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THE DEATH FACTORY

WHEN YOU’RE TOLD that your dying father has something important to say to you before he passes, two feelings flash through you: first, the sense that you’re in an Alexandre Dumas novel, that some momentous family secret is about to be revealed—­the lost inheritance, your true paternity, something like that. But once that passes, you realize that such a conversation is only natural. Because death is the end, and if a man doesn’t speak before it silences him, then the things he holds closest die with him.

In a way, I’d been expecting my father to die since I was a senior in high school, when he had his first heart attack. By age fifty he’d had a triple bypass, when the operation was far riskier than it is now. But Tom Cage was nothing if not stubborn. No matter what setbacks he endured after that operation (and there were many), he just kept practicing medicine. Even with diabetes and severe arthritis, he outlived my wife, who was born thirty years after him. And when I moved back to my Mississippi hometown with my daughter, who’d become so paralyzed by grief that she couldn’t leave my side, it was Dad and Mom who accomplished the miracle that no therapist in Houston had been able to manage: returning a grieving child to normalcy. Seven years after that, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and when, as mayor, I began fighting to get basic ser­vices like electricity restored to Natchez, my father—­by then seventy-­three—­was still beside me, helping coordinate the effort to get critical drugs to displaced storm victims who had fled north to my hometown.

But this morning, as my fiancée, Caitlin Masters, and I stood in a boat on the Mississippi River, spreading the ashes of a young woman who had died for helping a friend of mine expose a ruinous evil in our midst, I got the call I’d been dreading for years. Dad had collapsed at his office. Only swift CPR by his chief nurse and defibrillation by his partner had stabilized him sufficiently to reach the ER. When Mom called me off the river, she told me Dad was sure he was going to die and needed speak to me—­and only me—­before the end. I needed to get there as fast as I could.

After Caitlin and I raced back to shore and docked the boat, I floored my Audi all the way to the hospital. For the twenty-­five minutes that took, I was certain I would arrive too late. For twenty minutes, my father was dead to me. Yet when Caitlin and I sprinted into the intensive care unit, I was informed that despite suffering a serious myocardial infarction, Dad was alive and had a chance to survive. Natchez’s sole cardiologist had just taken off from the local airport to fly his family to Walt Disney World when the ER called his cell phone and told him my father was being brought in with a heart attack. Peter Bruen had immediately landed his plane and raced to the hospital. Within minutes he’d placed a new stent in one of Dad’s major vessels—­a procedure almost never performed in Natchez, only in nearby cities like Brookhaven or Jackson—­and that made the difference between life and death.

Bruen was completing that procedure when I reached the hospital. A whispering crowd had already gathered outside the cardiac cath lab, as doctors and nurses waited to hear the fate of one of their own, a man who had practiced medicine in Natchez for more than four decades and in the army before that. Everyone fell silent as they wheeled Dad out on a gurney and transferred him to the ICU; then restrained applause broke out as he passed from view and Dr. Bruen appeared.

During my first visit to Dad’s bedside, I was shocked. His white beard was always well trimmed, but now it looked oddly unkempt, his skin white and waxy. I took his cold hand, whispered that I was there, and asked what he needed to tell me. He opened his eyes and blinked several times, then pointed at his throat. I placed an ice chip in his mouth and repeated the question. He looked at my mother beside me, then croaked, “What are you talking about?”

I looked back at my mother, then after some hesitation asked her to leave me alone with him. Reluctantly, she agreed. After I assured Dad that we were alone, I asked once more what he’d needed to tell me. He said he had no memory of saying anything like that to my mother. I decided to let it go for the moment, and he was obviously relieved.

That was five hours ago.

The first two passed like a death watch, as a solemn parade of hospital workers visited the ICU, quietly paying their respects. But as time slipped by and more lab tests came in, Dr. Bruen came to believe that yet again—­against the odds—­my father would live to fight another day. During my second visit to the bedside, Caitlin and I told Dad and my mother that only hours earlier we had decided to get married. After a seven-­year relationship, that news should have seemed anticlimactic, but somehow it didn’t. It actually brought a weak smile to my father’s face, and my mother cried, knowing how badly my eleven-­year-­old daughter has been wanting that. We decided to wait to tell Annie about both the engagement and Dad’s heart attack. For the time being, Caitlin would pick her up from school and take her back to work with her.

