I put the tape recorder on the table. 'I'd like to record this,' I said.
'And if I say no it turns out you're wearing a wire, right? I think I saw that program.'
'No wire. If you say no I'll leave it turned off.'
'But you'd prefer to record it.'
'If you don't object.'
'Fuck it,' he said. 'What do I care?'
26
SCUDDER: Please state your name for the record.
MCGRAW: What bullshit… My name is Martin Joseph McGraw.
S: You want to tell me what happened?
M: You know what happened. You already told me what happened… Oh all right. After the death of Adrian Whitfield I desired as a journalist to maintain the momentum of the story. I sought to do this by writing additional letters.
S: From the person who called himself Will.
M: Yes.
S: Whitfield's last letter wasn't really misaddressed, was it?
M: He got the zip code wrong. That happens a lot but it doesn't delay the mail. We're the Daily News, for God's sake. Even the geniuses at the post office can find us.
S: So his letter arrived—
M: First thing Friday morning. Body was barely cold and there's a letter on my desk claiming credit for it. I took a good look at the postmark, wanting to know when it was mailed and where from, and while I was at it I happened to notice the zip code.
S: And?
M: First thing I thought was it wasn't from Will, because he never made that mistake. Then I read the letter and I knew it was from Will, it couldn't be from anybody else. And he said he was through. There wouldn't be any more letters, there wouldn't be any more victims. He was done.
S: Did you suspect Whitfield wrote the letter?
M: Not at the time. Remember, I'm reading this before there's any speculation about suicide. I don't know the autopsy's going to show he was dying of cancer. I just got the thought that I ought to hang on to this letter and see what happens. What the hell, it could have been delivered late the way it was addressed, so why not give myself time to think it through?
S: And you turned the letter over finally—
M: To spike the suicide theory. It proved Will was the killer. I thought about addressing a new envelope and mailing it to myself, but that could constitute sabotaging the investigation.
S: Hadn't you already done that?
M: I'd delayed it slightly, but a new envelope would establish that the letter had been mailed at a later date than it actually had, and suppose they finally catch up with Will and he can prove he's in Saudi Arabia at the date the letter's postmarked? I wanted to cover my ass without kicking sand over any bona fide clues. And then I remembered the zip code and decided to take advantage of it. So I took the envelope and circled the zip code in red and scribbled 'delayed—wrong zip code'
alongside of it. I made the writing illegible enough so you'd believe some postal employee actually wrote it. Anybody examining it would be able to determine when it was actually mailed, and would simply assume it had been delayed somewhere in the system.
S: That was clever.
M: It was clever but it was stupid, because it was the first step in fucking around with the case.
S: And the next step was writing your own letter.
M: I just wanted to keep it alive.
S: The story.
M: That's right. Even if Whitfield killed himself, which I didn't think he did, that still left Will out there, with a couple of other killings to his credit. Now he's lying low, but what's it gonna do to him to see someone else pretending to be him? He has to respond, doesn't he? And even if he doesn't, he's back in the news.
S: So you wrote the letter…
M: So I wrote the letter, and then you broke the case and got Adrian tagged as Will. And now I'm out here with this stupid phony letter from some fucking copycat, with everybody in a rush to demonstrate that only a punk with cheese where his guts ought to be would write such a chickenshit letter. I thought it was a pretty good letter. Remember, it wasn't supposed to be Will. It was supposed to pry Will out of the woodwork.
S: But that was impossible…
M: Because Adrian was Will, and the poor fuck was dead. And the story goes about quietly dying, and I try to fan the flames a little, and then that asshole Regis Kilbourne isn't content with stinking up the Arts section, he's got to piss all over the oped page. And he couldn't just say, hey, look at me world, I'm braver than the characters Errol Flynn used to play. Instead the dirty little cocksucker has the nerve to review me.
S: He gave you another bad notice.
