The Executioner's Song (117 page)

                Yet Farrell was just as glad it couldn't happen. He was saved thereby from having to muster that twinkle of the eye at which he had become so reassuring. Or that firm handshake which said, "I'm here to listen to you, man to man, buddy to buddy." All those things interviewers did, those up-front sympathies, those gut-grinder empathies. This way, there was no quickly-arrived-at brotherhood to betray.

                He could sit at the typewriter and compose his questions, Moody and Stanger would truck them out, Debbie and Lucinda would type the tapes, and he could study it long enough to write new questions.

                He and Gary were immunized from one another. No need to twist his face full of instant humanity in order to keep Gilmore talking.

                Even more important, he would not have to run the risk of getting too friendly with Gary and so forgetting that some basic pieces might be missing in Gilmore, that he, Barry Farrell, as a brother of Max Jensen, ought not to forgive for too little. Yes, it was better this way.

Still, the tapes were endlessly irritating. Barry was developing quite a dislike for the lawyers. It was too cruel a demand on his nervous system not to know whether a serious question was going to be presented properly, or if Moody, or particularly Stanger, would giggle his ass off. To Farrell, straining to listen at the end of a tape, the lawyers seemed too cautious when they were not too flighty. Some of those Sisters at the Catholic school in Portland, Gilmore would confide to the lawyers, gave us real whippings. "They used to go insane with frustration," Gary said, "trying to make me conform. I got beat by nuns more than once. It wasn't like when they disciplined other children there. My father finally took me out of the school." Farrell was up on tiptoe for the development of this theme. The key to every violent criminal could be found in the file of his childhood beatings, but Gilmore claimed his mother never touched him, and his father never bothered to. So here, at last, might be the beginning of some nitty-gritty. Stanger, however, chose to say, "Oh, gee, those nuns always seemed so nice in the movies." Gilmore answered, "Yeah. In the movies." Stanger cackled.

                To Farrell's ears at that moment, it went: Cackle, cackle, cackle.

                He went wild listening to those tapes late at night in Orem, in the ice-cold middle of winter.

Sometimes he and Schiller would sit down with the lawyers and go over the questions. Moody and Stanger would seem to know what they were doing as they left for the prison. Then they would come back saying great, great, and leave the tape. Schiller would play it—oh, God. The lawyers were hopeless as journalists. All that stuff they didn't get around to.

GILMORE            This kid come to me and asked if he could talk, and wanted to come out in the yard with me and asked if he could walk around with me. I asked him, "What's wrong?" and he said this, uh, nigger was trying to fuck him. He was going to turn himself in, you know, into the hole, to be locked up to get away from it. He didn't know how to handle it. I told him, "Well, listen, man, what do you want me to do?" and he says, "I'll be your kid if you'll protect me," you know. I says, "Well, I don't want a kid, I don't like punks, ya know, and I don't want you to be a punk anyway." I asked him if he was one. He said, "No," and he didn't want to be one. So I just went and got another guy and told him about it you know, and he said, Let's kill the motherfucker. As it turned out, we didn't kill him. Gibbs will say that we did, but we didn't. We just caught this guy coming up the stairs and we both had pieces of pipe in our hand, you know, and we beat him half to death and drug him down to another nigger's cell, and put him on the bunk. He was unconscious. We hit him so fast and so hard . . . he was a boxer, we didn't give him no chance, slammed the door, and left. He knew who did it, you know, and, uh, he never tried to do anything about it. He accepted it and, uh, that's the way it was.

That's the way it was. They never asked Gilmore another question.

                He could have shouted in frustration. He would not have let Gilmore get away with that story. Farrell would have liked to learn if Gilmore had ever been turned out by some black guy. Maybe as far back as Reform School, maybe later. But there was something in the story that left Farrell suspicious. This big, black brute who aroused Gilmore sufficiently to defend a sweet white boy—it was like a girl calling you on the phone to say, "I have a friend who's pregnant. Do you know a doctor?" Gary was walking tall in the tale, but what if that little white kid had been Gary?

So there would be hours when Farrell would be seized with depression at how few were the answers they had located in the inner works of Gary Mark Gilmore, and the size of the questions that remained. How could they begin to explain things so basic, for example, as the way he had led Nicole into suicide? That was clammy.

                Could you call such depths of lover's perfidy a product of environment?

                Might you dare to explain it by saying that only an urban cowboy could pass through psychological machines that would stamp you out that badly? Could you say that you had to eat the wrong foods, sleep in the wrong places, take the wrong drugs, drive the wrong cars, make the wrong turns, do all that for an awful long time before you turned into a force who did horrible things to people who loved you?

                Or did you put the blame on heredity, and say Gary Gilmore grew out of the evil seed of mystery in things itself? Why, there were thousands of people who could stick up a motel and shoot the motel owner. Afterward they would utter the same kind of half-stoned things Gilmore had testified to. Didn't quite know, didn't quite member, it was like a movie, man, no reason. A veil of water over the mind, you know. But planning for Nicole's suicide—that, to Farrell, had evil genius. "Little elf, how can you do this to me?" Gilmore would implore. Then, at the top of the next page, as if Gilmore had just swallowed a lightning bolt of rage, why, FUCK, SHIT, and PISS would be written in letters two inches high.

                Farrell got formidably suspicious of those letters. The mood, he noticed, often changed at the beginning of a new page. In effect, each sheet was being worked on as a separate composition. Gilmore—good old Renaissance man—wasn't about to sully the calligraphy of a pretty page with obscenities, not if he was planning to finish the pretty page with a drawing of an elf.

