Authors: Mary Willis Walker
When the light changed, she turned left onto Martin Luther King and pulled into the parking lot of a garish pink Taco Cabana. Whatever she was going to do next, she couldn’t do it without coffee. She ran inside and brought the cup back to the truck. Then she picked
up the phone to make the call she hated to make. Sister Addie would be waiting.
Addie answered before the first ring ended.
“She said no,” Molly said without identifying herself. “No executive clemency. Said we didn’t have diddly squat and Louie was just the sort we should be executing.”
Knitting needles clicked. Addie said, “Well, it’s hard to argue against that.” She clucked once. “And I just talked to Tanya Klein. The Fifth Circuit Court refused to grant relief and so did the state. Of course, she’ll file the usual last-minute petition to the Supreme Court, but there’s no chance, she says. It’s all over. We need to let Louie know.”
Molly hadn’t even thought about that. Of course, he’d be waiting to hear.
“Would you like me to tell him?” Addie asked. “I was just waiting for your call before driving over there. To the old death row over at the Walls. You know, they transferred him there early this morning. I think it’s better to tell him in person than ask them to give him the message, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes. Much better. You tell him, Sister Addie. Please.”
“All right. I don’t believe it will come as that much of a surprise to him. You want to see him before tonight, dear? We could put you on the list.”
The thought made Molly’s stomach swoop. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Any messages?”
“Messages? Let me think. Yes. Tell him I tried. And I’m sorry,” Molly said, feeling right down to her toenails the inadequacy of that message. “So sorry.”
“Well, I’ll see you tonight?” Addie said, her voice rising in a question.
“I don’t know. I guess,” Molly said. “It seems wrong to come and wrong not to.”
“I know what you mean.” Addie paused. “I don’t want to play the busybody here, but—”
“But you’re going to.”
“Yes, I’m afraid I am. One advantage of my having attended too many of these melancholy occasions is that I have considered this question five ways to Sunday. Here’s how I see it. Being there is not
in any way a tacit approval or acceptance. You are simply witnessing the event, that’s all.”
Molly considered it in silence. Addie broke into her thought. “You haven’t been to an execution before, have you, Sister Molly?”
“No.”
“That place, the death chamber, is like no other place I’ve ever been. This is going to sound silly to you, but just wait—you’ll feel it the second you walk in—the very air in there is corrupted. It reeks of misery. I think it’s important that a few of us who disapprove should be present, so we can fill the air with our own vibrations of opposition.”
It did sound silly. Molly said, “Prepare me for it. What should I expect?”
“It’s, oh, my dear, it’s, well, it’s not—”
“You aren’t going to tell me it’s not really so bad as I imagine, are you?”
“Heavens, no. It’s worse. Far worse than you imagine. They tell you lethal injection is humane, but sometimes it goes very badly. That’s another reason for you to come. You should
know.
”
Molly sighed. “I’ll be there,” she said. “Have you finished the afghan?”
Addie laughed. “Not quite. That was the real reason I was hoping you might get a thirty-day reprieve. For me. So I could finish this dratted thing. Well, I need to get on the road, dear. Thanks for your good efforts on Louie’s behalf. We tried.”
Molly put down the phone and checked her watch. Seven-forty. She didn’t want to go home and she didn’t want to go out for breakfast. And she absolutely did not want to go to the office.
She put her coffee cup in the circular holder between the seats and headed the truck toward South Austin. What she really wanted to do,
had
to do, was talk to Alison McFarland about her testimony ten years ago. The discrepancy was driving Molly crazy.
She headed south on Guadalupe, crossed the bridge over Town Lake, and took Congress Avenue. When she pulled up in front of the house on Monroe it was not yet eight. Hell of a time to be making a surprise visit. But that was the least of it. What she was about to do was probably inexcusable, just what Charlie had asked her not to do—put more pressure on an unstable young woman on a day that was sure to be monstrously difficult for her anyway.
Molly walked up the cracked sidewalk to the front door. She frowned when she saw that the door was standing open. For a flash she wondered if they felt safe because they knew for a fact there was no murderer loose outside their house.
She knocked on the wood door frame and waited.
