A Penny for the Hangman

by Tom Savage

  A snowstorm. Fat chance of that!

  She shook the perspiration from her face and squinted in the glare of the sun as she hurried toward Gabby’s boat.

  Chapter Three

  The restaurant wasn’t difficult to find. Mafolie Hotel was a charming guesthouse dramatically perched above the harbor city of Charlotte Amalie, halfway up Signal Hill, the highest mountain in the center of the island. The last rays of another glorious sunset streaked across the sky as Karen maneuvered the rental car through grueling traffic and up the hill. She found a roadside parking space farther up the hill and backtracked on foot to the hotel. A long stone staircase led down from the road to the lobby.

  She spotted her dinner date right away. There was only one lone elderly African American man on the crowded dining terrace when she came down the stairs. He sat at a table for two beside the railing at the outer edge of the wooden deck, which was dramatically suspended over the cliff, seven hundred feet above the city. Lieutenant Faison would be in his midseventies now, she knew. He was dressed in a lightweight gray suit and tie, his white hair gleaming above his handsome, deeply lined face. As she was shown to the table, she noted the cane that rested against his chair. With a smile and an audible grunt, the old man began to rise to his feet.

  “Please don’t get up, Lieutenant Faison,” Karen said as she slipped into the chair across from him, facing the harbor view. “I’m Karen Tyler. Thank you for agreeing to speak to me on such short notice—and for suggesting such a lovely place for dinner.”

  He smiled and settled back in his seat. “Welcome to the Virgin Islands, Ms. Tyler. I thought you’d like Mafolie. The food is excellent, and the view is one of the best on the island. Some parts of St. Thomas are still as pretty as they always were.” He noticed her glancing at his cane, then over toward the entrance. She was wondering how he’d managed the steps, and he read her thoughts. “My son deposited me here, and I sent him away. He’ll be back for me after dinner. Now that my wife is gone, I live with him and his wife. I realize that you are my hostess, but may I order for us? You must have a frozen piña colada to start, and the surf and turf is justifiably famous. I know just the right wine to go with it.”

  “Absolutely,” Karen said, smiling.

  His eyes twinkled as he took in her little black dress and carefully upswept hair. She was glad she’d dressed up. There was something wonderfully formal, even old-fashioned, about him. She suspected that the son and his wife adored him, and she was instinctively beginning to as well. Still, Karen was certain Lieutenant Faison was not all twinkle and grin; despite his charm, she sensed that very little got by him.

  Faison leaned forward and said, “But you are not here for the steak and lobster. Your phone call yesterday aroused my curiosity. I know you want to talk about my book, but you suggested that you are here in St. Thomas for a specific purpose. Are you allowed to tell me what it is?”

  She told him without hesitation. As the waiter brought their drinks, Karen sketched in everything she knew so far. The old man listened patiently, his remarkable eyes never leaving her face. When she was finished, he smiled.

  “First,” he said, “you must call me Josh—no more of this ‘Lieutenant Faison’ business, and I hate Joshua; it sounds like the Bible. I retired from the force thirty years ago, after this happened.” He indicated the cane leaning against his chair, and she realized his limp was not an infirmity of age but an injury in the line of duty. “And I shall call you Karen. But tell me, Karen, why do you assume your mysterious caller is one of those two boys? Rodney Harper was released in 1992, and he went to live with his brother in Boston. The brother died in a car accident about ten years ago, and Rodney disappeared—out west somewhere, or so I heard. Wulf Anderman has been out of sight for a long time, ever since his release in—When was it?”