GILMORE            If I talk to Nicole before I'm executed, I'm not going to ask her to do any particular thing, and I may encourage her to go on living and to raise her kids. Uh, I don't want anybody else to be able to have her, though.

MOODY               You're really on the horns of a dilemma.

GILMORE            Yeah, you might say it's giving me a little pause.

MOODY               She has a pretty heavy responsibility to those kids.

GILMORE            Aw, no more responsibility than anybody has for their kids. Listen, your kids come through you but they're not really of you. I mean . . . everybody is an individual little soul. Those kids come through her but they are not a part of her.

MOODY               Do you think they could get along as well without her as with her?

GILMORE            I guess this sounds like a cold-blooded thing, but I'm not really over-concerned about them kids. They're not going to starve to death. (pause) I'm concerned about Nicole and myself.

MOODY               Might it be kinder and more loving to instruct her to forget you, get over you, and find a man for herself and her children who would give them a chance for a better life than they've had?

GILMORE            Kinder and more loving to who?

MOODY               To her and the children.

GILMORE            I'm not going to answer that.

Well, a coherent philosophy came no more easily to him than to anyone else.

All this while Schiller was having his own reaction to Farrell. He didn't like the way Barry tended to shape his questions upon conclusions he'd already made. In a way, very Catholic, thought Schiller.

                Catholics were supposed to know what they thought. Sometimes the habit carried over from church to a lot of other things. Start with preformed conclusions, and your investigation would move on tracks.

                In his own classy way, Barry could be as narrow-minded as an FBI man. He certainly wasn't exploring karma enough. Nor was Schiller certain that Barry had a good sense of Gilmore.

                The real friction, however, was that Farrell didn't like to listen to tapes when they came in. For Schiller, that was the creative experience of the day. He'd have an immediate reaction. At such times, he felt he understood Gilmore at a moment-by-moment level. But Barry didn't like to listen. He waited for the tapes to be typed up. That left him a full day behind. Still, Farrell argued, he couldn't work until they were on paper. Then he could underline them and analyze them. Schiller would say, "Don't you hear his voice? Gary is ready to answer questions on this subject now." Barry would reply, "Well, I want to look at the transcript." Of course, their relations never got uncivil, except for that blowout over Jimmy Breslin.

Chapter 26

NOTHING LEFT

In December, after the Supreme Court turned them down, Anthony Amsterdam called Mikal. The decision, he explained, had not said the State of Utah was right and they were wrong. Only that the request to have the case heard immediately was being refused. That was merely a setback. Bessie or Mikal could still file the same argument in a lower Federal Court. The case would go up again.

                Mikal, however, replied that Gary had called his mother and asked her not to take any further steps.

                Bessie's decision to stay out looked final. Any new action, therefore, would have to be brought, Mikal said, by himself. He also told Amsterdam that he did not know what conclusion he would come to.

                Mikal thought he might have to go to Utah to decide. He confessed to Amsterdam that he hated the thought of such a trip,

                Mikal ought to recognize, Amsterdam said, that the Damicos wouldn't necessarily want him to visit his brother. Amsterdam said he did not pretend to know Vern Damico, but the uncle and his attorneys could have a financial interest in Gary's death. They would hardly be unaware of the possibility that Mikal could change Gary's mind. They could believe themselves full of human decency and family love, yet still offer a lack of cooperation.

                Mikal got ready to go.

On January 11, Richard Giauque met Mikal at the airport in Salt Lake, and drove him out to Point of the Mountain. Since Giauque's own car was being repaired, he showed up in his partner's limousine, a silver Rolls-Royce, and apologized for its gaudiness. Mikal, full of the tension of walking into an interview with a brother who might be hostile to him, was hardly observing in which car he traveled. In fact, once they passed the prison gate, and were escorted down the lane between the two high wire fences that led to Maximum, a long, one-story warehouse of a building, he was most surprised he was not searched. By way of Ron Stanger, Giauque had made arrangements for the visit, and been told that it would be a ninety-minute "one time only, no physical contact" affair. The Warden must have changed his mind, however, for Mikal was quickly passed through two sliding metal gates and brought into a chamber about 20 feet by 30, the visiting room for Maximum Security. In this room, everything was painted beige, a drab beige, old and grungy. There were cigarette butts on the floor, and, more than ten days after New Year's, a Christmas tree shedding its needles in the corner—an ill-kept dirty room.

                Gary came strolling in through another sliding gate. He was wearing red, white and blue sneakers, and white coveralls. Like a juggler, he was wigwagging a comb through his fingers. He had a big smile. "Well," he said to Mikal, "you're as damn skinny as ever."

                As soon as they began to speak, however, of the purpose of Mikal's visit, Gary said, "I don't want the family interfering." He stared into Mikal's eyes. "Amsterdam is out of this, I hope." Before he could reply, Vern and Ida came through the door. Mikal couldn't believe it. He had been promised a private visit.

                Vern had brought along a large green T-shirt with a computerized photo of Gary on it. Below was printed: GILMORE—DEATH WISH. Mikal couldn't tell if they were serious, but they kept talking about Gary wearing one of these T-shirts on Execution Day so they could auction it off, bullet holes and all. "Take it to Sotheby's," said Gary, laughing. Such talk consumed a lot of time. Vern and Gary were like veterans talking over old capers in front of a rookie.

                After the Damicos left, Mikal had a moment alone with Gary. He was promptly offered a shirt.

                "It wouldn't be much use to me."

                "Well," said Gary, "it is too big. Maybe you can grow into it."

                Mikal couldn't keep from saying, "Are you really planning to sell it?" "Do you think," said Gary, "that I have no more class than that?"