I’ve spent much of the time since making the necessary phone calls of a family crisis; various relatives are now arranging to fly in from around the country. Getting to Natchez in a hurry can be difficult. My older sister, who teaches American literature in England, boarded a Virgin Airways flight in London an hour ago, but that’s only the beginning of the logistical legerdemain it will take to bring her here by tomorrow afternoon. My dad’s two brothers should make it sooner, but probably not until ten or eleven tonight.

My mother hasn’t left Dad’s bedside. The hospital administrators have suspended their visitation rules for her, if for no one else. Had they not, they probably would have had to arrest her. Seventy-­one herself, Peggy Cage has already taken on a ghostly appearance, her skin almost transparent, her eyes alternately hyperalert with fear and clouded by fatigue. Caitlin and I have tried to get Mom to yield her place, but she will not be moved. At 2:45 P.M. Caitlin left to pick up Annie and return to her newspaper, the Natchez Examiner, to manage the story that broke five days before Dad’s heart attack, one in which she herself played a part, and as a result almost died.

I, too, played a central role in that case, but while I’ve been besieged by interview requests, I’ve declined them all. Hardly enough time has passed for me to process the enormity of what took place within the bounds of our little city, the oldest continuous settlement on the Mississippi River. From inside the Magnolia Queen—­a riverboat gambling casino docked at Natchez—­an international crime ring secretly ran a high-­end dogfighting and prostitution operation that attracted high-­stakes gamblers of all kinds: high-­rollers from Las Vegas, NFL players, rap artists, and dogfighters from around the world. The smashing of that ring has led to the exposure of a Chinese connection: a money-­laundering, human-­smuggling kingpin from Macao named Edward Po, whom the Justice Department and the CIA have been pursuing for years. With the help of her father’s media group, Caitlin has pushed this story as hard as she can, earning the enmity of the U.S. intelligence establishment in the process.

Both Caitlin and I lost friends during that case, and partly as a result of that, I changed my earlier decision to resign as mayor. Even my father urged me to stay the course and serve out the remaining two years of my term, despite his initial advice that I not seek the job in the first place. To my surprise, I’ve learned that the passion of a crusade to save one’s hometown can be a contagious thing.

My present dilemma is how to persuade my mother to leave Dad’s bedside long enough for me to ask him again what he needed to tell me. Perhaps the passage of time has improved his short-­term memory, or eased whatever anxiety is keeping him quiet. Mom has scarcely taken a bite off the trays the nurses have brought, nor has she tasted the fare Caitlin brought in from a local restaurant. For now, I’m working in an uncomfortable chair in the single vacant patient cubicle in the ICU, which has become our informal command center for coordinating this crisis.

My PowerBook lies on the bed, along with my BlackBerry, a Martin Cruz Smith paperback, today’s Examiner, and work papers from City Hall. An hour ago, unable to deal with the constant barrage of calls from around the state and country, I switched my phone to silent and tried to focus on the novel. My effort was in vain. Again and again I found myself reading the same page while my mind wandered, filling with violent, rushing images from the past ten days. At one time or another during that period, all my family members were put under threat of death, two close friends of mine were killed, and I ultimately had to kill a man. For the first ­couple of days after that event, I felt I was dealing with it pretty well. But my father’s unexpected heart attack coming on the heels of all that seems to have triggered a delayed shock reaction. Since I arrived at the hospital, doctors and nurses have shaken or squeezed my arm to bring me out of a kind of fugue state. One doctor even suggested that I have a neurological exam, given the savage fight I endured only days ago. But the odd trances I’m slipping into feel more like the result of emotional shock than physical trauma.

Rubbing my eyes hard, I focus on the novel again. For a ­couple of minutes Smith’s poetic descriptions of modern Russia draw me out of myself. But then the muted pulses and beeps of the medical gear outside the cubicle lull me into a kind of half sleep. When the glass door to my left slides open, I’m expecting a nurse or administrator to tell me they need the cubicle for a critical patient. Instead I find my father’s youngest brother, Jack Cage, looking down at me with concern.

