“How do you figure that?”
“If I believe a man’s story, it’s that much easier for him to believe it himself.”
20
Lawrence Block
“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 contra-diction of his situation.”
“That being?”
“That he’s going to be put to death in a matter of days, and that he’s innocent.”
All the Flowers Are Dying
21
“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?”
22
Lawrence Block
“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.”
