by James Ellroy
"Why is it so hard to believe? We conned each other, Billy. You pretended to repent and I pretended to believe you. You pretended to re-form and I pretended to be on your side. Now we can both stop pretending."
Billy was silent for a moment. Then he said, "I was trying to con you at the beginning."
"No kidding."
"There was a point where it turned into something else, but it started out as a scam. It was the only way I could think of to stay alive. You saw through it?"
"Of course."
"But you pretended to go along with it. Why?"
"Is it that hard to figure out?"
"It doesn't make any sense. What do you gain by it? My death? If you wanted me dead all you had to do was tear up my letter. The state was all set to kill me."
"They'd have taken forever," Paul said bitterly. "Delay after delay, and always the possibility of a reversal and a retrial, always the possibility of a commutation of sentence."
"There wouldn't have been a reversal, and it took you working for me to get my sentence commuted. There would have been delays, but there'd already been a few of them before I got around to writing to you. It couldn't have lasted too many years longer, and it would have added up to a lot less than it has now, with all the time I spent serving life and waiting for the parole board to open the doors. If you'd just let it go, I'd be dead and buried by now."
"You'll be dead soon," Paul told him. "And buried. It won't be much longer. Your grave's already dug. I took care of that before I drove to the prison to pick you up."
"They'll come after you, Paul. When I don't show up for my initial appointment with my parole officer—"
"They'll get in touch, and I'll tell them we had a drink and shook hands and you went off on your own. It's not my fault if you decided to skip town and violate the terms of your parole."
He took a breath. He said, "Paul, don't do this."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm begging you. I don't want to die."
"Ah," Paul said. "That's why."
"What do you mean?"
"If I left it to the state," he said, "they'd have been killing a dead man. By the time the last appeal was denied and the last request for a stay of execution turned down, you'd have been resigned to the inevitable. They'd strap you to a gurney and give you a shot, and it would be just like going to sleep."
"That's what they say."
"But now you want to live. You adjusted to prison, you made a life for yourself in there, and then you finally made parole, icing on the cake, and now you genuinely want to live. You've really got a life now, Billy, and I'm going to take it away from you."
"You're serious about this."
"I've never been more serious about anything."
"You must have been planning this for years."
"From the very beginning."
"Jesus, it's the most thoroughly premeditated crime in the history of the world, isn't it? Nothing I can do about it, either. You've got me tied tight and the chair won't tip over. Is there anything I can say that'll make you change your mind?"
"Of course not."
"That's what I thought." He sighed. "Get it over with."
"I don't think so."
"Huh?"
"This won't be what the state hands out," Paul Dandridge said. "A minute ago you were begging me to let you live. Before it's over you'll be begging me to kill you."
"You're going to torture me."
"That's the idea."
"In fact you've already started, haven't you? This is the mental part."
"Very perceptive of you, Billy."
"For all the good it does me. This is all because of what I did to your sister, isn't it?"
"Obviously."
"I didn't do it, you know. It was another Billy Croydon that killed her, and I can barely remember what he was like."
"That doesn't matter."
"Not to you, evidently, and you're the one calling the shots. I'm sure Kierkegaard had something useful to say about this sort of situation, but I'm damned if I can call it to mind. You knew I was conning you, huh? Right from the jump?"
"Of course."
"I thought it was a pretty good letter I wrote you."
"It was a masterpiece, Billy. But that didn't mean it wasn't easy to see through."
"So now you dish it out and I take it," Billy Croydon said, "until you get bored and end it, and I wind up in the grave you've already dug for me. And that's the end of it. I wonder if there's a way to turn it around"
"Not a chance."
"Oh, I know I'm not getting out of here alive, Paul, but there's more than one way of turning something around. Let's see now. You know, the letter you got wasn't the first one I wrote to you."
"So?"
"The past is always with you, isn't it? I'm not the same man as the guy who killed your sister, but he's still there inside somewhere. Just a question of calling him up."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Just talking to myself, I guess. I was starting to tell you about that first letter. I never sent it, you know, but I kept it. For the longest time I held on to it and read it whenever I wanted to relive the experience. Then it stopped working, or maybe I stopped wanting to call up the past, but whatever it was I quit reading it. I still held on to it, and then one day I realized I didn't want to own it anymore. So I tore it up and got rid of it."
"That's fascinating."
"But I read it so many times I bet I can bring it back word for word." His eyes locked with Paul Dandridge's, and his lips turned up in the slightest suggestion of a smile. He said, "'Dear Paul, Sitting here in this cell waiting for the day to come when they put a needle in my arm and flush me down God's own toilet, I found myself thinking about your testimony in court. I remember how you said your sister was a good-hearted girl who spent her short life bringing pleasure to everyone who knew her. According to your testimony, knowing this helped you rejoice in her life at the same time that it made her death so hard to take.
