Drew paused, like taking a second look. “No way.”
“What does the letter say?”
“It starts out, ‘To whom it may concern…’”
“Yes?”
“‘My name is Richard Eugene Hickock. I—’”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“What? You know this guy?” Drew asked.
Anniversary surprises be damned. With my brain fuzzy as if I’d just taken some mind-bending drug, I put the break-in on temporary hold, hung up the phone without being sure if I said good-bye, and drove the few minutes down to the framing shop, hoping there were no cops lurking on a side street to make up their ticket quota by end of month.
At the drive into the shopping center I pulled hard right with only the tiniest squeal of the tires, parked, ran into the shop, and had to cool my jets behind a customer who was picking up another job. I waited while Drew packaged the newly framed work in brown paper. I waited while he rang up the charges and took the guy’s credit card. I ground my teeth and waited while the two talked for a few minutes about the weather. People in Arizona usually aren’t in a hurry except for those instances of road rage, where we rank fifth in the country. I remained quiet, my heart idling. I’m working on patience.
When the other customer was gone after exhausting his discussion of the merits of the unseasonable coolness in relation to global warming, Drew gestured me over to his workbench, where a pencil sketch lay next to a handwritten letter. The cardboard backing where it had been sandwiched was faded on the outside and darker in the middle where the sketch had rested. That alone told me it was pretty old. Pretty authentic.
“Nice sketch,” he said, rubbing his ink-stained fingers over his beard as if to muffle the words he felt he had to say. Like I’d done it myself and it was crap. I don’t know where Carlo found it, but the fifties hoodlum look was unmistakable, that long thin face ending in a pointy chin, and the narrowed eyes, one slightly higher and more slitty, that I had seen in so many photographs. As Capote himself had described it more capably, “composed of mismatching parts as though it had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center, the eyes at uneven levels and of uneven size.” In the lower right-hand corner were the initials P.S.
I failed to stifle a gasp. “Do you recognize who this is?” I asked, ever curious about the extent of the younger generation’s cultural illiteracy.
“Looks familiar. Maybe from a television program?” He seemed embarrassed, more and more certain that I had done it myself and wanted recognition for it.
This beat my Kitt Peak present all to hell. I felt like one of those people who discovers a Van Gogh in their attic. I decided not to tell Drew that this was a sketch of Richard Eugene Hickock, almost certainly drawn by his partner in crime Perry Smith. I was leaving it in his hands and thought it better not to reveal its potential value. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. I leaned closer to the single page of lined notebook paper next to it, only confirming that the name was there as Drew had read it to me over the phone.
“Did you read this?” I asked.
“No,” he said. I’m sorry if I’m biased against youth, but I wasn’t surprised at his lack of interest. Maybe he couldn’t even read cursive. I carefully picked up the letter and asked for a folder to get it home safely. The creases where it had been folded in half and then folded in half again so it could be hidden behind the sketch were making the paper tear.
Drew focused on his job. “Your husband asked for this simple wooden frame with a two-inch matting, apricot. How do you like it?”
What I really wanted was to get out of there and get home where I could examine the letter more closely, and do an internet search to make sure it was something original rather than a copy of something already in the archive. “Sure, sure. Fine,” I said about the matting choice. “About the folder?”
Drew touched the Scotch tape that had been used to stick the sketch to the cardboard backing. “This is old stuff,” he said, scraping at a corner of the yellowed, brittle tape. “I should trim that away from the paper. It will make it just a little smaller but there’s no other way. Do you want the backing or should I throw it away?”
“Might as well pop it in the folder there. Good,” I said, restraining myself from screaming at him. Thinking more, I almost told Drew that I couldn’t leave the sketch there after all, that it was too valuable. But it felt as if more than one person had been accusing me of paranoia lately, and I took it to heart. Pretending to scoff at myself for worrying so, I did ask him if he had a safe he could leave it in overnight. He did.
Thirty–five
I forced myself to drive the short distance home without reading the letter to make sure I could get there before Carlo returned so he wouldn’t know I’d seen his present. Then I regretted my delay when I saw Carlo’s car in the garage. I could have lied and said I’d been to the grocery store, but had no groceries to show for it. Easier to simply confess.
“Well, look, you’ve spoiled the surprise,” Carlo said, though without any apparent hard feelings.
“Where did you get that sketch?”
“There you go with the interrogation again.”
I sat down at the dining room table. If my tote bag had contained diamonds I would not have clutched it more tightly. I patted the space next to me and he complied.
“Not a chance, Perfesser. You’re the one who’s always telling me we should have total honesty between us, right? Why didn’t you bring this out when Gemma-Kate was here and we were talking about In Cold Blood?”
“Of course I expected to tell you the story of its acquisition when I gave you the present. But if I showed it to Gemma-Kate that night you would have seen it, and I wouldn’t have been able to surprise you, would I?”
Well, that was intriguing and made my focus shift momentarily from the folded-up letter on the table to Carlo. “What story?” I asked. “How are you connected to this?”
For the first time since I’d known him, Carlo actually looked uncomfortable. A little bit of a grimace on his face at some disagreeable memory. “Let’s look at the letter first,” he said.
