Paul destroyed the first letter.
He opened it, unaware of its source, and was a sentence or two into it before he realised what he was reading. It was, incredibly, a letter from the man who had killed his sister.
He felt a chill. He wanted to stop reading but he couldn’t stop reading. He forced himself to stay with it all the way to the end.
The nerve of the man. The unadulterated gall.
Expressing remorse. Saying how sorry he was. Not asking for anything, not trying to justify himself, not attempting to disavow responsibility.
But there had been no remorse in the blue eyes, and Paul didn’t believe there was a particle of genuine remorse in the letter either. And what difference did it make if there was?
Karen was dead. Remorse wouldn’t bring her back.
His lawyer had told him they had nothing to worry about, they were sure to get a stay of execution. The appeal process, always drawn out in capital cases, was in its early days. They’d get the stay in plenty of time, and the clock would start ticking all over again.
And it wasn’t as though it got to the point where they were asking him what he wanted for a last meal. That happened sometimes; there was a guy three cells down who’d had his last meal twice already, but it didn’t get that close for Billy Croydon. Two and a half weeks to go and the stay came through.
That was a relief, but at the same time he almost wished it had run out a little closer to the wire. Not for his benefit, but just to keep a couple of his correspondents on the edges of their chairs.
Two of them, actually. One was a fat girl who lived at home with her mother in Burns, Oregon, the other a sharp-jawed old maid employed as a corporate librarian in Philadelphia. Both had displayed a remarkable willingness to pose as he specified for their Polaroid cameras, doing interesting things and showing themselves in interesting ways. And, as the countdown had continued toward his date with death, both had proclaimed their willingness to join him in heaven.
No joy in that. In order for them to follow him to the grave, he’d have to be in it himself, wouldn’t he? They could cop out and he’d never even know it.
Still, there was great power in knowing they’d even made the promise. And maybe there was something here he could work with.
He went to the typewriter. “My darling,” he wrote. “The only thing that makes these last days bearable is the love we have for each other. Your pictures and letters sustain me, and the knowledge that we will be together in the next world draws much of the fear out of the abyss that yawns before me.
“Soon they will strap me down and fill my veins with poison, and I will awaken in the void. If only I could make that final journey knowing you would be waiting there for me! My angel, do you have the courage to make the trip ahead of me? Do you love me that much? I can’t ask so great a sacrifice of you, and yet I am driven to ask it, because how dare I withhold from you something that is so important to me?”
He read it over, crossed out sacrifice, and pencilled in proof of love. It wasn’t quite right, and he’d have to work on it some more. Could either of the bitches possibly go for it? Could he possibly get them to do themselves for love?
And, even if they did, how would he know about it? Some hatchet-faced dame in Philly slashes her wrists in the bathtub, some fat girl hangs herself in Oregon, who’s going to know to tell him so he can get off on it? Darling, do it in front of a video cam, and have them send me the tape. Be a kick, but it’d never happen.
Didn’t Manson get his girls to cut X’s on their foreheads? Maybe he could get his to cut themselves a little, where it wouldn’t show except in the Polaroids. Would they do it? Maybe, if he worded it right.
Meanwhile, he had other fish to fry.
“Dear Paul,” he typed. “I’ve never called you anything but ‘Mr. Dandridge,’ but I’ve written you so many letters, some of them just in the privacy of my mind, that I’ll permit myself this liberty. And for all I know you throw my letters away unread. If so, well, I’m still not sorry I’ve spent the time writing them. It’s a great help to me to get my thoughts on paper in this manner.
“I suppose you already know that I got another stay of execution. I can imagine your exasperation at the news. Would it surprise you to know that my own reaction was much the same? I don’t want to die, Paul, but I don’t want to live like this, either, while lawyers scurry around just trying to postpone the inevitable. Better for both of us if they’d just killed me right away.
“Though I suppose I should be grateful for this chance to make my peace, with you and with myself. I can’t bring myself to ask for your forgiveness, and I certainly can’t summon up whatever is required for me to forgive myself, but perhaps that will come with time. They seem to be giving me plenty of time, even if they do persist in doling it out to me bit by bit…”
When he found the letter, Paul Dandridge followed what had become standard practice for him. He set it aside while he opened and tended to the rest of his mail. Then he went into the kitchen and brewed himself a pot of coffee. He poured a cup and sat down with it and opened the letter from Croydon.
When the second letter came he’d read it through to the end, then crumpled it in his fist. He hadn’t known whether to throw it in the garbage or burn it in the fireplace, and in the end he’d done neither. Instead he’d carefully unfolded it and smoothed out its creases and read it again before putting it away.
Since then he’d saved all the letters. It had been almost three years since sentence was pronounced on William Croydon, and longer than that since Karen had died at his hands. (Literally at his hands, he thought; the hands that typed the letter and folded it into its envelope had encircled Karen’s neck and strangled her. The very hands.)
Now Croydon was thirty-three and Paul was thirty himself, and he had been receiving letters at the approximate rate of one every two months. This was the fifteenth, and it seemed to mark a new stage in their one-sided correspondence. Croydon had addressed him by his first name.
“Better for both of us if they’d just killed me right away.” Ah, but they hadn’t, had they? And they wouldn’t either. It would drag on and on and on. A lawyer he’d consulted had told him it would not be unrealistic to expect another ten years of delay. For God’s sake, he’d be forty years old by the time the state got around to doing the job.
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he and Croydon were fellow prisoners. He was not confined to a cell and not under a sentence of death, but it struck him that his life held only the illusion of freedom. He wouldn’t really be free until Croydon’s ordeal was over. Until then he was confined in a prison without walls, unable to get on with his life, unable to have a life, just marking time.
He went over to his desk, took out a sheet of letterhead, uncapped a pen. For a long moment he hesitated. Then he sighed gently and touched pen to paper.
“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.