A Penny for the Hangman

by Tom Savage

  Like his client. The big man who worked for the client—Carl Graves—had told him they wouldn’t be needing his services for a few days, but that didn’t make any sense to Gabby. The pretty girl and the tall man, Price, didn’t have any bags or cases, and from what he’d overheard of their conversation on the trip out, they weren’t expecting to stay overnight on the island, which got Gabby to wondering.

  Graves always communicated by radio, so Gabby would check for traffic every couple of hours when he got back to the marina. He had a tentative gig tomorrow with two honeymoon couples from the Ritz-Carlton, fishing and sunbathing and a lap around St. John, weather permitting. Looking back at the house on the cliff as it receded in the distance, Gabby decided to get his friend Curtis to take the honeymooners instead.

  He glanced at his family photo beside the wheel, and his gaze lingered for a long moment on the blank space next to it. He wished he could go home tonight and sleep in his own bed, but he decided against it. He should stay on the Turnabout, with the radio, just in case. His wife, Alma, complained about his hours on the boat. She was lonely, with both their boys now married and fathers in their own households. She called it “empty nest syndrome,” whatever that meant; Alma was always talking like that. But she appreciated the fees he commanded for his services, and she knew how important this new venture was to him, so she never sulked for long. Gabby Smith’s Fishing and Water Taxi—the business was new, a mere two years old, but already his profits had surpassed his old salary as a pilot for Virgin Water Tours, where he’d toiled for twenty years. Yes, the Turnabout was the best investment he’d ever made. And now, with today’s turn of events, he expected it to reap even more rewards, rewards beyond money.

  He opened throttle, racing the weather back the way he’d come. He would wait, and he would watch, and, as usual, he would remain silent.

  Mating Net

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2009

  Chapter Five

  “Those Awful Boys”

  by Karen Tyler

  In one of his final speeches in office, in October of 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke of the need for stronger laws for “thrill killers” in America, citing several sensational crimes that had occurred during his administration. He mentioned Charles Starkweather’s multistate spree in 1958; Ed Gein, the serial murderer in Wisconsin in 1957; and Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, the Kansas killers from November of 1959. Eisenhower ended his list with the phrase “and let’s not forget those awful boys in the Virgin Islands.”

  —

  Karen looked out at the view from the sundeck at the top of the cliff, marveling at the fact that she could see nothing in any direction but dark water and overcast sky. In the boat on the way here, they’d passed several tiny keys and something larger called Norman Island, but the nearest body of land to Hangman Cay was not currently visible from here. She turned around, iced tea in hand, to look back at Don Price and their host. The two men stood just inside the sliding glass doors of the living room, sipping and chatting. They frequently glanced over at her, and she wondered what they were discussing.

  The photographer was clearly fascinated by Anderman. Don Price obviously knew all about the sensational crime from 1959, as she’d expect of any resident of the islands. Still, he seemed inappropriately delighted to be meeting one of the notorious boys. Human nature, she mused. We can make all the noises about evil, so dreadful and shocking and all that, but when it came right down to it, the evildoers were treated like rock stars. Wasn’t that what she, Karen, was doing here? She was getting the salacious story for her magazine, to be disseminated to ghouls and rubberneckers around the globe. She could hardly fault Don Price for his morbid interest.

  Wulfgar Anderman had led them from the front hall into the living room, a long rectangular space, high ceilinged, running the entire length of one side of the house. Two sleek couches and matching armchairs were grouped around a glass-topped coffee table, and Oriental area rugs accentuated a gleaming dark wood floor. The walls were painted a creamy beige, and one long wall was lined with bookshelves. Perhaps two hundred volumes—she’d have to inspect the collection at some point, get an idea of the man based on his reading tastes. A widescreen TV stood on a low table beneath a large painting.

  She hadn’t yet seen the rest of the house, but the living room had been furnished in simple good taste, and recently. The furniture and rugs looked fairly new; she wondered how long Anderman had been living here.

  The two unusual features of the living room were the table in one corner by the doors to the sundeck and the big painting above the television. The table was small, beautifully crafted of mahogany, with two matching wooden chairs facing each other, and taking up its entire surface was one of the oddest-looking chess sets she’d ever seen. It was clearly very old, hewn of some dull blond wood, and it seemed rather the worse for wear, stained and scored with scratches and dents and watermarks and a couple of cigarette burns. The playing field consisted of dark and light brown squares, with men to match. The two teams were fully set up for play, the crudely carved pieces as careworn as the board on which they rested. But the game, incongruous as it seemed in the otherwise modern setting, was not as arresting as the vivid portrait on the wall.

  She reentered the room, smiling as she passed the two men, and went over to look at the picture. It was about six feet by four, simply framed, painted in bright acrylic. Wulfgar Anderman, fourteen years old, forever. He stood on a sunlit beach, blue water and white breakers to one side and green palm leaves at the other edge. He was clad only in a pair of cutoff denim shorts, his hands on his hips, feet planted wide apart in the sand. The head above the muscular shoulders was thrown back, crowned by a flying mane of glistening white-gold hair, the sunburned chest thrust forward, the white teeth flashing below the sparkling blue eyes. He grinned out at the world, triumphantly beautiful.

