The Whole Truth

  I decided to stop talking, and see what he’d play next.

  That gave me a chance to get accustomed to his appearance, which was unexpectedly shocking. I had been warned, but it wasn’t enough. I had heard he looked creepy, but I hadn’t really understood how unnaturally small he was, or how confusingly young he appeared. It wasn’t just that he was short, although he wasn’t quite five foot four, but rather that he looked like a strange kind of boy, instead of a man. Skinny, bony. He might not have weighed a hundred pounds.

  It was strange that someone so small could seem so terrible.

  Ray looked as if he had never “filled out” as we say about grown men. There’s a stage with some kids when their joints look too big for the rest of them. Their arms and legs are four sticks hinged in the middle by their knees and elbows and when they take off their shirts, they’re all rib cage. He looked like that, not that I could actually see his ribs.

  Ray Raintree looked like a kid in a man’s outfit.

  I had also heard he was a full-blown hypochondriac, constantly requesting medicine they wouldn’t give him. Getting a prescription meant going to the prison clinic, and he refused to do that, not seeming to understand the one was a consequence of the other. He just wanted pills, any pills from the sound of it, something to swallow, or apply to his skin, or inhale. It made sense of the cornucopia of other people’s prescriptions they had found in one of his backpacks.

  When they originally booked him into the jail, and he got the usual checkup, the doctor noted three distinguishing physical characteristics: a scar on the front, right side of his throat, a second scar right below his rib cage on his left side, and only one testicle. Ray claimed the other one got removed because he got kicked, and it ruptured, but who knew whether to believe him?

  When they gave him a transcription of his own words to sign, he claimed he had never learned to read or write, except his name. Then he scribbled a sample of that on a spare piece of paper. Paul Flanck said it looked like “Da Tee,” and asked him, “Where’d you go to school, Ray?”

  “What’s a school?” his suspect had answered, with a smirk.

  “Where did you learn to play?” I asked him now, but got no reply at all.

  I could see the long, narrow scar on his throat, rising out of his collar, and my gaze fastened on that for a moment, because I would rather look almost anywhere except straight into his eyes.

  His face looked both too young and too old, all at the same time. The “youth” was partially in the hairless skin. Ray had probably never shaved, even though he was probably close to thirty years old. The razor and the blades in his backpack were just wishful thinking. The “age” was in the eyes, which were a flat, unpretty grayish blue color, and in the mouth, which he breathed through. He had thin, grayish blue lips, almost the same color as his eyes, very unusual, very strange to see. To me, Ray had the look of a frozen boy; a human Popsicle, shrunken and evaporated, left in the ice box too long.

  He gave me the willies.

  Ray played “Dixie” one clear note at a time, all the way through to the end of the song.

  “Are you originally from the South, Ray?”

  In reply, he strummed a G-major tonic chord: GBD, followed again by the subdominant and dominant chords, and even a dominant seventh. To the detectives, when they asked about his origins, he wouldn’t stop talking, even if it was all lies. I got chord progressions.

  Progressions, hah! The truth was, I got nowhere with him.

  I wondered if he had a large repertoire of plucked tunes, or if I was going to hear “Dixie” over and over again.

  Uncannily, he began to strum another tune just as I was having that thought. This time, I recognized “Stardust,” the old Hoagy Carmichael standard, which I wouldn’t have thought Ray was old enough to know. He played it one note at a time. “Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely nights dreaming of a star . . .”

  It’s a melancholy song.

  If there was anybody anywhere in the world who cared about him, the sound of his playing that song on the tape might have made them cry.

  “Pretty song,” I said, when he finished.

  He twanged out a discordant arpeggio, which I took as a kind of musical snub, along the lines of, “Who cares what you think?”

  After that, I had to give up, and say good-bye.

  On my tape of that “interview,” there is the sound of my chair being pushed back on the concrete. Then my footsteps, a door opening, my polite exchange with the guard who opened it. All the while, my tape was still running, recording everything. It sounds dramatic, Gothic, to hear it, because underneath the sounds of my exit there is Ray picking out on his guitar “Some Enchanted Evening.”

  “You will meet a stranger . . .”

  I played it later for Detectives Flanck and Anschutz, and it even gave them the shivers. I’ve played it for a few other people since then to show them one of the spookiest interviews of my career.

  I didn’t know if he would agree to see me again, but my educated guess was that he would. What I suspected was that Ray wanted an audience, and if he couldn’t keep it by telling lies, he’d get attention with his silence.

  I never choose a case entirely because of its victim; it is usually the killer who really draws me into it. The awful truth is that, by and large, victims are not nearly as interesting, being almost by definition weaker than their killers. Can the average person name any of the eight nurses Richard Speck killed? It is the names of the killers that people remember, and that is not only because of the media’s attention to them.

  There are exceptions to that general rule. There are victims whose names people remember, while their killers are forgotten. But that is because those victims are the stronger ones, either because of their fame, or because of the strength of the outcry and investigation raised on their behalf. John Lennon and Mark . . . what’s his name? And what’s the name of the fellow who shot Ronald Reagan?

