All the Flowers Are Dying

by Block, Lawrence

  The younger boy, Jeffrey Willis, was more appealing. Softer, smaller, his innocence more palpable. Too, there was the novelty of sex with a male. But for all that the experience with Scott Sawyer is savagely exciting, and there’s no need to hold back his climax. Straining for it, he reaches down, picks up the knife—how sweetly it fits his hand—and strikes, and strikes again.

  He wraps the body in a blanket, the one that’s been in the trunk of Applewhite’s car, where it could pick up fibers from the trunk lining and leave fibers of its own. Every contact involves the transfer of fibers, that’s why he did what he did with the blanket, and why he jettisoned the clothes he wore when he killed the Willis boy. He’ll do the same with these clothes, everything down to the sneakers on his feet. They’ll pick up fibers, they’ll carry grass stains and soil residue, and none of that will matter because they’ll wind up in a clothing donation box in Pennsylvania and no crime lab will ever look at them.

  He starts to dig a grave, but it’s getting dark and he’s tired, and the ground underneath is a maze of tree roots, impossible to dig in. Besides, he’s going to want this body to be found.

  He snips a lock of hair, tucks it into a glassine envelope. He stashes it in the trunk of the Camry, along with the tools he’ll need for his next visit to Richmond.

  He leaves the body shrouded in the army blanket, piles loose brush over it, and heads for the storage shed, where he switches the Camry for the Tempo. He takes I-64, then I-81. The condom he used, its end knotted to secure its contents, is on the seat beside him; when he’s crossed the state line into Maryland he lowers the window, tosses it, and drives on.

  After two more weeks he’s had enough of York. He’s paid up through the end of the month, so he keeps the keys to leave himself the option of returning, but erases all traces of his occupancy so that he need not come back. He drives to Richmond and begins setting the stage, dressing the sets.

  By now the cheap laptop contains on its hard drive a description of the second murder. He’s still somewhat vague concerning the location of the killing ground and dump site, but does call it a golf course, and he downloads and saves on his hard drive a MapQuest close-up map of the failed country club. There are also two drafts of an essay in which he, as Applewhite, expounds on the morality of murder, justifying his actions through a line of reasoning that, he has to admit, owes a good deal to the Marquis de Sade, for all that he dredges up supporting arguments from Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. One draft of the essay, including specific references to the killings of Willis and Sawyer, he erases, knowing it will prove recoverable; the other, which covers the same ground but is less damning, he saves on the hard drive, adding to the file the notation:

  Publish this? Where???

  One afternoon he drives to Applewhite’s suburban neighborhood. Both cars are gone, and school’s still in session. He lets himself into the house, tingling with excitement as he walks from room to room. Applewhite has a den, which his tax return no doubt identifies as a home office, and he leaves the computer in a desk drawer.

  In the bedroom, he takes socks and underwear from Applewhite’s dresser, a shirt and a pair of khaki trousers from his closet. The shirt has a laundry mark, he notes, and the pants, hanging on a peg, have been worn at least once since their last washing.

  Shoes? He considers a pair, then remembers some ragged sneakers he spotted on an earlier visit to the garage, no doubt reserved for gardening and yard work. And ideal for his purposes.

  The selection and disposal of the third victim is almost beside the point, because by now his chief concern is the web he’s weaving for Preston Applewhite. Slow down, he admonishes himself. Take time to smell the flowers. And, remembering how Scott Sawyer had amused him less than Jeffrey Willis, he takes pains this time to select a boy from the younger, more innocent end of the spectrum.

  The online newsgroups and bulletin boards for pedophiles (and yes, he’s found his way to them, and ScoutMasterBates has contributed observations of his own to more than one) have taught him a new vocabulary. A boy on the threshold of adolescence, he has learned, is said to be in his bloom, the dew of youth still on him. That is what he seeks, and what he finds in the thirteen-year-old person of Marcus Leacock. Who is not hitchhiking at all when he finds him, but merely walking home from school.

