-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
Loud and Clear
Lake Headly and William Hoffman�1990
Henry Holt and Company
115 W. 18th St.
New York, NY 10011
ISBN 0-8050-1138-2
272 pps � out-of-print/one edition
--[2]--
2.
The Patsy
I drove the rental car southeast on Interstate 10 toward Tucson, exiting on
387 to reach the town of Florence and the Arizona State Prison. I hardly
expected to find a model of the modern maximum security penitentiary jutting
out of the sand, but nothing in my experience had prepared me for the abysmal
hellhole I found.
Convict labor built the Florence "correctional facility" from remnants of the
Old West's notorious Yuma Territorial Prison, moved some two hundred
miles�literally stone by stone�across the desert.
Inmates sweltered in sizzling slow summers and shivered when whistling winter
winds chased in all manner of wilderness vermin through gaping cracks and
crevices. Its only appearances of "modernization": razor wire and closely
spaced guard towers topping the institution's ugly stone walls.
Death row, where Robison and Dunlap existed in six-by-ten-foot cells, came
equipped with aggressive rats and a menagerie of small, shyer creatures
skittering across the floor, over grungy walls, and along a crumbling ceiling
that leaked copiously whenever the rains came. Except for a few minutes of
fresh air and outdoor exercise in a hurricane-fence enclosure called the "dog
run," inmates stayed locked down twenty-four hours a day.
Death row also served as a deterrent to crime within the prison. When inmates
from the general prison population committed some serious infraction (say,
knifing a guard), the harshest punishment authorities could dole out was a
stint on death rowsuffering the same misery Dunlap, Robison, and several
dozen others convicted of capital crimes had to endure from their first day.
I had called ahead, and after a wearisome row with Carolyn Robinson, a
warden's assistant, had obtained an okay to visit Max and Jim. I suspected
the battle hadn't ended, however, and sure enough, as soon as I'd entered the
administration building, a surly captain with the walleyed stare of a fish
told me, "You can't be here."
"I'm already here," I pointed out, and attempted to reason with the man. He
griped that what I wanted was "something out of the ordinary." Logic seemed
beside the point as I tried to convince this "screw" that he had no say in
the matter-one of his superiors had already granted permission-until at last
he called Carolyn Robinson. (I grew to know her well in the next year and a
half and almost became fond of hearing, "You back again?") Although she was
still riled that I'd gained entrance into their domain-she must have checked
around and learned that (1) 1 couldn't be legally stopped and (2) my
reputation suggested I would sue if they tried-she told him to send me
through.
After the captain searched my pockets, briefcase, tape recorder, and self,
then had me walk through a metal detector, a trusty escorted me to another
building and into a minuscule attorney/client room containing all of one tiny
table and two small chairs. Through a window I spotted Max Dunlap being led
across the yard, knowing he would undergo a strip search before and after
seeing me.
I looked him over when we shook hands. He stood six feet tall, weighed around
two hundred and thirty pounds, and at fortyeight years already had a full
head of steel-gray hair. My instant impression: an outdoors type with a
permanent Huckleberry Hound expression on a guileless face that radiated
openness, honesty and, yes, simplicity. Even if I hadn't talked with the
committee, I would have judged this man a valued, trusted neighbor in
middle-income suburbia; in a hustler's milieu, he'd be an out-and-out sucker.
And clearly a staunch family man. Soon as we'd introduced ourselves�I with a
brief oral resume, he wondering if I'd met his wife and children-he said, and
I didn't doubt it, that he could accept his fate, but "It's terrible what
this has done to Barbara and the kids."
Dunlap's sun-weathered face made it easy to picture him as a
contractor supervising workmen at a construction site and still wearing his
hard hat after 5 P.m. in the good-time atmosphere of a neighborhood bar,
drinking beer with friends before heading home for dinner.
He spoke softly and earnestly, ignoring the yellow pads I brought for him to
write on, in case we had listeners. Already convinced that the Arizona
authorities had artfully maneuvered him onto death row, I assumed they'd
consider bugging his visitor conversations a small matter.
"Max," I said, "I think the toughest area you have to overcome is that money
you delivered to Adamson. And your relationship to Kemper Marley. Without
Marley, you had no motive at all for the killing."
Dunlap's delivery of cash to Adamson had evidently cinched the jury's
decision to convict. I knew the story by heart from the reading I did the
night before, but I wanted to hear it from my client's lips.
