The Chamber (8 page)

“I can’t wait.”

“I’ll talk to the warden, and get permission for the visit. They’ll usually give you a couple of hours. Of course, it may take five minutes if Sam doesn’t want a lawyer.”

“He’ll talk to me, don’t you think?”

“I believe so. I cannot imagine how the man will react, but he’ll talk. It may take a couple of visits to sign him up, but you can do it.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Couple of years ago. Wallace Tyner and I went down. You’ll need to touch base with Tyner. He was the point man on this case for the past six years.”

Adam nodded and moved to the next thought. He’d been picking Tyner’s brain for the past nine months.

“What do we file first?”

“We’ll talk about it later. Tyner and I are meeting early in the morning to review the case. Everything’s
on hold, though, until we hear from you. We can’t move if we don’t represent him.”

Adam was thinking of the newspaper photos, the black and whites from 1967 when Sam was arrested, and the magazine photos, in color, from the third trial in 1981, and the footage he’d pieced together into a thirty-minute video about Sam Cayhall. “What does he look like?”

Goodman left his pen on the table and fiddled with his bow tie. “Average height. Thin—but then you seldom see a fat one on the Row—nerves and lean food. He chain-smokes, which is common because there’s not much else to do, and they’re dying anyway. Some weird brand, Montclair, I believe, in a blue pack. His hair is gray and oily, as I recall. These guys don’t get a shower every day. Sort of long in the back, but that was two years ago. He hasn’t lost much of it. Gray beard. He’s fairly wrinkled, but then he’s pushing seventy. Plus, the heavy smoking. You’ll notice the white guys on the Row look worse than the black ones. They’re confined for twenty-three hours a day, so they sort of bleach out. Real pale, fair, almost sickly-looking. Sam has blue eyes, nice features. I suspect that at one time Sam Cayhall was a handsome fellow.”

“After my father died, and I learned the truth about Sam, I had a lot of questions for my mother. She didn’t have many answers, but she did tell me once that there was little physical resemblance between Sam and my father.”

“Nor between you and Sam, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“He hasn’t seen you since you were a toddler, Adam. He will not recognize you. It won’t be that easy. You’ll have to tell him.”

Adam stared blankly at the table. “You’re right. What will he say?”

“Beats me. I expect he’ll be too shocked to say much. But he’s a very intelligent man, not educated, but well read and articulate. He’ll think of something to say. It may take a few minutes.”

“You sound as if you almost like him.”

“I don’t. He’s a horrible racist and bigot, and he’s shown no remorse for his actions.”

“You’re convinced he’s guilty.”

Goodman grunted and smiled to himself, then thought of a response. Three trials had been held to determine the guilt or innocence of Sam Cayhall. For nine years now the case had been batted around the appellate courts and reviewed by many judges. Countless newspaper and magazine articles had investigated the bombing and those behind it. “The jury thought so. I guess that’s all that matters.”

“But what about you? What do you think?”

“You’ve read the file, Adam. You’ve researched the case for a long time. There’s no doubt Sam took part in the bombing.”

“But?”

“There are a lot of buts. There always are.”

“He had no history of handling explosives.”

“True. But he was a Klan terrorist, and they were bombing like hell. Sam gets arrested, and the bombing stops.”

“But in one of the bombings before Kramer, a witness claims he saw two people in the green Pontiac.”

“True. But the witness was not allowed to testify at trial. And the witness had just left a bar at three in the morning.”

“But another witness, a truck driver, claims he saw Sam and another man talking in a coffee shop in Cleveland a few hours before the Kramer bombing.”

“True. But the truck driver said nothing for three years, and was not allowed to testify at the last trial. Too remote.”

“So who was Sam’s accomplice?”

“I doubt if we’ll ever know. Keep in mind, Adam, this is a man who went to trial three times, yet never testified. He said virtually nothing to the police, very little to his defense lawyers, not a word to his juries, and he’s told us nothing new in the past seven years.”

“Do you think he acted alone?”

“No. He had help. Sam’s carrying dark secrets, Adam. He’ll never tell. He took an oath as a Klansman, and he has this really warped, romantic notion of a sacred vow he can never violate. His father was a Klansman too, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. Don’t remind me.”

“Sorry. Anyway, it’s too late in the game to fish around for new evidence. If he in fact had an accomplice, he should’ve talked long ago. Maybe he should’ve talked to the FBI. Maybe he should’ve cut a deal with the district attorney. I don’t know, but when you’re indicted on two counts of capital murder and facing death, you start talking. You talk, Adam. You save your ass and let your buddy worry about his.”