“My God,” I say, glancing at my watch, afraid that I’ve slept away six or seven hours. But I haven’t. “How the hell . . . ?”

Uncle Jack smiles. “You know I was never much for waiting.”

Jack Cage is seventeen years younger than my father—­effectively from a different generation altogether. While Dad lived through the Depression as a boy, Jack was a classic baby boomer. He sported long hair, rode a motorcycle, and barely escaped serving in Vietnam, thanks to a congenital hearing problem. Though I seldom saw Jack when I was a boy, I idolized him. Unlike Dad’s other brothers, who spent their lives in one branch or another of the military, Jack moved to the West Coast and worked in the aerospace industry. By the mid-­1980s, he’d switched to the computer business, and now he lives in comfortable semiretirement in Mountain View, California. Jack still has longer hair than most men his age (though it’s silver-­white now), and his eyes have not lost their youthful twinkle.

“Why didn’t you call ahead?” I ask, getting to my feet and hugging him.

“I’ve been calling you for the past half hour. Your cell kept kicking me to voice mail.”

“But why didn’t you call from California?”

He draws back, still squeezing my arm as though to hold me up. “We talked, didn’t we? I just didn’t want to give you guys any false hope that I could get here this fast.”

“How did you get here?”

A familiar, enigmatic smile tugs at his mouth. “A friend of a friend has a plane.”

I glance at my watch again, doing the math. “Must be some plane.”

“Hey, I wasn’t going to let my big brother go down without saying good-­bye, just because the airlines have lousy route tables.”

Jack’s buoying presence feels semimiraculous, as though I’ve surfaced from a dark maelstrom. “Has Mom seen you?”

“Not yet. I saw her through the glass, hunched over the bed with her arm on Tom’s legs. I didn’t know if I should just bust in there.”

“Come on.”

WHEN MY MOTHER sees Jack, tears fill her eyes. She hugs him for a full ten seconds, pulls back and looks at him as though she can’t believe her eyes, then hugs him again. After convincing herself that he’s really here, she gently takes my father’s hand and squeezes it.

“Tom?” she says near his ear. “Tom? Look who’s come to see you.”

Dad’s eyes flutter, then open and slowly focus as he turns his head toward us. A faint smile touches his lips. “I’ll be damned. It’s Tonto.”

Mom is softly rubbing Dad’s arm, as though he might fade into nothingness at any moment. “You’re the first to make it in,” she tells Jack. “Phil might be in late tonight.”

“I cheated,” Jack says with a smile. “But don’t tell Phil that.” He steps forward and takes Dad by the hand. “How you doing, Kemosabe? Not so great, huh?”

“Better than the friends I read about in the obituaries this morning.”

“That’s the spirit. Do you remember anything of what happened?”

Dad slowly moves his head from side to side. “Just a hell of a pain in my back. Nothing after that.”

“Well, you’ve got nothing to do now but loaf around and let ­people tell you how glad they are you made it.”

“That’s right,” Dad says, after a ten-­second delay.

He closes his eyes, takes a few labored breaths, then opens them enough to locate his baby brother again. “I thought I was taking my last ride this time, Jack.”

“You’ve got a lot of trail left yet,” my uncle says with assurance.

Mom smiles, but I see her chin quivering.

“Peg,” Jack says softly. “Why don’t you let me spell you for a little while?”

“Oh, no. I have to stay here.”

“Go, Peggy,” Dad whispers. “Take a break.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Not yet.”

Jack gives her a chiding glance. “You don’t want to hog all the quality time, do you? What do you think I came out here for?”

This was a good try, since Mom has a highly developed sense of guilt, but after a ­couple seconds, she sees through Jack’s ploy. “No, you’ve had a long trip. You go with Penn.” She takes my hand. “Drive Jack over to our house and get him settled.”

“No,” Jack says. “I’ve got a hotel room right up the road.”

“That’s ridiculous! Why waste good money on a hotel?”

Jack smiles and shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it, Peg.”

“I’ll put him up with me, Mom,” I interject, knowing it’s the quickest way out of this pointless discussion.

