Even the Wicked (3 page)

She abandoned her correspondence when Vollmer moved in with her. He insisted on being the only felon in her life. Before long she didn’t have much time for the church or the block association. She still took good care of the cats. Richie liked the cats, and all three of them were crazy about him. Franny said as much to a co-worker who’d been alarmed at her friendship with an ex-prisoner. “You know cats,” she crowed, “and what a good judge of character they are. And they absolutely love him.”

So did Franny, who was about as good a judge of character as her cats. Remarkably enough, jail-house therapy hadn’t changed her man’s sexual orientation, and he went right back to the seduction of the innocent. He started by luring teenage boys to the Haven Avenue apartment with the promise of sex with Franny, showing them nude Polaroids of her as an enticement. (There was a slump to her shoulders and a bovine cast to her features, but otherwise she was a not-unattractive woman, with large breasts and generous hips.)

She gave the boys what Richie had promised them, whether grudgingly or enthusiastically. Some of her guests were very likely enthusiastic themselves when Richie joined the party and sodomized them. Others were not, but what recourse did they have? Richie was a hulking, powerful man, physically capable of taking what he wanted, and afterward the boys were compromised by having been eager participants in the first stage of the proceedings.

Things escalated. Franny emptied her savings account and bought a van. The neighbors grew used to the sight of Richie washing and polishing it on the street in front of the apartment house, clearly proud of his new toy. They didn’t see how he’d tricked it out on the inside, with a mattress on the floor and restraints attached to the side panels. They would drive around town, and when they got to a likely spot, Franny would drive while Richie lurked in the back. Then Franny would find a child and persuade him (or her, it didn’t matter) to get into the van.

They would let the kids go when they were finished. Until one day there was a little girl who wouldn’t stop crying. Richie found a way to stop her, and they left the body in a thickly wooded section of Inwood Hill Park.

“That was the best ever,” he told her. “That rounds it out, it’s like dessert after a meal. We should have been finishing them off all along.”

“Well, from now on,” she said.

“The look in her eyes right at the end,” he said. “Jesus.”

“Poor little kid.”

“Yeah, poor little kid. You know what I wish? I wish she was alive so we could do her all over again.”

Enough. They were animals—a label we affix, curiously enough, to those members of our own species who behave in a manner unimaginable in any of the lower animals. They found a second victim, a boy this time, and dumped his corpse within a half mile of the first one, and they were caught.

There was no question of their guilt, and the case should have been solid, but piece by piece it fell apart. There was a ton of evidence the jury didn’t get to see, testimony they couldn’t hear, because the judge threw it out for one reason or another. That might not have mattered because Franny was set to confess and testify against Richie—they weren’t married, there was no cloak of privilege to preclude her doing so.

When she killed herself, that ended that.

The case against Richie did go to the jury, but there wasn’t much to it and his lawyer, Adrian Whitfield, was good enough to punch holes in it big enough for him to walk through. The judge’s charge was the nearest thing to an order of dismissal, and the jury took a scant hour and a half to come back with an acquittal.

“It was awful,” one juror told a reporter, “because we were all dead certain he did it, but the prosecution didn’t prove it. We had to find him not guilty, but there should have been a way to lock him up anyway. How can someone like that be released back into society?”

That’s what Marty McGraw wanted to know. “You may not be guilty in the eyes of the law,” he thundered, “but you’re as guilty as sin in my eyes, and the eyes of everybody I know, outside of twelve men and women forced by the system to be as blind as Justice herself…

“There are too many like you,” he went on, “falling through the cracks of the system and making the world a bad place to live. And I’ve got to tell you, I wish to God there were a way to get rid of you. Lynch law was a hell of a way to run things, and only a fool would want to go back to vigilante times. But you’re a powerful argument for it. We can’t touch you, and we’ve got to let you live among us like an ineradicable virus. You’re not going to change. You’re not going to get help, and guys like you are beyond help anyway. You nod and shuffle and con therapists and counselors and parole boards, and you slither out onto the streets of our cities and go back to preying on our kids.

