Incident at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (‘Angola’) June 12th,1982
Paul Fontaine is dying. Anyone can tell.
It’s not just the oxygen tank he drags behind him or his hissing nasal prongs attached to it by a thin clear tube, it’s his skin colour. His face is so grey he almost looks silver. A black growth, kind of spongy, has formed on his left nostril. His eyes are red rimmed and watery because the oxygen is up so high. If the nozzle attachment to the tank gets loose or falls off, which happens often, he knows it within seconds. He gets light headed. He can hardly curl his hand into a fist when that happens.
The other people in the prison waiting room avoid looking at him. Two men sitting together physically turn away and pretend to read the pamphlet on a stand. A young mother warns her daughter off when she slips off her knee to walks around the room. “Haley!” She says. “Don’t bother the man.” But she can’t look straight at him. Death is hard to look at.
Haley is not bothering Paul. Nothing is bothering him. He doesn’t even feel particularly strange wearing his Sheriff’s uniform in a prison waiting room though it might not be welcomed. Paul shouldn’t really be wearing that, he’s retired, but this is what he wants to wear when he dies and he’s going to die today. He’s here to meet his daughter’s killer and then he’s going to die.
There is no air con in the waiting room. It has to be eighty degrees in here and smells of sweat and cigarettes and Lysol. Galloping lung cancer and its brutal treatment have robbed him of most of his sense of smell so the smell must be strong.
They called Oliver B. De LeRoy the “Lafayette Strangler” though he only killed one girl there. Mostly he left them up and down Route 10, clustered around Grosse Tete. Maybe Lafayette sounded better. Sheila was found at the side of Route 10, near Atchafalaya, back in ’67.
She had brown hair and eyes as green as a can of Seven Up. She was found by the road side, thrown from his truck like a bag of garbage. She’d been raped and murdered and left in the high summer heat. Paul had to identify her. He felt as if a horse kicked his heart.
They say time is a great healer but Paul doesn’t know why.
Paul sits in the stifling room and remembers Sheila, ten years old, sitting in the passenger seat of his car, smiling. Sheila, tiny, on his knee in a booth at a diner. Sheila screaming with laughter on a tire swing over a brook. She had golden hair and little skinny legs like knots on a rope.
The cops didn’t care too much even though her daddy was a sheriff. Life went wrong for Sheila early and that was understood. ‘A truck stop girl’, they called her in the true crime magazines. ‘A hippy drug fiend’ they said on the news. She was only eighteen. Paul and his wife still had hopes, worried, but still thought she’d settle down eventually. She never got the chance.
He’s had to wait fifteen years for Oliver B. De LeRoy to make the time to meet him. Clear his diary. Find a space on his dance card. For eleven of those years Paul’s been writing and asking to come here, to the David County Correctional Facility. For the first eight years De LeRoy didn’t even answer. He was busy getting famous.
When they arrested him he had a child in the cab of his truck. Lee‐Anne Offenbache was only twelve, the blonde daughter of prominent people, missing for a week. It was her abduction and survival story that dominated the news. A true life movie was made about her.
The trial was a circus. They brought De LeRoy out through the front door of the court each day when they could just as easily gone out the back. Every day he got to shout about justice and truth to the TV news men, barking like a dog in his thin weasel-voice. He got married in prison, tried to strangle his crazy-eyed bride on conjugal visit, got divorced, had a baby. Lee-Anne Offenbache wrote a best selling book ‐ ‘I Am His Prisoner’. She was in all the magazines. The news kept on coming and the news was never about Sheila.
“What’s that say, Mister?” The little girl is pointing at a yellow triangle with a thick black border on Paul’s oxygen tank.
Paul runs his finger under the words: “ ‘Oxy-gen’.”
“Stop bothering that man,” calls her mother nervously.
“What’s that for?”
“Help me breathe.”
“You can’t do that yourself?”
“Not any more.”
“How come?”
“I got sick, honey. I’m real old.”
Haley listens unaware that her momma is coming for her, hand high, coming down in a slap. She knows soon enough.
“Now sit down over here and shut up.” She drags the girl backwards across the room and lifts her by her upper arm, dropping her into the seat. Then she smiles indulgently back at Paul who nods, respectfully acknowledging her strict parenting. She sits down next to Haley who’s crying quietly. Paul thinks this has happened to Haley quite often.
They won’t be going into the same room as Paul. Oliver B. De LeRoy is only allowed to visit one‐on‐one. They’ll be alone because he’s on Death Row but the regime is less rigorous because he’s on appeal. He’s always on appeal.
Paul feels in his shirt pocket for the soft pack of Lucky Strikes, taps one out on his knee and takes out his Zippo, opens it with a flick of his thumb and lights up.
The smoke grates down to his lungs like gravel being poured down a shoot. It curls heavily around the airs sacks that are still doing business and enters his blood stream, making everything a little better, a little lighter.
“Sheriff Paul Landy?” A prison guard stands by the door. His blue button down shirt is already dark with sweat.
Paul raises a hand to let him know he’s here, he’s coming, it just might take a while. He tries to get up from the seat but it’s too low for a tall man and his knee buckles. He falls back into the chair, falls down like a child. Humiliated, he tries again, putting one hand on top of the other on his cane, using the muscles of his once‐strong arms to lever himself up. He’s nearly there, just needs to lock his knees and he’s good. Lifting his head for that final effort, he sees them all watching him, afraid for him. Even Haley cringes.
He feels the vinegar sting of pity, averts his eyes and comforts himself with the thought that it won’t be like this for too much longer.
He shuffles to the door, the wheel on his tank giving out its customary squeal.
“I’m going to ask you to put your cigarette out, Sir.” Says the guard, “Just until we get inside. I’m going to have to search you for contraband.”
