by R.J. Ellory
She asked me why I killed her—more than any other question she asked—but I had no answer for her.
“Because of my father,” I said once.
“Your father?”
“Yes, because of my father,” I repeated.
“That’s no answer,” she said. “That’s no answer at all. Answer the question properly. Why did you kill me, Lewis Woodroffe?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why I killed you.”
And I would see her looking at me, patient but disappointed.
“I can wait for you to figure it out,” she said. “I have more time that you can even imagine.”
One time she explained eternity to me.
“There is a bird,” she said, “and the bird flies to a beach somewhere in the world, and that bird collects one grain of sand, and he flies and flies and flies until he reaches the moon, and then he leaves that one grain of sand right there on the moon. And he rests for a little while, and then he comes back. And you know what he does when he reaches that beach again? I’ll tell you what he does, Mr. Lewis Woodroffe. He takes another grain of sand and he flies right back to the moon. And then he takes a little rest, and then he returns once more, and he keeps flying back and forth and back forth from the earth to the moon, and he takes just one grain of sand at a time, and after he has carried every single grain of sand from every single beach in the world and put it right there on the moon, well mister . . . only then has eternity begun.”
And then she smiled.
“And that is how long you have to answer my question and come to terms with what you did.”
She would get snippy like that, and I wouldn’t regret choking the life out of her. Sometimes she’d get real mean and I’d imagine choking her again, but it was like she could see inside my head, and she would scold me for my thoughts and make me feel ashamed.
Sometimes the only thing to do was stay in bed and drink all day. Turn the TV up loud and drink cheap bourbon and hum tunes in my head to drown her out.
But it didn’t work. She was there all the time. She wasn’t going anywhere. One time I tried to work out the bird thing. The bird going to the moon with a grain of sand. I figured that it would take a lifetime just to make one trip.
And then I felt sorry for what I’d done. It took a while—a couple of years, maybe three—but I was sorry. I mean, I was always sorry, sure, and I wished a thousand times that I could go back to that day and wish her well as we left the restaurant, and tell her that it had been a good day, and it had been a pleasure to spend time with her, and perhaps we could do it again, and then wave to her from the corner and see her disappear toward the bus, and then go home and sleep and wake up the next morning and not be a killer. But I had killed her, and I was a killer, and I would always and forever be nothing more nor less than a killer, and when I realized that this was now my life, then I was really sorry. Sorry in the real sense. Desperately sorry. I told her so.
She smiled, like a smartass schoolteacher who’s trying to make you get it wrong by asking you some tricky question that don’t have a real answer, and she said, “Well, it’s taken some time, Lewis Woodroffe, but don’t think that saying sorry and meaning it will have any effect on me at all. You can’t ever forget that I am dead, see? I am dead because you killed me. I had a life. I had parents and friends and a job and people who cared about me, and you ended all of that because I wouldn’t fuck you.”
I told her not to talk smutty. She was not a smutty kind of girl.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you, Lewis Woodroffe,” she said, and laughed cruelly.
Seriously, if she hadn’t have already been dead, I would’ve choked her again, regardless of her admonitions.
Over time we came to an understanding, me and Caroline McCready. I went to work, she stayed home for the main part. I guess she didn’t care much for folks seeing me and her having our words, you know? Sometimes I would just tell her to shut the hell up, and she would laugh at me and tell me I was crazy.
“You do understand you’re talking to yourself, don’t you?” she’d say.
“I ain’t dumb,” I’d reply.
“Maybe you aren’t dumb, but I think you’re crazy nevertheless. Crazy people talk to themselves.”
“I ain’t crazy.”
“Are too. Crazy enough to kill someone.”
“You made me mad.”
“I made you mad. Seems to me, mister, that you were pretty mad already.”
I would never win. She was right. I was crazy before I killed her, crazier afterwards.
I spent more time away from home. I worked and worked and worked. I got Sunday hours in a meatpacking factory. I had three jobs. I had more money than I knew what to do with, and I was lonely as hell and drinking myself to sleep, and I knew that sooner or later I would have to turn myself in or shoot myself in the head or take a dive off a high building someplace.
Just so that voice in my head would stop.
Seemed that Caroline McCready had silenced the voice of my father, and then just stepped up to take his place.
I knew I was a bad ’un. I knew I’d never be anything more nor less than a bad ’un. I was broken before I even got started, and maybe that was all down to my father, or maybe I was a mess before he got his hand in, but I wasn’t coming back anytime soon from what I’d done.
Christmas of 1955 I tried to kill myself. I drank a whole bottle of bourbon and I took a whole bunch of pills, but I collapsed face down and vomited everything up and I didn’t get anyplace but real sick for a few days, and to make it worse I was still alive.
I was waiting for Caroline McCready to make some wisecrack about how I was so useless I couldn’t even kill myself, but she didn’t say a word. Then I figured that she didn’t want me to die. If I died, then she wouldn’t have no one to talk to. Simple as that.