“You two go on,” she insists. “Get Jack settled. I’ll take a break later on, after Tom’s had some rest and those enzyme tests come back.”

Jack hesitates, then hugs my mom once more and says, “All right, Peg. I’ll see you in a ­couple of hours.”

Leaning down over my father, Jack squeezes his hand once more, until Dad opens his eyes and nods as if to say I’m still here.

“I’ll take care of everything,” Jack says. “You get some rest.”

After Dad nods, Jack straightens up and quickly walks to the door of the cubicle, wiping his eyes on his shirtsleeve. Mom and I follow him with our eyes, and then I go after him. At the nurses’ station, Jack picks up a weekend bag, and we start toward the hospital lobby.

“Did you fly right into Natchez?” I ask.

“Hell, yes. They didn’t have any rental cars, but when the guy who runs the airport found out why I’d come, he offered to drive me into town himself. I knew then that I was back in the South.”

In the lobby, a nurse stops me and asks how Dad is doing. I give her a brief update, and then Jack and I head for the parking lot, where the late afternoon sun has come from behind the clouds.

“So,” my uncle says in a man-­to-­man voice. “You think Tom’s going to make it?”

“For a while,” I reply. “If Dr. Bruen hadn’t come back and placed that stent, we’d have been picking out a casket today. But Dad doesn’t have that long, regardless of this outcome. His heart’s about worn out, Jack. He’s going to be in failure before long. If he’d quit the cigars and ease back on self-­prescribing pain medication, he might stretch that out for two or three years, but . . .”

“I know. He can’t keep practicing medicine without the pain meds, because of his arthritis, right?”

“Right.”

“Then forget that.”

“Mom’s pushing him hard to retire.”

Jack chuckles. “Never happen. The Lone Ranger dies in the saddle. Might as well chisel that on his tombstone now.”

“Let’s take Dad’s car,” I suggest, pointing to a five-­year-­old black BMW 740, which I bought my father with the proceeds of my second book.

Jack nods, then makes his way around to the passenger side.

“He really thought this was the end,” I say.

As Jack looks at me across the roof of the car, I tell him about Dad’s urgent request to see me before he died, then his later denial.

“You have no idea what it might have been about?” Jack asks.

“No.”

“Something about money, maybe?”

“Could have been. But Dad never cared much about money. And I think all that’s pretty well settled.”

“Tell you to take care of your mother, maybe?”

“He already knows I’d do that. I think it’s something else. But now that he thinks he has a good chance of surviving, he doesn’t want to tell me.”

“Did he know his chances of survival had improved by the time you asked him the question?”

I think about this. “He knew that Bruen had placed a new stent. He couldn’t know how badly his heart had been damaged, because it was far too early for diagnostic enzyme tests. But I think he sensed that he was going to make it.”

Jack purses his lips with a speculative cast to his eyes. “Some dark secret? That’s what you’re thinking?”

I shrug. “Maybe.”

“Well . . . maybe together we can get it out of him before I go back home.”

With the push of a button on Dad’s key ring, I unlock the car and we get inside.

“Smells like cigars,” Jack says with a smile. “Every car he ever had smelled like this.”

“I hope this one always does.”

The heavy doors close with a satisfying thunk.

“Tom loves this car,” Jack says. “He says it reminds him of his time serving in Germany.”

I back out of the parking space and pull up to Jefferson Davis Boulevard. “Where do you want to go?”

“Why don’t we go to a drive-­through and get some coffee, then take a drive? I haven’t been to Natchez in six years, and that was just for Christmas. I must have seen a hundred downed trees during my ride in from the airport. Big oaks.”

“Katrina hit us pretty hard, even up here. Some families were without power for a week.”

“I’d like to see that gambling boat that nearly sank. Or that you nearly sank. Is it still down under the bluff?”

“No. They’ve towed it to a refitting yard in New Orleans for repairs. I hear the company’s going to sell it, and the new owners may reopen in three or four months. Can’t let a cash cow sit idle.”

“I’d like to see the river, anyway,” Jack says. “Being near something of that scale has a way of putting problems into perspective.”

