Penzler, Otto Ed v2

  God, this was great. It really brought it all back.

  “Here’s the thing,” he wrote. “The more we did it, the better it got. You’d think I would have grown tired of her, but I didn’t. I wanted to keep on having her over and over again forever, but at the same time I felt this urgent need to finish it, because I knew that would be the best part.

  “And I wasn’t disappointed, Paul, because the most pleasure your sister ever gave anybody was right at the very end. I was on top of her, buried in her to the hilt, and I had my hands wrapped around her neck. And the ultimate pleasure came with me squeezing and looking into her eyes and squeezing harder and harder and going on looking into those eyes all the while and watching the life go right out of them.”

  He was too excited now. He had to stop and relieve himself. Afterward he read the letter and got excited all over again. A great letter, better than anything he could get any of his bitches to write to him, but he couldn’t send it, not in a million years.

  Not that it wouldn’t be a pleasure to rub the brother’s nose in it. Without the bastard’s testimony, he might have stood a good chance to beat the death sentence. With it, he was sunk.

  Still, you never knew. Appeals would take a long time. Maybe he could do himself a little good here.

  He rolled a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter. “Dear Mr. Dandridge,” he wrote. “I’m well aware that the last thing on earth you want to read is a letter from me. I know that in your place I would feel no different myself. But I cannot seem to stop myself from reaching out to you. Soon I’ll be strapped down onto a gurney and given a lethal injection. That frightens me horribly, but I’d gladly die a thousand times over if only it would bring your sister back to life. I may not remember killing her, but I know I must have done it, and I would give anything to undo it. With all my heart, I wish she were alive today.”

  Well, that last part was true, he thought. He wished to God she were alive, and right there in that cell with him, so that he could do her all over again, start to finish.

  He went on and finished the letter, making it nothing but an apology, accepting responsibility, expressing remorse. It wasn’t a letter that sought anything, not even forgiveness, and it struck him as a good opening shot. Probably nothing would ever come of it, but you never knew.

  After he’d sent it off, he took out the first letter he’d written and read it through, relishing the feelings that coursed through him and strengthened him. He’d keep this, maybe even add to it from time to time. It was really great the way it brought it all back.

  Paul destroyed the first letter.

  He opened it, unaware of its source, and was a sentence or two into it before he realised what he was reading. It was, incredibly, a letter from the man who had killed his sister.

  He felt a chill. He wanted to stop reading but he couldn’t stop reading. He forced himself to stay with it all the way to the end.

  The nerve of the man. The unadulterated gall.

  Expressing remorse. Saying how sorry he was. Not asking for anything, not trying to justify himself, not attempting to disavow responsibility.

  But there had been no remorse in the blue eyes, and Paul didn’t believe there was a particle of genuine remorse in the letter either. And what difference did it make if there was?

  Karen was dead. Remorse wouldn’t bring her back.

  His lawyer had told him they had nothing to worry about, they were sure to get a stay of execution. The appeal process, always drawn out in capital cases, was in its early days. They’d get the stay in plenty of time, and the clock would start ticking all over again.

  And it wasn’t as though it got to the point where they were asking him what he wanted for a last meal. That happened sometimes; there was a guy three cells down who’d had his last meal twice already, but it didn’t get that close for Billy Croydon. Two and a half weeks to go and the stay came through.

  That was a relief, but at the same time he almost wished it had run out a little closer to the wire. Not for his benefit, but just to keep a couple of his correspondents on the edges of their chairs.

  Two of them, actually. One was a fat girl who lived at home with her mother in Burns, Oregon, the other a sharp-jawed old maid employed as a corporate librarian in Philadelphia. Both had displayed a remarkable willingness to pose as he specified for their Polaroid cameras, doing interesting things and showing themselves in interesting ways. And, as the countdown had continued toward his date with death, both had proclaimed their willingness to join him in heaven.

  No joy in that. In order for them to follow him to the grave, he’d have to be in it himself, wouldn’t he? They could cop out and he’d never even know it.

  Still, there was great power in knowing they’d even made the promise. And maybe there was something here he could work with.

  He went to the typewriter. “My darling,” he wrote. “The only thing that makes these last days bearable is the love we have for each other. Your pictures and letters sustain me, and the knowledge that we will be together in the next world draws much of the fear out of the abyss that yawns before me.

  “Soon they will strap me down and fill my veins with poison, and I will awaken in the void. If only I could make that final journey knowing you would be waiting there for me! My angel, do you have the courage to make the trip ahead of me? Do you love me that much? I can’t ask so great a sacrifice of you, and yet I am driven to ask it, because how dare I withhold from you something that is so important to me?”

  He read it over, crossed out sacrifice, and pencilled in proof of love. It wasn’t quite right, and he’d have to work on it some more. Could either of the bitches possibly go for it? Could he possibly get them to do themselves for love?

  And, even if they did, how would he know about it? Some hatchet-faced dame in Philly slashes her wrists in the bathtub, some fat girl hangs herself in Oregon, who’s going to know to tell him so he can get off on it? Darling, do it in front of a video cam, and have them send me the tape. Be a kick, but it’d never happen.

