A Penny for the Hangman (2 page)
Read A Penny for the Hangman Online
Authors: Tom Savage
I can’t bring myself to say “As luck would have it,” so I won’t. There was no luck in this. As
fate
would have it, that new movie about the case,
Bad Boys,
was set to open on Friday, March 13, 2009, fifty years to the day after the actual event. The movie was already big news, with its Oscar-winning director and all-star cast, and the two exciting new teen actors who played Harper and Anderman. They’d filmed it in St. Thomas, using many of the authentic locations. When Karen told her bosses at
Visions
magazine about the phone call, they were ecstatic. The story would be a perfect tie-in with the release of the hottest movie of the season.
Two weeks later, the mystery man called Karen again, and by then she had the green light from Sally Cohen. Karen was ready to hear his story, but he refused to discuss it on the phone. He told her she must come to him if she wanted it. He called a third time, on February 28, to confirm their appointment.
Karen collected a virtual library of information about the 1959 incident, and she was fascinated by it. She attended a trade screening of
Bad Boys,
and afterward she interviewed the director and screenwriter. She tracked down several people who’d known the two boys. She was writing a series of articles for the magazine, even talking about possibly assembling them into a book. There had already been five nonfiction books, a thinly veiled novel, a Broadway play, a TV miniseries, and two theatrical films based on the case, but Karen said she’d have a big advantage over all of them. The two boys had vanished after their release from prison years before, and they’d never spoken to any of those other writers. Karen was convinced that her caller was actually one of the boys, either Rodney Harper or Wulf Anderman.
I should have gone down there with her. I offered, but she wouldn’t hear of it, and neither would her mysterious contact. Karen said it was no big deal, she’d be back in a few days, and how could an old man possibly be a threat to her, anyway? Besides, she’d have a photographer with her, so she’d be fine. That’s what she believed, and I believed it, too.
Here’s how I’m going to do this: I’ll start with one of the
Visions
articles Karen wrote, the projected first chapter of the book she will never finish. Then I’ll finish her book for her, and I’ll use everything I’ve found here to help me. I have her notes and her computer journal going all the way back to college, as well as the books and documents she consulted.
And I have something else: an old black-and-white marbled school composition book filled with careful handwriting and smudged in places with faint black stains of dried blood. This is the diary of Rodney Harper, a journal he kept as a teenager in the months leading up to the incident. The diary arrived here a week after Karen went down there, in a box addressed to me, along with a battered-looking wooden chess set and several other items I’ll explain later. They’ve been entrusted to me, so I assume that I’m free to use them as I see fit.
Well, I shall use them. It’s taken me years to work up the courage, but now I’m ready. I’ll arrange Karen’s eager work and Rodney Harper’s diary and the reports from 1959, and I’ll fill in the rest myself, the events of March 2009, which I can only think of as the Harper/And
erman Golden Anniversary. I will tell their story.
Karen’s story.
M
ONDAY,
M
ARCH 9 TO
W
EDNESDAY,
M
ARCH 11, 2009
“Paradise Lost”
by Karen TylerEveryone is capable of murder. The urge to kill can infect anyone, at any time. Murderers may be the least likely people, their prey the least likely targets, and their killing grounds the least likely crime scenes imaginable.
There is a house on a hill in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, a big stone plantation manor called Tamarind in honor of the fruit trees that line its long front drive. From the spacious wood verandas and flagstone patios of the mansion, you can gaze out across the sloping lawn at the harbor, at the distant city of Charlotte Amalie nestled by the water’s edge, and up at the mountains behind it. On a fine afternoon, this lavish panorama takes the breath away from even the most jaded viewer.
St. Thomas is among the greatest natural wonders of the world, floating in the sunlit strait where the deep aquamarine of the Atlantic Ocean becomes the clear turquoise of the Caribbean Sea. It rises majestically up from the water, bright green against the bright blue sky, its thickly wooded mountains ringed by beaches of fine white sand. On January 17, 1917, St. Thomas and its two equally lovely neighboring islands were purchased from Denmark by the United States, and they became our most stunning possessions: “America’s Paradise.”
As in the original Paradise, this one had a serpent—or, to be precise, two serpents. On Friday, March 13, 1959, forty-two years after Americaniz
Karen looked up from the glossy white magazine page and out at the magnificent vista from the hotel terrace, smiling to herself at how accurately she’d managed to describe it without ever having seen it. Now that the view was actually here before her, she liked her own choice of words. This wasn’t exactly the view from Tamarind—the house was on the next point of land, closer to the harbor city—but it was the same angle from a slightly greater distance. She zeroed in, focused, from the island in general to the specific rooftop of the mansion on the hill between her and the town, studying it through the tops of the trees. If the man who’d summoned her here didn’t want to begin the interview right away, she’d go to Tamarind tomorrow and have a look around the scene of the crime.
She glanced down at her cell phone beside the frosted mug of tropical fruit punch on the glass-topped, umbrella-shaded patio table. No call yet, even though she’d arrived on the island last night, some eighteen hours ago. Oh, well, he was running this show, whoever he was.
She knew he was
not
Mr. T. H. Huxley. That was the name on the fruit basket she’d found waiting in her room when she checked in last night. The hotel, of course, would tell her nothing. Whoever had arranged for the basket had apparently demanded anonymity, and the Marriott people were honoring his wish. This morning Karen had asked the clerk behind the front desk if a Mr. Huxley had left word for her, and he said there were no messages. Karen could tell from the man’s expression that he’d never heard of Mr. Huxley. Interesting…
Karen hated waiting. She was a New York woman, and perpetual motion was in her constitution. She made lists of goals, checking off items as they were accomplished. Keeping busy was important to her, mainly because it prevented her from having to take stock of her life. Aside from her profession, she didn’t really have all that much to show for her twenty-seven years on earth, and she didn’t much like to contemplate that fact.