“The river it is.”

St. Catherine’s Hospital stands on high ground about two miles inland from the Mississippi River. I turn north on Highway 61, then pull into a McDonald’s drive-­through lane and order two coffees, and a chicken sandwich for Jack.

“What’s happening in California?” I ask, making conversation.

“Same as it ever was, ever was, ever was.”

“And Frances?” This question carries some weight; Jack’s wife was diagnosed with lupus eight years ago.

“She’s doing as well as can be expected. Up and down, you know. She lives for the grandkids now. Jack Junior just extended his fellowship at Stanford, so we see him a lot. And Julia just moved from Sun to a start-­up you haven’t heard of yet.”

“But will soon, I suppose?”

Jack laughs. “From your lips to God’s ears.”

As the line of cars inches forward in fits and starts, Jack taps his fingers on the dash. “You know,” he says, “there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

“What’s that?”

“Why have you stayed in Natchez? I mean, I understand why you came back. Your wife’s death, right? And your daughter having trouble with it?”

“That was most of it. More than half.” I hesitate, wondering whether today is the day to delve into darker chapters of the past. But the idea that my father might be hiding something makes me think of another mentor who threw my lifelong opinion of him into doubt. “But there was more to leaving Houston than that.”

“More than Sarah’s death? And your daughter?”

I hesitate a final moment, then plunge ahead. “Yes. Something strange happened just before Sarah died. She only lived four months after the diagnosis, you know. And right near the end, this other thing came out of nowhere. It knocked the cork out of something that had been building in me for a long time, while I was working as a prosecutor. I just didn’t know it. After I resigned from the office to focus on writing, I repressed it. I thought I’d put all that behind me. But I hadn’t.”

“Does this have to do with you shooting that skinhead guy? Arthur Lee Hanratty?”

That name triggers a silent explosion of images behind my eyes: a pale face leering in the dark, a bundled baby blanket clutched in one arm below it, the other reaching for the handle of our French doors in the moonlight shining through them—­

“It was Joe Lee Hanratty I shot,” I say softly. “Arthur Lee was executed in 1998.”

“Oh.”

“No. This was something else.”

Jack nods thoughtfully. “Your death penalty cases?”

“How did you know?”

“I sensed a change in you over the years you worked that job. I could tell you were glad to get out of it. I’ve been surprised that you haven’t written about it, though. Not as a central focus, anyway.”

“Not honestly, you mean.”

Jack shrugs. “It’s your life, man. I’d like to hear about it, but I understand if you’d rather not go there.”

An awkward silence fills the car. Thankfully, the SUV ahead of us moves, and the McDonald’s server passes me the coffee and a white bag. One minute later I’m turning off Highway 61 onto 84, heading west toward the river while Jack munches on his chicken sandwich.

The road that leads toward downtown Natchez cuts through old plantation lands still verdant with foliage in late October. Where slaves once walked, a foursome of black golfers in bright caps and polo shirts putt white balls across a manicured green. Behind them the sun falls on oak and elm trees hardly dotted with autumn browns, but heavy with Spanish moss. When we reach the intersection with Homochitto Street, I turn right, into town, and soon we’re passing Dunleith, the antebellum mansion that I always say makes Tara from Gone with the Wind look like a woodshed.

“Why haven’t you bought that yet?” Jack asks, elbowing me in the side.

“You couldn’t pay me to take on that kind of headache. Besides, a friend owns it, and even he spends most of his time out of town. It’s tough living in a house ­people fly to every weekend to get married.” As I brake for the red light at Martin Luther King, I say, “I’ve actually been thinking about writing about what happened in Houston. But that would upset a lot of ­people. Maybe damage some careers. It’s erupted into a major scandal over the past year, and it’s going to get worse.”

“Now I’m really interested. You said this happened near the time of Sarah’s death? How long before she got sick had you resigned from the DA’s office? A while, right?”

“Three years. I left shortly after I killed Hanratty. That experience scared Sarah so bad that she simply couldn’t handle me staying in the job.”

“So whatever it was took three years to come to a head?”

