The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (23 page)
Read The Execution of Noa P. Singleton Online
Authors: Elizabeth L. Silver
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary, #Mystery
Even Paramedic One was subpoenaed. He was asked about my predilection for getting my baby brother in trouble when I was a kid. He sat up there and claimed that I was the one who ran him out of the house. That it was my fault he left my mother, stranded with two young children, and not the stewardess he was screwing three nights a week in Burbank.
Even the arresting officer from my five-year-old shoplifting misdemeanor was flown in to testify to the sole demerit on my rap sheet. “She stole a pack of gum and a bra from a department store,” he said. “Stuffed them in her purse and tried to walk out the front door as if nothing was wrong.”
The very existence of that rap sheet, however, was one of the larger weights the state used to prove my predilection for a life of crime—specifically those of so-called moral turpitude. I had done it before and would do so again if given the chance.
At one point, between all the witnesses from California and Pennsylvania, I think I saw the accountant’s face. In an instant, the Xerox machine flashed over my body while I sat at the defense table, as it did all those years ago over the breakfast table. So many people were there, and clearly, since my back was facing them, I couldn’t count the number nor discern familiar faces. But for a brief moment, I thought I saw him, the caterpillar ’stache, the accountant, the second man with whom my mother tried to run off. His glasses had changed to a more modern style—plastic, squarelike, and still meaty—and he had shaved his mustache (at least mostly). In its stead was a thin five o’clock shadow dotted all across the lower half of his face like a Seurat painting. He was there only one day and was seated next to a young man, a student perhaps, in jeans and a vest, with his hair parted in the
middle. I kept glancing at the two of them together as if they came in a pair.
I had presumed that every individual from my past would be there, from Persephone’s family to the valedictorian in my high school class to my favorite pharmacist, Bob, but they didn’t show.
The final witness for the prosecution in the penalty hearing was Marlene. During the entire trial, she sat beside her husband with textbook compassion. His name was Blayne Dixon, and every so often, he would glance at me, trying to frown. He had eyelids like meat patties, slight flaps of creamy skin folded over his lids like a blanket tucking his pupils in. He failed miserably at connoting any sort of emotion save pain from old age. I want to say that his eyes were blue, but in all honesty, I could hardly see their color, what with a handful of flimsy white lashes sustaining the folded skin above them. How hard it must have been to see past it; past that roof of old, spotted skin drooping down into his line of vision.
Marlene untucked herself from his loose grip, stood, and walked toward the stand, slowly, as if it were her personal plank of justice. Her smooth head had adjusted to its alopecic display by this point, and she looked less like a cancer victim and more like an aging singer-songwriter at a funeral. The black pantsuit was a bit tight around her waist, and she flaunted the fact that the top half of her blazer flopped loosely without anything to fill it out. That golden locket still dangled between the open spaces of her chest like a rope swing. And in her hands was a canary legal envelope, at least half an inch thick.
“Can you state your name for the record?” Tom Davies requested, kindly, after she sat in the witness stand.
She leaned over to speak softly into the microphone as if this were the first time she’d opened her mouth in court—in public, no less.
“My name is Marlene Dixon.”
“What is your relationship to this case?”
“Sarah Dixon was my daughter. My only child.”
She didn’t crack a note. Her voice was as sturdy as if she were in
court for any other case in her long litigious career. She looked over to her husband. With each new statement she uttered, though, he seemed to dissipate. True, he was old, but he was also delicate, the way an old rocking chair is delicate. Push on it too hard, the joints will break, and it’ll fall apart into dozens of fragmented limbs.
“You are under no obligation to testify,” Tom Davies continued, “but you wanted to testify today. Why is that? Why do you feel as though you must take the stand?”
She looked to me and then back to Tom Davies.
“Because I want the jury to know what she took away from me and from the world. She took away a stunning, intelligent, creative, innocent soul, who was just beginning her exploration of this life.” Tom Davies nodded his head, allowing her to continue. “And we will never recover.” She looked over to the judge. “She has to know who she took away.”
“Did you bring some photographs with you?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Yes, I did.”
Tom Davies walked back to the witness stand, gently opened its wooden door, and escorted Marlene down the two steps to the courtroom floor. She stood, slowly, and taking his hand with her free hand (the envelope was still in the other), walked around the witness box directly before the jury box. He placed a chair in front of the jury box and helped her sit down.
