The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (8 page)

“I know that your father left before you were born,” Oliver said to me before “Hello,” “G’day,” or any number of greetings he could have mustered this early in our fledgling relationship. It was only a handful of weeks in, and already he was storming into the visitor’s booth toting a rolling briefcase behind him looking like Marlene Dixon’s
fiendish protégé. Part of me wanted to slap him, and the other part wanted, well, the other part wanted the contrary, as I listened to him rambling off an enumerated register of alleged facts from my past that he, no doubt, was proud to uncover.

“I also know that your mother hasn’t visited you in five years. Your brother has visited you only once, as he lives paycheck to paycheck in Encino as a production assistant for a small independent film company. You never met your maternal grandfather, and your maternal grandmother suffered a fatal heart attack when you were arrested. You were never able to go to her funeral. Your paternal grandparents’ absence needs no explanation. I know that you were accepted to Princeton but decided on Penn instead. I know that you wanted to become a doctor and scored exceptionally high on your SATs but never followed through on that goal. You didn’t even attempt to get back into college. You never took driver’s education, once took a flight lesson, are nearsighted and lactose-intolerant.”

A smirk seeped out between my lips like an unsuspecting belch. As if he were the first person to take an academic interest in my life from January 1, 2003, onward.

“All that is in my trial record?”

Amused, I unfolded my arms.

“Shall I go on?” he continued.

“If you must.”

“I know that you chose to sleep through your trial and refused to offer any mitigating evidence at the penalty phase. And of course, that is primarily why we are here in the first place, isn’t it?”

“If you insist.”

“You didn’t help your attorneys at trial or on appeal, and you certainly aren’t helping me to piece together anything that can spare your life now. We have five months remaining, and you’ve done nothing but tell me about your mother’s mustache fetish.”

I sat back in my chair and placed my hands together, slapping them hard in slow motion at Oliver’s Academy Award–winning
speech. It was very melodramatic, if I say so myself. The actress who will play me in the future cinematic depiction of my life will be thrilled to have such rich and hackneyed material from which to base her rendition.

“Well done,” I said. “You’ve reread my record and run a ninety-nine-dollar background check. But before you applaud yourself too earnestly, know that I only have a
half
brother, and he works in the exciting but respectable-ish industry of adult film. I actually attended Penn for slightly less than one semester and dropped out, you’re right, because I couldn’t shake the Van Pelt Incident. But good job there reminding me of the biggest failure of my life. My flight lesson was in a rickety old biplane in La Jolla when I was too young to even see over the dashboard of a car, which is why I
did
take driver’s ed. My grandmother died on the day of my
conviction
—not my arrest. And I’m farsighted.”

This was actually quite fun.

“You’re not inhuman and fearless,” he said to me, after a long pause. A strand of hair dropped between his eyes. “I know you think you are, but you’re not.”

Across the room, I noticed that Patsmith was getting seated in her telephone booth, awaiting another visitor for the umpteenth time this week. She wasn’t looking at me, though. She was staring at Ollie, as if he was another Pat Jeremiah of the ephemeral Pat’s Pub.

“We have five months to put together a narrative that might spare your life,” Ollie finally said. “If you don’t open up to me about who you are, about why you’re here, I can’t help you. And I want to help you, Noa. I really do.”

Beyond Ollie, beyond the multiplying layers of glass, chairs, linoleum, visitors, guards, space, Patsmith was turning away to someone new. I couldn’t help myself from watching her, but throughout it, Ollie’s gaze never left mine.

“Don’t get all serious on me now, Ollie. Come on,” I teased. “It’s the least you can do for me. It’s not like you’re actually my real lawyer.
We both know it’s Marlene. You and I are just another one of her little projects.”

He shook his head no with a smile—the universal sign that he knew his place but wasn’t about to challenge the one person who could alter it. Maybe he didn’t believe me. Maybe he did, and that’s why he grew reticent.

“Tell me this, Ollie, did you always want to come to Filthadelphia, America, to work for one of the last remaining Queen Bees of the women’s lib generation so that she could make you feel guilty about everything you’ve ever done? Is that why you hopped over?”

