Snake Eyes, Page 3

  And then there was friendship, and social life—under the expert orchestration of Gina, who had immediately locked into, and flourished happily amid, an élite circle of primarily older couples associated with such prestigious organizations as the Mount Orion Country Club, the Mount Orion Tennis Club, and the Mount Orion Friends of the Museum (a county historical museum housed, like the library, in a beautiful old Georgian mansion ideal for cocktail receptions and five-hundred-dollar-a-plate benefit dinners). Michael came to like his friends very much, and the friends of friends; he was himself gregarious, delighting in companionship and laughter; giving the impression, in any social setting, of being at the center of it, or very near the center. Yet parties did tire him, and weekends, far from being restful, quickly became ordeals from which it might require most of Monday to recover. Once, Michael observed to Gina, with a smile, and a caress, to indicate that he meant no serious criticism, that she had certainly made them popular here in Mount Orion; and Gina replied tartly, with that dead-certain air with which she’d lately learned to return serves on the tennis court, rushing to the net, slamming her racket at the ball, sending the ball into her startled opponent’s lap, “Not at all, Michael dear. It’s you who’s responsible—I’m just ‘Mrs. O’Meara.’”

  Which Michael knew was not true in the slightest, but—he had no wish to provoke a quarrel.

  The old sensation of guilt, banished from daylight, surfaced now and then in dreams, which bore no relationship whatever to Michael’s waking life. At such times he woke in the middle of the night more astonished than frightened, stunned by something he’d seen, or experienced, but could no longer recall, though he’d been in its presence only seconds before. Occasionally the dreams slid into classic nightmares, in which, helpless, he was caught up in an agitation as of dark, swirling, sucking water; he was both himself, and not himself; in a child’s frenzy struggling to free himself of someone or something that was bearing him down, down, down. A band—was it arms?—another’s arms?—tightened around his chest, choking off breath as he thrashed, pummeled, kicked. He screamed for help but, opening his mouth, he could not speak, for his very mouth was filled with that dark water. He panted, sobbed, tangled his feet in the bedclothes, as, waking, he saw the dream rapidly fading, saw it fade before his eyes, like an image projected upon the screen as the lights come up.

  And wasn’t there too, just faintly, a smell of something harsh, dry, astringent … the preservative phenol?

  With the swift passage of years, once they had survived a somewhat difficult early period of six or so months, Gina, sweet Gina, had learned to sleep through all but the worst of her husband’s nightmares. She was in the habit of alluding to herself, to their friends, as an insomniac; certainly she was highly sensitive, even at times cryptesthesiac; yet, lying beside poor Michael as he struggled in his sleep to keep from drowning, Gina floated free and was spared. Michael would begin to breathe heavily, and twitch, and writhe; he would fling out an arm, and kick at the bedclothes; he might, at last, sit up in bed to stare wildly and blindly into the dark, coughing, choking, whispering words that, not quite intelligible, might have been, “—who? Where—?” Gina, a slender figure on the far side of the king-sized bed, turned away from him, would drowsily murmur, without opening her eyes, “Yes, darling, that’s right,” and, “Yes, good, we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  Of course, they never did.

  In bed, many nights, Michael lay awake wondering whether he should father children?—not knowing what it was, imprinted deep in his soul, that he might have done, for which he should be punished.

  Gina, for her part, seemed to want a baby, or babies. Or believed that she did. Or spoke as if she did. She was nearing thirty: an age that shimmered before her, dreadful, inescapable. This beautiful young woman, so very American, trained virtually from the cradle to be a girl, and supremely successful and happy as a girl; if girlhood must be surrendered, might motherhood be a face-saving substitute?

  She said, longingly, with a mild undertone of reproach, “We should, you know. Soon. If we are going to, at all.”

  And Michael would say quickly, “Yes, of course. When?”

  Which question always deflected further discussion.

  Michael recalled his own father so awkwardly formal, so resistant, in the role of father. A painful creased expression on his face as, with apparent reluctance, he’d stooped to pick Michael up in his arms. Murmuring to Michael’s mother, “But what if I drop him?”