  “1981,” Karen supplied.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding, “not long before my book came out. He tried to prevent that, you know. He’d just gotten out of prison, and he actually went to New York and hired a lawyer to stop Random House from publishing the book. Fortunately for me, the court decided his case had no merit. But then he vanished—don’t ask me where. After my book became a bestseller, the press was looking all over for him. They wanted his version of things, but no one could find him. He’s dead, for all we know. No, I think your informant must be someone else, especially if he’s here in St. Thomas. Rodney and Wulf would both know better than to show their faces here. They’d be arrested.” He leaned forward again, his eyes shining in the glow of the sunset over the city beyond the railing. “But I will tell you this for free: If it is one of those two, don’t believe a word he says. Get away from him as soon as possible, and call my son—he currently has my old job.”

  Karen sipped her piña colada. “I don’t plan on being alone with the man. I’ll have a photographer with me, and I’m only going to ask a few—”

  “No,” Faison said, cutting her off with quiet force. “No, Karen, please listen to me. Fifty years ago, they were children and I was merely an eager young sergeant, but I learned one thing in my career, and it is this: People don’t change. Any cop in the world can tell you that. We keep locking up the same perps, over and over. The prevailing theory of the medical community has it that an individual’s basic personality is set for life by the age of twelve, and those two boys were well set on their particular path, I don’t care how young they were.”

  Now Karen leaned forward. The two of them would be an odd sight to the other diners, their heads close together above the candle in the center, their expressions tense, whispering like conspirators.

  “ ‘Set on their particular path,’ ” she repeated. “And what path was that, Josh?”

  The old man considered this for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair, gazed out at the view, and began to speak.

  —

  From Virgin Cop: My Life with the VIPD by Joshua L. Faison (Random House, 1982)

  The term most widely used to describe the relationship in question is the French phrase “folie à deux.” This occurs when two individuals form a symbiotic bond, a mutually nurturing arrangement that, ironically, removes all individuality. The subjects begin to think of themselves as one unit.

  That is the general term, but I was aware from the outset that the dynamic between the two boys was quite different. It was classic Freudian dominant/submissive, commonly called the “master/slave syndrome.” Rodney Harper, only fifteen, was pure evil, the most evil person I ever met in my twenty-six years on the force. There was a coldness about him, a lack of any recognizable traits whatsoever save arrogance and entitlement. And Wulfgar Anderman was his slave.

  Rodney and Wulfgar were remanded into the custody of the territory, under the protection of Governor James Merwin. There were no adults left to claim them. Rodney’s brother, Toby Harper, was nineteen, officially underage in 1959, and no Harper relatives in Boston or Andermans in Denmark seemed inclined to make an appearance on the island. When contacted, they all denied responsibility for the boys.

  In the days after their arrest, I was present at all the interviews. Lieutenant Broward was under orders to keep the boys separate during the examinations. Broward did all the talking, and I wrote everything down. There was also a court-appointed social worker present, a pretty young St. Thomian woman named Hannah Vernon. Each boy in his turn remained silent, unresponsive to the lieutenant’s questions. Rodney Harper maintained a relaxed sense of boredom, a smirking demeanor, which told me, more than any words he might have uttered, that he felt himself superior to us. Wulfgar Anderman, in contrast to his idol, was rigid and pale, indicating that he was not at all sure of himself or his future.

  This was 1959, pre-Miranda, and the boys were interviewed without counsel. Miss Vernon was always with them whenever they were outside their cells, and the officers treated them well. We were all natives, and I was aware of a strain, a racial barrier, as I always was on the rare occasions when white suspects were detained in Fort
Christian. And these particular suspects, these confessed murderers, were children.

  We knew that if we were ever to obtain any real information from either boy, it would be from Wulfgar Anderman, but, try as he might, Lieutenant Broward failed to elicit any reaction from him save one. This single statement occurred in our last meeting alone with him. As Broward rose to leave the interview room, he asked the boy, “Do you have any idea what could happen to you now?” Wulfgar looked away from us for a long moment, evidently considering the question. Then, just when I thought he would not respond at all, he murmured, “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore. It’s over.”

  —

  “ ‘It’s over,’ ” Karen repeated. “I wonder what he could have meant by that.”

