Anyone reading this will know how we got caught in Las Vegas, and tried, and convicted. We were in all the news, famous even if Capote doesn’t publish his book about us. He writes to both Perry and me about once a week and says it is coming along. What he does not say is that he is not going to publish it until after we are dead but I know this is the case.
What people do not know a lot about is that they tried to hang the Walker killings on us because we were in the vicinity at the time. Sarasota, Florida, is close to the town of Osprey where it happened. We were accused of the Walker murders after we had confessed to the Clutter killings and were waiting for trial, only they dropped the investigation after we passed a polygraph test.
Long before the actual trial Perry had changed his confession so that he claimed to have killed the entire Clutter family. He let me off the hook in return for me not betraying Jerry. I thought this would save me, but I got the death penalty just the same. I stewed about this for some time after our conviction. By that time they were not so careful about keeping us apart. We are kept in separate cells on death row, but sometimes take our showers together, or bribe the guards to let us speak.
It was at one of these times that I told Perry we were crazy to not collar Jerry on the Walker killings. We could say we knew the gun used on the Walkers was .22 caliber and that Jerry bought it. If they would find Jerry, they could match his prints to one found at the scene. It could keep me from being hanged, I said.
Perry begged me not to squeal, he practically got down on his knees and begged me. I asked why he was so stuck on that kid. He said because he had never done anything very noble in his life, and he thought this was a noble thing. I said why do a noble thing for that kid. He said Jerry had his whole life ahead of him, he was just a kid who did not know any better. I said that may be, but the kid had killed six people before the age of sixteen if you counted his own grandfather, two Clutters, and all the Walkers. Maybe it was not such a good idea to leave him loose on the world. Smith said he did not care, he wanted to do this and would I agree. I said I would think about it.
But Jerry must have been in contact with Perry. My father was dead by this time, but my mother came to visit me often. On one visit she told me that a boy had come to the house to say that if I didn’t keep to my word she and my whole family could be in danger. He gave her an article about a bunch of dead dogs that was supposed to show he meant what he said. She gave me the article.
That is why I am writing this true and final confession, and true to my word will go to the gallows without turning on Jerry. But I’ve told Mom that if she or any of my kin is threatened before or after my execution, she should go to Father Santangelo. He has instructions to give this confession to the authorities. I do not imagine Jerry can go long without being picked up on some charge or other, and then his prints can be matched to the Walkers’ house.
This finished, I’ve done everything I can think of to protect my family. Father Santangelo told me that God has forgiven me for the bad things I did in my life, and for the bad things I thought. This is a hard thing for me to believe, but I have to trust him. Now I am prepared to go to the gallows. I even decided what I will say for my last words. I will say, “I just want to say I hold no hard feelings. You people are sending me to a much better place than this has been.”
Sincerely,
Richard Eugene Hickock, April 6, 1965
Fifty–five
“Now why would you say that?” Beaufort asked Gloria.
“Because I checked. I called the stables and asked if they had someone named Jerry Nolan working there. When they said no, I even described you in case you used a different name. They still said no.”
“You went behind my back, asking questions?” It wasn’t so much that he didn’t understand what she meant by that, as that he couldn’t fathom she had that much moxie in her.
But she was in the shit now knee-deep and apparently could not stop. She pointed to Carlo. “I mean, who is this guy really?”
Beaufort snapped the recliner shut and stood up. Gloria remembered who she was and cowered from habit.
“We live,” Carlo said, trying to defuse the two of them, responding to Gloria in an amazingly normal way, “we live just about a half mile away. In the Black Horse Ranch subdivision. You might have seen us walking. We have two pugs. You may have met my wife. Brigid.”
Well, that set Gloria off again, this time more like a rocket. “Bri-gid! So what are you all planning?” Gloria asked. “A threesome, maybe?” Her eyes flickered over the duct tape on the coffee table and she said, maybe without knowing why, “Or bondage? Were you going to invite me?”
Carlo made some vague sound, a combination of protest and groan, while Beaufort advanced on Gloria. When Carlo found his words they were “My dear. Don’t.”
“That’s right, my dear,” Beaufort said, and almost sounded sincere. “You have nothing to worry about here.”
Maybe because she saw this as a chance to speak in front of a witness, her first without risking Beaufort’s private wrath, Gloria seemed to take courage. She lifted her chin to gain an inch on Beaufort and said, “Bullshit. I called that phone number in your wallet. The voice message was her.”
“This isn’t what you think,” Carlo said.
Locked together, Beaufort and Gloria both ignored him.
“You’re embarrassing yourself, honey,” Beaufort said. “Go back in the bedroom. I’ll be there in a minute. We’ll … talk.”
“Why doesn’t he just leave,” Gloria said, pointing at Carlo but with less aggression than she’d displayed only a moment before.
“You could leave,” Carlo said. “You can walk out the door right now.” He rose from the couch and tried to step between them, but Beaufort gently pushed him aside, the only acknowledgment that Carlo was even in the room.
