All the Flowers Are Dying

by Block, Lawrence

  “Yes.”

  “Child pornography on my computer hard drive. Little envelopes of hair from the dead boys in my desk drawer. A bloody handkerchief found at the burial site, and the blood’s mine. There was even a file on my computer, an elaborate obscene third-person account of one of the murders. It had been erased, but they managed to recover it, and only a monster could have written it. It contained details of the crime that could only have been known to the person who committed it. If I’d been on that jury, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. A guilty verdict was the only verdict possible.”

  “They didn’t spend much time in deliberations.”

  “They didn’t have to. I read an account, an interview with one of the jurors. They went around the room, and everyone said guilty. Then they discussed the evidence, trying to find arguments refuting some of it, and they voted again, and it was unanimous again. And then they discussed it some more, just to make absolutely certain they were all on the same page, and then they voted formally, and it was twelve for conviction and none for acquittal, and there was really no reason to waste any more time. So they filed back into the courtroom and announced the verdict. Then my lawyer insisted the jury be polled, and one by one they said the same thing, over and over. Guilty, guilty, guilty. What else did he expect them to say?”

  “And the penalty phase?”

  “My lawyer wanted me to change my story. He’d never believed me, although he wouldn’t come right out and say so. Well, why should he have believed me? To take my story at face value would have been evidence of incompetence on his part.”

  “He thought you’d have a better chance at escaping a death sentence if you said you’d done it.”

  “Which is nonsense,” he says, “because the sentence would have been the same either way. He wanted me to express remorse. Remorse! What remorse could possibly match the enormity of those crimes? And how could I express remorse for something I hadn’t done? I asked him as much and he just looked at me. He wouldn’t come right out and tell me I was full of shit, but that’s what he was thinking. But he didn’t push it, because he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. The death sentence didn’t take them any more time than the guilty verdict.”

  “Did it surprise you?”

  “It shocked me. Later, when the judge pronounced sentence, that shocked me, too. Shock’s not the same thing as surprise.”

  “No.”

  “The idea of it. ‘You’re going to die.’ Well, everybody’s going to die. But when someone sits there and tells you, well, it has an impact.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Remorse. Could you express remorse by proxy? Because I couldn’t be sorry that I’d killed those boys, because I hadn’t, but I was damn well sorry that someone had.” He frowns, a vertical line in his forehead forming to match the ones at the sides of his mouth. “He told me it would be a great help if I could tell them where to find the third body. But how could I do that if I’d never set eyes on the Willis boy and had no idea where he might be? I could tell him, he said, and he could say I let it slip while still maintaining my innocence. I told him I couldn’t quite see the logic of that. I’d be sticking to a lie while admitting it was a lie. He hemmed and hawed, and I said it hardly mattered, because I couldn’t tell what I didn’t know. You know, I didn’t care if he believed me, or if anyone else believed me. My wife didn’t believe me, she couldn’t even look at me. She’s divorced me, you know.”

  “So I understand.”

  “I haven’t seen her or my children since I was taken into custody. No, I take that back. I saw her once. She came to the jail and asked me how I could do such a thing. I said I was innocent and she had to believe me. But she didn’t, and something died in me, and from that point on it didn’t really matter what anyone else believed or didn’t believe.”

  Fascinating, just fascinating.

  “You wrote that you believed me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose that was just a way to get me to approve the visit. Well, it worked.”

  “I’m glad it got me here,” he says, “but it wasn’t a ruse. I know you didn’t commit those barbarities.”

  “I almost think you’re serious.”

  “I am.”

  “But how can you possibly be? You’re a rational man, a scientist.”

  “If psychology’s a science, and there are those who’d argue that it’s not.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “An art. A black art, some would say. There were those, you know, who wanted to give Freud the Nobel, not in medicine but in literature. A backhanded compliment, that. I like to think there’s a scientific basis to what I do, Preston, but—I’m sorry, is it all right if I call you Preston?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “And my name is Arne. That’s A-R-N-E, the Scandinavian spelling, though it’s pronounced like the diminutive for Arnold. My parents were English and Scots-Irish on both sides, I can’t think why they thought to give me a Swedish name. But that’s off the point, and I’m afraid I’ve lost track of what I was saying.”

  “A scientific basis to what you do.”

  “Yes, of course.” He hadn’t lost track, but is pleased to note that Applewhite’s been paying attention. “But even pure science has an intuitive element. Most scientific discovery comes out of intuition, out of an inspired leap of faith that owes little to logic or scientific method. I know you’re innocent. I know it with a certainty that leaves no room for doubt. I can’t explain how I know it, to you or to myself, but I know it.” He treats Applewhite to a gentler version of the rueful smile. “I’m afraid,” he says, “that you’ll have to take my word for it.”

  Applewhite just looks at him, his face soft now, defenseless. And, unbidden and quite unexpected, tears begin to flow down his cheeks.

  “I’m sorry. I haven’t cried in, hell, I couldn’t even guess how long it’s been. Ages.”

  “It’s nothing to apologize for. Perhaps I’m the one who should apologize.”

