Out Of Time (4 page)

In short, what the newspaper articles told me was that Gail Honeycutt had never had a prayer. North Carolina’s Correctional Center For Women was filled to the rafters with self- made widows who soon learned that shooting your husband was not as easy an offense to wiggle out of as shooting your wife was in most of the world. Especially when your husband was a well-respected police officer and you were widely acknowledged as a drunk, pill-popping slut.

The final public chapter in the case was a sad one. Gail’s daughter had become the object of a bitter custody dispute between maternal relatives and Roy Taylor’s parents. The whole wedlock mess had been brought out and speculation as to the identity of the child’s real father had been cruel, protracted and, ultimately, useless. In the end, the judge awarded custody of little Brittany Honeycutt Taylor to an unnamed relative of Gail’s on the grounds that blood was thicker than money. I’ve never understood why being genetically connected to someone should in the least affect suitability as a parent one way or the other, but the courts seem mighty keen on the concept.

The series of articles about the custodneyt the cy dispute had all been written by the same N&O reporter. They were remarkably restrained, given the sensational nature of the material. I wrote down the reporter’s name and reminded myself I could always call her if I hit a brick wall. She might know something that never made it into print, something she’d be willing to share.

I printed out the most important articles and started a case file—yet another sign that I was rapidly being sucked into the vortex of the Gail Honeycutt case. I jotted some questions in the margins and made a few notes about possible counter theories. When I was done, I had a thick manila folder of information that I tucked into my knapsack for safekeeping. I come from a superstitious lot. Where I go, my current case files go with me—even if I was off to as depressing a place as the women’s prison.

If I thought the morning had been rough on my psyche, I knew the afternoon would be worse. There isn’t a place on earth I’d rather avoid more than a women’s prison. I had bad memories of my own eighteen months spent behind bars. It had been a long time ago, when I was dumb enough to believe that the man I loved was a good man. Fortunately, that was also when I was young and strong enough to survive the rude awakening when it came. It had been many years since I’d willingly entered such a place, but I could remember the suffocating loneliness as if it had been yesterday. Not to mention the bad B-movie reality of the experience.

No matter. That was then. And this was now. I shouldered my knapsack and moved on. 

The women’s prison was on the south side of Raleigh, nestled among the town’s largest black neighborhood. The churches were just letting out from eleven o’clock services, and the streets were clogged with families dressed in their Sunday best which, in Raleigh on a nearly spring Sunday, could be pretty damn spiffy indeed. Tiny boys in white suits. Little girls in pastel dresses with big bows tied in back. Mothers in cobalt-blue and ruby-red dresses, their hair carefully tucked up under stylish hats. Fathers in somber gray and black suits, scrubbed and dignified in their praying clothes. Like me, everyone was just waiting for spring. They stared up at a heavy sky, wondering where all the sunshine had gone. I basked in this last glimpse of normalcy before I turned down the road that led to the prison.

The parking lot was only a quarter full, mostly, I suspected, with the cars of guards. The parade of children here to see their mothers under the supervision of weary grandmothers had not yet started. They were all still driving in from their coastal, country and mountain homes, wondering what the hell they would say to each other this time. I knew the rap.

As I followed the long brick sidewalk over a muddy lawn to the first guardhouse, my heart pounded and a muscle in my right thigh started to twitch. Bad memories can be a powerful force. I showed my I.D. to the guard manning the front post and was waved through to checkpoint two. It took a while to negotiate the various gates and administrative watchdogs, nearly all of whom were women. At least I think the guards were women. While a few looked like they could go either way—standing up or sitting down—odds were good they were femaleerf were f. They aren’t stupid in the penal system here. They know better than to stick a bunch of male guards in a women’s prison, and they have full confidence that the countrybred females of North Carolina can keep just about anyone in line, thank you very much. They’re right.

The prisoners were on their noon break, filing into a low brick building that held the cafeteria or lingering on the lawn to look up at the sky, just like their free brethren. They moved about in small groups, smoking cigarettes and whispering to one another, every now and then shouting an insult to another group. Most of the women were young, and all of them looked royally pissed off.

A tiny black female guard acted as my tour guide. She didn’t waste much time on small talk. “This is one unhappy lady you’re about to see,” she said, unlocking the door to a smaller brick building set apart from the other brick structures. They’re big on brick in prison.

“Yeah?” I asked. “She on medication?”

“That girl is so high she needs an air-traffic controller,” the guard replied, unlocking a small room and leaving me to wait at a wooden table.

They were pretty informal at the prison, if you were a mere murderer, drug dealer or abuser of small children. But death-row inmates were housed in separate quarters from the general population, in a building they shared with regular inmates who had violated prison rules. They lived an isolated life, with only one hour of solitary recreation allowed per day and a single outside visitor every twenty-four hours, clergy and lawyers excepted. As prisoners reached the end of the line, this rule was often relaxed to give families time to say good-bye—or at least the surviving family members. There weren’t a lot of husbands visiting wives on death row. Gail’s cohorts included a woman who had stomped her elderly husband to death with cowboy boots and several who had used their spouses as targets in their own private turkey shoots.

Two guards brought Gail to me without comment, unlocking her handcuffs and parking her on the other side of the table. They left us alone and looked away discreetly as they waited on the other side of the room’s glass windows.

“Hello, Gail,” I said, doing my best to erase any forced attempts at cheerfulness from my voice. It wasn’t hard. I felt like I could hardly breathe. Either my living bra was turning on me or I was on the verge of a panic attack.

Gail looked at me for a moment before abruptly asking, “What’s the matter with you? You don’t look too good.” Her southern accent was thick and much rougher than that of her relatives. Tough girl in prison talk.

