The Paperboy (9 page)

F
OR THE NEXT FIVE MONTHS
, Charlotte visited the New Orleans Public Library every afternoon after work, and not only pored over the pages of the
Times-Picayune
and the
States-Item
, neither of which carried much news from beyond Louisiana, for some mention of Hillary Van Wetter, but the
Atlanta Constitution
, the
Miami Times
, and the
Tampa Times
too. As the story cooled, she found Hillary Van Wetter and
Sheriff Call mentioned less often, but later, during the trial itself, she was rewarded with daily reports, and she cut these out of the papers, along with each picture of Hillary Van Wetter that appeared, even when it was a file picture which she already had.

She also cut out pictures of Sheriff Call and the prosecutor and the defense attorney and the two jurors who were interviewed and photographed after the verdict. Sometimes she looked at these pictures in the morning, when she woke up worrying about Hillary; it comforted her to compare them to him. She had turned down men with those same soft faces all her life.

She removed the pictures from the newspapers at a small table hidden from the front counter, using a pair of rounded cuticle scissors that left the borders of the emptied frames frayed. She felt guilty stealing the pictures, and once dropped a note in the suggestion box that said the place could use a better security system, and referred the library to the dark windows in the ceiling at the post office.

At home, she pasted the stories and pictures against typing paper, and laid the paper flat on the bottom of the box marked H.V.W. When it was half full, she started another.

All the while, she was writing Hillary Van Wetter every week at the county jail—long, wandering letters full of descriptions of the post office and the people who worked there, of the noises that came through the wall of her apartment in the Quarter at night, of the way he had appeared to her in a story or picture she’d seen. She asked questions but never asked him to write back with the answers. It was too early in things to push.

The other killers she’d chosen had been anxious and faithful correspondents from the first letter, even before she’d sent them her picture, but in the end there was a sameness to their letters that deadened her interest. She still
sent them all perfunctory cards at holidays, but neglected to even open some of the thicker envelopes that arrived with identification numbers for return addresses. They were all the same, full of legalese and stories of forgetful lawyers and prison routines and sexual longings; promises of sex that would last days and months.

Worse yet, the ones who read books were always quoting dead philosophers. Mostly Germans.

Nothing about the crimes themselves. Not a word about the victims or the rooms where the killings happened. No glimpse of that. It was as if the single exciting thing about them had never happened.

Still, she hadn’t given up on them completely—she still liked to think of them at night, imprisoned in six different states, staring at her picture in the half light of their cells, the place completely quiet except for their hard breathing and their rattling cots.

With Hillary Van Wetter, however, she realized that she was looking for something more substantial than her ordinary killers could offer.

She wanted someone less compromised, and after Hillary was convicted—that was how she was addressing him then, “Dear Hillary”—and sent to death row at Starke, she sent him her picture, and autographed it: “For Hillary Van Wetter, an intact man. Warmest regards, Charlotte.”

Coming across that same phrase—“an intact man”—in the accompanying letter, I thought suddenly of my Hungarian coach at the University of Florida. Commit everything to the swim.

She knew the picture flattered her, but thought of it, in the whole, as honest. It fairly represented her features, and if it softened and smoothed her skin, it had also showed nothing of her body, which, even in critical moments, she could not fault.

And if she knew when she sent the picture that she would at some point appear in front of Hillary Van Wetter not precisely as advertised, it wasn’t a deception on the order of, say, the cover of a TV dinner, which promised peas the color of green crayons that turned out to be gray.

She was not gray peas.

Eight days after she sent the picture, a letter arrived from Starke, Florida:

She read the words and could hear his voice. No evasions, no lawyer jargon, no bragging. He was purer than her other killers, but she had sensed that from the start. Uncompromised by jail and attorneys, an intact man.

And even acknowledging a certain misunderstanding at the center of her developing romance with Hillary Van Wetter, no one who ever met Hillary in person could say that Charlotte Bless entirely missed the point.

T
HERE WERE
, by actual count, forty-one boxes of “evidence” that Charlotte Bless had accumulated over four years. Newspaper clippings, letters to and from Hillary Van Wetter as
well as half a dozen other convicted killers, transcripts of the trial and the two appeals which followed, brief biographies of all eleven judges who had become involved in the case.

There were several newspaper reports on famous murder cases the same judges had been involved in before, along with a list of miscarriages of justice which had occurred at the hands of Sheriff Thurmond Call over the last fifteen years of his administration.

And through all the boxes, there was a kind of running diary, mingled with the other “evidence,” which not only argued with rulings and pressed alternate theories of the killing, but contained Charlotte Bless’s most intimate sexual thoughts over the entire period of the case.

