Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [189]
I replied that I believed I could. Gary stood up and started to walk around the room.
“They’d never let me free, man, and I’ve spent too much time in jail. I don’t have anything left to me.” He came face to face. “I killed two men. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail. If some fucker gets me set free, then I’m going to go get a gun and kill a few of those damn lawyers who keep interfering. Then I’ll say to you, ‘See what your meddling accomplished? Are you proud?’”
“Time’s up,” announced a voice from the guard’s nest.
Gary tried to flash a relaxed-looking smile. “Come back and talk to me some more about this tomorrow,” he said. As I was passing through the door, he called: “Where were you ten years ago when I needed you?” All the way back to Salt Lake those final words reverberated in my head. I felt confused and broken. An hour earlier, I thought that the only right decision was to argue for a stay, to choose life over death. But I couldn’t make that choice for Gary. I wanted to disappear, to fold up into a void where choices and conscience didn’t exist. Where I could forget the look in Gary’s eyes.
THAT NIGHT I HAD DINNER WITH MOYERS AGAIN. I told him about my conversation with Gary. After listening, Moyers asked me if I thought there was any chance he might be able to visit and speak with Gary. I told him that Schiller had an exclusive deal with my brother, and that no other journalists could talk to him. Moyers said he was willing to assure me and Gary and Schiller that he would not use the conversation for journalistic purposes. He did not want to tape it or film it, and unless he had the appropriate consent of those involved, he would not disclose the contents of the conversation in his report. He just thought that, since both he and Gary were men who had been born in Texas, they might have some common ground for talking. He also thought he might have a philosophical view or two to offer about Gary’s situation that my brother might find interesting, maybe even persuasive. I trusted Moyers and told him I would see what could be done.
I went on a long walk around the cold, snow-covered streets of Salt Lake that night. I was walking over by the Mormon Temple when I ran into Frank. At first he didn’t see me. He was going along with his hands jammed into his pockets, staring at the ground. I called his name.
I told him I’d been to see Gary, and I told him what we had discussed. I also said that Frank could go back and visit with Gary some more himself, either with or without me. Apparently the prison’s stipulation of a one-time visit had been forgotten.
“No,” said Frank, “I can’t do that. I can’t go see him again.” And then, as the tears began to fall from his eyes, my brother turned and walked off into the cold night.
Fifteen years later, Frank and I visited Salt Lake together, to try to reestablish some family contacts and to make sense of some of what had happened all those years before. One afternoon, Frank took me over to Liberty Park. It was here, when we were all children and were living with my parents in the haunted house in Salt Lake, that Frank and Gary used to come nearly every afternoon to play. They would run around, play ball, pull pranks on the stodgy Mormons. Frank thought it was maybe the happiest hours the two of them ever spent together. All this was just before Gary began stealing things and hiding them in the garage—before he changed forever into a bad boy.
As we sat there in the park that day, Frank explained to me why he had decided, those years before, not to visit Gary anymore at Draper. After seeing him that one time, Frank said, he came to this park and sat where we were now sitting, and he gave some long thought to what had happened, and what would yet happen.
“I hated what Gary had done,” Frank said to me. “What he did was hideous. But I also hate what had been done to him.
“Do you think if Gary hadn’t been in prison for twenty-two years, he would have shot that one man in the back of the head in front of his pregnant wife and little