That was what I wanted to do, so I took the letter out of my tote bag, placed it on the table in front of us, and very carefully unfolded it so it wouldn’t tear at the folds. We read together:
Dear Father Santangelo:
My name is Richard Eugene Hickock. I was convicted of being an accomplice in the murder of a family by the name of Clutter. My attorney, Mr. Joseph P. Jenkins, has petitioned for a stay of execution. If that is not approved, then I am going to be hanged, so this is my only chance to tell part of the story no one would know otherwise. The truth would not be important if I was the only one involved. I do this because people I love have been threatened and I fear for their lives. These people include my mother and brother, two ex-wives who I do not bear any grudge against, and my four children who at the time of this writing are seven, eight, twelve, and thirteen years of age. I may have done terrible things, and I deserve my fate. But I am not totally vicious the way they paint me, and the way I paint myself.
The confession I have written superceeds any other I provided. If my attorney is successful and my sentence is commuted to life, I will be an ongoing threat to the person who threatens to kill my family. Howsoever, I am caught “between a rock and a hard place,” because if I tell the whole truth now, the appeal will certainly be denied. So I am allowing the lie to continue in order to save my own life, not just my family.
I am going to give the confession for safekeeping to you, under the seal of confession when you come to see me a few days from now. I place this letter here with instructions to share my confession with the authorities if at some time someone in my family feels threatened. I understand this may be useless and even stupid, but I don’t know what else to do and I am half crazy with fear of that boy! Still, I take what steps I can. I have been a bad father, not caring for my children. But I don’t have to die
a bad father.
I hope you are a good man who can keep a secret, and share my story if that becomes necessary.
Sincerely,
Richard Eugene Hickock
Kansas State Penitentiary, Lansing
Prisoner Number 14746
Carlo and I both read quietly, maybe two or three times, then just stared at the document.
“What boy?” I finally asked. “And he threatens to kill Hickock’s family? I take it you got this from Victor Santangelo?”
Carlo scowled. “It must be bogus,” he said.
“Why do you think?”
“Look at the linguistics. ‘Howsoever’? Bit of archaic elegance. Except for the several misspellings there’s an articulateness here that’s far beyond what I’ve known of Richard Hickock. It doesn’t sound like the voice of Hickock as Capote portrays it. Look, he spelled ‘supersedes’ wrong, but it’s a marvel that the word is in his working vocabulary. Keep in mind I’ve read the book as well, and saw the movies, too, not only because everyone did, but because I was working at the same prison that executed these men. Smith’s style has a poetic lilt to it when Capote quotes him, but Hickock has the voice of a…”
“Depraved, ignorant savage?”
“Yes. That.”
“Well, the interesting thing is that this style actually matches other letters Hickock wrote in prison, which makes the letter feel more authentic. Plus you got it from Santangelo. Santangelo must have got it from Hickock and tucked the letter behind the sketch for safekeeping.” I felt goose bumps rising on my forearms. “Oh my God, I know someone who knew someone who was one of the last people to speak with Hickock just before his execution.”
“Santangelo is definitely the priest who visited Hickock. He told me about it, but he didn’t break the seal of confession. Like I said, when it came up in conversation I didn’t tell you because I wanted to hand you the framed sketch at the same time.”
I felt myself stutter over my next words, aware of what they might mean. “He must have had the confession, too. He didn’t give it to you?”
“No, he didn’t. At least not that I can remember. There might have been something else.”
“Like what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Some other information he said he couldn’t share. But he would send me things from time to time. Books. Articles he’d written that he wanted me to comment on.”
“And you’ve never wondered about what information he might have on the Clutter case? Probably in the top five homicide cases of the twentieth century? Up there with Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer?”
“Oh, Brigid, stop. Not everyone in the country continues to be obsessed with the Clutter case. It happened when you and I were both kids. When Vic gave this to me it was about fifteen years after the events and he might not have remembered he put the letter with it. And neither of us were thinking about the case.” The corner of Carlo’s mouth went up on one side as he said, “I wasn’t thinking about much of anything except Jane.”
“It had to mean something to Santangelo. Otherwise why give it to you?”
“Vic didn’t own much. Vow of poverty and all that. Maybe this was all he had to give. He said he was giving this sketch to me as a symbol of his trust that I was an honorable man.” Carlo hung his head a bit and shook it. “He was wrong about that, about my being honorable.” Carlo’s face took on an expression that was at odds with his general placid philosophical bent. You could tell there was a hurt that would last forever. He said, “That crisis of faith that I told you about, that made me leave the priesthood, it doesn’t gnaw at me in the way of some grievous sin, but it’s still a failure. You see, Brigid,” and I knew this was serious because he used my name, “it was all about Jane.”
My thoughts had been rushing hither and yon while we were talking, but now they lighted on what Carlo had said a minute before, about not being so interested in a fifteen-year-old case because he was only caring about Jane. I suddenly remembered the night I sat listening to my dad’s friends talk about the Walker murders, how I wanted to say stop talking, but could not. We don’t change much.
“This is going to be about sex, isn’t it?” I said sweetly, feeling my face turn a lovely shade of green.