Well, at least her life was looking up lately. She was in love with Jim O’Brien, that was certain. Jim was an improvement over the men she’d dated in college, and he was serious about her—serious enough to want to get married, which made her nervous. She didn’t know if she was ready for it, but she was determined to make a decision about him soon; it was the first thing she wrote on every list these days. Maybe she should find a mate for Ruth Rendell, her Siamese, the latest in a long line of feline companions. She could call him Raymond Chandler. Yes, Ruth and Raymond…
Karen was avoiding reality again, and she forced herself to return to the present. She drained the mug of cool, sweet punch and sat back in her chair, adjusting a strap on her brand-new bikini. The main professional asset she had now was this gig, whatever it turned out to be. She had a feeling about it, the nagging certainty that this forthcoming interview would be a milestone of some kind, a defining moment for her. Seeing the placement of her article in this week’s issue, the first of her four-parter, she felt that certainty again.
The magazine had kicked off her series with a dramatic cover photo of the two young actors who played the leads in
Bad Boys
and the title of her first installment, “PARADISE LOST,” in bold capitals. Her first cover story! Several pictures accompanied the article—a mix of color stills from the new movie and black-and-white shots of the actual people involved in the 1959 scandal.
The interview would be the final entry, the culmination of her series of pieces on the crime. Part one was the background, mood music to set the scene. She’d already handed in part three, the section about the incident’s enduring legend over the past fifty years, and she’d nearly finished part two as well, the quotes from people who’d known the two boys at the time of the murders. She would send part two off to Sally in New York for next week’s issue as soon as she dined with one last witness, which was scheduled for tomorrow night.
The waiter arrived to ask if she’d like anything else, so she ordered another fruit punch. He smiled, glanced at her cleavage, and hurried off. Karen laughed to herself as she looked down at her carefully lotioned, nearly naked body. Gwen Levene, her friend and colleague at
Visions,
had insisted on the scanty blue bikini, not to mention the halters, shorts, jeans, and summer dresses crammed into the new suitcase in Karen’s room upstairs. She’d probably be here for only three or four days, tops, but she’d brought enough clothes for a month.
Gwen. Yes, Karen had some nice friends. Gwen was a lot of fun, but her taste in men was questionable. Her latest conquest was a man named Sidney Singleton. Karen hadn’t met this Sidney guy yet, but already he’d managed to annoy her, sight unseen. According to Gwen, he called himself a “freelance investigative reporter,” which Karen assumed meant he couldn’t hold a steady job, but he apparently thought he was the next Bob Woodward. He also considered himself the World’s Leading Authority on famous crimes. Gwen told her that Sidney had always dreamed of writing a book about Harper and Anderman, and when he’d heard that Karen was coming down here, and why, he was green with envy. Aside from her employers, Karen had informed only Jim and Gwen about the sinister phone calls, but Gwen had blabbed the news to her new flame in some misguided, Gwen-like attempt to impress him. Sorry, Sid, Karen thought with a little thrill of smug satisfaction. This one is mine.
If he
ever
calls…
She cast another impatient glance at the cell phone before snatching up the new issue of
Visions
and resuming her story.
“Paradise Lost”
The most famous instance of parricide in America before 1959 differed from this one in important respects. In Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892, 32-year-old Lizzie Andrew Borden was accused of killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet while they slept, but Lizzie Borden was an adult, the charge was never proved in court, and the case remains officially unsolved. The Harper/And
He stood at the railing of the dining terrace above the pool patio of the Frenchman’s Reef, gazing down at the woman in the blue bikini. She sat at one of the umbrella tables almost directly beneath him, her back to him, reading her own article about the Harper/Anderman murders. The new issue of
Visions
had become available this morning, but he’d already read her cover story online. She was an excellent writer. And she was extremely pretty….
A group of boisterous tourist children was playing a game in the pool, the object of which seemed to be splashing one another and dunking the loser. Their excited screams drew Karen Tyler’s attention briefly. She glanced over at them, smiling, then back down at the magazine. Her cell phone was lying on the table, and he knew she was waiting for a call. An important call for both of them.
He leaned forward on the railing and watched the woman below him as she continued to read.
“Paradise Lost” (continued)
Rodney Harper was 15 at the time of the incident, and his friend, Wulfgar Anderman, was 14. Both boys were Caucasian, Rodney of British/
The Harpers and the Andermans had spent most of their adult lives in the Islands. They were part of that closed circle of upper-class whites who made up some ten percent of St. Thomas’s population. In addition to the rich white crowd, there was a small black aristocracy who owned nearly everything worth owning in the region. These two groups occasionally socialized with each other, and together they virtually ran the U.S. Virgin Islands. The rest of the populace were the native poor, many of them descendants of slaves of the original sugar plantations. If there was a middle class, it was too small to be noticed.
Wulf was an only child, whereas Rodney was the younger of two sons. Tobias Harper, Jr., 19, was away at college, his father’s alma mater, so he was not in the Harper mansion, Tamarind, on that fateful Friday the 13th. His parents and Dr. and Mrs. Anderman and an Afro-Caribbean woman named Bernice Watkins were not so lucky.