Even the Wicked

Things escalated. Franny emptied her savings account and bought a van. The neighbors grew used to the sight of Richie washing and polishing it on the street in front of the apartment house, clearly proud of his new toy. They didn't see how he'd tricked it out on the inside, with a mattress on the floor and restraints attached to the side panels. They would drive around town, and when they got to a likely spot, Franny would drive while Richie lurked in the back. Then Franny would find a child and persuade him (or her, it didn't matter) to get into the van.

They would let the kids go when they were finished. Until one day there was a little girl who wouldn't stop crying. Richie found a way to stop her, and they left the body in a thickly wooded section of Inwood Hill Park.

"That was the best ever," he told her. "That rounds it out, it's like dessert after a meal. We should have been finishing them off all along."

"Well, from now on," she said.

"The look in her eyes right at the end," he said. "Jesus."

"Poor little kid."

"Yeah, poor little kid. You know what I wish? I wish she was alive so we could do her all over again."

Enough. They were animals—a label we affix, curiously enough, to those members of our own species who behave in a manner unimaginable in any of the lower animals. They found a second victim, a boy this time, and dumped his corpse within a half mile of the first one, and they were caught.

There was no question of their guilt, and the case should have been solid, but piece by piece it fell apart.

There was a ton of evidence the jury didn't get to see, testimony they couldn't hear, because the judge threw it out for one reason or another. That might not have mattered because Franny was set to confess and testify against Richie—they weren't married, there was no cloak of privilege to preclude her doing so.

When she killed herself, that ended that.

The case against Richie did go to the jury, but there wasn't much to it and his lawyer, Adrian Whitfield, was good enough to punch holes in it big enough for him to walk through. The judge's charge was the nearest thing to an order of dismissal, and the jury took a scant hour and a half to come back with an acquittal.

"It was awful," one juror told a reporter, "because we were all dead certain he did it, but the prosecution didn't prove it. We had to find him not guilty, but there should have been a way to lock him up anyway.

How can someone like that be released back into society?"

That's what Marty McGraw wanted to know. "You may not be guilty in the eyes of the law," he thundered, "but you're as guilty as sin in my eyes, and the eyes of everybody I know, outside of twelve men and women forced by the system to be as blind as Justice herself…

"There are too many like you," he went on, "falling through the cracks of the system and making the world a bad place to live. And I've got to tell you, I wish to God there were a way to get rid of you.

Lynch law was a hell of a way to run things, and only a fool would want to go back to vigilante times. But you're a powerful argument for it. We can't touch you, and we've got to let you live among us like an ineradicable virus. You're not going to change. You're not going to get help, and guys like you are beyond help anyway. You nod and shuffle and con therapists and counselors and parole boards, and you slither out onto the streets of our cities and go back to preying on our kids.

"I'd kill you myself, but it's not my style and I haven't got the guts.

Maybe you'll step off the pavement and get hit by a bus. If you do, I'll gladly kick in for the bus driver's defense fund, if they're crazy enough to charge him with anything. They ought to give him a medal—and I'd kick in for that, too, with pleasure.

"Or maybe, for once in your awful life, you'll be a man and do the right thing. You could pick up a cue from Franny and put yourself out of everybody's misery. I don't suppose you've got the guts, either, but maybe you'll summon up the courage, or maybe somebody'll give you a hand. Because no matter what the nuns at St. Ignatius taught me, I can't help it: I'd give a lot to see you with a rope around your neck, hanging from a tree limb, twisting slowly, slowly in the wind."

* * *

It was classic McGraw, and very much the sort of thing that kept the tabloids hiring him away from one

another at ever-higher salaries. His column was, as somebody had said, one of the things that made New York New York.

He'd tried his hand at other tasks over the years, and not without some success. He had published several books of nonfiction over the years, and while none had been a big seller they'd all been respectfully received. A couple of years back he'd hosted a talk program on a local cable channel, giving it up after a six-month run and a series of arguments with the station management. A while before that he'd written a play and actually had it produced on Broadway.