Free All the Flowers Are Dying by Lawrence Block Page B

arouse him. Pornography almost never does. But nevertheless it diverts him. Not the plots, such as they are. To those he pays no attention. The dialogue is a nuisance, and he’d mute the sound if it didn’t mean losing other sounds as well—the background music, the sound effects of a zipper being lowered, a vibrator humming, a slap.
    He watches it all, takes it all in, and lets his mind wander at will. There’s a glass of Scotch on the table beside him, and he takes a sip from time to time. There’s still a little left in the glass, diluted by the now-melted ice cubes, when the last film ends. He pours it down the sink and goes to bed.
    Thursday he spends several hours in Applewhite’s cell. Their ritual handshake has by now become an embrace. Applewhite, in a reminiscent mood, talks at length about his childhood. It’s interesting enough, for all that it’s predictably ordinary.
    There are interruptions. A doctor is admitted to the cell, carrying an ordinary bathroom scale, on which he duly weighs Applewhite, the weight jotted down in his notebook.
    “So that he can calibrate the right dose,” Applewhite says after the man has left. “Though wouldn’t you think they’d just err on the side of caution and give everybody three or four times the lethal dose? What are they trying to do, save a few dollars on chemicals?”
    “They want to maintain the illusion of scientific method.”
    “That must be it. Or else they’re making sure they get a gurney stout enough so it won’t buckle under me. You know, they’d save themselves a lot of trouble and expense if they made it possible for a man to kill himself. You could braid a rope out of strips of bed linen, but what would you hang it from?”
    “Would you kill yourself if you could?”
    “I think about it. I read a book years ago, a thriller, and in it a man, I think he was Chinese, killed himself by swallowing his tongue. Do you suppose it’s possible?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “Neither have I. I was going to try it but…”
    “But what, Preston?”
    “I didn’t have the nerve. I was afraid it might work.”
     
     
    “I can have whatever I want for dinner tonight. Within reason, they said. You know, I’ve had no trouble eating whatever’s on the tray. But now that they’re giving me a choice I don’t know what to ask for.”
    “Whatever you want.”
    “The guard slipped me a wink, told me he could probably bring me a drink if I wanted. I haven’t had a drink since they arrested me. I don’t think I want one now. You know what I think I’ll have?”
    “What?”
    “Ice cream. Not for dessert. A whole meal of ice cream.”
    “With sauce and toppings?”
    “No, just plain vanilla ice cream, but a lot of it. Cool, you know? And sweet, but not too sweet. Vanilla ice cream, that’s what I’ll have.”
     
     
    “Do you ever think about the real killer?”
    “I used to. That was the only way I could be exonerated, if they were to find him. But they weren’t looking for him, and why should they? All the evidence pointed to me.”
    “It must have been maddening.”
    “It was exactly that. It was driving me mad. Because it wasn’t just coincidence. Someone had to have gone to great length to plant evidence implicating me. I couldn’t think of anyone who would have had reason to hate me that way. I didn’t have many close friends, but I didn’t have any enemies, either. None that I knew of.”
    “He not only framed you, but he killed three innocent boys in a horrible fashion.”
    “That’s it—it’s not as though he embezzled money from a company and cooked the books to implicate a coworker. You could understand something like that, there’s a rational underpinning to it. But this guy would have had to be a sociopath or a psychopath, whatever the right term is, and he’d also have to have been fixated on me, on blaming me for it. I must sound paranoid, talking about this faceless enemy, but somebody must have done all of this, and