The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Allen Steele Doblin’s Lecture from Pirate Writings

A crisp autumn night on a midwestern university campus. A cool breeze, redolent of pine cones and coming winter, softly rustles bare trees and whisks dead leaves to scurry across the walkways leading to the main hall. Lights glow from within Gothic windows as a last handful of students and faculty members hurry toward the front entrance. There is to be a famous guest speaker tonight; no one wants to be late.

A handful of students picket in the plaza outside the hall; some carry protest signs, others try to hand fliers to anyone who will take them. The yellow photocopies are taken and briefly read, then shoved into pockets or wadded up and tossed into waste cans; the signs are glanced at, but largely ignored.

A poster taped above the open double-doors states that absolutely no cameras, camcorders, or tape recorders are permitted inside. Just inside the doors, the crowd is funneled through a security cordon of off-duty police officers hired for the evening. They check campus IDs, open daypacks, run chirping hand-held metal detectors across chests, arms, and legs. Anyone carrying metal objects larger or less innocent than keyrings, eyeglasses, or ballpoint pens is sent back outside. A trash can behind the guards is half-filled with penknives, bottle openers, cigarette lighters, and tear-gas dispensers, discarded by those who would rather part with them than rush them back to dorm rooms or cars and thereby risk missing the lecture. Seating is limited, and it’s been announced that no one will be allowed to stand or sit in the aisles.

Two students, protesters from the campus organization opposed to tonight’s presentation, are caught with cloth banners concealed under their jackets. They’re escorted out the door by the cops, who dump their banners in the trash without reading them.

The auditorium holds 1,800 seats, and each one has been claimed. The stage is empty save for a podium off to one side and a stiff-backed oak armchair in its center. The chair’s legs are securely bolted to the floor, its armrests equipped with metal shackles; loose belts dangle from its sides. Its vague resemblance to a prison electric chair is lost on no one.

Four state troopers stand quietly in the wings on either side of the stage. Several more are positioned in the back of the hall, their arms folded across their chests or their thumbs tucked into service belts carrying revolvers, tasers, and Mace canisters. More than a few people quietly remark that this is the first time in a long while that the auditorium has been filled to capacity without anyone smelling marijuana.

At ten minutes after eight, the house lights dim and the room goes dark save for a pair of spotlights focused on the stage. The drone of voices fades away as the dean of the sociology department — a distinguished-looking academician in his early fifties, thin gray hair and humorless eyes — steps from behind the curtain on stage left and quickly strides past the cops to the lectern.

The dean peeks at the index cards in his hand as he introduces himself, then spends a few moments informing the audience that tonight’s speaker has been invited to the university not to provide entertainment, but primarily as a guest lecturer for Sociology 450, Sociology 510, and Sociology 525. His students, occupying treasured seats in the first six rows, try not to preen too much as they open their notebooks and click their pens. They’re the chosen few, the ones who are here to learn something; the professor squelches their newfound self-importance by reminding them that their papers on tonight’s lecture are due Tuesday by ten o’clock. The professor then tells the audience that no comments or questions will be permitted during the guest speaker’s opening remarks, and that anyone who interrupts the lecture in any way will be escorted from the hall and possibly be placed under arrest. This causes a minor stir in the audience, which the dean smoothly placates by adding that a short question-and-answer session will be held later, during which members of the audience may be allowed to ask questions, if time and circumstances permit.

Now the dean looks uncomfortable. He glances uneasily at his cards as if it’s faculty poker night and he’s been dealt a bad hand. After the guest speaker has made his remarks, he adds (a little more softly now, and with no little hesitancy), and once the Q&A session is over, there may be a special demonstration. If time and circumstances permit.

The background noise rises again. Murmurs, whispers, a couple of muted laughs; quick sidelong glances, raised or furrowed eyebrows, dark frowns, a few smiles hastily covered by hands. The cops on stage remain stoical, but one can detect random shifts of eyes darting this way and that.

