Larry scrambled hurriedly on, letting out his breath in a burst as soon as he was a couple of yards into the turn behind the cells and felt he was out of earshot of the guards.
Just what was awaiting him in the boiler room dawned on him. Tally wouldn’t do something like this without back-up, never did. Two men, maybe three. Then the couple of guards who’d helped get Roddy out of his cell.
Larry had been good in his day, one of the best, but even then taking out four or five at once would have been a tall order. And unlike Tally and his crew, he didn’t spend every day in the muscle yard training up. The hopelessness of what he was attempting weighed heavy on him, telling in the ache in his limbs as he dragged himself through the narrow shaft.
As he came to the junction with the main shaft rising up from the boiler room, the warm air wafting through intensified. He scrambled forward faster, more desperately, not sure whether it was to get away from the intense heat or to ensure that he got to Roddy in time. He’d given up caring whether he was making a noise or not, the thud of his elbows and knees against steel a repetitive, penetrating echo.
He stopped abruptly as he came to the grill by the upper part of the boiler room, hurriedly unscrewed its bolts, and yanked it aside. Still on his hands and knees he kept still, his breathing shallow, taking stock. No sounds or voices that he could pick out.
Though something else reached him in that moment that made him have doubts again: the soft lap and sway of the Achalaya river echoing up through the waste pipe a yard to his side, beckoning, taunting. Elusive freedom. Yet suddenly so tangible, real, that he felt he could reach out and touch it.
Probably his last and only chance. He’d long ago decided that he couldn’t face another day inside, so a commute to life imprisonment held nothing for him. And his chances of a complete reprieve were practically nil — so his only real hope of freedom lay in what he could hear now with the gentle lapping of the Achalaya river. Make the break and find out what was happening with Joshua, hold him in your arms again… stay back and save Roddy… make the break…
Or head back to his cell and they all make the break together in three weeks when the tide would be right, as they’d all originally planned. He wasn’t going to be able to save Roddy in any case. One against four or five, he didn’t stand a chance. Maybe he should…
His thoughts were broken. He could hear voices from the far end of the boiler room.
2
Lawrence Tyler Durrant, born May 8th 1962 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the second child (there’s an elder sister) of Nathan Joseph and Myrie-Jane Durrant. The family moved to New Orleans when Durrant was eleven.
First arrested 19th August 1992, six months after the offence, made a full confession on his second interview, held without bail in Oakdale Detention Centre until trial, which ran through April and May 1993. Sentenced to death by lethal injection by Judge Thomas S. Colby on May 26th and bought to Libreville prison.
Jac lifted his head from the files and took a quick sip of coffee, grimacing as it trickled down. It was already cold; he’d been reading longer than he had realized.
Most of the information was in a five-page summary provided at the time of Durrant’s appeal, but Jac found himself leafing back through the files each time he hit a key point — parents, siblings, wife and young child, past criminal form — to find out more.
No history of criminality in the family. Nathan Joseph had been a postal sorting worker for most of his life, then later managed a small chain of grocery stores, while Myrie-Jane worked in a local Ninth Ward cafe once the kids had grown up. The only other family member with any run-ins with the law, though once removed, was Lawrence’s first cousin, Simon: juvenile shoplifting and one count of assault when he was nineteen.
Lawrence was a different matter. After five years of trying to make his name as a light-heavyweight boxer, interspersed with casual jobs, he became a serial house thief — though out of four previous arrests, New Orleans PD had only managed to make one conviction stick.
While his falling from grace as a boxer could have been viewed as the start of his criminality, his police file noted that there was ‘suspicion of other robberies both before his boxing career and while he was still amateur, albeit that no arrests were made during these periods’. And little pattern of violence connected with the robberies, except on one occasion when he was disturbed and knocked a man unconscious with a couple of pistol-whip blows from behind.
But the NOPD argued that Durrant had simply been lucky enough not to have been seen on any of the past robberies. And on this occasion, Jessica Roche had seen him, and he was desperately afraid of going down for a second time. He’d had a taste of prison, a three-year stretch in Oakdale, and didn’t want to return. Second offence, he’d have got a minimum of five years.
Jac rubbed the bridge of his nose. With Durrant’s later self-educating and finding religion in prison, his life was certainly one of contrasts — boxer, thief, scholar, preacher — few of them sitting that comfortably together.
Jac went back to the beginning of the segment on Durrant’s family. Second marriage to Francine Gleason (Durrant’s first at the age of nineteen ended in divorce after only fifteen months) just three years before the Roche break-in, no record of other robberies in that period, or at least none that the NOPD had him down as a specific suspect for, and a baby son, Joshua, only three months old at the time. Not the best timing to re-offend.
But then that had been part of the motive, the prosecution had argued: the financial pressures of the new family and Durrant losing his job as an assistant in a sporting-goods store only six weeks previously. Then his return to heavy drinking and his car accident four months after the murder while out on one of his binges. Larry Durrant’s life was a wreck of mishaps and falling from graces. Doing the right thing at the right time was far from his strongest suit.
Then the therapy sessions following the accident to treat his resultant partial amnesia — or ‘selective amnesia’ as the prosecution later termed it, ‘to blank out the darkness of his actions that night with Jessica Roche’ — and his confession coming out when…
Jac jumped at a sudden bang from next door sounding like a pistol-shot, before he realized it was a door slamming. A man’s voice, shouting, came straight after.
‘I told you. I don’t like you working there any more.’
‘And how am I meant to take care of Molly and pay for my courses?’ The woman’s voice higher-pitched, shriller. Defensive.
‘I’m workin’ again now, I could take care of you. And you got that other money.’
‘Yeah, Gerry. And you know what that other money was for. You know! And how come you’re still splashing it around?’
‘Come on, babe — gimme some credit. I told you what mine was for, too. But this time, I’m like an assistant bar-manager rather than just a barman… and the tips are big.’
Muted mumbling and rustling, as if he was in close, trying to hug and sweet-talk her. Then, after a moment, rising from the mumbling:
‘Give it up, babe… give it up.’ The words punctuated by what sounded like gentle kisses. ‘For me. Is that too much to…’
‘No… no!’ Sharper, louder. Annoyance at his intimacy to try and sway her. ‘It’s not even open for… what? What are you doing? You’re hurting me.’
‘I just don’t like other guys lookin’ at you like that. It drives me, well… crazy, thinking about it.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Crazy’sabout right. Now let me go.’ Brusquer rustling as she wrenched free, and then the slamming of another door.