Was that acid on the cuff of Carlo’s pants or was it only because they were frayed? When he refused to move away from Beaufort I found a spaghetti pot in one of the cabinets and filled it with water from the tub in the bathroom, then carried it back into the living room to pour it over Carlo’s leg without asking permission, without asking whether his leg was burning. Then he looked at me, and something in his dull stranger gaze made me back away with the empty pot.
Did he force himself to look at me? We stared at each other across a room that felt like a chasm. With all the carnage around us, I found my thoughts going back to the time when I was certain he would leave me because he knew in theory what I could do. This was worse. This time he had both seen me in action, and read the satisfaction that I couldn’t hide. We knew all of one another’s secrets now.
Maybe this time Carlo had been burned after all. Maybe I had burned him beyond repair.
Fifty–seven
Before the cops showed up I opened the door to the bedroom and let Carlo scoop up Achilles so he wouldn’t get into the acid. Carlo held him while the cops were there. I was glad that Max Coyote was on duty. He knew enough about all of us that he didn’t have to ask so many questions.
“It’s your burglar,” I said. It was getting on to early evening, and the room had slowly darkened. I turned on a table lamp to help Max see the scene.
“This seems excessive for a burglar,” Max said while watching the paramedics load Beaufort onto the gurney after determining that Gloria could wait. He had recommenced his screaming. No conning there. I liked the honest sound of it.
“Sorry, I can’t hear you over the screaming,” I said.
“Excessive force,” he yelled.
The morphine they plugged into Beaufort started to take effect rapidly and he quieted. As they wheeled him out I stepped up to the gurney and said, “You were right, Jerry. Hickock never knew your last name. There was nothing in that confession, if it had ever been read, that could have been used to track down Jeremiah Randolph Beaufort. I found out who you were from your booking fingerprints. Now that they have you, they can match your DNA to that from the crime scene. If you had just left things alone, you could have gotten away with killing the Walkers for the rest of your life. You could have just disappeared, you brainless twit.”
He moaned, and I took that as an admission of his twittedness. So I turned once more to Max Coyote. “You’ll have him on at least five counts of murder going back to 1959. Also murder of a priest in Florida. And a contract hit on a detective in Sarasota County. And the woman in the bedroom.” I gave Coyote all the information he needed about Beaufort, including checking his DNA against that found in Christine Walker, via the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office cold case unit. I told Max to use hazmat protocol at the crime scene in Gloria’s house. I told him why the bag containing a confession should be handled with plastic gloves. I told him it was the final confession of Richard Hickock. I should have kept it. Max is in his early forties, and from his blank look I could tell he didn’t know who I was talking about. He turned to go without asking for an explanation, though I figured once he’d seen to Beaufort and assessed the crime scene, we’d talk at greater length. Just as well; it was time to get out of there, because Carlo was still looking at me in that way you’d look at a spouse who has just, with great zest, nearly killed a guy with acid.
Gemma-Kate accepted a ride back to her dormitory from one of the deputies. Before getting into the car she told me she was royally pissed that I hadn’t kept the confession. Seemed I couldn’t please anyone that day.
We just had the one car at the crime scene, the Miata I’d driven from the airport. I was a little rattled after something like this, but no more than usual, and trusted myself driving the half mile back to our house with Achilles in the backseat. Carlo was the one I was concerned about. Too obediently, he got into the car and sat hunched over his knees with his hands tucked between them, staring at the glove compartment. He just as obediently got out of the car when I pulled into the garage, walked into the house, and sat in his reading chair hunched over as if he was still staring at the same glove compartment.
I turned on a few lights here, too.
Al and Peg ran up to him and, expecting the usual rubbings, jumped at his knees, then smelled the dampness of them from the water I’d splashed on him. Carlo didn’t appear to see or feel them. Achilles sat close to the garage door, waiting to be invited in. When the pugs couldn’t get attention from Carlo, they trotted over and sniffed Achilles suspiciously. Then they came over to me by the liquor cabinet in the kitchen and stared with all their WTF bug-eyes. If they were thinking you just can’t rely on Homo sapiens, I agreed with them.
I opened a bottle of red wine, took a look at Carlo, and, assuming a stronger dose was needed, put the cork back in. We had some Glenlivet. It had been there for years, but liquor doesn’t go bad. At least God got that detail right. It’s the least he can do. I went into the living room and handed a glass to Carlo, but he didn’t take it, didn’t look up. I put it on the end table next to his chair.
I knelt in front of him, hoping to catch his gaze and make him see me, I admit, to reassure myself as much as him. “Talk to me,” I said. “You can’t keep this inside. Sooner or later you have to talk.”
I’d been worried about all kinds of things; what Carlo might think of me, for example, watching me in action, seeing what I was capable of. How he might be traumatized by his scrape with death. I ached at what he might have seen Beaufort do to Gloria Bentham, some horror that he couldn’t express. So I was surprised when he did speak, at what he talked about.
