“Dear Croydon,” he wrote. “I don’t know what to call you. I can’t bear to address you by your first name or to call you ‘Mr. Croydon.’ Not that I ever expected to call you anything at all. I guess I thought you’d be dead by now. God knows I wished it...”
Once he got started, it was surprisingly easy to find the words.
An answer from Dandridge.
Unbelievable.
If he had a shot, Paul Dandridge was it. The stays and the appeals would only carry you so far. The chance that any court along the way would grant him a reversal and a new trial was remote at best. His only real hope was a commutation of his death sentence to life imprisonment.
Not that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in prison. In a sense, you lived better on Death Row than if you were doing life in general prison population. But in another sense the difference between a life sentence and a death sentence was, well, the difference between life and death. If he got his sentence commuted to life, that meant the day would come when he made parole and hit the street. They might not come right out and say that, but that was what it would amount to, especially if he worked the system right.
And Paul Dandridge was the key to getting his sentence commuted.
He remembered how the prick had testified at the pre-sentencing hearing. If any single thing had ensured the death sentence, it was Dandridge’s testimony. And, if anything could swing a commutation of sentence for him, it was a change of heart on the part of Karen Dandridge’s brother.
Worth a shot.
“Dear Paul,” he typed. “I can’t possibly tell you the sense of peace that came over me when I realised the letter I was holding was from you...”
Paul Dandridge, seated at his desk, uncapped his pen and wrote the day’s date at the top of a sheet of letterhead. He paused and looked at what he had written. It was, he realised, the fifth anniversary of his sister’s death, and he hadn’t been aware of that fact until he’d inscribed the date at the top of a letter to the man who’d killed her.
Another irony, he thought. They seemed to be infinite.
“Dear Billy,” he wrote. “You’ll appreciate this. It wasn’t until I’d written the date on this letter that I realised its significance. It’s been exactly five years since the day that changed both our lives forever.”
He took a breath, considered his words. He wrote, “And I guess it’s time to acknowledge formally something I’ve acknowledged in my heart some time ago. While I may never get over Karen’s death, the bitter hatred that has burned in me for so long has finally cooled. And so I’d like to say that you have my forgiveness in full measure. And now I think it’s time for you to forgive yourself...”
It was hard to sit still.
That was something he’d had no real trouble doing since the first day the cell door closed with him inside. You had to be able to sit still to do time, and it was never hard for him. Even during the several occasions when he’d been a few weeks away from an execution date, he’d never been one to pace the floor or climb the walls.
But today was the hearing. Today the board was hearing testimony from three individuals. One was a psychiatrist who would supply some professional arguments for commuting his sentence from death to life. Another was his fourth-grade teacher, who would tell the board how rough he’d had it in childhood and what a good little boy he was underneath it all. He wondered where they’d dug her up, and how she could possibly remember him. He didn’t remember her at all.
The third witness, and the only really important one, was Paul Dandridge. Not only was he supplying the only testimony likely to carry much weight, but it was he who had spent money to locate Croydon’s fourth-grade teacher, he who had enlisted the services of the shrink.
His buddy, Paul. A crusader, moving heaven and earth to save Billy Croydon’s life.
Just the way he’d planned it.
He paced, back and forth, back and forth, and then he stopped and retrieved from his locker the letter that had started it all. The first letter to Paul Dandridge, the one he’d had the sense not to send. How many times had he reread it over the years, bringing the whole thing back into focus?
“...when I turned her facedown, well, I can tell you she’d never done that before.” Jesus, no, she hadn’t liked it at all. He read and remembered, warmed by the memory.
What did he have these days but his memories? The women who’d been writing him had long since given it up. Even the ones who’d sworn to follow him to death had lost interest during the endless round of stays and appeals. He still had the letters and pictures they’d sent, but the pictures were unappealing, only serving to remind him what a bunch of pigs they all were, and the letters were sheer fantasy with no underpinning of reality. They described, and none too vividly, events that had never happened and events that would never happen. The sense of power to compel them to write those letters and pose for their pictures had faded over time. Now they only bored him and left him faintly disgusted.
Of his own memories, only that of Karen Dandridge held any real flavour. The other two girls, the ones he’d done before Karen, were almost impossible to recall. They were brief encounters, impulsive, unplanned, and over almost before they’d begun. He’d surprised one in a lonely part of the park, just pulled her skirt up and her panties down and went at her, hauling off and smacking her with a rock a couple of times when she wouldn’t keep quiet. That shut her up, and when he finished he found out why. She was dead. He’d evidently cracked her skull and killed her, and he’d been thrusting away at dead meat.
