“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