We Were Killers Once

by Becky Masterman

  Santangelo indicated a bedside table with a glass of water on it, half full. Beaufort took the glass, held it to the priest’s lips, and hoped the guy wasn’t a better con than he was. If the man was scared, he wasn’t showing it. Santangelo put his paper-dry hand over Beaufort’s that held the glass. Before he could take it away, Santangelo pulled the hand to his face.

  “Your hands are cold and sweaty,” Santangelo said. “The sweat smells like fear.” He sniffed again, as if sampling a new wine. “And a little like damnation.”

  Beaufort drew his hand away and put the glass back on the table without letting himself be taunted. Then he said, “Okay. Talk.”

  When Santangelo did not talk, Beaufort picked up the morphine dispenser and moved it to the table next to the bed.

  “There was a confession,” Santangelo said. “The penitent said you were still alive and dangerous. That you threatened to hurt someone. I always suspected that included me.”

  “The penitent. Dick Hickock,” Beaufort said. “Say his name. We both know it.”

  “Richard Eugene Hickock. Was everything true, what he said about you?” Santangelo asked.

  Beaufort felt like the priest was baiting him, and tried not to feel that. “What difference could it make?”

  “You’re the one who’s still searching for the answer.”

  “And you’re the one who can give it to me. Tell me what he confessed to.”

  “Sorry, no can do. I don’t make up the canonical rules. I just follow them.”

  “You smug bastard. Was it in writing?”

  “Interesting question. If I had a document, and the document made clear who the penitent was, what would I do with that document? Now that I’m dying, who would I give it to? These are great mysteries, yes.” Saying all that exhausted Santangelo, and his head seemed to sink further into the pillow afterward. His hand fluttered over where the morphine dispenser had been.

  Beaufort took his index finger and found the pulse in the side of Santangelo’s throat. For a dying man it was pretty strong. Maybe the fear he said he didn’t feel made this so.

  “Have you talked with Detective Ian Meadows? Maybe just over the phone? Did you tell him you have the confession?” Beaufort asked.

  “That’s three questions and you are, as they say in baseball, striking out.” Santangelo’s eyes gleamed in the dark. He may have been a priest, but he would have made a damn good poker player. He went on, “Do you know, I can tell someone that someone meeting your description was here without breaking the seal of confession? A very small man, with a full head of silver hair, and a face like a weasel’s.”

  Somewhere a bell sounded.

  “What was that?” Beaufort asked.

  “That’s the call for midnight prayers for the die-hards. One of them will check on me.”

  “We’re running out of time. Do you understand what I can do?”

  “You think it matters to me whether I get another twenty-four hours? I’m near death and can think of less banal ways to spend my last moments.” And the smallest of smiles, or a grimace of pain.

  Beaufort knew he had to send a stronger message, that he meant business. He pulled up the hem of his brown robe until he could get his hands underneath it. He lifted his covered hands and pressed them to Santangelo’s face. Through the cloth he pinched the man’s nostrils shut with one hand and clamped the other over his mouth.

  He had caught the priest by surprise. After trying and failing to take one breath the man lay still. When he thought the priest had gotten the message but was still conscious, Beaufort pulled his hands away. The priest opened his mouth and sucked loudly at the blessed air.

  “I don’t want to kill you, old man. No matter what you think, I’d take no pleasure in it. Last chance,” Beaufort said. “Where’s the confession?”

  Beaufort could barely see the slight move of the head that indicated negation, but negation of what he couldn’t know. He cut off the priest’s air the same as before and whispered as loudly as he dared when he had pulled his hands away and Santangelo had gotten his breath once more. “Where is it?”

  “It’s all there, everything. Everything you did, and it’s far away and safe.”

  “Where? Did you leave it at Lansing?”

  There was almost a flicker of sympathy in those eyes that looked on Santangelo’s killer. “You’re in such a hell. It almost makes me want to absolve you.”

  “Did you give it to Father Carlo?”