  He’s driving the Camry now. And he changed clothes at the storage shed. He’s rolled up the sleeves of Applewhite’s shirt, turned up the cuffs of the khaki trousers. The sneakers are a little large, too, and he experimented with tissue paper in the toes, but decided against it. They’re not that big, and it’s not as if he’s going to be walking long distances in them.

  “Son? Come here a minute, will you? There’s an address I’m having trouble finding.”

  Delicious. He’s spent enough time on the man-boy bulletin boards to have little regard for the pedophiles, but their enthusiasm is not entirely incomprehensible. Out at the abandoned golf course, he takes his time with Marcus, and, while that increases his own enjoyment of the enterprise, it perforce adds to the boy’s pain and suffering. Well, sometimes it does appear to be a zero-sum universe, doesn’t it? A gain for one is a loss for another, and one knows on which side of the equation one would prefer to be.

  Anyway, it’s soon enough over, and once it’s done the boy has to endure neither pain nor the memory of pain. The boy is gone, wherever people go.

  Wherever that is…

  And the finishing touches: The body, minus a lock of hair, covered in brush and a blanket a few yards from Scott Sawyer’s body. Underneath it, apparently dropped and overlooked, the handkerchief that set all of this in motion, his own handkerchief, soaked two months ago in Applewhite’s blood. The mallet, the spade, the tape, the scissors, stowed first in the Camry’s trunk and transferred in the dead of night to Applewhite’s, where they’ll be found hidden away in the spare tire well. The box of a dozen condoms, minus the two he used, stashed in Applewhite’s glove compartment, so they can be matched to the residue to be found on the bodies. The clothes he wore, the sneakers and socks and underwear, the khakis, the laundry-marked shirt, all go in a Hefty bag and the bag in the trunk, as if Applewhite were planning to dispose of them.

  And does he dare enter the house one more time?

  He does, moving slowly and silently. There’s no dog, no burglar alarm. This is a safe neighborhood, a low-crime suburb, and the sleep of all the Applewhites is deep and untroubled. Standing there in their darkened house, an alternate plan suggests itself to him. He has the knife with him; how hard would it be to murder the children in their beds, to slit the throat of the sleeping wife, and to arrange a convenient suicide for the master of the house?

  No, he decides. Better to stick with the original plan, better to let the Commonwealth of Virginia handle the business of punishment.

  He tapes the three glassine envelopes to the underside of a desk drawer. The knife, the magnificent knife that Randall made, wiped clean of visible blood and prints but surely bearing blood traces from all three victims, proves difficult to part with.

  All the more reason to part with it. One must never allow oneself to become too deeply attached to anything—not a place, not a person, not a possession. One’s only attachment, and it must be total, should be to oneself. If thy right eye offend thee, get over it; if thy house or car or custom-made knife delight thee overmuch, cast it out.

  The knife goes in a desk drawer. As he leaves the house, moving slowly and silently, he transforms the pain of losing the knife into the satisfaction of having chosen the right course of action. And it’s only a knife, after all, a tool, a means to an end. In the course of time there will be other knives, and he’ll like some of them as much as he’s liked this one.

  He’s been driving the Camry, and he keeps it and takes I-95 into Washington. It’s morning by the time he gets there. He runs the car through a car wash, then leaves it parked on the street a few blocks from Dupont Circle, with the key in the ignition and the windows rolled down. He t
akes the Metro to Union Station, confident that the car will have been stolen by the time his train departs for Richmond.

  He goes to the rented storage shed, reclaims his Ford, and drives off.

  Two days later, after the boy’s disappearance has made the newspaper headlines and led the TV news, after an eyewitness has turned up who saw a boy fitting Marcus Leacock’s description getting into a small dark sedan, he uses an untraceable phone to call the number provided for tips in the case. He reports having noticed a dark-colored car leaving the grounds of the old Fairview Country Club on the evening of the boy’s disappearance, and that there was something about the incident that made him suspicious enough to jot down the first four digits of the license number, which was as much as he could get.

