“Impressive, isn’t it?” he said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “I missed summa by like point-oh-six or some such. I really wanted to go to Yale, but their rugby team flat out blew that year.” He took a long sip, burped, and helped himself to a crushed Boston Kreme.
“What are you doing down here?” I said.
“Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame,” he sang with his mouth full. “But I know—”
“Please shut up,” I said.
“Fine,” he said, chewing. “Like everybody else, I guess things went south until there was no more south left to go. This is actually my granddaddy’s place. He was a Texas oilman. He actually won it in a poker game at the age of seventy. Family legend has it he came down, took one look around, and telegraphed back, ‘If all works out, I’ll never be sober again.’ ”
“Touching story,” I said.
“Anyway,” Charlie said. “A few years ago, I inherited it and his dusty toolbox. After I bring this baby back to its former glory, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I got a friend who works for HGTV, said I’d be a shoo-in for one of those hunky carpenter dudes. How much money they make, you think?”
“You’re too old,” I said.
He finished his doughnut with another slug of beer and made a growling sound. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m also actually taking a stab at being the next John Grisham or Ernest Hemingway. You been to Papa’s house yet? Did you know some of the cats there have six toes?”
“Did you know Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun?” I said quickly. “This is a lot of fun and everything, but we need to go over Harris’s case. I got the brief, but I’d like to hear in your own words, in a nutshell, where it went wrong.”
“In a nutshell,” Charlie said. “OK, let’s see. It all went wrong probably right around the time the cops said, ‘Hey, Harris, you have the right to an attorney,’ and Harris didn’t say, ‘Where’s the phone?’ ”
He leaned back in his swivel chair, balancing the can on his bare chest.
“Harris was his own worst nightmare. First he tells the cops he didn’t know Foster. Lie numero uno. Then, faced with the DNA results, he claims he remembers having consensual sex with her at the prison where he worked and she was a volunteer. He said the coed scholarship musician was ‘quite the little freak,’ quote unquote. That she liked to slap and scratch him and for him to cuff her up before they did it in the janitor’s closet.
“Which is exactly what he said happened when she came in to volunteer that morning before she went missing. He claimed after he went off shift that day, he was with another woman, his fiancée, the whole day at the Miami Seaquarium. But when police questioned his alibi, the fiancée completely denied it.”
“Crap,” I said.
“On a pointy stick,” he said. “That’s why my white-shoe firm handed the case to me when his first lawyer was disbarred for bilking his real estate clients. See, like you, I was once moronic enough to believe in Harris, too. Enough at least to take it to trial.”
“What happened in court?”
“It came down to the jury not buying that a poor black prison guard could possibly have consensual sex with an angelic white college student who volunteered there. Foster’s mother sat in the front row, and she cringed and cried whenever the notion of her daughter and Harris being together came up. The jury wasn’t too hot on the idea either. Slam dunk. Capital murder.”
Charlie yawned and licked some custard off his finger.
“I left my firm a year later. Couldn’t stop thinking about it, I guess. So there you have it. In a nutshell. Trying to dig Harris out of his hole cost me pretty much everything. How you figure you’re going to get it done in a week?”
“I don’t know,” I said standing, “but I’m going to do something that maybe you haven’t thought of this year.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” Charlie said, sitting up.
“I’m going to fucking try,” I said.
Chapter 75
IT WAS FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON by the time my chartered plane brought me up to Raiford, where Harris was being held on death row.
Raiford, in North Florida near Jacksonville, was about as far from Key West as you can get without leaving the state. Charlie had suggested to Harris that a local attorney might be more practical, but Harris had refused to get someone else.
It was Charlie or no one, Harris had said. Which made me wonder about Harris’s judgment.
I passed a small group of young protesters sitting on cars parked in the brown grass across from the maximum security prison. A waiflike teen in a vintage flowered dress waved a sign at me that said, DOWN WITH THE DEATH PENALTY. FREE JUSTIN HARRIS!
“Doing my best,” I mumbled as I approached the razor-wire fence of the prison parking lot.
With its king palms, hedged grounds, and whitewashed mission architecture, the entrance of Raiford looked more like a nineteenth-century resort than a prison.
But I nearly forgot that impression forever the moment I stepped inside and took in the stark concrete-and-steel interior decoration. I was buzzed in and felt as much as heard the clack as a door bolt shot home behind my back. It was the first time I’d ever been inside a prison. Movies didn’t do justice to the demoralizing horror.
From somewhere and everywhere came indeterminate shouts, overly loud televisions, flushing toilets, steel on steel.
I thought about that night on the beach so long ago. About Ramón Peña. About the fate I’d dodged.
Or had I? I wondered. Every time I thought I’d gotten away from it, it seemed to pop up again, like a will-o’-the-wisp in reverse.
After being admitted and having my bag searched, I was escorted by a mute, broad-backed Hispanic guard down a bleak cement hallway. I had to wait twenty minutes before Justin Harris hobbled into the death row visitor area in wrist-to-leg shackles. The guard with him actually cuffed him, like a wild beast, to a raised iron ring in the floor beside the table.
And the guard didn’t go far. He stood watching us intently from the other side of a large wired-glass window.
I looked at Justin Harris for the first time. He was heavier than his Fox News picture. He was a big man, gone to fat, his massive shoulders and arms and chest crumpled toward the floor as if something at his center had caved in. He sat there breathing raspily as he stared at me blankly. I noticed a raised, bluish bump on his cropped head.
“Where’s Charlie?” he finally said. “I thought they said my lawyer was here.”
“I’m Nina Bloom. I work at a law firm in New York, and I was assigned to help out Charlie on your case. What happened to your head?”
“This?” he said, pointing at the bruise with a goofy grin. “I bumped it water-skiing.”
I let out a breath as I held eye contact with him. He had a week to live, and he was being a wiseass? Was Harris actually nuts? I wondered.
“I know you didn’t do this, Justin,” I said quietly. “I’m here to help.”
Anger flashed in Harris’s suddenly wide eyes. His chains jingled as he sat up. “Oh, really. How do you know I didn’t do it? Because I’m black, and you voted for Obama? Listen, I fought for this country with honor with the Army Rangers in the first Iraq War, and now they’re closing down Gitmo. Maybe you and your ACLU pals should skip me and try springing a terrorist.”
“I know you believe in this country, Justin,” I said even quieter now, as I took his medal out of my bag.
“Who gave you that?” he said, outraged.
“Your mother. I’m here for her as well as you.”