The Executioner's Song - The Executioner's Song Part 70
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The Executioner's Song Part 70

Sam returned to another crucial question. In November, in December, and now again there had been popular talk. of employing volunteers from the general public as executioners. A few people had even sent letters. From the beginning, however, it had been Dorius's flat-out recommendation to use peace officers. The statute was silent on the matter, but Earl thought any system set up for screening possible kooks among the volunteers would be expensive, and the legalities a tangle. Like it or not, Earl didn't see it as a viable choice.

It came down, as it always had, to using peace officers. Earl thought it was important, however, not to use anyone from the prison. Sam agreed it could only get a guard labeled a convict-killer, and thereby make him a future risk if he wanted to continue working inside. He would be an affront to the inmate population. So, they agreed: peace officers. From either the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office or the Utah County Sheriff's Office, Sam would keep the names secret.

It was Earl Dorius's view that the ACLU would have to file some action by Wednesday, January 12. Otherwise, should they lose in the lower Courts, they would not have allowed themselves time to appeal.

Bob Hansen, however, made Earl a bet. The ACLU would save Judge Ritter, their ace in the hole, for the very end so there might not be time to obtain an override from a higher Court. "They'll wait until Friday the fourteenth, just before closing."

Hansen was ready to tell you his opinion of Ritter. "The law can be bent," he would say, "we all twist the law, a little. But Ritter tortures it." And he would go on to speak of the Judge's habits.

One of Ritter's most unendurable characteristics, according to Hansen, was that he might have a list of forty trials and, on one day, call in all the attorneys in all forty cases. Then he would go down the list asking, "Are you ready? Are you ready?" He'd let them know, "All right, you're number two, you're number three," so forth, but when the first trial would end, he would call everybody back in, and say, "I've decided on number twenty next instead of number two," It sounded like a bad joke, but that was the way he ran things. Number twenty had to start a trial in five minutes. It was crazy. You never knew when you were going to be on. You'd have to have your witnesses ready four or five trials ahead. If they came from out of town, you had to put them up in motels. It was a disaster.

Of course, as a practical matter, give Ritter forty trials, and thirty-eight got settled out of Court. Nobody could stand the god damned suspense. That might be all right for some, but if you were working for the government, and didn't have a budget to keep your witnesses indefinitely available, and so they weren't there, Ritter simply dismissed the case. It could be a major felony, or a securities fraud, even an indictment the government had been working on for twenty years, Ritter would dismiss. You had to go up on appeal to get a reverse. That would usually be won, but then the government had to rearrest the parties all over again. A horrible waste of time. He just tortured the law.

4.

By January 10, one week to go, there were press people in and out of the ACLU office all day. Cameras and microphones were always cocked. One didn't have to get prepared for them, they were there. Shirley Pedler felt as if she was always on. It had her up the wall that her hair needed to be constantly combed. She never knew when someone was going to be pointing another lens. And her clothes had become a problem. She could no longer come to work in dungarees and a T-shirt. Shirley decided to keep the Levi's, but wear a good shirt and a nice blazer. Since you were photographed from the waist up, it worked.

At least she began to lose that awful awareness of "Hey, you're on TV. A lot of people are going to see this!" It was a relief. She'd been going for a long time with the feeling they were going to lose, so it gave her a heavy sense of responsibility when she didn't do things right with the media. She was so wound up that even when she managed to leave the office at seven or eight at night, she would just pace at home and smoke. She'd always been a smoker, but now she never quit. On a chain from morning to night.

That morning, January 10, Shirley and some of the attorneys were discussing final legal operations and when she stepped out of the conference room into the hall, she was almost knocked down by press people. Didn't even have a statement. The conference had been called to determine which group could do what, but the lawyers hadn't come to any conclusions. Shirley started to say, "I have nothing to say," and dropped her papers. The haste with which she stooped to pick them up got some of the press laughing, as if she was trying to conceal dark deeds. Shirley couldn't get over how the media thought the ACLU was the center of a lot of legal action coming up.

In fact, they had about decided there were good reasons for the ACLU to stay out. In the Utah community they were seen as such a radical group, that they hurt a cause by coming in.

So, it was one glum conference. They felt they had no real standing. Their best hope was with Richard Giauque who had informed them that Mikal Gilmore was arriving in Salt Lake tomorrow. If Giauque could bring in a suit by the brother, or Gil Athay come in with one for the hi-fi killers, then the ACLU could enter as Friends of the Court. But the only real shot they could fire on their own was a taxpayers' suit. That was on the shakiest ground. They had such slim pickings that the best idea proposed this morning was for somebody to go out to the hospital and try to see Nicole. Maybe she could get Gary to change his mind about dying. Dabney said he would give Stanger a ring.

