The Death Factory: A Penn Cage Novella

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“Smells like cigars,” Jack says with a smile. “Every car he ever had smelled like this.”

“I hope this one always does.”

The heavy doors close with a satisfying thunk.

“Tom loves this car,” Jack says. “He says it reminds him of his time serving in Germany.”

I back out of the parking space and pull up to Jefferson Davis Boulevard. “Where do you want to go?”

“Why don’t we go to a drive-­through and get some coffee, then take a drive? I haven’t been to Natchez in six years, and that was just for Christmas. I must have seen a hundred downed trees during my ride in from the airport. Big oaks.”

“Katrina hit us pretty hard, even up here. Some families were without power for a week.”

“I’d like to see that gambling boat that nearly sank. Or that you nearly sank. Is it still down under the bluff?”

“No. They’ve towed it to a refitting yard in New Orleans for repairs. I hear the company’s going to sell it, and the new owners may reopen in three or four months. Can’t let a cash cow sit idle.”

“I’d like to see the river, anyway,” Jack says. “Being near something of that scale has a way of putting problems into perspective.”

“The river it is.”

St. Catherine’s Hospital stands on high ground about two miles inland from the Mississippi River. I turn north on Highway 61, then pull into a McDonald’s drive-­through lane and order two coffees, and a chicken sandwich for Jack.

“What’s happening in California?” I ask, making conversation.

“Same as it ever was, ever was, ever was.”

“And Frances?” This question carries some weight; Jack’s wife was diagnosed with lupus eight years ago.

“She’s doing as well as can be expected. Up and down, you know. She lives for the grandkids now. Jack Junior just extended his fellowship at Stanford, so we see him a lot. And Julia just moved from Sun to a start-­up you haven’t heard of yet.”

“But will soon, I suppose?”

Jack laughs. “From your lips to God’s ears.”

As the line of cars inches forward in fits and starts, Jack taps his fingers on the dash. “You know,” he says, “there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

“What’s that?”

“Why have you stayed in Natchez? I mean, I understand why you came back. Your wife’s death, right? And your daughter having trouble with it?”

“That was most of it. More than half.” I hesitate, wondering whether today is the day to delve into darker chapters of the past. But the idea that my father might be hiding something makes me think of another mentor who threw my lifelong opinion of him into doubt. “But there was more to leaving Houston than that.”

“More than Sarah’s death? And your daughter?”

I hesitate a final moment, then plunge ahead. “Yes. Something strange happened just before Sarah died. She only lived four months after the diagnosis, you know. And right near the end, this other thing came out of nowhere. It knocked the cork out of something that had been building in me for a long time, while I was working as a prosecutor. I just didn’t know it. After I resigned from the office to focus on writing, I repressed it. I thought I’d put all that behind me. But I hadn’t.”

“Does this have to do with you shooting that skinhead guy? Arthur Lee Hanratty?”

That name triggers a silent explosion of images behind my eyes: a pale face leering in the dark, a bundled baby blanket clutched in one arm below it, the other reaching for the handle of our French doors in the moonlight shining through them—­

“It was Joe Lee Hanratty I shot,” I say softly. “Arthur Lee was executed in 1998.”

“Oh.”

“No. This was something else.”

Jack nods thoughtfully. “Your death penalty cases?”

“How did you know?”

“I sensed a change in you over the years you worked that job. I could tell you were glad to get out of it. I’ve been surprised that you haven’t written about it, though. Not as a central focus, anyway.”

“Not honestly, you mean.”

Jack shrugs. “It’s your life, man. I’d like to hear about it, but I understand if you’d rather not go there.”

An awkward silence fills the car. Thankfully, the SUV ahead of us moves, and the McDonald’s server passes me the coffee and a white bag. One minute later I’m turning off Highway 61 onto 84, heading west toward the river while Jack munches on his chicken sandwich.

The road that leads toward downtown Natchez cuts through old plantation lands still verdant with foliage in late October. Where slaves once walked, a foursome of black golfers in bright caps and polo shirts putt white balls across a manicured green. Behind them the sun falls on oak and elm trees hardly dotted with autumn browns, but heavy with Spanish moss. When we reach the intersection with Homochitto Street, I turn right, into town, and soon we’re passing Dunleith, the antebellum mansion that I always say makes Tara from Gone with the Wind look like a woodshed.

“Why haven’t you bought that yet?” Jack asks, elbowing me in the side.

