“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 safe. Now I’m a free man, and it scares the crap out of me.”
“Look in the glove compartment,” Paul said.
“Jesus, Johnny 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.”
“There was nothing available in prison?”
“Oh, there was stuff. The jungle juice cons made out of potatoes and raisins, and some good stuff that got smuggled in. But I wasn’t in population, so I didn’t have access. And anyway it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.”
“Well, you’re a free man now. Why don’t you drink to it? I’m driving or I’d join you.”
“Well . . .”
“Go ahead.”
“Why not?” he said, and uncapped the bottle and held it to the light. “Pretty color, huh? Well, here’s to freedom, huh?” He took a long drink, shuddered at the burn of the whisky. “Kicks like a mule,” he said.
“You’re not used to it.”
“I’m not.” He put the cap on the bottle and had a little trouble screwing it back on. “Hitting me hard,” he reported. “Like I was a little kid getting his first taste of it. Whew.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“Spinning,” Billy said, and slumped in his seat.
Paul glanced over at him, looked at him again a minute later. Then, after checking the mirror, he pulled the car off the road and braked to a stop.
Billy was conscious for a little while before he opened his eyes. He tried to get his bearings first. The last thing he remembered was a wave of dizziness after the slug of scotch hit bottom. He was still sitting upright, but it didn’t feel like a car seat, and he didn’t sense any movement. No, he was in some sort of chair, and he seemed to be tied to it.
That didn’t make any sense. A dream? He’d had lucid dreams before and knew how real they were, how you could be in them and wonder if you were dreaming and convince yourself you weren’t. The way you broke the surface and got out of it was by opening your eyes. You had to force yourself, had to open your real eyes and not just your eyes in the dream, but it could be done . . . There!
He was in a chair, in a room he’d never seen before, looking out a window at a view he’d never seen before. An open field, woods behind it.
He turned his head to the left and saw a wall paneled in knotty cedar. He turned to the right and saw Paul Dandridge, wearing boots and jeans and a plaid flannel shirt and sitting in an easy chair with a book. He said, “Hey!” and Paul lowered the book and looked at him.
“Ah,” Paul said. “You’re awake.”
“What’s going on?”
“What do you think?”
“There was something in the whiskey.”
“There was indeed,” Paul agreed. “You started to stir just as we made the turn off the state road. I gave you a booster shot with a hypodermic needle.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You never felt it. I was afraid for a minute there that I’d given you too much. That would have been ironic, wouldn’t you say? ‘Death by lethal injection.’ The sentence carried out finally after all these years, and you wouldn’t have even known it happened.”
He couldn’t take it in. “Paul,” he said, “for God’s sake, what’s it all about?”
“What’s it about?” Paul considered his response. “It’s about time.”
“Time?”
“It’s the last act of the drama.”
“Where are we?”
“A cabin in the woods. Not the cabin. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I killed you in the same cabin where you killed Karen. Ironic, but not really feasible. So this is a different cabin in different woods, but it will have to do.”
“You’re going to kill me?”
“Of course.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Because that’s how it ends, Billy. That’s the point of the whole game. That’s how I planned it from the beginning.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Why is it so hard to believe? We conned each other, Billy. You pretended to repent and I pretended to believe you. You pretended to reform and I pretende
d to be on your side. Now we can both stop pretending.”
Billy was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I was trying to con you at the beginning.”
“No kidding.”
“There was a point where it turned into something else, but it started out as a scam. It was the only way I could think of to stay alive. You saw through it?”
“Of course.”
“But you pretended to go along with it. Why?”
“Is it that hard to figure out?”
“It doesn’t make any sense. What do you gain by it? My death? If you wanted me dead all you had to do was tear up my letter. The state was all set to kill me.”
“They’d have taken forever,” Paul said bitterly. “Delay after delay, and always the possibility of a reversal and a retrial, always the possibility of a commutation of sentence.”
“There wouldn’t have been a reversal, and it took you working for me to get my sentence commuted. There would have been delays, but there’d already been a few of them before I got around to writing to you. It couldn’t have lasted too many years longer, and it would have added up to a lot less than it has now, with all the time I spent serving life and waiting for the parole board to open the doors. If you’d just let it go, I’d be dead and buried by now.”
“You’ll be dead soon,” Paul told him. “And buried. It won’t be much longer. Your grave’s already dug. I took care of that before I drove to the prison to pick you up.”
“They’ll come after you, Paul. When I don’t show up for my initial appointment with my parole officer—”
“They’ll get in touch, and I’ll tell them we had a drink and shook hands and you went off on your own. It’s not my fault if you decided to skip town and violate the terms of your parole.”
He took a breath. He said, “Paul, don’t do this.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m begging you. I don’t want to die.”
“Ah,” Paul said. “That’s why.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I left it to the state,” he said, “they’d have been killing a dead man. By the time the last appeal was denied and the last request for a stay of execution turned down, you’d have been resigned to the inevitable. They’d strap you to a gurney and give you a shot, and it would be just like going to sleep.”
“That’s what they say.”
“But now you want to live. You adjusted to prison, you made a life for yourself in there, and then you finally made parole, icing on the cake, and now you genuinely want to live. You’ve really got a life now, Billy, and I’m going to take it away from you.”
“You’re serious about this.”
“I’ve never been more serious about anything.”
“You must have been planning this for years.”
“From the very beginning.”
“Jesus, it’s the most thoroughly premeditated crime in the history of the world, isn’t it? Nothing I can do about it, either. You’ve got me tied tight and the chair won’t tip over. Is there anything I can say that’ll make you change your mind?”
“Of course not.”
