The Last Juror

The Last Juror Page 36

On a Thursday afternoon in early May, I received a phone call from the attorney for the Parole Board. The next Padgitt hearing would take place the following Monday.

"Convenient timing," I said.

"Why's that?" he asked.

"We publish every Wednesday, so I don't have time to run a story before the hearing."

"We don't monitor your paper, Mr. Traynor," he said.

"I don't believe that," I snapped.

"What you believe is irrelevant. The Board has decided that you will not be permitted to attend the hearing. You violated our rules last time by reporting on what happened."

"I'm banned?"

"That's correct."

"I'll be there anyway."

I hung up and called Sheriff McNatt. He, too, had been notified of the hearing, but wasn't sure if he could attend. He was hot on the trail of a missing child (from Wisconsin), and it was obvious he had little interest in getting mixed up with the Padgitts.

Our District Attorney, Rufus Buckley, had an armed robbery trial scheduled for Monday in Van Buren County. He promised to send a letter opposing the parole, but the letter never made it. Circuit Judge Omar Noose was presiding over the same trial, so he was off the hook. I began to think that no one would be there to speak in opposition to Padgitt's release.

For fun I asked Baggy to go. He gasped, then quickly let loose with an impressive list of excuses.

I walked over to Harry Rex's with the news. He had an ugly divorce trial starting Monday in Tupelo; otherwise he might have gone with me to Parchman. "The boy's gonna be released, Willie," he said.

"We stopped it last year," I said.

"Once the parole hearings start, it's just a matter of time."

"But somebody has to fight it."

"Why bother? He's gettin' out eventually. Why piss off the Padgitts? You won't get any volunteers."

Volunteers were indeed hard to find as the entire town ducked for cover. I had envisioned an angry mob packing into the parole board hearing and disrupting the meeting.

My angry mob consisted of three people.

Wiley Meek agreed to ride over with me, though he had no interest in speaking. If they were serious about banning me from the room, Wiley would sit through it and give me the details. Sheriff McNatt surprised us with his presence.

Security was tight in the hall outside the hearing room. When the Board attorney saw me he became angry and we exchanged words. Guards in uniforms surrounded me. I was outnumbered and unarmed. I was escorted from the building and placed in my car, then watched by two thick-necked ruffians with low IQs.

According to Wiley, the hearing went like clockwork. Lucien was there with various Padgitts. The Board attorney read a staff report that made Danny sound like an Eagle Scout. His caseworker seconded the nomination. Lucien spoke for ten minutes, the usual lawyerly bullshit. Danny's father spoke last and pleaded emotionally for his son's release. He was desperately needed back home, where the family had interests in timber, gravel, asphalt, trucking, contracting, and freight. He would have so many jobs and work so many hours each week that he couldn't possibly get into more trouble.

Sheriff McNatt gamely stood up for the people of Ford County. He was nervous and not a good speaker, but did a credible job of replaying the crime. Remarkably, he neglected to remind the Board members that a jury drawn from the same pool of people who elected him had been threatened by Danny Padgitt.

By a vote of 4 - 1, Danny Padgitt was paroled from prison.

Clanton was quietly disappointed. During the trial, the town had a real thirst for blood and was bitter when the jury didn't deliver the death penalty. But nine years had passed, and since the parole hearing it had been accepted that Danny Padgitt would eventually get out. No one expected it so soon, but after the hearing we were over the shock.

His release was influenced by two unusual factors. The first was that Rhoda Kassellaw had no family in the area. There were no grieving parents to arouse sympathy and demand justice. There were no angry siblings to keep the case alive. Her children were gone and forgotten. She had lived a lonely life and left no close friends who were willing to press a grudge against her murderer.

The second was that the Padgitts lived in another world. They were so rarely seen in public, it was not difficult to convince ourselves that Danny would simply go to the island and never be seen again. What difference did it make to the people of Ford County? Prison or Padgitt Island? If we never saw him, we wouldn't be reminded of his crimes. In the nine years since his trial, I had not seen a single Padgitt in Clanton. In my rather harsh editorial about his release, I said "a cold-blooded killer is once more among us." But that wasn't really true.

The front page story and the editorial drew not a single letter from the public. Folks talked about the release, but not for long and not very loudly.

Baggy eased into my office late one morning a week after Padgitt's release, and closed the door, always a good sign. He'd picked up some gossip so juicy that it had to be delivered with the door shut.

