“The one thing I’ve been sure of, from the first moment on, is that they were all making a horrible mistake. I knew I didn’t kill those boys.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“But if what you say is true—”
All the Flowers Are Dying
51
“For some people. Sociopaths, men with something missing inside them. You’re not like that.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Well, how do I know? Believe me, I’d like to take your word for it, but failing that, how can I be sure? You can see where logic leads. It’s a co-nundrum. If I’m innocent, I’d know I was innocent. But if I was guilty, and had managed to convince myself I was innocent, I’d also know I was innocent.”
“Look at yourself, Preston.”
“At myself?”
“At the sort of man you are, the sort of man you always have been.
Have you ever committed a violent act?”
“If I killed those boys—”
“Before. Did you abuse your wife?”
“I shoved her away from me once. It was when we were first married, we’d argued and I was trying to leave the house. I wanted to go for a walk and clear my head, and she wouldn’t let go of me, you’d have thought I was on my way to Brazil, and I pushed her to make her let go. And she fell down.”
“And?”
“And I helped her up, and we had a cup of coffee, and, well, it worked out.”
“That’s the extent of your history of spousal abuse? How about your children? Did you beat them?”
“Never. We didn’t believe in it, either of us. And I never felt the kind of anger toward them that you’d want to express physically.”
“Let’s look at your childhood, shall we? Ever torture animals?”
“God, no. Why would anyone—”
“Ever set fires? I don’t mean Boy Scout campfires. I mean anything ranging from mischief to pyromania.”
“No.”
“You wet the bed as a kid?”
“Maybe, when my parents were toilet training me. I don’t honestly remember, I was, I don’t know, two or three years old—” 52
Lawrence Block
“How about when you were ten or eleven?”
“No, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“The standard profile of the serial killer or lust murderer. Bedwetting, fire-setting, and animal abuse. You’re batting oh-for-three. How about your sexual orientation? Ever have sex with young boys?”
“No.”
“Ever want to?”
“The same answer. No.”
“Young girls?”
“No.”
“Really? When you approached middle age, didn’t teenagers start looking good to you?”
Applewhite thinks it over. “I won’t say I never noticed them,” he said,
“but I was never interested. All my life, the girls and women I’ve been attracted to have been around my own age.”
“And the males?”
“I’ve never had relations with a man.”
“Or a boy?”
“Or a boy.”
“Ever wanted to?”
“No.”
“Ever found a male attractive, even without having any desire to act on it?”
“Not really.”