In the early part of 1956 things changed. I couldn’t kill myself. I knew that. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Maybe I was weak, or maybe I was too strong. I thought about how suicide was a mortal sin in the eyes of the church, and that would get me two hallway passes into Hell.
I was desperate. Really desperate. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think or feel or say or believe. I was getting on for thirty-two years of age and I should have been settled with a wife and a couple of kids and moving forward toward some kind of security and future. I should’ve had good things to look forward to, but I didn’t have nothing.
I even started to pray. Had never been much of a religious-minded kind of person, but then I pretty much had my father to thank for that as well. My experiences with the Bible hadn’t been so uplifting, if you know what I mean. But I started to pray, and for some reason I felt like I was actually talking to someone up there, and I didn’t know if it was God or Jesus or just some other part of my fevered imagination, but things started to ease down a little, and Caroline McCready showed up in my thoughts less and less, and by the time Eugene phoned me with an answer to my prayers, well she had pretty much left me alone for some weeks.
It was four o’clock in the morning, and Eugene was all the way over in Milwaukee, and he was ready to kill himself.
He was sobbing and crying, and he said how he was done for, and his life was all over, and it took me five minutes to get him to calm down enough to even tell me what the damn hell was going on.
I couldn’t believe it.
If you’d asked me to sit down and make up a list of the most unlikely things to ever happen in this world or the next, then what I heard Eugene say would have been numero uno.
“I done killed a girl, Lewis.”
“You done what?”
“I killed a girl. I was fooling around with this girl, and she got mad at me, and then she said she was gonna go get her neighbor, and he was gonna knock me all to hell, and I just wanted her to stop saying things, and I put my hands around her neck—”
I knew then that my father had made his way right through me and gotten i
nto Eugene too.
How else was it possible for two brothers to kill two girls the same way?
I got him to stop talking. I asked him what happened, just exactly what happened. He told me the when and the where and all that stuff, and then I told him to get back on that bus and come right home to Chicago, and I would take care of everything.
Eugene said that there were some things that just couldn’t be taken care of, and I said well that may well be the case, but this here thing wasn’t one of them. This could be taken care of, and I was the man to do it.
He said he didn’t understand what I could do to fix this. A girl was dead. He had killed a girl and she was dead on the floor of her kitchen, and the only way something that broke could be mended was if she was to come back alive again, or maybe if there was a way to turn back time and go and start the day over again and not kill her at all. And I told him it wasn’t his job right now to understand how I was gonna fix anything. Only job he had now was to get right on the bus like I told him already and come on back here to Chicago.
He did as I said for him to do, and he showed up somewhere around half past seven that morning, and the first thing I did was give him some of the tranquilizer pills I tried to kill myself with. He settled some after a while, and then I told him to explain everything that happened, minute by minute, hour by hour, and I listened to him explain how he’d met this girl in a diner, and he’d gotten talking to her, and how he hadn’t gone to work and they had spent the day together in the Field Museum, and then this restaurant for lunch, and then later they’d had dinner at a place I knew called Hannigan’s, which was just down a few blocks, and then they’d gone to The Blue Parrot.
I told him to go over it again, everyone he spoke to, every name he could remember. Who was the waitress there? What was the name of the guy at the museum? How long were you there? Where did you get your bus ticket? How much did it cost? And then what? And what happened in Milwaukee? You had hot-dogs? How many hot-dogs? Where did you buy them?
And he answered all my questions, and then I told him to give me the keys to his apartment, and after he’d handed them over he asked me why I wanted to know these details over and over again.
“Because I’m going to fix this,” I replied. “Just like I said I would.”
Eugene—my dear sweet kid brother, the kid brother who should never have been subjected to my father, the kid brother I failed to protect, the kid brother that my father somehow managed to poison despite all my best efforts—just looked at me, dumb as milk, a frown knitting his brows together.
“I am gonna walk right in to the police precinct and tell them that I live right here in this apartment. And then I am going to tell them that I killed this Carole Shaw. I am going to confess for you, Eugene, and my mind is made up and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. I have saved up a whole bunch of money, damn near a thousand bucks, and I’m gonna give you that money and you are going to leave Illinois and never come back.”
And Eugene went right on looking at me, dumber than milk, and he didn’t have a word to say.
“This is what big brothers are for,” I said. “This is what big brothers do for kid brothers when kid brothers screw up.”
He cried then. I don’t know if it was shame or relief or just plain grief, but he cried a whole bunch, and then when I thought he was done crying he went on and cried a good deal more.
He thought I was saving him. I wasn’t. I was saving myself.
Eugene should have been happy and contented. He should have been the one who escaped clear and certain. He did his army term, and then he got a job, and he worked hard and he was a decent feller, and this thing that happened with the girl was just some throwback from my father, and I knew that Eugene didn’t have a mean bone in his body.
Accidents happen. People make mistakes. The difference between me and Eugene was that Eugene had one accident and made one mistake, whereas I was an accident and a mistake.
I didn’t tell him anything about why I was doing this.
