Just Cause
John Katzenbach
Just
Cause
Also by John Katzenbach
Red 1-2-3
What Comes Next
In the Heat of the Summer
First Born
The Traveler
Day of Reckoning
Just Cause
The Shadow Man
State of Mind
Hart’s War
The Analyst
The Madman’s Tale
The Wrong Man
Just
Cause
John Katzenbach
The Mysterious Press
New York
Copyright © 1992 by John Katzenbach
Preface © 2014 by John Katzenbach
Cover design by Swann
Cover Art by Paola Kornemann courtesy of Droemer-Kramer
Author photograph by Ben Rosenzweig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011
or [email protected].
“Hell in A Bucket,” © 1984, 1988 Ice Nine Publishing Company, Inc.
Words and music by Robert Weir, John Barlow, and Brent Mydland.
This edition first published in 1992 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8021-2326-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-9194-6
The Mysterious Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
The book is for my mother, and to the memory of three men: V.A. Eagle, Wm. A. Nixon, and H. Simons.
I am especially grateful for the assistance of my friends Joe Oglesby, of The Miami Herald, and Athelia Knight, of The Washington Post. Their wise suggestions immeasurably aided the preparation of this manuscript. It, of course, would have been impossible to accomplish without the help and tolerance of my wife, Madeleine Blais, and children, as well.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Maxims for Revolutionists
PREFACE
Here is a quote that I admire, attributed to the great Gabriel Garcia Márquez:
Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife he was three days late because he’d been swallowed by a whale.
Curiously enough, dishonesty is an integral part of the storytelling process. It is not exactly as we’ve come to employ the act of lying in a moral sense—but something slightly different. Authors use dishonesty as an engine. It takes some time to recognize this because it flies in the face of what we’ve learned from earliest days.
When we first encounter it, lying seems simple: Liar, liar, pants on fire. A common moment in childhood, part rhyme, part insult, a definite playground challenge—although I doubt telling a kindergarten falsehood has ever actually resulted in sudden clothing combustion. We grow up absorbing lessons that stress the immense importance of telling the truth. For example: George Washington and the cherry tree. Sadly, it never actually happened, my learned historian friends tell me. But the message isn’t lost on us. The real implication of that cherry tree and young GW is different: It’s that lies and lying are constantly with us. Like a warm coat on a chilly day, we wish to envelop ourselves with falsehoods from an early age, and we need to defend ourselves against this base instinct by emphasizing honesty.
Honesty—naturally—is rarely any fun. We get told that honesty is, well, the best policy, but frankly one of our most important life lessons is that one person’s truth is another’s lie.
Indeed, I could argue that lying and lies are a part of culture.
Want to hear some interesting music? The Liars are an excellent group. But you would have to go to a Christian revival tent to hear some band called the Truth Tellers—if there even is such a group. Perhaps you simply want to listen to a single song? Liar by Three Dog Night has had real staying power over the years. Or you would prefer to read? How about The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr? It’s excellent. Don’t have the time for that book? How about the wonderful poem “Lying” by Richard Wilbur? In some evangelical circles, the Devil is referred to as the Great Liar. Boy Scouts are admonished: “A scout is trustworthy”—because the alternative really sounds unlikeable—but typically we mock scouts, because we all know just how hard it is to not tell the occasional fib or white lie. If you think about it, well, there are whole industries built around lies of varying degrees of whopper-hood—only we like to call these politics or advertising or even pornography.
Which brings me to novelists.
We love lies. We embrace lies. Indeed, lies are a necessary part of our business—as much as they are for any Madison Avenue type or eager congressman seeking reelection in a tough fight. Why? Every novelist knows that within the rhythms of lying are subtle chords of truths—and we rely on these to construct our stories. If we invented characters that only told the truth (like those Boy Scouts), how boring fiction would be.
That was the mantra I kept close when I first started to write Just Cause.
The lurking notion I had was that if I could invest each character with a big enough lie—about what they’d done, who they were, their ambition, their future, their past—I could manufacture tension out of the confluence of all these falsehoods. After all, what is the essence of modern psychology? It is discovering how we have lied to ourselves and inventing a way forward based on more honest assessments. Or, to be more accurate: slightly more honest assessments. This statement is equally true for the world a novelist creates on the page as it is for the four walls and couch of an analyst’s office.