“Honestly, group sex? Babe, we need to work on getting your confidence back.” Beaufort took Gloria by the shoulders and put his face closer to hers. “Where’s that old I-can-change spirit? Everything is going to be okay,” he said. “You just have to trust me, that whatever I’m doing is for us. You and me. Okay?”
Gloria opened her mouth, part of her still wanting to say yes, but then stopped, searching his face.
Beaufort looked at Carlo to gauge his response to this interaction. He had regretted the way he’d let himself run on over at Carlo’s place, and wanted Carlo to understand he was capable of whatever it took to accomplish his purpose. He wanted Carlo to know that women didn’t treat him the way Brigid Quinn treated him. Beaufort summoned up all the persuasion he had and said once more, “Now. In the bedroom.”
She only had so much fight in her, a muscle weakened from disuse, and it was gone now. As she turned to go Beaufort playfully swatted her rear end, at which she almost smiled. Then he grabbed the duct tape he’d left on the coffee table, and jerked a chair out from the dining room table nearby. “Sit,” he said to Carlo.
“You don’t have to do this,” Carlo said, as he obeyed.
“You don’t have to do this,” Beaufort repeated Carlo’s words, and this time didn’t hide the mocking. “Do you know every time that line appears in every movie ever made it never convinces anyone?”
“She doesn’t know anything,” Carlo whispered.
“Now who’s bullshitting?” Beaufort said as he pulled Carlo’s hands behind the chair and duct-taped his wrists together. “You think I wanted it to happen this way? I told you to keep your fucking mouth shut but no, you had to talk about Brigid. The pugs.” He squatted and taped one of Carlo’s ankles to the leg of the chair, stood back up, and said, “There, that should do it for now.”
All Carlo could say was “Please. You don’t need to. Brigid will be here and give you what you want and you can go away and just leave us all here. Tie us all up so you have time to get across the border. It’s only an hour away.”
Beaufort shook his head, regretful. He was conscious of feeling full of regret, and he liked it. “She know
s too much, and it’s all your fault.”
Beaufort tore off a small piece of duct tape from the roll and placed it against his shirt, then, thinking about how the duct tape would leave residue around her mouth that could be detected in an autopsy, said “hm,” went to the kitchen, and came back with a plastic grocery bag.
“No,” Carlo shouted and kicked out ineffectually with the leg that hadn’t been taped.
Beaufort opened the bedroom door. Achilles tried to get through, but Beaufort bent down and gently shoved him back, saying, “There you go, boy. That’s a good boy.”
He shut the door behind him. Gloria still didn’t have much of a clue about what was going on, but she did look startled at the shout from Carlo which had come through the closed door. Beaufort figured it was only a matter of time before she started putting things together, especially once the bodies were discovered and things got on the news. At one time he thought he might bring her around to understanding that he was not a bad man, and they could have a life together, but the little scene in the living room told him that was unlikely. He regretted this.
Beaufort was across the room while he thought and regretted, and had Gloria’s arms pinned to her sides and her body on the bed before she had time for even one good scream.
It didn’t take long to straddle her to where she couldn’t fight him off. The plastic bag went over her head easily, and allowed less airflow than the pillow alone would have done. “That’s it, go ahead and scream,” he said, feeling the vibration through the pillow. When the scream was done he said, “Hush now, babe.” He said it more to himself, knowing she couldn’t hear much.
He watched the bedside clock as he pressed down. It took a good eight minutes to make sure she was dead, longer than Santangelo but better than leaving marks or blood. Eight minutes is a long time when there’s nothing to do but press down. Once she stopped struggling so much Beaufort heard himself humming the old tune, stopping to make that popping sound with his mouth at the end of each musical phrase. What he did when he was enjoying himself.
He was enjoying this. He had been able to assure himself that he hadn’t enjoyed killing Santangelo or arranging for the deaths of Meadows and Quinn, but this, this gave him little thrums of pleasure that coursed through his body.
He forced himself to stop humming, hoping that stopping that would stop the feelings, but he could not deny the pleasure. His face grew hot, and a string of no no no no no popped like silent firecrackers in his mind.
When Gloria was certainly dead, he got off the bed, reeling a little. He didn’t think they’d been noisy, but he could hear Carlo yelling. Had he been yelling the entire eight minutes? Beaufort could also hear Achilles snuffling at the door, like he wanted to get away from what was going on in the bedroom.
Beaufort bent down and petted Achilles. “That’s a boy, that’s a good boy,” he said, and hoped that way to retrieve the feelings of regret. “You stay in here with Mommy now. We’ll go for a walk in a bit.”
Beaufort came out from the bedroom wiping his right palm on his jeans over and over. He said to Carlo, who watched with horror from his chair, “Too many people dead because of you.”
Beaufort thought about taping Carlo’s other leg to the chair and then figured it was too much bother. He sagged back down in his recliner to wait for Brigid’s arrival, feeling a little old. He was wearied and saddened by what had happened to Gloria. But hopeful, too. The feeling of pleasure had subsided until he could almost think it had never happened. There must be other women like Gloria out there. When that curse that Hickock had laid on him was finally at rest, and he could have peace inside himself, he might be a different man.
