The Sentence - Chapter 1

     So I’m down at the courthouse and the press gallery was packed. The sardine metaphor was so appropriate it ceased to be a metaphor. Packed, stuffed, canned. Contents under pressure. The hack in front of me, Frank from The Times, took a hanky to his forehead, and turned to the skirt-suit next to him, Janet from The Observer. Frank’s always wiping his melon with this handkerchief. The air conditioning could be on full blast, or it could be December, even in short sleeves, this guy he’s sweating like a sonofabitch.

     “Did you see the guy during the trial? Cold hearted-killer. Mean son of a bitch, you could see it in the eyes. Eyes were damn granite.”

     “Ugh. He made eye-contact with me when he walked past and I felt violated.” People around them chimed in with similar sentiments, and at times I felt the same way.

     You’re not supposed to write about it, of course, not in the news. Just the facts, right? You don’t write what you feel, you don’t make evaluative statements. You don’t feel like it’s Tuesday, it’s just Tuesday, so that’s what you write. That’s the when, one of your ‘w’s, you’ve got that base covered. Now you just have to fill in the rest. They start teaching you that in your eighth grade journalism class, before you ever try to make it a job, they teach it to you in school, it’s just the facts, and you fit ninety percent of the story in the first paragraph. The inverted pyramid, they call it. I always got a kick out of that, nobody knows how they built the pyramids, but hacks like us, we can build them upside down. 

     You got that image in your head now, a pyramid sticking in the sand point down? Buried under the sand is the capstone, the most mysterious part of it all. 

     I’ve known Frank for years, sitting in spots just like this all over town, for all kinds of stories. Today we’re surrounded by the marble, wood paneling, official seals with their gold leaf formality, but it might as well be a brightly colored big top. Same fuckin’ circus, same fuckin’ clowns. Each time, same story but thirty of us, each from a different outfit, and we’re all there. We’re just writing the facts, but it takes thirty of us to do it I guess. Some people I guess they buy Frank’s rag because they like that he writes “Something happened to somebody one day at an address,” and they buy my rag because they like that I write, “On this day, this guy did that thing over there.” And the sponsors, they try to figure out which one of our rags the demographic they’re  trying to sell to is reading, and buy ad space in it. Sometimes I just wish we could take turns covering for each other, one day I could take the day off and he could write both our stories for us, and the next I could cover for him so he could go sweat somewhere. As he usually does when seated near a woman, Frank tried some more talk.

     “And when they read the verdict? Jesus. They read off the counts individually and found him guilty of each one, and it was like somebody told him his shoe was untied, he didn’t move, didn’t blink. What a creep.” 

     Janet agrees. “And they wasted all that time deliberating I mean the guy was, like, just so obviously guilty, you could just, like, tell, you could see it in his eyes, he’s guilty.”  I decided to put in my two cents at this point. When I speak, Janet startles as if she forgot there were people around.

     “Well in that case,” I finally join in, “who needs a jury when they got us, right Janet?” I been on this job too long when I let a naïve college kid like Janet rile me up, but like I said I been on this job too long, so a few years back I took to drinking at work, and it’s mid afternoon, and I’ve already had my liquid lunch across the street at O’Toole’s when court recessed for lunch, and a nip in the bathroom, so now I got no filter. “Who needs em? Due process, pssshhh. We know what’s going on, we got the facts, why not let us tell it, right?”

     “Forgive my grumpy colleague,” Frank tells Janet, with a little touch on her shoulder. Good for you Frank, you’ve initiated physical contact, glad I could be here to be your wingman you sleaze. “He’s just sore the guy didn’t include him on his little killing spree.”

     “Not sure I take your meaning, Frank,” I return, “what, like as a victim, or an accomplice? You must mean a victim, because I think we both know that if I were the getaway driver, we would have made a detour past your house.” We both laughed because that’s the kind of gallows humor you can expect from us, a couple guppies in a big pond of crime, waiting for the official word from the judge that they got the great shark on the hook.

     “Take it easy on the kid,” he says, “She’s just saying that he looks mean, he’s got mean eyes.”

“Well what about me Janet,” I turn to her, smiling toothlessly and brows raised, “do I pass your eye test? Take a peek in the windows to my soul, tell me what you see.” She squints, then smiles and winks.