Paul drops the cigarette to the floor and uses the tip of his cane to crush the red tip.
When the door is shut and locked behind them the guard nods at Paul’s Sheriff’s badge and says, “I’m sorry about that, now, it’s just that we’ve had cigarettes used against us. I can see you’re not that kind of a gentleman but rules is-”
“-Rules?” says Paul.
“Yes, sir.”
They give each other a half smile.
The guard searches him respectfully, feels in his socks for bottles of Rye, has him turn out his pockets for rifles or pistols, checks the oxygen tank to make sure there’s no knives tapes to the bottom. Then he send him through a heavy locked door into the visiting room.
It’s a long, thin hall. Tables, must be fifty of them, arranged to maximize the floor space. They’re round, bolted to the floor and have seats coming out of the central stand, hovering, four to a table. Oliver B. De LeRoy is the only person in there. He’s sitting at the far end of the room, watching him.
He’s smaller than Paul imagined. Dark haired, wiry, alert. Sitting at the table with his hands crossed in front of him and a stiff smile on his weasel-face.
Paul struggles towards him. The guard wants to pull the oxygen tank for him but Paul shakes his head and says he’ll do it himself, officer, you stay on the door where you should be. They lock eyes and nod. They both understand how to keep order, both know where the security weak points are.
“Stay down there, son, in case this man makes a run for it.”
“Yes, sir, I will,” says the guard, so respectful it sounds almost mocking.
It takes what feels like a month for Paul to make it the length of the room, shuffling one foot then bringing the other one up to meet it. The wheel on the tank lets out its shrill squeal. He glances up once or twice to find Oliver B. De LeRoy watching him, open mouthed and unmoving.
During the court case Oliver B. De LeRoy laughed out loud when Anne Offenbache gave her testimony. He ate peppermints as the jury brought in their guilty verdicts. He wasn’t tried for Sheila’s murder. The DA felt they ‘had enough on him’.
Paul gets up to the table and slumps onto a seat. De LeRoy smirks at him, upright and spritely, glorying in his health. God is not fair. This Paul knows.
De LeRoy licks his lips. “Don’t look too good, ol’ man.”
“Dyin’,” Paul says softly to the man who raped and killed his only child.
“You want to see me about your daughter?” His voice is just as squeaky as Paul remembers and just as grating.
“Sheila.”
“That her name?”
He knows it is. They’ve already hashed this out in their letters. Oliver B. said over and over that he barely remembers her, has nothing to add, doesn’t want to quare his appeal by ‘saying the wrong thing’. But he agreed to meet Paul because Paul will give him cigarettes. They’ve discussed a mutual love of Lucky Strikes in their letters. The Lafayette Strangler has been reduced to this.
“I don’t remember much about much,” says De LeRoy, looking at the pack of cigarettes in Paul’s shirt pocket, “I don’t know what I can do for you.”
Paul takes out the packet. He means to tap one out for himself and one for De LeRoy but his hand is trembling and he jerks the upended packet too hard. Cigarettes scatter over the table top and De LeRoy snatches them up greedily, setting them out in his own shirt pocket as if he was arranging pens, patting them and giggling. He knows it was a mistake, “You weren’t lying about dyin’, was you.”
“No, I was not,” says Paul.
De LeRoy clamps one between his teeth and grins, nodding a prompt to Paul to light it. Prisoners are not permitted to bring a lighter in the visiting room. These are dangerous men.
Paul takes a cigarette from the packet and puts it between his own lips. He feels in his pocket for the lighter.
“What you dyin’ of?”
“Lung cancer,” says Paul, feeling the familiar weight of the Zippo in his hand.
“Didn’t think you’se suppose to smoke if you’re on oxygen.”
“Not if you want to live.”
“You don’t want to live?”
“No. Do you?”
“Sure. I can get another ten, fifteen years in here, if I appeal long enough. Got a great lawyer, high profile case. Hell, I’m a celebrity now.”
Paul flicks the Zippo open and lights it. He holds the flame out to the tip of De LeRoy’s cigarette who takes a draw and exhales luxuriously.
“I don’t think I remember your daughter.”
“She had green eyes.”
“Well,” De LeRoy looks away, remembering, “Yes. Yes, she did. If this was her: she was drunk as a skunk, falling around, just some truck stop whore. ‘Magine that! I do remember her. Never figured she’d have a Sheriff for a Daddy.”
They smoke in silence. De LeRoy is smiling. He’s enjoying this. “What you want to ask me, anyway, dead man?”
“Nothing,” says Paul.
“You been writing to me for fifteen years, begging to meet and you don’t want to ask anything?”
“Nope.”
Oliver B. tilts his head. “What in the hell we doing here, then?”
Paul remembers Sheila laughing on the tire swing. “De LeRoy, do you know why people don’t smoke cigarettes when they’re on oxygen?”
Oliver shrugs a careless shoulder, “Want to get better?”
“No,” says Paul carefully, “We can’t get too much sicker. The damage is already done. A few cigarettes won’t make one blind bit of difference.”
“Well, why then?”
“You don’t know chemistry?”
Oliver B. De LeRoy draws on his smoke, “Do I look as if I know chemistry?”
“Hmm. Oxygen is highly flammable. D’you know what ‘flammable’ means?”
De LeRoy nods.
“But this here,” Paul put his hand on the tank, “this is compressed oxygen. D’you know what that means?”
“Does it mean it’s not flammable?”
“No. No, son, it means it’s explosive and flammable.” Paul lifts his Zippo, thumbs open the lid and flicks it alight. “So, if I put this flame near this tank and pull this nozzle out like so…”
Oliver B. De LeRoy opens his mouth to scream for the guard but he doesn’t make it.