Executive Privilege

Chapter Ten

The trip down I-5 from Portland to the state penitentiary in Salem, Oregon ’s capital, took an hour. During the ride, Brad Miller’s thoughts seesawed between his upcoming visit with Clarence Little and the meeting he’d had two days before with the Dragon Lady. As soon as he’d completed his research, Brad had told Susan Tuchman that he didn’t think there was any issue in Clarence Little’s case that he could argue with a straight face to an appellate court. He’d assumed that Tuchman would tell him to file a motion to dismiss the appeal after writing a letter to Little explaining that he had no case. Neither of these actions would require Brad to come within fifty miles of his homicidal client. Instead, Tuchman had ordered him to drive to the penitentiary and explain his conclusion to the death row inmate in person. Brad had tried to convince his boss that he should be billing hours for the firm rather than spending nonbillable hours locked behind high concrete walls with someone whose idea of a good time was chopping off the pinkies of the women he’d murdered. Tuchman had smiled-sadistically Brad had thought-while explaining how client contact would aid his growth as a lawyer.

Brad’s knowledge of prison came mostly from movies in which brutal inmates either raped one another in the shower or took i

The night before he drove to the penitentiary, Brad had a vivid dream about Laurie Erickson’s autopsy. In parts of his nightmare Laurie was on the slab, but in other lurid dream sequences there was a man who vaguely resembled Brad lying beneath the coroner’s blood-stained scalpel. Brad had startled out of sleep several times during the night, and each time he burst into consciousness his heart was racing and his sheets were damp with sweat. When he finally gave up on sleep at 5:45 A.M. he was exhausted and worried. By the time he parked in the visitors’ lot at the penitentiary he was a wreck.

Brad made certain that his car was locked before walking down the tree-lined lane from the lot to the front door of the prison. The sun was warm, and there was a light breeze. On either side of the lane were pleasant white houses that were once residences and now served as offices for the staff. It would have been an idyllic setting if the prison’s intimidating egg yolk yellow walls, topped with razor wire and guarded by gun towers, weren’t looming over the charming houses with their neatly trimmed lawns.

Brad walked up a short flight of steps to a door that opened into a waiting room tiled in green and lined with cheap couches covered in rust-colored upholstery that had been made in the prison. Two guards stood behind a circular counter in the center of the room. After Brad explained the purpose of his visit and showed his bar card and driver’s license he was told to have a seat.

Two heavyset older women occupied one of the couches. One was African-American and the other was white. They seemed to know each other. Brad guessed that their sons were in prison and they’d struck up a friendship during prior visits. A woman in her early twenties sat on another couch fussing with a boy who looked to be four or five. The woman was attractive but wore too much makeup. The boy was whining and straining against the hand that held him firmly. His mother looked harried and on the verge of using violence to make the boy do what she wanted.

Brad found an unoccupied couch as far from the mother and her child as possible and studied his notes for the meeting. The kid was screaming now and it was hard to concentrate so he was relieved when one of the guards walked over to a metal detector and called out his name and several others. The older women had headed for the metal detector as soon as the guard left his post behind the counter. The mother picked up her son and carried him to the end of the line the older women had formed. Brad joined them. When it was his turn the guard told him to take off his shoes and belt and empty his pockets before walking through the machine. When Brad had his belt and shoes back on, the guard led the visitors down a ramp. At the end of the ramp was a set of sliding steel bars. Their escort signaled another guard who sat in a control room. Moments later the gate rolled aside with a metallic groan and they entered a holding area. As soon as the first gate closed a second gate opened and the group followed the guard down a short hall where they waited while he unlocked the thick metal door to the visiting area.

A corrections officer sat on a raised platform at one end of a large open room crowded with more prison-made couches and flimsy wooden coffee tables. Vending machines dispensing soft drinks, coffee, and candy stood along one wall. A gray-haired man shuffled over to the coffee machine. It was easy to tell he was a prisoner because the inmates wore blue work shirts and jeans.

Brad waited until the women had talked to the guard before telling him that he had an appointment to meet with Clarence Little. Brad expected the guard to be impressed or horrified when he heard the name of Brad’s client, but he just looked bored when he called death row to request Little’s transport.

“You’re across the hall,” he said when he hung up. “It’ll take about fifteen minutes to get him down here. Do you want to wait here or in the noncontact room?”

Brad glanced briefly at the occupants of the visiting room, which he had expected to be filled with tattooed Hells Angels and wild-eyed psychos with shaved heads, but none of the prisoners looked threatening. Several men sat on the floor playing with young children. Others leaned across coffee tables holding whispered conversations with wives and girlfriends. Still, it made Brad nervous to be in close proximity to someone who’d done something bad enough to get him sent to prison.

“I’ll wait in the noncontact room,” he told the guard.

Across the hall from the general visiting room was another visiting area. Windows made of bulletproof glass were set in two of the walls. Behind some of these windows sat prisoners deemed too dangerous to be allowed in the open visiting area. Their visitors sat on folding chairs, and the conversations were carried on over phone receivers. At the end were two rooms barely big enough to accommodate a bridge chair. The guard opened the door to one of them and ushered Brad inside. The chair faced a glass window set in concrete blocks painted institutional brown. A slot for passing papers had been built into the bottom of the window and a metal ledge just wide enough to accommodate a legal pad jutted out from the wall underneath the window. A phone receiver like those Brad had seen the other visitors using was attached to the wall.

The guard left and Brad stared anxiously through the glass at a door that allowed entry into an identical room on the other side. There were no photographs of his client in his file and Brad’s imagination had created a murderer who was an amalgamation of Ha