“Prisons do that to me,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? You should try being in one.” She leaned back and crossed her a/forossed rms, waiting for me to apologize. She was in for a surprise.

“I have been in one,” I told her. “For eighteen very long months.” I am not above pandering my past if it furthers my future.

She stared at me, expressionless. “Got a cigarette?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Never mind. That stuff’ll kill you.” She made a rusty coughing sound that was supposed to be a laugh. “I cracked a joke, did you notice?” Her words came out in disjointed intervals and her pupils were small. The lady was bombed on prescription drugs. Medical management, they called it. I called it zombie time. It was no way to spend the last thirty days of your life.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Her sullen attitude returned. “Nanny Honeycutt said you were coming. I don’t know why the hell she doesn’t let me die in peace.”

“Maybe she loves you?” I suggested sarcastically. “It’s just a wild guess, of course.” Her passiveness was getting on my nerves. I could imagine she drove her lawyers up the wall.

“I can’t help you,” she said, looping a long string of black hair behind one ear. She had been a pretty, though overweight, woman in her pre-prison photographs, with a catlike face and big eyes. Now she was puffy, and her country tan had faded to a sickly pallor. Her shirt strained at the buttons and a roll of soft fat spilled over the waistline of her blue jeans. Her hair was still glossy and thick, however. It was brushed into the familiar prison shag that’s a cross between feminine and butch, and has never looked good on anyone other than David Cassidy. I wondered at this small vanity. It gave me a little hope.

“I haven’t decided whether to take your case yet,” I announced, hoping to shake her up.

“Really? I haven’t decided whether I should let them kill me by drugs or the gas chamber. Maybe we should both flip a coin?”

So much for that strategy. “Look, I met with your family and promised Nanny Honeycutt I’d talk to you and let her know if I could do anything,” I said. “I know you don’t care if you’re going to die, but your family sure does.”

“Some of my family cares,” she corrected me. “I bet my daddy wasn’t at that meeting, was he?”

“No men were,” I admitted.

She shrectext”>Srugged. “Big surprise. How about my sister Brenda?”

“She wasn’t there either,” I answered. “But I’m supposed to meet with her as soon as possible.”

Gail began rapidly drumming her fingers on the tabletop as if I bored her. I gritted my teeth, reminded myself of what it had been like and tried again.

“Listen, Gail. I know you don’t think you can help me and I know that you don’t really care what happens to you. I’ve been behind bars, like I told you. A place like this has a way of sucking the hope out of you. But you’ve been in here too long to be able to see things clearly anymore. You might be able to help me and not even know it. Why don’t you just tell me what you remember about the night Roy died and let me decide what’s important and what’s not?”

She shrugged again. “I don’t know what the hell I did or did not do that night. I blacked out. I knew something like this would happen one day. But I couldn’t seem to stop drinking. All Roy and me ever did was drink together. That was what we had in common. I drank four, maybe five, drinks that night. I was okay for awhile, but then everything kind of went dark.”

“When did it go black?” I asked. “Before or after the bar?” I was curious as to why she would black out after five drinks. She was a big woman and sounded like she’d been a functioning alcoholic. Five drinks shouldn’t have put her away like that. Hell, I was two-thirds her size and I could go a whole fifteen rounds before the lights went out.

She thought for a moment. “After the bar, I think. On the way home in the truck. Roy and me had been fighting. I can’t remember over what. We left and we were still fighting. That was about all I remember until I woke up in the backseat of a police car on my way to jail.” She glanced around the tiny room. “It’s not so bad inside,” she added. “People are nice to me in here. Especially now that I’m going to die.”

How heartwarming. I wondered which one of these nice people would be the one to kill her. “Did you tell your lawyer about blacking out?” I asked.

“You mean my first lawyer?” she asked. “I told her. She didn’t want to hear. She just wanted me to say that Roy beat me and that was why I shot him.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“Hell, no.” She held up one arm and flexed it. I had to admit she was built pretty good for a woman. I estimated it would take me thirty seconds to whip her ass instead of the usual ten.

“You think any man would try to beat on me?” she continued. “I’d have kicked his tail faster than he could sneeze. Besides, me and Roy, we got along fine. We just didn’t love each other.”
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“Why’d you get married in the first place?’ I asked. “It’s customary to love your husband.”

“On what planet?” She laughed bitterly. “We got married because Roy wanted to. He loved my kid is what he loved.”

“Your kid?” I asked, my voice rising involuntarily.

“Not that way,” she complained. “You got a dirty mind. He loved Brittany like she was his own little girl. He couldn’t have kids of his own and he felt sorry for us. Me, I married him because, what the hell, it was better than living with my parents.”

“Does Brittany come to see you often?” I asked.

Her mouth clamped down in a tight line. “She doesn’t come to see me at all. Children got no business seeing their mothers like this. The sooner my daughter forgets about me, the better. I am going to die, you know. There’s nothing anyone can do.” She sounded both resigned and relieved at the prospect.

“God almighty, Gail. Don’t you care about that?” I asked. “It’s not a game. You are going to die if no one does anything about it.”

She let her hands drop to her sides. “Don’t you get it? I give up. I’m tired of all of this. I’m tired of my family acting like I’m a big disappointment. I’m tired of always being the one who screws things up. I’m tired of thinking things are going to be better and then finding out they’re the same old bullshit. Shit, I’m just plain tired.”

“Maybe you need to cut back on the tranquilizers?” I suggested.

“They took away my booze,” she said. “The least they can do is leave me my pills.”

“Were you on pills the night Roy died?”

“Of course I was on pills,” she said impatiently. “I been on pills since I was fifteen. But I wasn’t taking black market like people are always saying. I didn’t do those kinds of pills. People who say I did are liars.”