Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [422]
Then he taped her carton. "I want you to swear that this will all go to her," said Gary, and Vern said, "You know I'll do what you want."
Chapter 34
OVER THE MOUNTAINOUS ABODE
Earl, Bill Barrett, Mike Deamer, and the others had hardly gotten back to the office when Bob Hansen phoned. Judge Lewis, he said, had agreed to hear an appeal in the next few hours, but stipulated that that serious a decision would have to be made by a three-man Court in Denver. Therefore, Hansen was letting the boys know that all legal documents had to be finished in time for departure from Salt Lake by 4 A.M. Given the speed of a small plane, it would be a two-hour flight over the mountains, and they would get in before dawn at 6 a.m. Not much time to draft a paper of quality to submit to the Tenth Circuit Court.
All Earl could feel was fatigue. They would have to do it right there in the middle of the night, no secretaries present. Ironically, that was the worst part. They had already researched the law. By divvying up the assignments, they could certainly write the papers in the time they had. Earl, for example, could save three hours on his Writ of Mandamus because he had already drafted one back when Judge Ritter granted the Tribune those exclusive interviews with Gilmore in November. Now he only had to plug in the facts of the current case to procedural steps already learned. It was the simple absence of secretaries, however, that could hold you up. Schwendiman and Dorius began to type, awfully slow going. Earl had to suffer at the idea of turning in a document so filled with typographical errors to a Court as high as the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.
While he had been told to just get any kind of paper done, still it was hellish to hand over such a sloppy piece of typewriting. He was relieved when the Salt Lake Sheriff's dispatcher sent over two girls to help.
Other problems came up. A phone call from Gary Gilmore. Of course, they didn't take it. Everybody in the office had the same reaction: Don't talk to him. All they needed was for the State to confer with the condemned man. Just the same, Earl was impressed. He had still been expecting Gilmore to say at the last second, "I want to appeal." Having conned society one way, he would turn them around at the end. But now in the bottom of the night, Earl began to believe that maybe Gilmore really wanted his sentence carried out.
A new anxiety began to weigh on the Assistant Attorney Generals. Bob Hansen planned to get them in to Denver by 6 A.M., but the execution was scheduled for today's time of sunrise, 7:49. In the hour and fifty minutes after landing, how could they drive to Court, conduct the case, and have the Judges come back with a decision? They had a law clerk named Gordon Richards spending the night out at the prison as a standin for Earl, and Dorius called him now. Richards said that unless Sam Smith got word by 7:15, he could not, repeat, definitely could not, bring the execution off by 7:49. Also, Gordon would need a code message like "Mickey from West Virginia," to make certain any phone calls he received from Denver were legitimate. Dorius knew that Howard Phillips, the Clerk of the Tenth Circuit, lived on Eudora Street in a suburb called Park Hill, so he gave Richards: "Eudora from Park Hill."
Now, Dorius began to research whether it was imperative that Judge Bullock's order be in fact carried out at 7:49. He looked up the appropriate statutes in the Utah code. Sure enough, the two relevant ones were in conflict. Section 77-36-6 said the Court would declare a day on which the execution was to take place. Another, 77-36-15, said the Warden was to execute the judgment at the