When I first came to Just Cause I was still loosely connected to my first career as a newspaper reporter. I had spent significant time listening to lies in my own years on the crime and punishment beats. Some of these lies were simple: “I didn’t do it!” Some were more complicated: “I didn’t do it, but I can tell you who did …” Back then I listened to all these statements with the proverbial grain of salt. So often the job of a newspaper reporter is figuring out not who is lying, but how much one is being lied to. As a novelist, I wanted to find the same skepticism, prejudices, and then excitement, and endow it in my newspaper-reporter character. I didn’t want him to be me. I just wanted him to think like I once did. I figured—hoped, guessed, prayed—that this would bring young Matthew Cowart to life on the pages of Just Cause.
And then in the novel, I wanted to take truth and turn it into lies, and lies into truths.
Journalism—in the Woodward and Bern
stein heyday all the way up to our modern definition of the profession as tweets, blogs, and the ever-present yakety-yak of talk radio and TV news—has always had a slippery relationship with the truth, because a reporter is constantly wading through the mire of lies to find something that just might, hopefully, conceivably, knock on wood, be accurate. In this march, journalists are forever slipping, sliding, getting caught up in quicksand or mud, balancing one lie against another, listening to beliefs expressed as accuracies and accuracies expressed as beliefs, all with some great mystery of truth awaiting at the end. This optimism fuels the profession. And—obviously—creates immense traps. Lobster traps. You can get in. You just can’t get out.
It was inside one of those dilemmas that I wanted to put the characters of Just Cause. It’s an interesting quandary for an author: Can you make each truth support a lie, and can each lie buttress a truth?
This is the sort of question that energizes fiction writers. They fuel the plot, they juice the characters, they electrify each moment for the writer—and make the process of writing fiction hard work but also, well, fun. Digging holes—that often look suspiciously like graves—for characters, and then finding ways for them to clamber out is both the challenge and the reward of writing psychological thrillers.
I feel—if one looks carefully at almost every good novel—one can hear the underlying exchange beating at its core:
“Yes, dear. Sorry I’m late . . . Of course. I know you were expecting me three days ago . . . Well yes, now that you ask, I do have an excuse. More an explanation, really . . . See, dear, the other day I was totally minding my own business when I was suddenly and unexpectedly swallowed up by this great big old fish. It’s taken me all this time to get out. Very unpleasant, I must say. No, really. Don’t shake your head. That’s what happened. I promise.”
And then that conversation—just like all novels and good stories—would end with the last critically crucial question:
“You believe me, don’t you?”
ONE
PRISONERS
When you win the prize they tell you a joke:
Now you know the first line of your
own obituary.
1
A MAN OF OPINIONS
On the morning that he received the letter, Matthew Cowart awakened alone to a false winter.
A steady north wind had picked up after midnight and seemed to push the nighttime black away, smearing the morning sky with a dirty gray that made a lie of the city’s image. As he walked from his apartment to the street outside, he could hear the breeze rattle and push at a palm tree, making the fronds clash together like so many swords.
He hunched his shoulders together tightly and wished that he’d worn a sweater beneath his suit coat. Every year there were a few mornings like this one, filled with the promise of bleak skies and blustery winds. Nature making a small joke, causing the tourists on Miami Beach to grumble and walk the sandy stretches in their sweaters. In Little Havana, the older Cuban women would wear heavy woolen overcoats and curse the wind, forgetting that in the summer they carried parasols and cursed the heat. In Liberty City, the rat holes in the crack houses would whistle with cold. The junkies would shiver and struggle with their pipes. But soon enough the city would return to sweaty, sticky normalcy.
One day, he thought as he walked briskly, perhaps two. Then the warm air will freshen out of the South and we will all quickly forget the cold.
Matthew Cowart was a man moving light through life.
Circumstances and bad luck had cut away many of the accoutrements of impending middle age; a simple divorce had sliced away his wife and child, messy death his parents; his friends had slid into separate existences defined by rising careers, squads of young children, car payments, and mortgages. For a time there had been attempts by some to include him in outings and parties, but, as his solitude had grown, accompanied by his apparent comfort in it, these invitations had fallen off and finally stopped. His social life was defined by an occasional office party and shop talk. He had no lover and felt a vague confusion as to why he didn’t. His own apartment was modest, in a sturdy highrise overlooking the bay, built in the 1950s. He had filled it with old furniture, bookcases stuffed with mystery novels and true crime nonfiction, chipped but utilitarian dinnerware, a few forgettable framed prints hanging on the walls.
Sometimes he thought that when his wife had taken their daughter, all the color had fled from his life. His own needs were satisfied by exercise—an obligatory six miles a day, running through a downtown park, an occasional game of pickup basketball at the YMCA—and his job at the newspaper. He felt possessed of a remarkable freedom yet somehow worried that he had so few recognizable debts.