  And of course it is enough…

  And here’s the guest of honor. Here’s Preston Applewhite, the star of our little spectacle, making his belated entrance. He’s wearing leg shackles and wrist restraints, so it’s a less elegant entrance than it might be, but he’s here now, and the show can go on.

  His face is expressionless, his mood unreadable. What fills his mind now? Dread of the unknown? Fury at the failure of the system to exonerate an innocent man? Hope, however unwarranted, that some miracle may come along to save his life?

  A week ago he, Arne Bodinson, could have furnished just such a miracle. He might have confessed, openly or anonymously, and proved his claim by offering up the location of the Willis boy’s grave. Now, having spent so many hours with Applewhite, anything he might say would be discredited out of hand. You say you know where the body is, Dr. Bodinson? If so, it’s because Applewhite told you. You’re only confirming his guilt.

  The warden, his face lined with the demands of his office, recites a few pro forma words, then asks the condemned man if he has anything to say. There is an extended pause. Applegate—they’ve not yet strapped him to the gurney, he’s evidently allowed to be on his feet while he voices his last words—has his eyes lowered in thought, then raises them to look for the first time at the faces behind the glass. He finds his new friend Arne, and his eyes brighten in recognition, but only for a moment.

  When he speaks, his voice is soft, as if he doesn’t intend it to reach his audience. There’s a microphone, however, so it’s audible in the witness chamber.

  “You’re all certain I did these things,” he says. “I know otherwise, but there’s no reason for anyone to believe me. I almost wish I were guilty. Then I could confess, I could beg forgiveness.” A pause, and the attendants move in, thinking he’s finished, but a quick shake of his head halts them. “I forgive you,” he says. “All of you.”

  And at the end his eyes fix on those of the one man who professes to believe in his innocence. Has he figured it out? Is that the meaning of those final three words? But no, he’s looking for approval of his eloquence, and he gets it, a nod of acknowledgment from behind the glass. And Applewhite registers the nod, and seems grateful for it.

  Applewhite lies down on the gurney and they adjust the straps. The physician finds a good vein in his arm, swabs the skin with alcohol-soaked cotton, gets the IV inserted on the second attempt.

  And then he sits transfixed, watching, while a man dies before his eyes. There’s very little to see. The first drug, the pentothal, has no apparent effect. The second, the Pavulon, induces paralysis, rendering Applewhite incapable of breathing—or of changing expression. And the final ingredient, the potassium chloride, burns or does not burn, it’s impossible to tell, but what is evident, at least to those close enough to see the heart monitor, or the physician who checks the pulse, is that it does what it is supposed to do.

  Preston Applewhite is dead.

  And, behind the glass, the man who will soon discard forever the name Arne Bodinson is careful to maintain the expression he has worn throughout, one of somber detachment. He has an erection, but he’s fairly certain no one has noticed it.

  I-95, he knows, will be a nightmare on a Friday. He takes Interstates 64 and 81 instead, spends what’s left of the night at a motel in Pennsylvania,

  then drives east on I-80 Saturday morning, aiming to hit the George Washington Bridge when traffic’s likely to be light. And it works out as he’d planned.

  Lately, everything’s been working out as he planned.

  As he’d thought it would. He’d done the hard work years ago in Richmond, made his kills, planted the incriminating evidence, fitted the frame precisely around a man whose only mistake was to sustain a bloody nose at the worst possible moment. This past week came under the heading of unfinished business.

  He has unfinished business of another sort in New York.

  10

  Monday night I was having a cup of coffee in front of the television set when my cell phone rang.

  “I feel like a fucking spy,” Louise said. “I’m in the ladies’ room at the restaurant. We’re about to go back to my place. You’ve got the address?”

  I said I did.

  “This is so deeply weird. I’m going to take him home and have sex with him, and meanwhile you’ll be lurking outside waiting to follow him home. Tell me that’s not weird.”

  “If you’d prefer—”

  “No, it makes sense, it’s just totally weird. If he’s who he says he is, then he never has to know about this. If he’s not, then I have to know about it.”

  I asked if he was likely to stay overnight.

