Hallas didn’t look scared, though. He looked the same as ever: a small man with bad posture, a sallow complexion, thinning hair, and eyes that looked painted on. He looked like an accountant – which he had been in his previous life – who had lost all interest in the numbers that had previously seemed so important to him.
‘Enjoy your visit, boys,’ McGregor said, and went over to the chair in the corner. There he sat, turned on his iPod, and stuffed his ears with music. His eyes never left them, however. The circle of speaking holes was too small to admit the passage of a pencil, but a needle was not out of the question.
‘What can I do for you, George?’
For several moments Hallas didn’t answer. He studied his hands, which were small and weak-looking – not the hands of a murderer at all, you would have said. Then he looked up.
‘You’re a pretty good guy, Mr Bradley.’
Bradley was surprised by this, and didn’t know how to reply.
Hallas nodded, as if his lawyer had tried to deny it. ‘Yes. You are. You kept on even after I made it clear I wanted you to stop and let the process run its course. Not many court-appointeds would do that. They’d just say yeah, whatever, and go on to the next loser some judge hands them. You didn’t do that. You told me what moves you wanted to make, and when I told you not to make them, you went ahead anyway. If not for you, I would’ve been in the ground a year ago.’
‘We don’t always get what we want, George.’
Hallas smiled briefly. ‘Nobody knows that better than me. But it hasn’t been all bad; I can admit that now. Mostly because of the Chicken Run. I like going out there. I like the wind on my face, even when it’s a cold wind. I like the smell of the prairie grass, or seeing the day-moon in the sky when it’s full. Or deer. Sometimes they jump around up there on the ridge and chase each other. I like that. Makes me laugh out loud, sometimes.’
‘Life can be good. It can be worth fighting for.’
‘Some lives, I’m sure. Not mine. But I admire the way you’ve fought for it, just the same. I appreciate your dedication. So I’m going to tell you what I wouldn’t say in court. And why I’ve refused to make any of the usual appeals … although I couldn’t stop you from making them for me.’
‘Appeals made without the appellant’s participation don’t swing much weight in this state’s courts. Or the higher ones.’
‘You’ve also been very good about visiting me, and I appreciate that too. Few people would show kindness to a convicted child murderer, but you have to me.’
Once again, Bradley could think of no reply. Hallas had already said more in the last ten minutes than in all their visits over the last thirty-four months.
‘I can’t pay you anything, but I can tell you why I killed that child. You won’t believe me, but I’ll tell you, anyway. If you want to hear.’
Hallas peered through the holes in the scratched Plexiglas and smiled.
‘You do, don’t you? Because you’re troubled by certain things. The prosecution wasn’t, but you are.’
‘Well … certain questions have occurred, yes.’
‘But I did it. I had a forty-five revolver and I emptied it into that boy. There were plenty of witnesses, and surely you know that the appeals process would simply have dragged out the inevitable for another three years – or four, or six – even if I had participated fully. The questions you have pale before the bald fact of premeditated murder. Isn’t that so?’
‘We could have argued diminished mental capacity.’ Bradley leaned forward. ‘And that’s still possible. It’s not too late, even now. Not quite.’
‘The insanity defense is rarely successful after the fact, Mr Bradley.’
He won’t call me Len, Bradley thought. Not even after all this time. He’ll go to his death calling me Mr Bradley.
‘Rarely isn’t the same as never, George.’
‘No, but I’m not crazy now and I wasn’t crazy then. I was never more sane. Are you sure you want to hear the testimony I wouldn’t give in court? If you don’t, that’s fine, but it’s all I have to give.’
‘Of course I want to hear,’ Bradley said. He picked up his pen, but ended up not making a single note. He only listened, hypnotized, as George Hallas spoke in his soft mid-South accent.
2
My mother, who was healthy all her short life, died of a pulmonary embolism six hours after I was born. This was in 1969. It must have been a genetic defect, because she was only twenty-two. My father was eight years older. He was a good man and a good dad. He was a mining engineer, and worked mostly in the Southwest until I was eight.
A housekeeper traveled around with us. Her name was Nona McCarthy, and I called her Mama Nonie. She was black. I suppose he slept with her, although when I slipped into her bed – which I did on many mornings – she was always alone. It didn’t matter to me, one way or the other. I didn’t know what black had to do with anything. She was good to me, she made my lunches and read me the usual bedtime stories when my father wasn’t home to do it, and that was all that mattered to me. It wasn’t the usual setup, I suppose I knew that much, but I was happy enough.
In 1977 we moved east to Talbot, Alabama, not far from Birmingham. That’s an army town, Fort John Huie, but also coal country. My father was hired to reopen the Good Luck mines – One, Two, and Three – and bring them up to environmental specifications, which meant breaking ground on new holes and designing a disposal system that would keep the waste from polluting the local streams.
We lived in a nice little suburban neighborhood, in a house the Good Luck Company provided. Mama Nonie liked it because my father turned the garage into a two-room apartment for her. It kept the gossip down to a dull roar, I suppose. I helped him with the renovations on weekends, handing him boards and such. That was a good time for us. I was able to go to the same school for two years, which was long enough to make friends and get some stability.
One of my friends was the girl next door. In a TV show or a magazine, we would have ended up sharing our first kiss in a treehouse, falling in love, and then going to the junior prom together when we finally made it to high school. But that was never going to happen to me and Marlee Jacobs.
Daddy never led me to believe we’d be staying in Talbot. He said there was nothing meaner than encouraging false hopes in a child. Oh, I might go to Mary Day Grammar School through the fifth grade, might even through the sixth, but eventually his Good Luck would run out and we’d be moving on. Maybe back to Texas or New Mexico; maybe up to West Virginia or Kentucky. I accepted this, and so did Mama Nonie. My dad was the boss, he was a good boss, and he loved us. Just my opinion, but I don’t think you can do much better than that.
The second thing had to do with Marlee herself. She was … well, these days people would call her ‘mentally challenged,’ but back then the folks in our neighborhood just said she was soft in the head. You could call that mean, Mr Bradley, but looking back on it, I think it’s just right. Poetic, even. She saw the world that way, all soft and out of focus. Sometimes – often, even – that can be better. Again, just my opinion.
We were both in third grade when I met her, but Marlee was already eleven. We were both promoted to the fourth grade the next year, but in her case it was just so they could keep moving her along through the system. That’s how things worked in places like Talbot back then. And it wasn’t like she was the village idiot. She could read a little, and do some simple addition, but subtraction was beyond her. I tried to explain it every way I knew how, but she was just never going to get it.