Hardly a memory to stir the blood ten years later. The second one wasn’t much better either. He’d been about half drunk, and that had the effect of blurring the memory. He’d snapped her neck afterward, the little bitch, and he remembered that part, but he couldn’t remember what it had felt like.
One good thing. Nobody ever found out about either of those two. If they had, he wouldn’t have a prayer at today’s hearing.
After the hearing, Paul managed to slip out before the press could catch up with him. Two days later, however, when the governor acted on the board’s recommendation and commuted William Croydon’s sentence to life imprisonment, one persistent reporter managed to get Paul in front of a video camera.
“For a long time I wanted vengeance,” he admitted. “I honestly believed that I could only come to terms with the loss of my sister by seeing her killer put to death.”
What changed that? the reporter wanted to know.
He stopped to consider his answer. “The dawning realisation,” he said, “that I could really only recover from Karen’s death not by seeing Billy Croydon punished but by letting go of the need to punish. In the simplest terms, I had to forgive him.”
And could he do that? Could he forgive the man who had brutally murdered his sister?
“Not overnight,” he said. “It took time. I can’t even swear I’ve forgiven him completely. But I’ve come far enough in the process to realise capital punishment is not only inhumane but pointless. Karen’s death was wrong, but Billy Croydon’s death would be another wrong, and two wrongs don’t make a right. Now that his sentence has been lifted, I can get on with the process of complete forgiveness.”
The reporter commented that it sounded as though Paul Dandridge had gone through some sort of religious conversion experience.
“I don’t know about religion,” Paul said, looking right at the camera. “I don’t really consider myself a religious person. But something’s happened, something transformational in nature, and I suppose you could call it spiritual.”
With his sentence commuted, Billy Croydon drew a transfer to another penitentiary, where he was assigned a cell in general population. After years of waiting to die he was being given a chance to create a life for himself within the prison’s walls. He had a job in the prison laundry, he had access to the library and exercise yard. He didn’t have his freedom, but he had life.
On the sixteenth day of his new life, three hard
-eyed lifers cornered him in the room where they stored the bed linen. He’d noticed one of the men earlier, had caught him staring at him a few times, looking at Croydon the way you’d look at a woman. He hadn’t spotted the other two before, but they had the same look in their eyes as the one he recognized.
There wasn’t a thing he could do.
They raped him, all three of them, and they weren’t gentle about it either. He fought at first but their response to that was savage and prompt, and he gasped at the pain and quit his struggling. He tried to disassociate himself from what was being done to him, tried to take his mind away to some private place. That was a way old cons had of doing time, getting through the hours on end of vacant boredom. This time it didn’t really work.
They left him doubled up on the floor, warned him against saving anything to the hacks, and drove the point home with a boot to the ribs.
He managed to get back to his cell, and the following day he put in a request for a transfer to B Block, where you were locked down twenty-three hours a day. He was used to that on Death Row, so he knew he could live with it.
So much for making a life inside the walls. What he had to do was get out.
He still had his typewriter. He sat down, flexed his fingers. One of the rapists had bent his little finger back the day before, and it still hurt, but it wasn’t one that he used for typing. He took a breath and started in.
“Dear Paul...”
“Dear Billy,
“As always, it was good to hear from you. I write not with news but just in the hope that I can lighten your spirits and build your resolve for the long road ahead. Winning your freedom won’t be an easy task, but it’s my conviction that working together we can make it happen...
“Yours, Paul.”
“Dear Paul,
“Thanks for the books. I missed a lot, all those years when I never opened a book. It’s funny-my life seems so much more spacious now, even though I’m spending all but one hour a day in a dreary little cell. But it’s like that poem that starts, ‘Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage.’ (I’d have to say, though, that the stone walls and iron bars around this place make a pretty solid prison.)
“I don’t expect much from the parole board next month, but it’s a start...”
“Dear Billy,
“I was deeply saddened by the parole board’s decision, although everything I’d heard had led me to expect nothing else. Even though you’ve been locked up more than enough time to be eligible, the thinking evidently holds that Death Row time somehow counts less than regular prison time, and that the board wants to see how you do as a prisoner serving a life sentence before letting you return to the outside world. I’m not sure I understand the logic there...
“I’m glad you’re taking it so well.
“Your friend, Paul.”
“Dear Paul,
“Once again, thanks for the books. They’re a healthy cut above what’s available here. This joint prides itself in its library, but when you say ‘Kierkegaard’ to the prison librarian he looks at you funny, and you don’t dare try him on Martin Buber.
