Murder For Revenge

Didn’t Manson get his girls to cut X’s on their foreheads? Maybe he could get his to cut themselves a little, where it wouldn’t show except in the Polaroids. Would they do it? Maybe, if he worded it right.

Meanwhile, he had other fish to fry.

“Dear Paul,” he typed. “I’ve never called you anything but ‘Mr. Dandridge,’ but I’ve written you so many letters, some of them just in the privacy of my mind, that I’ll permit myself this liberty. And for all I know you throw my letters away unread. If so, well, I’m still not sorry I’ve spent the time writing them. It’s a great help to me to get my thoughts on paper in this ma

“I suppose you already know that I got another stay of execution. I can imagine your exasperation at the news. Would it surprise you to know that my own reaction was much the same? I don’t want to die, Paul, but I don’t want to live like this, either, while lawyers scurry around just trying to postpone the inevitable. Better for both of us if they’d just killed me right away.

“Though I suppose I should be grateful for this chance to make my peace, with you and with myself. I can’t bring myself to ask for your forgiveness, and I certainly can’t summon up whatever is required for me to forgive myself, but perhaps that will come with time. They seem to be giving me plenty of time, even if they do persist in doling it out to me bit by bit…”

When he found the letter, Paul Dandridge followed what had become standard practice for him. He set it aside while he opened and tended to the rest of his mail. Then he went into the kitchen and brewed himself a pot of coffee. He poured a cup and sat down with it and opened the letter from Croydon.

When the second letter came he’d read it through to the end, then crumpled it in his fist. He hadn’t known whether to throw it in the garbage or burn it in the fireplace, and in the end he’d done neither. Instead he’d carefully unfolded it and smoothed out its creases and read it again before putting it away.

Since then he’d saved all the letters. It had been almost three years since sentence was pronounced on William Croydon, and longer than that since Karen had died at his hands. (Literally at his hands, he thought; the hands that typed the letter and folded it into its envelope had encircled Karen’s neck and strangled her. The very hands.)

Now Croydon was thirty-three and Paul was thirty himself, and he had been receiving letters at the approximate rate of one every two months. This was the fifteenth, and it seemed to mark a new stage in their one-sided correspondence. Croydon had addressed him by his first name.

“Better for both of us if they’d just killed me right away.” Ah, but they hadn’t, had they? And they wouldn’t either. It would drag on and on and on. A lawyer he’d consulted had told him it would not be unrealistic to expect another ten years of delay. For God’s sake, he’d be forty years old by the time the state got around to doing the job.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he and Croydon were fellow prisoners. He was not confined to a cell and not under a sentence of death, but it struck him that his life held only the illusion of freedom. He wouldn’t really be free until Croydon’s ordeal was over. Until then he was confined in a prison without walls, unable to get on with his life, unable to have a life, just marking time.

He went over to his desk, took out a sheet of letterhead, uncapped a pen. For a long moment he hesitated. Then he sighed gently and touched pen to paper.

“Dear Croydon,” he wrote. “I don’t know what to call you. I can’t bear to address you by your first name or to call you ‘Mr. Croydon.’ Not that I ever expected to call you anything at all. I guess I thought you’d be dead by now. God knows I wished it…”

Once he got started, it was surprisingly easy to find the words.

An answer from Dandridge.

Unbelievable.

If he had a shot, Paul Dandridge was it. The stays and the appeals would only carry you so far. The chance that any court along the way would grant him a reversal and a new trial was remote at best. His only real hope was a commutation of his death sentence to life imprisonment.

Not that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in prison. In a sense, you lived better on Death Row than if you were doing life in general prison population. But in another sense the difference between a life sentence and a death sentence was, well, the difference between life and death. If he got his sentence commuted to life, that meant the day would come when he made parole and hit the street. They might not come right out and say that, but that was what it would amount to, especially if he worked the system right.

And Paul Dandridge was the key to getting his sentence commuted.

He remembered how the prick had testified at the pre-sentencing hearing. If any single thing had ensured the death sentence, it was Dandridge’s testimony. And, if anything could swing a commutation of sentence for him, it was a change of heart on the part of Karen Dandridge’s brother.

Worth a shot.

“Dear Paul,” he typed. “I can’t possibly tell you the sense of peace that came over me when I realised the letter I was holding was from you…”

Paul Dandridge, seated at his desk, uncapped his pen and wrote the day’s date at the top of a sheet of letterhead. He paused and looked at what he had written. It was, he realised, the fifth a

Another irony, he thought. They seemed to be infinite.

“Dear Billy,” he wrote. “You’ll appreciate this. It wasn’t until I’d written the date on this letter that I realised its significance. It’s been exactly five years since the day that changed both our lives forever.”

He took a breath, considered his words. He wrote, “And I guess it’s time to acknowledge formally something I’ve acknowledged in my heart some time ago. While I may never get over Karen’s death, the bitter hatred that has burned in me for so long has finally cooled. And so I’d like to say that you have my forgiveness in full measure. And now I think it’s time for you to forgive yourself…”

It was hard to sit still.

That was something he’d had no real trouble doing since the first day the cell door closed with him inside. You had to be able to sit still to do time, and it was never hard for him. Even during the several occasions when he’d been a few weeks away from an execution date, he’d never been one to pace the floor or climb the walls.

But today was the hearing. Today the board was hearing testimony from three individuals. One was a psychiatrist who would supply some professional arguments for commuting his sentence from death to life. Another was his fourth-grade teacher, who would tell the board how rough he’d had it in childhood and what a good little boy he was underneath it all. He wondered where they’d dug her up, and how she could possibly remember him. He didn’t remember her at all.

The third witness, and the only really important one, was Paul Dandridge. Not only was he supplying the only testimony likely to carry much weight, but it was he who had spent money to locate Croydon’s fourth-grade teacher, he who had enlisted the services of the shrink.

His buddy, Paul. A crusader, moving heaven and earth to save Billy Croydon’s life.

Just the way he’d pla

He paced, back and forth, back and forth, and then he stopped and retrieved from his locker the letter that had started it all. The first letter to Paul Dandridge, the one he’d had the sense not to send. How many times had he reread it over the years, bringing the whole thing back into focus?