True Crime (11 page)

“I’m sorry for you, Frank,” said Shillerman.

“I’m sorry too,” said Frank thickly. “Believe me.”

“Come
on
, Reverend,” Benson said, really nervous now, hearing the tone of Frank’s voice. “I’m serious here. We don’t want any trouble.” He even tugged at the chaplain’s arm lightly.

“All right, all right,” said the chaplain. He raised his two hands as if in benediction. He smiled his lofty blessing upon them all.

Benson kept his arm extended behind the man as they walked to the door together, as if he were afraid Shillerman would turn suddenly and make a break for the cage again. But the chaplain permitted himself only one last backward look of pity and sorrow. Then the guard at the door opened at Benson’s knock and Shillerman was gone.

Benson ran his fingers up through his slick black hair as he returned to his table. “Hey, forget it, Frankie,” he called toward the cage. “The guy’s an asshole.” He shook his head, sitting down, muttering, “Everybody wants to get in on the action, you know.”

Frank nodded. His temple pulsed as he fought for control. He crushed out his cigarette, pressing down hard to drive the energy out of his trembling hand. He dragged the back of his fist across his lips to dry them and, as he did, he looked across the cell at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. Thirty minutes to the visiting hour. And he felt as if he were choking. Just as he’d feared. Now that his anger was subsiding, there was a powerful urge to release the rest of it, all of it, everything. A great pressure of anguish rose up in him
and Frank wanted to tear himself open to let it out. He wanted to stand and howl and sob and cry to heaven, and beat his hands against the bars, against the air.
It wasn’t right. He hadn’t
done it. It wasn’t fair
. And a pernicious inner whisper told him: No one could blame you. It’s what anyone would do.

Frank shut his eyes. His lips moving silently, he appealed to that ever-watching God of his. He conjured Bonnie’s face and Gail’s. If they came in now—if they saw him—raging helplessly against his fate, weeping over the unfairness of it all—boo-hoo, boo-hoo—Christ, how that would torture them—in their beds at night—they would see him like that—forever after—husband and father—impotent and sobbing—their bitterness and pain—it would haunt them their whole lives long. He clenched his fist and rapped it lightly on the tabletop, nearly chanting in his mind: If you would give me strength, if you would give me the appearance of strength, the appearance of strength for them to remember, if you would give me the appearance of strength …

“Ach,” he said. He opened his eyes, annoyed, snarling all his passion back into its corner. He pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table and shoved it in his mouth and struck a match angrily. He sat at his table behind the bars of his cage and his long, sad face was still. The smoke trailed up from the cigarette in his hand. Expressionless, he waited for his wife and daughter to arrive.

This, after all, he told himself, is what a man does.

I
n my youth, I was a racer of cars. A dragster, I mean. The teenage terror of Long Island’s byways. Well, I’d seen it in old movies and it was as good a form of rebellion as any. My parents—my adopted parents—were softspoken, thoughtful and humorless attorneys, pater for a firm of environmental activists, and mater for a planning group that fought for housing for the poor. I could think of no better way to irritate them both than mindlessly vroom-vrooming jalops up and down the Guyland boulevards, pistons at the limit. My parents and I, we don’t speak much anymore, so I guess it must’ve worked.

I mention this only because the habit stuck. I drove a floppy-gutted Tempo these days. A slumping blue sad sack of a car. It could jump from zero to fifty in a generation, if you had the time. And still, I had managed to beat the bejesus out of it. Working it up to impossible speeds, screeching round corners, tatting through traffic like a lacemaker’s needle. I never had time to tune the poor machine, or wash it even. It was ratty with grime. It sputtered and popped and whined in its exertions. But I showed it no mercy, and I made it run.

I gunned it now out of the
News
parking lot, lanced it through a gap in the noonday stream of cars and joined the race along the boulevard. It was still twenty minutes before twelve o’clock noon. I’d promised my wife to be home by the hour, and it wasn’t going to be a problem, not the way I
drove. Getting home in time seemed like a pretty good idea to me. I had a notion that this day was not going to end before word of my latest indiscretion reached Barbara’s ears. She had promised to leave me if she caught me cheating again, and I was pretty sure she meant it. Still, begging shamelessly had worked once and it might work once more. So I wanted to keep her in as good a mood as possible.

