Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  Police found no pills in Richie’s room, but they did discover a small amount of marijuana in a plastic bag. Several days later, when Carol had the strength to enter the room and dismantle its trappings, she found one of his nature encyclopedias with a two-inch-square hole cut into the pages, a secret place to hide whatever Richie wanted to hide.

  At the funeral home in East Meadow, Richie’s body was put into a poplar coffin with a mahogany finish and a white-satin lining. Joe Marck told George that Richie was eligible to be buried for free in Long Island National Cemetery, because George was a veteran. Had the death occurred four months later, after Richie’s eighteenth birthday, he could not have lain in a military dependent’s grave.

  On the second night of Richie’s wake, the coffin was open. Carol was both surprised and touched at the large number of East Meadow youngsters, seventy-five at least, who came to pay their respects. She had no idea that her son could count that many friends. As it had been in Richie’s life, there were both “heads” and “straights” at his death. A few of the former, Carol noticed, were obviously stoned for the occasion.

  Richie was dressed in the gray Edwardian suit he had worn to the dinner-dance at the New York Hilton. Neither Mark nor Peanuts had ever seen their friend dressed formally, and they muttered to one another that jeans and a polo shirt would have become him more.

  One further change in Richie’s appearance incensed his young friends.

  Richie’s wispy red beard was gone, his sideburns raised, his stubborn red hair neatly, forever cut. The undertaker’s razor had accomplished what George could not do. It had, of course, been the father’s idea. He conferred with Carol and she agreed. There was criticism of the barbering, but George dismissed it. “I didn’t want him to go to his grave with that Charles Manson look,” he said. “I wanted to remember my son the way I wanted him to look.”

  Sheila passed by the coffin and looked at Richie for a long time. Afterward she told Peanuts, “He looks exactly the way he did when I first met him, when he was fourteen, before the trouble with his father began.”

  “I guess that’s the point,” said Peanuts, bitterly.

  Brick Pavall asked his mother to telephone Carol and ask if his presence at the wake would offend anyone. Carol said all were welcome. With a joint quickly smoked to fortify his courage, Brick entered the parlor and approached the coffin. Later he broke down and became hysterical, more so than anyone else.

  When Peanuts passed by, George said pointedly, loud enough for the boy to hear, “I hope this will be a lesson to some of these kids.”

  Peanuts went outside and told his sister, “What is the lesson? Be good or your father will shoot you?”

  Later that night, Mark and Brick met to share a bottle of apple wine and talk of Richie. Brick reminisced about their drug experiences. “The night before he died, he copped downs,” said Brick. “I sold him the downs and the funny thing was, they weren’t too good. I warned him they were bad. The next day—the day he died—he looks at me out his car window and his eyes are rolling around and he says, ‘You think these downs aren’t good?’ He was reeling! Downs always hit him harder than anybody else.”

  Mark disagreed. The blame, he said, lay not with drugs but with George Diener.

  “That old man is a fuckin’ hard hat,” he said. “He flat hates kids. Maybe he hates us because we have long hair and money and spirit. Mr. Diener is the winner now, you see. You don’t even get to hear the loser’s side, because the loser is dead. Richie’s dead!”

  Brick began to cry again. His grief was real. He had depended on Richie.

  “I was in a fuckin’ trance in that funeral parlor,” went on Mark. “I was flippin’ out seeing my best friend lying in his coffin. I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh, shit, I am at Richie Diener’s death wake.’ How can a father kill something he’s raised since he was an infant? It’s like a puppy. You raise a dog up to five or six and if he goes crazy, you take him to a doctor.

  “If it had been the other way around—Richie with the gun—you think Richie would have gotten off? He’d have been in jail for the rest of his life. I think Mr. Diener planned everything. He kept records, he made tapes, he looked like a conqueror in there tonight—standing there with his arms crossed. Just slidin’ along. Practically accepting congratulations. No wonder Richie hated him.”

  Once, Brick remembered, Richie had run out of his house and to the Blackstone corner to meet his friends. “He was so fuckin’ mad at his old man. He says to me, ‘I’ll give anybody a hundred dollars to kill him.’ I didn’t think he really meant it. Did you?”

  Mark shrugged.

  When it was time to close the coffin, Carol put an old photograph of Boots, Richie’s first dog, beside her son, along with a poem two girls had written and left on the condolence book stand. She found it touching and appropriate, even though she did not know the authors:

  To us you will exist

  in the flowers

  in the trees

  and all things of nature

  God has given us.

  Richie, you are now in a world of peace and happiness forever.

  Pray for us as we pray for you.

  And somewhere, sometime, we shall join.

  Love from all your friends.

  Diane and Joan.

  George asked Carol for one last minute alone with Richie. When he caught up with her, she asked what he had done.

  “I asked Richie to forgive me,” he said.

  Mr. Barbour, principal of East Meadow High, was requested by a delegation of Richie’s friends to comment on his death over the public-address system during the home room period.