“I shouldn’t talk, because I’m having troubles of my own with both of those guys. I haven’t got anybody else to bounce this off, so do you mind if I press you into service? Here’s my take on Kierkegaard...
“Well, that’s the latest from the Jailhouse Philosopher, who is pleased to be
“Your friend, Billy.”
“Dear Billy,
“Well, once again it’s time for the annual appearance before parole board-or the annual circus, as you call it with plenty of justification. Last year we thought maybe the third time was the charm, and it turned out we were wrong, but maybe it’ll be different this year...”
“Dear Paul,
“‘Maybe it’ll be different this time.’ Isn’t that what Charlie Brown tells himself before he tries to kick the football? And Lucy always snatches it away.
“Still, some of the deep thinkers I’ve been reading stress that hope is important even when it’s unwarranted. And, although I’m a little scared to admit it, I have a good feeling this time.
“And if they never let me out, well, I’ve reached a point where I honestly don’t mind. I’ve found an inner life here that’s far superior to anything I had in my years as a free man. Between my books, my solitude, and my correspondence with you, I have a life I can live with. Of course I’m hoping for parole, but if they snatch the football away again, it ain’t gonna kill me...”
“Dear Billy,
“...Just a thought, but maybe that’s the line you should take with them. That you’d welcome parole, but you’ve made a life for yourself within the walls and you can stay there indefinitely if you have to.
“I don’t know, maybe that’s the wrong strategy altogether, but I think it might impress them...”
“Dear Paul,
“Who knows what’s likely to impress them? On the other hand, what have I got to lose?”
Billy Croydon sat at the end of the long conference table, speaking when spoken to, uttering his replies in a low voice, giving pro forma responses to the same questions they asked him every year. At the end they asked him, as usual, if there was anything he wanted to say.
Well, what the hell, he thought. What did he have to lose?
“I’m sure it won’t surprise you,” he began, “to hear that I’ve come before you in the hope of being granted early release. I’ve had hearings before, and when I was turned down it was devastating. Well, I may not be doing myself any good by saying this, but this time around it won’t destroy me if you decide to deny me parole. Almost in spite of myself, I’ve made a life for myself within prison walls. I’ve found an inner life, a life of the spirit, that’s superior to anything I had as a free man...”
Were they buying it? Hard to tell. On the other hand, since it happened to be the truth, it didn’t really matter whether they bought it or not.
He pushed on to the end. The chairman scanned the room, then looked at him and nodded shortly.
“Thank you, Mr. Croydon,” he said. “I think that will be all for now.”
“I think I speak for all of us,” the chairman said, “when I say how much weight we attach to your appearance before this board. We’re used to hearing the pleas of victims and their survivors, but almost invariably they come here to beseech us to deny parole. You’re virtually unique, Mr. Dandridge, in appearing as the champion of the very man who...”
“Killed my sister,” Paul said levelly.
“Yes. You’ve appeared before us on prior occasions, Mr. Dandridge, and while we were greatly impressed by your ability to forgive William Croydon and by the relationship you’ve forged with him, it seems to me that there’s been a change in your own sentiments. Last year, I recall, while you pleaded on Mr. Croydon’s behalf, we sensed that you did not wholeheartedly believe he was ready to be returned to society.”
“Perhaps I had some hesitation.”
“But this year...”
“Billy Croydon’s a changed man. The process of change has been completed. I know that he’s ready to get on with his life.”
“There’s no denying the power of your testimony, especially in light of its source.” The chairman cleared his throat. “Thank you, Mr. Dandridge. I think that will be all for now.”
“Well?” Paul said. “How do you feel?”
Billy considered the question. “Hard to say,” he said. “Everything’s a little unreal. Even being in a car. Last time I was in a moving vehicle was when I got my commutation and they transferred me from the other prison. It’s not like Rip Van Winkle. I know what everything looks like from television, cars included. Tell the truth, I feel a little shaky.”
“I guess that’s to be expected.”
“I suppose.” He tugged his seat belt to tighten it. “You want, to know how I feel, I feel vulnerable. All those years I was locked down twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. I knew what to expect, I knew I was s
afe. Now I’m a free man, and it scares the crap out of me.”
“Look in the glove compartment,” Paul said.
“Jesus, Johnnie Walker Black.”
“I figured you might be feeling a little anxious. That ought to take the edge off.”
“Yeah, Dutch courage,” Billy said. “Why Dutch, do you happen to know? I’ve always wondered.”
“No idea.”
He weighed the bottle in his hand. “Been a long time,” he said. “Haven’t had a taste of anything since they locked me up.”
The Best American Noir of the Century Page 59