I did not sleep. I sat on the porch at three in the morning with the Polaroid in my lap and the dog at my feet, and I looked across the street at the place where the gray van had been parked for six months. I turned the photograph over. The words on the back did not end in a threat. The line had been cut off by the edge of the paper, but I could read it now in the porch light: You took my life. I am dying. Hear me. Under it was a telephone number.
I called the number at seven. A young woman answered, with a voice that shook. She said her name was Brenda Collier, that the man in the video was her father, and that she was sorry. “I wanted to tell you in the lot, Mr. Mendoza, but I lost my nerve.” She said they would meet me anywhere I chose, in public, with deputies if I liked. I chose the one place in Amarillo where I could be sure I would not run away: the grave of my wife.
They were waiting at the gate of Llano Cemetery. Curtis Collier sat in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank at his feet, a hollowed out old man with a gray beard and a hospital bracelet still on his wrist. He was not the man of my nightmares. He was sixty six and looked eighty. Brenda pushed him up the path to the stone of Maria, and there he stopped, and I saw the fresh dirt in the Polaroid for what it was: a bed of bluebonnets, newly planted, along the base of her grave.
A witness who is certain is not always right, and the courage to say so is worth more than the certainty.
“Your wife wrote to me,” Curtis said. His voice was thin and rough. “For twenty six years. She taught Sunday school at the prison on Wednesdays, and when I told her what I told no one, she did not believe me and she did not disbelieve me. She wrote. Every month.” He lifted a trembling hand toward the stone. “Mr. Mendoza, I did not shoot that boy. I robbed that store. I will say that until I die. But my younger brother Dwayne fired the gun, and I took the blame.”
I stood very still. I had been the manager that night. I had seen a man in a ski mask with a gun, and later a man in a gray jacket running to a car, and in a Lubbock courtroom I had looked at Curtis Collier and said, with my hand on a Bible, that he was the one. I had believed it for thirty years. “Why would you take the blame?” I said. “Dwayne had three children. I had none.” He smiled, a sad crooked smile. “I thought I would be out in ten.”
Brenda opened a folder on the lap of her father. She had the letter Dwayne wrote in a hospice in 2002, notarized, saying he fired the shot and that his brother never knew he would. She found it among the things of her uncle after the funeral. She had carried it for twenty four years, afraid that if she showed it, her father, who had already served so long, would be punished for the robbery all over again. Then the doctors said six months.
The last letter of Maria lay in the folder too. She had written it in the week before she died, in the soft blue ink she used for birthday cards. Curtis, she wrote, when you are free, find my husband. Ray is a stubborn man but he is a just one. Ask him to look again. Tell him that I asked. I read it standing in the wind, in a cemetery in Amarillo, and I had to put my hand on her stone to keep from falling.
I called a lawyer that afternoon. Within a month, the Texas Innocence Project had taken the case and the district attorney of Potter County, a careful woman who read every word, had agreed to review it. I testified at the hearing in July. I said, under oath, that I had been mistaken, that the thing I said in 1995 with such certainty was a thing I had wished to be true, and that I was sorry. Curtis, in his wheelchair, did not look at me. He looked at his daughter.
The judge vacated the conviction for the shooting and reduced the robbery sentence to time served. Curtis Collier left the courthouse a free man in the afternoon sun, wearing a borrowed jacket, and for the first time in my life I saw a human being weep because the sun was warm. He lived four more months. I drove to the apartment of Brenda every Thursday and sat by his bed, and he told me about prison chess and the books he had read, and I told him about my wife.
He died in November, with Brenda holding one hand and me the other. At his funeral the little chapel was full of the men from the prison ministry, and Brenda asked me to speak. I said only that I had been a good witness to the wrong thing, and that a woman who wrote letters had known better than all of us. There are bluebonnets on the grave of Maria in the spring now, and beside them, a small stone with the name of a man I wronged.
