We Were Killers Once Read online

  That was why he couldn’t put it out of his mind, whether or not someone, someday, would link him to the things he had done. It invaded his thoughts every ten minutes or so, the way they say young men think about sex, or old men think about death. Nobody ever talks about how a killer might suffer, thinking about being caught. Not every killer was cold-blooded, or not totally, or at least not for a whole lifetime. He brushed the back of his hand against his eyes. Do one thing and you’re marked for life.

  Appetite suddenly lost, he stared down at his fries getting soggy in the ketchup pool on his plate. Stop thinking, he told himself. Be a man, he told himself. He paid his bill and heaved himself out of the booth to go back to the library.

  * * *

  Beaufort spotted a Walgreens down the street from Applebee’s, stopped in there and, after looking again at an enormous number of options on the shelf, with odd names like Zantac, chose a large bottle of Tums and put it in his backpack. Outside the library, he stopped for a smoke, figuring if it wasn’t allowed in a restaurant it sure wouldn’t be allowed in a library.

  Spilling a few fruit-flavored tablets into his mouth, with a deep breath and a curse at the Reuben sandwich mixed with the anxiety that had given him gas, he went back to the bank of computers and tried typing Walker again, this time with Murder. There on the screen he saw the possibility of Walker family murders. His heart pounded and his hands went moist. He wondered if the computer could somehow detect what he was thinking. That he was thinking of the nightmares. But not knowing was worse than the nightmares. He accepted the suggestion.

  There were a million results, but the ones he saw at the top of the screen were all on target. He chose the second and read. He read things he didn’t know about the Walker family, Cliff and Christine in their midtwenties, and two children, a boy and a girl both under five years of age. This information wasn’t readily accessible in 1959, only in the police reports and whatever the police chose to give to the newspapers. For the first time he read about the neighbor finding the bodies, and about the ton of evidence that had been collected:

  Some red cellophane from a cigarette wrapper, supposedly from a brand that Cliff Walker did not smoke.

  A bloody boot print that did not match anyone in the family.

  Witnesses reporting the presence of a ’57 Chevy in the Walkers’ yard.

  Witnesses reporting seeing Hickock with a scratch on his face.

  Baby dolls wrapped in Christmas paper that Hickock had sold to a preacher in Louisiana.

  A pocketknife with a fruit tree design that had belonged to Cliff Walker and the one like it in Hickock’s possession when he was captured.

  A fingerprint on the bathtub faucet that didn’t match any known individual.

  Semen in Christine Walker.

  And finally, that they were trying to match Hickock’s and Smith’s DNA to that semen.

  Beaufort looked at the date this was posted. April 2012. It chilled him to think of all the people who might read this, who knew so much because of this computer. Cold cases. The automated fingerprint system. DNA profiling. Could they really test those old bones of the two killers? All this was new in the last twenty years, thirty at most. In 1959 the closest they could get to matching a man to his semen was the blood group. The passing of time might have eased Beaufort’s mind, but this, this new world changed everything.

  Steeling himself against the burn in his gut, he went back to the place where you could ask a question, and with two fingers slowly picked out the letters on the keyboard: “what happened to Smith and Hickock DNA test?”

  An article from a newspaper called The Bradenton Times appeared.

  Ian Meadows of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department spent years investigating all the available evidence, both physical, written, and witness, concerning the case that had been cold for nearly fifty years. Then he successfully filed an affidavit to exhume the bodies of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the article said. If DNA tests showed that one of them had raped Christine Walker, then it would be one more inaccuracy contained in Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel.” Chewing more antacid tablets, Beaufort read, “‘Capote began telling everybody he was writing something that was 100 percent accurate,’” said Ralph F. Voss, who in 2011 wrote Truman Capote and the Legacy of ‘In Cold Blood.’ Should the Florida connection be confirmed, Voss said, ‘there’s going to be a whole lot of reason to write articles about how Smith and Hickock conned Capote.’”

  Holy Christ. He remembered he was in a library, and looked up over the top of the computer screen to see the librarian staring at him. She looked away quickly, and he wondered if he had said the curse aloud.