  He refused. “We’ve had other students who died and made no such remarks,” he said. “I don’t want to establish a precedent.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Although it was not required, George asked permission to testify personally before the grand jury investigating the charge of murder. Both he and Carol made appearances before the panel of respectable, middle-class Nassau County citizens—the kind of people George felt sure would understand.

  So often had he told his story by now, to police, to his lawyer, to his and Carol’s parents, that he felt he could get through it without weeping. But he began to cry at the moment when Richie faced him with the steak knife. Some of the jurors cried too.

  Grand jury deliberations are secret, but it was learned that the decision was unanimous. They voted not to indict George Diener for the murder of his son. He was a free man.

  The verdict was not altogether popular in the community. Judge Burstein of Family Court, for one, was openly annoyed that the case would never be heard in public trial. “As far as I’m concerned,” she said, “it was a deliberate act. As far as I’m concerned, he murdered his kid.”

  Hundreds of letters from all over the world poured into the Diener house, most expressing sympathy for the loss, many expressing approval of what George had done. Carol answered every one, even the cruel notes that made her break down and weep and send Russell outside to play. On the day of his release from jail, George took his younger son aside and spoke to him quietly of what had happened. “Richie was very sick,” said George to the little boy. Russell nodded, saying he understood and did not hold his father to blame. But both parents wondered what memories lodged within their second son and what the years would bring.

  The Dieners found strength in the letters that told of other tragic households. One California man, the president of a large corporation, wrote on his letterhead to say that he and his wife propped a chair against their locked bedroom door each night, so fearful were they that their son, “also a down freak,” would murder them as they slept.

  Fritz the dealer had not attended the wake or the funeral of his friend and customer. It was not that he lacked grief over Richie’s death, it was just that he was more upset over the loss of the $400 he had paid for ten thousand Seconal pills that were never delivered. On the two nights that Richie lay in the funeral parlo
r, Fritz waited in the bitterly cold parking lot of Roosevelt Field for the Southampton connection, who never showed up with the grocery sack full of barbiturates.

  Two months later, around a table at Ryan’s, talk turned—as it often did—to Richie’s death. Suddenly Fritz grew morose. He revealed his shame in not going to the funeral and “paying his respects.”

  Another boy mentioned that he and his girl had visited Richie’s grave the previous Sunday. This gave Fritz an idea. He would journey this very night to say good-bye to Richie! The second boy warned him that the grave was difficult to find, even in daylight hours, so enormous was the cemetery.

  But Fritz, emboldened by some good hash he had elected to use himself rather than chip off and sell, was insistent. He received instructions from the friend on how to find Richie’s grave.

  The cemetery was closed and dark and cold. Fritz parked his car and climbed over the fence. He tried to follow the instructions, he looked for the grove of cedar trees, he tried to find the curving road with the bushes beside it, but suddenly all he could see were tens of thousands of white markers on graves, all alike, none of which contained the name or the body of Richie Diener.

  He began to run, wildly, hysterically, in panic falling across the tombstones, fear rising in his throat. For a moment he could not even find the road on which he had parked his car. A tree branch ripped the sleeve from his jacket. A thorn drew blood from his arm. Hurdling the fence, he cried out in happiness to see his car.

  Inside, safe, the doors locked, the music going, he tried to stop his body from trembling. But his limbs would not obey. Then he remembered the piece of aluminum foil in his pocket. Quickly he ate the four Seconals.

  When he turned onto the Long Island Expressway for the drive back to East Meadow, the lights from other cars were growing blurry. The highway surface felt like a downy mattress. Fritz was sleepy, drifting out, but he blessed the downs. They would make everything all right. They always did.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Thomas Thompson (1933–1982) was a bestselling author and one of the finest investigative journalists of his era. Born in Forth Worth, Texas, he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and began his career at the Houston Press. He joined Life as an editor and staff writer in 1961 and covered many major news stories for the magazine, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As Paris bureau chief, Thompson reported on the Six-Day War and was held captive by the Egyptian government along with other Western journalists. His first two books—Hearts (1971), about the rivalry between two famous Houston cardiovascular surgeons, and Richie (1973), the account of a Long Island father who killed his drug-addicted son—established Thompson’s reputation as an originator, along with Truman Capote, of the “nonfiction novel.” In 1976, Thompson published Blood and Money, an investigation into the deaths of Texas socialite Joan Robinson Hill and her husband, John Hill. It sold four million copies in fourteen languages and won the Edgar Award and the Texas Institute of Letters prize for best nonfiction book. To research Serpentine (1979), an account of convicted international serial killer Charles Sobhraj, Thompson flew around the world three times and spent two years in Asia. His other books include Lost! (1975), a true story of shipwreck and survival, and the novel Celebrity (1982), a six-month national bestseller. Among numerous other honors, Thompson received the National Headliner Award for investigative reporting and the Sigma Delta Chi medallion for distinguished magazine writing.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1973 by Thomas Thompson

  Cover design by Kat JK Lee

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4329-8

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10038

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  THOMAS THOMPSON

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