“You couldn’t pay me to take on that kind of headache. Besides, a friend owns it, and even he spends most of his time out of town. It’s tough living in a house ­people fly to every weekend to get married.” As I brake for the red light at Martin Luther King, I say, “I’ve actually been thinking about writing about what happened in Houston. But that would upset a lot of ­people. Maybe damage some careers. It’s erupted into a major scandal over the past year, and it’s going to get worse.”

“Now I’m really interested. You said this happened near the time of Sarah’s death? How long before she got sick had you resigned from the DA’s office? A while, right?”

“Three years. I left shortly after I killed Hanratty. That experience scared Sarah so bad that she simply couldn’t handle me staying in the job.”

“So whatever it was took three years to come to a head?”

“If it had been left to me, I probably would have buried it for life. But then someone came walking out of the past, almost like a messenger. And he was bearing in his hands the very thing I thought I’d escaped.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“It was.”

The light changes, and I head into the center of old Natchez, where the doors of the police cars once proclaimed WHERE THE OLD SOUTH STILL LIVES—­and not so long ago. I turn left on Washington Street, where my town house stands, then drive slowly toward the river between the lines of crape myrtles drooping over parked cars.

“When I took the assistant DA job in Houston, I was one year out of UT law school. Sarah and I had gotten married my senior year. I was pro–capital punishment, always had been. And in a world of perfect cops, lawyers, crime labs, and juries, I still would be. But Harris County tries more capital cases than any other in the nation. It also sends more ­people to death row, and they don’t linger there for decades. They get executed. I saw that sausage grinder from the inside, Jack. Unlike in the rest of America, the death penalty system in Houston pretty much works as the law intended. Mainly because it’s adequately funded. We had enough courts and judges to handle the caseload—­or a good part of it—­and we could afford to pay visiting judges, experts to testify, and order complex forensic analyses. That streamlined the process, made it practicable. Then you have the Texas ethos that’s persisted from the frontier days. ‘West of the Pecos justice,’ they call it. If somebody stole a horse or shot somebody in the back, they hung him. You can bet the gangbangers who evacuated New Orleans during Katrina aren’t finding Texas to their liking.”

Jack says, “I’ve heard Harris County called ‘the Death Factory’ on talk radio in California.”

“They call it that all over the country, and not without reason. Harris County sends more ­people to death row than the other forty-­nine states combined.”

“Jesus, Penn.”

“I know. I spent most of my time working for the Special Crimes Unit, prosecuting complex cases like criminal conspiracies, serving on joint task forces, that kind of thing. But I also handled a certain number of capital murder cases. It’s like a rite of passage in that office, and I did my share. And I don’t mind telling you, I had no problem with it. Because when you deal with the victims, as we did, it’s hard to see any flaw in capital punishment. I studied the brutalized corpses, examined crime scenes, hugged distraught parents and siblings—­some of whom never recovered from losing their loved ones in that way. I heard audio and saw video recordings that killers had made of their crimes. And in every death case I prosecuted, I realized that there was a moment in which the killer had coldly made a decision to take his victim’s life. The rapist who strangled a girl after raping her, then stomped on her throat to be sure she was dead. The robber who shot terrified cashiers and clerks who had obeyed every order given to them. The skinheads who chained a guy to a bumper and dragged him over gravel until he was in pieces. When you see that . . . it’s hard to see justice in any sentence but death.”

“But . . . ?” Jack says softly, his eyes knowing.

I sigh heavily. “But over time, certain things began to bother me.”

“Such as?”

“Well, for one thing, Houston has no public defender’s office.”

“Isn’t that in the Constitution or something? Or the Bill of Rights?”

“Most ­people think so, but it’s not. And while defendants often received excellent representation from appointed counsel, other times . . . not so much. As time went on, I also realized that most of the judges handling those cases—­even the appeals—­were former prosecutors, some of them from Harris County itself. I started to feel that the deck was stacked in the state’s favor. That bias was so entrenched in the system that even the defense bar sort of accepted it as the reality of Texas. Don’t get me wrong, the defendants were guilty. And we were following the law. Joe Cantor always said, ‘If the ­people don’t want me to enforce the law, they should change the law or elect another DA. Because not enforcing the law only breeds contempt for it.’ And as simplistic as that may sound, he was right.”

“Sounds like the worst nightmare of my California neighbors.”