Getting home in time, taking Davy to the zoo: that was the ticket. Zip right on back to Skinker-De Balivere, that was the smart guy’s plan. What would’ve been stupid, on the other hand—what would’ve been, you might say, the Dunderhead Strategy—would be to detour round the park out to Dogtown to have a look at Pocum’s grocery. Just to get a gander at the crime scene, I mean. To get a feel for the murder’s choreography, if you will. That—on a story like this, on a human interest sidebar about a guy on death row—that would’ve been unnecessary, even obsessive. Even cruel, if you think about Barbara—waiting, martyred—if you think about what was in store for her today. Bad enough that she had given up her job so we could come to St. Louis and make a fresh start. She was also, as I say, an austere woman, and it had cost her God knows what price in pride to teach herself to trust me again. When she found out about Patricia, that sacrifice of hers, that trust, was going to turn round and slap her in the kisser like a vaudevillian’s fish. So getting on home to Skinker-De Balivere, taking that Davy to the good old zoo, giving her the sense that I was in there fighting on the conjugal front—these were the first steps in the groundwork of my salvation. Assuming there was any salvation to be had.

Using overdrive and low gear, I worked the sluggish Tempo up to speed. Slanting from one lane to the next, dodging cars. Painting a trail like a sound wave on the road. Ahead, the city center rose above the low wasteland of the southern boulevard. Lean skyscrapers flamed up out of hunkering
clusters of red brick and gothic stone. I caught a glimpse, as I sped toward it, of the old courthouse dome, the reflection of it, shimmering, verdigris, on the mirrored windows of the Equitable Building. The great arch, over to the left and down by the Mississippi, vaunted flashing through the surface of the hot white sky.

Then it was all behind me and, with the Tempo gurgling for mercy, I was darting up onto the expressway with the big river to my side.

It was summer and noon and the city was a furnace. And the Tempo’s air conditioner was no more than a husk in the dashboard. But now I was rattling past the pinnacled clocktower of Union Station, and the wind through the open window fluttered my shirtsleeves and cooled my face. The Tempo was hacking like an old man, but it was tacking like a pro. Only I could have made it fly that way. I was a bullet, I was a hummingbird. Boy wonders in their Jaguars were snorting my exhaust as if it were cocaine. In minutes—it seemed like seconds—I shot down the exit ramp and rocketed right into the center of Dogtown. Just a quick swing by Pocum’s, I thought, and I could still make it home in time or thereabouts.

Well, I confess, my blood ran thick with guilt. As I cruised onto the dilapidated avenue, past the dingy brown stores, toward the weary old gazebo slouching on the grass meridian, I felt foolish and depressed. What difference does it make, at this point? I asked myself. But I wished that I had not done it. I wished that I had gone straight home. Then, where the avenue turned in the middle distance, I spotted the big oval Amoco sign that marked the gas station where Frank Beachum had worked. The actual place where the killer worked, I thought, where the condemned man worked. And it gave me a little thrill. I do love a crime scene. And I said to myself,
Hey, here I am
. And I was lost in soaking up
the milieu of what I already thought of as “my murder, my execution.”

Then there was Pocum’s, just there to my right.

The grocery was a one-story red-brick bunker with a dingy, brick-red awning overhanging the sidewalk. It was the last in a line of small stores—an appliance store, a hair stylist’s, a pet shop—that looked pretty much just like it. The parking lot was on the far side at the corner of the intersection with Art Hill. I turned in there and slowed the Tempo down.

The car sputtered as I rolled across the lot.
This is it
, I thought. I felt I almost knew the place. There, to my right, was where Frank Beachum had come running out the door. He had crossed the edge of the lot just behind me, hurrying to his car. There, against the long side of the building, a dirty brick wall with blackened windows, was the soda machine Nancy Larson had used. I pulled the Tempo up alongside it and stopped.
There it is
.

The moment the car stopped moving, the heat of the day closed around me. The interior became stifling at once. Sweat collected under my arms and ran down my temples into my shirt collar. I looked out the side window at the soda machine.

