The pastor continued as if we hadn't taken nearly a three hour break, mostly continuing his sermon. I tried my hand at getting him back on track.
"How were you caught, Reverend, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Lord be praised, no. I don't mind at all because it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Getting pinched saved my life and introduced me to God. But it was the damnedest thing. I was just coming down an escalator in J C Penny's down in Orange County when Mary Beth Ashmont, this girl I'd take advantage of in a park in Irvine; a girl I didn't even remember, started yelling her head off, 'that's the man, that's the man!' and like a damned fool, I began running. I didn't get past the perfume counter. I later thanked Mary Beth mightily for her keen observation skills that cost me a dozen years and saved me for Jesus."
"What would have happened if she hadn't spotted you?"
"Someone else would have, of I'd have screwed up some other way. We all do. We're following a hunger and when it's ripe, all common sense and caution fly out the window. It's only a matter of time before the hand of the law is laid upon us."
"How did the man you were discussing before dinner get caught, do you know?"
"Lord if I know. I don't even remember his name. I believe he went by three names, like those serial killer; John Wayne Gacy, Randy Stephen Kraft and guys like that. I just don't think it was all bragging, more like it was his private joke. That's why I put him as a possible for killing my neighbor Annie. We all had nicknames for each other and that's what we used, though some weren't said to their faces. There was Carl the Cutter, The Gypsy, Frank the Fruitcake; crazy names."
"What was your moniker?" I asked.
He scowled. "They called me Humper Willie, because of my name . . . Humphries. I didn't much like it."
"What about the three name fellow we were discussing before dinner? Do you remember his nickname?" Willard thought for a moment.
Willard picked up a toothpick and began working it. "He was Luke the Fluke, but you didn't call him that."
"Did he brag about specific cries when you were cellmates?"
"Not names and dates bragging; just how he'd had more honeys than anyone in there and they wouldn't be spotting him in any department store. He scorned all the rest of us for not holding on to our prizes, as he called them. He claimed to keep his victims, sometimes for weeks. That got me wondering about Annie too; she wasn't found for some time and the papers said she wasn't dead that long."