“When he came over to the house he asked to make his confession. I suspected at first that I was being conned, but there are those times when the job demands … well, at first Jerry rattled on. I could tell he thought he was being so clever, and manipulating me. But at some point, he really did start to confess. Not the whole thing. Probably not everything Hickock put in his record. But painful things I’m sure he had never admitted to anyone before. It was the first time I’d listened to a confession in more than thirty years.”
Carlo’s lips trembled, and then he started to cry. I’d never seen Carlo cry before. Was it the result of the trauma he had been through, or did he want to leave me and go back to the priesthood? I didn’t dare to try to stop him so I just hugged him at the knees and let him put his hand on the top of my head, half pulling me to him and half pushing me away. It felt like he was needing to connect with someone, but part of him didn’t want it to be me just now. Being the unwanted person hurt.
When he had finished crying, he pulled his hand back from my head and let me look up into his face. “You were going to kill him,” he said. “Or at least you were going to let him die.”
What I thought I saw there made me understand that you can kill all the people you want, to fix the world, but that doesn’t mean you’ll ever be able to control the live ones. It again occurred to me I could have blamed it on Gemma-Kate, but what good would that really do when we both already knew what I was capable of? I couldn’t win this.
So, tucking up my little protective core in preparation for whatever might come, I said, “I don’t understand why that surprises you.”
Carlo didn’t respond for a long time, and with each second I imagined the chasm between us widening. When he finally spoke, it wasn’t with the final judgment I was expecting. Not yet. “I’m different from you,” he said. “You see good and evil. All my life I’ve never seen black on black on black.”
“He’s evil,” I said.
“Is he?” Carlo said. “What about us? Are we good or are we evil?”
Oh for God’s sake, did he have to define everything? I said, “Do you remember a while ago when I was in a terrible place? You brought me home covered with someone else’s blood, and you put me in the shower and washed me like a child. Then you tucked me into bed. I was afraid that night that you were just responding with your usual kindness. I was afraid
that you were getting ready to leave me, because you knew me deep down, what I had felt and thought and done. And that you found me … unlovable.”
He really saw me now, and was listening. Thank God I was a person, too, not just black on black. It was my last hope. I went on despite my terror of where this was going.
“Do you remember that night?” I asked.
Carlo barely nodded. Oh, the times that he had been so strong and I had been able to lean on him. This wasn’t that time.
“Brigid. I’m sorry, but everything is dark right now. I’m having a hard time with clarity.” He was speaking in his old Perfesser way, but when he tried to pick up the glass of Scotch his hand was shaking so badly the glass wobbled like a top at the tail end of its spinning.
I took his other hand and put it on the glass so he could hold it without spilling. Then I drew away. Nobody knows dark better than me. I thought about how much he was capable of loving me, and my not knowing whether it was enough. I said, “I understand. I understand.”
He shook his head and blinked. “What?”
Hold on to the hardness, I thought. I was going to be needing it while he got out the pictures of his saintly wife. “I understand that I can’t become you and you can’t become me. It’s pretty simple.”
He nodded. Oh my God, he nodded. But then he said, “You know, sometimes I wonder if you’re as smart as I think you are. You do realize that this whole thing wasn’t about you? Without you there still would have been Jerry. I was the one who caused Jeremiah Beaufort to come to Tucson. I was the one he was after, or at least that thing of Hickock’s. He would have killed me. You would have been, how would you call it, mere collateral damage. And it’s likely that Gloria still would have died, too.”
“Well, I guess that’s so,” I said, sitting back on my heels, though hardly encouraged.
“And then,” he said, “then you saved my life. So now I have to live with the fact that he’s likely to die and I’m allowed to live. I’ll be alive because he’s dead.”
“Perfesser, I wish to God he was dead, but you’ll love this part. I checked with the paramedics, who said Beaufort’s vital signs were strong. He’ll likely be permanently blind and ugly as hell with scarring, but he’s going to stand trial for his part in the Clutter family murders, and for the slaughter of the Walker family, too. Not to mention your old friend Father Santangelo. Besides Gloria Bentham.”
Carlo didn’t full-on sob, but he did choke on my words as if he’d spoken them himself. When I caught his gaze and held it I could see he was embarrassed by his gentleness in the face of however he saw me.
I was still the first one to look away. “But will you be all right?” I asked. Of course I knew even then that I was really asking will we be all right.
“Oh, I doubt that there’s anything wrong with me that several years of psychiatric counseling and a little Xanax can’t ease.” He finally picked up the glass of scotch from the table and raised it in my direction. He looked at me, carefully, seeing me for the first time again although through a film of great sadness. His hand was still trembling just a little when he said, “Cheers, honey.”
A door that had been momentarily opened between us was closing again. Damned if I’d let that happen. I swatted his knee, which was the closest thing to hand. “Oh, no you don’t,” I said. “Dammit, Perfesser, I’m the one who does sarcasm. ‘Cheers, honey’ isn’t enough for me.” I took a deep breath and released it with the sense that I had removed a glove and was smacking him with it. “You were the one who once told me love isn’t so much a feeling as it is a decision.” Then I took the glass from him and took a good swig before asking, “So. Are we still on? Are we going to fight for us or just slink off?”