The dean knows that he doesn’t need to introduce the guest speaker, for his reputation has preceded him and any further remarks he might make would be trivial at best, foolish at worst. Instead, he simply turns and starts to walk off the stage.

Then he stops. For the briefest instant there is a look of bafflement — and indeed, naked fear — on his face as he catches a glimpse of something just past the curtains in the left wing. Then he turns and walks, more quickly now, the opposite way until he disappears past the two police officers on stage right.

A moment of dead silence. Then Charles Gregory Doblin walks out on stage.

He’s a big man — six feet and a couple of inches, with the solid build of someone who has spent most of his life doing heavy labor and only recently has put on weight — but his face, though brutal at first sight, is nonetheless kindly and oddly adolescent, like that of a grownup who never let go of some part of his childhood. The sort of person one could easily imagine dressing up as Santa on Christmas Eve to take toys to a homeless shelter and would delight in playing horsey for the kids, or on any day would help jump-start your car or assist an elderly neighbor with her groceries. Indeed, when he was arrested several years ago in another city and charged with the murders of nineteen young black men, the people who lived around him in their white middle-class neighborhood believed that the police had made a serious mistake.

That was until FBI agents found the severed ears of his victims preserved in Mason jars in his basement, and his confession led them to nineteen unmarked graves.

Now here he is: Charles Gregory Doblin, walking slowly across the stage, a manila file folder lucked under his arm.

He wears a blue prison jump suit and is followed closely by a state trooper holding a riot stick, but otherwise he could be a sports hero, a noted scientist, a best-selling author. A few people automatically begin to clap, then apparently realize that this is one time when applause is not warranted and let their hands fall back into their laps. Some frat boys in the back whistle their approval, and one of them yells something about killing niggers before three police officers — two of whom, not coincidentally, are black — descend on them. They’ve been led out the door even before Charles Gregory Doblin has taken his seat; if the killer has heard them, there is nothing in his face to show it.

Indeed, there is nothing in his face at all. If the audience had expected the dark gaze that had met a news photographer’s camera when he was led into a federal courthouse on the day of his arraignment four years ago — a shot engraved in collective memory, deranged Eyes of a Killer — they don’t see it. If they had anticipated the beatific look of the self-described born-again Christian interviewed on 60 Minutes and PrimeTime Live in the last year, they don’t see that either.

The killer’s face is without expression. A sheet of blank paper. A calm and empty sea. A black hole in the center of a distant galaxy. Void. Cold. Vacant

The killer lakes his seat in the hard wooden chair. The state trooper hands him a cordless microphone before taking his position behind the chair. The arm restraints are left unfastened; the belts remain limp. Long moments pass as he opens the manila folder in his lap, then Charles Gregory Doblin — there is no way anyone here can think of him as Charlie Doblin, as his neighbors once did, or Chuck, as his late parents called him, or as Mr. Dobbs, as nineteen teenagers did in their last hours of life: it’s the full name, as written in countless newspaper stories, or nothing else — Charles Gregory Doblin begins to speak.

His voice is very soft; it holds a slightly grating Northeastern accent, high-pitched now with barely concealed nervousness, but otherwise it’s quite pleasant. A voice for bedtime stories or even pillow talk with a lover, although by all accounts Charles Gregory Doblin had remained a virgin during the thirty-six years he spent as a free man. He quietly thanks the university for inviting him here to speak this evening, and even earns a chuckle from the audience when he praises the cafeteria staff for the bowl of chili and the grilled cheese sandwich he had for dinner backstage. He doesn’t know that the university cafeteria is infamous for its food, and he could not possibly be aware that three cooks spat in his chili just before it was delivered to the auditorium.

Then he begins to read aloud from the six sheets of single-spaced typewritten paper in his lap. It s a fairly long speech, the delivery slightly monotone, but his diction is practiced and nearly perfect. He tells of childhood in an abusive family: an alcoholic mother who commonly referred to him as a little shit and a racist father who beat him for no reason. He tells of having often eaten canned dog food, heated in a pan on a hibachi in the bathroom, for dinner because his parents could afford nothing better, and of going to school in a slum neighborhood where other kids made fun of him because of his size and the adolescent lisp that he didn’t completely overcome until he was well into adulthood.