A nervous grin bled through his face. “She’s not that bad.”

“You’ll see.”

“And, yes, I did want to come back here.”

“Back?” I said, lifting my legs to the chair. “Now I’m listening.”

He smiled downwardly again, signaling to everyone around him that he was approaching distinguished-hood prematurely but hadn’t quite realized it.

“Noa, please focus.”

“I am,” I said.

He looked behind to Patsmith and Nancy Rae and the surplus of empty chairs before slumping into his chair like a derailed child.

“I spent a summer traveling cross-country on a bus before university, and I loved it here.” He smiled, his cheeks spackled with dark-red spots. “I always knew I wanted to come back.”

I laughed. “You spent your summer on a bus?”

“A Greyhound bus,” he said proudly, as if reliving the vile memory.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“What?”

“What do you mean … what?” I asked. “Nobody takes the bus cross-country in America. You do realize that.”

He sat up. “I hate flying—that’s why I took the bus. That’s all.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I sighed. “You’re one of them. You’re afraid to fly.”

“No I’m not,” he said.

“Come on.”

“I’m not. Really,” he said lowering his voice. “I was actually conceived on a plane.”

I folded my arms, one on top of the other. “I’m listening,” I said, though in hindsight, I don’t think I really was.

My eyes were drifting slightly beyond him to Patsmith, who was now glaring over at us from behind her visitor (a priest? a grandfather?). But Ollie’s lips were moving in animation, his eyes jumping about his face. Somewhere between Ollie’s throat-clearing anxiety and nail-biting interrogation, he had slipped into the role of enchanting storyteller, far better than Madison McCall, who never told me so much as his wife’s name, or Stewart Harris, who claimed he lived in Philadelphia, but I knew really lived in the Delaware Valley on the weekends, where his estranged ex had full custody of his children. Ollie, one month in, was already sharing the files from his life without my prying so much as a birth date or alma mater from him. It takes a certain amount of self-awareness to confide so much in a near stranger this early on. It takes an even greater amount of resilience to proffer it to a double murderer.

“My dad was a pilot, my mom a flight hostess,” he continued, “and, yes, it’s terribly charming—”

“—I was going to say cheesy, cliché, nauseating, but go on.” I smiled, looking directly at him.

“I was conceived on a weekend flight somewhere in either Morocco, Algiers, or Gibraltar, but no one can be sure exactly where.”

“Please tell me your father was not flying the plane that weekend.”

Oliver laughed, briefly. “No, he was just flying with my mum that weekend as a passenger.”

“I see.” I smiled. “Cute.”

“He’s very important to me,” he added. “My father.”

He clutched his hands together into a ball but didn’t elaborate. Instead, he gazed at me, looking up, sort of. He was short—I could
tell that even when he was sitting down—and blessed or cursed with a mug of babyface magnitude. But his words were so elegantly articulated—even silently—that I was getting lost in his damned gaze. It bothered me.

“You’re not very subtle, are you, Ollie?”

Again, the uplifted shoulders.

“How do you know that what you’re reading in your record is actually the truth?” I asked.

“Perjury, Noa,” he declared. “That’s how.”

“And nobody lies on the stand? Really, Ollie. You’re foreign, but you’re not that foreign.”

“You never took the stand.”

“You have a point there,” I said, “but that’s not the reason I didn’t testify. Ask Marlene.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” I sighed, looking beyond him again. Patsmith was still in her booth speaking at someone, while staring over at Ollie. Ollie was my visitor, though. Not Patsmith’s. She wasn’t about to change her name to Olliesmith days (or was it years?) prior to her execution.

“Noa?”

I looked back to him.

“Nothing,” I said. “You know, you’re not going to find anything new in that record of yours. You think I haven’t read it from cover to cover?”

“I spoke with your father yesterday on the phone.”

From their fans of lashes, average brown eyes stared back at me with urgency and precision. It was like he wanted a medal for picking up a telephone.

“Guard!” I called. It was instinct at this point. I stood and looked out from the divider. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Nancy Rae putting her Dr Pepper can down on a chair to walk over to me.

“Why won’t you tell me about him?” Oliver pleaded.

“I was really starting to like you.”