  She was familiar with all the photographs from 1959, of course, but now, as she studied the painting, Karen found herself reminded of the film she’d seen two weeks before, the young actor who played Wulf. He was a handsome, engaging seventeen-year-old passing for fourteen, the son of a famous actor making his début in the role, and Karen had thought he and his costar were a tad too grown-up for the parts. Seeing this picture, she realized what the filmmakers had captured, perhaps unconsciously: At the time of the murders, Wulf Anderman had appeared to be a poised, mature young man with an aura that was distinctly sensual.

  It was a remarkable portrait, the work of a talented amateur, and Karen knew—as the journalist in her always knew—that the artist had painted it with love, both for the act of creation and for the subject himself. She tore her gaze away from the laughing face and sculpted torso to glance down at the bottom corner, blinking in surprise even though she’d half expected it. Rodney Harper had signed his name there in bold black letters.

  The voice behind her startled her.

  “The Secret Place,” Wulf Anderman said. “That’s what he called the painting. I’m sure you recognize the beach; you were just on it.”

  “You were here—before?” Karen asked.

  He smiled. “Constantly. It was our refuge from the world back then. We had a speedboat, and we came here all the time.”

  Karen wondered if this speedboat was the one in which Rodney Harper had attempted his getaway after the murders, but she didn’t ask. Instead she said, “Who lived here then?”

  “Nobody. It was all boarded up in those days. The people who owned the island never used it. Over lunch, I’ll tell you how I ended up owning it. But it’s private property and not a part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, so I haven’t breached any court orders by being here.” He joined her in front of the portrait, and for a moment they studied it in companionable silence. Then Anderman said, “He painted this years later, in prison.”

  Karen was surprised by this revelation, but she didn’t want it to show. “You’ve seen him since then?” she asked in what she hoped was a casual tone of voice.


  “Oh no,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since ’59.”

  “So, how did you get the painting?”

  He shrugged. “That’s rather a long story. Later, perhaps.” He regarded the picture for another moment, then sighed and shook his head. “I never really looked like that. I don’t know what he was thinking.”

  Karen turned her head to look at the man beside her. Don’t you? she thought, but she didn’t say it. Now, studying the subject fifty years on, she found it incredible that this bald, wrinkling old man had once been the blond young god in the painting. They didn’t resemble each other at all.

  “Let me show you the rest of the house,” the old man said.

  —

  “Those Awful Boys” (continued)

  “Frick and Frack,” says Darlene Provall Gleason, 64, a former classmate of Harper and Anderman. “That’s what we called them. They kept their distance from the rest of us, and they were always playing chess on that ratty board Rodney carried everywhere. The other boys tormented them, called them names like ‘sister’ and ‘girly-boy,’ and they got beaten up a few times. Rodney wore a swastika around his neck, and he used to draw swastikas on everything—notebooks and blackboards. Wulf was cute, but no one would go near him. They just didn’t fit in.”

  —

  Sid was recording every word of Wulfgar Anderman’s story from the baggy pocket of his pants. He’d left his cell at the hotel in favor of the recorder. Karen had a similar device running on the table in front of her, and she was also jotting things down in a notebook.

  The house tour had been brief and, in Sid’s opinion, a bit dull. Aside from the living room and sundeck where they’d begun, there were the dining room, kitchen, and rooms for Mr. Graves and his wife on the ground level. The staircase from the front hall led up to a gallery with bedroom suites at either end. Anderman didn’t show them his bedroom, but he told them the guest room was identical to it. This was a large bedroom and bath, with windows facing the water in two directions, the cove below the cliff and the open sea. The canopied, four-poster mahogany bed was freshly made up with white linens, and brand-new-looking towels and soaps and shower curtain glistened in the bathroom. A third door between the two suites revealed a smaller room with windows that faced out above the sundeck, its large wooden desk and bookshelves indicating that it was used as an office. An old Remington typewriter stood on the otherwise bare desk. Sid noted that Anderman unlocked the door of this room to show it to them and then quickly relocked it.

  The interior of the building was cool and dry, the result of central air-conditioning, and lamps and chandeliers shone in every room. Anderman explained that the generator was in the boathouse, along with a tank for oil that was refilled regularly by a barge from Tortola. He pointed out the television and a DVD player in the living room, explaining that the TV signal was sporadic, working only in good weather, so DVDs were the best bet for entertainment. The only telephone on the island was in the front hall, a heavy, corded landline with a rotary dial that looked to be the oldest thing in the house, and he explained that its undersea cable came from Tortola. When Karen asked about cell and Internet reception, he smiled ruefully and shook his head.

  “Welcome to the West Indies,” he murmured.

  Their host was cordial throughout the tour, and he smiled a great deal, but Sid wondered about the house itself. Why, he thought, would the man need a second bedroom in this remote place? Whom did he entertain? Who knew he was here? Was there a Mrs. Anderman? He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Why was his office kept under lock and key?