"'Well, Paul, in the interest of helping you rejoice some more, I thought I'd tell you just how much pleasure your little sister brought to me. I've got to tell you that in all my life I never got more pleasure from anybody. My first look at Karen brought me pleasure, just watching her walk across campus, just looking at those jiggling tits and that tight little ass and imagining the fun I was going to have with them"
"Stop it, Croydon!"
"You don't want to miss this, Paulie. 'Then when I had her tied up in the back seat of the car with her mouth taped shut, I have to say she went on being a real source of pleasure. Just looking at her in the rearview mirror was enjoyable, and from time to time I would stop the car and lean into the back to run my hands over her body. I don't think she liked it much, but I enjoyed it enough for the both of us.'"
"You're a son of a bitch."
"And you're an asshole. You should have let the state put me out of everybody's misery. Failing that, you should have let go of the hate and sent the new William Croydon off to rejoin society. There's a lot more to the letter, and I remember it perfectly." He tilted his head, resumed quoting from memory. "'Tell me something, Paul. Did you ever fool around with Karen yourself? I bet you did. I can picture her when she was maybe eleven, twelve years old, with her little titties just beginning to bud out, and you'd have been seventeen or eighteen yourself, so how could you stay away from her? She's sleeping and you walk into her room and sit on the edge of her bed" He grinned. "I always liked that part. And there's lots more. You enjoying your revenge, Paulie? Is it as sweet as they say it is?"
CRACK
1999: James W. Hall
JAMES W. HALL was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, but has lived in Florida most of his adult life. He received a BA in literature in 1969 from Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College), an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University (1970), and a PhD in literature from the University of Utah (1977). A full professor, he has taught literature and creative writing
at Florida International University for more than three decades.
His writing career began with four books of poetry and several short stories in such literary journals as Georgia Review and Kenyon Review before he turned to the mystery genre with Under Cover of Daylight (1986), which introduced the character Thorn. Thorn, a cranky middle-aged loner who earns a modest living tying fishing flies, finds himself unexpectedly involved in mysteries when he'd rather be left alone to fish, but he cannot turn his back on friends, relatives, and neighbors who need his help. He is reminiscent of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, but without the charm. He has appeared in ten novels, one of which, Blackwater Sound (2002), won the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel from the Private Eye Writers of America. The author's writing, both in the Thorn series and in his six nonseries novels, is clearly influenced by the hard-boiled style of Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald. Most of his books are set in Florida and often involve serious issues such as illegal animal smuggling and fish farming, but Thorn (and Hall) never gets on a soapbox.
"Crack" was first published in the anthology Murder and Obsession (New York: Mysterious Press, 1999); it was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America and was selected for the 2000 edition of The Best American Mystery Stories.
***
WHEN I FIRST saw the slit of light coming through the wall, I halted abruptly on the stairway, and instantly my heart began to thrash with a giddy blend of dread and craving.
At the time, I was living in Spain, a section named Puerto Viejo, or the Old Port, in the small village of Algorta just outside the industrial city of Bilbao. It was a filthy town, a dirty region, with a taste in the air of old pennies and a patina of grime dulling every bright surface. The sunlight strained through perpetual clouds that had the density and monotonous luster of lead. It was to have been my year of flamenco y sol, but instead I was picked to be the Fulbright fellow of a dour Jesuit university in Bilbao on the northern coast where the umbrellas were pocked by ceaseless acid rain and the customary dress was black—shawls, dresses, berets, raincoats, shirts, and trousers. It was as if the entire Basque nation was in perpetual mourning.
The night I first saw the light I was drunk. All afternoon I had been swilling Rioja on the balcony overlooking the harbor, celebrating the first sunny day in a month. It was October and despite the brightness and clarity of the light, my wife had been darkly unhappy all day, even unhappier than usual. At nine o'clock she was already in bed paging aimlessly through month-old magazines and sipping her sherry. I finished with the dishes and double-checked all the locks and began to stumble up the stairs of our 250-year-old stone house that only a few weeks before our arrival in Spain had been subdivided into three apartments.
I was midway up the stairs to the second floor when I saw the slim line of the light shining through a chink in the new mortar. There was no debate, not even a millisecond of equivocation about the propriety of my actions. In most matters I considered myself a scrupulously moral man. I had always been one who could be trusted with other people's money or their most damning secrets. But like so many of my fellow puritans I long ago had discovered that when it came to certain libidinous temptations I was all too easily swept off my safe moorings into the raging currents of erotic gluttony.
I immediately pressed my eye to the crack.
It took me a moment to get my bearings, to find the focus. And when I did, my knees softened and my breath deserted me. The view was beyond anything I might have hoped for. The small slit provided a full panorama of my neighbors' second story. At knee-high level I could see their master bathroom and a few feet to the left their king-size brass bed.
That first night the young daughter was in the bathroom with the door swung open. If the lights had been off in their apartment or the bathroom door had been closed I might never have given the peephole another look. But that girl was standing before the full-length mirror and she was lifting her fifteen-year-old breasts that had already developed quite satisfactorily, lifting them both at once and reshaping them with her hands to meet some standard that only she could see. After a while she released them from her grip, then lifted them on her flat palms as though offering them to her image in the mirror. They were beautiful breasts, with small nipples that protruded nearly an inch from the aureole, and she handled them beautifully, in a fashion that was far more mature and knowing than one would expect from any ordinary fifteen-year-old.