“And if there was no accomplice?”

“There was.” Goodman took his pen and wrote a name on a piece of paper. He slid it across the table to Adam, who looked at it and said, “Wyn Lettner. The name is familiar.”

“Lettner was the FBI agent in charge of the Kramer case. He’s now retired and living on a trout river in the Ozarks. He loves to tell war stories about the Klan and the civil rights days in Mississippi.”

“And he’ll talk to me?”

“Oh sure. He’s a big beer drinker, and he gets about half loaded and tells these incredible stories. He won’t
divulge anything confidential, but he knows more about the Kramer bombing than anyone. I’ve always suspected he knows more than he’s told.”

Adam folded the paper and placed it in his pocket. He glanced at his watch. It was almost 6 p.m. “I need to run. I have to pack and all.”

“I’ll ship the file down tomorrow. You need to call me as soon as you talk to Sam.”

“I will. Can I say something?”

“Sure.”

“On behalf of my family, such as it is—my mother who refuses to discuss Sam; my sister who only whispers his name; my aunt in Memphis who has disowned the name Cayhall—and on behalf of my late father, I would like to say thanks to you and to this firm for what you’ve done. I admire you greatly.”

“You’re welcome. And I admire you. Now get your ass down to Mississippi.”

T
HE APARTMENT WAS A ONE-BEDROOM loft somewhere above the third floor of a turn-of-the-century warehouse just off the Loop, in a section of downtown known for crime but said to be safe until dark. The warehouse had been purchased in the mid-eighties by an S&L swinger who spent a bundle sanitizing and modernizing. He chopped it into sixty units, hired a slick realtor, and marketed it as yuppie starter condos. He made money as the place filled overnight with eager young bankers and brokers.

Adam hated the place. He had three weeks left on a six-month lease, but there was no place to go. He would be forced to renew for another six months because Kravitz & Bane expected eighteen hours a day, and there’d been no time to search for another apartment.

Nor had there been much time to purchase furniture, evidently. A fine leather sofa without arms of any kind sat alone on the wooden floor and faced an ancient brick wall. Two bean bags—yellow and blue—were nearby in the unlikely event a crowd materialized. To the left was a tiny kitchen area with a snack bar and three wicker stools, and to the right of the sofa was the bedroom with the unmade bed and clothes on the floor. Seven hundred square feet, for thirteen hundred bucks a month. Adam’s salary, as a blue chip prospect nine months earlier, had begun at sixty thousand a year, and was now at sixty-two. From his gross pay of slightly over five thousand a month, fifteen hundred
was withheld for state and federal income taxes. Another six hundred never reached his fingers but went instead into a Kravitz & Bane retirement fund guaranteed to relieve the pressure at age fifty-five, if they didn’t kill him first. After rent, utilities, four hundred a month for a leased Saab, and incidentals such as frozen food and some nice clothes, Adam found himself with about seven hundred dollars to play with. Some of this remainder was spent on women, but the ones he knew were also fresh from college with new jobs and new credit cards and generally insistent on paying their own way. This was fine with Adam. Thanks to his father’s faith in life insurance, he had no student loans. Even though there were things he wanted to buy, he doggedly plowed five hundred a month into mutual funds. With no immediate prospect of a wife and family, his goal was to work hard, save hard, and retire at forty.

Against the brick wall was an aluminum table with a television on it. Adam sat on the sofa, nude except for boxer shorts, holding the remote control. But for the colorless radiation from the screen, the loft was dark. It was after midnight. The video was one he’d pieced together over the years—The Adventures of a Klan Bomber, he called it. It started with a brief news report filed by a local crew in Jackson, Mississippi, on March 3, 1967, the morning after a synagogue was leveled by a bomb blast. It was the fourth known attack against Jewish targets in the past two months, the reporter said as a backhoe roared behind her with a bucket full of debris. The FBI had few clues, she said, and even fewer words for the press. The Klan’s campaign of terror continues, she declared gravely, and signed off.

The Kramer bombing was next, and the story started with sirens screaming and police pushing people away from the scene. A local reporter and his cameraman were on the spot quickly enough to capture the initial
bedlam. People were seen running to the remains of Marvin’s office. A heavy cloud of gray dust hung above the small oak trees on the front lawn. The trees were battered and leafless, but standing. The cloud was still and showed no signs of dissipating. Off camera, voices yelled about a fire, and the camera rocked along and stopped in front of the building next door where thick smoke poured from a damaged wall. The reporter, breathless and panting into the microphone, jabbered incoherently about the entire shocking scene. He pointed over here, then over there as the camera jerked in belated response. The police pushed him away, but he was too excited to care. Glorious pandemonium had erupted in the sleepy town of Greenville, and this was his grand moment.