He describes the afternoon when he was attacked by three black teenagers who beat him without mercy only because he was a big dumb white kid who had the misfortune of shortcutting through their alley on the way home from school. His voice remains steady as he relates how his father gave him another even more savage beating that same evening, because he had allowed two niggers to get the better of him.

Charles Gregory Doblin tells of a lifelong hatred for black people that became ever more obsessive as he became an adult: the brief involvement with the Klan and the Brotherhood of Aryan Nations before bailing out of the white supremacy movement in the belief that they were all rhetoric and no action; learning how some soldiers in Vietnam used to collect the ears of the gooks they had killed: the night nine years ago when, on impulse, he pulled over on his way home from work at an electronics factory to give a lift to a sixteen-year-old black kid thumbing a ride home.

Now the audience stirs. Legs are uncrossed, crossed again over the other knee. Hands guide pens across paper. Eighteen hundred pairs of eyes peer through the darkness at the man on the stage.

The auditorium is dead silent as the killer reads the names of the nineteen teenagers that he murdered during the course of five years. Besides being black and living in black neighborhoods scattered across the same major city, there are few common denominators among his victims. Some were street punks, one was a sidewalk crack dealer, and two were homeless kids looking for handouts, but he also murdered a high school basketball star, a National Merit Scholarship winner recently accepted by Yale, a rapper wannabe who sang in his church choir, an aspiring comic book artist, and a fifteen-year-old boy supporting his family by working two jobs after school. All had the misfortune of meeting and getting into a conversation with an easygoing while dude who had money for dope, beer, or pizza; they had followed him into an alley or a parked car or some other out-of-the-way place, then made the mistake of letting Mr. Dobbs step behind them for one brief, fatal moment... until the night one kid managed to escape.

The audience listens as he says that he is sorry for the evil he has done, as he explains that he was criminally insane at the time and didn’t know what he was doing. They allow him to quote from the Bible, and some even bow their heads as he offers a prayer for the souls of those he has murdered.

Charles Gregory Doblin then closes the folder and sits quietly, hands folded across his stomach, ankles crossed, head slightly bowed with his eyes in shadow. After a few moments, the dean comes back out on stage; taking his position behind the lectern, he announces that it is now time for the Q&A session.

The first question comes from a nervous young girl in the third row center: She timidly raises her hand and, after the dean acknowledges her, asks the killer if he has any remorse for his crimes. Yes, he says. She waits for him to continue; when he doesn’t, she sits down again.

The next question is from a black student farther back in the audience. He stands and asks Charles Gregory Doblin if he killed those nineteen kids primarily because they were black, or simply because they reminded him of the teenagers who had assaulted him. Again, Charles Gregory Doblin only says yes. The student asks the killer if he would have murdered him because he is black, and Charles Gregory Doblin replies that, yes, he probably would have. Would you kill me now? No, I would not. The student sits down and scribbles a few notes.

More hands rise from the audience; one by one, the dean lets students pose their questions. Has he seen the made-for-TV movie based on his crimes? No, he hasn’t; there isn’t a television in the maximum security ward of the prison, and he wasn’t told about the movie until after it was aired. Did he read the book? No, he hasn’t, but he’s been told that it was a bestseller. Has he met any members of the families of his victims? Not personally, aside from spotting them in the courtroom during his trial. Has any of them attempted to contact him? He has received a few letters, but aside from the one from the mother who sent him a Bible, he hasn’t been allowed to read any correspondence from the families. What does he do in prison? Read the Bible he was sent, paint, and pray. What does he paint? Landscapes, birds, the inside of his cell. If he could live his life all over again, what would he do differently? Become a truck driver, maybe a priest. Is he receiving a lecture fee from this visit? Yes, but most of it goes into a trust fund for the families of his victims, with the rest going to the state for travel expenses.

