Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Excellent,” Ehrengraf said.

“You think so? If the District Attorney got a hold of that...”

“Ah, but he won’t, will he?” Ehrengraf crumpled the paper, stuffed it into a pocket, handed the legal pad back to his client. “All of those negative thoughts,” he explained, “have been festering in your mind and soul, preventing you from believing in your own untarnished innocence. By letting them surface this way, we can stamp them out and affirm your own true nature.”

“My own true nature’s nothing to brag about,” McCandless said.

“That’s your negativity talking,” Ehrengraf told him. “At heart you’re an innocent child of God.” He pointed to the legal pad, made scribbling motions in the air. “You’ve got work to do,” he said.

“I hope yougot another of those yellow pads there,” Dale McCandless said. “It’s a funny thing. I was never much of a writer, and in school it was torture for me to write a two-page composition for English class. You know, ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’?”

Ehrengraf, who could well imagine how a young McCandless might have spent his summer vacation, was diplomatically silent.

“But this time around,” McCandless said, “I’ve been writing up a storm. What’s it been, five days since you got me started? Well, I ran through that pad you gave me, and I got one of the guards to bring me this little notebook, but I like the pads better. Here, look at what I wrote this morning.”

Ehrengraf unfolded a sheet of unlined white paper. McCandless had drawn a line down its center, writing his affirmation over and over again in the left-hand column, jotting down his responses to the right. I am completely innocent. / I’ve been in trouble all my life... I am completely innocent. / Maybe it wasn’t always my fault... I am completely innocent. / I don’t remember doing anything bad... I am completely innocent. / In my heart I am... I am completely innocent. / How great it would be if it was true!

“You’ve come a long way,” Ehrengraf told his client. “You see how the nature of your responses is changing.”

“It seems like magic,” McCandless said.

“The magic of affirmation.”

“All along, I would just write down the first thing that popped into my head. But the old bad stuff just stopped popping in.”

“You cleared it away.”

“I don’t know what I did,” McCandless said. “Maybe I just wore it out. But it got to the point where it didn’t seem natural to write that I was a born killer.”

“Because you’re not.”

“I guess.”

“And how do you feel now, Mr. McCandless? Without a pen in your hand, just talking face-to-face? Are you innocent of the crimes of which you stand accused?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“It’s almost too much to hope for,” the young man said, “but maybe I am. I could be, couldn’t I? I really could be.”

Ehrengraf beamed. “Indeed you are,” he said, “and it’s my job to prove it. And yours—” he opened his briefcase, provided his client with a fresh legal pad “—yours to further affirm that innocence until there is no room in your consciousness for doubt and negativity. You’ve got work to do, Mr. McCandless. Are you up for it?”

Eagerly, McCandless reached for the pad.

“Little Bobby Bickerstaff,”McCandless said, shaking his head in wonder.

Ehrengraf’s hand went to the knot of his necktie, adjusting it imperceptibly. The tie was that of the Caedmon Society, and Ehrengraf was not entitled to wear it, never having been a member of that organization. It was, however, his invariable choice for occasions of triumph, and this was just such an occasion.

“I never would have dreamed it,” McCandless said. “Not in a million years.”

“You knew him, then?”

“We went to grade school together. In fact we were in the same class until I got held back. You know something? That’s hard to believe, too.”

“That you’d be held back? I must say I find it hard to believe myself. You’re an intelligent young man.”

“Oh, it wasn’t for that. It was for deportment. You know, talking in class, throwing chalk.”

“High spirits,” Ehrengraf said.

“Setting fires,” McCandless went on. “Breaking windows. Doing cars.”

“Doing cars?”

“Teachers’ cars,” the young man explained. “Icepicking the tires, or sugaring the gas tank, or keying the paint job. Or doing the windows.”

“Bricking them,” Ehrengraf suggested.

“I suppose you could call it that. That’s what’s hard to believe, Mr. Ehrengraf. That I did those things.”

“I see.”

“I used to be like that,” he said, and frowned in thought. “Or maybe I just used to think I was that way, and that’s why I did bad things.”

“Ah,” Ehrengraf said.

“All along I was innocent,” McCandless said, groping for the truth. “But I didn’t know it, I had this belief I was bad, and when I was a little kid it made me do bad things.”

“Precisely.”

“And I got in trouble, and they blamed me even when I didn’t do anything bad, and that convinced me I was really bad, bad clear to the bone. And... and...”

The youth put his head in his hands and sobbed. “There, there,” Ehrengraf said softly, and clapped him on the shoulder. After a moment McCandless got hold of himself and said, “But little Bobby Bickerstaff. I can’t get over it.”

“He killed your parents,” Ehrengraf said.

“It’s so hard to believe. I always thought of him as a little goody-goody.”

“A nice quiet boy,” Ehrengraf said.

“Yeah, well, those are the ones who lose it, aren’t they? They pop off one day and the neighbors can’t believe it, same as I can’t believe it myself about Bobby. What was the name of the couple he killed?”

“Roger and Sheila Capstone.”

“I didn’t know them,” McCandless said, “but they lived in the same neighborhood as my folks, in the same kind of house. And was she in a wheelchair the same as my mom?”

“It was Mr. Capstone who was wheelchair-bound,” Ehrengraf said. “He’d been crippled in an automobile accident.”

“Poor guy. And little Bobby Bickerstaff emptied a clip into him, and another into his wife.”

“So it seems.”

“Meek little Bobby. Whacked them both, then went into the bathroom and wrote something on the mirror.”

“It was Mrs. Capstone’s dressing table mirror,” Ehrengraf said. “And he used her lipstick to write his last message.”

“ ‘This is the last time. God forgive me.’ ”

“His very words.”

“And then he put on the woman’s underwear,” McCandless said, “or maybe he put it on before, who knows, and then he popped a fresh clip in his gun and stuck the business end in his mouth and got off a burst. Must have made some mess.”

“I imagine it did.”

McCandless shook his head in amazement. “Little Bobby,” he said. “Mr. Straight Arrow. Cops searched his place afterward, house he grew up in, what did they find? All these guns and knives and dirty magazines and stuff.”

“It happens all the time,” Ehrengraf said.

“Other stuff, too. Some things that must have been stolen from my parents’ house, not that anybody had even noticed they were missing. Some jewelry of my mom’s and a sterling silver flask with my dad’s initials engraved on it. I don’t think I ever even knew he had a flask, but how many are you going to find engraved W. R. McC.?”

“It must have been his.”

“Well, sure. But what really wrapped it up was the diary. From what I heard, most of it was sketchy, just weird stuff that was going through his mind. But the entry the day after my parents died, that was something else.”