  Taking that chance was worth it to see the old man’s face. Even that bit of name finally cut through the priest’s composure. His eyes and mouth opened wide.

  But then he tried to shout for help.

  Maybe what they say about the religious living longer because they lead such healthy lives had some truth to it. Even with stage four cancer it took a longer time than Beaufort had expected for the priest to die.

  Beaufort picked up the priest’s right arm that dangled off the side of the bed after his struggles. He pressed the palm of the hand to his forehead as if even after death the priest had some power to cool the burning in his brain. It did no good. So, first arranging the arms next to the body, he straightened out a few wrinkles in the bedsheets. It was too dark to tell if the face was reddened where the cloth had been pressed against the man’s face. Not too suspicious, Beaufort thought.

  He heard a sound out in the hallway. Beaufort slipped behind the bed, which was out from the wall and raised a bit at the head for the ease of the patient. He hoped the monk coming in was too sleepy to notice any shadows he might cast on the floor.

  The monk came over to the side of the bed and seemed to lean over Santangelo, though from his position, and holding his breath, Beaufort couldn’t be sure. The three men, two living and one dead, were separated by less than three feet. After a few moments—perhaps he was trying to rouse the man, or at least determine if he was sleeping comfortably—or feeling for his pulse—the monk ran out of the room.

  There was no time to see how long it would take for him to rouse the other monks and bring a whole troop of them into the room. Beaufort stood up and sped out, closing the door not as quietly as he would have liked, and ran left down the hallway toward the pilgrims’ quarters. There was noise in the hall behind him, so he didn’t bother to relock the outside door.

  Running back to his car, past the statue of Mary, he thought about how good he had felt arriving here this night, and how unexpectedly bad he felt now even though he had a decent lead on where the confession was. Santangelo’s last words, about Beaufort being in hell, kept repeating … he couldn’t stop those words. How did the priest know?

  But then if Santangelo were still alive Beaufort would tell him that it wasn’t hell he was in. Hell was permanent. This was purgatory because he was finding a way out.

  Eleven

  My questions about Jane weren’t the only things fired up the night that Gemma-Kate interviewed Carlo. I remembered mentioning to Carlo that night in bed how I’d checked from time to time about whether there’d been any progress on the Walker family murder case. So here I was sitting at my computer on a slow day, googling. I also made a mental note to get back the book I’d loaned to Gemma-Kate.

  That copy of In Cold Blood? My father gave me that first edition for my twelfth birthday. I read it then and several times since. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Truman Capote’s masterwork, here’s the story according to Capote: Two guys, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Smith, meet in prison where they’re doing time for petty crimes. Hickock tells Smith that another prisoner, Floyd Wells, has told him of a well-to-do Kansas farmer named Herb Clutter, for whom Wells has worked. Wells says that Clutter keeps ten thousand dollars in a safe in his house office. Hickock gets Smith to help him rob Clutter. In Cold Blood relates their adventures, on road trips from Mexico to Florida, passing bad checks for cash, including the night when they go to the Clutter place in Holcomb, Kansas, and with a knife and shotgun slaughter Mr. and Mrs. Clutter, and their two teenage chil
dren.

  They find less than one hundred dollars.

  Ultimately, the two men are captured by the FBI in Las Vegas on December 30, 1959.

  Smith confesses to killing two of the Clutters, but later changes his confession to say he killed the whole family. When questioned, he says it’s because he feels sorry for Hickock’s mother, “who is a sweet woman.” No one, not Capote or Special Agent Alvin Dewey, questions the motivation for this reversal. The men at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation are so happy to finally find the killers they don’t care about the fine points of their confession.

  While Hickock and Smith are incarcerated, it’s discovered that they were in the area of Osprey, Florida, at the exact time that the Walker family was killed. That was late December, just about a month after the Clutter killing. Prime suspects, they’re polygraphed, which is thought to confirm their innocence. Despite some witnesses reporting them in the area, and considerable physical circumstantial evidence, such as scratch marks on Hickock’s face that could have been made with a high heel, the state doesn’t press its case. This is nuts. Maybe the state doesn’t want to delay hanging them, and the Clutter case is enough to accomplish that goal.