I handed back the glass. Carlo took his time sipping the Scotch. And sipping it again. Good God, he was in thinking mode at a time like this. The thinking seemed to calm him. When he finally put the glass down on the table next to his chair, his hand was steadier as he spoke in thoughts that only after a time blended into full sentences. “This? That inability to reach perfection. Or outright fuckups. Let’s call it. Call it sin. Woven into our fabric. Body and spirit. No escape. And then.” Carlo’s hand started to move in circles, the fingers slightly curved, as if he was pulling the words out of his mind and winding them into a ball only he could hold. “When we look back at the whole thing, the life, the terrible things we’ve done that often led inexplicably to good, we can see sin as a necessity, even a gift, for making life work in the direction it ought to, to change us as needed. The black hole in the center that keeps a galaxy spinning around it. It’s not change per se, but the openness to learning something difficult that’s key. Like Wittgenstein says, ‘I’m not sure why we’re here, but I’m pretty sure it is not to enjoy ourselves.’”
“I have a strong feeling that whatever it is you just said sucks,” I said. “Now stop having a roundtable discussion with dead philosophers and look at me, dammit.”
He stopped, and looked at me as if only now aware that he wasn’t alone. That sucked, too. I held my breath waiting for more. When it appeared he was finished, because all the words in the world don’t mean anything to me, I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t operate on pure logic. I don’t even understand half of what you’re saying. What does sin have to do with whether we can be together?”
“Now. Well, I guess we say we’re sorry to each other not only for what we did or didn’t do, but sorry for what we are. Then we go on despite it, because we can change what we say and do, but not what we are at our core. I just remembered something Victor Santangelo told me. ‘We fall in love with the person we want ourselves to be, and then they drag us there kicking and screaming.’” Going into abstract thought seemed to calm him again as he wondered, “Where are we dragging each other?”
“Hopefully some place where you stop quoting other people and speak for yourself, because sometimes it gets to be fuckin’ annoying,” I said without rancor.
We stopped. Then at the same time he started to laugh and I started to cry. The commonality was that both were a little hysterical. Carlo’s laughter was the first to fade. He picked up the edge of his T-shirt, held my chin with one hand, and wiped a glop of snot from my wet upper lip with his other. He didn’t let go of my chin. It struck me that the last time I had looked into his eyes this way was when we were making love. How strange that a few days ago I wasn’t sure I could forgive Carlo, and today I wasn’t sure he could forgive me.
What we were dealing with now, what we were, was bigger than my petty jealousy of Jane. That had been before he watched how, without hesitation, I could kill a human being. And worse, with what relish. And I had to face the fact that Carlo loved me, perhaps not as much as he had ever been capable of loving, but enough. Whether it was enough was up to me.
Carlo loved me the way I loved him: maybe not exclusively, but uniquely, and no matter that I wasn’t all that good a person. I knew this.
It had to be enough.
Maybe that’s the unique difference between romance and marriage; it’s not about losing ourselves and changing into the other person, or what we think the other wants. That’s for the infatuation stage. No, marriage is about repeatedly forgiving the other person for not being us.
I couldn’t remember a romance novel ending that way, but then I haven’t read that many. Hm … a romance for grown-ups … it chafes, but it’s where the marital rubber hits the road.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. But parts of the story are drawn from fact. Truman Capote made Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Smith famous in In Cold Blood, the “nonfiction novel” about the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas in late 1959. I tried to stay true to Capote’s account, and more important, to the facts as I found them in police reports and prison archives. Dozens of links between the story according to Capote and my own fictions are here for the interested reader, making the book different from historical fiction, and more of a puzzle in which fact is not a
ltogether apparent.
For example, meeting the young unnamed boy on the road, and the episode of collecting the bottles, was related by Perry Smith to Truman Capote. That the boy left his grandfather to die, joined up with Smith and Hickock, and was the one who killed the Walkers, is my story.
Capote mentions an article in the Garden City newspaper around the time of the Clutter case which told of the killing of ten local dogs. This is factual, but the perpetrator and the motive are fiction.
The Walker family murder case, which occurred near Sarasota, Florida, in December 1959, roughly two months after the Clutters were killed, is also real. Hickock and Smith have been linked to the crime because of the similarities to the Clutter family murders and because they were in Florida when it happened. It’s also true that the men’s bodies were exhumed later in order to test their DNA against the semen found in Christine Walker. No match was found, but it’s unclear whether the DNA samples were too corrupted to provide conclusive evidence. The Walker family murders are still unsolved.
Some significant discrepancies among police reports, archives, and Capote’s book:
In a clemency hearing, Richard Hickock claimed that they took over a thousand dollars from the Clutter house, though official confessions, and Capote’s book, put the amount at forty dollars. What would motivate Hickock to change the amount? And how else would he and Smith have been able to afford to travel from one coast to another, staying at hotels along the way?
Capote’s version has the killers going to Sarasota first and then Miami, either to make the narrative more interesting, or to help clear them of the Walker murders by placing them elsewhere at the time. My version of Hickock’s confession matches the police reports that had them going to Miami before Sarasota.
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