On a typical day I arrived for work around 11 A.M. And on a typical day he began hitting the sauce around noon, so we usually had about an hour to discuss stories and monitor rumors.

He glanced around as if the walls were bugged, then said, "It cost the Padgitts a hundred grand to spring the boy."

The amount did not shock me, nor did the bribe itself, but I was surprised that Baggy had dug up this information.

"No," I said. This always spurred him to tell more.

"That's what I'm tellin' you," he said smugly, his usual response when he had the scoop.

"Who got the money?"

"That's the good part. You won't believe it."

"Who?"

"You'll be shocked."

"Who?"

Slowly, he went through his extended ritual of lighting a cigarette. In the early years, I would hang in the air as he delayed whatever dramatic news he had picked up, but with experience I had learned that this only slowed down the story. So I resumed my scribbling.

"It shouldn't come as a surprise, I guess," he said, puffing and pondering. "Didn't surprise me at all."

"Are you gonna tell me or not?"

"Theo."

"Senator Morton?"

"That's what I'm tellin' you."

I was sufficiently shocked, and I had to give the impression of being so or the story would lose steam. "Theo?" I asked.

"He's vice chairman of the Corrections Committee in the Senate. Been there forever, knows how to pull the strings. He wanted a hundred grand, the Padgitts wanted to pay it, they cut a deal, the boy walks. Just like that."

"I thought Theo was above taking bribes," I said, and I was serious. This drew an exaggerated snort.

"Don't be so naive," he said. Again, he knew everything.

"Where did you hear it?"

"Can't say." There was a chance that his poker gang had cooked up the rumor to see how fast it would race around the square before it got back to them. But there was an equally good chance Baggy was on to something. It really didn't matter, though. Cash couldn't be traced.

Just when I had stopped dreaming of an early retirement, of cashing in, walking away, jetting off to Europe, and backpacking across Australia, just when I had resettled into my routine of covering stories and writing obits and hawking ads to every merchant in town, Mr. Gary McGrew reentered my life. And he brought his client with him.

Ray Noble was one of three principals in a company that already owned thirty weekly newspapers in the Deep South and wanted to add more. Like my college friend Nick Diener, he had been raised in the family newspaper business and could talk the talk. He swore me to secrecy, then laid out his plan. His company wanted to buy the Times, along with the papers in Tyler and Van Buren Counties. They would sell off the equipment in the other two and do all the printing in Clanton because we had a better press. They would consolidate the accounting and much of the ad sales. Their offer of $1.2 million had been at the high end of the appraisal.

Now they were offering $1.3 million. Cash.

"After capital gains, you'll walk away with a cool million," Noble said.

"I can do the math," I said, as if I closed such deals on a weekly basis. The words "cool million" were rumbling through my entire body.

They pressed a little. Offers were on the table for the other two papers, and I got the impression that the deal wasn't exactly coming together as they wished. The key element was the Times. We had better equipment and a slightly larger circulation.

I declined again and they left; all three of us knew it was not our last conversation.

Eleven years after he fled Ford County, Sam Ruffin returned in much the same manner as he left - on a bus in the middle of the night. He'd been home for two days before I knew it. I arrived for my Thursday lunch and there sat Sam, rocking on the porch, with a smile as wide as his mother's. Miss Callie looked and acted ten years younger now that he was safely back home. She fried a chicken and cooked every vegetable in her garden. Esau joined us and we feasted for three hours.

Sam now had one college degree under his belt and was planning on law school. He had almost married a Canadian woman but things blew up over her family's heated opposition to the union. Miss Callie was quite relieved to hear of the breakup. Sam had not mentioned the romance in letters to his mother.

He planned to stay in Clanton for a few days, very close to home, venturing out of Lowtown only at night. I promised to talk to Harry Rex, to fish around and see what I could learn about Trooper Durant and his sons. From the legal notices we printed, I knew that Durant had remarried, then divorced for the second time.

He wanted to see the town, so late that afternoon I picked him up in my Spitfire. Hiding under a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, he took in the sights of the small town he still called home. I showed him my office, my house, Bargain City, and the sprawl west of town. We circled the courthouse and I told him the story of the sniper and Baggy's dramatic escape. Much of this he'd heard in letters from Miss Callie.

As I dropped him off in front of the Ruffin home, he said, "Is Padgitt really out of prison?"

"No one's seen him," I said. "But I'm sure he's back home."

"Do you expect trouble?"

"No, not really."

"Neither do I. But I can't convince Momma."

"Nothing will happen, Sam."