A dry laugh escapes my throat. “It is. Another thing: death penalty law in Texas contains almost no subtleties, which you have in other jurisdictions. The end result was, our office took capital cases to trial that never would have seen a courtroom in other jurisdictions, even in other parts of Texas. They would have been pled down to lesser sentences, or even lesser charges. So, I’d had doubts building up for a while. I think Joe Cantor kept me around as a sort of foil—­the loyal opposition. Not that I was anti–capital punishment, but I held every case to a very high standard. That’s partly what kept me there, feeling like I was working as a check to that ‘hang ’em high’ bias, keeping the system in balance.”

“A seductive lure for a budding crusader like you.”

This makes me chuckle. “I guess so. But when Joe Lee Hanratty tried to kidnap Annie, and I shot him, life spun out of control. Overnight, I became a hero in Texas. I’d sent a skinhead cop-­killer to death row, and when his brother tried to kidnap my daughter from her crib in revenge, I gunned him down like it was Dodge City. When some Chronicle reporter actually compared me to Wyatt Earp, half the lawyers in the office started calling me ‘Marshal.’ Joe Cantor loved the notoriety. I truly was his fair-­haired boy, then. But Sarah nearly lost her mind. The what-­ifs were killing her. What if I hadn’t heard the noise that night? What if I’d walked into that hallway just three seconds later? Annie would have been gone. Dead. Sarah wanted me out of the criminal justice business for good.”

“So that’s when you started writing your novel?”

One block from the river, I turn right on Canal Street and head for Natchez’s Garden District.

“No. I’d been writing what became False Witness off and on since 1987, when Scott Turow published Presumed Innocent. I’d submitted a few chapters to several literary agents under a pseudonym, and one had taken me on after The Firm exploded in 1991. By the time I shot Hanratty in 1994, I had a ­couple of offers on the table. Nothing big. But when the story of the shooting broke, my agent told me if I’d publish under my own name, she could get me two or three hundred thousand dollars for a two-­book deal. I swallowed my pride, put a muzzle on my conscience, and took the money. In the end, there was an auction among the major publishers, and I got half a million bucks.”

Jack shakes his head. “And the book went to number three?”

“Number four. But that was high enough. That’s what allowed me to resign from the DA’s office. I just slipstreamed behind Grisham after that, and life got a lot better very quickly—­at least in the material sense.”

“That’s when you moved into that neighborhood where President Bush the elder lived?”

“Tanglewood?” I laugh at Jack’s memory. “Yeah. That was the era when Enron yuppies were buying old lots, razing the houses, and building McMansions. But Sarah decided to restore the original house on our lot. It was a midcentury modern, and she wanted a project. We got Annie onto the waiting list at the Kinkaid School, and it looked like we’d landed in the middle of the American Dream. I wrote three more novels in quick succession, and each sold better than the last. Sarah kept working on the house, wouldn’t let me help her at all. She also kept my nose to the grindstone on the novels. Like my mom, she didn’t trust something as unreliable as publishing.”

“And then she got cancer,” Jack says in a flat voice.

“Naturally.”

To our right appears a low building with a sign that reads THE NATCHEZ EXAMINER. Caitlin’s Acura is parked out front, and through the back windshield I can see my daughter’s backpack sticking up.

“That’s Caitlin’s paper,” I tell him, trying to delay the conversation. “Annie’s with her now. We’re hoping to have some better news before we tell her about Dad.”

“Good thinking,” Jack says. “So, how are you guys doing? Are you ever going to make an honest woman of her?”

This, at least, brings a smile to my face. “Actually, we decided just this morning to get married. Right about the time Dad was having his heart attack.”

“Seriously?” Jack gives me a sidelong glance. “Let’s hope that’s not an omen.”

I laugh off his comment, although the juxtaposition of those events is a little disconcerting.

Looking forward again, Jack says, “Is this the way down to the river?”

“It can be. I thought I’d take you up to the city cemetery, where you can see ten miles of the Mississippi from one spot.”

“Let’s get down to the riverbank first. I want to put my hand in that water. The Mississippi gives me that feeling Don McLean sang about in ‘American Pie.’ Driving your Chevy to the levee and all that. I know that song was about the loss of innocence, but it makes me feel nostalgia for mine.”

This is the Jack I remember. “One nostalgia trip, coming up.”

I turn left and drive to where the road ends at a two-­hundred-­foot drop to the river. Here the roller-­coaster-­steep Pierce’s Mill Road leads down to where the Magnolia Queen floated like a nineteenth-­century paddlewheel palace only five days ago. I make the dogleg turn slowly, and seconds later a hundred miles of space opens up to the west of us. Five miles of the broad river is rolling toward us from Vicksburg, and Jack’s breath catches at the sight of it.