  Michael’s father had spent most of his waking hours at his store, amid exquisitely beautiful, and expensive, fur coats, jackets, stoles. O’Meara’s Furs of Distinction. That templelike place on Main Street of Darien, Connecticut, with its broad show windows, its coolly lit plush-carpeted interior, numberless mirrors, luxury, in which, it scarcely needs be said, the O’Meara children were not welcome. Mr. O’Meara was a successful businessman if success meant making profits, and making them with regularity, yet he appeared to his family as driven, perplexed, forever impatient and irritable; whenever anyone spoke to him, he responded with a look of barely contained outrage, as if an urgent conversation inside his skull had been rudely interrupted. What remained of his ancestral Irishness—a certain wry combination of features, muddy green eyes, somewhat pug nose, cleft chin, russet brown curly hair—had, like his ancestral religion, Roman Catholicism, ebbed, faded, to be replaced with—what? He’d soon come to hate his merchandise: the words fur and furrier sounded harsh in his mouth, like expletives. He seemed to have no friends, only business acquaintances who were forever letting him down—thus Mr. O’Meara’s bemused quip, “What are people for, except to let you down?” Only years later, as adults, did Michael and Janet realize that the quip was not a common saying, like “A stitch in time saves nine,” or, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

  What are people for, except to let you down?

  No, this was wisdom Michael O’Meara decisively rejected.

  Beyond Jerome O’Meara the furrier of Darien, Connecticut, was Michael’s paternal grandfather, a merchant too, whom Michael could recall only dimly (he had died when Michael was very young) as a bemused taciturn old man whose predominant grandfatherly quality was his custom of slipping his grandchildren five-dollar bills on birthdays and holidays, like clockwork. The bills were both blessings of a kind and dismissals. Expressions of gratitude—“Thank you, Grandfather!”—were waved aside as if recognized, perhaps accurately, as mechanical too.

  Beyond this chilly old gent was the only legendary O’Meara—Lucas Quincy O’Meara, of Oxblood, New Hampshire. He had been a lawyer, and then a judge, with the local reputation of being a “hanging” judge, and was one morning near Christmas 1889 discovered in his courthouse chambers, savagely stabbed and beaten, his very blood and brains smeared on the walls. Numerous suspects were questioned, for the judge had many enemies, but the murderer, or murderers, was never found. There existed, evidently, a local rumor, of which the O’Meara sons, seventeen and twenty years old at the time, were perversely proud, or about which, in any case, they were defiant, that they themselves had killed their father!

  Such family secrets, Michael O’Meara naturally did not care to share with Gina.

  Nor had he wanted to tell her much about his involvement with The Coalition; and with the case of Lee Roy Sears, who, having been found guilty of first-degree murder five years ago in Hartford, Connecticut, was scheduled to die in the electric chair on the night of May 12, 1983.

  Sears, the quintessential American victim: the victim-turned-outlaw.

  Michael O’Meara was not an expert in the Sears case, as others, representing the American Civil Liberties Union, had become, in their zealous but futile efforts to have his conviction overturned by the state supreme court; but all that he’d learned outraged and sickened him. It seemed probable that Sears was innocent of the charge for which he’d been found guilty, yet, apart from that, apart entirely from the issue of the man’s guilt, was the issue of capital punish
ment itself. What more lurid perversion of the state’s power—the power of “The People” (as the prosecution calls itself)—than putting a human being to death in the interest of justice! Years ago, as an idealistic undergraduate, Michael had read Albert Camus’s “Reflections on the Guillotine,” and it had made a powerful impression upon him, substantiating inchoate convictions of his own. Since that time, Michael had grown to believe that it is a society’s collective guilt that sends individuals to their deaths in the name of justice. The “guilt” of the convicted individual is only partly a factor.