  “For what? For being the first person to believe me?” He laughed shortly. “Except that’s not strictly true. I’ve received letters from half a dozen women over the years. They just know I couldn’t have done such things, and their hearts go out to me, and they want me to know how strongly they support me in my hour of need. I’m told everyone on Death Row gets letters like that, and the nastier and more publicized your crimes, the more mail you get.”

  “It’s a curious phenomenon.”

  “Most of them sent their pictures. I didn’t keep the photos, or the letters, for that matter, and I didn’t even think about answering them, but a couple of them kept writing all the same. They wanted to visit me, and one just wouldn’t give up. She wants to marry me. Now that my divorce is final, she explained, we can get married. And it’s my constitutional right, according to her. It’s a right I’m somehow not tempted to exercise.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think you would be.”

  “And I don’t really think for a moment that she or any of the others really believed I was innocent. Because they don’t want a romance with some poor bastard who’s going to die for no reason whatsoever. They want an affair, or the fantasy of an affair, with a man who’s the very personification of evil. Each of them wants to be the one selfless woman able to see the good in this worst of men, and if there’s a chance I might wring her neck, well, the danger just adds spice to the mix.”

  They talk some more about the vagaries of human behavior. Applewhite is intelligent, as he’d known he would be, with an extensive vocabulary and a logical mind.

  “Tell me again why you’re here, Arne.”

  He thinks for a moment. “I guess because you meet the criteria for what seems to be my interest these days.”

  “And that is?”

  “There must be a better phrase, but what comes to mind is ‘doomed innocence.’ ”

  “Doomed innocence. You and I are the only two people on earth who think I’m innocent.
The doomed part, that’s pretty clear to everyone.”

  “I’m interested,” he says, “in how a person in your position faces the inevitable.”

  “Calmly.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “When I think about it, everybody with a pulse is under a death sentence. Some of us are under more immediate ones. People with terminal illnesses. They’re as innocent as I am, but because some cell went haywire and nobody caught it in time, they’re going to die ahead of schedule. They can beat themselves up, they can say they should have quit smoking, they shouldn’t have put off that annual physical, they should have eaten less and exercised more, but who knows if that would have made any difference? The bottom line is they’re going to die, and it’s not their fault. And so am I, and it’s not my fault.”

  “And every day…”

  “Every day,” he says, “I get a day closer to the end. I told my lawyer not to bother trying for any more stays. I could drag it out for another year or two, if I pushed, but why? All I’ve been doing is marking time, and all it would get me is a little more time to mark.”

  “So how do you get through the days, Preston?”

  “There aren’t that many. Friday’s the day.”

  “Yes.”

  “Until then, I get through the hours. Three times a day they bring me something to eat. You’d think I’d have lost my taste for food, but one’s appetite doesn’t seem to have much to do with one’s long-term prospects. They bring the food and I eat it. They bring a newspaper and I read it. They’ll bring books if I ask for them. Lately I haven’t felt much like reading.”

  “And you have the TV.”

  “There’s a channel that has nothing but reruns of cop shows. Homicide, Law & Order, NYPD Blue. For a while I was addicted, I watched them one after another. Then I realized what I was doing.”

  “Seeking escape?”

  “No, that’s what I’d assumed, but that wasn’t it. I was looking for an answer, a solution.”

  “To your own dilemma.”

  “Exactly. Surely one of those programs would hold the key. I’d see something, and there’d be that aha! Moment, that instant of revelation that would enable me to save myself and pinpoint the real killer.” He shakes his head. “Listen to me, will you? ‘The real killer.’ I sound like OJ, for Christ’s sake.” He purses his lips, emits a soundless whistle. “Once I knew why I was watching the shows, I couldn’t watch them anymore. Lost my taste for them completely. There’s not much I can watch, actually. Football, during the season, but that’s over until the fall. I’ve seen my last football game.”

  “Other sports? Baseball? Basketball?”

  “I used to play a little basketball.” His eyes narrow for a moment, as if reaching for a memory, but it eludes him and he lets it go. “I watched the college games. The tournament, the Final Four. When the college season ended I lost interest. I put a pro game on a few days ago but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. And I never could work up an interest in baseball.”

  “So you don’t watch much television.”

  “No. It passes the time, which is part of its appeal, but it wastes the time, and I don’t have that much time left that I can afford to waste any of it. You asked how I get through the days. There’s nothing to it. I just sit here, and one way or another the hours pass. And the next thing you know it’s Friday, and that’s as far as I have to go.”

  “I’d better go,” he says, rising from the white plastic chair. “I’m taking up all your time, and you already said you don’t have that much of it left.”

  “I’ve enjoyed this, Arne.”

  “Have you?”

  “This is the first time I’ve been in the company of anybody who thought I was innocent. I can’t tell you what a difference that makes.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, absolutely. There’s been an element of stress in every conversation I’ve had since they cuffed me and read me my rights, because every single person, even the ones who’ve tried to help me, have believed me to be this monster. It was always there, you know? And today for the first time it wasn’t, and I could have an unguarded conversation and relate to another human being. I haven’t talked like this in, well, I couldn’t say how long. Since I was arrested, but maybe longer than that. I’m glad you came, and I’m sorry to see you leave.”