Hundreds of edges peeked out from the clean fissure of the envelope when she opened it. She grabbed a handful and spread them out on her lap as if counting a poker hand. First she chose one in faint sepia enlargement. A baby photograph—Sarah, chubby as a troll, with a scrub of fuzz all over her head. Parts of it wilted into curls by her ears. From my angle, though, she looked a bit like a boy. Marlene held it out to the jury like she was beginning story time for kindergartners. Lakeisha smiled. Shanaya cooed. Melissa clutched her chest.
The next photo skipped to Sarah’s tenure in the Girl Scouts. Marlene forced her through Brownies and Girl Scouts, enabling her industrious sale of Samoas for three years, just until she would be able to put it on her college applications. Marlene selected a photograph of Sarah, missing one of her front teeth, her tongue pushing through the gap as she grinned widely, saturated with chocolate and charity. Beverly wiped a tear that was rolling down her nose.
In another, Sarah was sitting in a pool with ten other girls, giggling and contorting her face in girlish camaraderie. And another photo was Sarah on her first day at Penn, hair pulled back, wire-rimmed glasses resting on her nose, and her thick backpack weighing down her feeble bones. Yet another of Sarah in her old school uniform from middle school, brown and yellow checks covering the pleated knee-length skirt. And still another of Sarah with Marlene, both swathed in the professional habit: conservative navy suit, eggshell blouse buttoned up to the neck, hair parted ever so slightly to the side and then pulled into a low-reaching bun at the base of the neck. I knew this photo well. Marlene handed it to me when she first initiated our relationship. In it, Marlene was smiling as if she were in front of yet another camera, perhaps for publicity or perhaps for a client. Her lips were spread wide, covered in an opaque collection of rusts and wine colors. Her bleached teeth were glimmering from the flash in perfect synchronicity—but there was nothing behind the eyes. No sense of accomplishment or pride, no expression of joy that was supposed to match the mouth. Simply a woman wearing her designer smile without the ability to fill it out properly. Sarah, on the other hand, was unable to feign joy, which I presume is part of what made my father like her, at least from what I’ve garnered thus far. Next to Sarah’s, Marlene’s head looked awkward, like they were two business colleagues forced to share a photograph for a marketing pamphlet.
At first, I wondered why this was the photo of their relationship selected and framed for display. Their heads were turned away from each other and their arms hung primitively to their sides, but when I
watched Marlene pass the photograph around from jury member to jury member, allowing their twelve greasy sets of prints to pollute the front, I knew. It must have been the only image of the two of them that existed beyond childhood.
Madison McCall could do nothing but watch in awe as the jury members—one by histrionic one—voted against me in unanimity. He felt it, too, I know. He was equally privy to the daggers within their eyes, their anger and hatred coming to a boil as they were forced to watch Marlene and her silent picture show. In fact, Madison McCall might have gotten even more bitter glares than me. After all, he was the one who chose to represent me. He had a choice in this entire production. Tom Davies was employed by the state and was just doing his job. Marlene played her unwilling part. And I, well, we know why I was there.
By the time Tom Davies asked Marlene more questions, she had returned to her seat at the witness stand. She was adjusting her microphone as she listened to him, ready with her prepackaged answer.
“Why do you think the defendant should be sentenced to death? Why should she be punished without life in prison without the possibility of parole?” It didn’t even sound rehearsed.
She bent over to the microphone, and I could hear the manufactured weakness in her voice splinter the quietude like white noise.
“I’ve known the defendant,” she stalled, no doubt preparing her thoughts. Tom Davies said nothing for the record, though his face read confusion. She quickly corrected herself. “If it were not for her, then not only would my Sarah still be with us today, but she would be in graduate school, married, with a family. All of those things were taken away from her by a virulent, destructive woman. Nothing will stop her from taking another person as prey. Inside prison or out.”
She looked over to my father and then directly at me when she finished.
“The death penalty is the single most profound form of punishment to grace our nation’s system of justice, and one that should be
reserved for only the most egregious of crimes and the most horrific of people who could be stopped by no other means than deactivating their path of terror. No person more suitably fits into the suit of a deserving body of that precious designer as does Noa P. Singleton.”
By the time it was my turn to put on a defense of character, only one reluctant witness remained. My father. Not even my brother could be bothered to fly in for the trial. After twenty-five years of childhood, adolescence, straight A’s, surgeries, a life without a single speeding ticket or DWI, my father was still the only person who was willing, albeit unsympathetically, to take the stand tearfully on my behalf. Maybe he wanted to do it out of guilt or maybe because it was the right thing to do. I’ll never know. All I know is that I refused to let him speak. I refused to offer any mitigating evidence. I refused to put on any defense of character. I was found guilty. There was no point in furthering the charade at that point.