  Sears, never before indicted on murder or manslaughter charges, had been found guilty in late 1978 of the shooting death of a Hartford man known to be associated with drug dealing, and subsequently sentenced to death in the electric chair. The verdict was clearly unjust: witnesses gave conflicting testimonies at the trial, and were in any case unreliable; evidence linking Sears to the shooting was circumstantial; the likelihood had seemed to be that an accomplice of Sears’s, an older man long involved in the drug trade, had actually done the shooting, but was in turn shot down by police shortly afterward, fleeing the scene of the crime in his car, and leaving Sears behind. Sears had fled on foot, going to the home of a neighborhood woman, apparently an acquaintance, friend, or lover of his, and convincing her—or, it may have been forcing her—to drive him out of Hartford; he was subsequently caught by police the following day, badly beaten while “resisting” arrest, jailed and in time convicted of first-degree murder though he insisted upon his innocence and had twice passed a lie detector test. (The results of such tests are not admissible in court.) Like all criminal cases, this was more complex, and more mysterious, than a brief summary makes it sound. For one thing, there were said to be numerous others in the murdered man’s apartment during the course of the night, in addition to Sears and his accomplice; and these others Sears may have been protecting out of fear of retribution, or misplaced loyalty. (One of the apartment walls had been—so very oddly, the coincidence fairly took Michael O’Meara’s breath away!—smeared with the murdered man’s blood, an act of deranged vengeance entirely at odds with Sears’s having fled the scene of the crime as desperately as an eyewitness claimed he had.) In another puzzling aspect of the case, Sears was at first charged with having kidnapped, raped, and abused the woman who drove him out of the city, as well as abusing the woman’s twelve-year-old daughter, for some reason taken along on the wild ride; these charges were later dropped, when the woman failed to press them, defied the district attorney’s office, and later, apparently with her daughter, disappeared. Sears claimed that he and the woman had had voluntary sexual relations, as they had had several times in the past; it was only after Sears’s arrest, and after police had questioned her at length, that the woman initially agreed to file charges. Most damaging to the prosecution’s case was the fact that witnesses could not agree on what they’d seen, or at what time. Sears might very well have been confused with another man, or men; he might have been deliberately tagged for the killing, since one of the witnesses was a relative of the murdered man who was also an acquaintance of Sears, and who might very well have ordered the killing himself, or committed it himself; another witness was a well-known police informer who, happening to share a holding cell with Sears after his arrest, shrewdly negotiated a deal for early release with police in exchange for testifying that Sears had boasted of the killing. For some reason, the public defender assigned the case had not very thoroughly cross-examined these witnesses. He had even counseled his client to plead guilty to the district attorney’s offer of a reduced charge of aggravated manslaughter, with a sentence of twenty years in prison and a mandatory minimum of ten—though Sears had insisted he was innocent.

  Reviewing the case, Michael O’Meara, though no expert in criminal law, was dismayed by the presiding judge’s apparent indifference to the quality of the police work and the prosecution’s case; most of all, the slapdash defense provided Sears by the public advocate’s office. It was as if—and this angered Michael—everyone, all the officers of the court, and the twelve jurors, had made up their minds beforehand not only that Lee Roy Sears was guilty but that his very life was of no special worth.

  The trial had lasted only three days, and the jury had been out only two and a quarter hours. Guilty! Guilty as charged! The verdict was outrageous, particularly in light of the defendant’s prior record and his having served in Vietnam, yet, at the time, it passed unnoticed by the press. (No doubt, there were other highly publicized outrages at that time, claiming the public’s attention.) Had Lee Roy Sears died on schedule, he would have been the youngest man executed by the State of Connecticut since World War I.

  In all, there would be five years of appeals to the state supreme court, stays of execution, hearings, delays, postponements; and now this final-hour hearing, an appeal to the Board of Pardons to commute Sears’s death sentence to life in prison. Michael O’Meara rose early, before dawn, and drove up into Connecticut, both eager and apprehensive, suffused with a sense of purpose, yet dreading what might happen. It was his first direct involvement with any of the unhappy clients whom The Coalition defended. Lee Roy Sears was the first “condemned man” he had ever seen in person.