"You need to remember," Dunlap began, "that Neal Roberts was in my high
school class. Through the years after graduation we stayed in touch, and I
used him on a few small land deals. Well, eight days after the bombing, he
called and asked me to do him a favor: deliver some money to Adamson's
lawyer, Tom Foster. Neal said it would be in hundred-dollar bills, which I
should change into tens and twenties. I said, 'Why can't you do this
yourself?' He said he knew Adamson pretty well, and since Adamson was already
a prime suspect in the bombing, he didn't want to get involved any deeper.
Really, it was a favor I didn't mind doing."
This fit the profile provided by his friends on the committee. Good old Max
would help anybody, especially a former high school classmate.
"The next morning," Dunlap continued, "very early, just as I was leaving for
work, a car pulled up in my driveway. The driver said, 'Neal sent me,' handed
me a paper sack, and left. Marty Fogelsong, who dates one of my daughters,
was at my house that morning. He witnessed everything that happened. Anyway,
I went to my bank later in the day, changed the five thousand eight hundred
dollars into lower denominations, and took it to Tom Foster's office. His
receptionist said Tom had gone to court, but John Adamson was in the
conference room and I should give the money to him."
"Did you?"
"Yes."
"What did you say to Adamson?"
"Nothing. I handed him the money and went about my business.
The prosecution, after Adamson testified that the money came from Kemper
Marley, understandably imputed the most sinister of motives to Dunlap's
delivery of this cash.
I watched in the close quarters we occupied as Max struggled to find the
right words to explain. "Lake," he said finally, "would you do a favor like
that for George Vlassis, if he asked?"
My turn had come to think, but only for a moment. "In a hot second," I said,
"without looking back."
"That's how I felt."
I remembered again what those committee members said about Max, always ready
to help a pal. That's why they had come together at the eleventh hour: to try
to do something for him.
"Describe the man who brought the money."
"I think he was Mexican. One of Neal Roberts's gofers. Neal always had a lot
of people around to run errands."
"What kind of car did he drive?"
"An older model. I really don't remember. It might help if you talked to
Marty Fogelsong." (This I did. Fogelsong confirmed Max's story and passed a
lie detector test. I also had him put under hypnosis, and he remembered a
partial license plate number; but I never did locate that bagman.)
"Tell me about Kemper Marley."
"He's been my friend since I was in high school. I wrote him a letter in my
freshman year�a history teacher told me Kemper enjoyed helping ambitious
youths-and this started a friendship that has lasted to the present day. He's
provided guidance, both business and personal. He enjoyed, vicariously,
whatever small successes I achieved. Kemper's got millions of dollars and
zillions of projects. He's also an old man, and thick-skinned from this
desert heat. It's important for you to understand Kemper's personality. He's
a rough old cob�races horses and likes cockfights�and he didn't give a flying
flip what Don Bolles or the Arizona Republic said about him. Remember this,
too: Kemper knows everybody. He'd never use someone like me to arrange a
murder. I'm a pushover, the last person in the world he'd associate with
violence. And besides, Kemper's not the underhanded sort who hires people to
do his dirty work. If he wanted Don Bolles dead, he would have killed him
himself, right on the courthouse steps."
The possibility that Dunlap told the truth-his straightforward,
a-train-just-ran-over-me demeanor differing from any innocence-vowing
defendant I ever met�was overwhelming, alerting everything in me to my
responsibility to ferret out the facts. If Dunlap was innocent, he was living
a Kafkaesque nightmare, awaiting execution for a crime to which he was only
remotely and unwittingly connected-doing a favor for a high school chum, the
same man now safe under a grant of immunity in exchange for the very theory
that put Max Dunlap here in the first place. Mr. Perfect Patsy, merely in the
right place at the right time-for Neal Roberts, John Adamson, and who knew
how many others.
"Are there areas I should avoid?" I asked routinely. The query was one way to
determine if he had anything to hide.
"Lake, do anything you want. Go anyplace. Talk to anybody. Even if you think
it's leading to me, keep heading forward, because it can't lead to me. I'm
innocent."
"Well, the state wants to execute you, and your best hope is my operating
unshackled."
"You need to understand, only recently has the state become serious about
killing me. They didn't aim for that before, but they're doing it now. Police
officers, guards, prosecutors, and plenty of others have told me, 'You know
what we want. Give it to us. You've got the key to your cell in your pocket.'
What they're after, of course, is Kemper's head on a silver platter. And for
the life of me, I don't know why. I suppose someone that rich and powerful
has stepped on a lot of toes. But, no sir, I refuse to play their game.