  Sid had no opportunity to pose any of these questions. Not that he would, he reminded himself, because Karen was the ostensible interviewer here, and he was merely the shutterbug. At that point in the tour the silent Mrs. Graves—and what an odd-looking character she was!—had arrived to indicate, as opposed to announce, that lunch was ready on the sundeck. So, here they were, the three of them, at a wrought-iron table at the top of the cliff, gazing out over the ocean, with chicken salad and fresh rolls and iced tea. Sid and Karen listened as Wulfgar Anderman spoke in his strong, mellifluous voice.

  “Roddy discovered this island in his speedboat. Actually, it was his brother’s boat, but Toby lost interest in it when he discovered girls, so Roddy inherited it. He used to go all over the place—St. John and Tortola and Virgin Gorda—and he especially liked to explore the little places here in the British Virgins, the cays. Nowadays a lot of them are rented out by their owners as expensive vacation sites—one of them is owned by Richard Branson, the Virgin billionaire—but in those days they were mostly deserted.

  “This particular island was originally called Lookout Cay. It is situated right along the sea lanes used by pirates in the old days, and this house was built for guards and their families, placed here by the Spanish, and eventually the British, to watch for marauders. The guard would light a bonfire here on the cliff that could be seen from the nearest island, and someone there would light another one, and so on, until everyone around here knew to be prepared for an imminent pirate invasion. But the practice was abandoned in 1678 when a band of brigands stole onto this island and killed the British lookout and his family.

  “For many years, no one would come near the place, and a legend sprang up—don’t they always?—that the big oak tree at the edge of the cliff beside this house was used by the maritime authorities as a place of execution for the pirates they managed to apprehend. They’d string up the outlaws and leave the corpses hanging there, a lesson and a warning to any passing ships, hence the island’s new name: Hangman Cay.

  “When Roddy saw it, with that perfect beach and the forest and sea caves, and this lone house on the cliff, he fell in love with it. It belonged to an eccentric British man who’d expanded the old sentry house back in the 1930s as a vacation home for his family, but he and his wife were killed in the Blitz, and his daughter inherited it. She hated the tropics, so she just ignored the property. Roddy first stumbled on it in 1957.”

  “When did you first see it?” Karen asked.

  “Shortly after that. We were always best friends, all through school. The outcasts. The other children hated Roddy, and I—well, I suppose I was just too quiet for them. Roddy was the only person in St. Thomas who would have anything to do with me, and vice versa. We explored the beach and the forest and the caves at the far end, but most of our time was spent inside this house. It was locked and boarded up, but we found a loose shutter. We used to play chess at that table in the living room. This was our very own Neverland.”

  “How long have you owned it?” Karen asked.

  The old man smiled. “I bought Hangman Cay three years ago, from the eccentric Brit’s daughter. I moved here a year later, after the renovations were completed. This sundeck is new, and the generator and the glass windows for the air-conditioning and the furniture. The only original thing I kept was that table the chess service is on. I’ve been here two years, with Mr. and Mrs. Graves for company. They’re…old friends.”

  Sid noticed the slight pause before Anderman said that, and he bit his tongue, cursing himself for his masquerade as an assistant who must defer to Karen Tyler. Oh God, what he wouldn’t give to have this man alone, all to himself! The thousand questions he wanted to ask! But now all he could do was smile, pick at the excellent lunch, and bide his time.

  Karen, to her credit, was clearly thinking along his lines. She didn’t jump right in, as some might do, merely sipped her iced tea and smiled around at the view and allowed the man to talk freely. But a covert glance at her notepad showed him that she was actually listing things, arranging a series of questions for later, after the amenity of lunch was behind them, perhaps during the photo session.

  Anderman was in no hurry to tell his story. He poured more tea, smiled at Karen, and said, “It’s so pleasant to have you here. One grows weary of one’s own company all the time. I’m glad you came.” He glanced over at Sid and added, “And you, too, of course.”

  K
aren Tyler smiled back and thanked him for inviting her. Sid studied the old man, wondering why he was suddenly so eager to break a fifty-year silence. More than that, Sid couldn’t shake the feeling that Karen was a carefully selected Boswell, a scribe for a scrupulously rehearsed performance. And he—Sid—was an interloper, an unexpected and barely tolerated addition to the party. Anderman was much too well bred and polite to say that, naturally, but Sid felt it just the same.

  —

  “Those Awful Boys” (continued)

  “Then came that terrible Friday night.” Mrs. Gleason pauses here, remembering, brushing tears from her eyes before continuing. “The following Monday at school—well, the bullies were delighted, having a field day, but most of us were in shock. The headmaster called an assembly and told us that we should pray for them and their victims. I don’t look at the world in the same way since then. I don’t take anyone I meet at face value, and my old school friends agree. You never know about people.”

  —

  “Tell me about prison,” Karen said, “and your life since then.”

  She smiled as she said it, but she was watching her host, assessing his reaction to such a blunt inquiry. They had left the table, which Mrs. Graves was now clearing, and gone over to stand by the railing. Anderman was posing for the camera, following Don Price’s instructions—“Smile!” and “Look out at the ocean” and “Now a serious expression”—with patient grace. When Karen spoke, Anderman glanced sharply over at her, apparently surprised by her lack of tact, but then he returned her smile and relaxed. The busy-bee photographer continued working as Anderman delivered his reply.