Fifty–six
When we landed in Tucson I put the confession back into its envelope and the envelope back into my tote bag. On my phone I found a message from Beaufort, with the caller ID GLORIA BENTHAM. So it was likely he was at her place, using her phone. I called the number back and played dumb.
“Where are you?” I asked Beaufort when I heard his voice. “Are you still at the house?”
“No. Where are you?”
I didn’t tell Beaufort I was stuck in the bathroom waiting for everyone else to deplane so I wouldn’t be seen. “I’m waiting to deplane. I’m at the back.”
“How long does it take you to get home from the airport?”
“About fifty … maybe an hour with traffic.” I didn’t want him to get nervous and do something rash, so I said, “Maybe a little more.”
“Then call me again when you get close to your house. I’ll tell you what to do when you get there. Do you have the document?”
“I do.”
“Good. I’m tired of worrying.” I heard his voice catch on this unintended spillage of honesty, and could almost imagine him rubbing his face to get control. Maybe he was losing his grip. That could be good or bad.
Beaufort went on, “So I want you to know, if you made a copy, if you had a notion to leave one in a safe deposit box somewhere—”
“I haven’t had the time to do that, you idiot.”
“—or you’re having my location traced while we talk, I swear I’ll stay alive at least long enough to find you, kill Carlo, and make you watch while I do it. Got that?”
“I do. Where’s Gloria?”
“She’s fine.”
“That’s not what I asked. I said where, not how.”
“In one hour I’ll call again and tell you where to go.” And he disconnected.
I ran off the airplane and paused for one minute on the concourse, wanting to check one more thing. I accessed the Wi-Fi in the terminal, went to YouTube, and searched Humoresque. The even, plodding beat of the melody played on a violin gave me the chills.
Yep, that was what Beaufort was humming at the house when he came for dinner.
I ran down the small concourse, stopping in one of those shops that sell travel-sized everythings along with the supersized packages of Twizzlers and the latest bestsellers. I’d been in enough airports to know where to look and scanned the items hanging against the wall—aspirin … tiny nail files—looking for the right container. Dammit, there were no plastic hair spray bottles, just metal ones with the hair spray sealed inside. I chose a vial containing nasal spray. As I paid, I asked the clerk who was charging me somewhere in the neighborhood of five bucks for it, “Does this look like plastic to you?”
She just narrowed her eyes and said, “Do you want to buy that?”
On the way out to pick up my car from the parking garage I tore off the bit of plastic sealing the vial, popped off the lid, and spilled the solution on the ground without breaking my pace. It would work, but whether I would harm myself with it rather than Beaufort remained to be seen. I hoped there were not different kinds of plastic, with some working and some not. Or things that appeared to be plastic but were not? I was focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and put this out of my mind, figuring that with capsicum it wouldn’t make a difference, Gemma-Kate was just being overly cautious.
* * *
I got my car out of hock and drove the twenty minutes to the college dorm, talking to Gemma-Kate all the while on my phone, getting instructions that she would give me again. And again, just to be on the safe side. When I pulled up, she got in the backseat with her backpack slung over her shoulder.
“Go ahead,” she said, “I’m coming with you. I don’t trust you with this.”
I spent a few precious seconds trying to figure out how to get her out of the car. Her father would kill me if Gemma-Kate got hurt.
She said, “We’re losing daylight, Aunt Brigid. And I can work while you’re driving.” When I recognized the Quinn stubbornness on her face I didn’t waste time arguing with her. As I drove, keeping my eyes on the road, skirting ass-draggers when I could, trying to do something more useful than honk, I was aware of her working. She took a black garbage bag out of her backpack, left it folded in half, and spread it over the passenger seat with part of the plastic angled against
the back of the seat. That done, she got another, this one a gallon-sized storage bag.
“Where’s the manuscript?” she asked.
I reached behind my seat to point out my tote, then put both hands on the wheel again to avoid a crash.
“Jesus, Aunt Brigid, you’re going to get us stopped.”
“Let them try.”
“Oh cool, so you show up with three black-and-whites, lights and sirens, following you. That will send a good message. He’s not going to do anything until you get there.”
I slowed down some at her logic. She opened my tote and in my rearview mirror I could see her almost fondling the document. Then, by God, she started to read it.
“Gemma-Kate,” I yelled.
“We still have a good thirty minutes until we’re at the house,” she said.
“You can read it later,” I said, not commenting that maybe it was time to feel a little something, concern for Carlo, perhaps. A little something.
Gemma-Kate reluctantly folded the document sideways into a tube that would fit inside the zip-lock bag. She handled it like a museum curator. Then she sealed the tab at the top of the bag.
At this point I swung the car on a caution light around the corner of First and Skyline. Not being warned, Gemma-Kate fell against the door of the car.
We Were Killers Once Page 28