  As terrified as he was of taking any chances, Beaufort knew that if he was to have any peace at all the rest of his life, he couldn’t stick his head in the sand. This internet business was fine as far as it went, but he needed to track down Detective Meadows, find out what he knew that wasn’t recorded here. This forensic science business.

  Seven

  “I’m supposed to ask if I can turn on this recorder,” Gemma-Kate said.

  “Sure, that’s fine,” Carlo said.

  GEMMA-KATE, reading from prepared notes: I’m interviewing Carlo DiForenza of Tucson, Arizona. Let’s get some of the basics out of the way. How old are you and where were you born?

  CARLO: I’m sixty-seven years old. I was born in Torino, Italy, in 1949, four years after World War II ended.

  I had cleaned up the kitchen after dinner while they were talking, and then put on a sweater and went outside to listen to all this, pulling up a patio chair near the chaise lounges where they sat keeping warm by the fire pit. I knew pretty much all of what Carlo was telling Gemma-Kate, heard it more than once and never tired of it. I thought this was what it meant to love.

  That was a good evening, all of us accustomed to the worst that life could throw, yet none of us conscious of that melodramatic thing they call impending doom.

  When Carlo gave his date and place of birth he spoke like someone who knew he was being recorded, carefully and slightly formal.

  Carlo’s father was a fisherman, with a small boat that he took into the Mediterranean from the coastal town. This was before the whole Cote d’Azur from Montpellier down the Italian coast to Sorrento was linked by wealth, border patrol, and the euro. So Carlo’s boyhood was that of the too-intelligent lower-class child, sneaking into the local library as if it was something sinful to read. His mother, Sophia, took him to mass daily at the large church that had been built to house the Holy Shroud. Carlo would stare at it during the mass, squinting his eyes in hopes that the blurring would make the figures more likely to move. He wanted to be the kind of person who saw visions.

  GEMMA-KATE: Did you believe the shroud was the burial cloth of Jesus?

  CARLO: Of course. We all did.

  GEMMA-KATE: It’s not. Science has proven it’s not.

  CARLO: Does it matter? I think the miraculous lies not so much in the physical world as in what meaning we see in it. And how we’re changed by the meaning.

  Gemma-Kate gave him the respect of not scoffing, while I watched Carlo look at her with an open smile. The smile was one he had turned on me from time to time. It said, you either feel this or you don’t, and I won’t try to convince you.

  GEMMA-KATE: Did the shroud ever move?

  CARLO: It moved me.

  Carlo’s father, Antonio, had a brother in the States who pressed the family for years to emigrate to the Midwest. The DiForenza family, Antonio, Carlo, an older brother, Franco, and Sophia, did so in 1959 when Carlo was only ten. But he spoke Italian at home his whole life, and that accounted for a rich undertone of the romantic accent that still surfaced, especially when he was talking to me. Especially in bed. This was not mentioned in the recorded interview.

  The shroud’s influence, added to his mother’s, sent Carlo off to seminary before he graduated from St. Anthony’s High School in Kansas City. This was a great relief to Sophia, who had lost Fra
nco to the gangs several years before. Carlo never said, and I never suggested, that maybe he was making up for the loss of his brother, hoping to ease his mother’s grief by being the best boy possible. Being a Roman Catholic priest. At that time he didn’t realize being a priest would produce its own shame, what it did to his mother when he left the priesthood and married. I knew that part, too.

  But back then, the priesthood itself gave Sophia some amount of agita. While in seminary, Carlo volunteered to do part of his chaplaincy in the Kansas State Penitentiary—Lansing—the same prison where Franco had died. Sophia was terrorized by the thought of him entering that prison.

  GEMMA-KATE: What about you?

  CARLO: I let the warden know who I was, and he checked the records and personally escorted me to the spot where it had happened and had me talk to the chaplain who had been there, and who said Franco was already gone when he arrived on the cell block. It felt like a pilgrimage, only backwards, in the sense that I was following the footsteps not of a declared saint, but of a declared sinner. Still, you learn.