“I’d kill you myself, but it’s not my style and I haven’t got the guts. Maybe you’ll step off the pavement and get hit by a bus. If you do, I’ll gladly kick in for the bus driver’s defense fund, if they’re crazy enough to charge him with anything. They ought to give him a medal—and I’d kick in for that, too, with pleasure.

“Or maybe, for once in your awful life, you’ll be a man and do the right thing. You could pick up a cue from Franny and put yourself out of everybody’s misery. I don’t suppose you’ve got the guts, either, but maybe you’ll summon up the courage, or maybe somebody’ll give you a hand. Because no matter what the nuns at St. Ignatius taught me, I can’t help it: I’d give a lot to see you with a rope around your neck, hanging from a tree limb, twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.”

It was classic McGraw, and very much the sort of thing that kept the tabloids hiring him away from one another at ever-higher salaries. His column was, as somebody had said, one of the things that made New York New York.

He’d tried his hand at other tasks over the years, and not without some success. He had published several books of nonfiction over the years, and while none had been a big seller they’d all been respectfully received. A couple of years back he’d hosted a talk program on a local cable channel, giving it up after a six-month run and a series of arguments with the station management. A while before that he’d written a play and actually had it produced on Broadway.

But it was with his column that he made his mark on the city. He had a way of articulating the anger and impatience of his readers, putting better words to it than they would have chosen yet sacrificing nothing in the way of plain-spoken blue-collar fury. I remember reading the column he wrote about Richie Vollmer, and I remember more or less agreeing with it. I didn’t much care for frontier justice, but there were times it seemed better than no justice at all. I’d hate to see a lynch mob marching down the street, but if they stopped in front of Richie Vollmer’s house I wouldn’t have run out there and tried to talk them out of it.

Not that I gave a lot of thought to the column. Like everybody else, I nodded from time to time in agreement, frowned now and then at this oversimplification or that infelicitous turn of phrase, thought to myself that it would not be a bad thing at all if Richie was found dangling from a limb or a lamppost. And, like everybody else, I turned the page.

Almost everybody else.

The column ran on Thursday, with the paper’s bulldog edition on the street late Wednesday night. In addition to eight or ten letters to the editor, two of which were later excerpted in “The Voice of the People,” five letters came in Friday and Saturday addressed to McGraw personally. One, from a Catholic layman in Riverdale, reminded McGraw that suicide was a mortal sin and urging another to commit such an act was sinful as well. The others all expressed agreement with the column, to one degree or another.

McGraw had a stack of printed postcards: “Dear _________, Thanks for taking the time to write. Whether you did or didn’t care for what I had to say, I’m grateful to you for writing, and pleased and proud to have you as a reader. I hope you’ll keep reading my stuff Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday in the Daily News.” Not everyone who wrote would include a return address—some didn’t even sign their names—but those who did got postcards in reply, with their first names written in after “Dear” and a handwritten comment at the end—“Thanks!” or “You said it!” or “Good point!” He’d sign the cards and mail them off and forget the whole thing.

One of the five letters gave him a moment’s pause. “Your open letter to Richard Vollmer is sharply provocative,” it began. “What are we to do when the system fails? It is not enough to walk away, congratulating ourselves on our commitment to due process even as we wring our hands at the incident’s unfortunate outcome. Our criminal justice system requires a backup, a fail-safe device to correct those mistakes that are an inevitable outcome of a flawed system.

“When we send a rocket into space, we build it with components designed to back up other components which might fail. We allow for the possibility that some unforeseen factor will nudge it off course, and build in devices to correct any such deviations as occur. If we routinely take such precautions in outer space, can we do less on the streets of our cities?

“I submit that a backup system for our criminal justice system exists already in the hearts and souls of our citizens, if we have the will to activate it. And I believe we do. You are a manifestation of that collective will, writing the column you wrote. And I, too, am very much a manifestation of that will, the will of the people.

“Richard Vollmer will be hanging from that tree soon. It is the people’s will.”