It stood alone against the wall. Its chesty convex front displayed cartoons of fizzy bubbles and bottles happily popping their caps. Nearby, a small Bud Light sign shone forlornly, red, white and blue. Other than that, and the windows, the dingy wall was bare.

I wiped my palms on my pants leg. Nancy Larson must have reached through her window to use the machine, I thought. It was set up for that, so you could buy your soda without leaving your car. Then she had put the car into reverse just as Beachum, with Amy Wilson choking in her own blood on the floor behind him, exited the store, turned right and rushed into her path.

I slid the Tempo forward into a parking space and killed the engine. I stepped out and felt the sun press down on me, making me squint behind my glasses. I dragged my hand across my forehead and walked across the lot to the store itself.

All my guilt had now, for the moment, been forgotten. My wife and our impending disaster were pushed to one side of my mind. I felt excited. I love a crime scene. I do. A murder scene especially. It’s like the set of a movie, as familiar somehow as the movie’s star. You’ve read about the people who killed and died here. You’ve suffered with the victim and clucked for her poor relatives grieving on TV. You’ve scowled at the villain and asked yourself what the world was coming to. And now you were there, at the very site of the drama.

I came around in front of the glass storefront. I stopped a moment on the sidewalk, the traffic on the avenue whispering by behind me. There, in the grocery’s window, just over a line of withering oranges and tomatoes, just next to a row of dusty bottles of olive oil, was a sign, hand-lettered in marker on a sheet of typing paper.
An Eye For An Eye!
the sign read.
Beachum has to die
. There was a drawing beneath the words: a dripping syringe with a death’s head on the tube. I felt my eyes shining as I looked at it. I could get some good quotes for my sidebar here. I’m telling you: I love this stuff.

I went into the store.

A ribbon of sleigh bells tinkled from the lintel of the glass door as I pushed it open. They tinkled again as the door swung shut behind me. I felt the stale air-conditioned air surround me, cool me. I looked around at dully lighted aisles, shelves of jars and boxes. The counter was to my left. A candy tray hung on it and a fishbowl full of sun lotion tubes stood on top. She’d been standing right there, I thought, right behind that counter. Amy Wilson. Her belly
curved with her baby, her hands thrown up uselessly.
Please not that!
She had dropped down behind that very counter with a bullet in her throat.

Now, another young woman stood there. Disappointingly unattractive, not fitting Amy’s description at all. She was obese, with a sullen, bloated face. Her huge breasts and belly bulged through the cotton of her white T-shirt. She raised her eyes from the tabloid she was reading.
Man Gives Birth To Alien Through His Nostril
. That sort of thing.

“Help you?” she said.

At the sound of her voice, another woman glanced up at me from the far end of an aisle. Small and pinched-looking with frosted hair done up in a bright bandanna, with green slacks pressing a shade too tightly around her middle. She had been edging along the detergent shelf, the handle of a red plastic basket looped over her arm.

I gave the counterwoman my Handsome Guy Smile. “I’m a reporter,” I said. “With the
News.”

These were magic words, as I suspected they would be. The counterwoman left her tabloid and waddled toward me, breathing hard as she moved. The woman in the bandanna started sidling my way resistlessly.

I saw now that the counterwoman was wearing a button on her T-shirt. It had red block letters on it:
Remember Amy
.

I pointed at it. “This
is
the place where the Wilson girl was killed, isn’t it?”

“It sure is,” said the counterwoman proudly. Her wattles unfolded and hung loose as she stood a little straighter. She fingered her button, turned it for display. “She was right behind this same counter. Almost six years ago exactly.”

“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. I gave the store an appreciative once-over, ceiling to grubby floor, as if it were a showplace.

“We’re gonna get our own back tonight though,” said
the counterwoman. “That is, if the damned lawyers don’t get in the way.”

“Yeah.” I ambled over to her, to the counter.
Please not that
, I thought. “Like your sign says. In the window.”

“You bet,” said the woman. “Mr. Pocum put that up there himself. He says the needle’s too good for him. For Beachum. Just putting him to sleep like that is too damn good for him. Amy didn’t get any put to sleep. They oughta bring back the chair, that’s what I say, really let him have a jolt of something.”