All the Flowers Are Dying (3 page)

“That would be awful,” Herb said. “Imagine knowing you didn’t do something, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening to you.”

“People die all the time,” Pat said, “for no good reason at all.”

“But the state doesn’t do it to them. That’s different, somehow.”

Abie said, “But sometimes there’s just no fit response short of death. Terrorists, for example. What would you do with them?”

“Shoot them out of hand,” Ray said. “Failing that, hang the bastards.”

“But if you’re against capital punishment—”

“You asked me what I would do, not what I think is right. When it comes to terrorists, home-grown or foreign, I don’t care what’s right. I’d hang the fuckers.”

This made for a spirited discussion, but I tuned out most of it. In the main I enjoy the company of my fellow sober alcoholics, but I have to say I like it less when they talk politics or philosophy or, indeed, anything much beyond their own immediate lives. The more abstract the conversation got, the less attention I paid to it, until I perked up a little when Abie said, “What about Applewhite? Preston Applewhite, from Richmond, Virginia. He killed those three little boys, and he’s scheduled for execution sometime next week.”

“Friday,” I said. Ray gave me a look. “It came up in a conversation earlier tonight,” I explained. “I gather the evidence is pretty cut-and-dried.”

“Overwhelming,” Abie said. “And you know sex killers will do it again if they get the chance. There’s no reforming them.”

“Well, if life without parole really meant life without parole…”

And I tuned out again. Preston Applewhite, whose case hadn’t interested me much at the time and of whose guilt or innocence I had no opinion, had unwittingly found his way into two very different conversations. That had caught my attention, but now I could forget about him.

“I had the Irish breakfast,” I told Elaine, “complete with black pudding, which Joe is crazy about so long as he can manage to forget what it is.”

“There’s probably a kosher vegetarian version,” she said, “made out of wheat gluten. Did it feel strange going there?”

“A little, but less so as the evening wore on and I got used to it. The menu’s not as interesting as Jimmy’s, but what I had was pretty good.”

“It’s hard to screw up an Irish breakfast.”

“We’ll go sometime and you can see what you think. Of the place— I already know what you would think of the Irish breakfast. You’re home early, incidentally.”

“Monica had a late date.”

“The mystery man?”

She nodded. Monica’s her best friend, and her men run to type: they’re all married. At first it would bother her when they’d hop out of her bed to catch the last train to Upper Saddle River, and then she realized that she liked it better that way. No bad breath in your face first thing in the morning, plus you had your weekends free. Wasn’t that the best of all worlds?

Usually she showed off her married beaus. Some of them were proud and some were sheepish, but what this one was we seemed unlikely to find out, as he’d somehow impressed upon her the need for secrecy. She’d been seeing him for a few weeks now, and Elaine, her confidante in all matters, couldn’t get a thing out of her beyond the admission that he was extremely intelligent and—no kidding—very secretive.

“They don’t go out in public together,” she reported, “not even for a charming little dinner in a charming little bistro. There’s no way she can reach him, not by phone or e-mail, and when he calls her the conversations are brief and cryptic. He won’t say her name over the phone, and doesn’t want her to use his. And she’s not even sure the name he gave her is his real name, but whatever it is she won’t tell me.”

“It sounds as though she’s getting off on the secrecy.”

“Oh, no question. It’s frustrating, because she’d like to be able to talk about him, but at the same time she likes that she can’t. And since she doesn’t know who he is or what he does, she can make him into anything in her mind. Like a government agent, and she can’t even be sure what government.”

“So he calls her and comes over and they go to bed. End of story?”

“She says it’s not just sex.”

“They watch
Jeopardy
together?”

“If they do,” she said, “I bet he knows all the answers.”

“Everybody knows the answers.”

“Smartass. The questions, then. He knows all the questions. Because he’s superintelligent.”

“It’s a shame we’ll never get to meet him,” I said. “He sounds like a whole lot of fun.”

The Greensville Correctional Center is located just outside of Jarratt, Virginia, an hour’s drive south of Richmond. He pulls up to the gate-house, rolls down his window, shows the guard his driver’s license and the letter from the warden. His car, a white Ford Crown Victoria with a moonroof, is immaculate; he spent the previous night in Richmond, and before he left this morning he ran it through a car wash. This car’s a rental, and it hadn’t gotten all that dirty in a few hundred miles of highway travel, but he likes a clean car, always has. Keep your car washed, your hair combed, and your shoes shined, he likes to say, because you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

He parks where the guard indicates, no more than thirty yards from the main entrance, over which the facade is filled with the institution’s name
:
GREENSVILLE / CORRECTIONAL / CENTER
.
The name’s scarcely necessary, the structure could hardly be anything else, squat and rectilinear and hinting at confinement and punishment
.

There’s a briefcase on the seat beside him, but he’s already decided not to take it inside, to avoid the nuisance of having to open it time and time again. He opens it now, takes out a small spiral-bound notebook. He doubts he’ll need to take notes, but it’s a useful prop.

Before leaving the car he checks himself again in the rearview mirror. Adjusts the knot of his silver tie, smoothes his mustache. Tries on a few expressions, settling on a rueful half-smile.

He locks the car. Hardly necessary, as the likelihood of someone breaking into a car in a prison parking lot in the very shadow of the guards’ tower strikes him as infinitesimal. But he always locks the car upon leaving it. If you always lock it, you’ll never leave it unlocked. If you’re always early, you’ll never be late.

He likes catchphrases like that. Pronounced with the right degree of certainty, even of solemnity, they can make a remarkable impression on others. Repeated over time, their effect can verge on the hypnotic.

He strides across the tarmac toward the entrance, a trimly built man wearing a gray suit, a crisp white shirt, an unpatterned silver tie. His black cap-toe shoes are freshly shined, and the rueful half-smile is in place upon his thin lips.