  Didn’t Manson get his girls to cut X’s on their foreheads? Maybe he could get his to cut themselves a little, where it wouldn’t show except in the Polaroids. Would they do it? Maybe, if he worded it right.

  Meanwhile, he had other fish to fry.

  “Dear Paul,” he typed. “I’ve never called you anything but ‘Mr. Dandridge,’ but I’ve written you so many letters, some of them just in the privacy of my mind, that I’ll permit myself this liberty. And for all I know you throw my letters away unread. If so, well, I’m still not sorry I’ve spent the time writing them. It’s a great help to me to get my thoughts on paper in this manner.

  “I suppose you already know that I got another stay of execution. I can imagine your exasperation at the news. Would it surprise you to know that my own reaction was much the same? I don’t want to die, Paul, but I don’t want to live like this, either, while lawyers scurry around just trying to postpone the inevitable. Better for both of us if they’d just killed me right away.

  “Though I suppose I should be grateful for this chance to make my peace, with you and with myself. I can’t bring myself to ask for your forgiveness, and I certainly can’t summon up whatever is required for me to forgive myself, but perhaps that will come with time. They seem to be giving me plenty of time, even if they do persist in doling it out to me bit by bit...”

  When he found the letter, Paul Dandridge followed what had become standard practice for him. He set it aside while he opened and tended to the rest of his mail. Then he went into the kitchen and brewed himself a pot of coffee. He poured a cup and sat down with it and opened the letter from Croydon.

  When the second letter came he’d read it through to the end, then crumpled it in his fist. He hadn’t known whether to throw it in the garbage or burn it in the fireplace, and in the end he’d done neither. Instead he’d carefully unfolded it and smoothed out its creases and read it again before putting it away.

  Since then he
’d saved all the letters. It had been almost three years since sentence was pronounced on William Croydon, and longer than that since Karen had died at his hands. (Literally at his hands, he thought; the hands that typed the letter and folded it into its envelope had encircled Karen’s neck and strangled her. The very hands.)

  Now Croydon was thirty-three and Paul was thirty himself, and he had been receiving letters at the approximate rate of one every two months. This was the fifteenth, and it seemed to mark a new stage in their one-sided correspondence. Croydon had addressed him by his first name.

  “Better for both of us if they’d just killed me right away.” Ah, but they hadn’t, had they? And they wouldn’t either. It would drag on and on and on. A lawyer he’d consulted had told him it would not be unrealistic to expect another ten years of delay. For God’s sake, he’d be forty years old by the time the state got around to doing the job.

  It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he and Croydon were fellow prisoners. He was not confined to a cell and not under a sentence of death, but it struck him that his life held only the illusion of freedom. He wouldn’t really be free until Croydon’s ordeal was over. Until then he was confined in a prison without walls, unable to get on with his life, unable to have a life, just marking time.

  He went over to his desk, took out a sheet of letterhead, uncapped a pen. For a long moment he hesitated. Then he sighed gently and touched pen to paper.

  “Dear Croydon,” he wrote. “I don’t know what to call you. I can’t bear to address you by your first name or to call you ‘Mr. Croydon.’ Not that I ever expected to call you anything at all. I guess I thought you’d be dead by now. God knows I wished it...”

  Once he got started, it was surprisingly easy to find the words.

  An answer from Dandridge.

  Unbelievable.

  If he had a shot, Paul Dandridge was it. The stays and the appeals would only carry you so far. The chance that any court along the way would grant him a reversal and a new trial was remote at best. His only real hope was a commutation of his death sentence to life imprisonment.

  Not that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in prison. In a sense, you lived better on Death Row than if you were doing life in general prison population. But in another sense the difference between a life sentence and a death sentence was, well, the difference between life and death. If he got his sentence commuted to life, that meant the day would come when he made parole and hit the street. They might not come right out and say that, but that was what it would amount to, especially if he worked the system right.

  And Paul Dandridge was the key to getting his sentence commuted.

  He remembered how the prick had testified at the pre-sentencing hearing. If any single thing had ensured the death sentence, it was Dandridge’s testimony. And, if anything could swing a commutation of sentence for him, it was a change of heart on the part of Karen Dandridge’s brother.

  Worth a shot.

  “Dear Paul,” he typed. “I can’t possibly tell you the sense of peace that came over me when I realised the letter I was holding was from you...”

  Paul Dandridge, seated at his desk, uncapped his pen and wrote the day’s date at the top of a sheet of letterhead. He paused and looked at what he had written. It was, he realised, the fifth anniversary of his sister’s death, and he hadn’t been aware of that fact until he’d inscribed the date at the top of a letter to the man who’d killed her.

  Another irony, he thought. They seemed to be infinite.

  “Dear Billy,” he wrote. “You’ll appreciate this. It wasn’t until I’d written the date on this letter that I realised its significance. It’s been exactly five years since the day that changed both our lives forever.”

