“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.”
3
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 y
ou 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.”
“This facility houses three thousand inmates,” Humphries says, “and I don’t know how many committed crimes they can’t consciously recall. They were in a blackout, drug-or alcohol-induced. They don’t necessarily deny their actions, but they don’t remember them. But that’s not what you mean.”
“No. There are some instances, especially in sex crimes of the sort Applewhite committed, where the perpetrator’s in an altered state during the performance of the act. But that’s rarely enough to keep him from being aware of what he did. No, the phenomenon I’m talking about happens after the fact, and it’s a case of the wish being father to the thought.”
“Oh?”
“Let me put myself in Applewhite’s place for a moment. Suppose I killed three boys over a period of—what was it, two months?”
“I believe so.”
“Abducted them one by one, committed forcible sodomy, tortured them, killed them, concealed the bodies, and covered up evidence of the murders. Either I found a way to make this acceptable to my conscience or I was sufficiently sociopathic as not to be burdened with a conscience in the first place.”
“I grew up certain that everyone had a conscience,” Humphries reflects. “That’s an illusion you lose in a hurry in this line of work.”
“These people are sane. They just lack a piece of standard human equipment. They know right from wrong, but they don’t feel the distinction applies to them. It strikes them as somehow beside the point.”
“And they can be quite charming.”
He nods. “And can act convincingly normal. They know what a conscience is, they understand the concept, so they can behave as though they have one.” The rueful smile. “Well. I’ve killed these boys, and it doesn’t bother me in the least, but then I’m caught, and placed under arrest, and it turns out there’s an abundance of evidence of my culpability. I’m in a jail cell, with the media damning me as the blackest villain of the century, and all I can do is protest my innocence.
“And I do so, with increasing conviction. I have to do more than insist I’m innocent, I have to do so with utter certainty, for how am I to convince anyone if I am not myself convincing? And how better to be convincing than to believe myself in the truth of my arguments?”
“Other words, you wind up believing your own lies.”
“That’s what appears to happen. I’m not entirely certain of the mechanics of the process, but that’s how it manifests itself.”
“It sounds almost like self-hypnosis.”
“Except that self-hypnosis is generally a conscious process, while what I’ve described is largely unconscious. But there are elements of self- hypnosis, certainly, and elements of denial as well. ‘I could not have done this, ergo I did not do it.’ The mind’s reality trumps the reality of the physical world.”
“Fascinating. You make me wish I’d taken more psych courses.”
“I’d say you’re getting a crash course on the job.”
“I’m an administrator, Dr. Bodinson, and—”
“Arne.”
“Arne. I’m an administrator, the plant manager at a factory. My job is to keep the line running and handle problems as they arise. But you’re right, it’s a crash course in the intricacies of the human psyche. You know, if Applewhite believes he didn’t do it—”
“Which I haven’t yet established, but which strikes me as likely.”
“Well, that means there won’t be any last-minute confession.”
“How could there be, if in his mind he has nothing to admit to?”
“It ordinarily wouldn’t matter,” Humphries says, “because either way he gets the needle, but I was thinking of the parents of the one boy, the first victim. I don’t recall his name, and I should. I’ve heard it often enough.”
“Jeffrey Willis, wasn’t it? The one whose body was never found.”
“Yes, of course. Jeffrey Willis, and his parents are Peg and Baldwin Willis, and they’re having a terrible time of it. They can’t get closure. That’s one good thing about capital punishment, it provides closure for the victim’s family in the way a life sentence never does, but for the Willises it’ll be only partial closure, because they’re deprived of the opportunity to bury their son.”
“And in their minds they can’t shake off the slim hope that he’s alive.”
“They know he’s not,” Humphries says. “They know he’s dead and they know Applewhite killed him. There was a manila envelope in a locked drawer of the man’s desk, and in it were three glassine envelopes, each containing a lock of hair. One was the Willis boy’s, and the others were from the other two victims.” He shakes his head. “Of course Applewhite had no explanation. Of course someone must have planted the trophies in his desk. Of course he’d never seen them before.”
“He may believe that.”
“All anyone wants from him now, all he can do in the world on his way out of it, is tell those poor people where their son’s body is buried. That might get him a call from the governor, at the very least staying his execution long enough to recover the body. But if he honestly believes he didn’t do it—”
“Then he can’t admit it. And couldn’t locate the body, because he no longer knows where it is.”
“If that’s what he believes, I don’t suppose there’s anything to be done in that regard. But if he’s just putting on an act, and if he were somehow convinced that it’s in his own best interests to provide us with the whereabouts of the body…”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he says.
4
The cell is larger than he’d expected, and more comfortably appointed. There’s a built-in concrete platform to support the mattress, a built-in kneehole desk. There’s a television set mounted high on the wall, out of reach, with a remote control pointed toward it and bolted to the desktop. A single molded plastic chair—white, st
ackable if there were another to stack upon it—is the cell’s only movable furniture. After a tentative handshake, Applewhite motions him to the chair, takes a seat for himself on the bed.
He is a handsome man, is Preston Applewhite, although the years in confinement have taken a toll. He’s five years older than when he was arrested, and they’ve been hard years, soul-deadening years. They’ve rounded his broad shoulders, bowed his back. They’ve put some gray in his dark blond hair, even as they’ve etched vertical lines at the sides of his full-lipped mouth. Have they washed some of the blue from his eyes? Perhaps, or it could be that it’s not the color but the expression in those eyes that has faded. The thousand-yard stare, the unfocused gaze into the middle distance, and on into the abyss.
When he speaks, his voice is flat, uninflected. “I hope this isn’t a ruse, Dr. Bodinson. I hope you’re not from the media.”
“Certainly not.”
“I’ve turned down their requests. I don’t want to be interviewed, I don’t want a chance to tell my story. I don’t have a story to tell. My only story is that I’m innocent, that I’m living in a nightmare, and that’s not a story anyone wants to hear.”
“I’m not from the media.”
“Or from the boy’s parents? They want to know where their son is buried, so they can dig him up and bury him again. For the love of God, don’t they think I’d tell them if I knew?”
“They think you’re unwilling to own up to knowing.”
“Why? Friday they’re going to pump a mix of chemicals into me, and what little life I’ve got is going to come to an end. That’s going to happen no matter what I do. I don’t deserve it, I never harmed anyone in my life, but that’s beside the point. Twelve men and women looked at the evidence and decided I was guilty, and then they thought it over and decided I deserved to die for it, and I can’t really blame them for either of those decisions. I mean, look at the evidence.”