  “If he does, it’ll be a first. He usually comes over and stays for three or four hours, but this time we had dinner, which we usually don’t, so we’re getting a late start. What time is it, eight-thirty? No, closer to nine. My guess is he won’t stay past eleven-thirty.”

  I asked what he was wearing, to make sure I didn’t follow the wrong guy. Designer jeans and a navy-blue polo shirt, she said. I suggested she could flick the lights on and off a half dozen times as soon as he left the apartment, and she said it was a great idea, but her apartment was in the rear of the building, so I’d never be able to see it from the street.

  “But I may just do it anyway,” she said, “because it’s such a cool Mata Hari–type thing to do. Hey, wait a minute. Won’t you have your cell phone with you? So why don’t I just call you when he leaves? And then I’ll flick the lights, too, just for fun.”

  Her estimate wasn’t off by much. It was twenty to twelve when my cell phone rang.

  “Mata Hari speaking,” she said. “He’s all yours. I have to tell you, dinner was good but the dessert was better. Do me a favor, will you? Call me tomorrow to tell me that he’s David Thompson and he’s single and the only secret he’s keeping from me is that he’s fabulously wealthy.”

  I told her I’d see what I could do, and then I rang off and the door opened and he came out. I’d probably have made him without the phone call. He was wearing jeans and a dark polo shirt, and the photo I had of him was a good likeness.

  Tailing somebody is complicated enough when you’ve got a full team, half a dozen in cars and about as many on foot. I had TJ along for company, and an off-duty cabby named Leo whom I’d promised fifty bucks for a couple of hours of chauffeur duty.

  Louise lived on the third floor of a brownstone on the uptown side of West Eighty-seventh Street between Broadway and West End. Like most odd-numbered streets, Eighty-seventh is one-way westbound. If David Thompson lived in or around Kips Bay, he’d probably take a cab home, and he’d probably walk to Broadway to catch it. The same was true if he wanted to go somewhere else by cab. If he wanted the subway, he’d catch it at Eighty-sixth and Broadway, so once again he’d be walking toward Broadway, and against the flow of traffic.

  We’d set up accordingly. TJ and I were standing in the doorway of a building directly opposite Louise’s, while Leo’s car was parked next to a hydrant on Broadway. If a cop rousted him he’d circle the block, but it wasn’t likely, not at that hour. All he had to do was say he was waiting on a fare.

  When Thompson left the building, we’d tag him to Broadway, then get in Leo’
s car and follow whatever cab he hailed. If he walked down to Eighty-sixth and took the subway, TJ would go down into the tunnel after him. He’d try to stay in touch by cell phone, and we’d try to be there when he and Thompson got off the train.

  So Thompson came out the door and down the stoop, looked at his watch, hauled out a cell phone, and made a call. At first no one answered, but then someone did, or voice mail kicked in, because he talked with animation for a moment or two before snapping it shut. He held it out, looked at it, then put it away, got out a cigarette and lit it, blew out a cloud of smoke, and started walking, but not toward Broadway. He headed the other way, toward West End Avenue.

  Shit.

  “Plan B,” I said, and took off after Thompson, while TJ sprinted to the corner of Broadway and around it to where Leo was waiting with the bulldog edition of the Daily News open on the steering wheel. He had the motor running before TJ was in his seat. New York’s the one place in the country when you can’t make a right turn at a red light, the traffic’s just too chaotic for that to work here, but David Letterman pointed out once that New Yorkers think of traffic laws as guidelines, and Leo figures a grown man ought to be able to use his own judgment. He slid around the corner and picked me up halfway down the block.

  I got in back, and Leo coasted to the corner, where the light was red against us. Thompson, when he reached the corner, could have stepped to the curb to flag a southbound taxi, or he might have crossed Eighty-seventh Street himself, or waited for the light and crossed West End and headed for Riverside Drive.

  If he’d done any of those things we could have followed him with no trouble, but instead he turned right on West End and headed uptown. Leo might have been willing to push his luck and run another red light, but he’d be going the wrong way on a one-way street, and we couldn’t do that.