In the recess shortly before he was scheduled to testify, my father visited me. He walked directly into the holding cell and stood silent, his upper lip twitching in syncopation with his blinking eyes.
“You’re not going to say anything?” he asked, confused. “You’re not going to put on any defense of your life?”
Impotence
was the first word to come to mind.
Sorrow
was the next.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “You, above all people, should understand why I’m doing this.”
He shrugged. It was as if he had so much he wanted to say, but his tongue had been plucked from his mouth.
“That’s it? You’re just going to … shrug?”
He ran his hands through his hair, which didn’t seem to have been placed under water in weeks. There was dirt under his fingernails, and a stain on his jeans. Even when he came to court, the man couldn’t be bothered to clean out the dirt from under his fingernails.
“You’re not going to fight? We can fight this,” he said, louder. “We can do it together. I can say something.”
My right hand gripped the metal bars between us. I shrugged.
“Now you’re just shrugging?” he asked.
“It’s supposed to be this way,” I told him.
“What are you talking about?”
“We both know it’s supposed to be this way, Dad. You and I both know that.”
My hands twisted within the handcuffs searching for my diamond bracelet.
“You’re not going to appeal?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“You’re really not going to appeal?” he asked again. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “I guess … I don’t know. I guess if I fought it, it would seem like she died in vain. You know?”
He was tearing skin off his lower lips, flaring his nostrils, and looking like a caricature of mental instability. I did this to him, too. I didn’t need to do anything more, whether he realized it or not.
“I told myself I’d fight the charge through trial. But now it’s done. I lost.”
“Done?” he said. “It’s not done, dollface.”
“It’s done.”
He started to slip into nervous laughter, but aged tension held it back.
“Okay?”
He nodded, slowly, dropping his hands from the bars and wiping the excess moisture on his jeans. He couldn’t even look at me.
“I’m so sorry, Noa.”
I had waited to hear those words since the day I met him. And now I had.
And then, I told him not to testify.
September
Dearest Sarah
,
Your father died only a few months after Noa was sentenced. I think his heart couldn’t bear your loss. He held out long enough to see justice, and then he simply died in his sleep. I found him in bed on a Friday morning. His bifocals were resting on his nose, and he was in the middle of a Philip Roth novel. I don’t even remember which one anymore
.
You and I never spoke much about this, and I know you often wondered how I truly felt, but I did love your father very much, even though I spent much of my life running from marriage. At age twenty, when my girlfriends began to get married and don housedresses to baste chickens, I was studying in France. At age twenty-two, when all of those girls puffed out like tetherballs, their cheeks bouncy like play dough, their toes swollen as boiled sausages, I gawked in fear. But at thirty-two, when my friends regained their tight stomachs and spent their mornings sweeping peanut butter onto jelly-drenched sliced bread, I met your father. He was a wonderful man, a beautiful, statuesque professor with one eye that meandered halfway between green and brown, like a graduating color chart. We could see into each other, both parts of each other: the lawyer and also the pitifully insecure old maid
.
To you, I’m sure it seems implausible when I talk about this, but it’s the truth. To you, it probably sounds impossible that I even wanted children, and at first, I wasn’t sure that I did. But those doubts always existed in the attic of my mind, like a latent desire to dye my hair red or move to China—not something that I would ever entertain. Though I can admit it now, part of me was scared to have you because I thought that my life would be over. There would be no more career, no more traveling, no more independence, no more skipping out on my marriage if it no longer served my needs. There would be handcuffs to diaper rash, colic, and the smell of regurgitated milk radiating within my clothes
.
Your father resented me because of that. The minute we got married, he wanted you. He wanted to love you, kiss you, spoil you, teach you, and create you in his image. And I let him. The problem is that you were more a facsimile of me than either one of you would have liked
.
Shortly before he died, your father and I met with Caleb. It seems odd to write about Noa’s father in these letters, doesn’t it? But the most influential people in our lives aren’t always the most beneficial, and it was Caleb—not any professor, judge, lawyer, or colleague—who made that clear
.
I spotted him outside the police station shortly after Noa was arrested. He was sobbing—for Noa, for you, for the baby, for you all—really, I didn’t know. Your father and I took one look at him and made the decision together
.