  Subsequently, they’re convicted only of the Clutter murders, and executed in 1965. In Cold Blood is published shortly after.

  Now here’s the thing that has always intrigued me.

  It’s not news that there are discrepancies in Capote’s telling. This is well established. For example, there is no proof that “Willie Jay,” said to be a religious mentor of Perry, and an early cellmate of Dick’s, existed. Invented by Capote, or invented by Perry Smith? I often wondered if it was because most of Capote’s interviews were with Perry Smith, and all he got was Smith’s account of the events. What we get from that account is that Smith is a poor victim of childhood misfortune and abuse. Sensitive. Liked to paint and play his guitar. A TV series they made once had him crying and wetting his pants.

  Hickock, on the other hand, comes across as a sociopath, stupid and cruel. Smith painted him as the ringleader who kept insisting “they would leave no witnesses.” A pedophile who wanted to rape Nancy Clutter until Smith bravely stopped him—by killing her himself.

  But if you go to the Kansas Historical Society Archives you see a different Dick Hickock. This one has been reading law during his five years on death row prior to his execution. He’s writing letters that show a degree of articulation and intelligence unlike the man portrayed by Capote. Sure, that he’s a murderer, and a cold-blooded one, that cannot be denied, but the man has more depth than what we read about him in Capote’s account.

  Was Smith telling the whole truth? And if not, why not? Was it to weave a sympathetic portrait of himself with just enough villainy to titillate an author like Capote?

  And was it sheer coincidence that the two men were in the neighborhood when the Walker family was murdered?

  Questions like that have obsessed more than a few over the years.

  My internet research brought me to a cold case investigator named Ian Meadows, who operated out of Sarasota County. He had actually gotten permission to exhume the bodies of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, to check their DNA against that in the semen found in the underpants of Christine Walker, the mother who had been raped and shot. The DNA was pretty corrupted in both the bodies and the pants after so many years, but the analysts thought it was good enough for testing. No match was found.

  For the umpteenth time I thought, Who killed you?

  A welcome distraction. I made a mental note to one of these days call the detective, or even go over to Sarasota to visit him the next time I was in Florida. Find out if he had a next move. These guys loved to talk about cases. Seriously, give them an opening and you can’t shut them up.

  Twelve

  Beaufort’s drive took him west on I-10, a straight shot out the panhandle of Florida through Alabama, Mississippi (passing back through Pascagoula), Louisiana, and finally Texas. Only not so finally. Texas was the worst, more distance from side to side than all the other states put together, and El Paso was at the farthest point west. He drove five miles over the speed limit the whole way to make the best time possible without making a highway patrolman suspicious.

  He wasn’t expected in El Paso until three nights later, so he took his time, doing about five hundred miles a day, stopping at motels now that he had the extra money. It was easy to find computers at each stop, twice at small libraries, and once in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express. From one of those locations he sent an email under the account he had created. The librarian in the Pascagoula library was right about being able to use his email account from any computer. From one of the places he stopped he sent an email to the current chaplain at Lansing. He said he was doing some genealogy research (from TV commercials everybody seemed to be doing it) and was looking into a relative who had been a chaplain there. Did they have a record of every minister who had served there, and could he get it? Hopefully with the years they were there?

  He hoped a chaplain would be a little more cooperative than a government bureaucrat. It didn’t appear that way, though. The next time he was able to get to a computer, the next night, there was no response waiting.

