That’s How I Roll

hat I needed was to be gone.

Gone, but still around.

I’m the most patient man you’ll ever meet. You learn patience when you have to do everything for yourself. When nothing about you past the end of your spine works, it takes a lot of time to do even the smallest things.

But it wasn’t patience that kept me from killing myself. I needed folks to always say, “Esau Till didn’t give it up; he made them come and get it.”

If you leave that kind of name behind you, burned in deeper than anyone could ever chisel a tombstone, it counts for a lot.

Others have done so. And it spooks folks seriously whenever they hear their names said aloud.

was pretty sure I knew how to make all that happen. The trick was to keep the lawyers away.

The free lawyers, that is. Some would be the kind who didn’t care about the case, just the cause. Like that Mr. Diamond and his followers. They’re so against the death penalty that they end up specializing in defending people who need killing.

You know the kind I’m talking about—those who kill just because they like doing it. Only makes sense that normal folks would enjoy killing them.

In fact, I was counting on that.

The other kind of free lawyer would be one of those you see on TV all the time. “High-profile,” they were called. Didn’t matter if they won or lost, people would remember their names. Which was the whole point.

Problem with their kind is that you lose all control. No telling what they’d say when they went in front of the camera.

Besides, it wasn’t their name I needed people to remember, it was mine.

ll my life, I gathered up information like I was harvesting a crop. A man who buys a pistol may never have to pull the trigger, but it comforts him to carry it around. Some places more than others.

Every piece of information I gathered, I tested, every chance I got. If it didn’t qualify as reliable, it didn’t qualify as information.

That’s why I knew so much about Death Row. The first man to tell me about it, his brother was there at the time. When he told me that some of those men have fans—I mean, like a movie star might have—I didn’t believe him. But enough other folks said the same thing that I eventually came to accept it.

Serial killers, especially the ones who killed girls, they had women wanting to marry them. That’s the truth, too, although I never believed it until I started getting those same kind of letters myself.

I surely had a high enough body count to qualify as a serial killer and mass murderer, both. But I didn’t need any fans; I needed money. Real money, not some twenty-five-dollar money order so I could have pictures of myself taken to mail back to them.

tep Six was a tumbler falling into place. You couldn’t see it with your eyes; you couldn’t hear it without a stethoscope—but if you’d worked with locks enough, you could feel it.

The Feds proved they had the money, all right. Tons of it. But they weren’t getting up off one dime unless I gave them information. Hard information. The kind that would get me a lot of company in the Death House.

Oh, they could see easily enough that I wasn’t afraid of dying. That shook them a little at first, but not all that much. They had studied how to make people tell them things. That’s why they kept upping the offer, but always held it just out of my reach, like taunting a dog to jump higher if he really wanted the bone.

That might be a useful tactic against most killers, but it was doomed against me. The Feds never did understand what would have worked. And I would have died a thousand times before I’d ever let them know.

If they’d ever known what button to push, I would have sung like a whole aviary. But what they had wouldn’t draw a peep from a born canary.

“This is the way it works,” one of them told me. “You give us something. Not everything we want, not at first, but some little piece of it. We check it out. If it turns out you’re being truthful with us, then we release a little piece of what you want. That’s only fair, right?”

I didn’t answer him. I already had that bad feeling you get inside you when you know a promise is a lie. A girl’s smile, a man’s word—it doesn’t matter—there were times when you just knew they wouldn’t ever prove true.

“Then you turn over a little bigger piece,” the Fed went on. “And we get you a bigger chunk of the money. It can go as high as you take it, Esau—Uncle Sam’s got all the money there is.”

I think he knew all along I wasn’t going to do any trading with him, but it was his job to try, so he kept at it.

Just like that dog who couldn’t quite manage to grab that taunting bone.

tep Seven came after days of their useless hammering, as if I didn’t understand that the Feds weren’t going to give me the money I needed without me giving certain people up first.

I didn’t panic. I still had money enough to make certain nobody bothered Tory-boy for quite a while. And if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s wait.

I was almost three months behind bars before someone who had all the money I needed showed up. I hadn’t reached out for him. I wouldn’t have even known where to look. He just came.

He had the money, all right. But he was a man who was used to being accommodated. He said they—he meant the TV people he fronted for—they wanted to put me in front of a camera. Kind of like an acting job, he said. They’d call it an “interview.” I’d have to pretend some plastic-faced fool had broken me down, sliced me open with his scalpel-sharp questions, then pulled back the skin to show everyone the truth underneath.

Since I was planning to tell a pack of lies in court anyway, I couldn’t see any harm in repeating them on camera. And the money man didn’t care, either … just as long as I told his people first.

But even with clean money coming in, I would still need one thing only the Feds could give me. And I couldn’t let them know how bad I had to have that one thing, or they’d have me on a steel leash.

I worked it over and over again in my mind, trying to strengthen it, the same way you do with a muscle. And, sure enough, I came up with a perfect package. All the while the Feds were working so hard trying to find out what I wanted, what would make me talk, they were busy telling me what they wanted.

I don’t mean who paid me to do what, I mean that special piece. The one they wanted bad. All I had to do was listen.

Step Eight came when I realized I could give the Feds what I knew they wanted more than anything else, and still keep faith with the people who had hired me for all the jobs I was never going to talk about.

A simple formula: if I could just get the right lies accepted by one side, that would prove my word was good to the other.

But that formula was easier to memorize than put into practice. For that, I had to move the TV man off his square—and he was standing his ground like a mother badger with cubs behind her.

“Esau, you don’t have to tell us a thing about the crime itself. If you just talk about your life, what happened when you were just a little kid, how you raised your younger brother all by yourself … well, that alone could be worth the kind of money you’ve been asking for.”

I didn’t like that word “could.” I wasn’t about to be giving them enough leverage to keep raising the bar, either. And they weren’t going for any kind of money-in-front deal.

So I had to sell them. And I knew that the only way that ever works is if the other man thinks he’s selling you.