Then we waited
.
We waited for your funeral
.
We waited for the police to begin their investigation
.
We waited for the one-month anniversary of your death
.
Then we waited for the two-month, and the three. We had only one shot at this, and we knew it had to work
.
After spotting him outside the jail three months after you died, we invited him back to our house. At first, he was taken aback by our willingness to engage, but it took no more than five minutes for him to warm to us. After all, he was the key. He lost both you and his unborn child, and also Noa. It would be his testimony that would cement either Noa’s death sentence or her freedom or her permanent residence in the open society of a general prison population, where she would be able, if her behavior was good enough, to learn music and sculpture and writing and ceramics. Summer camp for the morally challenged, an ethically virulent gene splice in the correctional system. Quite clearly, we wanted the first alternative
.
Once Caleb was in our home, glancing at the smattering of family portraits over the fireplace, we gave him some scotch, a sandwich,
and a copy of the same photograph I handed to Noa less than a year earlier
.
“This is your work, is it not?” I said to him, just as he opened the envelope
.
Scotch nearly spilled from the glass in his hand when he saw the face in a baneful frame, memorialized in stitches from his perfectly engineered fist
.
“You don’t need to answer me,” I continued, handing him another photograph. “We both know who it is.”
He didn’t reply
.
“I would have presumed that you learned how to fight so well while in prison if I didn’t already know why you were there in the first place.”
“That was an accident in a—”
“—I don’t really care why you beat my investigator or why you beat another man so senselessly that he died in a bar in Ohio. Or that you organized the second-largest cocaine ring in Kentucky, or that you convinced your daughter you were in those wrong places at the wrong time all due to a dormant need to shoplift.”
He swallowed
.
“I pled out to manslaughter on that first one. You know that, Mrs. Dixon. I mean, you’d know that if you looked into it. I didn’t mean to.”
“—you didn’t mean to what? You didn’t mean to hurt him? You didn’t mean to hurt my investigator, either? You’re starting to see a connection, are you not?”
I placed a coaster on the table where Caleb was close to dropping his glass—one of those mother-of-pearl ones you brought us back from Paris on your semester abroad
.
“I’m really confused right now.”
Caleb looked over to your father and then back to me, his pupils expanding and contracting along with his labored breath. I handed him another photo—one of the storefront of the Little Gun and Ammo Shop on the Schuylkill
.
“This is where you stole your gun, is it not? The one you gave your daughter. The one she used to kill my daughter.”
He took the photo from me and stared at it. Splashes of luminescence began to materialize
.
“The owner’s name escapes me at the moment, but I have spoken with him and, it’s interesting, because he remembers you. You went in a few times to look at a particular gun, and then one week later, that gun was stolen from his shop. And that gun matches the gun that was used to kill my daughter. Not a bad coincidence.”
“I don’t understand. I didn’t steal any gun.”
“The thing is, you did. We both know you did. The owner can place you in his store a week before the gun was stolen. And with your history and his testimony—”
Caleb tore the photo in half, in quarters, and eighths, and so on
.
“I have many more copies of that photo. And a promise from my investigator that he will have no problem testifying who put him in the hospital that night. He remembers it vividly. He remembers you vividly. He remembers the intricate details of Dive Bar vividly. So you can tear this little photo up as much as you want. It won’t change the fact that it exists.”
“I didn’t steal any gun,” he insisted, leaning down to put his glass on the wood. I picked it up and placed it in the center of the coaster
.
“Whether you actually stole a gun or not really is irrelevant at this point. The shop owner will put you at his store. My investigator will place you at your bar when he was attacked. I am sure you are seeing the full picture that will be painted.”
He stumbled into the couch, stuttering. “What do you want from me?”
Your father and I looked at each other, and while he couldn’t understand how we got here, it was he, your father, who nodded to me to proceed. To this day, I don’t know why I was so nervous. I’d done this a hundred times before. In front of heads of state. In front of judges and wealthy landowners. In front of my own daughter when she observed me in court
.
“You are currently on probation here in Pennsylvania, are you not?”
He nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“For the crime of manslaughter, correct? Aggravated assault being the first prison sentence served. Aggravated assault being what your lawyers unsuccessfully attempted as a lesser-included charge up in Pittsburgh a few years back? Clearly, they made a mistake letting you out early. In the others, too. Not just Kentucky and Ohio.”
“I … I don’t …”
“You haven’t stopped, Caleb.”
He stared at me
.
