, her stomach feeling raw and empty. Rubin slumped in his chair.

Softly, Terri asked, "What happened with Thuy Sen?"

Twitching to life, Rubin clamped a hand on Payton's wrist. "He can't answer that," the lawyer snapped at Terri.

Payton faced him. "You don't know the answer," he said. "Gonna die, man—no help for that at all. Might as well tell someone."

Rubin shook his head. "Whatever you tell Ms. Paget won't be confidential. You could be admitting to a capital crime."

"Yeah," Payton answered tersely. "I got that. The crime I'm gonna die for. I just learnt the word for that: re-dun-dant."

Without awaiting a response, Payton turned to Terri. "Happened just like they said—girl choked to death on come. Only thing they got wrong was 'bout Rennell." Payton paused, his smile tinged with an ironic melancholy. "He's scared of the dark—afternoon was the only time Rennell could sleep. Poor sucker slept right through that girl dyin'."