“If it had been left to me, I probably would have buried it for life. But then someone came walking out of the past, almost like a messenger. And he was bearing in his hands the very thing I thought I’d escaped.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“It was.”

The light changes, and I head into the center of old Natchez, where the doors of the police cars once proclaimed WHERE THE OLD SOUTH STILL LIVES—­and not so long ago. I turn left on Washington Street, where my town house stands, then drive slowly toward the river between the lines of crape myrtles drooping over parked cars.

“When I took the assistant DA job in Houston, I was one year out of UT law school. Sarah and I had gotten married my senior year. I was pro–capital punishment, always had been. And in a world of perfect cops, lawyers, crime labs, and juries, I still would be. But Harris County tries more capital cases than any other in the nation. It also sends more ­people to death row, and they don’t linger there for decades. They get executed. I saw that sausage grinder from the inside, Jack. Unlike in the rest of America, the death penalty system in Houston pretty much works as the law intended. Mainly because it’s adequately funded. We had enough courts and judges to handle the caseload—­or a good part of it—­and we could afford to pay visiting judges, experts to testify, and order complex forensic analyses. That streamlined the process, made it practicable. Then you have the Texas ethos that’s persisted from the frontier days. ‘West of the Pecos justice,’ they call it. If somebody stole a horse or shot somebody in the back, they hung him. You can bet the gangbangers who evacuated New Orleans during Katrina aren’t finding Texas to their liking.”

Jack says, “I’ve heard Harris County called ‘the Death Factory’ on talk radio in California.”

“They call it that all over the country, and not without reason. Harris County sends more ­people to death row than the other forty-­nine states combined.”

“Jesus, Penn.”

“I know. I spent most of my time working for the Special Crimes Unit, prosecuting complex cases like criminal conspiracies, serving on joint task forces, that kind of thing. But I also handled a certain number of capital murder cases. It’s like a rite of passage in that office, and I did my share. And I don’t mind telling you, I had no problem with it. Because when you deal with the victims, as we did, it’s hard to see any flaw in capital punishment. I studied the brutalized corpses, examined crime scenes, hugged distraught parents and siblings—­some of whom never recovered from losing their loved ones in that way. I heard audio and saw video recordings that killers had made of their crimes. And in every death case I prosecuted, I realized that there was a moment in which the killer had coldly made a decision to take his victim’s life. The rapist who strangled a girl after raping her, then stomped on her throat to be sure she was dead. The robber who shot terrified cashiers and clerks who had obeyed every order given to them. The skinheads who chained a guy to a bumper and dragged him over gravel until he was in pieces. When you see that . . . it’s hard to see justice in any sentence but death.”

“But . . . ?” Jack says softly, his eyes knowing.

I sigh heavily. “But over time, certain things began to bother me.”

“Such as?”

“Well, for one thing, Houston has no public defender’s office.”

“Isn’t that in the Constitution or something? Or the Bill of Rights?”

“Most ­people think so, but it’s not. And while defendants often received excellent representation from appointed counsel, other times . . . not so much. As time went on, I also realized that most of the judges handling those cases—­even the appeals—­were former prosecutors, some of them from Harris County itself. I started to feel that the deck was stacked in the state’s favor. That bias was so entrenched in the system that even the defense bar sort of accepted it as the reality of Texas. Don’t get me wrong, the defendants were guilty. And we were following the law. Joe Cantor always said, ‘If the ­people don’t want me to enforce the law, they should change the law or elect another DA. Because not enforcing the law only breeds contempt for it.’ And as simplistic as that may sound, he was right.”

“Sounds like the worst nightmare of my California neighbors.”

A dry laugh escapes my throat. “It is. Another thing: death penalty law in Texas contains almost no subtleties, which you have in other jurisdictions. The end result was, our office took capital cases to trial that never would have seen a courtroom in other jurisdictions, even in other parts of Texas. They would have been pled down to lesser sentences, or even lesser charges. So, I’d had doubts building up for a while. I think Joe Cantor kept me around as a sort of foil—­the loyal opposition. Not that I was anti–capital punishment, but I held every case to a very high standard. That’s partly what kept me there, feeling like I was working as a check to that ‘hang ’em high’ bias, keeping the system in balance.”