The letter was more literate than most, and it was typed. McGraw’s readers were not all clowns and morons, scrawling their approval in crayon on brown paper bags, and he had received typed and well-phrased letters before, but they were invariably signed and almost always bore return addresses. This one was unsigned and there was no return address, not on the letter itself, not on the envelope it had come in, either. He made a point of checking, and the envelope bore his own name and the newspaper’s address. Nothing else.

He filed it and forgot about it.

The following weekend, two Dominican kids on mountain bikes came tearing down a steep path in Inwood Hill Park. One of them cried out to his friend, and they both braked to a stop as soon as they got to a spot that was level enough. “Joo see that?” “See what?” “On that tree.” “What tree?” “Was a guy hanging from that tree back there.” “You crazy, man. You seeing things, you crazy.” “We got to go back.” “Uphill? So we can see some guy hanging?” “Come on!”

They went back, and the boy had not been seeing things. A man was indeed hanging from the stout limb of a pin oak ten or fifteen yards off the bike path. They stopped their bikes and took a good look at him, and one of the kids promptly vomited. The hanging man was not a pretty sight. His head was the size of a basketball and his neck was a foot long, stretched by the weight of him. He wasn’t twisting slowly in the wind. There wasn’t any wind.

It was Richard Vollmer, of course, and he’d been found hanging not far from where both of his victims had been found, and McGraw’s first thought was that the misbegotten son of a bitch had actually done what he’d told him to do. He felt a curious sense of unsought power, at once unsettling and exciting.

But Richie had had help. Asphyxiation had caused his death, so he’d been alive when the rope went around his neck, but he’d probably been unconscious. An autopsy disclosed that he’d been beaten severely about the head, and had in fact sustained cranial injuries that might have proven fatal if someone hadn’t taken the trouble to string him up.

McGraw didn’t know how he felt about that. It certainly appeared as though a column of his had led some impressionable yahoo to commit murder; at the very least, the killer had looked to McGraw for the murder method. That disgusted him, and yet he could hardly bring himself to mourn the death of Richie Vollmer. So he did what he had grown in the habit of doing over the years. He talked out his thoughts and feelings in a column.

“I can’t say I’m sorry Richie Vollmer is no longer with us,” he wrote. “There are, after all, a lot of us left to soldier on, eight million and counting, and I’d be hard put to argue that the quality of life will be a whole lot worse with Richie in the cold cold ground. But I’d hate to think that I, or any reader of this column, had a part in putting him there.

“In a sense, whoever killed Richie Vollmer did us all a favor. Vollmer was a monster. Is there anyone who seriously doubts he’d have killed again? And aren’t we all justified now in feeling relieved that he won’t?

“And yet his killer did us a disservice at the same time. When we take the law into our own hands, when we snatch up in our own hands the power of life and death, we’re no different from Richie. Oh, we’re a bunch of kinder, gentler Richie Vollmers. Our victims deserve what they get, and we can tell ourselves we’ve got God on our side.

“But how different are we?

“For wishing publicly for his death, I owe the world an apology. I’m not apologizing to Richie, I’m not for one moment sorry he’s gone. My apology is to all the rest of you.

“It’s possible, of course, that the person or persons who took Richie out never read this column, that they did what they did for reasons of their own, that they were old foes of his from his days in prison. That’s what I’d like to believe. I’d sleep better.”

McGraw had a visit from the cops, predictably enough. He told them he’d had a batch of letters agreeing and disagreeing with his column, but that no one had specifically offered to see that his wishes were carried out. The cops didn’t ask to see the letters. His column ran, and the next day’s mail brought a second letter.

“Don’t blame yourself,” McGraw read. “It might be interesting to discuss the extent to which your column prompted my action, but a search for the ultimate cause of any phenomenon is ultimately fruitless. Can we not say with more assurance that Richard Vollmer, by his monstrous actions, caused you to write what you wrote even as it caused me to do what I did? Each of us responded—promptly, directly, properly—to an insupportable state of affairs, i.e., the continuing capacity of a child-murderer to walk free among us.