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.