“Are you considering that her letters to him might have been intercepted?”
“There is no question about that. When I talked to Jennifer Deighton on the telephone, she claimed that she had continued to write to Ronnie. She also said that she had received no letters from him over the past several months, and I’m very suspicious that this is because his letters were intercepted as well.”
“Why did you wait to contact her until after the execution?” I puzzled.
“I did not know about her before then. Ronnie said nothing about her to me until our last conversation, which was, perhaps, the strangest conversation I’ve ever had with any inmate I’ve represented.”
Grueman toyed with his sandwich and then pushed it away from him. He reached for his pipe. “I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, Dr. Scarpetta, but Ronnie quit on me.”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“The last time I talked with Ronnie was one week before he was to be transported from Mecklenburg to Richmond. At that time, he stated that he knew he was going to be executed and that nothing I did was going to make a difference. He said that what was going to happen to him had been set into motion since the beginning and he had accepted the inevitability of his death. He said that he was looking foward to dying and preferred that I cease pursuing federal habeas corpus relief. Then he requested that I not call him or come see him again.”
“But he didn’t fire you.”
Grueman shot flame into the bowl of his briar pipe and sucked on the stem. “No, he did not. He simply refused to see me or talk to me on the phone.”
“It would seem that this alone would have warranted a stay of execution pending a competency determination,” I said.
“I tried that. I tried citing everything from Hays versus Murphy to the Lord’s Prayer. The court rendered the brilliant decision that Ronnie had not asked to be executed. He’d simply stated that he looked forward to death, and the petition was denied.”
“If you had no contact with Waddell in the several weeks before his execution, then how did you learn of Jennifer Deighton?”
“During my last conversation with Ronnie he made three last requests of me. The first was that I see to it that a meditation he had written was published in the newspaper days before his death. He gave this to me and I worked it out with the Richmond Times-Dispatch.”
“I read it,” I said.
“His second request – and I quote – was ‘Don’t let nothing happen to my friend.’
And I asked him what friend he referred to, and he said, and again I quote, ‘If you’re a good man, look out for her. She never hurt no one.’
He gave me her name and asked me not to contact her until after his death. Then I was to call and tell her how much she had meant to him. Well, of course I did not abide by that wish to the letter. I tried to contact her immediately because I knew I was losing Ronnie and I felt that something was terribly wrong. My hope was that this friend might be able to help. If they had corresponded with each other, for example, then maybe she could enlighten me.”
“And did you reach her?”
I asked, recalling Marino’s telling me that Jennifer Deighton had been in Florida for two weeks around Thanksgiving.
“No one ever answered the phone,” Grueman replied. “I tried on and off for several weeks, and then, to be frank, because of timing and health fortuities relating to the pace of litigation, the holidays, and a god-awful ambush of gout, my attention was diverted. I did not think to call Jennifer Deighton again until Ronnie was dead and I needed to contact her and convey, per Ronnie’s request, that she had meant a lot to him, et cetera.”
“When you had attempted to reach her earlier,” I said, “did you leave messages on her answering machine?”
“It wasn’t turned on. Which makes sense, in retrospect. She didn’t need to return from vacation to face five hundred messages from people who can’t make a decision until their horoscopes have been read. And if she left a message on her machine saying that she was out of town for two weeks, that would have been a perfect invitation for burglars.”