In one paragraph she analyzed Judge Waylan Lord’s death sentencing patterns, and in the next she noted that all the killers who had written her except Hillary Van Wetter wanted to press their mouths into her vagina and even the crack of her behind. Hillary had no such desire, which she considered “psychological proof” of his innocence.

He wanted to be sucked himself, like a judge.

Y
ARDLEY ACHEMAN AND
my brother stayed in their office every day for a week, reading everything inside the boxes of evidence. Ward opened each box first, numbered it, and then examined what was inside, making notes as he went. When he had finished with a box, he turned it over to Yardley Acheman, who went through faster, and without notes, stopping occasionally to read something out loud.

“Listen to this,” he said, “she’s talking about blowing him through the bars of the cell with all the prisoners watching, and then, wait … ” He stopped for a moment, finding the place. “Yes, right here … ‘I would suck his shaft, if it
comes to that, as they strap on the electrodes, to hold him in my mouth as he comes and goes.… ’ ”

He looked at my brother, smiling, and then, getting no reaction, he looked at me. “I don’t think she’s thought that all the way through,” he said.

Ward was back studying the pages spread out across his desk.

“If nothing else comes of all this,” Yardley said, “we’ve got a strange story here about a girl who falls in love with killers.…”

My brother looked up again, about to open another of the boxes which, with all the others, held every private thought and craving that had come into Charlotte Bless’s head since 1965, and which she had turned over to him and Yardley Acheman on blind faith and out of love for her fiancé, whom she had yet to meet.

“We didn’t make any promises,” Yardley said.

Ward struggled with it a moment, then, without a word, went back to the box. The betrayal was built in; it was in the boxes when she turned them over, in the grain of the story, and in the grain of the business.

“S
O,” SHE SHOUTED
, “you’re smart. Why aren’t you in college?” Her window was open and the wind lifted her hair off the seat behind her, blowing it into the corners of her mouth.

“We could turn on the air conditioner,” I said, but probably not loud enough to be heard over the wind. I moved my hand toward the dashboard, trying to remember how it worked.

She stopped me, touching my arm, shaking her head no,
and her hair was free in the air and turned red as it crossed the sun, which was hanging just over the horizon.

“I like real air,” she said, and I nodded, and a moment later my own hair slapped into my eyes, making them fill with tears. “So why aren’t you in college?” she said.

I rolled my window halfway up, and the beating wasn’t as bad. “I was,” I said.

She looked at me, waiting. As if because she gave up the details of her own life to strangers, strangers would give up theirs to her.

“Something happened,” I said.

“What was it?” Not even giving that a chance to settle, but now at least she was watching the road. She’d wanted to drive, I didn’t know why.

“I forgot where I was,” I said. And hearing myself say that, it seemed like the truth. She leaned across the seat to hear me, and the wind beat the top of her blouse against her chest, and in the second I looked that way, speaking of forgetting where you are, I saw the pink of her nipple.

“You got lost?” she said.

“Not lost,” I said. “I knew I was somewhere familiar, I just forgot where it was.”

“It’s the same thing,” she said.

“No,” I said, “it’s not.”

She went quiet a moment, thinking it over. We were on the way to Starke. She’d said she wanted to be close to the prison for a little while, to sit in the parking lot and see what it felt like to be near him.

She’d wanted Yardley to take her, but late in the afternoon he showed up at the office and told her he couldn’t. “Jack’ll have to do,” he said. He’d met a girl at the Laundromat that afternoon, and needed to explore the local milieu with her instead. He said he was way behind on the local milieu.

“How do you forget where you are at college?” she said.

I thought about it, trying to remember how it happened. “I was a swimmer,” I said slowly.

“You can swim?”

“It’s Florida, everybody can swim.”

It was quiet between us again, and she pushed the lighter into the dashboard and when it was ready she stuck a cigarette in her lips and then, letting go of the wheel, cupped one of her hands over the top when she lit it.

“Where did you swim?” she said, no one driving the car.

“University of Florida. I was on the team.”

“In a pool?”

She pulled on the cigarette and the wind caught the cigarette and blew sparks into her hair. “You weren’t in the ocean or anything.”

“Not at the University of Florida,” I said.

“Good.”

And it was quiet again, and a few minutes later we drove through Starke and turned north on Highway 16. She saw a mileage sign for the state prison and slowed before she went past, watching it until it was cut from view, as if it were something she wanted to remember, and then for a while seemed to immerse herself in the land—studying the flat, lifeless landscape as if each piece of it had a separate meaning, like a battlefield from the Civil War.