  Carlo formed a strong friendship with the head chaplain.

  GEMMA-KATE: Another priest.

  CARLO: No, actually Mark Listewnik was Presbyterian. I learned a lot from him over many rounds of drinks. And he knew all about my order.

  GEMMA-KATE: By order you mean—

  CARLO: The religious order to which I belonged. I was, I am, a Franciscan.

  GEMMA-KATE: You mean you can’t stop being a priest.

  CARLO: No. Once you’re ordained, it’s forever.

  GEMMA-KATE: But you married. Twice.

  CARLO: Yes, I did.

  At her questioning, Carlo told Gemma-Kate some stories of his time, as he called it, behind bars. He lived in the rectory of a large church in the city, and drove a dilapidated car back and forth to work every day. There he was cleared by security along with the rest of the prison staff, and had the use of a small desk in Pastor Listewnik’s office. He had visiting hours and heard confessions of the Catholic prisoners. He gave last rites on many occasions, most in the clinic where men would go to die of rotted livers and kidneys and lungs after years of chemical abuse. Once he gave last rites while kneeling in a pool of blood when an inmate had been knifed while taking a shower.

  CARLO: Convicts die just like everyone else, frightened and sad that they hadn’t learned how to pray before now.

  GEMMA-KATE: How long did you work there?

  CARLO: Just three months.

  I noticed Carlo’s answers were not so expansive as they had been at first. He wasn’t exactly curt, but hardly as forthcoming as when he talked about his youth and his family, open even about his brother, Franco, dying in prison. I think GK noticed it, too.

  GEMMA-KATE: What about this Listewnik? How long did he stay at the prison? Did you keep in touch with him?

  He started to cross his arms and then consciously separated them again, refusing to give in to that gesture of hiding oneself. Carlo answered only the last question. “No.”

  GEMMA-KATE: No …

  CARLO: No, I didn’t keep in touch with him.

  GEMMA-KATE: What about your first wife? Where were you and how long were you out of the priesthood before you met her?

  Carlo paused. I could see him going through possible answers as if he was talking about existentialism rather than the simple facts of his life. That was when I thought again how this was one question I had never asked.

  “Gemma-Kate Quinn,” I said. “It’s a school project, not a Dr. Phil show.”

  CARLO: It’s okay, love. After my prison chaplaincy I was assigned to a church as an assistant priest. I worked there for two years, and then had my own church where I worked for three more years. I was thirty years old then. So young, and yet feeling as if I’d experienced all that was possible in a lifetime. Feeling so wise. I think all young people feel that way. And yet, I had what they call a crisis of faith, which must have been brewing, but that I never acknowledged.

  That’s all he would say. His vocation ended, he was hired as an assistant professor at the local college. He talked about marrying Jane, moving to Tucson, teaching at the university, her death. As always, Carlo spoke of her respectfully, but not at length. I was content with that because I didn’t want to know. It was enough that sometimes her presence still haunted the house, in some vacation souvenir that remained on a corner shelf, or that smell in the kitchen cupboard of the spices I never used. I was a newcomer, both to Carlo’s life and to the normal world itself. But these were my own thoughts as I listened to Gemma-Kate interview Carlo.

  Had he actually answered Gemma-Kate’s question about how long he was out of the priesthood before he met Jane? Had he even said her name? I thought not.

  GEMMA-KATE: So your wife died, you kept teaching at the university, and that’s where you met Aunt Brigid, right?

  CARLO: That’s right, five years after Jane’s passing. I was in the philosophy department. We met when Brigid took my course on the ethics of Buddhism. She was not a very good student, I recall. I kicked her out of the class.

  “Oh, go on,” I said. “You just wanted to date me.”

  GEMMA-KATE: Ethics …

  I interrupted with “It’s a sense of right and wrong, dear.”

  Carlo hid a smile and Gemma-Kate ignored me altogether.

  GEMMA-KATE: How much did you know about Aunt Brigid before you married her? Did you know about what she did with the FBI or did she give you that crap about investigating copyright infringements?