  Instead, he went back to the Kansas Historical Society Archives and continued to pour through Hickock’s and Smith’s files at Lansing Penitentiary. Hickock had a never-ending stream of correspondence, five-and six-page single-spaced, handwritten letters addressed to the warden and his attorney Joseph Jenkins, going on and on about how it wasn’t fair that death row prisoners should have to be incarcerated next to the petty criminals who were generally more rowdy at all times of the day and night so he couldn’t sleep. Another letter explaining why he should be allowed to have art supplies in order to spend some time drawing. Another letter begging for a radio to help the death row prisoners preserve their sanity. Even a brief one requesting watermelon. Except for the art supplies, most of his requests were rejected. Beaufort had to read every word in every document because he wasn’t totally sure what he was looking for, and a clue might be contained in a phrase anywhere in any letter or legal brief.

  There was the letter from Capote asking Warden Crouse for permission to interview the men—initially denied—newspaper articles about Smith going on a hunger strike in order to “cheat the gallows,” a telegram from Smith to Capote sent the day before his execution, asking if Capote would come visit him. A letter from Hickock’s mother that mentioned him finding God. Fat chance on that, Mom.

  Letters from Hickock to his attorney. None of the letters talked about a separate document, any confession that would supersede the official one he’d made. Just to see how far this internet could get him, Beaufort googled the name Joseph Jenkins. Nothing likely, just a real estate agent somewhere in Idaho. Joseph Jenkins Attorney, he typed. Nothing. Man long dead, probably, even the law firm defunct.

  There was an article published in the December 1961 issue of Male magazine, in which Hickock himself told his life story. Beaufort scanned the article as fast as he could read, holding his breath to the end to see if Hickock had ratted him out there in any way. True to his promise, though, Hickock said nothing about Beaufort, didn’t even mention “the boy and his grandfather” that Smith had told Capote about, leaving the identity of the pair anonymous as they would appear in the book.

  He did not enjoy doing any of this. He did not like to remember his time with them. During his association with Hickock and Smith, and in the aftermath of the Clutter and Walker killings, Beaufort could never have anticipated how famous Smith and Hickock would become because of Truman Capote’s book. Damn bad luck. If Beaufort had known that would happen he never would have hooked up with the two of them.

  When he stopped in the early evening, in Houston, Beaufort found the library still open and finally got the message he had been waiting for. Someone named Phillip Payne, the Reverend Phillip Payne, wrote that the list of chaplains serving at Lansing prison was quite extensive, and wo
uld he be able to narrow down his search by date?

  Beaufort wrote back that he could narrow the search to 1960 to 1970.

  Payne must have been at his computer, because the answer came back immediately.

  DEAR MR. NOLAN: In 1960 during the time in question the chaplain at Lansing had been Werner Krause, and was replaced in 1965 by Mr. John L. Hurld who continued well into the seventies. Does this serve your purpose?

  DEAR REVEREND PAYNE: Were either of these chaplains Catholic?

  DEAR MR. NOLAN: No, Mr. Krause was Lutheran, and Mr. Hurld was Presbyterian.

  DEAR REVEREND PAYNE: Was there any Catholic priest working at the prison during that time?

  MR. NOLAN: One was on call when needed, a Father Victor Santangelo. Other than that I can offer that there was a seminarian doing his chaplaincy at Lansing. A note in the file said that he was recommended by Father Santangelo. That was for three months beginning in 1972. I know that’s outside your date range.

  Payne gave Beaufort that seminarian’s name. Carlo (not Carlos as Abbot Franklin had said) DiForenza.

  Santangelo. Son of a bitch, Santangelo. Santangelo calling him stupid still rankled, would sometimes be the first thing he thought about when he woke in the middle of the night, and it gnawed at him. I gotcher stupid right here, he thought.

  It felt good to finally be doing something. When Hickock and Smith were still alive he had lived in fear that they would rat him out. Then he stopped worrying when they died. Then he started worrying again with this whole forensic science business. Meadows had eased his fears for just a moment before telling him about the suspected confession. Then Santangelo had confirmed the confession, and now Beaufort knew where it might be. Having become an expert with internet searches, he found he was headed in the right direction, toward Tucson, Arizona, where this Carlo DiForenza lived. He was a genius, and lucky to boot. Genius and luck put him only a ten-hour drive from his next target.