Thirty–six
Just as lightly, not suspecting that I really cared, Carlo said, “Isn’t it always?”
I felt my chest rise and fall more rapidly with what I might be about to hear. But hadn’t Carlo listened to everything about my past that I was willing, that I needed, to share, no matter how gruesome? There were likely pictures in his head that would never leave. I had to be willing to carry the same kind of pictures, though in his case I imagined they would be lovely, lovelier than any he had about me. In at least two cases, pictures of me included blood. I suppose this is what they mean when they talk about a late marriage and the baggage that comes with it.
The picture of wedding rings in a bedside table drifted into my mind again. “This story seems important,” I said, using a blander statement than the accusatory Why haven’t you told me this story? It struck me that I hadn’t realized I’d been anticipating it these past two years, like waiting for what comes after “shave and a haircut.” There was something big to know, and those rings were confirmation. “So tell me.”
He shook his head, and examined my face the way he does, and seeing what I didn’t want him to see, said, “I’ve never told you this story because it wasn’t mine to tell. Jane got into some trouble, so it’s her story. Telling it to you feels … it feels disloyal.”
“No.” I turned more in his direction, putting one of my feet on the crossbar of his chair but not touching him. I kept my face still so he couldn’t see the hurt that his excuse had caused, that he would keep a secret from his living wife in order to stay loyal to his dead one. She was dead, for Pete’s sake. Why would she care more than me? There was something fucked up about that. “You could have kept it to yourself before you started. Now you have to tell the story.”
He looked alarmed at that, like a suspect who knows he’s been found out. Then he started in an unexpected direction, not one with hearts and flowers and a slightly prim love story like I would expect about him and Jane.
Carlo said he knew that when it came to working with inmates there was a delicate balance between being helpful and being a patsy. Carlo understood getting conned. He knew all about it from watching the grief his brother, Franco, had put his parents through. But Jane hadn’t had this counsel.
“Shortly after my work at the prison was finished, she called and asked to see me. She was crying. Oh, how she cried.”
I don’t cry much. “It just rips your heart out when they cry,” I said, but Carlo was too wrapped in his memories of dear innocent Jane to notice the irony.
“So what did they do to sucker her?” I asked.
“I can’t remember all the details. Some routine setup, a prisoner asking her to mail a letter for him, which—”
“Is verboten even though it seems like such a harmless thing,” I finished for him.
“It escalated slowly, with this and that little favor, you know how it goes.”
“I do.”
“Until he said he’d turn her in if she didn’t have sex with him.”
“The poor lamb,” I murmured rather than I cannot believe she fell for that.
Carlo, clueless to my subtext, continued, “Jane asked me what she should do, and I told her I’d go with her to tell everything to the warden, and vouch for her. She did that, and was told she couldn’t volunteer at the prison anymore, but they wouldn’t press any charges.”
“Thank God,” I said.
Carlo told me how they went out to lunch after that, and then lunch again, and then dinner. At first Jane asked him to be her spiritual director, and they started talking about theology, but it always got off track somehow and went to what novels they were both reading, what movies they’d seen. Serious novels, serious movies, I assumed. No, not movies. Films.
&
nbsp; “I bet she loved Italian food,” I said, and went on before he could catch the snark in my voice. “So when did you actually become lovers? After you became a priest? Before?”
Carlo sighed. “About a month before my ordination. And after. We were lovers well into the time I had my own church. I couldn’t stop, but Jane was a better person than I.”
Now who’s the sucker?
“At some point she said she couldn’t go on that way, being secretive. But I tell you, Brigid. There was nothing sordid about it. Jane was my grande passion. At the time, I had to make a choice between God and Jane, and I chose Jane.”
Of course he did. After all, Jane was a saint. It may be apparent by now that I am not.
If he could understand how I felt just now, he was too lost in his Carlo thoughts to see it. No matter what he said, what I heard was that a person only has one grande passion in their life, and that I was not Carlo’s the way he was mine. I had to get us off this train of thought before the track ran out.
“Do you like fly-fishing?” I asked, assuming a negative on that.
“God, no. I don’t even like anyone who does.” He looked at me with an expression that clearly was not connecting my question to anything we’d been talking about. Maybe there were so many photos of him and Jane having fun that he had forgotten this one. Or maybe, I thought hopefully, the trip was such a disaster that he’d forced it from his memory.
“I saw a photo of Jane when I was cleaning up the mess after the burglary,” I said. “You were fly-fishing. I never took you for a sporting kind of guy.”
He still wasn’t warned. “Ah, that vacation.” He turned his left palm up and pointed to his thumb. “See that scar? I caught a hook there.” And smiling at the scar that he would always have, “I would have done anything for her,” he said, clearly without thinking through his words before he spoke them.
That did it. The rings, the intellectual pet names, the shared ministries, the book she had written, her baking skill, for fuck’s sake, the photograph with the laughing face that he would have done anything for, and then the coup de grace, a tragic death. I had the whole picture now. Carlo’s grande passion had brought together romance, mutual faith, and loss, an almost combustible erotic combination.
We Were Killers Once Page 18