Mark Redinger came to the door in a pair of white shorts and nothing else. His tanned chest was finely muscled and covered with just the right amount of curly black hair. Molly wondered what he had looked like at seventeen. Pretty spectacular, she imagined. A handsome, wild boy—according to Stuart and Charlie both, a real bad influence. A boy who liked older women, who liked to spy on people. A boy who had reason to hate Charlie McFarland, then and now.
Through the screen she thought she saw Mark scowl when he recognized her. Well, who could blame him. “Good morning, Mark,” she said. “I know it’s ungodly early, but I wonder if I could have a word with Alison.”
“Well, Mrs. Cates,” he said in a cold voice. “She isn’t dressed yet.” He looked down at himself—his flat belly, narrow hips, and long muscled legs, and when he looked up he wore his flirtatious grin, as if he had just remembered to put it on. “Neither am I actually,” he added.
“It’s important,” Molly said. “If she could spare me a minute I surely would be grateful. And I don’t mind whether she’s dressed or not.”
“Just a sec,” he said, and faded into the darkness inside.
When he reappeared, he’d thrown on a short-sleeved shirt but hadn’t buttoned it, so a generous expanse of chest still showed. He opened the screen for her and said, “I’m going to put on some coffee. Will you have some?”
“I’d love some,” Molly said as she entered. The hall was filled with cardboard boxes and large green garbage bags full of clothes and books. “Someone moving?” she asked.
“Alison’s moving back home.” Mark led the way back to the sunny kitchen.
In the kitchen, she watched as he went about the business of making coffee with graceful, efficient motions. Molly said, “I suppose Alison feels she can be more helpful to her father right now if she’s home.”
“I guess,” Mark said, his eyes down, fixed on the coffee he was measuring into a filter.
In a minute Alison walked into the room. She carried a small calico cat in her arms. She was wearing dirty gray sweatpants, a huge blue T-shirt, and no shoes. She looked at Molly and said, “Today’s the day.”
“For Louie Bronk, you mean?” Molly asked.
Alison nodded.
“I think of it as today, too,” Molly said, “although really it’s tomorrow. The law reads that it has to be done between midnight and sunrise on the date the court has set, and the date’s the twenty-ninth.”
Alison shrugged. “Well, in any case, we’re about to see the end of it.”
“Maybe not,” Molly said, watching her face.
Alison stopped still. “Oh? Has something happened?” The cat made a sudden twist as if it had been squeezed too hard. Alison leaned over and let it down on the floor.
“Yes,” Molly said, “and I wanted to ask you about it.”
Mark finished the preparations and switched on the coffee maker. He turned and leaned a hip against the counter, nonchalant, his shirt hanging open.
Molly paused. What she was going to ask would be best done in private. Maybe she should ask Mark to leave. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see his reaction to it.
“I’m not going to take the time to go into details,” she said, “but in the past two days I’ve unearthed some new evidence. It’s enough to convince me that Louie Bronk did not kill your mother, and that there was no white Mustang with a brown door at your house that morning. Louie did own such a car, but before the ninth of July, it had been painted bright blue and sold to a scrap yard in Fort Worth for junk. It could not have been in Austin.”
Neither of the two young faces changed expression.
“So I wonder,” Molly continued in a slow, neutral voice, “if you could have been mistaken about what you saw that day, Alison?”
Mark reached out and put his arm in front of Alison the way a driver reaches out to stop his passenger from flying forward when the brakes are applied suddenly. “Charlie was right,” he said between
tight lips. “You are a troublemaker. What are you trying to do here?”
“I’m just trying to find out what really happened that day,” Molly said. “And I wish you’d both help me.” The coffee maker emitted a loud grinding noise, very much like a Bronx cheer.
Mark kept his arm out in front of Alison. “Help you? Help you do what? Drive Alison crazy with this? Don’t you think it’s hard enough for her?”
Molly directed her words to Alison. “I think it’s very, very hard. But I hope you’ll answer the question, Alison. Could you possibly have been mistaken?”
The delicate lavender skin under the girl’s eyes wrinkled; it was the only movement she made to show she was considering the question.
“This is enough, Mrs. Cates,” Mark said, finally lowering his arm and standing up straight. “We don’t need this today.”
