A Penny for the Hangman (6 page)

“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 slaughterh
ouse. 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 attorney, 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/And
erman 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.

The sun was disappearing behind the distant Sangre de Cristo Mountains, turning the wide stretches of desert a rich purple, when Yolanda heard the rattly old Jeep pull in from the highway and stop at the gas pump outside. She watched through the front window as the man got out and went around to the pump. He always served himself and came inside to pay, which was good. Her husband and his father were over in Taos, and she was alone here. Even with the sun down and the desert quickly cooling, she didn’t want to leave the air-conditioned building to fill a gas tank. Besides, she’d always been a little afraid of this man, and she was sorry Jorge and Papa Velasquez weren’t here with her.

There’d been some tourists here just now, two young couples on their way to Los Angeles stopping for gas and cold drinks, but they’d pulled out again not five minutes ago. Just her luck. She watched the man as he pumped. He was wearing his usual today: gray Stetson, work shirt, jeans, Frye boots. He was tall and powerfully built, and from this distance, with the hat, he might be mistaken for a much younger man, but she guessed his age was close to sixty, maybe even older. His longish hair and thick mustache were brilliant white, his tanned face was deeply lined, and the usual expression in his clear blue eyes could only be described as skeptical, as though he’d seen a great deal in his long life and hadn’t liked much of it. He always seemed to be frowning.

She’d known he was coming, ever since the fax arrived while the tourist couples were here. He frequently sent and received them on the bulky machine in Papa Velasquez’s office behind her, and he often used the pay phone. Papa Velasquez got along with the man well enough, laying in supplies for him—ballpoint pens, legal pads, typing paper, and Remington typewriter ribbons that had to be special-ordered from Phoenix. Papa V. supplied all the local artists and writers, but he always referred to Mr. Brown as his best customer. And maybe he was.

She glanced at the sheet of fax paper on the counter, wondering yet again why Mr. Brown, unlike the other writers and artists hereabouts, was so dependent on the Velasquezes’ fax machine and public phone. Everybody these days had a cell, or at least a regular phone, not to mention a computer—hell, even
she
had these things—but not Mr. Jonathan Brown. He lived all by himself in that small adobe house just outside town, with his manual typewriter and his ancient Jeep, and Rosa at the Tumbleweed Diner down the highway said he went in there for meals at least three times a week, always alone. He wrote books—mystery stories or thrillers or whatever they were called. They’d sold some of his books here on the spin rack from time to time, shiny paperbacks with pictures on the covers of angry men with guns and sexy women in lingerie, with titles like
Blood Vengeance
and
Dark Journey
and
The Devil Knows I’m Dead
. Mr. Brown was apparently famous, but you’d never know it to look at him. He was quiet and kept to himself.

But he sent faxes, and he received them, mostly from his publisher and his agent in New York City. He also got packages in his mailbox—big rubber-banded stacks of paper that were his stories in various stages of preparation. He explained to Papa V. that he corrected them, marking them up with blue pencils before mailing them back, and then there’d be a big flurry of faxes and phone calls from New York. Sometimes Jorge drove over to his place with messages, and Mr. Brown always rewarded him with a twenty, so Jorge didn’t mind doing it. He’d peeked inside the house, reporting back to her that Mr. Brown didn’t have much in the way of furniture, not even a TV.

This fax was from New York, too, but it wasn’t from one of the usual places. It was one of the others, as Yolanda thought of them, the ones from someone named Frank. She was better at reading Spanish than English, but she could make out a few of the phrases on the paper:
subject took sudden trip
and
Kennedy Airport
and
Virgin Islands
. The Virgin Islands were in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere. Who could Mr. Brown possibly know there? And who was Frank, who didn’t work for the literary agency or the publishing company but seemed to be watching someone in New York and reporting on it to Mr. Brown in New Mexico? Yolanda was curious, but she was also too scared of Mr. Brown to ever dream of asking him. And, as her husband and her father-in-law were constantly reminding her about any number of things, it was none of her business in the first place.

The brass bell above the door tinkled as Mr. Brown came inside to pay. He was frowning as he approached her across the shop, his boots clomping loudly on the wood floor, and Yolanda took a small involuntary step back. Even with the counter between them, she shrank from the force of his presence.