All the Flowers Are Dying (4 page)

“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.

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, stackable 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.”

“Yes.”

“Child pornography on my computer hard drive. Little envelopes of hair from the dead boys in my desk drawer. A bloody handkerchief found at the burial site, and the blood’s mine. There was even a file on my computer, an elaborate obscene third-person account of one of the murders. It had been erased, but they managed to recover it, and only a monster could have written it. It contained details of the crime that could only have been known to the person who committed it. If I’d been on that jury, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. A guilty verdict was the only verdict possible.”

“They didn’t spend much time in deliberations.”

“They didn’t have to. I read an account, an interview with one of the jurors. They went around the room, and everyone said guilty. Then they discussed the evidence, trying to find arguments refuting some of it, and they voted again, and it was unanimous again. And then they discussed it some more, just to make absolutely certain they were all on the same page, and then they voted formally, and it was twelve for conviction and none for acquittal, and there was really no reason to waste any more time. So they filed back into the courtroom and announced the verdict. Then my lawyer insisted the jury be polled, and one by one they said the same thing, over and over. Guilty, guilty, guilty. What else did he expect them to say?”

“And the penalty phase?”

“My lawyer wanted me to change my story. He’d never believed me, although he wouldn’t come right out and say so. Well, why should he have believed me? To take my story at face value would have been evidence of incompetence on his part.”

“He thought you’d have a better chance at escaping a death sentence if you said you’d done it.”

“Which is nonsense,” he says, “because the sentence would have been the same either way. He wanted me to express remorse. Remorse! What remorse could possibly match the enormity of those crimes? And how could I express remorse for something I hadn’t done? I asked him as much and he just looked at me. He wouldn’t come right out and tell me I was full of shit, but that’s what he was thinking. But he didn’t push it, because he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. The death sentence didn’t take them any more time than the guilty verdict.”

“Did it surprise you?”

“It shocked me. Later, when the judge pronounced sentence, that shocked me, too. Shock’s not the same thing as surprise.”

“No.”

“The idea of it. ‘You’re going to die.’ Well, everybody’s going to die. But when someone sits there and tells you, well, it has an impact.”

“I can imagine.”

“Remorse. Could you express remorse by proxy? Because I couldn’t be sorry that I’d killed those boys, because I hadn’t, but I was damn well sorry that someone had.” He frowns, a vertical line in his forehead forming to match the ones at the sides of his mouth. “He told me it would be a great help if I could tell them where to find the third body. But how could I do that if I’d never set eyes on the Willis boy and had no idea where he might be? I could tell him, he said, and he could say I let it slip while still maintaining my innocence. I told him I couldn’t quite see the logic of that. I’d be sticking to a lie while admitting it was a lie. He hemmed and hawed, and I said it hardly mattered, because I couldn’t tell what I didn’t know. You know, I didn’t care if he believed me, or if anyone else believed me. My wife didn’t believe me, she couldn’t even look at me. She’s divorced me, you know.”

“So I understand.”

“I haven’t seen her or my children since I was taken into custody. No, I take that back. I saw her once. She came to the jail and asked me how I could do such a thing. I said I was innocent and she had to believe me. But she didn’t, and something died in me, and from that point on it didn’t really matter what anyone else believed or didn’t believe.”

Fascinating, just fascinating.

“You wrote that you believed me.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose that was just a way to get me to approve the visit. Well, it worked.”

“I’m glad it got me here,” he says, “but it wasn’t a ruse. I know you didn’t commit those barbarities.”

“I almost think you’re serious.”

“I am.”

“But how can you possibly be? You’re a rational man, a scientist.”

“If psychology’s a science, and there are those who’d argue that it’s not.”

“What else could it be?”

“An art. A black art, some would say. There were those, you know, who wanted to give Freud the Nobel, not in medicine but in literature. A backhanded compliment, that. I like to think there’s a scientific basis to what I do, Preston, but—I’m sorry, is it all right if I call you Preston?”

“I don’t mind.”

“And my name is Arne. That’s A-R-N-E, the Scandinavian spelling, though it’s pronounced like the diminutive for Arnold. My parents were English and Scots-Irish on both sides, I can’t think why they thought to give me a Swedish name. But that’s off the point, and I’m afraid I’ve lost track of what I was saying.”

“A scientific basis to what you do.”

“
Yes, of course.” He hadn’t lost track, but is pleased to note that Applewhite’s been paying attention. “But even pure science has an intuitive element. Most scientific discovery comes out of intuition, out of an inspired leap of faith that owes little to logic or scientific method. I know you’re innocent. I know it with a certainty that leaves no room for doubt
.
I can’t explain how I know it, to you or to myself, but I know it.” He treats Applewhite to a gentler version of the rueful smile. “I’m afraid,” he says, “that you’ll have to take my word for it
.”

Applewhite just looks at him, his face soft now, defenseless. And, unbidden and quite unexpected, tears begin to flow down his cheeks.

“I’m sorry. I haven’t cried in, hell, I couldn’t even guess how long it’s been. Ages.”

“It’s nothing to apologize for. Perhaps I’m the one who should apologize.”