“He was very concerned about you,” Ollie replied.

“I haven’t heard from him in years,” I said, looking back to Nancy Rae. “I heard he was in Costa Rica.”

“Canada.”

“Canada,” I said, still looking for Nancy Rae. “Okay. Fine, then. Did Marlene put you two in touch?”

“Marlene?” He laughed, shaking his head no. “No. She doesn’t know where he is.”

“Right.” My head nodded, and I sat. “How would she?”

“I just felt that there was something missing when I read the transcript,” he said. “So I tracked him down.”

It was almost as if he were looking for validation. Pride in his job well done far beyond the call of pro bono law firm duty. I was about to hand him a dozen roses and a tiara when Nancy Rae arrived outside my door.

“Noa, please,” he said, almost pleading with me. “How often have you spoken with him?”

I said nothing.

“Noa?”

“Three times,” I said. “I’ve spoken with him three times since.”

“Three times?” he echoed. “Try again.”

God, he was relentless. I thought the English were supposed to be slightly more passive than us. Meanwhile, Nancy Rae’s ring of keys jingled off her belt like a corporate janitress. Metal clanking echoed into my booth as she searched for the proper key.

“Look, I knew my father only briefly before the trial, and honestly, that is the real reason that Sarah died, okay?”

“Excuse me?”

“Forget it, Ollie. You’ll never get in touch with that man again. Trust me.”

“What do you mean, that’s the real reason that Sarah died?”

“Hands,” Nancy Rae requested, rather timely, as soon as she found her key. She opened the four-by-ten-inch window on the door. It was the size of a mail slot. I stood, backed up to the door, and like a
wounded bird, poked my bony fingers through the opening from behind, and the metal cuffs once again adorned my wrists. Oliver stared at me during the whole spectacle without budging.

“Noa, please answer me.”

“There’s no need. Clearly you already know everything you need to know.”

I
T WAS AN ANOMALOUS
T
UESDAY NIGHT IN 2002 WHEN THE
phone calls started. For over a week (at precisely 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights), my apartment became a torrent of moral decay. His moans lubricated the phone lines like a sexually transmitted disease. Whirls of tornadic subjugation seeped through the little holes of the telephone receiver, which, within seconds, was marred by a rapid dial tone. I would answer, and before having a moment to ask who it was—(Paramedic One? Andy Hoskins? the Rigas? my baby brother joking around?)—was hung up on as soon as I spoke.

I didn’t think much of it after the first call. Or even the second, really. It was only after the third that I started to get a little concerned. I believed, even after everything that preceded my incarceration, in honor and in trust, two virtues that belie my current rank. Whoever was calling me was looking for someone and didn’t realize he or she had the wrong number. He’ll stop when he’s ready to stop, I thought. She must have a reason for this. It’s not exactly stalking per se; he’s just looking for someone, and I’ve got that someone’s phone number. His ex-wife might be terrorizing him, and this is his way of getting even. It’s a wrong number. She’s an angry student who got a B on her last biology test. And so on. But Bobby McManahan, the police officer trainee with whom I was sleeping at the time, did not
have the same patience. So after five calls, I figured I’d ask him for some vaguely professional advice.

At 6:05 p.m. on that Thursday in February, Bobby was waiting with me for the call before heading back to his night shift. He was working the general street patrol on South Street that month, watching street bums attempt to chat with overstimulated, overprivileged college kids just moments after they pierced their gonads or some other brilliant idea of the like. (The resulting interactions were always humorous for at least one party—and I won’t say which one.) Meanwhile, the phone call was five minutes late.

“See,” I said to Bobby, smiling at the clock. “No need to tell the police.”

His face dropped. “I
am
the police.”

“Oh, Bobby.” I grinned, cupping his face with my palms. His cheeks were pocked with what appeared to be year-old acne that had since cleared in part, and his dusty blond hair was parted down the side a little too carefully for my taste. But he was fairly benign and easy enough to manipulate, which didn’t exactly bode well for his professional ambitions, which wasn’t my problem, but that’s irrelevant at the moment. “You’re far too gullible to carry a gun.”

He bit his lip. “It’s just a taser.”