The Ring on His Kitchen Floor

Thirty years or a needle

A man killed in his own home during a burglary is capital murder in Texas. The district attorney told the Amarillo television station she would seek the death penalty. I heard it on the little television bolted to the wall of the dayroom, with a man from Hereford who had stolen a trailer sitting beside me eating a honey bun.

My lead court-appointed lawyer, Ray Dobbs, sixty-three and tired, came to see me on the fourth day and put it plainly.

“They’ll offer thirty years if you plead guilty to murder,” he said. “Take it and you could be seventy-four before you walk out. Go to trial and lose, and they will ask a jury for death.”

“I didn’t do it, Ray.”

“I believe you,” he said, and I could tell he wanted to. “But I’ve tried cases in this county for thirty-five years, and a jury out here is going to look at a gold ring and a new will and a man who can’t say where he was. I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you what it looks like.”

That night I lay on a steel bunk and did arithmetic. Thirty years. Kaylee would be forty-nine. Dana would be seventy-two. Harlan’s porch would be somebody’s parking lot.

Kaylee called on the fifth day. Her voice was so small I had to press the phone against my ear until it hurt. She did not ask if I did it. She asked if I was eating. I told her the food was terrible, and she laughed, and then she cried, and then the call timed out.