  So what is this supposed strength that the public perceives in these dreadful men, and how could I possibly detect any of it in skinny, weird, unhealthy-looking Ray Raintree?

  It was the strength of his long silence, for one thing, the way he wouldn’t talk to anybody for the longest time, and at no apparent advantage to himself, like prisoners of war won’t talk to the enemy. What was even more strange, Ray refused even to give anybody so much as the equivalent of his “rank and serial number.” Even prisoners of war do that much. As for his name, that strangely poetic, alliterative, haunting moniker, nobody could even swear it was the genuine article either, not after the string of other lies and stories he spun out.

  “Got a middle name, Ray?” they asked him.

  “Steven,” he said, and Francis, Quentin, and Federico. Take your pick, he gave them everything but Peter, Paul and Mary. Those first four were evidently stolen from movie directors: Spielberg, Ford Coppola, Tarantino, and Fellini. When he finally said his middle name was Suck My Cock, they quit asking him.

  Even before that, there was the absolute, head-shaking, throw-your-hands-up-in-the-air utter frustration of the strength with which the guy continued to maintain black was not black and white was not white. Yes, he gave her a ride in his boat. No, that didn’t mean he killed her. Yes, she stopped breathing. No, that didn’t mean she was dead! As Robyn Anschutz said, “It makes me crazy, how he does that. I want to shake him until his eyes pop out of his head. I want to pick him up by his ankles and slam his head into the bars of his cell. He makes me crazy.”

  It was already getting into August when I got my second interview with him. He had already run through one public defender, and he was close to losing his second one, too.

  The day I went to see him for a second time, I was not in a good mood. Usually, when interviewing killers, I tried to win them over, but Ray had annoyed me with the little game he played with his guitar, and the longer I had to think about it, the more annoyed I got, and I had decided to let him know it.

  “Here we go again,?
?? I said, and tossed my tape recorder down.

  I was determined to behave in front of him exactly the way I felt about him, which was, essentially, “Talk to me, don’t talk to me. I want your story, but it’s not like I care about you, or any of my readers will. You are not the hero of this book.”

  It was a brave attitude, but not quite an honest one.

  I very much hoped he would talk his ugly little head off.

  I stuck my legs out in front of me and crossed one ankle over the other. I slouched down enough to feel comfortable, and then I crossed my arms over my chest. It was a closed-off, screw-you posture, which some people might have made the mistake of seeing as defensive. It wasn’t; it meant, “I can’t stand you.”

  I let all of my dislike appear in my words and voice, too.

  “Monologue with musical accompaniment,” I said.

  He grinned, and I nearly sat bolt upright in the chair.

  A response! And one that didn’t require any musical knowledge to interpret.

  Ray began to pluck notes, apparently aimlessly.

  “There are many things I don’t know about you, Ray. Most things, I guess. I’d like to know them, not because I would be interested in them for their own sake, although I might be, but because it would give my book a greater feeling of verisimilitude.”

  I had planned this out, in a rather bratty way.

  There was a brief pause in his plucking, and I knew I’d caught him listening to me, and that he was thinking, What is veriwhatever?

  “Verisimilitude. As you know, it’s very important for any writer, but especially for someone like me who purports to be writing about actual events. It’s a funny word, don’t you think? Its roots make it sound like an oxymoron. Veri—meaning, truth, and similar—meaning, like something else. Like the truth. Not the truth. Just like the truth. And yet it means, to impart a feeling of accuracy.”

  I had no idea if he was bright enough to follow this pompous baloney, but I knew one thing for sure: You could never exaggerate a killer’s overestimation of his own intelligence. The dullest-witted psychopath was convinced that he could be in Mensa, except that taking the IQ test was beneath him.

  I was trying to snag that killer-ego.

  “I’d like to write about your life in a way that gives my readers a feeling of verisimilitude, Ray. If I can’t do that, I’ll make it up. Like you do. I’ll retell the stories you’ve told us, and then I’ll get various learned professionals to analyze them and make suppositions about what those stories suggest about the truth of your life. They may hit close to the mark, they may get it all wrong. But whatever other people say about you, that’s what I’ll write, and that will become the official version of your life, forever.”

  I stopped talking.

  He began to play “Yesterday.”

  His choice hit me hard, that song always does, but I didn’t let him see that. Was he musically joking around again? Giving me a clue?

  I took it as a legitimate reply in a real conversation this time, and I listened to it as if he were talking. When the notes died away, I replied, just as if it were my turn to talk, “I don’t like to tell much about myself to strangers, either. It’s weird, I guess, since I tell so much about other people in my books, but I keep my own life pretty much a secret, like you do yours. When I get interviewed for magazines, I tell them exactly what I want them to know, and nothing else. And when I have to finish a book, or things start closing in, I leave town, and I go away to a place that nobody knows anything about except my attorney. I even use a different name, like I’m a criminal on the run, or something.” I laughed a little. I had planned this out, too. “I’ll tell you the truth, Ray. I’m not crazy about the idea of having anything in common with you, but apparently, I do.”