STANGER Jinks said, "How much influence does Nicole have over Gary?" I said, "Why, what are you talking about?" He said, "Well, we were thinking that possibly we could get her to try to talk Gary into fighting."

GILMORE They're clutching at straws, aren't they?

Schiller decided it was time to set up an office in Utah for the big Push. Told his secretary in L.A. to call some agencies and hire a couple of hard workers to type the transcripts. Single girls who could make the move to Provo and be able to work twenty hours a day, if necessary. Keep their mouths shut. Under the circumstances, Schiller wasn't about to look for local Provo talent. He arranged to have phones put in at the Orem TraveLodge and began making as many as two trips a day between Salt Lake and Los Angeles. With better than a week to go, the new hired girls, Debbie and Lucinda, came to Utah, and set up his office in the motel. First thing he told Debbie was, "I want the night phone numbers of two Xerox repairmen."

When she said, "Can't we always get a repairman?" he told her, "Debbie, I may need a guy at three in the morning. Get that number. Give him a twenty-dollar bill. If he goes out to dinner, I want to know. I want him to call us. That's the way it has to operate."

Wanted to break her in right.

In the meantime, he was making plans to sneak a tape into the execution. It had to be small enough to fit inside a pack of cigarettes. He didn't know whether he'd use it or not, but had to have the tool. Psychologically, he told himself, he would spend thousands for things he might never use, just to feel secure.

Of course, he wasn't really spending thousands. Schiller made a deal with a private investigator in Las Vegas who would sell him this minuscule tape recorder for $1,500 and buy it back for $1,300. Schiller would have to advance the entire amount up front and there'd be the cost of airfare to Vegas and back. Even so, he'd have an extra implement that might prove crucial for no more than few hundred dollars.

All the same, he was getting in deep, but deep. The last week was shaping up, no question about it, as an $11,000 week. Off-duty policemen had to be hired as guards. He wanted Vern's home protected for the last three or four days, and talked Kathryne Baker into moving out of her house with her kids. Then he set up his office in the motel practically like a fortress. Was obliged to. Now that ABC had pulled out, NBC would have their hounds running. They had staked him out as if he was Mrs. Onassis. Frantic. NBC knew Schiller had given Moyers material for CBS. Another guy might have double-crossed the first commitment and given a couple of minutes on Gilmore to NBC to get them off his back. Otherwise, they would, he knew, begin to harass him. In fact, one night, staying over in Salt Lake at the Hilton, he actually had to call the police at 4:30 A.M. in order to have a couple of NBC reporters removed from the hall outside the room he was occupying. Afterward, Gordon Manning, NBC Executive Producer for Special Broadcasts, kept describing him to media people as a lizard. That was television. When you didn't cooperate, they did their best to squash your nuts.

All the while he was trying to stay on top of his options. What if Gary did change his mind? What if the story became "Gilmore Takes His Appeal"? He and Barry discussed it. They were not sitting there hoping Gary would be executed. They were prepared to go either way. With Gilmore alive, the story would not be as obviously dramatic, but it could be good. You could show the slow subsidence of a man's hour in the great light of publicity. Gary's return to the shadows. The thing was not to panic, and never to try to influence history, never force the results. He would realize the story potential whatever it was. They might call him a carrion bird, but he knew from deep inside that he could live with Gilmore's life. He did not have to profit from his death.

6.

All the same, temptations were commencing for Schiller. No sooner had he set up the office than some crazy offers started to come in.

Before they were even settled at the TraveLodge in Orem, Sterling Lord, acting as Jimmy Breslin's literary agent, was on the phone. He had heard that Schiller might be one of Gilmore's five guests to the execution, and Lord wanted to see about switching that invitation to Jimmy. It wasn't clear whether the Daily News or the column's syndicate was going to pick up the check, but the offer started at $5,000.

Schiller said, "It's not for me to sell. I can't even swear to you, Sterling, that I'm going to be there." Lord called back and said, "I might be able to get as much as thirty-five or even fifty thousand."

"It's not for sale," said Schiller. Breslin called. "I'll give you a carbon of my story," he growled. That meant Breslin would own it on Headline Day, and Schiller could have it for the rest of time.