  He hesitates, then says, tentatively, “I could come back tomorrow.”

  “You could?”

  “I don’t have anything I have to do for the next several days. I’ll come back tomorrow, if you’d like, and as often as you want after that.”

  “Well, Jesus,” Applewhite says. “Yes, I’d like that. Damn right I’d like that. Come anytime. I’m not going anywhere.”

  5

  At a meeting over the weekend a woman whom I knew by sight came up to me and said she’d heard I was a private investigator. Was that true?

  “Sort of,” I said, and explained that I was semiretired, and didn’t have a license, which meant I lacked any official standing.

  “But you could investigate someone,” she said.

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “I have to think about this,” she said. “Is there a number where I can reach you?”

  I gave her a card, one of the new ones with my cell phone number on it, along with the phone in our apartment. I avoided a cell phone as long as I possibly could, until the realization that I was being ridiculous gradually overcame the stubbornness that seems to be an irreducible part of me. I still forget to carry it half the time, and don’t always remember to turn it on when I do, but I’d done both Monday morning, and when it rang I even managed to answer it without disconnecting the caller.

  “This is Louise,” she said. “You gave me your card. The other night, I asked if you could investigate someone, and—”

  “I remember. You had to think about it.”

  “I’ve thought all I need to, and I’d like to talk to you. Could we meet somewhere?”

  I was having breakfast with TJ, who’d kept a remarkably straight face while I’d fumbled with the phone. “I’m at the Morning Star,” I said.

  “Are you really? Because I’m at the Flame.”

  The Morning Star’s on the northwest corner of Ninth and Fifty-seventh; the Flame’s at the Fifty-eighth Street end of the same block. They’re both New York–style Greek coffee shops, and neither one’s a candidate for the next edition of Zagat, but they’re not terrible, and God knows they’re handy.

  She said, “Will you still be there in fifteen minutes? I want to finish this cup of coffee, and then I want to stand around outside long enough to smoke a cigarette, and then I’ll come to the Morning Star, if you’ll still be there.”

  “They haven’t even brought my eggs yet,” I told her. “Take your time.”

  “I feel funny about this,” she said. “Here I’m having this romance, and it feels as though it might really go somewhere, and a relationship ought to be based on trust, and how trusting am I if I hire a detective to investigate the guy? It’s like I’m sabotaging the whole process from the get-go.”

  Louise was somewhere in her late thirties, medium height and build, with dark brown hair and light brown eyes. She’d had acne in adolescence, and its legacy was a light pitting on her cheeks and pointed chin. She was dressed for the office in a skirt and blouse, and she’d put on some cologne, a floral scent that blended imperfectly with the smell of cigarette smoke.

  She’d joined us at our table, a little taken aback to discover that I wasn’t alone. I introduced TJ as my assistant, and that mollified her some. He’s a black man in his twenties—I don’t know his exact age, but then I still don’t know his last name, for all that he’s a virtual member of the family—and this morning he was dressed for comfort in baggy bleached denim shorts and a black T-shirt with the sleeves and neckband cut off. He didn’t look much like my assistant, or anybody else’s, except perhaps a dope dealer’s. I could tell she’d be more comfortable if it were just
the two of us, but I’d only have to fill TJ in afterward, and I figured she could get over it, and she did.

  I said, “Trust is at the basis of most enduring relationships.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself, but—”

  “It’s also a key component of most scams and con games. They couldn’t work without it. You might have an easier time trusting this guy if you can establish that there’s no abiding reason not to trust him.”

  “And that’s the other thing I keep telling myself,” she said. “It seems tacky, but I can’t get past the fact that I don’t really know a thing about him. It’s not like my parents and his parents are friends, or I met him at a church social.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “On the Internet.”

  “One of the dating services?”

  She nodded, and gave its name. “I don’t know how the hell else people are supposed to hook up in this city,” she said. “I work all day. In fact I’m supposed to be at my desk in twenty minutes, but Tinkerbell’s not gonna die if I’m ten minutes late. I spend my days at the office and my nights at AA meetings. My last relationship was with somebody I knew from the program. That gets you past the small talk, but then when things don’t work out one of you has to start going to different meetings.” She glanced at my left hand. “You’re married, right? Is she in the program?”

  “No.”

  “How’d you meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  We met in an after-hours gin joint, at Danny Boy Bell’s table. She was a young call girl then, and I was a cop with a wife and two kids. But that was a lot more than she needed to know, and what I said was that Elaine and I had known each other years ago, that we’d met up again after having lost contact, and that this time it had worked out for us.

  “That’s romantic,” she said.

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Well, the men in my past, I hope to God they stay there. My boyfriend in high school was cute, but he never got over it when I threw up in the middle of… well, never mind. Jesus, I wish you could smoke in here. If you can have a cup of coffee you ought to be able to have a cigarette with it. Our tightass mayor should go fuck himself. Can you believe he wants to ban smoking outside, too? Like it’s not bad enough you have to go out in the street for a smoke? I mean, who does he think he is?”