“That’s what I thought.” He sighed. “Get it over with.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Huh?”
“This won’t be what the state hands out,” Paul Dandridge said. “A minute ago you were begging me to let you live. Before it’s over you’ll be begging me to kill you.”
“You’re going to torture me.”
“That’s the idea.”
“In fact you’ve already started, haven’t you? This is the mental part.”
“Very perceptive of you, Billy.”
“For all the good it does me. This is all because of what I did to your sister, isn’t it?”
“Obviously.”
“I didn’t do it, you know. It was another Billy Croydon that killed her, and I can barely remember what he was like.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Not to you, evidently, and you’re the one calling the shots. I’m sure Kierkegaard had something useful to say about this sort of situation, but I’m damned if I can call it to mind. You knew I was conning you, huh? Right from the jump?”
“Of course.”
“I thought it was a pretty good letter I wrote you.”
“It was a masterpiece, Billy. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t easy to see through.”
“So now you dish it out and I take it,” Billy Croydon said, “until you get bored and end it, and I wind up in the grave you’ve already dug for me. And that’s the end of it. I wonder if there’s a way to turn it around.”
“Not a chance.”
“Oh, I know I’m not getting out of here alive, Paul, but there’s more than one way of turning something around. Let’s see now. You know, the letter you got wasn’t the first one I wrote to you.”
“So?”
“The past is always with you, isn’t it? I’m not the same man as the guy who killed your sister, but he’s still there inside somewhere. Just a question of calling him up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just talking to myself, I guess. I was starting to tell you about that first letter. I never sent it, you know, but I kept it. For the longest time I held on to it and read it whenever I wanted to relive the experience. Then it stopped working, or maybe I stopped wanting to call up the past, but whatever it was I quit reading it. I still held on to it, and then one day I realized I didn’t want to own it anymore. So I tore it up and got rid of it.”
“That’s fascinating.”
“But I read it so many times I bet I can bring it back word for word.” His eyes locked with Paul Dandridge’s, and his lips turned up in the slightest suggestion of a smile. He said, “ ‘Dear Paul, Sitting here in this cell waiting for the day to come when they put a needle in my arm and flush me down God’s own toilet, I found myself thinking about your testimony in court. I remember how you said your sister was a goodhearted girl who spent her short life bringing pleasure to everyone who knew her. According to your testimony, knowing this helped you rejoice in her life at the same time that it made her death so hard to take.
“ ‘Well, Paul, in the interest of helping you rejoice some more, I thought I’d tell you just how much pleasure your little sister brought to me. I’ve got to tell you that in all my life I never got more pleasure from anybody. My first look at Karen brought me pleasure, just watching her walk across campus, just looking at those jiggling tits and that tight little ass and imagining the fun I was going to have with them.’ “
“Stop it, Croydon!”
“You don’t want to miss this, Paulie. ‘Then when I had her tied up in the backseat of the car with her mouth taped shut, I have to say she went on being a real source of pleasure. Just looking at her in the rear-view mirror was enjoyable, and from time to time I would stop the car and lean into the back to run my hands over her body. I don’t think she liked it much, but I enjoyed it enough for the both of us.’ “
“You’re a son of a bitch.”
“And you’re an asshole. You should have let the state put me out of everybody’s misery. Failing that, you should have let go of the hate and sent the new William Croydon off to rejoin society. There’s a lot more to the letter, and I remember it perfectly.” He tilted his head, resumed quoting from memory. “ ‘Tell me something, Paul. Did you ever fool around with Karen yourself? I bet you did. I can picture her when she was maybe eleven, twelve years old, with her little titties just beginning to bud out, and you’d have been seventeen or eighteen yourself, so how could you stay away from her? She’s sleeping and you walk into her room and sit on the edge of her bed.’ “ He grinned. “I always liked that part. And there’s lots more. You enjoying your revenge, Paulie? Is it as sweet as they say it is?”
Points
The Knicks were hosting a first-year expansion team at the Garden, and when the two men arrived, thirty minutes before game time, half the seats were empty.
“I’m afraid it’s not going to be much of a game,” the younger man said, “and it looks as though I’m not alone in that opinion. Last time I was here the Lakers were in town, and there wasn’t an empty seat.”
“We’re early,” the older man said. “They won’t sell out tonight, but they’ll come closer than you might guess. Remember, this is New York. A lot of guys don’t even leave their desks until seven-thirty for a game that starts at eight.”
“That’s me you’re describing. Not tonight, but the Laker game? There were points on the board by the time I got to my seat. And it would have been the same story tonight if I hadn’t put my foot down. Carrigan came into my office at half past six with something that had to be done and would only take me a minute, swear to God. ‘Not tonight,’ I told him. ‘I’m meeting my dad.’ “
Anyone looking at them would have suspected they were father and son. The resemblance was unmistakable, in their faces and in the easy loose-limbed grace with which they moved. The son was a younger version of the father, his hair darker, his features less emphatic. Both were tall men, standing several inches over six feet. Both had been slim in their youth, and both had thickened some around the middle with age, the father more than the son. The son was perhaps an inch taller than the father, a fact which had not gone unremarked at their meeting a few minutes earlier.
“You’re taller,” Richard Parmalee had said. “I don’t suppose your pituitary gland kicked into overdrive when nobody was looking. Have you been taking growth hormone?”
The son, whose name was Kevin, shook his head and grinned.
“Then the odds are you’re not taller,” the father said. “So, unless you’ve got lifts in your shoes—”
“Just insoles, but they don’t make you any taller.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. Well, where does logic inexorably lead us? I’m shrinking.”
“You look the same to me.”