Schiller decided Jimmy Breslin did not understand where Larry Schiller was really at. Of course, he had a lot of old friends these days. All of a sudden, Sterling Lord was his old friend. Jimmy Breslin was his old friend. "Where should I stay?" Breslin asked Schiller, and Larry answered, "Well, you can be a monkey and go to the Hilton, or come out here and slum with me." Breslin took a room right next to them in the motel. He had great instincts that way.

Barry got upset. "Why Breslin?" he asked. "I'm sorry," said Schiller to Farrell, "I can't do it all alone."

"While we're at it," said Farrell, "why did you invite Johnston here from the L.A. Times?"

"Don't you realize," said Schiller, "I want to give these fellows a little piece of the story, so at least I won't have the L.A. Times and the New York Daily News against me. I got to get some people on our side, you know." Couldn't Barry understand how alone he was now that ABC had pulled out? The umbilical cord had certainly been cut. "Yes," thought Farrell, "he does everything with a motive. He's always got a good reason. It's never that he's drunk or horny."

Schiller, decided Barry, was getting awful close to giving the goods away. He simply did not understand that each piece, no matter how small, still belonged to one potentially beautiful structure now being put together, and so were not separate chunks of wampum to be traded off at forest clearings to propitiate media dragons.

Farrell told himself that he should have been prepared. All the precautions had been going too well. From the time they moved into the seven rooms Larry had taken at the Orem TraveLodge, complete with their own rented typewriters, tables, two secretaries, guards, office room, writing room for Barry, archive room, Barry's bedroom, Schiller's bedroom, each girl's room, plus direct telephone lines so they only had to use the switchboard for standard incoming calls, and no motel employee could listen in on them, Larry had been dodging the media. Dodging them well. In the middle of all that heat, with everybody trying to get to him, Schiller had been careful to leak only the right stories through Gus Sorensen and Tamera, thereby coloring Salt Lake news, and so indirectly shaping the wire service output. Still, after all that hard-achieved control, Barry had only to walk into the main office to Xerox a page, and there was Jimmy Breslin, notebook in hand, twenty days late on the story, nicely driven down, thank you, in a hired Lincoln with a chauffeur.

There was Schiller telling Jimmy Breslin about the eyes. The eyes.

Well, Farrell liked Jimmy. Breslin had done some nice things for him over the years. When Farrell was doing his column for Life back in '69 and '70 and got into a large dispute one time with his editors, a make-or-break conflict, Breslin did him the favor of talking it over for an evening. Farrell came to the conclusion that Breslin was very smart. "You know, Barry," Jimmy had said, "your column is your real estate," a phrase to stick in Farrell's mind. "Never give up your real estate," Breslin said, "fight and fuck around, patch it up, spackle it, make compromises, but don't give up the real estate." Farrell had followed his advice and thought it was right, so he had a soft spot for Jimmy Breslin.

The soft spot vanished, however, in one hot minute when he walked into the room and there was Schiller with this idiotic blissful smile on his face, rapping away to Breslin about the eyes. He could have been selling a new kind of floor polish on TV. And there was Breslin sitting on the couch, fat as a wild boar, taking notes three weeks late. One monument of bulk accepting tribute from another.

For weeks, trying to push these interviews uphill, Farrell had felt like he was searching in a dark room for a somber object. So when the story about the eyes came through, Farrell felt as if, finally, a little light was being generated. Living with Gilmore's rap sheet, going through his long prison record and petty busts, Farrell had about decided that Gary's life, by the measurement of its criminal accomplishment, would not rank high on any self-respecting convict's scale. He would be looked upon not as a heavy, but a ding.

Sufficiently unpredictable for other convicts to give him a wide berth, but not a convict with real clout on the inside. In fact, close to a total loner. The kind of guy police terminology referred to as a germ. On human scale, a weed. Yet, just yesterday, coming toward the day of his death, talking about his eyes, Gilmore had said something fine as far as Farrell was concerned.

GILMORE I told you that this ninety-year-old man wrote and asked me for my eyes . . . ah, eh, he's too old. I mean I don't want to sound harsh about it, but this other guy is only twenty, and I think it might be better. Would you like to call this doctor and, ah, just tell him simply: . . . you got 'em! Gary Gilmore. And to draw up the papers through you guys.

MOODY We'll bring it up with the Warden.

GILMORE In his letter here, he says something about the young guy's life is just dwindling. Like the guy is really living a hopeless life. I'd rather the eyes be his than just give 'em to the Eye bank. I'd kinda like to know where they went. All right . . . call him collect. (laughing) . . . Ask him if he'll accept a collect call from Gary Gilmore.