Molly held up a hand. “Wait. I’m talking with Alison. Give her a chance to answer please.”
Mark turned toward Alison, but the girl didn’t look at him. She continued to stare down at her toes. She said, “It’s always possible to be mistaken. Maybe I was. But David, he was sure of what he saw.”
“No,” Molly said, “he wasn’t. When we talked Tuesday night, David hinted that he was having doubts. I don’t think he was sure at all. Alison, please tell me about the car.”
Alison took a quick bite at the side of her thumbnail. “There’s not much to tell. I was kind of sluggish and bleary-eyed, the way you are after a nap. And I was only a kid. When I looked out the door, I thought I saw a car. David made me promise to stay in the house, in the TV room, even though I was scared to be alone, and when he came back in, we talked about the car and I remembered it was white. He thought it had a brown door and I thought I remembered that, too. That’s it. That’s what I remember.”
Molly felt a buzzing in her fingertips. “But David always said he stayed with you in the house after the two of you saw the car drive away.”
“Did he? I think he was out of the house for a little while.” Alison shook her head. “I’m just not sure.”
Mark took a step forward. “Come on, Mrs. Cates, what are you
trying to accomplish here? This guy was convicted five times. He’s a killer. He confessed.”
“That’s all true, Mark. He’s also a liar and has been known to confess to crimes he didn’t commit. I think he lied when he confessed to Alison’s mother’s murder. Now, that means someone else killed her.” She looked him in the eye. “Don’t you think we need to know who it was?”
He didn’t flinch from Molly’s stare. “Wait a minute. If you really had some new evidence you’d have given it to the court and gotten Bronk a pardon, or whatever they call it. You don’t have anything.”
“Well, I don’t have enough to interest the courts, that’s true,” Molly admitted. “But I have enough to convince me. Mark, that coffee smells done. After my rudeness, do I still get a cup?”
He smiled, though it looked like his lips had to make a real effort to do it. “Coming right up.” He turned to open the cabinet behind him. “What do you take?”
“Oh. Nothing. Black, please.”
He took out a glass jar containing little packets of Sweet’n Low, reminding Molly of what Georgia McFarland carried in the pocket of her terry-cloth robe. After he had poured coffee into three mugs he handed Molly one and then emptied a packet into each of the other two. He pushed one mug down the counter to where Alison was leaning. She didn’t even glance at it.
Molly took a sip of her coffee. “Sorry to barge in like this so early, but I thought you’d want to know.”
“Yes, I guess I do,” Alison said. “Is there anything else you found out? Anything you haven’t told us?”
Molly thought about Charlie—his cancer and the payments to David Serrano. Nothing she could tell. “No,” Molly said. “That’s it so far. I don’t want to scare you, but I believe now that David was murdered because of something he was going to tell about your mother’s death. When he and I talked Tuesday night, I think he was on the verge of telling me something important, something that had been eating at him. Do you have any idea what that might have been?”
Alison shook her head. “You know, when I woke up that day, I thought it was just another long, hot, boring summer day. I wasn’t paying much attention to anything. If you only knew what moments
in life were going to be important, you’d pay more attention to them.”
“Amen,” Molly said.
They drank coffee in silence until Mark said, “Sorry if I’ve been inhospitable here, but this is one hell of a hard day for Alison. I hate to see her made more unhappy. Anyway, who can blame a man for what he does before his first cup of the day? We’re just going to have to agree to disagree here. I don’t buy your theory for a second. Alison’s always done just the right thing and this Bronk guy is as guilty as they come.”
Molly took a sip of her coffee and watched the cat rubbing against Mark’s ankle, meowing. Mark got a carton of milk out of the refrigerator and took it to the back door where he leaned over and poured it into a small bowl. The cat went for it right away. Then Mark put the carton back. Well damn, Molly thought, who knows? Maybe Alison has herself one hell of a man here. Maybe she ought to stay right here with him and not move back to her father’s. Maybe it’s safer here.
Molly took another sip of her coffee. “Mark, did you have any luck with the attorney general’s office?”
“About attending the execution? No. They said I wasn’t official enough. They do not allow the general public to attend executions and I guess that’s what I am. I’m going over anyway, to drive Alison. I’ll just wait outside for her.”