scrawling their approval in crayon on brown paper bags, and he had received typed and well-phrased letters before, but they were invariably signed and almost always bore return addresses.
This one was unsigned and there was no return address, not on the letter itself, not on the envelope it had come in, either. He made a point of checking, and the envelope bore his own name and the newspaper's address. Nothing else. He filed it and forgot about it.
* * *
The following weekend, two Dominican kids on mountain bikes came tearing down a steep path in Inwood Hill Park. One of them cried out to his friend, and they both braked to a stop as soon as they got to a spot that was level enough. 'Joo see that?' 'See what?' 'On that tree.'
'What tree?' 'Was a guy hanging from that tree back there.' 'You crazy, man. You seeing things, you crazy.' 'We got to go back.'
'Uphill? So we can see some guy hanging?' 'Come on!'
They went back, and the boy had not been seeing things. A man was indeed hanging from the stout limb of a pin oak ten or fifteen yards off the bike path. They stopped their bikes and took a good look at him, and one of the kids promptly vomited. The hanging man was not a pretty sight. His head was the size of a basketball and his neck was a foot long, stretched by the weight of him. He wasn't twisting slowly in the wind.
There wasn't any wind.
* * *
It was Richard Vollmer, of course, and he'd been found hanging not far from where both of his victims had been found, and McGraw's first thought was that the misbegotten son of a bitch had actually done what he'd told him to do. He felt a curious sense of unsought power, at once unsettling and exciting.
But Richie had had help. Asphyxiation had caused his death, so he'd been alive when the rope went around his neck, but he'd probably been unconscious. An autopsy disclosed that he'd been beaten severely about the head, and had in fact sustained cranial injuries that might have proven fatal if someone hadn't taken the trouble to string him up.
McGraw didn't know how he felt about that. It certainly appeared as though a column of his had led some impressionable yahoo to commit murder; at the very least, the killer had looked to McGraw for the murder method. That disgusted him, and yet he could hardly bring himself to mourn the death of Richie Vollmer. So he did what he had grown in the habit of doing over the years. He talked out his thoughts and feelings in a column.
'I can't say I'm sorry Richie Vollmer is no longer with us,' he wrote. 'There are, after all, a lot of us left to soldier on, eight million and counting, and I'd be hard put to argue that the quality of life will be a whole lot worse with Richie in the cold cold ground. But I'd hate to think that I, or any reader of this column, had a part in putting him there.
'In a sense, whoever killed Richie Vollmer did us all a favor.
Vollmer was a monster. Is there anyone who seriously doubts he'd have killed again? And aren't we all justified now in feeling relieved that he won't?
'And yet his killer did us a disservice at the same time. When we take the law into our own hands, when we snatch up in our own hands the power of life and death, we're no different from Richie. Oh, we're a bunch of kinder, gentler Richie Vollmers. Our victims deserve what they get, and we can tell ourselves we've got God on our side.
'But how different are we?
'For wishing publicly for his death, I owe the world an apology.
I'm not apologizing to Richie, I'm not for one moment sorry he's gone.
My apology is to all the rest of you.
'It's possible, of course, that the person or persons who took Richie out never read this column, that they did what they did for reasons of their own, that they were old foes of his from his days in prison.
That's what I'd like to believe. I'd sleep better.'
McGraw had a visit from the cops, predictably enough. He told them he'd had a batch of letters agreeing and disagreeing with his column, but that no one had specifically offered to see that his wishes were carried out. The cops didn't ask to see the letters. His column ran, and the next day's mail brought a second letter.
'Don't blame yourself,' McGraw read. 'It might be interesting to discuss the extent to which your column prompted my action, but a search for the ultimate cause of any phenomenon is ultimately fruitless.
Can we not say with more assurance that Richard Vollmer, by his monstrous actions, caused you to write what you wrote even as it caused me to do what I did? Each of us responded—promptly, directly, properly—to an insupportable state of affairs, i.e., the continuing capacity of a child-murderer to walk free among us.
'Or, to put it another way, each of us embodied for a moment in time the collective will of the people of New York. It is the ability of the public to work its will that is, when all is said and done, the genuine essence of democracy. It is not the right to vote, or the several freedoms provided by the Bill of Rights, so much as it is that we are governed—or govern ourselves—according to our collective will. So don't hold yourself accountable for the timely execution of Richard Vollmer.
Blame Vollmer himself, if you wish. Or blame or credit me—but when you do, you are only blaming or crediting 'THE WILL OF THE
PEOPLE.'
One of the cops had left his card, and McGraw dug it out and reached for the phone. He had the number half dialed when he broke the connection and started over.
First he called the City Desk. Then he called the cops.
* * *
RICHIE'S KILLER GOES PUBLIC' the next day's headline screamed. The lead story, under