     “I see you’ve started your weekend a couple hours early.” I guess she had me there. Right on two counts, I had to admit. The guy, a week ago the defendant, now the convict, was the owner of one of the meanest mugs I had ever seen in my life. Not that that means anything, plenty of these psychos look like boy scouts. Not only did he look mean, but he had committed some of the most heinous crimes I’d ever heard of. Exhibits A through Z were enough to make the reuben on rye want to crawl back up my esophagus, but I seen so much of this shit it hardly phases me. Anybody who watches t.v. has, even if you don’t watch the news, they got a dozen sitcoms about the cops trying to catch another perpetrator of some ever nastier crime, like the news and the sitcoms are competing for who can come up with the gristliest crime scene, the most horrifying eyewitness account. The people want to see that stuff, read about that stuff, the bloodier the better, and none more than they want to hear about this guy, because I think he might have set some kind of world record for fucked up.

     Hence, the public interest in the case. They don’t want the news, they want to be entertained. They want blood, boobs or famous people, or all three if they can get it. Out of all the murders that happen every year, how many of them have this many reporters waiting around for the next little scrap to feed to the snapping piranhas we call our readers? None but this one, because it’s heinous. It stands out. 

     Dozens of people go missing a year, and the ones you hear about are the pretty white girls, the pretty white girl who was the congressman’s aide and the pretty white girl who was in those baby doll beauty pageants. Why? Because sex sells, even in murder cases. 

     Two guys kill two entire families, one white family and one black family, all the victims get a mention, but the photo that runs more often is the wasps with the two point five kids that own a toy store. 

     A dozen illegal dog-fighting rings get broken up and arrests made, but which one makes the news night after night? The one allegedly owned by the pro football player. The league gets to play the hero by insisting he can’t play, the public gets its sensational headline, followed by the scapegoat they so desperately need to blame, and the dogs, they get impounded, and later euthanized. It was never about the dogs. People who never previously cared or paid attention to issues of animal rights or animal welfare are suddenly at a rally with a sign, screaming for blood. 

     Well in this case they didn’t just get blood. 

     The judge invented a whole new kind of punishment for this creep, and that was what we were here for today, the sentence. I always got a kick out of that too. In school they teach you that a sentence has to have certain things, a subject and a verb, but not here under the big top though. You can get a sentence of just one word. Life. Death.

     The judge didn’t want to give the guy Life, and he didn’t figure Death would cut it either. He wanted the guy to suffer, but more importantly than that, he wanted to make sure that the body count wouldn’t get any higher. People are always fond of saying that you take a killer off the street so they can’t hurt anybody else, but that’s just plain naivety. They can hurt plenty of people, other inmates, corrections officers, infirmary nurses, prison chaplains, and on more than one occasion, their lawyers.

     The courtroom murmur gets louder as one by one the players enter the stage, the state prosecutor, the defense counsel, the judge, and finally, surrounded by sheriff deputies, shuffling along in shackles and a bullet proof vest, the killer. We don’t have to call him alleged anymore, he’s just the killer now.

     Then the tone of the noise changes. The crowd’s murmer is distinctly quieter, and yet perceptibly more alive and bubbling with comment, as if they now have much more to say but don’t want to be overheard saying it. Frank and Janet stop their strange flirtatious exchange to stare with their mouths open, and even a jaded drunk such as myself is rather bronzed by the moment.

     This brute, this horrid monster we’ve all learned to loathe, who just yesterday loomed as a menace, now tiptoes along like a squirrel between two rows of hungry dogs. He is cowed, bent over, eyes darting everywhere, as if the attack might come from anywhere.

     The courtroom doors open one more time, and he practically dives under the defense table, as a man who I’ve never seen before walks in and sits beside the prosecutors. He’s dressed like a lawyer, expensive suit, briefcase, neat hair and all that. Doesn’t appear to be at all out of the ordinary, in this environment he fits right in with all the other clowns, and yet this is the first we’ve seen of him throughout this whole process from arraignment to the trial to sentencing. Doesn’t really seem to pose much of a threat to the bad guy, but there he is, visibly shaking. 

     The buzz grows louder, and the judge has to bang for silence for a solid minute.