“You beat up my investigator,” I continued, “and—”
“—Mrs. Dixon.”
“You scratched the numbers off the gun Noa used on my daughter just before you gave it to her.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did you or did you not? Let’s not play games.”
“I … uh …”
“Well, did you or didn’t you? It’s a simple yes-or-no question.”
“Yes,” he mumbled, “… yes, I did, but not to use like this. Not to use like this at all. It was for protection. You know this already.” He paused, reiterating his excuse. “It was for protection. She knew that. I told her that.”
“Protection?” I laughed. “From what?”
“From … from …”
“From?”
“From people following me. From … from people in Kentucky, you know, anyone who might be trying to hurt her. I wanted her to be safe. Someone was following her,” he said, close to tears
.
There was no need to look anywhere else, though. I held strong and continued
.
“But you did give Noa the gun, correct?”
“Uh-huh,” he nodded, again without choice
.
“And you did steal that gun from …,” I read from a little piece
of paper in my hands, “the Little Gun and Ammo Shop on the Schuylkill?”
Growing rapids of breath swept out of him
.
“You stole the gun used to kill my daughter from that store. Correct? I need an answer.”
“Uh … Uh-huh.”
“And the police, to this date, have not been able to trace it back to you, have they?”
Paralyzed but for the shifting of his eyes, he glanced over to your father
.
“Over here,” I instructed
.
His eyes returned to me
.
“Have they?”
“No … no, ma’am.”
His stilted legs split in two
.
“Exactly,” I continued. The couch caught him when he fell. “Make yourself comfortable. Please.”
Your father sat down, too, across from him. I’d never been more proud of him. They both looked to me to proceed—one brimming with passion and the other terrified of what I might ask. To this day, I don’t think your father truly understood what we were doing or what it would do to his heart after the trial ended, but still he went along with it
.
Caleb looked to your father and back to me again
.
“What we have here is a situation with an easy solution. I won’t bring this evidence to the police or to my friends down at the district attorney’s office, which not only implicates you in my daughter’s death, but will be evidence of your own set of violations, far beyond mere theft.”
“I don’t understand.”
I folded my hands and crossed my legs
.
“Well, for starters, you were in possession of a stolen firearm, which, if I’m correct, is a violation of your probation. And it could, if I’m correct, which I’m fairly certain I am, send you back to prison
in Pennsylvania alone. Now, of course, the other states will learn about this arrest and will likely vie for your extradition, and it’s possible Ohio will win because of the whole manslaughter conviction there, but who knows who will actually win your custody? Drug cartels are often more dangerous than accidental bar fights, so Kentucky could get equally greedy, and Pennsylvania won’t want to get left out or let go of you, given the whole ‘we found you, we caught you’ state of affairs here. It could get pretty messy.”
He looked again to your father, as if he could help him, though no bonds of gender resided there
.
“So I stole a gun,” he protested. “So I got into a beer brawl that went bad. So what?”
“Well, since you ask, we both know you assaulted my investigator, who your daughter so affectionately refers to as, what was it? A shadowman? Now Caleb, even if we take away the manslaughter conviction, this new assault would add to your other two aggravated assault convictions and would send you to jail for habitual criminal activity for the rest of your life, not necessarily here, but perhaps in Ohio or Kentucky, or maybe there’s another state I’m missing entirely when you claim you merely have a history of petty theft across the country. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Red clouds puffed across his cheeks
.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. But in reality, I think it was more of a stutter. “Y … yes, m … ma’am.”
“Good,” I said, handing him the rest of the photographs. “We’re all settled then. You will do what must be done to ensure a finding of guilt for Noa.”
The blacks of his eyes shrunk like a retarding aperture. He didn’t understand a single word I was saying. I was just another lawyer reciting his criminal history for his own edification
.
“You can’t ask me to—”
“You will be a witness for the state and the defense, no doubt, given your relationship to both Noa and Sarah. In that testimony, they’ll ask you about what you knew. And you’ll simply tell the truth.
That Noa knew my daughter was pregnant. That you told her she was pregnant, that she was angry and hurt and—”
“—she’s … she’s …” he stuttered, pleading. “She’s my daughter, Mrs. Dixon.”
“And Sarah was mine,” I said in the same thought. “I can’t imagine you’d want to add perjury to your list of charges.”
No moments to think. No methodology of response. His tools of language got him as far as five prison sentences, two misdemeanors, six felonies, and at least two illegitimate children, so needless to say, he was without choices
.