I did not know her name. I still don't, though certainly she is the most important female who ever crossed my path. Far more crucial in my life's trajectory than my mother or either of my wives. Yet it seems appropriate that I should remain unaware of her name. That I should not personalize her in any way. That she should remain simply an abstraction—simply the girl who destroyed me.
In the vernacular of that year in Spain, she was known as a niña pera, or pear girl. One of hundreds of shapely and succulent creatures who cruised about the narrow, serpentine roads of Algorta and Bilbao on loud mopeds, their hair streaming in their wake. She was as juicy as any of them. More succulent than most, as I had already noticed from several brief encounters as we exited from adjacent doors onto the narrow alley-streets of the Old Port. On these two or three occasions, I remember fumbling through my Spanish greetings and taking a stab at small talk while she, with a patient but faintly disdainful smile, suffered my clumsy attempts at courtesy. Although she wore the white blouse and green plaid skirts of all the other Catholic schoolgirls, such prosaic dress failed to disguise her pearness. She was achingly succulent, blindingly juicy. At the time I was twice her age. Double the fool and half the man I believed I was.
That first night, after a long, hungering look, I pulled away from the crack of light and with equal measures of reluctance and urgency, I marched back down the stairs and went immediately to the kitchen and found the longest and flattest knife in the drawer and brought it back to the stairway, and with surgical precision I inserted the blade into the soft mortar and as my pulse throbbed, I painstakingly doubled the size of my peephole.
When I withdrew the blade and applied my eye again to the slit, I now could see my niña pera from her thick black waist-length hair to her bright pink toenails. While at the same time I calculated that if my neighbors ever detected the lighted slit from their side and dared to press an eye to the breach, they would be rewarded with nothing more than a static view of the 250-year-old stones of my rented stairwell.
I knew little about my neighbors except that the father of my pear girl was a vice consul for that South American country whose major role in international affairs seemed to be to supply America with her daily dose of granulated ecstasy.
He didn't look like a gangster. He was tall and elegant, with wavy black hair that touched his shoulders and an exquisitely precise beard. He might have been a maestro of a European symphony or a painter of romantic landscapes. And his young wife could easily have been a slightly older sister to my succulent one. She was in her middle thirties and had the wide and graceful hips, the bold, uplifting breasts, the gypsy features and black unfathomable eyes that seemed to spring directly from the archetypal pool of my carnality. In the Jungian parlance of my age, the wife was my anima, while the daughter was the anima of my adolescent self. They were perfect echoes of the dark secret female who glowed like uranium in the bowels of my psyche.
That first night when the bedsprings squeaked behind me, and my wife padded across the bedroom floor for her final visit to the bathroom, I allowed myself one last draft of the amazing sight before me. The niña was now stooped forward and was holding a small hand mirror to her thicket of pubic hair, poking and searching with her free hand through the dense snarl as if she were seeking that tender part of herself she had discovered by touch but not yet by sight.
Trembling and breathless, I pressed my two hands flat against the stone wall and shoved myself away and with my heart in utter disarray, I carried my lechery up the stairs to bed.
&
nbsp; The next day I set about learning my neighbors' schedule and altering mine accordingly. My wife had taken a job as an English teacher in a nearby instituto and was occupied every afternoon and through the early evening. My duties at the university occupied me Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I was expected to offer office hours before and after my classes on those days. However, I immediately began to curtail these sessions because I discovered that my niña pera returned from school around three o'clock, and on many days she showered and changed into casual clothes, leaving her school garb in a heap on the bathroom floor as she fled the apartment for an afternoon of boy-watching in the Algorta pubs.
To my department chairman's dismay, I began to absent myself from the university hallways immediately after my last class of the day, hurrying with my umbrella along the five blocks to the train station so I could be home by 2:55. In the silence of my apartment, hunched breathless at my hole, I watched her undress. I watched the steam rise from her shower, and I watched her towel herself dry. I watched her on the toilet and I watched her using the sanitary products she preferred. I watched her touch the flawless skin of her face with her fingertips, applying makeup or wiping it away. On many afternoons I watched her examine herself in the full-length mirror. Running her hands over that seamless flesh, trying out various seductive poses while an expression played on her face that was equal parts exultation and shame — that peculiar adolescent emotion I so vividly recalled.
These were the times when I would have touched myself were I going to do so. But these moments at the peephole, while they were intensely sexual, were not the least masturbatory. Instead, they had an almost spiritual component. As though I were worshiping at the shrine of hidden mysteries, allowed by divine privilege to see beyond the walls of my own paltry life. In exchange for this gift I was cursed to suffer a brand of reverential horniness I had not imagined possible. I lusted for a vision that was forever intangible, a girl I could not touch, nor smell, nor taste. A girl who was no more than a scattering of light across my retina.