“I’ll be damned,” he says. “I see the Pacific all the time, but this sight never ceases to amaze me. It just comes out of nowhere.”

“I know what you mean. You can see the Rockies for miles, but this divide is like a buried vessel. The aorta of the whole continent.”

As we slowly descend the precipitous slope, Jack says, “Tell me something. How did Sarah progress to stage-­four breast cancer without noticing anything?”

“It’s an old story, I’m told. She was so busy that she simply ignored the signs. She wrote her symptoms off to fatigue and hard physical work, told herself she didn’t have time to get things checked out. She was only thirty-­six, remember. The last pure joy I remember is a trip we squeezed in to Disney World. Annie was three, and she wore her Snow White costume the whole time. The whole trip was magical. But late that week, I noticed how tired Sarah looked, and how badly she was hurting. She’d been blaming it on tiling floors, stripping furniture, that kind of thing. But the day we got home, she reached down to pick up a box from UPS and felt excruciating pain in her back. That time I made her go to the doctor. When he shot the first X-­ray, there it was. Her spine was collapsing, due to bone metastases. They did full-­body scans. She had bone mets all over. One of her hips was half eaten away. It was in her liver, too, and soon the brain.”

“Jesus. I never knew it was that bad.”

I wave my hand as if that could banish the memories. “That was the background of what I’m going to tell you about. Sarah went downhill fast. I was doing everything humanly possible to find a last-­ditch miracle. I knew a doctor who was a big deal over at MD Anderson, and he knew a guy who was helping to develop a new drug out at UCLA, which turned out to be Herceptin. We actually got hold of some, after phenomenal effort and expense, and Sarah got to take a regimen. But it didn’t do any good. It was like trying to stop the Titanic from sinking. We were fighting a mathematical certainty.”

Jack closes his eyes and sighs like a man who knows all about time and biological entropy.

“Sarah’s parents came to stay with us, meaning to help. That didn’t work so well. Her dad couldn’t stand seeing his baby in that condition. Sarah was down to eighty-­five pounds, and the pain was becoming unbearable. Bill had to move to a nearby motel. Eventually, the docs couldn’t keep her both lucid and comfortable. But that’s what she wanted. Sarah wanted to be home, and she wanted every second she could get with her daughter. Her goal was to reassure Annie until the very end. I never felt so helpless in all my life, Jack. I’d have given every dollar I had to have gone to medical school instead of law school.”

“Where was Tom in all this?”

“Natchez, mostly. But he’d been talking to the oncologists all along. He knew what was coming. He was waiting for his moment. And when it came, he rode in like the real Lone Ranger, if there ever was one. He loaded up his car with drugs, drove out to Houston with Mom, and informed the docs he was taking over the case. Mom politely asked the nurses to leave, and she and Sarah’s mother started caring for her around the clock. I don’t think Dad slept more than three hours out of twenty-­four for a week. He lived at Sarah’s bedside, administering drugs like some kind of alchemist. I remember him calculating dosages of five different drugs on a legal pad, several times a day. But it worked. He kept her lucid and mostly pain-­free until the absolute end.”

“That’s Tom, right down to the ground.”

I nod, thinking of my father lying helpless in his own hospital bed. “You know how ­people joke about doctors’ handwriting? Well, Dad’s prescriptions always looked like chicken-­scratch, sure enough. But I still have a page of those drug calculations. And they look like they were written by a seventeenth-­century mathematician, they’re so precise.”

“He loved Sarah like his own daughter,” Jack says. “He’s told me that.”

“Well . . . it was near the very end of that struggle that the other thing happened.”

“Which was?”

Even now, a shudder of dread goes through me at the memory. “A Hispanic guy knocked on our front door. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was about thirty, tall, light-­skinned, nerdy-­looking. Turned out he was a serology technician from the Houston PD crime lab. Felix Vargas. I’d dealt with him on a few cases. Vargas was a chain-­smoker, but I could smell alcohol on him the second I answered the door.”

“What did he want?”

We’ve reached the flat riverbank at the bottom of the mill road. Where the Magnolia Queen once floated in its movie-­prop majesty, now only broken mooring cables trail into the river. The Mississippi is still wearing its summer colors, the muddy brown tide rolling through sandy banks thick with green willow oak and kudzu, and white fields of cotton stretching away over the flat Louisiana delta. I pull to the edge of the asphalt and park at the edge of the gray anti-­erosion rocks that slope down to the water.