The warden, one John Humphries, is also wearing a gray suit, but there the resemblance ends. Humphries is the taller by several inches and heavier by fifty or sixty pounds. He carries the weight well and has the look of an ex–college athlete who never lost the habit of gym workouts. His handshake is firm, his authority unmistakable.

“Dr. Bodinson,” he says.

“Warden.”

“Well, Applewhite’s agreed to see you.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“For my part, I wish I had a better sense of your interest in him.”

He nods, grooms his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “I’m a psychologist,” he says.

“So I understand. Yale doctorate, undergraduate work at UVA. I was at Charlottesville myself, though that would have been before your time.”

Humphries is fifty-three, ten years his senior. He knows the man’s age, just as he knew he’d graduated from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. The Internet’s wonderful, it can tell you almost anything you need to know, and this particular bit of knowledge is responsible for his having included UVA on his own résumé.

“Yale tends to impress people,” he says, “but if I ever amount to anything in this world, the credit should go to the education I got here in Virginia.”

“Is that a fact?” Humphries looks at him, and it seems to him that his gaze is less guarded, more respectful. “And are you a Virginian yourself?”

He shakes his head. “Army brat. I grew up all over the place, and mostly overseas. My four years in Charlottesville was the longest I ever stayed in one spot in my whole life.”

They reminisce briefly about the old school, and it turns out that their respective fraternities were friendly rivals. He’d considered making himself a fellow member of Sigma Chi, but decided that would be pushing it. He’d picked another house, just two doors away on Fraternity Row.

They finish with their old school ties, and he explains his interest in Preston Applewhite. This interview, he tells Humphries, will be one part of an extensive study of criminals who steadfastly maintain their innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt. He is particularly interested, he says, in murderers facing the death penalty, insisting on their lack of culpability right up to the very moment of execution.

Humphries takes this in, frowns in thought. “In your letter to Applewhite,” he says, “you indicate that you believe him.”

“I was attempting to give that impression.”

“What’s that mean, Doctor? You think he’s innocent?”

“Certainly not.”

“Because the evidence offered at his trial—”

“Was overwhelming and conclusive. It convinced the jury, and well it might have.”

“I have to say I’m relieved to hear you say that. But I don’t know that I understand your motive in suggesting otherwise to Applewhite.”

“I suppose one could argue the ethics of it,” he says, and smoothes his mustache. “I’ve found that, in order to win the confidence and cooperation of the men I need to interview, I have to give them something. I’m not prepared to offer them hope, or anything tangible. But it seems to me permissible to let them think that I believe in the veracity of their protestations of innocence. It’s easier for them to pour their revelations into a sympathetic ear, and it may even do them some good.”

“How do you figure that?”

“If I believe a man’s story, it’s that much easier for him to believe it himself.”

“But you don’t. Believe their stories, that is.”

He shakes his head. “If I had the slightest doubt of a man’s guilt,” he says, “I wouldn’t include him in my study. I’m not investigating the unjustly accused. The men I’m looking at have been justly accused and justly convicted and, I must say, justly condemned to death.”

“You’re not opposed to capital punishment.”

“Not at all. I think the social order requires it.”

“Now there,” Humphries says, “I wish I had your certainty. I don’t disagree with you, but I’m in the unfortunate position of being able to see both sides of the issue.”

“That can’t make your job easier.”

“It can’t and it doesn’t. But it’s part of my job, and only a small part, although it takes up a disproportionate amount of my time and thought. And I like my job, and like to think I’m good at it.”

He lets Humphries talk about the job, its trials and its satisfactions, providing the nods and responses and sympathetic facial expressions that would encourage the flow of words, There’s no hurry. Preston Applewhite isn’t going anywhere, not until Friday, when it’s time for them to put the needle in his arm and send him off to wherever people go.

“Well, I didn’t mean to go into all that,” Humphries says at length. “I was wondering how you’d get Applewhite to talk to you, but I don’t guess you’ll have much trouble drawing him out. Look how you drew me out, and you weren’t even trying.”

“I was interested in what you were saying.”

Humphries leans forward, puts his hands together on his desk blotter. “When you talk to him,” he says, “you’re not going to offer him any false hope, are you?”

False hope? What other kind is there?

But what he says is, “My abiding interest is in what he has to say. For my part, I’ll do what I can to help him reconcile the impossible contradiction of his situation.”

“That being?”

“That he’s going to be put to death in a matter of days, and that he’s innocent.”

“But you don’t believe he’s innocent. Oh, I see. His innocence is something in which you’re both pretending to believe.”

“It’s pretense on my part. He may very well believe it.”

“Oh?”

He leans forward, folds his own hands, purposely mirroring the warden’s own body language. “Some of the men I’ve interviewed,” he confides, “will actually admit, with a wink or a nod or in so many words, that they’ve done the deeds for which they’re condemned to death. But there have only been a few of those. Others, probably the greater portion, know they’re guilty. I can see it in their eyes, I can hear it in their voices and read it in their faces, but they won’t admit it to me or to anyone else. They’re holding out deliberately, waiting for a stay from the Supreme Court, an eleventh-hour phone call from the governor.”

“This one’s up for reelection next fall, and Applewhite’s the most hated man in the state of Virginia. If there’s a phone call, it’ll be for the doctor, wishing him luck in finding a good vein.”

That thought seems to call for the rueful half-smile, and he supplies it. “But what I’ve come to realize,” he says, “is that a substantial minority of condemned men honestly believe they’re innocent. Not that they had just cause, not that it was the victim’s own fault, not that the Devil made them do it. But that they didn’t do it at all. The cops must have framed them, the evidence must have been planted, and if only the real killer can turn up then the world will recognize their own abiding innocence.”