  The meal had been cleared, and dessert was brought to them. Faison—Josh—had insisted that she try the chocolate cake, and it was every bit as delicious as advertised. Karen was feeling contented as she sipped her coffee, contented and relaxed. It was the first time in her forty-eight hours on the island that her sense of anxiety had temporarily abated. Her companion was assessing her last remark, and now he addressed it.

  “It’s hard to say what he meant, really—he never spoke of it again, according to my wife. Wulf Anderman rarely spoke at all. The trial came soon after that, and the whole thing was over quickly. There were no more interviews.”

  Karen leaned forward. “Your wife?”

  Joshua Faison grinned and sipped his coffee before replying, clearly relishing this little detail of his story. “Oh yes. I see you didn’t read all of my book, just the early part that covered the Harper/Anderman business; otherwise, you’d know this. My late wife was Hannah Vernon, the social worker I mentioned. We met on that case. She was so lovely and so protective of those two boys—not that she got much response from them, but she treated them kindly, in spite of everything. That’s the thing I first noticed about her, her kindness. She was a remarkable woman. I wish you could have met her; she would have liked you.”

  Karen smiled. “So, something good came of it after all.”

  The old man nodded, remembering. “For me, yes. But not for those boys. They were tried and convicted, and they spent many years in prison. The press and the public made them into a freak show, and their legend lives on, even now. But I’ve never known if that was really fair to one of them….”

  “Fair? What do you mean?”

  He shrugged, gazing down at Charlotte Amalie below them. “Well, you know how we found them, right? On the night of the murders, I mean. I was there on duty, at the fort. The telephone call arrived from Hank Vance, Harper’s construction foreman—he was the man who found them—and I was dispatched with two officers. We drove to Tamarind, and Lieutenant Broward joined us there. We found Wulf Anderman in the living room, the bodies of the four parents on the veranda outside, and the housekeeper in the kitchen. I won’t go into that now, but it was—it was horrible. Wulf was just sitting there, nearly catatonic, and Vance was watching over him. Broward asked the boy what had happened, and it took a few efforts before he could get him to reply. Wulf finally said that Rodney Harper had run off, down to the beach below the house, to his boat. One of the officers and I took off down the path to the little bay there, and that’s where we found Harper. He was in a speedboat, but he was having trouble starting it. He’d flooded the motor. When he saw us coming out of the woods onto the beach, he jumped into the water and started swimming.”

  He pointed down at the nighttime harbor below them. “You see the point over there, the hill with those lights at the top? That’s Tamarind. The beach is below it, on the other side of the mountain; you can’t see it from here. That kid just leaped into the water and took off, straight out toward the ocean. It was dark by then, and all we had were flashlights and walkie-talkies. I called the Coast Guard—they have a dock down there, at the waterfront—and they went out after him. They found him an hour later, still swimming with all his might. It took three divers to get him into the boat and restrain him. He was…violent. They finally got him under control and took him to the fort.”

  “Yes,” Karen said. “I guess that’s part of the legend now. And you went back up to the house.”

  He nodded. “Right. By then the place was full of people. All those bodies—and that child, Bernice Watkins’s five-year-old son. We found him in the servants’ quarters behind the house, fast asleep, and someone got him away from there. All the while, Wulf Anderman sat in the living room, staring at the floor. It seemed like the longest night of my life, and I don’t like to think about it, but I did notice something odd. I told Broward, and he made a note of it, but it was never mentioned at the trial. I didn’t even put it in the book, for legal reasons. It was mere speculation on my part. But I’ll tell you now, and you can make of it what you will.”

  He paused. Karen stared at him, waiting. She could see that the old man was hesitant to impart this information. When at last he spoke again, she knew why.