All this time, his gaze remains centered on a space between his knees, as if he is reading from an invisible Teleprompter. It is not until an athletic-looking young man in the tenth row asks him, in a rather arch voice, whether he received any homoerotic gratification when he committed the murders — an erection, perhaps? perhaps a fleeting vision of his father? — that Charles Gregory Doblin raises his eyes to meet those of his questioner. He stares silently at the pale young man for a long, long time, but says nothing until the student sits down again.

An uncomfortable hush follows this final question; no more hands are raised. The dean breaks the silence by announcing that the Q&A session is now over. He then glances at one of the guards standing in the wings, who gives him a slight nod. There will be a brief fifteen-minute intermission, the dean continues, then the program will resume.

He hesitates, then adds that since it will include a demonstration that may be offensive to members of the audience, this might be a good time for those people to leave.

Charles Gregory Doblin rises from his chair. Still refraining from looking directly at the crowd, he lets the state trooper escort him offstage. A few people in the auditorium clap self-consciously, then seldom-used gray curtains slide across the stage.

When the curtains part again fifteen minutes later, only a handful of seats in the auditorium are vacant. The one in the center of the stage is not.

A tall, skinny young black man is seated in the chair that Charles Gregory Doblin has kept warm for him. He wears a prison jump suit similar to the one worn by his predecessor, and his arms are shackled to the armrests, his body secured to the chair frame by the leather belts that had hung slack earlier. The same state trooper stands behind him, but this time his riot stick is in plain view, grasped in both hands before him.

The prisoner’s eyes are cold searchlights that sweep across the audience. No one can meet his gaze without feeling revulsion. He catches sight of the young woman in the third row who had asked a question earlier in the evening; their eyes meet for a few seconds and the prisoner’s lips curl upward in a predatory smile. He starts to mutter an obscenity, but shuts up when the state trooper places the end of his stick on his shoulder. The girl squirms in her seat and looks away.

The dean returns to the lectern and introduces the young black man. His name is Curtis Henry Blum; he is twenty-two years old, born and raised in this same city. Blum committed his first felony offense when he was twelve years old, when he was arrested for selling crack in the school playground; he was already a gang member by then. Since then he has been in and out of juvenile detention centers, halfway houses, and medium security prisons, and has been busted for mugging, narcotics, carjacking, breaking and entering, armed robbery, rape, attempted murder. Sometimes he was convicted and sent to one house of corrections or another; sometimes he was sentenced on lesser charges and served a shorter term; sometimes he was just let go for lack of evidence. Each occasion he was sent up, he spent no more than eighteen months before being paroled or furloughed and thrown back on the street.

Nineteen months ago. Curtis Blum held up a convenience store on the city’s north side, one owned and operated by a South Korean immigrant family. Blum held mother, father, and teenage daughter at gunpoint while he cleaned out the cash register and lucked two bottles of wine into his pockets. The family knell on the floor and begged him to be merciful and just leave, but he shot them anyway, along with an eleven-year-old kid from the ’hood who had been sent out by his mother to buy some cat food and beer and had the misfortune of walking through the door just as Blum was going out. He didn’t want to leave any witnesses, or maybe he simply felt like killing people that night.

A police SWAT team found Blum at his grandmother’s house two days later. He wasn’t hard to find; although by then he had bragged to everyone he knew about how he had capped three slants the night before, it was his grandmother who had called the cops. She also testified at her grandson’s trial six months later, saying that he regularly robbed and beat her.

Curtis Blum was convicted on four counts of second-degree murder. This time, he faced a judge who didn’t believe in second chances; he sentenced Blum to death. Since then, he has been filling in time on death row in the state’s maximum security prison.

The dean steps from behind the lectern and walks over to where the prisoner is seated. He asks Blum if he has any questions. Blum asks him if the girl in the third row wants to fuck.

The dean says nothing. He simply turns and walks away, vanishing once again behind the curtains on stage left.