Kemper's my friend, and I won't lie and blame him for a crime he didn't
commit. I wouldn't frame anyone the way Adamson framed me."
"You've been offered a deal if you'll finger Marley?"
"Many times. I've been told they'll go lighter on me than they did on
Adamson."
"Sounds as if I should stay clear of Marley. If they see or hear me getting
together with him, they're going to figure there is something between you.
Unless you think he knows something that might help us."
"Lake, he doesn't know anything. I don't know anything. Except for delivering
that money to Adamson, which I've tried to explain, Adamson's lies were the
only testimony against me."
He was right-Adamson's was the only testimony against him. Later, reading the
trial transcript, I would confirm that the Dunlap I saw was the Dunlap
everybody got. Ed Carson, president of First National Bank, called Max's
reputation for honesty "excellent." "A reputation for peacefulness," said Leo
J. Baumgartner. "His reputation was, in my opinion, spotless." Said longtime
friend Charles Mann: "I have found Max to be a very honorable gentleman, very
upright. He's a very peaceful sort of man."
Honest and peaceful, that's what witness after witness told the jury. Never
violent, they all stressed. Wouldn't hurt a fly. Or a June bug.
"Max, about my investigation." I needed to make this point clear. "What if
the committee has a different agenda?"
"I can't worry about the committee. They're a bunch of nice people, but
they're not in my spot. You work for me, and I'm giving you carte blanche.
I'm the guy who wakes up every morning just fifty feet from the green door."
"When did you first meet Jim Robison?"
"The day we were arraigned. Isn't that a kicker? I was indicted as a
co-conspirator for first-degree murder, and I'd never met my supposed
partner. That's what was so bizarre, Lake. They convicted me of conspiring
with a man I didn't even know. Actually, he remained a stranger�we were
totally separated during the trial�until we reached Florence and were put on
death row.
Since then, however, they had become good friends, two completely different
men�Dunlap, naive, open, warmhearted; Robison, tough and shrewd-bonded by a
shared disaster. And I would learn they had something else in common:
resentment toward John Adamson, that he wasn't the one on death row. But
because of Adamson's cushy plea bargain, that could never be.
Or could it?
"Do you have much chance to talk with Jim?"
"I do now. Controls have been relaxed, and inmates can converse more with one
another. I take some credit for that. I began interceding for other prisoners
with the guards. It was a horrible situation before, with the inmates unable
to communicate with them. The cons just didn't know any better. When they
wanted something, they would 'motherfucker' and 'cocksucker' the guards, and
of course this gained them nothing. So I began presenting their beefs in a
human-to-human approach. It worked wonders."
Max told me if he ever got released, he would devote his spare time to prison
reform, with special emphasis on training guards, whom he described, without
rancor, as mentally dense and/or sadistic. "But whoa," he said, "I'm getting
off the track. You asked me about Jim. He's a genuinely intelligent man, and
I have the greatest respect for him. I couldn't roll over on Kemper Marley.
He's my friend. Actually, more like a father, as I'm sure you've heard. My
own dad died when I was thirteen. And that's when Kemper came into my life.
So I couldn't accuse him falsely, but Jim Robison sure could, if he wanted to
save himself. Kemper Marley is just a face in the crowd to him. Jim could
snitch him off in a minute and save his own neck, but he won't. It's a matter
of principle. He and I realize we're in this together, and we've become like
brothers. Shared experience, I guess you call it. There's nothing I wouldn't
do for Jim Robison, and I'm sure he feels the same way about me."
A guard knocked on the door, indicating we had five more minutes. I asked if
Max had anything special he wanted me to do.
" Tell Barbara I say 'hi.' Tell her I love her very much. You should go by
the house. They'll be glad to know someone's working on this. And don't
forget to give the kids my love."
"I'll do it." Barbara visited every week, and sometimes the children came
along, but Max wanted them to know they were always in his thoughts.
"Anything else?"
"No, except to say I'm grateful. I know you're operating on short money, and
if I ever get out, I'll take care of you. Unfortunately, I'm broke now, this
case has cost me everything, but maybe I'll get a chance to build a new nest
egg."
I sensed in Dunlap a desire to accept me as a potential savior, a tough role
to play, but even in this open, straightforward man there lurked suspicion of
anyone connected with the case.
I had learned little from Dunlap about the Bolles killing because he claimed
not to know anything. He said he had been framed, and that was it. From
Robison I expected much more. Robison had known Adamson well, had been his
confidant.
pps. 23-30
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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