I didn’t tell him about Caroline McCready. I knew I would get the chair or hang for this Carole Shaw murder, and I didn’t want him to look back and remember me for anything but the big brother that I was. I didn’t want him to remember me as being anything like our father.
I was going to confess to killing Carole Shaw, but really I would be confessing to the murder of Caroline McCready, and it even made sense that their names were damned near the same all but two letters.
And Eugene could have fought me on it, but he didn’t.
He was young and he didn’t want to die, and he was still kind of dopey from the tranquilizers I’d given him, and after all the talking and answering questions he was tired and he lay down and went to sleep.
I sat there for a long time and listened to him breathing.
He was my kid brother. What was I going to do?
“You did the right thing,” Caroline McCready said.
I could hear her voice as if she was stood right there over my shoulder, looking down at Eugene just exactly as I was.
“You did the right thing, Mr. Woodroffe. I have to hand it to you. You have surprised me a little. You are braver than I thought.”
“Thank you, Caroline.”
“I came back to tell you that, and to tell you that I was leaving. This is where you and I part company.”
I felt her hand on my shoulder, and then I didn’t feel her hand, and I knew she was gone.
Just like that.
Later, Eugene woke, and it was as if he was waking from a nightmare, and there was a momentary relief on his face, but he saw me sitting there and he remembered why he was in my apartment, and he looked all afraid again.
“It is done,” I told him.
I gave him all the money, and then I showed him a bag of clothes I had packed for him, and I told him he had to leave Chicago and Illinois right now and never come back.
“No matter what you hear, no matter what you might read in the newspapers about this, you can never come back to Chicago.”
He hugged me, and he cried some more, and then he started talking about how many times we’d spoken of leaving Taylorville, and how we used to call this place Chicagoland, and how everything would be better once we got away from our father.
“You go on and live your life like none of this ever happened,” I told Eugene. “You need to do that for yourself, and you need to do it for me and your ma, but most of all you need to do it to prove to that old bastard that he didn’t beat us both down. You’re a good kid, and you did this thing, but it don’t matter now because in an hour or so it will all be taken care of. Just go to the bus station, and get on whatever bus is leaving first, and I don’t want to know where you wind up.” And then I hugged him again, and said to him just like Caroline McCready had said to me.
“This is where you and I part company.”
I put my coat on, and I walked him down to the corner, and I sent him in the direction of the bus stop, and then I turned back the other way and kept on walking until I found a police precinct. I walked right on in there, and I went to the desk sergeant, and I said, “I killed a girl. I strangled her with my own hands, and I left her dead in her house,” and then I held up my hands just to show him that these were the hands that did it, and he nodded gravely, and he said, “Is that so?”, and I said, “Yes, it is so, and I am here to accept the consequences of this terrible thing, and whatever penalty the law sees is fit.”
They locked me up for a while. They had people come down and talk with me. I told them precisely what had happened, just as Eugene had told me, and then the following day this other detective called Maguire came over and told me that I had confessed in the wrong precinct and he was going to take me to the right precinct, and there they would finish all the paperwork and I would appear before the judge.
Maguire seemed to know what he was doing, and he had a kind manner, and even though he said I had done a terrible, terrible thing, there was still somethin
g about him that made me feel that he cared about people, however bad they were.
He didn’t get mad with me, and he didn’t threaten me, and he asked his questions and listened to the answers, and then he had me write everything down and sign it, and then we were done.
I was arraigned, I was held over pending trial, and then I was tried and sentenced, and I was meant to go on down to death row at Pontiac, but that didn’t never happen for one reason or another.
And I’ve been here all this time—four years and five months and a couple of weeks, right here in Cook County Jail, and I look out through the peephole in my door and I can just see the clock on the wall, and it’s an hour until I die, and I still know that I’ve done the right thing.
I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.
In an hour it all ends. Whatever virus spread from my father to me, and whatever got around me and touched my brother, is gone. The line stops here.
I can honestly say that I had never felt so calm in my life, and when Father Henry came on down to talk to me in the last forty minutes of my life, I could only listen to him and wonder how someone could believe so hard in something they had never seen.
“So next step is Hell,” I said.
He smiled, shook his head. “Purgatory, my son. Purgatory is the destination for those who die in a state of grace and there they will await their Final Judgment.”
“Does He weigh the good against the bad?”
“Yes, He does.”
“And is there anything I can do now . . . you know, that will help swing the decision in my favor.”
“You can pray, my son. You can kneel with me now and pray to the Almighty Father, and he will hear you in your hour of need and give you the strength to suffer the torment that awaits you.”
And so I knelt with the Father, and I prayed with him, and even though I didn’t believe I needed any further strength, even though I believed I had rid myself of all fear, I was wrong.
I do not know where those last minutes went, but I heard the door at the end of the hallway, and the sound of a key in a lock, and then there were footsteps, and the cell door was opened, and the warden was there with two guards and he looked down at me on my knees beside Father Henry, and he said, “It’s time.”