The Icebox Revisited

Frank approached. She swung. The needle in her left hand went through his chest and punctured his right aorta. He fell, pulled off his shirt and passed out. She called an ambulance and returned to beg that he please not die. The ambulance arrived and wheeled him out. Massive internal bleeding. Neighbors came to see what had happened. "Well," Doris told them.

Long story short: He lived, forgave her unconditionally, no charges were brought, and she "felt so damn guilty" that she stayed with him another five years. When she finally left, the anger and sadness became more just flat-out fear. She was scared. Fifty years old and never had lived completely on her own. She'd spend the morning looking forward to lunch, which was after all basically the early afternoon, which was itself very close to the early evening, which would be time for the first glass of wine. Then she'd drink until she passed out. Ten years it went on.

Finally that very real crash. In the end, it was only a gate closing. But somehow that crash became the thing that told her it's time. Why that particular gate or that particular morning or that particular moment, no one could really say. She went to a noon AA meeting, and here she is now, 16 years later. The grief still comes, still seems as raw as when it first happened, but she copes differently. Her social life revolves around the church. Unitarian, still. She tried some other things. Zen meditation. Detective stories. Sitting in her apartment among her books and Shakespearean plays and classical LPs, sipping tea, there's a quiet calmness about her. Yet one cannot entirely shake the feeling that true serenity will visit her again only once.

---

A recent February morning. Robert LeRoy Miller sits in the living room of his mother's house. It's before noon. Robert, soft-spoken and friendly, looks tired. Tall and gaunt and a little bit gray. He still lives here. Roy, too. They have kids, families, ex-wives, but they always end up back at home. Willie Mae cooks fried chicken in the kitchen.

Everybody from Green Pond is dead, dying, or on crack. The neighborhood itself is gone. A few houses off Dallas and Clay still stand, awaiting encroachment from nearby urban-renewal condo projects. But no one from the old neighborhood lives there anymore. Smith died 11 months after his welcome-home party in 1980. Twenty years on death row, then he gets out, falls out of a tree doing some yard work and breaks his neck. Sadler has been in and out of jail for selling crack. Archer lives in a subsidized apartment in far east Houston. He can't communicate clearly and invariably tells visitors to call his mother, who died last year. Roy does Sheetrock, hasn't seen a hint of trouble since he got out. Robert works every now and then. Drywall, still. Most days he's around the neighborhood, looking for a game of dominoes, talking to the guys, having a drink. A few years ago he was shooting dice and drinking and got picked up for crack.

The Icebox Murder, for a time considered Houston's most infamous race crime, has been forgotten, erased from public consciousness. Briscoe, semi-retired after recent stints as a Fort Bend County prosecutor and assistant state attorney general, still considers it an open-and-shut case--they confessed; they had bruises on their penises. "No wiggle room." So do the police officers, those still alive. Arresting officer A.C. Hopper, now retired from the FBI, denies the abuse allegations with the same vehemence he did 45 years ago.

"I wouldn't even honor the thing," he says. "That's ridiculous. All the officers from that far back are dead; I'm one of the only ones left, and my memory is about as long as yesterday." Hopper says some officers in some departments "might pull that, but I was not one of them. Officers get blamed for [brutality] all the time, but it's just a bunch of crap."

As for Robert and Roy and Ira Lee, they haven't stopped protesting their innocence since the ink dried on those confessions.

"The Houston Police Department cleaned its books on some little black kids," Robert says. "That's all it was. Tuesday I'll be 57. That was 44 years ago. I could admit it now, if I did it. But I'll go to my grave telling the truth: I didn't."

You like to think the truth will be someone's version of simple. Racist cops pin murders on troubled black kids. Angry black communities blame police for their own crimes. Every prisoner professes innocence; every prosecutor is sure he has the right man.

And maybe it was. Simple. But somewhere between the dueling fictions of history sit Doris B. Field and Robert LeRoy Miller, alone, never quite able to imagine a past before the sweeping sense of loss, and never quite able to fashion a present that provides comfort from memory.