The Executioner's Song (131 page)

                Larry cleared his throat. "Okay, I can take it from there, okay?"

                "Go ahead."

                He got to the subject fast. "At this point, Gary, at one in the morning . . ."

                "Pardon," said Gilmore.

                "At one in the morning," Larry continued, reading off a card, "do you think you still have to hide anything about your life?"

                "Like what?"

                "I'm not asking you to tell me what it is, you see? I'm just asking if there's the feeling that you want to hold back something."

                Gilmore sighed. "Do you have anything specific?" he asked.

                "Well, let's say," said Schiller, "did you ever kill anybody besides Jensen and Bushnell?"

Maybe it was more of his romanticism, but he had the idea that if a man was about to die, he would be ready to reveal himself, and Schiller really wanted to know if Gilmore had ever killed anyone before.

                "Did you?" repeated Schiller.

                "No," said Gilmore.

                "No," repeated Schiller. One more frustration. There was a silence.

                No way to continue. He had to try another line of inquiry.

                "Is there anything about your relationship with your mother or father," he asked, "that is so personal to you, that even at the moment of death you'd rather not talk?" What kind of relationship could a mother have, he was thinking, that she would not come to see her son? Even if she had to arrive by stretcher! Schiller couldn't comprehend it. There had to be some buried animosity—something Gary had done to her, or she to him. If he could only get a clue to that. But nobody got to Bessie Gilmore. Dave Johnston had gone up to Portland on his own for the L.A. Times and couldn't speak to her. When Johnston failed, you had a woman not ready to talk.

                "Goddammit," said Gilmore over the phone, "I'm getting pissed off at that kind of question. I don't give a damn what anybody else has said. I've told you the fucking truth. Man, my mother's a hell of a woman. She has suffered with rheumatoid arthritis for about years and she's never bitched about it at all. Now, does that tell anything?"

                "That tells me a fucking lot, right now," said Schiller hoarsely.

                "My dad got thrown a lot in jail, when we was kids," said more. "He was a rounder. My mother would say, 'Well, he walked out,' and she let it go at that. She did the very goddamned best could, and man, she was always there, we always had something eat, we always had somebody to tuck us in."

                "Okay," said Schiller, "I believe you."

                "What about your mother?" asked Gilmore.

                "My mother," said Schiller, "was a rough, hard woman. She worked every day. She used to put me in the movies with my brother. We'd watch movies every day while she scrubbed floors for my dad."

                Much of human motivation, he had decided for himself in later years, came from the idea of behavior that movie plots laid into your head.

                When you could make remarks that brought back those movie plots, people acted on them. So the story he told Gilmore was something of a film scene. In actuality, his family had been in financial straits for only a few years, and in that period, his mother had to scrub floors at times, but the idea of a life spent on one's knees certainly mollified Gilmore.

                "My mother," said Gary, "worked as a buswoman. She didn't have any money, and she was trying to hold on to a beautiful house that we had with a nice swing-around driveway where you drive up and it makes a circle. She wanted that. She wanted some things. She lost it. When she did, she moved into a trailer. She never bitched about it."

                "You really love her, man, don't you?" said Schiller.

                "Goddammit, yes," said Gary. "I don't want to hear any fucking bullshit that she was mean to me. She never hit me."

                At that moment there was an interruption on the phone. "Hello," said a voice. "Hello," said Gary. "Is this Mr. Fagan?" said the voice.

                "Who's this?" asked Gary.

                "This is the Warden."

                "This is Mr. Gilmore," said Gary modestly, "I'm making a phone call that Mr. Fagan approved."

                "Okay, thank you," said Sam Smith, "pardon me," and he hung up. There was something in the Warden's voice that sounded like he was just about holding on to himself. It gave Schiller the feeling he had better hurry.

Next to Schiller, lying on the floor under the table, was Barry Farrell listening to the conversation through an earpiece attached by a short wire to the tape recorder. Schiller wanted to see Barry's face and get his reactions, but all he could manage from the angle at which he sat was the occasional sight of Barry's hand writing on a 3 x 5 card.

                Schiller took his last crack at the question they could not get Gilmore to respond to. "I believe you had rough breaks," said Schiller. "You got into trouble, and had a temper and were impatient, but you weren't a killer. Something happened. Something turned you into a man who could kill Jensen and Bushnell, some feeling, or emotion, or event."

                "I was always capable of murder," said Gilmore. "There's a side of me that I don't like. I can become totally devoid of feelings for others, unemotional. I know I'm doing something grossly fucking wrong. I can still go ahead and do it."

                It wasn't exactly the answer Schiller was hoping to hear. He wanted an episode. "I still," he said, "don't understand what goes on in a person's mind who decides to kill."

                "Hey, look," said Gilmore, "listen. One time I was driving down the street in Portland. I was just fucking around, about half high, and I seen two guys walk out of a bar. I was just a youngster, man, 19, 20, something like that, and one of these dudes is a young Chicano about my age and the other's about 40, an older dude. So I said, Hey, you guys want to see some girls? Get in. And they got in the back. I had a '49 Chevrolet, two door, you know, fastback? And they got in.

                And I drove out to Clackamas County, a very dark . . . now I'm telling you the truth, I ain't making this up, I'm not dramatizing, I'm going to be blasted out of my fucking boots, and I swear to Jesus Christ on everything that's holy that I'm telling you the truth verfuckingbatim. This is a strange story."

                "Okay."