The fact that Gilmore could come up with that kind of thinking moved Farrell right down to the gut. The interview had come in the day before, and after he and Schiller had listened to it, Farrell played it again when alone in his room. It was late at night. He had been working for a long time that day. Gilmore's voice got to him. Barry was crying and laughing and felt half triumphant that the man could talk with such clarity. Farrell's own eyes were good, and he always thought of them as precious cargo. While he would sign a card giving any part of his body to anybody, willingly, cock included, it would be after he died his normal death. Here was a fellow who had an execution date-imagine that, Barry said to himself after twenty hours of work, alone in a room at three in the morning-an execution date and everybody wants a piece of him. Everybody is writing to ask for this part of his body or that, yet, he could think clearly about it. Sure there were people who carried cards in their wallets that said, "If you find me dead, you can have my kidney," but that was not the same as knowing you were going to be gone on the 17th of January, and applicants were coming around now, one week before, asking for your liver, your spleen, your left nut. Why a small-minded man could see it all as cannibalism, and cry out, "For Christ's sakes, leave me in peace. I want my eyes."

By God, was Gary like Harry Truman, mediocrity enlarged by history? Christ, he had even become the owner of a cottage industry: the precise remains of Gary Gilmore. That, to Farrell, was more impressive than any ability to steer a firm course toward execution. Farrell had not been much impressed by that bravery. Gilmore, he thought, had a total contempt for life, his life, your life, anyone's life.

Waived his own away because it was a boss thing to do, showdown shit, pure pathology that came out of long years of playing chicken with prison authorities. Yet, now, overnight new celebrity, movie star without portfolio, Gilmore was responding humanely to all the attention, actually functioning like a decent man. Those eyes redeemed the scene. Farrell was feeling very protective about this story.

So when he saw Schiller and Breslin on the couch, he went into a tantrum. Barry liked to keep his cool, but twenty-hour work sessions had certainly heated him up. "You have a cop," he said to Schiller, "sitting up all night across the corridor to make sure nobody breaks into this office, but you ought to have that cop sitting on your upper lip." He was mad enough to smash a table. "Schiller, you're not handing this over to Breslin."

Before the fight could even develop, however, Jimmy took out his pad, pulled the page he had been writing on, tore it in little pieces, and threw them up in the air. Beautiful, thought Farrell. He was very pleased with Breslin.

Chapter 25.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU.

Farrell had to be glad the eyes had been kept for him. He needed something nourishing in the marrow, for he had been discovering an awful lot about Gilmore that was not so good. Rereading the interviews and letters, Farrell began to mark the transcripts with different-colored inks to underline each separate motif in Gilmore's replies, and before he was done, he got twenty-seven poses. Barry had begun to spot racist Gary and Country-and-Western Gary, poetic Gary, artist manque Gary, macho Gary, self-destructive Gary, Karma county Gary, Texas Gary, and Gary the killer Irishman. Awfully prevalent lately was Gilmore the movie star, awfully shit-kicking large-minded aw-shucks.

GILMORE Here is that other girl who writes to me: "How's my wild pony with those wild eyes" "I wish I could kiss you just once. I don't know, Gary, how to say goodbye to you. Gary, I'm cryin' right now on your letter, I love you, I hate the fucking system, I hate that they won't even let you call Nicole, the fuckers. Execution. What is this? Wild, wild West? My love is with you, Gary. I love you." (laughing) I think she's got a case for me, eh? I got three letters from her today. A good thing for me I'm not in California. Christ, oh, ah, man, she'd wear me out.

STANGER Is she fifteen? Holy mackerel.

GILMORE Pretty hard to keep up with.

Then there was the old con full of jailhouse wisdom: GILMORE After you get known as a troublemaker, it's so easy to keep getting in trouble, 'cause all them guards, man, like they put your picture on the hot list in the fucking guards' lounge. You know, watch this guy, suspected of doing this and that. Some guards take a personal dislike to you, man, and antagonize you in little ways that'll make you blow up, you know, in a situation where you're always wrong-and never right-because you're the prisoner. They got the hammer, you know?

The subtlety of the self-pity was cloying. Still, Farrell was loving the job even more than expected. One twenty-hour day after another, sure enough, but what absorption! What delight to be altogether out of himself. By God, Barry thought, I have all the passions of an archivist. I'm proprietary about the material.

