Slater sits across the table from Nicholas Godejohn in a bare and forbidding concrete-and-tile interrogation room. They’ve dressed Nicholas in an orange jumpsuit. His dark hair is matted and oily; his morning breath has only grown more rank over the past few hours. He is skinny, short, pale. Sickly, Slater thinks. He might even pass for Gypsy’s brother.
“I confessed,” Godejohn says. “What more we got to talk about?”
“Quite a bit,” Slater says. “The judge and the lawyers and the jury will want the full picture. They’ll want details. A timeline.”
“What kind of details?”
“Every kind. They’ll want your every thought and action from the moment you met Gypsy to the moment we slapped the cuffs on.”
“First of all,” Nicholas says, “I never knew she was called Gypsy Rose till you all told me. She said her name was Penelope. People shouldn’t be allowed to make up fake names on a Christian dating site.”
Slater sees already where this is going: Godejohn will make himself an accomplice—a victim of Gypsy’s siren spell.
“You’ve been arrested before,” Slater pivots.
“Now don’t go bringing that up,” Nicholas says. “That was a big mix-up and it ain’t got nothing to do with this.”
Slater ignores him.
“For public lewdness,” he continues. “Apparently, you were watching porn and giving yourself a yank in the middle of a fast food restaurant at three thirty in the afternoon. Around the time school kids would be showing up.”
“You got it wrong. It wasn’t like they say. Not one bit.”
“How was it, then?”
“First off, I had a jacket over my lap, so no one saw nothing worth seeing. And I was sitting far off in a corner by myself. No way no one but me saw that screen.”
“Someone must have seen it.”
“Yeah, well…that someone must’ve tried real hard.”
Slater decides to change tacks.
“No need to be defensive, Nick,” he says. “If anything, I think your prior helps you.”
“Yeah, right. How’s that gonna help me?”
“It shows your emotional state. The jury will read it as a cry for help. You must have been very lonely. You belonged in therapy, not prison. In fact, if they’d got you the help you needed, Dee Dee Blancharde might still be alive.”
“You mean then it ain’t my fault?”
“It’s less your fault.”
Nick looks disappointed.
“Yeah, OK,” he says.
“And I’m guessing that same loneliness led you to Christian Couples?”
“Ain’t no other reason to go on there. I mean, a guy’s got to be pretty hard up to start shopping for strangers online.”
“I know that’s true,” Slater says. “Hell, I’ve been there myself.”
“Yeah, huh?”
“I’d been divorced ten years and hadn’t so much as touched a woman in all that time. Unless you count prostitution busts.”
Godejohn smiles.
“It’d been a while for me, too. I ain’t even gonna say how long.”
“What led you to Christian Couples?”
“They got a billboard up on the highway. Says something about God being the first matchmaker on account of Adam and Eve.”
Slater knows that billboard. It stands maybe fifty yards from an adult store for swingers.
“How long ago did you join?” he asks.
“Not long before I met Penelope…I mean Gypsy.”
“Did you meet anyone besides Gypsy?”
“Not to speak of. Just some chat room flirting that didn’t go nowhere.”
Slater smiles. He has Godejohn a little more relaxed, a little more trusting. It’s time, he thinks, to dig in.
“So why Gypsy? What made her different?”
Godejohn shrugs. His eyes dart around the room.
“She was the only one,” he says.
“The only one?”
“Who reached out to me. She clicked the Like button on my photo. Even sent me a little note ’bout how cute I was. I didn’t have to do no chasing at all.”
Good, Slater thinks. We can check on that. This is the real purpose of the interview: solicit statements that might support or contradict Godejohn’s version of events.
“And she kept on pursuing you?” he asks.
“Oh yeah. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but that one’s pure vixen.”
He tells Slater about the midnight cosplay, goes into great detail about the fantasies—all of them, he claims, Gypsy’s—that had them dressed as pirate and princess, shepherd and shepherdess, sorcerer and sorceress, alien and astronaut.
“At first, I took it personal,” he says. “I thought she just didn’t wanna see my face unless there was some kind of mask on it. But it turns out that’s her thing. It’s cosplay or the highway with her. Hell, she might even like jail. She might never want to leave. It’s all costumes in there.”
Salter takes a sip of coffee while he thinks through his next question: “Now, this is very important, Nicholas,” he begins. “Did Gypsy always know she could walk? Did she know from the start that she wasn’t sick?”
Godejohn squirms a little in his seat.
“Well, I wouldn’t say from the start.”
“When did she know?”
“I ain’t sure, exactly. You kinda gotta read between the lines with Gypsy.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well, she kept going on about someone she called the Savior. Took me a while to figure out that the Savior was some kind a doctor. She’d write things like: The Savior says I’m fit to walk on water, and The Savior says my blood’s the same as everyone else’s. He says I can sleep just by closing my eyes. And then I had to figure out that her ma was the one she called the Lard Monster. The Lard Monster tied her to chairs and wouldn’t let her eat nothing. The Lard Monster shaved off all her hair before it had a chance to grow. The Lard Monster did this and that and the other, all of them things the devil himself couldn’t make no worse.”
Slater nods as though something has clicked into place.
“So the Lard Monster had to die?” he says.
“After a while, yeah. Maybe Gypsy had that in mind the whole time. You’d have to ask her.”
“Here’s what I really want to know,” Slater says. “How is it that you wound up with the knife in your hand?”
Nicholas thinks back to that night. He sees himself lingering at the curb, his heart beating so hard he can barely hear over it. He must have spent an hour just staring at the dark house. Then came the slow walk up the steps to the Blanchardes’ front door. He found it unlocked, just as Gypsy promised.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It was like we were playing one of our games, only in real life. Gypsy needed saving.”
“And you’d never met her before? I mean in person.”
“No sir.”
“But she knew what you were going to do?”
“I’m tellin’ you, it was her idea. From start to finish.”
Slater rubs his thumbs hard against his temples.
“You’re saying you went over there to kill the mother of a young woman you’d never so much as laid eyes on?”
Nicholas grins, nods enthusiastically. As though he’s found his defense. As though the fact that he’d never seen Gypsy in the flesh makes his actions selfless. Chivalric. Knight Nicholas Godejohn riding to the damsel’s rescue.