“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 realised 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 good-hearted 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 rearview 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?”
Mary Higgins Clark
Mary Higgins Clark is a phenomenon, certainly, and one who has earned her status on the world’s best-seller lists by dint of hard work. In the very best sense, she is the novelist-as-Everywoman, and her devoted readers identify not only with her imperilled heroines but with the author herself. The romantic suspense tradition, after all, is a great one, with roots stretching back to the delicious Gothic excesses of Ann Radcliffe and racing forward to the modern era as heralded by Daphne du Maurier.
Clark’s books and stories, however, are firmly contemporary. Shunning moats and manor houses, she reminds us time and again of the many sorts of courage women exemplify in the lives they lead today-as professionals, as wives, mothers, stalwart friends. Add sudden death to the mixture, along with villainy and betrayal, plus a surprise twist or two, and you have the ingredients for another best seller. It may look easy to pull this off, keeping fans hooked, turning pages into the small hours of the morning, but it’s not. There have been, and are, many imitators, convinced that they can use the same ingredients to cook up their own best sellers, but they just can’t match the priceless recipe.