Once in a while, he even laughed. One night when he and Larry were so tense from overwork that they could hardly look at one another, a tape came in from Gilmore that got them laughing so hard they almost slid off their chairs. It had to be the tension. Yet for one glorious minute, Gilmore was as funny to Farrell as Bob Hope on a good night, same maniacal see-through X-ray eye, same hatred of horseshit. God, sometimes he saw into the bottom of the pot, thought Farrell.

GILMORE Oh, hey, man, I got something that'll make a mint. Get aholda John Cameron Swazey right now, and get a Timex wristwatch here. And have John Cameron Swazey out there after I fall over, he can be wearing a stethoscope, he can put it on my heart and say, "Well, that stopped," and then he can put the stethoscope on the Timex and say, "She's still running, folks."

Nonetheless, it offended Farrell to be so hooked. He often thought that if less attention had been paid to Gilmore he might have changed his mind and looked to avoid his execution. Now Gary was trapped in fame, and it gave him a crazy strength. Of course, one Barry Farrell had become an integral part of this machine that was making it impossible for Gilmore to take an appeal. Hardly a flattering light on yourself. You could try to say, "I'm not the locomotive, only one of the cars, and in my car, the best, most sensitive, thinking is being done about the situation. Therefore, my moral responsibility is to stay with it. If I leave," Farrell told himself, "Gilmore is abandoned to the likes of 'Good Morning America.' "

Nonetheless, in the quiet of 2 A.M., Barry would recall how his New West piece described Larry Schiller as a carrion bird. Now he had to wonder if Barry Farrell was not the blackest wing in journalism.

Somebody was always dying in his stories. Oscar Bonavena getting killed, Bobby Hall, young blond girls getting offed on highways in California. One cult slaying or another. He even had the reputation of being good at it. His telephone number leaped to the mind of various editors. Barry Farrell, crime reporter, with an inner life exasperatingly Catholic. Led his life out of his financial and emotional exigencies, took the jobs his bills and his battered psyche required him to take, but somehow his assignments always led him into some new great moral complexity. Got into his writing like a haze.

Yet there was one aspect of the interviews he did not question.

There was something marvelous about the energy Gilmore had to give. Cline Campbell stopped by at the motel to say hello, and remarked to Farrell, "Your work is a godsend. This is Gary's one chance to express himself." Looking at the daily bits and pieces of produce, Farrell would think, Yes, you could see Gilmore's attempt to form a coherent philosophy in relation to some incredibly tangled ethical matters.

MOODY What are some of the things you could never do?

GILMORE Oh, I couldn't snitch on anybody. I couldn't rat on anybody. I don't think I could torture anybody.

MOODY Isn't forcing somebody to lie down on the floor and shooting him in the back of the head torture?

GILMORE I'd say it was a very short torture.

MOODY But how could any crime be worse than taking a person's life?

GILMORE Well, you could alter somebody's life so that the quality it wouldn't be what it could've been. I mean, you could torture 'em, you could blind 'em, you could maim 'em, you could cripple 'em, you could fuck 'em up so badly that their life would be a misery for the rest of it. And for me, that's worse than killing somebody. Like, if you kill somebody, it's over for them. I-I believe in karma and reincarnation and stuff like that, and if you kill somebody, it could be that you just assume their karmic debts, thereby you might be relieving them of a debt. But I think to make somebody go on living in a lessened state of existence, I think that could be worse than killing 'em.

STANGER Then there are crimes that you consider worse than murder?

GILMORE Well, Jesus, I don't know, there's all kinds of crimes, you know . . . what some governments do to their people, you know? Forms of brainwash in some countries . . . I think some forms of behavior modification, like, ah, you know, the irreversible forms, like lobotomies, and ah, you know, Prolixin-I won't say they're worse than murder, but man, you gotta give it some thought . . . You don't interfere with somebody's life. You let people meet their own fate.

STANGER Didn't you interfere with Jensen's and, ah, Bushnell's lives?

GILMORE Yes.

STANGER You think you had any right to do that?

GILMORE No. (sighs) MOODY If you really believe that your soul is full of evil, and if you really wish to atone, why haven't you attempted . . . some expression of remorse?

GILMORE I don't believe my soul is that full of evil.

MOODY Do you think it's filled with any?

GILMORE More evil than yours, or Rod's, or, uh, a lot of people's. I think I'm further from God than you are, and I would like to come closer.

MOODY Do you think expressing remorse is mushy?

GILMORE I'm afraid the newspapers would interpret it in a mushy light.

Campbell might be right. With all his poses, Gary was still rising to the interview so well it was frustrating on occasion not to be able to conduct the interviews oneself.

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.