                "They got back there," said Gary, "and I got to telling them about these broads, I was just embroidering how they had big tits and liked to fuck and had a party going and how I left the party to get some guys to bring out there because they were short on dudes, and these two were about half drunk, and I drove 'em down this pitch-black fucking road, it had gravel on it, you know, not a rough road, black, smooth, flat, chipped fucking concrete, that's how I remember it, and I reached down under the seat—I always kept a baseball bat or a pipe, you know—and I reached down under the seat . . . just a minute."

                Schiller was not following the story. He knew they were getting it on tape, and so he leaned over the table to see if Barry had a question for Gilmore, and as he did, he was listening to something about a pipe, a baseball bat, or whatever it was, and then he heard Gary say, "Jesus fucking Christ."

                Schiller could feel a shift in the silence.

                "Lieutenant Fagan just told me that Ritter issued a Stay," said Gary. "Son of a bitch. Goddamn foul motherfucker."

                "Okay," said Schiller, "let's just hold this shit together. You can hold it. You've held it together before, man." Now, he wanted to hear the story.

                Instead, he had to listen to Gary talking to Fagan. "Ritter definitely issued a Stay," Gary said to Larry finally. "Says it's illegal to use taxpayers' money to shoot me."

                "Yeah," said Schiller softly. There was a long pause and then he declared, "You couldn't define what the roughest torture is. What Ritter just did, is." "Yeah," said Gilmore, "Ritter's a bumbling, fumbling fool. Yeah, yeah," he said, "yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Foul cocksuckers. A taxpayers' suit. I'll pay for it myself. I'll buy the bullets, rifles, pay the riflemen. JesusfuckinggoddamnedChrist, man, I want it to be over." He sounded like he was close to crying.

                "You have a right for it to be over," said Schiller, "an inalienable right."

                "Get ahold of Hansen," said Gilmore.

                "Get on the fucking phones, girls," shouted Schiller to Lucinda and Debbie. "Get an attorney in Salt Lake City named Hansen."

                Gilmore said, "He's the fucking Attorney General of the State of Utah."

                "Attorney General of the State of Utah, okay?" Schiller repeated to the girls.

                "Tell him to go to the next highest Judge, and get Ritter's bullshit thrown out."

                "Maybe," Schiller thought, "I've seen too many movies myself."

                He could hear his voice exhorting Gary to live. It was the kind of pep talk he had heard in many a flick.

                "Gary," Schiller was saying, "maybe you're not meant to die. Maybe there's something so phenomenal, so deep, in the depths of your story, that maybe you're not meant to die right now. Maybe there are things left to do. We may not know what they are. Maybe by not dying you may be doing a hell of a lot for the whole fucking world, Maybe the suffering that you're doing now is the way you're giving back those two lives. Maybe you're laying a foundation for the way society and our civilization should proceed in the future. Maybe the punishment you're going through now is a greater punishment than death, and maybe a lot of fucking good's gonna come from it."

                Abruptly, he realized he was affecting himself a good deal more than he was moving Gilmore, "Oh, am I going to sound like a schmuck in the transcript," thought Schiller, and aloud he said, "You're not listening to me, are you?"

                "What?" said Gary. "Yeah," he said, "I'm listening."

                "Let's look at the other side of it," said Schiller, "Let's get through the next hour together. You know they're making you suffer like nobody's suffered."

                Gary's voice sounded like it was close to snapping. "Do me a favor," he said. "I got to get off this fucking phone. Because Mr. Fagan wants to use it. Get ahold of your girls."

                "Right."

                "Give 'em each a kiss for me. Tell 'em to get ahold of Mr. Hansen. Find out what the fuck can be done to overcome that guy immediately. That fool Ritter. He'll do any given thing on any fucking given day. And call me back."

                "You gotta call me," said Schiller. "I can't call you."

                "I'll call you back in a half hour."

                "In one-half hour. Keep your shit together."

                "Yeah."

                "It's shit," said Larry, "but keep it together."

                "Jesus Christ," Gary replied. "Shit. Piss. Gawd!"

It had taken until 1 A.M. for Judge Ritter to come back to the Bench.

                "The Utah death penalty statute," he read aloud to everyone in the courtroom, "has not been held constitutional by any courts . . . Until doubts are resolved . . . there can be no lawful executions. Consent of the defendant gives no power to the State to execute." It went on, and Judith Wolbach began to breathe again, and happiness went through her. The terror she liked to keep away went back to its far-off place. She could have embraced Judge Ritter. In his resonant old voice, he concluded, "There is too much uncertainty in the law and too much haste to execute the man." God, that voice sounded as good to her as old newsreels of Franklin Delano Roosevelt! Then the Judge signed the Temporary Restraining Order for Dabney and Wolbach, and set January 7th, ten days later, at 10 A.M., for a hearing on these questions.

It was a dejected gang that went back to the Attorney General's office, although Bill Barrett, Bill Evans, and Mike Deamer were trying to decide on the next step. They had all about concluded the best approach was to file a Writ of Mandamus in the morning and rush it to Denver. If they could obtain a delay from Judge Bullock, the execution could still take place tomorrow, although twelve or fourteen hours late.

                Judge Bullock had been in Salt Lake to a social affair. On his return, before he went to sleep, he turned on the radio and heard about the Stay. To himself, he thought, "That's it." There was an unmarked Sheriff's car parked outside, and Judge Bullock went out to the street and told the fellow, "No need to hang around now. Might as well go home."

                The Sheriff's office had called earlier that night to inform Judge Bullock there might be demonstrations by people opposed to the execution.

                They wanted to watch his house. The Judge thought, "Well, I don't have fear for my own safety, but who knows, maybe these groups might burn a cross on my lawn or something." He did not anticipate real violence, but just to protect the property, he thought he would accept the Sheriff's offer. A little surveillance might protect his wife and children from being disturbed.