John Grisham
I’ll admit, I heart old-school John Grisham. The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client. My stack of ten paperbacks stands as a (sad and wobbly) monument to my sadly un-ironic love of stories featuring small-town lawyers, poor defendants, bad guys in black hats or black suits, all soaked in bourbon and sweet tea and set out to dry in the sun and dirt of the rural south. (It also testifies to how much I love used bookstores).
Once his lawyers got richer and started turning into corporate douchebags in fancy cars and private jets, I aggressively lost interest. The Confession reads like vintage Grisham. It’s like The Chamber, but from the opposite side of the coin. I read it straight through in three days, nose-in-book, doing things with one hand and trying not to bump into the walls, the way I read when I was a kid. It made me want to watch The Client, and Dead Man Walking, and maybe also Thelma and Louise because I just love Susan Sarandon that much.
The plot is so sadly familiar. A cheerleader disappears and, after a couple of weeks, the police have no idea what happened to her. They arrest Donte Drumm, an 18-year-old football player. Legally an adult, he’s interrogated for hours without his parents, without a lawyer, without any recordings of the interrogation. No physical evidence, no body, an anonymous tip to the cops, a confession full of factual inaccuracies and leading questions. Any one of those things should add up to reasonable doubt…did I mention that he’s convicted of murder and they can’t prove that anyone’s dead?...but none of those things make a difference.
I was about a third of the way through, on August 18th (trust me, the date’s significant), and realizing that Donte was going to be killed for something he didn’t do. It made me feel horrible, because it reminded me of Damien from the West Memphis Three. I ran the Arizona branch of the support group for years, spent a lot of hours tabling out on Roosevelt on First Fridays, telling anyone who would stand still long enough to listen about three boys in jail because they wore black clothes and listened to heavy metal. I saw Wil Wheaton at a benefit years ago, and was so busy going ohmygodit’sWesleyCrusher!!! in my head that I was too shy to go up and say hi to him. I hadn’t checked in with the effort for years, mostly because I was terrified that I’d find out that they’d set a date for execution or worse. It was also the beginning of a bad time in my life, and a lot of my memories are colored with memories of a bad ex-boyfriend.
In a weird moment of synergy from the universe, the next day the news broke that they were being released. It was the happiest I’ve felt in a long time, and it felt wonderful to be so purely happy for someone else. And it happened without the ex-boyfriend from hell. It felt like, because I had the end of the experience by myself, he was cleansed from the entire experience. Like someone took a giant bunch of sage and smudged him the fuck out of my memories. I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair, except with voodoo incense that you use to chase spirits from your home. Suddenly, like everything was shiny and new, and a part of my old life was mine again.
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