Thirty minutes later, from a different angle, his voice was somewhat calmer as he described the frantic removal of Marvin Kramer from the rubble. The police extended their barricades and inched the crowd backward as the fire and rescue people lifted his body and worked the stretcher through the wreckage. The camera followed the ambulance as it sped away. Then, an hour later and from still another angle, the reporter was quite composed and somber as the two stretchers with the covered little bodies were delicately handled by the firemen.

The video cut from the footage of the bombing scene to the front of the jail, and for the first time there was a glimpse of Sam Cayhall. He was handcuffed and ushered quickly into a waiting car.

As always, Adam pushed a button and replayed the brief scene with the shot of Sam. It was 1967, twenty-three years ago. Sam was forty-six years old. His hair was dark and cut close, the fashion of the times. There was a small bandage under his left eye, away from the camera. He walked quickly, stride for stride with the
deputies because people were watching and taking pictures and yelling questions. He turned only once to their voices, and, as always, Adam froze the tape and stared for the millionth time into the face of his grandfather. The picture was black and white and not clear, but their eyes always met.

Nineteen sixty-seven. If Sam was forty-six, then Eddie was twenty-four, and Adam was almost three. He was known as Alan then. Alan Cayhall, soon to be a resident of a distant state where a judge would sign a decree giving him a new name. He had often watched this video and wondered where he was at the precise moment the Kramer boys were killed: 7:46 a.m., April 21, 1967. His family lived at that time in a small house in the town of Clanton, and he was probably still asleep not far from his mother’s watch. He was almost three, and the Kramer twins were only five.

The video continued with more quick shots of Sam being led to and from various cars, jails, and courthouses. He was always handcuffed, and he developed the habit of staring at the ground just a few feet in front of him. His face bore no expression. He never looked at the reporters, never acknowledged their inquiries, never said a word. He moved quickly, darting out of doors and into waiting cars.

The spectacle of his first two trials was amply recorded by daily television news reports. Over the years, Adam had been able to retrieve most of the footage, and had carefully edited the material. There was the loud and blustering face of Clovis Brazelton, Sam’s lawyer, holding forth for the press at every opportunity. But the clips of Brazelton had been edited quite heavily, with time. Adam despised the man. There were clear, sweeping shots of the courthouse lawns, with the crowds of silent onlookers, and the heavily armed state police, and the robed Klansmen with their coneheads
and sinister masks. There were brief glimpses of Sam, always in a hurry, always shielding himself from the cameras by ducking along behind a beefy deputy. After the second trial and the second hung jury, Marvin Kramer stopped his wheelchair on the sidewalk in front of the Wilson County Courthouse, and with tears in his eyes bitterly condemned Sam Cayhall and the Ku Klux Klan and the hidebound justice system in Mississippi. As the cameras rolled, a pitiful incident unfolded. Marvin suddenly spotted two Klansmen in white robes not far away, and began screaming at them. One of them yelled back, but his reply was lost in the heat of the moment. Adam had tried everything to retrieve the Klansman’s words from the air, but with no luck. The reply would be forever unintelligible. A couple of years earlier, while in law school at Michigan, Adam had found one of the local reporters who was standing there at the moment, holding a microphone not far from Marvin’s face. According to the reporter, the reply from across the lawn had something to do with their desire to blow off the rest of Marvin’s limbs. Something this crude and cruel appeared to be true because Marvin went berserk. He screamed obscenities at the Kluckers, who were easing away, and he spun the metal wheels of his chair, lunging in their direction. He was yelling and cursing and crying. His wife and a few friends tried to restrain him, but he broke free, his hands furiously working the wheels. He rolled about twenty feet, with his wife in chase, with the cameras recording it all, until the sidewalk ended and the grass began. The wheelchair flipped, and Marvin sprawled onto the lawn. The quilt around his amputated legs flung free as he rolled hard next to a tree. His wife and friends were on him immediately, and for a moment or two he disappeared into a small huddle on the ground. But he could still be heard. As the camera backed away
and shot quickly at the two Klansmen, one doubled over with laughter and one frozen in place, an odd wailing erupted from the small crowd on the ground. Marvin was moaning, but in the shrill, high-pitched howl of a wounded madman. It was a sick sound, and after a few miserable seconds of it the video cut to the next scene.