  I jerked to attention with another sharp word ready, but Carlo raised two fingers in almost a peace sign. “That’s your aunt’s story to tell. You and I are talking about my life right now.”

  GEMMA-KATE: It seems like you stop me before we get to anything really good, but okay. Let’s see. Did you know anyone famous who was in prison while you were there?

  CARLO: Just like a Quinn, always most interested in crime. No, there wasn’t really, not during my time. But there had been.

  Gemma-Kate turned off the recorder, apparently having sufficiently exhausted the story of Carlo’s life. She asked, “Who?”

  Carlo looked at me and we both smiled, knowing what was coming. “Have you heard the names Richard Hickock and Perry Smith?”

  Gemma-Kate got sort of a rock-star-fan look on her face and Carlo noticed.

  “Ah, now I’m less boring.” Carlo suggested we move inside, so we left the embers of the fire pit and sat in the living room. He went into his library in the front room, made some racket, and returned with a plastic bin. He sat on the floor with Gemma-Kate, rustled around in the bin until he found a large brown envelope, and from there drew out several articles about Hickock and Smith.

  “You told me you didn’t have anything on them,” I said.

  “I just remembered,” Carlo said. “It’s not much.” He raised his eyebrows with, I thought, some air of faked mystery, which made me wonder if he was telling the truth and why he would lie.

  “Those are the killers from the book In Cold Blood,” he said, pointing to their pictures in the article. “Your aunt and I were talking about it just the other night. I assume you’ve heard of that as well.”

  “I just know the killers’ names because I saw those movies they made about Truman Capote a few years ago. I never read the book,” Gemma-Kate said.

  “I have a copy.” I went into the library where Carlo had gotten the bin from. I haven’t said much about this room in my earlier stories. It was to Carlo what garages or other man caves are to other men. Shelves lined the walls floor to ceiling, and more shelves were placed in two rows down the center of the room, with access on both sides of the shelves. Some of the works I recognized, like Plato’s Republic, and Bertrand Russell’s History of Philosophy, but only because of hearing Carlo quote from them. No question about it, Carlo and I were different. I was only recently beginning to admit how much.

  My own paltry collection rested on a single shelf, so I was able to find the book ea
sily. It still had the original jacket on it, cream-colored background with the title in black and Capote’s name in maroon.

  “You take care of this, it’s a first edition,” I said, bringing it back to the living room.

  Gemma-Kate opened it to the title page. “‘To my little girl on her birthday.’ Grandpa gave this to you?”

  “Your grandfather didn’t have real strong boundaries,” I said.

  Eight

  Beaufort had loaded his bike on the bus to Sarasota. A rental car would have been nice, but he needed Yanchak for that. He had told the man in Pascagoula he might be back and thanks for the use of the room.

  It was easy to find the cop he wanted. Even if Beaufort hadn’t seen his name on the internet article about the Walker cold case investigation, Ian Meadows’s photo was on the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department website. Small towns like Sarasota, where they didn’t think they had to worry about gangs, real criminals, they’d be all over themselves being friendly with the populace, that whole community-policing thing. Photographs of each guy in the division. There he was, round baby face with a mustache that didn’t help, older guy who might have been a real homicide detective in his heyday, now working cold case homicides.

  Beaufort parked his bike around the corner from the sheriff’s office, and found a coffee shop close by where he could watch the entrance to the building. From there he saw when Meadows exited the building, and followed him on and off for a week to pick up his patterns. He wouldn’t have been able to actually follow the guy home, as he couldn’t keep up with a car. But he did find the guy’s watering hole, which was within walking distance from the station.

  Meadows was never on call in the evenings, which allowed him plenty of free time to drink. And talk like he was still somebody. But mostly drink. Always at the same bar, one of those places that cops frequent where there’s always another cop to take them home in case of one too many. The Pelican Pub had dusty nautical decorations, a sign that said HEAD instead of RESTROOMS, heavy boat ropes with a sticky film on them lining the edge of the bar and making it uncomfortable to lean your elbows.