The wind was still gusting hard, pulling and tugging at a trio of flags outside the main entrance to the Miami Journal. He paused momentarily, looking up at the stolid yellow square building. The paper’s name was emblazoned in huge red, electric letters against one wall. It was a famous place, well known for its aggressiveness and power. On the other side, the paper looked over the bay. He could see wild waters splashing up against the dock where huge rolls of newsprint were unloaded. Once, while sitting alone in the cafeteria eating a sandwich, he’d spotted a family of manatees cavorting about in the pale blue water, no more than ten yards from the loading dock. Their brown backs burst through the surface, then fell back beneath the waves. He’d looked about for someone to tell but had found no one, and had spent the next few days, at lunch, staring constantly out at the shifting blue-green surface for another glimpse of the animals. It was what he liked about Florida; the state seemed cut from some jungle, which was always threatening to overtake all the development and return it to something primeval. The paper was forever doing stories about twelve-foot alligators getting trapped on entrance ramps to the interstate and stopping traffic. He loved those stories: an ancient beast confronting a modern one.
Cowart moved quickly through the double doors that led to the Journal’s newsroom, waving at the receptionist who sat partially hidden behind a telephone console. Next to the entrance was a wall devoted to plaques, citations, and awards: a parade of Pulitzers, Kennedys, Cabots, Pyles, and others with more mundane names. He paused at a bank of mailboxes to pick up his morning mail, flipping rapidly through the usual handouts and dozens of press releases, political statements, and proposals that arrived every day from the congressional delegation, the mayor’s office, the county manager’s office, and various police agencies, all alerting him to some development that they thought worthy of editorial attention. He sighed, wondering how much money was wasted on all these hopeless efforts. One envelope, however, caught his eye. He separated it from the pile.
It was a thin, white envelope with his name and address written in sturdy block print. There was a return address in the corner, giving a post office box number in Starke, Florida, in the northern portion of the state. The state prison, he thought instantly.
He put it on top of the other letters and headed toward his office, maneuvering amidst the room of desks, nodding at the few reporters who were in early and already working the telephones. He waved at the city editor, who had his feet up on his desk in the center of the room and was reading the last edition. Then he moved through a set of doors in the rear of the newsroom marked EDITORIAL. He was halfway into his cubicle when he heard a voice from nearby.
“Ahh, the young Turk arrives early. What could bring you in before the hordes? Unsettled by the troubles in Beirut? Sleepless over the president’s economic recovery program?”
Cowart stuck his head around a partition. “Morning, Will. Actually, I just wanted to use the WATS line to call my daughter. I’ll leave the truly deep and useless worrying to you.”
Will Martin laughed and brushed a forelock of white hair out of his eyes, a motion that belonged more to a child than an old man. “Go. Abuse the abundant financial generosity of our
beloved newspaper. When you get finished, take a look at the story on the Local page. It seems that one of our black-robed dispensers of justice cut something of a deal for an old buddy caught driving under the influence. It could be time for one of your ever-popular crime-and-punishment crusades.”
“I’ll look at it,” Cowart said.
“Damn cold this morning,” said Martin. “What’s the point of living down here if you still have to shiver on the way to work? Might as well be Alaska.”
“Why don’t we editorialize against the weather? We’re always trying to influence the heavens, anyway. Maybe they’ll listen to us this time.”
“You’ve got a point.” Martin smiled.
“And you’re just the man for the job,” Cowart said.
“True,” Martin replied. “Not steeped in sin, like you, I have a much better connection to the Almighty. It helps in this job.”
“That’s because you’re so much closer to joining him than I.”
His neighbor roared. “You’re an ageist,” he protested, waggling a finger. “Probably a sexist, a racist, a pacifist—all the other ists, too.”
Cowart laughed and headed to his desk, dumping the pile of mail in the middle and leaving the single envelope on top. He reached out for it, while with the other hand he started dialing his ex-wife’s number. With any luck, he thought, they should be at breakfast.
He crooked the receiver beneath his shoulder and ear, freeing his hand while the connection was being made. As the telephone began ringing he opened the envelope and took out a single sheet of yellow legal-ruled paper.
Dear Mr. Cowart:
I am currently awaiting execution on Death Row for a crime that I DID NOT COMMIT.
“Hello?”
He put the letter down. “Hello, Sandy. It’s Matt. I just wanted to talk to Becky for a minute. I hope I didn’t disturb anything.”