  Thinking, chilled, What must it be, my God!—to be him.

  For a prisoner on death row, Lee Roy Sears, at the age of thirty-one, was unexpectedly young-looking, though alarmingly thin. His arms and legs were long and gangling; his head seemed too narrow for his shoulders, as if it were squeezed together, or had not fully matured. And he was short—no more than five feet seven or eight. When he entered the crowded hearing room, limping, eyes straight before him, escorted by two burly prison guards, everyone stared at him, and there was a moment’s startled silence—That’s Lee Roy Sears?

  Despite his limp Sears carried himself with a measure of dignity. Head stiffly high, shoulders very straight, and stiff too, he limped to the chair reserved for him and lowered himself into the seat with exaggerated care. The maneuver was awkward: he was handcuffed. At once the buzzing in the room resumed, with an undercurrent of embarrassment. It seemed to have struck everyone at the same time, Michael O’Meara included, that here was the sole man for whom the liberal issue of “Lee Roy Sears” was not theoretical in any way. If the Connecticut Board of Pardons could not be persuaded to set aside his sentence, Sears would be dead by midnight of the next day.

  Sears, in his immaculate prison khakis, creased slightly baggy trousers and long-sleeved shirt primly buttoned to the wrists, did not much resemble the swarthy, smudged photograph Gina had studied the night before. His skin was grainily pale, his bony forehead oddly prominent, with a vague reptilian cast. If you believed him to have Indian blood, his features might have suggested it—his hair very black and lankly straight, his nose long, thin, and aquiline, with prominent nostrils. His hair had been severely trimmed, shaved up the sides and the back, so that his waxy-pale ears stuck out, with a look of schoolboy innocence. Certainly he did not look like a killer. Nor like a man whose existence was such a grave threat to humanity that he must be executed within thirty-six hours.

  By 10:20 A.M., when the hearing finally began, the atmosphere in the room had grown tense and combative. There were more than sixty people, the great majority of them men, crowded into the lowceilinged, harshly lit room; some latecomers were standing at the rear and along a wall of barred windows that overlooked damp concrete walls shutting out the sun. At the front, at a rectangular table, sat the five-man Board of Pardons, facing outward; far to one side was Sears, as if his physical presence were irrelevant to the proceedings. The opening remarks were formal and summary, read off by the chairman of the board, who frowned at the sheet of paper in his hand as if he had never seen it before. He was a man of late middle-age, with a thick suety body, a bald-gleaming head. All of the gentlemen of the Board of Pardons were middle-aged, and Caucasian; two lawyers, a penologist, a psychologist, a university professor; men of no evident distinction except that they
held another man’s life in their hands.

  Next, a young assistant prosecutor rapidly reviewed the state’s case. Lee Roy Sears stared off stonily into space, beyond the room’s foreshortened horizon. Maybe he thought of himself as a dead man already. He’d lived through five years of this sort of thing, after all.

  Suddenly nothing seemed to Michael O’Meara more important than that Lee Roy Sears’s life be saved. He began to feel adrenaline pumping erratically through his veins, quickening his heart.

  Since Sears had been incarcerated in Hunsford in late 1978, he’d been granted three stays of execution; his most recent appeal to the state supreme court, in March, had been rejected, and his death sentence set a fourth time. Since that time, however, his defense had managed to launch a protest; articles began to appear, letters and telegrams were sent to the governor of the state, there were public officials beginning to speak out on his behalf. An article appeared in the Boston Globe in which Lee Roy Sears was discussed along with a number of other Vietnam veterans-turned-criminals who were believed to be suffering “post-traumatic stress disorder” and neurophysiological impairments associated with the highly toxic defoliant Agent Orange. An essay by a celebrated American male novelist appeared in the April issue of The Atlantic, “On Dying in the Electric Chair,” which named Lee Roy Sears and some others as “martyrs” to the corrupt criminal justice system. Both these publications had aroused a good deal of comment and controversy. The very fact that so many people had converged upon Hunsford State Prison in this rural corner of the state was an encouraging sign.