  He took a breath, considered his words. He wrote, “And I guess it’s time to acknowledge formally something I’ve acknowledged in my heart some time ago. While I may never get over Karen’s death, the bitter hatred that has burned in me for so long has finally cooled. And so I’d like to say that you have my forgiveness in full measure. And now I think it’s time for you to forgive yourself...”

  It was hard to sit still.

  That was something he’d had no real trouble doing since the first day the cell door closed with him inside. You had to be able to sit still to do time, and it was never hard for him. Even during the several occasions when he’d been a few weeks away from an execution date, he’d never been one to pace the floor or climb the walls.

  But today was the hearing. Today the board was hearing testimony from three individuals. One was a psychiatrist who would supply some professional arguments for commuting his sentence from death to life. Another was his fourth-grade teacher, who would tell the board how rough he’d had it in childhood and what a good little boy he was underneath it all. He wondered where they’d dug her up, and how she could possibly remember him. He didn’t remember her at all.

  The third witness, and the only really important one, was Paul Dandridge. Not only was he supplying the only testimony likely to carry much weight, but it was he who had spent money to locate Croydon’s fourth-grade teacher, he who had enlisted the services of the shrink.

  His buddy, Paul. A crusader, moving heaven and earth to save Billy Croydon’s life.

  Just the way he’d planned it.

  He paced, back and forth, back and forth, and then he stopped and retrieved from his locker the letter that had started it all. The first letter to Paul Dandridge, the one he’d had the sense not to send. How many times had he reread it over the years, bringing the whole thing back into focus?

  “...when I turned her facedown, well, I can tell you she’d never done that before.” Jesus, no, she hadn’t liked it at all. He read and remembered, warmed by the memory.

  What did he have these days but his memories? The women who’d been writing him had long since given it up. Even the ones who’d sworn to follow him to death had lost interest during the endless round of stays and appeals. He still had the letters and pictures they’d sent, but the pictures were unappealing, only serving to remind him what a bunch of pigs they all were, and the letters were sheer fantasy with no underpinning of reality. They described, and none too vividly, events that had never happened and events that would never happen. The sense of power to compel them to write those letters and pose for their pictures had faded over time. Now they only bored him and left him faintly disgusted.

  Of his own memories, only that of Karen Dandridge held any real flavour. The other two girls, the ones he’d done before Karen, were almost impossible to recall. They were brief encounters, impulsive, unplanned, and over almost before they’d begun. He’d surprised one in a lonely part of the park, just pulled her skirt up and her panties down and went at her, hauling off and smacking her with a rock a couple of times when she wouldn’t keep quiet. That shut her up, and when he finished he found out why. She was dead. He’d evidently cracked her skull and killed her, and he’d been thrusting away at dead meat.

  Hardly a memory to stir the blood ten years later. The second one wasn’t much better either. He’d been about half drunk, and that had the effect of blurring the memory. He’d snapped her neck afterward, the little bitch, and he remembered that part, but he couldn’t remember what it had felt like.

  One good thing. Nobody ever found out about either of those two. If they had, he wouldn’t have a prayer at today’s hearing.

  After the hearing, Paul managed to slip out before the press could catch up with him. Two days later, however, when the governor acted on the board’s recommendation and commuted William Croydon’s sentence to life imprisonment, one persistent reporter managed to get Paul in front of a video camera.

  “For a long time I wanted vengeance,” he admitted. “I honestly believed that I could only come to terms with the loss of my sister by seeing her killer put to death.”

  What changed that? the reporter wanted to know.

  He stopped to consider his answer. “The dawning realisation,” he s
aid, “that I could really only recover from Karen’s death not by seeing Billy Croydon punished but by letting go of the need to punish. In the simplest terms, I had to forgive him.”

  And could he do that? Could he forgive the man who had brutally murdered his sister?

  “Not overnight,” he said. “It took time. I can’t even swear I’ve forgiven him completely. But I’ve come far enough in the process to realise capital punishment is not only inhumane but pointless. Karen’s death was wrong, but Billy Croydon’s death would be another wrong, and two wrongs don’t make a right. Now that his sentence has been lifted, I can get on with the process of complete forgiveness.”

  The reporter commented that it sounded as though Paul Dandridge had gone through some sort of religious conversion experience.

  “I don’t know about religion,” Paul said, looking right at the camera. “I don’t really consider myself a religious person. But something’s happened, something transformational in nature, and I suppose you could call it spiritual.”

  With his sentence commuted, Billy Croydon drew a transfer to another penitentiary, where he was assigned a cell in general population. After years of waiting to die he was being given a chance to create a life for himself within the prison’s walls. He had a job in the prison laundry, he had access to the library and exercise yard. He didn’t have his freedom, but he had life.

  On the sixteenth day of his new life, three hard-eyed lifers cornered him in the room where they stored the bed linen. He’d noticed one of the men earlier, had caught him staring at him a few times, looking at Croydon the way you’d look at a woman. He hadn’t spotted the other two before, but they had the same look in their eyes as the one he recognized.