  Then I acted as if I had just had a brainstorm.

  “Hey, listen, have you ever heard of hypnotic regression?”

  His right hand hovered, motionless, over his strings.

  “You could get hypnotized, and go back to when”—I paraphrased the lyric to the Beatles song, which played right into my scheme—“all your troubles . . .”

  He plucks the notes to accompany the next four words: seemed so far away.

  “I know of a woman who can take you way back, skip you right over Natalie’s death, Ray, and all of the years you’d rather forget, and go straight back to any happy time there might have been in your life, even if it was only the first five minutes after you were born.”

  His hands froze on the strings again.

  “You might see your mother’s face, or your father’s, or maybe just a doctor or a nurse. I don’t know. But a hypnotist might be able to take you back to only happy times.”

  I paused, raised my gaze from his frozen hands to his face.

  His mouth looked slack, and he was staring at the floor.

  “Think about it. Only happy times.”

  Our “interview” ended in silence, without any music to accompany my walk to the door this time. Then, for the first time, I heard his voice, just as I had previously heard it on the interview tapes. It was high pitched, thin, more like a boy’s.

  “You ever done it?”

  I turned slowly, trying not to whirl around in excitement.

  “Get hypnotized?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “You ever want to?”

  I smiled slightly at him. “No.”

  He strummed the strings, looked down at his guitar, and mumbled, “Somethin’ else we’ve got in common.”

  I waited a moment, and then exited.

  When I went to see him three days later, it was at his request, and he didn’t have his guitar with him, and he began to talk. Not easily, not in the flow with which he flamboozled everybody, but slowly and cautiously, like a blind man walking down a pot-holed street.

  “Ask me questions.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Do you have any memories of your childhood?”

  “No.”

  “None, Ray? Isn’t there a wisp of some kind of memory? A feeling you can recall?”

  He shook his head from side to side, and frowned.

  “What is your first memory?”

  He took a very long time to answer that. Finally, he said, speaking as if reluctant to tell me, “A dog.”

  I waited a beat, then said, “Tell me about the dog, okay?”

  He looked me full in my eyes, which unnerved me so much that I had to force myself to hold his gaze.

  “Like a cocker spaniel.”

  “Brown and white?”

  His brow furrowed again, as if something puzzled him. “No, like orange.”

  “Yeah, that could be right, Ray. Cockers sometimes have a kind of orange color. What did the dog do?”

  He shook his head. “He was just a dog.”

  “You remember it was a male?” I asked, quickly. “Maybe you remember his name?”

  Suddenly he stood up, startling the guard and me.

  “I want to go back now.”

  To his cell, he meant.

  He would rather go sit in his cell than sit there talking about these things.

  Before he walked out, he turned around and said to me, “That woman, the one who hypnotizes people. It won’t work on me. Nobody can hypnotize me, not if I didn’t want them to.”

  Of course. I had forgotten about the problem of a killer’s ego. Of course, he wouldn’t want to admit that anybody could exert any power over his own thoughts, except him. He wouldn’t want to make himself that vulnerable; only victims were supposed to do that. And yet the fact that he has mentioned it at all meant that he had been thinking about it.

  I remained seated until the door snapped shut behind them.

  This could take forever, was my thought, and it might not be worth anything when I got it. And yet, it was well known that sociopaths often started their r
eign of pain with small animals. Dogs and cats were common, easy targets. Did the memory of a cocker spaniel make Ray feel uncomfortable for just that sort of reason?

  No, I argued with myself, because if the memory of torturing an animal made him feel uncomfortable, he couldn’t be defined as a sociopath, could he? These things could get very circular, and the more books on psychology I read and the more analysts I met, the more round and round I went sometimes. It was a good thing I could quote the “experts” in my books, because my own opinions about these things were as firm as tapioca pudding.

  All I knew was that I was going to have a hard time creating a real-sounding life out of, “Dog. Orange and white.”

  I made a bet with his lawyer that he’d do it.

  For the session of hypnotic regression, Ray sat with his legs sprawled on the raised bottom of a reclining chair, with his fingers splayed on the armrests, and his eyes closed.

  And what a strange session that was.

  After taking Ray through a relaxation exercise, the psychologist said, in her literally hypnotic voice, “With your eyes closed, look down at your feet. What do you see?”

  Ray laughed. “Little feet. Little white feet. Bare.”

  “Now move your gaze up your body. What do you see?”

  “It’s like a dress, only it’s not. I don’t know why. Does this mean I’m really a girl?” The question was sarcastic.

  “Don’t worry about what it means.” The doctor’s voice was relaxed, neutral, resonant. It reverberated in the listener’s chest like the low notes from a cello. “Just be there. See what you see. Do you think it’s a little girl’s dress?”

  “No. Feels like a boy. But why’s he wearing a dress?”

  “I’m going to ask you to look around you now, and see if you can see anybody else who is there. Do that now.”

  “A lady.”

  “Try to see her face. Does she look like anybody you know?”

  “Yeah, sure, she looks like that movie star. Cool.”