  “When we got to the beach, we saw Rodney standing in the boat in the beam of my flashlight. It was just for a moment, before he jumped into the water, but we saw that he was covered in blood, head to toe. His face was red with it. When I went back up to the house, I was assigned to stay with Wulf Anderman in the living room while the others went about their business. We sat there for about an hour, until Broward told me to take the boy downtown to the fort. Wulf never spoke to me or even looked at me, but I got a good long look at him. And that’s what’s been troubling me all these years.”

  He shook his head at the memory, and then he looked at Karen across the restaurant table. She was surprised to see tears in his eyes.

  “Rodney Harper had been drenched,” he whispered, “absolutely covered in blood. If you’d seen the victims, what was done to them, you’d expect that. Wulf Anderman was dressed the same as Rodney—a dark turtleneck and blue jeans—and he had all that shiny blond hair, but there was hardly any blood on him. Just a little, on the right sleeve and the right knee of the pants.” He looked away from Karen again, out at the nighttime view. “That place was a slaughterhouse. How do you suppose Wulf stayed so clean?”

  Karen followed Lieutenant Faison’s gaze out at the lights of the city. She had no reply. After a long silence, the old man sighed.

  “It was the shortest trial I ever saw,” he said, “and they never mentioned the blood.”

  —

  From Virgin Cop: My Life with the VIPD by Joshua L. Faison (Random House, 1982)

  The trial itself was a matter of three days, start to finish. There would not have been one at all in ordinary circumstances, but the public defender, Harold Calhoun, had advised his court-appointed clients to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. At the request of Governor Merwin, Judge Lincoln Sinclair conducted a bench trial in the municipal courtroom located in Fort Christian, where the boys were being held. The crowds of reporters, photographers, and curious onlookers outside Fort Christian made it inadvisable to transport the boys the short distance to the district courthouse on the other side of Emancipation Park. Everyone, from the governor down, wanted the affair to be over as quickly as possible.

  With the stories we had by then collected about the boys’ home lives and the circumstances of their parents’ unusual relationships, temporary insanity seemed a promising strategy. Unfortunately for the defense, there were no witnesses, no one left alive who could give the court any useful firsthand information. Acquaintances and business associates of the murdered parents all claimed no knowledge of their private lives—a patent lie on this small island—and they were not pressed to come forward, class having its privileges. The servants of both households were illegal aliens; they’d scattered to the winds the moment they’d learned of the murders. But the real weakness in Calhoun’s plan, in my opinion as proved by hindsight, was his refusal to allow either boy to testify in court or be questioned by the prosecution.

  In 1959, Harold Calhoun was an ambitious young attorn
ey, a native of St. Thomas from a prominent local family. His father had founded a popular law firm, and Harold was preparing to become a junior partner by working temporarily for the local legal system. Harold regarded the Harper/Anderman case as a no-win situation, a potential stain on his otherwise promising record. He wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.

  The territorial attorney, Gaston Hodge, was young Calhoun’s complete opposite. A successful civil servant in his fifties, Hodge approached the trial with ruthless single-mindedness. His office had a clear case against the two boys, including their confessions, and he had attempted to avoid going to trial entirely. When the not guilty plea was entered and the trial date set, his office went to work with a vengeance. His court presentation of the events surrounding the murders was clarity itself, and he played up the fact that the defense would not allow the boys to testify. The island-wide rumors of parental abuse and adultery were inadmissible in court, and Hodge easily convinced the judge that they were dealing with two young sociopaths who had exhibited craven and remorseless disregard for their victims. Calhoun’s defense was weak, practically nonexistent, and the judge’s decision was quickly reached.

  What I remember most about the trial was the odd behavior of the two boys themselves. They sat at the defense table, well dressed and groomed, never speaking and barely moving. Wulfgar Anderman sat slumped beside Calhoun, staring down at the table in front of him. Rodney Harper was on the other side of Anderman, next to Calhoun’s assistant. He constantly gazed at Judge Sinclair, a little smile on his face. The two boys never spoke to each other or even exchanged a glance, not even when Judge Sinclair pronounced their guilty sentences.