Free All the Flowers Are Dying by Lawrence Block

the kind of anger toward them that you’d want to express physically.”
    “Let’s look at your childhood, shall we? Ever torture animals?”
    “God, no. Why would anyone—”
    “Ever set fires? I don’t mean Boy Scout campfires. I mean anything ranging from mischief to pyromania.”
    “No.”
    “You wet the bed as a kid?”
    “Maybe, when my parents were toilet training me. I don’t honestly remember, I was, I don’t know, two or three years old—”
    “How about when you were ten or eleven?”
    “No, but what does that have to do with anything?”
    “The standard profile of the serial killer or lust murderer. Bedwetting, fire-setting, and animal abuse. You’re batting oh-for-three. How about your sexual orientation? Ever have sex with young boys?”
    “No.”
    “Ever want to?”
    “The same answer. No.”
    “Young girls?”
    “No.”
    “Really? When you approached middle age, didn’t teenagers start looking good to you?”
    Applewhite thinks it over. “I won’t say I never noticed them,” he said, “but I was never interested. All my life, the girls and women I’ve been attracted to have been around my own age.”
    “And the males?”
    “I’ve never had relations with a man.”
    “Or a boy?”
    “Or a boy.”
    “Ever wanted to?”
    “No.”
    “Ever found a male attractive, even without having any desire to act on it?”
    “Not really.”
    “ ‘Not really’? What does that mean?”
    “I’ve never been attracted to a man myself, but I might notice that a man is or is not generally attractive.”
    “You sound awfully normal, Preston.”
    “I always thought I was, but—”
    “How about sexual fantasies? And don’t tell me you never had any. That’s too normal to be normal.”
    “Some.”
    Ah, he’d touched a nerve. “If you’d rather not go there, Preston—”
    “We were married a long time,” he says. “I was faithful. Sometimes, though, when we made love—”
    “You entertained fantasies.”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s hardly unusual. Other women?”
    “Yes. Women I knew, women I just… imagined.”
    “Did you ever discuss your fantasies with your wife?”
    “Of course not. I couldn’t do that.”
    “Were there men in the fantasies?”
    “No. Well, sometimes there were men present. Sometimes the fantasy was a party, all our friends, and people would take off their clothes, and it would be sort of a free-for-all.”
    “Would you have liked to transform that fantasy into reality?”
    “If you knew the people,” he says, “you’d know how inconceivable that is. It was hard enough to make them act like that in my own mind.”
    “And you never had sex with another man in these fantasies?”
    He shakes his head. “There was nothing like that. The closest was sharing a woman with another man.”
    “And you never did that outside of the world of your imagination?”
    “No, of course not.”
    “Never suggested it to your wife?”
    “Jesus, no. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, but in fantasy it was exciting.”
    “Any children in those fantasies?”
    “None.”
    “Neither girls nor boys?”
    “No.”
    “Any violence? Any rape, any torture?”
    “No.”
    “Any forcing a woman to do something she didn’t want to do?”
    “Never. They didn’t have to be forced. They all wanted to do everything. That’s one way you could tell it was a fantasy.”
    They join in laughter, perhaps more than the line calls for.
    He says, “Preston? Have you been listening to yourself? It’s inconceivable that you could have done what they said you did.”
    “
I’d always known as much, but—well, I’m relieved, Arne. You had me worried there, or perhaps I should say that I had myself worried.” He manages a smile. “Of course the bad news,” he says, “is that the day after tomorrow they’re still going to give me the needle
.”
     
     
    “It’ll be around noon,” Applewhite says. “I always assumed midnight. I mean all my life, when I thought of executions,