Curtis laughs out loud, then looks again at the woman in the third row and asks her directly if she wants to fuck. She starts to get up to leave, which Blum misinterprets as willingness to conjugate; even as he assails her with more obscenities, though, another female student grasps her arm and whispers something to her.

The girl slops, glances again at the stage, and then sits back down. This time, she has a slight smile on her face, for now she sees something that Blum doesn’t.

Curtis is about to shout something else at the girl when a shadow falls over him. He looks up, and finds himself looking into the face of Charles Gregory Doblin.

Killing a man is actually a very easy thing to do, if you know how. There’s several simple ways that this can be accomplished that don’t require knives or guns, or even garrotte wires or sharp objects. You don’t even have to be very strong.

All you need are your bare hands, and a little bit of hate.

The dry crack of Curtis Blum’s neck being snapped follows the students as they shuffle out of the auditorium. It’s a cold wind, harsher than the one that blows dry leaves across the plaza outside the main hall, that drives them back to dormitories and apartments.

No one will sleep very well tonight. More than a few will waken from nightmares to find their sheets clammy with sweat, the sound of Blum’s final scream still resonating in their ears. Wherever they may go for the rest of their lives, whatever they may do, they will never forget what they have witnessed this evening.

Fifteen years later, a sociology post-grad student at this same university, in the course of researching her doctoral thesis, will discover an interesting fact. Upon tracking down the students who were present at Charles Gregory Doblin’s lecture and interviewing them or their surviving relatives, she will find that virtually none of them was ever arrested on a felony offense, and not one was ever investigated or charged with spousal or child abuse, statistics far below the national average for a population of similar age and social background.

Yet that is still in the future. This is the present:

In a small dressing room behind the stage. Charlie Doblin — no longer Charles Gregory Doblin, but simply Charlie Doblin. Inmate #7891 — sits in a chair before a makeup counter, hunched over the dog-eared Bible the mother of one of his victims sent him several years ago. His lips move soundlessly as he reads words he does not fully comprehend, but which help to give his life some meaning.

Behind him, a couple of state troopers smoke cigarettes and quietly discuss tonight’s lecture. Their guns and batons are holstered and ignored, for they know that the man in the room is utterly harmless. They wonder aloud how much vomit will have to be cleaned off the auditorium floor, and whether the girl in the third row will later remember what she yelled when the big moment came. She sounded kinda happy, one cop says, and the other one shakes his head. No, he replies, I think she was pissed because she missed out on a great date.

They both chuckle, then notice that Charlie Doblin is silently peering over his shoulder at them. Shut up, asshole, one of them says, and Doblin returns his attention to his Bible.

A radio crackles. A trooper plucks the handset off his jacket epaulet, murmurs into it, listens for a moment. The van is waiting out back, the local cops are ready to escort them to the interstate. He nods to his companion, who turns to tell Charlie that it’s time to go. The killer nods his head: he carefully marks his place in the Bible, then picks it up along with the speech that he read tonight.

He didn’t write this speech, but he has dutifully read it many times already, and will read it again tomorrow night in another college auditorium, to a different audience in a different city. And, as always, he will end his lecture by becoming a public executioner.

Somewhere else tonight, another death-row inmate unwittingly awaits judgment for his crimes. He sits alone in his cell, playing solitaire or watching a sitcom on a TV on the other side of the bars, and perhaps smiles at the notion that, this time tomorrow, he will be taken out of the prison to some college campus to make a speech to a bunch of kids, unaware that what awaits him are the eyes and hands of Charles Gregory Doblin.

It’s a role that Charlie Doblin once savored, then found morally repugnant, and finally accepted as predestination. He has no say over what he does; this is his fate, and indeed it could be said that this is his true calling. He is very good at what he does, and his services are always in demand.

He has become a teacher.

Charles Gregory Doblin scoots back his chair, stands up and turns around, and lets the state troopers attach manacles to his wrists and ankles. Then he lets them take him to the van, and his next lesson.